Presentation short abstract

Adaptation in the Paris Agreements Global Stocktake (GST) is governed through technocratic logics that marginalise political and local knowledges. This study shows how epistemic and structural power shape outcomes and argues for a more deliberative, justice-oriented GST.

Presentation long abstract

The Global Stocktake (GST) of the Paris Agreement is often portrayed as a technocratic mechanism to assess collective progress on climate action. Yet, beyond its procedural role, the GST constitutes a key site where norms, knowledge, and authority in global climate governance are negotiated. This article examines how adaptation is governed through the first GST, revealing how epistemic and structural power shape what counts as legitimate adaptation knowledge and action. Drawing on 32 semi-structured interviews with UNFCCC negotiators, national policymakers, and civil society actors, the study analyses how adaptation was discursively constructed, interpreted, and institutionalised across the technical and political phases of the GST. The findings show that adaptation was largely framed as a managerial and measurable process of planning and reporting, mirroring the concurrent Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) negotiations, while deeper distributive and political dimensions of vulnerability were sidelined. Despite providing limited political signals, most notably the call for national adaptation plans by 2025, the GST’s design and implementation reinforced hierarchies privileging mitigation over adaptation and technocratic expertise over plural knowledges. The article argues that the GST’s potential to advance adaptation lies less in refining indicators than in fostering deliberation, inclusivity, and accountability for the structural drivers of vulnerability. By reframing the GST as a deliberative and inclusive process, the study identifies concrete pathways for enhancing the political relevance and legitimacy of global adaptation governance in future stocktake cycles.

Presentation short abstract

To discuss the hypothesis of conservation as design, this presentation asks how protected areas can be read as operational landscapes of a global conservation regime, considering global and situated conservation geographies as interconnected with the rhythms of planetary urbanization.

Presentation long abstract

Building on literature on planetary urbanization, critical design theory, and critical conservation studies, this paper examines how conservation strategies can be examined not only as managerial practices of control, administration, and protection of life, but also as design operations embedded in the genealogy of nature–society spatial relations. It argues that protected areas function as operational landscapes of a global conservation regime, interconnected with the rhythms of planetary urbanization rather than existing as performative enclaves protected from urban–industrial expansion. Focusing on Brazilian environmental spatial policies, I will explore the hypothesis of conservation as design through illustrative global, national, and extra-state cases, including the global 30×30 target, the territorialization of carbon-credit projects, and state-led production of conservation units as devices of extensive urbanization. These examples reveal how conservation geographies are designed through territorial planning, legal–spatial instruments, as well as socioenvironmental activism that mediate ecological, political, and economic interests at multiple scales. By tracing the interconnections between situated conservation practices and global design logics for nature protection, the paper highlights the defuturing effects that emerge from the entanglements of conservation with contemporary forms of extractivism and greenwashing, thereby reproducing colonial dispositions within global environmental narratives. Bringing political-ecological debates on conservation into a spatial research agenda foregrounds the extensive conditions of urban life in the face of planetary challenges of climate mitigation and adaptation, with the potential to rehearse novel gazes into conservation geographies and contribute to a broader understanding of contemporary urbanization processes.

Presentation short abstract

Analyses Mexico’s federal and state solar programmes (2013–2024) to ask who becomes a “solar subject” and who is excluded, showing how developmentalist logics in energy transition policy shape access, justice and power in the post-Paris era.

Presentation long abstract

The dominant discourse on the energy transition portrays solar energy as a global “win-win” solution that can mitigate GHG emissions and reduce energy poverty. In much of the Global South, however, this promise materializes through state programs that translate the “solar solution” into administrative categories, access rules, and justificatory narratives. Since the enactment of the Climate Change Act (2012), federal and state governments in Mexico, across changing administrations, have implemented solar programs targeting diverse populations. This article explores which groups the Mexican state designates as “solar subjects” and which it renders invisible when translating this global script into policy. Empirically, I analyze all federal and state solar-support programs (2013–2024) using program rules and official documents. I combine computational text analysis with qualitative coding to position each program along two axes: whether it invokes the rhetoric of “sustainable development” or operates as developmentalist social policy with little environmental content, and which types of beneficiaries it privileges—households, firms, productive projects or communities—through differentiated access barriers. The article bridges policy design approaches and the social construction of target populations with debates on distributive energy justice and the depoliticization of climate action in the Global South. Rather than proposing a new grand theory, it offers an empirical map of how developmentalist logics persist across political ideologies, structuring who is positioned to benefit from solar technology and under what conditions in Mexico’s post-Paris era, nuancing political ecology debates about how climate policies become instruments of inclusion and exclusion.

Presentation short abstract

Everyday encounters with environmental change shape how individuals interpret and internalize climate change. In two coastal regions in India, lived experiences and local ecological and cultural contexts produced distinct climate perceptions, highlighting the need for place-based communication.

Presentation long abstract

Climate change is exerting profound and uneven impacts across the world, reshaping ecosystems and communities in various ways (IPCC, 2021; 2023), shaped by the geographic, ecological, and sociocultural contexts in which people live. Lived experience has emerged as a key factor influencing how communities interpret and internalise climate change, particularly in vulnerable regions (Myers et al., 2012). India’s coastal zones, exposed to sea-level rise, salinisation, and extreme weather events, offer a critical setting for examining these dynamics (Roy et al., 2023). This study investigates climate perceptions and knowledge in two socio-ecologically distinct coastal regions of southern India: Vypin, an island shaped by marine–wetland interactions, and Kozhikode, a mainland city with a long fishing tradition and significant historical depth.

Using a mixed-methods, we measured basic climate knowledge using a 4-item scale (Lee et al., 2015) and complemented this with open-ended questions to capture lived knowledge and perceptions. Quantitative results show that participants across both sites possess comparable levels of basic climate knowledge. However, qualitative findings reveal marked differences in lived experiences and interpretations of climate change. Reports of sea-level rise were higher in Vypin, consistent with its low-elevation geomorphology and greater exposure to tidal processes. Participants also described indirect impacts, including education disruptions due to heavy rainfall and heat-related challenges affecting labourers, and often attributed climate change to a mix of scientific, cultural, and religious explanations. Taken together, the findings demonstrate that climate perceptions are not shaped by physical exposure alone but emerge through culturally embedded and place-based ways of knowing.

Presentation short abstract

This panel examines inclusive climate policies to combat desertification in Brazil’s semi-arid northeast. Working with Indigenous and Quilombola communities, we explore tensions in adapting global frameworks and strategies that empower local knowledge, practices, and technologies.

Presentation long abstract

This panel explores how global climate frameworks intersect with local adaptations to address desertification in Brazil’s semi-arid northeast. Centred on a collaborative project in Pernambuco, it aims to generate inclusive, evidence-based policies that enhance community resilience while informing national strategies. Endorsed by Brazil’s Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change, the initiative contributes directly to the Brazilian Action Plan to Combat Desertification and Mitigate the Effects of Drought.

Using an intersectional and participatory approach, combining focus groups, photovoice, interviews, participatory mapping, and spatial modelling, the project works with Quilombola and Indigenous communities to: (a) document and systematise local practices and technologies; (b) identify priority areas and measures for ecological restoration; (c) foster dialogue between traditional knowledge and environmental science; and (d) co-produce actionable policies that empower local actors rather than merely integrate their knowledge.

This work interrogates the challenges and possibilities of participatory and co-produced policy design in contexts marked by historical marginalisation. It advocates for an ontological shift in evidence-informed policymaking to move beyond tokenistic inclusion of different ethnic communities, toward genuine co-production of knowledge and governance. The panel will showcase methodological innovations, reflect on tensions in aligning global and local priorities, and outline pathways for scaling community-driven solutions to combat desertification under accelerating climate change.

Presentation short abstract

Exploramos cómo el paradigma del agua moderna, entendido sobre todo como un régimen de saber-poder sobre el agua, reorganiza las relaciones hidrosociales y reproduce territorialidades de exclusión y extracción en contextos de adaptación a los riesgos hidrológicos del cambio climático.

Presentation long abstract

Desde los estudios críticos del agua, la crisis hídrica global se entiende como una expresión más de la actual crisis civilizatoria y su racionalidad moderna-occidental. Una racionalidad que desplaza el/las agua/s de su sitio, su significado cultural, histórico y espiritual, al espacio de la razón instrumental (Linton, 2014). Este trabajo ofrece una revisión crítica del paradigma del agua moderna y su vínculo con las medidas de adaptación a los riesgos hidrológicos del cambio climático. El objetivo es expandir la noción del agua moderna para mostrar que, incluso cuando el agua es tratada como un peligro, este régimen de conocimiento y poder colonial, capitalista y patriarcal, sigue produciendo formas de exclusión y jerarquización de la vida misma (cf. Sultana, 2010). Así, el caso empírico abordado se desarrolla en contextos de retroceso glaciar e incremento acelerado de peligros hidrológicos para las poblaciones altoandinas más vulnerables de la cordillera Blanca, Perú. Al integrar perspectivas críticas, decoloniales y situadas con enfoques territoriales, las autoras invitan a reflexionar sobre estas otras dimensiones del agua moderna poco abordadas desde la ecología política, para ampliar y enriquecer radicalmente el debate sobre la adaptación al cambio climático con énfasis en los riesgos hidroclimáticos. Es decir, reflexionar en torno a preguntas sobre qué tipo de agua, saber y poder sustentan esas adaptaciones, cómo esto es una limitante para la adaptación en sí, y qué posibilidades se abren para reimaginar no solo las prácticas y políticas de adaptación, sino los modos mismos de pensar el agua incluso como una amenaza.

Presentation short abstract

This study shows how dominant adaptation projects reinforce technocratic control and obscure the social processes producing vulnerability, normalizing displacement and marginalization rather than enabling just, community-centered climate resilience.

Presentation long abstract

This study examines climate change adaptation in the Bangladesh Sundarbans, moving beyond dominant narratives that cast climate impacts as external hazards to which vulnerable populations must adjust. Drawing on mapping of adaptation projects and interviews with policymakers, practitioners and academia, the analysis shows how mainstream interventions i.e embankment fortification, mangrove afforestation, livelihood shifts and coastal infrastructure, are anchored in climate society binary that naturalizes vulnerability while obscuring the socio-ecological and economic processes that produce it. By prioritizing technocratic solutions and managerial control, adaptation becomes a vehicle for consolidating state and donor agendas rather than addressing the everyday realities of marginalized groups. In the project documentation, gender is operationalized as a numeric checkbox, with women’s decision making power, control over resources, differential exposure to climate risk or divergent social burdens addressed systematically. Similarly, displacement, both direct through resettlement and indirect through dispossession of land and livelihood because of salinity, waterlogging and loss of access to commons is rarely acknowledged in project documentation, reflecting a normalization of social disruption as an inevitable cost of resilience. Employing a political ecology lens, the paper argues that the mapping’s silences reveal structural biases mainly through adaptation becoming a tool of state territorialization and donor driven control over vulnerable deltaic landscapes, rather than a site of social justice or community centered transformation. The result is a reproduction and in some case intensification of existing patterns of marginalization under the guise of climate resilience.

Presentation short abstract

A REDD+ project in Peru shows how global climate designs force states to override their own histories. After promoting agrarian development in "Alto Mayo" during the 1970s, the state partnered with an NGO to protect the same area decades later, criminalizing settlers and dividing local responses.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines the contentious implementation of REDD+, a global climate design, in Peru’s protected area: "Alto Mayo Protected Forest" (AMPF). First, in the 1970s, the state declared these area as "empty" and ideal for agrarian colonization; the state built highways and granted settlers land deeds to settle there. Decades later, in partnership with an international NGO, the State deployed a REDD+ project that enforced a radical re-ordering of the same territory. Leveraging international carbon finance and its legal authority, the state re-categorized settlers from legitimate pioneers to “illegal occupants,” imposing a market-conservation logic over the prior developmentalist framework.

Local responses bifurcated. One group (“subscribers of the conservation agreement”) pragmatically adapted, trading historical land claims for conditional benefits. In contrast, the organized "Rondas Campesinas" (Peasant territorial defense groups) mounted rights-based resistance. Grounded in their own socio-legal legitimacy, they framed REDD+ not as conservation but as “carbon colonialism,” a dispossession where the protected value was financialized carbon credits, not the forest.

The case demonstrates that global climate designs land on historically layered political territories. Their implementation often requires states to invalidate their own prior legitimacies, forcing local actors into a constrained choice between co-optation and criminalization. True climate justice must address these foundational historical debts and contested sovereignties before layering on market solutions.

This paper is based on a mixed-method approach and fieldwork conducted in 2024 (cartographic analysis, interviews, and document review).

Keywords: REDD+, Climate Coloniality, State Territoriality, Carbon Markets, Adaptation, Resistance, Peru.

Presentation short abstract

This presentation explores the ways & degree to which North American Indigenous Peoples with long-term engagement with forest-based carbon offsetting have adapted it to meet their vision for their forests & their communities, the barriers and challenges they overcame in doing so & those that remain.

Presentation long abstract

Forest-based carbon offsets (FBCOs), allow companies, governments or individuals to mitigate their greenhouse gas emissions by purchasing “offsets” produced through changes in management practices by landowners. Indigenous Peoples are often targeted by FBCO developers. While many Indigenous Peoples have actively rejected FBCOs based on objections to the concept of commodification of nature, concern over the potential for exploitation by market actors and/or loss of control over their forest lands, others have chosen to engage. Based on cases of North American Indigenous Peoples’ long-term engagements with FBCO, this presentation will explore the ways and degree to which these groups have been able to adapt this externally constructed construct and market to meet their own vision for their forests and their communities, the barriers and challenges they overcame in doing so and those that remain. Through interventions in law, policy and offsetting protocols and adaptations to conform implementation to traditional land use, governance and relational practices, these engagements have produced some positive outcomes, including financial benefits, strengthening of organizational capacity, revitalization of land use practices, and increased access to and control of land and natural resources. However, considerable challenges remain, including financial risk from market volatility and changing requirements, significant undervaluing of the intense labor, knowledge and commitment required and lack of recognition of the interrelation of the well-being of human and forest communities.

Presentation short abstract

This paper conceptualizes “digital glacier geographies” to explore the socio-ecological implications of the intersection of climate change, digital media technologies, and international environmental conservation in glacial fjord parks in Alaska and Chile.

Presentation long abstract

As glaciers retreat and digital media technologies advance, tidewater glaciers have become icons of climate change, drawing increasing numbers of visitors to the protected glacial fjords that contain them. These visits generate millions of digital images of glaciers in the name of climate awareness—for tourism, for land management, and for science—which together increase visibility and demand while the glaciers continue to melt, leaving local communities to grapple with newly unfolding socio-ecological challenges. This paper conceptualizes “digital glacier geographies” to understand how global online climate narratives shape local realities and uncover the unseen power dynamics behind international environmental conservation, tourism infrastructures, and media materializing in glacial fjord parks. I argue that the advancing “digital glacier” occurring simultaneously with increasing glacier melt, environmental degradation, and tourism demand redirects focus away from climate action and towards continued capitalist and colonial consumerism practices.

Alaska and Chile contain internationally-recognized glaciated wildernesses facing similar challenges balancing local community needs, ecological sustainability, growing tourism, and climate impacts. Chile’s newly-created “Ruta de los Parques” is a conservation strategy facilitated by international power relations with a colonial legacy connected to Alaska’s public lands through environmental conservation discourse. This paper compares Alaskan and Chilean parks as case studies, engaging critical geography, political ecology, and visual media analysis to highlight tensions between global conservation and local realities, and show how digital representations of glaciers and their concocted landscapes mask the structures and power dynamics that ultimately undermine environmental collaboration and conservation goals and instead perpetuate environmental injustice.

Presentation short abstract

An empirical case study of Lagos' (Nigeria) lagoon waterfronts inhabitation between climate chaos, urban expansion, and self provision: when plastics and water coalesce into life sustaining practices that defeat climate action rhetorics by owning socio-ecological and hydro-geological uncertainty.

Presentation long abstract

In the context of ongoing anthropogenic climate chaos and large scale biodiversity and ecosystems loss, coastal futures are at the forefront of transforming landscapes – most intuitively because of sea level rise. Waterfront changes are a most pressing transformation due to the great proportion of humans living by coasts. The particularity of coastal systems - fragile and now vulnerabilised - demands urgent attention, especially as they enmesh geoecologies and water with livelihoods and life sustaining functions. Presenting ongoing work on inhabitation in Lagos’ (Nigeria) lagoon islands and waterways, the presentation considers the entangled possibilities of oil and water in the age of Plastics, where making do with affordable, colourful, and quite designedly plastic objects extends the grammars of inhabiting urban marginalised spatialities. That is, where urban habitation in self-built environments - often reliant on multiple solidarities to stand against dispossessive and violent urban processes - complicates the applicability of globally circulated climate adaptation and mitigation measures. Attending to the ephemeral and un-heroic practices that animate and sustain amphibious lives along the lagoon waterfronts, I examine the lagoon inhabitants’ affordances of the local socio-ecological and hydro-geological formations as more than materialisations of vernacular culture. They are modulations of matter, technology and climate that call into question mutual care, intersectional urban violence and livelihood infrastructures for inhabiting coasts at times of climate chaos.