Presentation short abstract

We conceptualize super-vulnerability of migrants to urban heat to be shaped by intersectional patterns of "othering" and oppression, operating at individual, institutional and structural levels, and expressed through four key domains: housing, employment, healthcare, and urban infrastructures.

Presentation long abstract

Heatwaves are increasingly framed as a public health emergency, yet dominant approaches rely on meteorological indicators and epidemiological metrics that obscure how heat is differentially lived, felt and endured across social groups. We advance a critical heat justice perspective by centering heat as an embodied, socio-political, and place-based phenomenon. Drawing on feminist, critical urban, and environmental justice scholarship, we develop an analytical framework that conceptualizes the super-vulnerability of migrants to heat as a dynamic and relational condition shaped by intersectional and historical patterns of "othering" and oppression (along lines of class, race, religion, migration status or gender) and operating at individual, institutional and structural levels across Europe. These are expressed in four key domains surrounding everyday life: housing, employment (formal and informal), healthcare, and urban infrastructures (hard, soft and social). To assess how far existing literature captures these dynamics, we conducted a scoping review of empirical studies on heat-related vulnerability in European cities focusing on migrants and racialized populations. Our findings indicate that evidence of disproportionate exposure and health risk is growing, but vulnerability continues to be operationalized through reductive proxies such as neighborhood deprivation or income, with limited engagement with racism or migration as structuring forces. Moreover, few studies explicitly theorize heat as an embodied experience or address the role of institutional neglect, labor precarity, and racialized housing pathways in producing “super-vulnerability” for migrant groups. We argue that reframing heat as a justice issue is essential for making visible the political conditions under which exposure is produced and sustained.

Presentation short abstract

Photovoice with Majority World migrants in Dublin reveals how persistent rain and damp housing become embodied forms of climate injustice, shaping health, everyday life, and migrant-led adaptations in the inner city.

Presentation long abstract

Persistent rain and damp are emerging as defining climate stresses in Dublin, where 2023 marked the wettest year on record. However the climate-health impacts of persistent rain receive little attention in adaptation discourse compared to high-magnitude flooding events. These slow-onset weather patterns intersect sharply with Dublin’s housing crisis, particularly in the inner city where many Majority World migrants are confined to the private rental sector. Here, expensive, poorly insulated, and overcrowded dwellings mean rain is felt not only outdoors but inside the home, through damp, mould, condensation, cold, and the embodied strain of living in conditions that harm human health.

This paper uses photovoice to explore how Majority World migrants perceive and navigate, and adapt to persistent rain and damp living conditions. Drawing on an embodied political ecology framework, the study examines how climatic forces become materially and affectively inscribed in bodies, homes, and everyday practices, and how these embodied experiences are compound with pre-existing vulnerabilities such as discrimination employment, legal status, and unequal urban development. Photovoice images and narratives reveal how participants interpret dampness as both a physical health risk and a lived expression of social exclusion.

This project foregrounds the situated knowledges, and adaptive practices that residents develop in response to chronic rain and deteriorating housing conditions. By centring embodied experience through participant-produced visual methods, the paper advances debates in urban climate justice and argues for adaptation strategies in Dublin that include persistent rain as a factor, and that meaningfully incorporate migrant perspectives into more equitable climate futures.

Presentation short abstract

This research uses serious gaming to examine how queer urban communities navigate flood vulnerability through informal support and mutual aid, offering a feminist critique of institutional adaptation and climate injustice.

Presentation long abstract

This study explores how LGBTQ+ communities in Hull, UK, navigate flood vulnerability through a feminist, Butlerian lens that reconceptualizes vulnerability not as weakness but as a condition of interdependence that can foster resilience through mutual aid and solidarity. Using serious gaming as a participatory method, the research engaged queer residents in a co-creative card game to examine how structural inequalities shaped by institutional neglect and exclusionary practices shape flood preparedness, response, and recovery. Findings reveal that informal support networks, distrust in formal authorities, and resource inequities critically influence adaptive capacities. Participants emphasized community-driven care over institutional responses, highlighting how everyday adaptations emerge from shared vulnerability. This research argues for justice-centered flood risk management that recognizes vulnerability as relational and transformative, challenging neoliberal and paternalistic frameworks. It demonstrates the utility of serious gaming as a critical methodology for surfacing marginalized climate narratives and imaginaries, as well as engaging marginalized groups in climate adaptation discourse.

Presentation short abstract

Coastal communities in Malindi adapt to shifting sand resources and shifting livelihood options as climate variability and urban demand for sand reshape labour. These everyday adaptations highlight how environmental change and development patterns influence emerging forms of social vulnerability.

Presentation long abstract

On Kenya’s northern coast, the Malindi sand-mining frontier is increasingly shaped by climate variability, shifting geomorphologies, and the urban construction boom in Mombasa. Extreme weather, marked by intensified tidal surges, erratic rainfall, and changing sediment flows in the Sabaki River estuary, is transforming local livelihoods while deepening existing inequalities. This paper examines how coastal communities navigate these intertwined climate and urbanization pressures through everyday adaptive practices that are simultaneously resourceful and precarious.

Drawing on distinctions made by interlocutors between “red sand” from siltation, “white sand” that sustains tourism, and “golden sand” used for construction, I analyse how value, labour, and vulnerability are co-produced with dynamic geophysical processes. As declining fish catches and unpredictable farming conditions push artisanal fishers, mangrove conservationists, and ecotourism workers into sand-related labour, sand itself emerges, via its “thing-power” (Bennett 2010), as a more-than-human force structuring livelihood possibilities. These shifts illustrate how climate-affected landscapes generate new forms of dependence on hazardous and exploitative extractive work.

By extending the concept of geosocialit, I propose the notion of geosocial vulnerability to describe how climate change, environmental degradation, and uneven development converge to expose coastal residents to escalating risks. Situating Malindi within broader debates on urban climate justice, I show how community responses to shifting sands both mitigate immediate climatic pressures and reveal the structural drivers, coastal erosion, extractive urbanism, and limited adaptation support, that reproduce inequality. Ultimately, the paper highlights how everyday adaptations in Kenya’s sand-mining frontier offer critical insights for justice-centred and transformative approaches to climate adaptation.

Presentation short abstract

Extreme heat and adaptation reshape cities but mirror inequalities, sometimes driving displacement. This study maps climate gentrification in metropolitan Barcelona, revealing unequal vulnerability and urging justice-centered, community-informed adaptation.

Presentation long abstract

Extreme heat and climate adaptation are reshaping cities, but these shifts follow entrenched inequalities that determine who remains vulnerable and whose needs are overlooked. Adaptation efforts like heat mitigation and green infrastructure, can unintentionally heighten displacement pressures by increasing neighborhood desirability without securing affordable housing, pushing out low income and minority residents. These dynamics expose a housing–climate paradox in which expanding adaptation measures can deepen exclusion through rising costs, shifting risk geographies, and speculative investment in climate resilient areas.

This paper examines how climate adaptation strategies in the Barcelona metropolitan area intersect with housing precarity, climate adaptation, and emergent forms of climate gentrification. Using a participatory mixed methods design that combines spatial indicators, correlation based statistical analysis, and qualitative work with municipal actors and grassroots organizations, the study develops a metropolitan vulnerability index grounded in the exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity framework.

Results reveal a geography of unequal climate vulnerability where peripheral municipalities of the metropolitan area concentrate high exposure, intensified social sensitivity, and limited adaptive capacity. Expanded qualitative data further illuminate how community-based organizations negotiate heat through embodied, domestic, and collective practices that coexist with and often contradict institutional adaptation strategies. By foregrounding the entanglements between everyday climate practices, housing inequalities, and the political economies driving metropolitan adaptation, this research offers tools for anticipating climate related displacement. It argues for justice centered adaptation strategies that attend to structural drivers of vulnerability and recognizes community knowledge as essential to building more equitable urban futures.

Presentation short abstract

The project examines how extreme heat disproportionately affects marginalized communities in Rio de Janeiro, showing how colonial and racialized power shape heat exposure, and how feminist, decolonial, and community practices can inform more just urban climate policies.

Presentation long abstract

Extreme heat is distributed unevenly and disproportionately affects socio-economically marginalized communities, especially in (post)colonial regions where environmental degradation and global inequities are starkly visible. Drawing on Critical Heat Studies, the project examines how embodied, social, and spatial experiences of urban heat are shaped by colonial and capitalist exploitation, extractivism, and racialized violence. Although many regions in the so-called Global South are most affected by climate impacts—particularly extreme heat—research still concentrates on high-income regions. This contrasts with lived realities in the Global South, where large populations in informal settlements face heightened vulnerability to extreme heat, yet their experiences remain insufficiently documented. Mazzone (2024) therefore calls for examining the “decolonisation of thermal comfort” (15) to better understand inequalities in heat exposure and in how different bodies experience, adapt to, and access cooling.

This project focuses on Rio de Janeiro, where perceived temperatures often exceed 60 °C and favelas face acute thermal insecurity shaped by racialized violence, territorial stigma, and infrastructural neglect. It analyzes how heat is embodied, and politically structured, and how domestic and community-based practices generate localized cooling and care. The project also assesses state-led adaptation measures and their potential to reinforce or mitigate inequities.

Centering feminist, decolonial, and care-oriented perspectives, the research shows how everyday adaptation practices can inform more just urban climate policies and improve equitable access to thermal comfort across Latin American cities.

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines Istanbul’s threatened Yedikule Bostans, where “green” redevelopment displaces subsistence practices. Drawing on ethnographic data, the paper explores how gardeners’ care and agroecological practices resist technocratic planning and open pathways for environmental justice.

Presentation long abstract

Istanbul is among Europe’s most climate-vulnerable coastal cities, where intensifying heat, floods, droughts, and sea-level rise reshape urban life and deepen inequalities for marginalized communities. Under authoritarian and neoliberal governance, municipal climate plans follow converging logics of climate urbanism and technocratic solutionism, prioritizing risk management, optimization, and “green” infrastructure fixes. Yet these interventions frequently target ecological commons and subsistence ecologies that have long sustained communities through food production, situated knowledge, and socio-environmental reproduction.

This paper examines one such site: the Yedikule Bostans, centuries-old subsistence gardens alongside Istanbul’s UNESCO-listed Land Walls, historically cultivated by diverse migrant communities. Long dismissed as “informal,” the Bostans gained renewed meaning in post-Gezi urban movements, becoming sites of resistance where gardeners, activists, and state actors negotiate contested claims to land, memory, and just urban futures. Here, climate-oriented redevelopment manifests as displacement, replacing subsistence gardens with “green” parks and erasing agroecological practices that have sustained biodiversity, food security, and flood mitigation.

The paper asks: How do marginalized communities adapt to climatic uncertainties while navigating dispossession? And what alliances emerge through conflicts that open possibilities for more just climate action?

Drawing on ethnographic research (2018–2022), I explore how gardeners’ embodied practices—soil care, seed saving, irrigation, and collective labor—constitute vernacular and politicized forms of climate adaptation that challenge technocratic planning. Integrating eco-feminist subsistence perspectives, commons scholarship, and feminist political ecology, the paper argues that contested urban ecologies such as the Bostans generate transformative adaptation imaginaries grounded in care, marginal ecological knowledge, and the right to the city.

Presentation short abstract

This research explores how women waste pickers in Delhi’s Bhalaswa landfill experience and cope with extreme heat, documenting its physical, mental, and spiritual impacts and capturing feminist, decolonial stories of community wisdom, resilience, and resistance.

Presentation long abstract

Bhalaswa, located in Delhi the capital of India hosts one of the country’s largest landfills and is home to communities living in conditions of severe poverty, exclusion, and environmental precarity. Gender and caste-based inequities shape daily life in this settlement, where most residents work as waste pickers and face heightened vulnerability to the accelerating climate crisis. Intensifying summer heat waves, harsh winter cold, and toxic pollution create a cycle of compounded marginalisation, making access to basic services, social protection, and dignified living increasingly difficult.

This research seeks to understand how extreme heat is experienced, embodied, and navigated by waste picker communities, with a particular focus on women whose labour, care responsibilities, and social location expose them to disproportionate risks. It explores the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of heat, tracing how it affects health, livelihood rhythms, mobility, and everyday decision-making. At the same time, the study aims to document the deep reservoirs of ancestral and community wisdom that shape local strategies of care, resilience, and resistance in the face of worsening climatic stress.

Grounded in feminist and decolonial methodologies, the project adopts a storytelling-centred approach, using visual and oral narratives to illuminate lived realities often overlooked in formal climate research and policy. Through co-created stories, photographs, soundscapes, and testimonies, the research will map the intimate, intergenerational knowledge systems that help communities endure and adapt to extreme heat.

Presentation short abstract

What we learn from Indonesian and Vietnamese hill stations about urban forms of climate injustice.

Presentation long abstract

This communication examines the postcolonial trajectories of Indonesian and Vietnamese hill stations in the context of climate change. Developed in the mountains of French and Dutch colonial empires, they have invariably been presented as prime locations for colonists where the climate is cooler and healthier but also as places where the population is predominantly white, which has justified urban forms of segregation. Since the time of independence, domestic tourism is now predominant in these areas and it could be perceived as a form of climate justice redistribution (Rawls,1971 ; Klinsky & Dowlatabadi, 2009), fostering access to coolness in a context of climate inequalities, in opposite to metropolitan hot areas such as Jakarta or Ho Chi Minh City.

We test this hypothesis by adopting a critical postcolonial perspective on the urban process (Roy, 2016 ; Yeoh, 2011) supported by our Urbaltour’ research program (French National Agency, ANR). We have examined historical archives and conducted fieldwork in four hill stations in Indonesia (Tretes and Garut) and Vietnam (Sa Pa and Da Lat). In accordance with Iris Marion Young’s five faces of oppression (1991) : exploitation, marginalization, cultural imperialism, powerlessness and violence, we demonstrate that actual domestic tourism in those hill stations are closely bound up with the reproduction of social and ethnic inequalities between low and highlands, also called “zomia” (Scott, 2009). Finally, we contribute to deconstruct the naturalization of freshness and its relationship with whiteness (Keucheyan, 2018).

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines the adaptation responses to extreme heat in Ghana. It shows that extreme heat vulnerabilities go beyond the visible male-female and poor-rich neighborhood divide and reveal how their adaptation challenges mirror remnants of the colonial legacy of gendered access to resources.

Presentation long abstract

Ghana has developed and implemented various policies and practical measures to establish and lead a national approach to climate change adaptation and mitigation. These frameworks notably consider gender and space as critical analytical lenses for assessing and addressing climate vulnerabilities. Similarly, academic literature has explored gendered and spatial inequalities in people's lived experiences of climate change. While this is encouraging, a closer look at the research and policy responses reveals a continuation of colonial discourses that reinforce dichotomous female-male gender categories and rural-urban or north-south spatial vulnerabilities. Using empirical data from extreme heat adaptation research in Accra, we demonstrate how current climate policies perpetuate colonial legacies that can hinder effective action. Moreover, we argue that the adaptation strategies employed by participants replicate colonial remnants of framing care, particularly in relation to domestic care, thereby entrenching and perpetuating female domestication and creating an added burden of care and adaptation responses. Thus, we argue that Ghana’s approach to extreme heat adaptation requires a nuanced, intersectional, and critical understanding of vulnerabilities that moves beyond rural-urban, north-south, and socio-economic divisions. It must account for urban dynamics shaped by colonial structures that influence access, opportunities, barriers to resources, displacement, and neglect

Presentation short abstract

This study examines how climate stressors, energy insecurity, and housing instability impact the health of older adults in the South Bronx. We analyze physical activity, survey, and air quality data, while exploring policy risks under New York City local housing regulations.

Presentation long abstract

This interdisciplinary, multi-site study explores the intersection of climate justice, housing insecurity, and health vulnerability among older adults living in under-resourced urban environments. We focus on the South Bronx, a New York City neighborhood marked by aging housing, concentrated poverty, racial segregation, high rates of energy insecurity, and extreme heat vulnerability, to explore how climate-related stressors combined with social vulnerability affect the health and housing stability of senior tenants.

A cohort of 24 older adults (aged 55+) has been enrolled in a two-year longitudinal study. Participants are asked to wear a Fitbit to collect physiological data, host indoor air quality monitors, and complete surveys on health, housing, and energy insecurity. The study also evaluates how different structures of targeted cash transfers for summer energy costs, combined with extreme heat alert messaging, influence coping strategies during the extreme heat season. The average age of participant is 62 years old, 65% identify as female, and 65% are of Hispanic or Latino origin. Most participants report low income and high energy costs: 90% spend over $100/month on utilities, and 25% exceed $250. Preliminary results show that 60% receive external support to pay energy bills, yet many still experience multiple forms of energy insecurity, alongside chronic conditions such as hypertension, cardiovascular disease, or diabetes.

In parallel, we are analyzing spatial and policy data to evaluate whether New York City’s Local Law 97 (intended to improve energy efficiency) may unintentionally increase displacement risk or eviction pressure.

Presentation short abstract

The presentation traces the geographies of gendered inequalities embedded within urban mobility and how these inequalities manifest as gendered climate vulnerability. Through qualitative studies, I map gender climate injustice and everyday adaptation practices of women.

Presentation long abstract

Climate-induced disasters are increasingly threatening the resilience of transport systems. Indian cities frequently experience flooding due to extreme rainfall, inadequate drainage systems, and unplanned urban expansion. In recent years, extreme rainfall has caused frequent transportation disruptions in Hyderabad and Kochi in South India due to resultant flooding. These disruptions expose not only infrastructure vulnerability but the disproportionate effects it has on those reliant on public transport and active mobility: women, informal workers, and low-income groups, sometimes a combination of all three. The resulting immobility and the inability to access safe transport systems can prevent evacuations to safer zones and access to healthcare.

I present my PhD dissertation research on how gendered (im)mobility intersects with urban flooding in South Indian cities, Hyderabad and Kochi. Through comparative case studies across the cities, the project investigates everyday adaptation practises of women against climate-induced immobility. By foregrounding the politics of gendered (im)mobility, this research contributes to advancing both theoretical debates on mobility justice and practical interventions for more equitable and climate-resilient urban transport systems in India.

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines how Bangkok’s heat governance shapes risks for informal workers. Using policy analysis and surveys with over 1,000 workers, it reveals how current adaptation strategies overlook livelihood realities and reinforce inequities.

Presentation long abstract

Heat stress is an escalating challenge in Bangkok, Thailand, with profound implications for economic productivity and public health (Arifwidodo et al. 2019; Rubinyi et al. 2025). Impacts are shaped by socioeconomic inequalities and the urban environment (Arifwidodo & Chandrasiri 2020), but few studies examine how risks vary across worker groups, particularly the 42% employed in the informal economy.

Since the 1990s, Bangkok’s pursuit of “global city” status has relied on private-sector-led real-estate projects (Endo 2022; Polakit & Boontharm 2008). Private investments increasingly feature in heat mitigation strategies, but access to cooling and green space remains deeply unequal (Rubinyi et al. 2025; Marks & Connell 2024). Key climate plans and adaptation agendas focus on broad technical measures and a few economic sectors, which risks reinforcing inequalities by overlooking urban informal livelihoods.

This paper uses mixed methods to examine Bangkok’s heat governance, analyzing the interplay of state and institutional responses and the limits of private adaptation for marginalized workers. It draws on policy analysis, key informant interviews and phone‑based surveys with over 1,000 informal workers —street vendors and home‑based workers as representative outdoor and indoor occupations— conducted in May 2025. Comparing formal adaptation frameworks with workers’ lived experiences reveals gaps in risk governance and highlights the need for livelihood‑sensitive heat adaptation that explicitly includes informality.

Adopting a political ecology perspective, the paper emphasizes that heat risks are unequally distributed and shaped by political and economic processes. It examines why dominant adaptation approaches often overlook or reproduce inequalities affecting the city’s informal workforce.

Presentation short abstract

Tracing two recent global responses to heatwaves – namely the Extreme Heat Risk Governance Framework launched at COP30, and the parametric heatwave insurance – I ask why certain models of heat management emerge, how scale is considered, and what measurements are salient, over what temporalities.

Presentation long abstract

The rise of urban temperatures and extended heatwaves in cities across the world, has led to recent global, multi-lateral responses. These responses, whether advocating individual coping mechanisms, infrastructural solutions, or financial products, imagine the future of extreme heat in specific ways. Given the differentiated risks of extreme heat amongst urban residents facing social and economic exclusion, adaptation approaches can determine how livelihoods are accessed, and housing reconfigured in increasingly unbearable weather conditions.Tracing two initiatives that have been adapted and repurposed in different contexts – namely the Extreme Heat Risk Governance Framework launched at COP30, and the parametric heatwave insurance – I ask why certain models of heat management come to fore, how the scale (of the problem) is considered, and what measurements are considered salient, over what temporalities. More specifically, I pay attention to the messiness that top-down calculable models often erase, when imagining the future, and consider the cracks through which alternative heat imaginaries, which are justice-focused, emerge.