Presentation short abstract

On 9 October 1963, a landslide into the Vajont reservoir sent a wave that killed 2,000 people. Beyond an Anthropocene tale of humans moving mountains, Vajont exposes a Wasteocene logic in which profit overrides human and ecological safety, revealing entangled power, science, and resistance.

Presentation long abstract

On October 9, 1963, a massive landslide into the Vajont reservoir unleashed a wave of water and mud that killed two thousand people. This tragedy might initially appear as a quintessential Anthropocene narrative: humans, acting as geological forces, moving mountains—and, in a prophetic interpretation, facing nature’s retribution for attempting to dominate her. However, viewed from the cemetery where the victims are buried, the story of Vajont reveals itself less as an Anthropocene parable and more as an expression of the "Capitalocene" or "Wasteocene"—an era in which capitalism generates socioecological assemblages that prioritize profit over human and environmental well-being. Vajont acts as a kaleidoscope, refracting contemporary discourses on science, species, and agency, and showing their entanglements with power, oppression, and resistance.

Presentation short abstract

Achieving sustainable development has been increasingly understood as an outcome not only of economic and social policies but also the ability to manage disaster-related risks. We explore how incorporating multiple values into social designs reduce the impact of disasters and promote development.

Presentation long abstract

In a rapidly changing world, the ability to manage disaster-related risks is central to achieving sustainable development. While climate change and biodiversity loss are creating conditions of complexity and uncertainty, current knowledge systems, practices, and policies remain highly specialized and fragmented, and are increasingly not sufficient to meet these challenges. Linear understandings of top-down, fragmented, technical responses to disasters and development reflect a set of narrow understandings of why disasters occur and how we should respond to them. However, there has been growing policy attention to the importance of examining how values shape policies. A growing literature emphasizes that values that conceive of humanity as part of nature are central to addressing the formidable climatic, biophysical and socio-economic challenges humanity currently faces. In this presentation, we employ World Ecology as the framework that acknowledges peoples’ various relations with nature, and view “region” as a space of humanity-in-nature relations where multiple places contain different relations between nature, society, and humanity. Particularly, in East Asia, flows of trade, investment, and aid have reworked humanity-in-nature relations, creating growing risks and vulnerabilities of disasters. Through a lens of World Ecology, we critically rethink the relationship between disasters and development, and explore the ways in which multiple values could be integrated into policies and governance of development, environment, and disasters through shifting knowledge systems, worldviews and values on humanity-in-nature relations.

Presentation short abstract

Large-scale infrastructure expansion in fragile Himalayan terrain has turned Uttarakhand into a landscape of chronic, human-made disasters. Weak disaster governance and haphazard development deepen disaster risk, demanding urgent, community-centred and ecologically grounded reforms.

Presentation long abstract

Uttarakhand, a visually spectacular Himalayan state in northern India, has become a site where disaster is produced through the everyday workings of development and weak governance. Over the last two decades, the Bhagirathi–Alaknanda river basin has been transformed by a combination of infrastructure and extractive projects such as dams, tunnels, river diversions, riverbed mining, slope cutting, and blasting. These projects, justified through narratives of clean energy, national security, and regional modernisation, have disrupted livelihoods, destabilised slopes, and intensified subsidence, landslides, tunnel collapses, and flash floods during extreme climatic events.

Using a political ecology approach, this paper examines how development in Uttarakhand has produced disaster rather than mitigating it. Using evidence drawn from interviews with civil society organisations, non-profits, local communities, and activists, alongside Right to Information (RTI) responses in which state departments openly acknowledge the absence of a functional disaster management system, effective governance, and meaningful disaster risk reduction, the paper reveals how institutional weakness compounds disaster, deepening both ecological and social vulnerability in the state.

For residents of towns such as Joshimath and villages across Uttarkashi, disaster is not an episodic event but an ongoing condition that shapes mobility, livelihoods, water access, and trust in the state. The paper argues that Uttarakhand’s experience reveals how development polices centred on economic growth and geopolitical dominance, produce new forms of vulnerability in mountain regions already experiencing climate stress. It calls for re-imagining Himalayan development through relational, ecologically grounded, and community-centred approaches that challenge the political drivers of risk.

Presentation short abstract

Based on a detailed analysis of the specific causes of death, this contribution aims to shed light on how disasters are socially produced and governed, particularly through increased exposure and vulnerability to disasters, as a direct consequence of neoliberal urban planning decoupled from nature.

Presentation long abstract

The increase in natural disasters, often linked to climate change, not only causes enormous material damage and impacts on biodiversity, but also claims thousands of lives worldwide each year. Between 1995 and 2024 alone, 830,000 people died worldwide because of natural disasters, and 58% of these deaths were due to storms and floods (Adil et al., 2025: 20). In Europe, the Valencia floods of October 2024 were one of the most serious events, with 229 fatalities. Many of these people died in the street, in their homes, or inside their cars, unaware of the danger they faced, and for almost a week the Spanish state proved incapable of providing aid to most of the 75 affected towns.

Based on a detailed analysis of the specific causes of death of these individuals, the result of extensive research into a highly sensitive issue, this contribution aims to shed light on how disasters are socially produced, particularly through increased exposure and vulnerability to disasters, a direct consequence of neoliberal urban planning decoupled from nature. Secondly, it seeks to highlight the weak and insufficient government response to this disaster, despite Spain's excellent economic standing in 2024 according to classic capitalist metrics such as GDP, job creation, and corporate profits. The growing decoupling between the capitalist economy and social protection against disasters is analysed from the perspective of the political ecology of natural disasters, using the case of Valencia as a case study, to urge the construction of a society better adapted to natural disasters.

Presentation short abstract

This study examines how development-driven deforestation and shrimp aquaculture intensified vulnerability to Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar’s delta. It shows how women-led, multispecies regeneration, rooted in river and care, offered alternatives to colonial post-disaster governance and technocratic aid.

Presentation long abstract

Cyclone Nargis struck Myanmar’s Ayeyarwady Delta in May 2008 with catastrophic force, killing an estimated 138,000 people and displacing millions. Decades of export-oriented shrimp aquaculture had accelerated deforestation, mangrove clearance, habitat fragmentation, and water pollution, eroding ecological buffers that historically mitigated storm surges, supported fisheries, and stabilised riverine life (FAO, 2005; EJF, 2004).

Based on fieldwork in two severely affected riverside communities in Dedaye and Myaungmya townships, this study examines how recovery unfolded along competing trajectories: externalised humanitarian intervention and grassroots regeneration. Post-disaster assistance, while framed through humanitarian rationales, frequently operated through technocratic and spatially re-ordering logic, resettlement schemes, standardised housing, and infrastructure placement, that reproduced colonial modes of governance by displacing local lifeworlds and consolidating state authority over land and populations.

Against this, the paper documents a community-led regeneration process led by women’s collectives that remained less dependent on externally delivered goods and services. Women mobilised river knowledge, cultural practices, and multispecies care to reconstruct livelihoods through reciprocal relations with land, water, and non-human life.

Conceptually, the paper proposes forces of regeneration as an analytical framework to capture how communities recover not merely through reconstruction but by re-making socio-ecological relations in the aftermath of destruction. It shows how women’s labour, river ecologies, and multispecies relations function as sites of political agency, care, and renewal. This study argues regeneration as relational, situated, and feminist, and reframes resilience as a political-ecological process grounded in land-river-based ethics and more-than-human alliances, therefore, contributing to the political ecology of disasters.

Presentation short abstract

The Western Caribbean region, known for its rich socio-environmental diversity, faces today big climate injustices related to disaster capitalism which affects cultural, historical, and agroecological systems, in relation to ancestral traditions that have defined these communities for centuries

Presentation long abstract

Disaster capitalism refers to an economic model of intervention that benefits from crises. In the context of the climate crisis, this model translates into exploiting natural disasters for commercial purposes, such as tourism or property sales. In the cases of Barbuda, Vieques, Jamaica, Old Providence (Toro, Perez, 2020) rebuilding, reflects the trend of investing resources without taking into account ancestral knowledge. (SCT, 2024) Devastated regions as Western Jamaica, Haiti and Cuba, after the passage of hurricane Melissa, show how local peoples are disproportionately affected by centuries of nature´s colonization.

Indigenous and local communities as Maya, Raizal, Miskito, Garifuna and Raizal peoples and many others, in this considered, resource-rich areas are simultaneously exposed to the local impacts of extraction and the broader effects of climate change, creating a feedback loop of environmental and social damage.

In particular, the Archipelago of San Andres and Old Providence, located in the South-Western Caribbean, serves as a clear example of the challenges faced by coastal and island communities protecting their heritage in the contect of a climate crisis. This paper aims to distinguish how disaster capitalism impacted Old Providence Island, after the passage of Hurricane Iota in 2020. Social and symbolic values of architecture and landscape involves a historical and emotional dimension of relationships in this terri/maritories that were not being considered in the rebuilding process. We will present the conflicts associated with the recovery of the wooden architectural heritage of cultural, emotional, physical, and intangible value and the defense of its ancestral Caribbean territories.

Presentation short abstract

Based on qualitative research, this paper investigates the emergence of a political ecology of reconstruction after the Valencia climate disaster in 2024. It examines how community initiatives challenge state-capital dominance in reconstruction and promote democratic and ecological alternatives.

Presentation long abstract

In late October 2024, a sudden flood turned Valencia’s streets into torrents that devastated the predominantly low-income western districts, submerging thousands of buildings and causing 230 deaths. It was the most severe climate disaster in recent European history and a major focusing event (Giordono et al. 2020) that exposed contradictions in climate governance and intensified conflict among political actors (Tierney 2007).

Disasters often function as “windows of opportunity” through which state–capital alliances consolidate power and expand capitalist interests. The concepts of shock economy and disaster capitalism (Klein 2007) capture how extreme events create new spaces for accumulation and profit, particularly during reconstruction (Schuller and Maldonado 2016; Keucheyan 2019; Imperiale and Vanclay 2020). Yet, while such trajectories have frequently been contested, they have rarely produced large-scale alternative reconstruction processes.

Valencia offers a noteworthy exception. In the aftermath of the DANA, local communities mobilised not only to challenge top-down emergency and reconstruction management but also to articulate bottom-up responses grounded in political ecology principle. Based on qualitative research, this contribution examines reconstruction as a contested political field by exploring aims, approaches and practices of community-led initiatives organised through the Comitès Locals d’Emergència i Reconstrucciò (CLER). These committees seek to reclaim territorial decision-making power and redefine reconstruction priorities around ecological and democratic principles rather than technocratic or market-driven criteria.

This research investigates how community-driven reconstruction can generate trajectories toward transformative post-disaster futures, positioning the Valencia case at the crossroads of political ecology and disaster sociology.

Presentation short abstract

Chile’s recent forest fires reveal how neoliberal policies have produced flammable territories. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the afterlife of two massive events, this paper shows how scapegoat politics obscure the structural origins of these disasters and limit both prevention and response.

Presentation long abstract

In recent decades, massive wildfires have erupted across Chile with growing intensity, exposing how neoliberal state policies have reshaped landscapes and produced hazardous living conditions. Among these, two events stand out: The 2017 Santa Olga fire, which ravaged more than 550,000 hectares of territory, and the 2024 Viña del Mar fire, which claimed 139 lives and affected at least 20,000 people. Taken together, these events reveal how long-term transformations linked to extensive deforestation, the expansion of monoculture plantations, weak environmental regulation, and a persistent housing crisis have pushed low-income communities into risk-prone areas. In the afterlife of these fires, state institutions focused on identifying individuals accused of starting the flames. This narrow narrative of culpability operated as a form of scapegoating and failed to acknowledge the broader political and ecological conditions that have intensified fire exposure and limited the possibility of meaningful prevention and response. Drawing on fieldwork with victims, community organizations, and state agents in Santa Olga and Viña del Mar, this paper examines the political origins of Chile’s current fire crisis. It asks where fire comes from and why this question matters in a context where neoliberal land policies, private forestry regimes, and unequal access to safe housing continue to produce unequal territories. By approaching fire as both an environmental process and a political force, the paper shows how scapegoat politics obscure the structural origins of wildfire risk and prevent recognition of the long-term transformations that have produced Chile’s flammable landscapes.

Presentation short abstract

Narratives about technology in capitalism. Agriculture and forestry in Uruguay. The Work aims to denaturalize the category of technology , to define it among capitalist context and the the social, planetary, and ecosystemic implications.

Presentation long abstract

The concept of technology involves an appropriation of the accumulation regime and the affective economy of predatory, extractivist capitalism. This technology, and the risks associated with it, which are subjects of controversy, are at the same time defined as producers of potential dangers and as means of protection. They are forms of the present and future structured from the global North, within the consensus of decarbonization and green colonialism, of a technocratic and increasingly denialist capitalism, anchored in current, digitized versions of scientific paradigms that assume human conquest over phenomena and species (both human and non-human), placing morality at the service of production and control. At the service of a societal model that focuses on wealth generation and production as objectives, patriarchal and Eurocentric.

As such, it is a paradigm that exploits and oppresses. It privatizes social and ecosystemic relationships, technologically mediated as part of what has been called technofeudalism or cannibalistic capitalism. The Work aims to denaturalize the category of technology and current technological transformations, to define them in their proper terms: one option among others and the social, planetary, and ecosystemic implications it shapes for certain worlds of work and subjectivities. It extracts natural goods massively and intensively for its own benefit, treating them as commodities. Examples of these narratives and tensions are presented through the analysis of discourses on risks in agriculture and in the pulp industry in Uruguay.

Presentation short abstract

Without understanding the non-material impacts of poor disaster response, climate change will continue to erode the liveability of places. This paper explores these issues in a flood affected town in Australia, where a strong and well-funded state could have done better.

Presentation long abstract

While debates surrounding uninhabitability under climate change create a dichotomy between habitable and uninhabitable, uninhabitability is driven from within by structural factors that drive vulnerability and poor disaster response. Thus, counter to some discourses, there will be no safe place in which people can take refuge under future climate change. This paper explores the non-material factors that undermine the liveability of place post-disaster. The research focuses on Lismore, a town in regional Australia that, while accustomed to flooding, experienced flood heights in 2022 that were two metres higher than recorded in written records. The response from the government was commensurate to the impact, promising a transformational approach that would build a Lismore fit for the future, ultimately investing a billion Australian dollars. However, government decisions, driven by risk aversion, market priorities and top-down decision-making, and amplified by local politics, undermined the transformational nature of the response and ultimately the viability of place. The mismatch between the pace and priorities of reconstruction and unmet humanitarian needs eroded residents’ trust in government, generated grief over the missed opportunity for radical change, and caused psychological trauma and detachment from place, undermining life in the community and causing unnecessary displacement. As extreme weather becomes more widespread and intense there is increasing need to ensure repeated events do not lead to inevitable decline and to understand non-material trade-offs that occur during disaster response.

Presentation short abstract

As floods and fires engulf more of our homes, varieties of 'disaster ecosocialism' are desperately being excavated from ruins. What connects disaster solidarity with an ecosocialist, degrowth horizon? This presentation braids degrowth, disaster studies and political ecology to develop those links.

Presentation long abstract

In their reflection on 20 years of the RADIX network -- the home of radical interpretations of disaster -- Ben Wisner and Maureen Fordham (2022) asked a provocative question: Which disaster solutions assume an infinitely expanding market economy, and which ones are "compatible with a degrowth strategy"? This talk explores the latter possibility in depth by articulating a conceptual framework to link disaster studies and degrowth. Drawing on evidence collected from recent disasters in Valencia (DANA 2024), Cuba (Hurricane Helene 2025), and New Orleans (Hurricane Ida 2021), I highlight the manifold ways that radical approaches to disaster -- centered on repair, care, and social reproduction -- challenge the capitalist growth machines at work in disaster zones. Through material practices, affective labor, alliance-building, territorialized organization, and cultural work, I trace the rise and revival of 'disaster councils': communal institutions where affected groups do the work of contesting reconstruction and articulating alternatives. I show how these alternatives often emphasize degrowth-like logics, and serve as vital spaces of learning and unity for militant sectors of anti-capitalist struggle. I describe the strengths and limitations of strategies centered on mutual aid and self-organization, highlighting dilemmas of scale, state engagement, sustainability, and the centrality of exhaustion as an emotion. I conclude by describing possibilities for a political ecology of disaster that centers radical alternatives to capitalist growth and maladaptive development.