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- Convenors:
-
Noah Walker-Crawford
(London School of Economics)
Angelica Johansson (UCL)
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Short Abstract:
As governments and social leaders around the world struggle to deal with the impacts of global warming, scientific climate change knowledge plays a key role in shaping discussions about potential solutions. This panel examines how climate knowledge is mobilised for political action.
Long Abstract:
Anthropogenic climate change has slowly but steadily received more public attention over the last three decades. Parallel to this development is a growing demand for the systemic transformation of industrial societies, and at its core, a demand for a political response to the imminent problems of a changing climate. In UN discussions, climate change lawsuits and public protests, people are formulating demands about who should take responsibility and how actors including governments, corporations and citizens should act to prevent climate disaster. Scientific climate change knowledge plays a key role in shaping discussions about potential solutions. Climate knowledge mediates how people understand the problem and envisage scenarios for mitigation, adaptation, and dealing with loss and damage. In this panel, we interrogate how climate knowledge is brought to bear on social, political, and legal disputes about climate change. How does climate knowledge shape the prospects for political action? How do governments, activists and other actors mobilise climate knowledge to promote particular strategies? What are the risks of politicising climate knowledge? We address climate politics in a broad sense: from climate action to climate change litigation; from legislative bodies and ministries to courtrooms; from citizens and activists demanding action or compensation in the face of climate change to the negotiation of international agreements which act as points of reference for national-level climate action. This panel examines how climate knowledge shapes political futures on a warming planet.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 11 April, 2023, -Noah Walker-Crawford (London School of Economics)
Paper short abstract:
Major energy companies are no longer denying climate change, but are rejecting responsibility for its impacts in their defences against climate justice lawsuits. Large emitters shift blame to broader economic forces and seek to invalidate scientific evidence to evade legal liability.
Paper long abstract:
In recent litigation against major greenhouse gas emitters over their contribution to climate change, fossil fuel companies are no longer denying anthropogenic climate change. Rather, they question the validity of climate science for establishing legal responsibility. This article contributes an in-depth analysis of corporate defendants’ evidentiary arguments in four climate change lawsuits. Through a comparative study, I trace how normative understandings come to bear on epistemological disputes about causality. Linking the cases to theoretical discussions about legal evidentiary standards and the use of climate science in the courtroom, I examine the defendants’ efforts to invalidate scientific proof and attack researchers’ credibility. My analysis indicates that the interpretation of evidentiary standards will likely shape the outcome of climate litigation going forward. I find that plaintiffs’ and defendants’ legal narratives and factual claims are linked to broader concerns about who should take responsibility for climate change. Like all knowledge, climate science is inherently value-imbued, emerging in relation to policymakers’ demands, public concerns and researchers’ own worries about global warming. While we must recognise its relational nature and underlying uncertainties, I argue that climate science is a crucial tool for addressing legal and political questions about responsibility and justice in a warming world.
Paloma Yáñez Serrano (Adam Mickiewicz University)
Paper short abstract:
heatwave action protocols should be centered around the social and ecosystem capital of the cities in which they are deployed, because these can help us improve the capacity of the infrastructure and its residents to absorb or withstand heat stress.
Paper long abstract:
This paper draws from long term ethnography with older adults living in areas affected by Madrid's urban heat island effect. It analyzes the limits to extreme heat adaptation that result from existing urban and nature conservation developments and the potential that older adults' intergenerational knowledge and skills could have for the city's socio-ecological resilience. This will be illustrated through the examination of a collaborative design, elaborated with participants, to reframe the authorities recommendations during heatwave alerts. The current recommendations are impairing for older adults because they suggest older adults should stay at home, largely in isolation. What the participants propose is a new set of recommendations that value relationships, traditional non-energy dependent cooling practices, intergenerational knowledge transfer and the use of green cover and air currents to cope with heat.