Paper short abstract:

Topic presentation: This project will implement and analyse an intervention with small scale farmers who are vulnerable to escalating climate variability, to improve their response to these impacts. Interventions that integrate traditional knowledge may hold the key to climate-resilient communities.

Paper long abstract:

This project will involve ethnographic research among 5 communities surrounding Munywana Conservancy and the iSimangaliso Wetland Park in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. My research will study the implementation and development of a resilience intervention with specific focus on the impact of climate change. Research will be conducted through Africa Foundation, a community-based conservation NGO that works in communities surrounding nature reserves. The aim of this project is to understand how to improve the ability of rural communities, and in particular, subsistence farmers, to respond to the emerging impacts of climate change. Interventions like localized climate-wise agriculture, and small-scale water harvesting may hold the key to climate-resilient communities.

As communities become involved in adaptation planning activities, such as the one implemented by Africa Foundation, I argue it is important to have well-developed understandings of the vulnerabilities and resiliencies identified by local residents, and how these intersect with other factors such as Indigenous Knowledge, and gender. There is a need in this space for the concepts of resilience and vulnerability to be defined by community members instead of researchers or scientists, as well as the collaborative involvement from community members in the process of building resilience to climate change. Learnings from the project will have relevance beyond this case study. In many countries, such as Australia, strategies to improve co-management of land with Indigenous populations, as well as interactions in the delegation of World Heritage Sites in the face of climate change, could benefit from research into climate resilience interventions.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper we argue that Marine Protected Areas, which operate with the mandate of the citizenry, and within the legal framework of the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (1999), mutually reinforce the paradox of abstinence from the world within which we necessarily exist.

Paper long abstract:

Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) are shared spaces where human use is regulated or excluded. A mandate from the community helps to justify the contribution of public funds to MPA development and enforcement. In Australia, as in other parts of the world, MPAs generally enjoy a high level of support. The tool is not without controversy among maritime scholars, however, who have questioned the claims made by MPA proponents about their efficacy across a range of measures as well as the economic and social impacts on local stakeholders. Like other environmental management tools, MPAs are enacted predominantly through the management of humans. What is more, the design and deployment of MPAs reflect the normative postulates—the world view, assumptions, culture—of humans, and particularly those shaped by a Western cultural tradition. Within this social framing ‘the environment’ is at its best, most natural, when it is free of humans. However, as is becoming more apparent via the melting of icecaps, rising of seas and pollution of atmospheres, humans need not be present in order to have an impact on distant natural environments. We consider these competing realities—the Western idealisation of wilderness, and the shared impact of humans—in our critique of MPAs in Australia. We argue that MPAs, which operate with the mandate of the citizenry, and within the legal framework of the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (1999), mutually reinforce the paradox of fetishizing abstinence from the world within which we necessarily exist.

Paper short abstract:

Corals Gardens are an important means through which the Great Barrier Reef is understood, experienced and managed. With the impacts of climate and other global impacts, reef scientists are turning to increasingly radical forms of gardening.

Paper long abstract:

Corals Gardens are an important means through which the Great Barrier Reef is understood, experienced and managed. This paper traces the use of the coral garden analogy from early European attempts to make the Reef familiar, to futuristic experiments to ensure its survival. The coral garden allows visitors to experience the Reef through controlled and bounded spaces, separated from the dangers and wildness of the Reef itself. However, climate change and other global impacts transgress garden boundaries, and reef scientists are turning to increasingly radical forms of gardening to protect the Reef. These interventions make it clear that the Great Barrier Reef is a form of nature-culture, rather than a natural World Heritage property.

Paper short abstract:

The growth in carbon & biodiversity credits is hailed as a way to combat climate change. Farmers for Climate Action promotes credits to ‘reward farmers’ & ‘grow the carbon market’. But more radical voices are calling for degrowth & rejecting capitalist solutions to capitalist problems.

Paper long abstract:

Many farmers are drawn into the rhetoric of financial rewards for good custodianship - they believe they should be paid for sequestering carbon and protecting biodiversity. Farmers for Climate Action in Australia has said that carbon and biodiversity credits will provide ‘permanent ongoing funding to reward farmers for the good work they’re doing and provide sustainable, drought-resistant income,’ and going further, asserts that ‘Farmers for Climate Action has been calling for this kind of practical, on-ground assistance to grow the carbon market.’ While one can empathise with farmers’ interest in greater financial security in increasingly unstable climatic and economic conditions, the baked-in logic of pricing is to transform credits into tradable commodities, with the associated offsets available to polluters and destroyers of biodiversity.

But there are alternative voices calling for degrowth and rejecting the increasing commodification of nature, including the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA), a national civil society organisation representing small-scale farmers and their allies for food sovereignty and an agroecological transition. This paper draws on the author’s activist participatory research to argue that movements for climate action must necessarily involve a radical economic transformation alongside the ecological. Drawing on Indigenous ways of knowing and being in the world, and building on the work of Illich, Plumwood, Harvey, Büscher, Fletcher, and Graeber, it argues that the value of nature lies not in its capacity for capitalist accumulation, but in the ways it allows humans and more-than-humans to live convivial lives.

Paper short abstract:

Performance gains in industrial livestock breeding have been extraordinary, yet come at a cost to animal welfare, the environment and agrobiodiversity. Recognising this, heritage breed farmers are going back to basics in pursuit of more just and ecologically sound multispecies futures.

Paper long abstract:

Since the 1940s, in pursuit of profitability the livestock industry has subjected farm animals to heavy selection pressure for productive traits. Performance gains have been extraordinary, as seen in hyper-prolific sows, double-muscled cattle, and broilers with dizzying growth and feed conversion rates. Yet, these gains have come at a cost to animal welfare, the environment and breed diversity. Heritage breed farmers offer an alternative to the productivist model, making holistic selection decisions within systems oriented around the biological basics, including the sunshine and sex shunned by industrial poultry producers. This focus on the old breeds and farming methods serves as both an ode to the past, and a safeguard for an uncertain future, as these hardy, old breeds embody agrobiodiversity and can survive and thrive in diverse, often marginal, environmental conditions without the energy intensive, and ecologically expensive, inputs required in industrial systems.