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| 1 |
ID:
107931
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2011.
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| Summary/Abstract |
At the local level, global climate change is exacerbating current environmental conditions while creating entirely new environmental and human hazards. The thesis of this article is that these new threats merge with preexisting vulnerabilities, creating a hybridized force that ripples through every aspect of society and threatens human security. The vulnerabilities intensify as these communities lack the adaptive and developmental capacity to address the multifarious effects, further undermining their human security. This article examines the case of the Funafuti, Tuvalu, and the effect of a warming Southern Pacific Ocean on Tuvaluan societal structural flows and processes. As the case demonstrates, climate change becomes more than an environmental issue; rather, it is a global social problem bound by multiple human security issues. For extremely vulnerable countries like Tuvalu, the case suggests that a human security approach best captures the dynamics of climate impacts in vulnerable communities, and, as such, requires adjustments in the global climate regime's current approach. This conclusion also represents a challenge to current scholarship which suggests that the small islands will be uninhabitable simply from sea level rise.
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| 2 |
ID:
095588
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2010.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Disappearing islands and climate refugees have become signifiers of the scale and urgency of uneven impacts of climate change. This paper offers a critical account of how sea level rise debates reverberate around Western mythologies of island laboratories. I argue that representations of low-lying Oceania islands as experimental spaces burden these sites with providing proof of a global climate change crisis. The emergence of Tuvalu as a climate change 'canary' has inscribed its islands as a location where developed world anxieties about global climate change are articulated. As Tuvalu islands and Tuvaluan bodies become sites to concretize climate science's statistical abstractions, they can enforce an eco-colonial gaze on Tuvalu and its inhabitants. Expressions of 'wishful sinking' create a problematic moral geography in some prominent environmentalist narratives: only after they disappear are the islands useful as an absolute truth of the urgency of climate change, and thus a prompt to save the rest of the planet.
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