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Paper short abstract

This paper shows how colonial sugar cane production in Maui reshaped land and water systems, intensifying the 2023 forest fires. Plantation irrigation, land clearing, and the displacement of Indigenous governance produced fire-prone landscapes, amplifying wildfire risk under climate stress.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how colonial development trajectories in Maui reshaped land and water systems, increasing the frequency and intensity of natural disasters, with particular attention to the legacy of sugar cane production. It argues that plantation-era infrastructure, epistemic erasure of Indigenous ecological knowledge, and settler-colonial political economy reconfigured ecosystems to prioritise extractive accumulation over ecological resilience. Irrigation works, stream diversions, wetland drainage, and land clearing for sugar cane monoculture transformed hydrological and vegetative regimes, producing dry, fire-prone landscapes that persist long after the decline of the plantations.

Rather than treating the 2023 Maui wildfires as an anomalous climate event or a failure of emergency response, the paper situates them within a longer history of colonial development that reorganised natural processes. Indigenous systems of watershed management and fire-adaptive landscapes were displaced by legal, scientific, and bureaucratic frameworks that defined land and water as productive inputs rather than relational ecologies. These transformations did not merely shape risk exposure but also altered how climate stress manifests materially on the ground.

Drawing on and extending existing scholarship on the production of vulnerability, the paper shows how development operates as a historical process that conditions disaster outcomes over time. By tracing the connections between sugar cane production, water governance, and contemporary wildfire risk, the analysis demonstrates how colonial infrastructures continue to structure environmental instability in the present. The Maui case contributes to decolonising development debates by showing that reducing disaster risk requires confronting the historical and institutional foundations of development models that amplify natural disasters.