Paper short abstract:

In the Anthropocene, the water crisis is deeply entangled with the climate crisis. This paper explores how to examine and theorise unprecedented climate extremes. To this aim, it proposes an experimental political ecology to engage with unprecedented floods and droughts.

Paper long abstract:

In the Anthropocene, unprecedented climate extremes are expected to become a new 'normal'. Urban Political Ecology is thus confronted with the challenge of theorizing rapidly changing and unprecedented socionatures under anthropogenic climate change. Hydroclimatic extremes aptly illustrate this, with many regions already experiencing unprecedented events and numerical projections suggesting this trend will worsen in the coming years. This will significantly affect the ability of different social groups to respond to and recover from future climate extremes. It also raises questions on how they might (re)constitute future political formations and imaginaries, and what societal responses they might elicit. In this paper I argue that the theoretical task brought about by these emerging socionatures demands new paradigms and analytical approaches. To this aim, I present two experimental approaches to engage with unprecedented urban futures. The first consists of scenarios combining the physical characteristics of unprecedented hydroclimatic extremes with political ecology examinations of how power and variability in the exercise of agency shape societal responses to these events. In the second experiment I collaborate with political ecologists and modelers to speculatively bring about a better world in response to hydroclimatic extremes. Although both experiments depart from past and present logics of colonial violence, racism, capitalism and climate change, they explore competing notions of the unprecedented. By engaging with both desirable and undesirable urban futures of hydroclimatic extremes, I seek to pluralise urban futures and to lay the foundations for a future-oriented political ecology of the unprecedented.