scholarly journals Climate Change and the Surge for Pandemics

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 138
Author(s):  
Durr e Shehvaar ◽  
Wardah Idris ◽  
Mubashira Ahmed

The pandemic of the century has caused great concern about the global environmental crisis. The article outlines the various aspects of the surge of pandemic its link to climate change along with the prospects for the nation-states and how they have seen it as a challenge as it is being seen as taking thousands of lives. In the literature review, the research problem that has been tailored is if the pandemic can create a common awareness about the global climate crisis that has destructive projections for the globe itself. A causal link between the surge of pandemics and climate change that helps spread the viruses has been created. In addition to this, we further argue that the nation-states and their exploitative corporate goals that are manipulating the environment should be curbed through decisive steps.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul L. Leshota ◽  
Ericka S. Dunbar ◽  
Musa W. Dube ◽  
Malebogo Kgalemang

Climate change and its global impact on all people, especially the marginalized communities, is widely recognized as the biggest crisis of our time. It is a context that invites all subjects and disciplines to bring their resources in diagnosing the problem and seeking the healing of the Earth. The African continent, especially its women, constitute the subalterns of global climate crisis. Can they speak? If they speak, can they be heard? Both the Earth and the Africa have been identified with the adjective “Mother.” This gender identity tells tales in patriarchal and imperial worlds that use the female gender to signal legitimation of oppression and exploitation. In this volume, African women theologians and their female-identifying colleagues, struggle with reading and interpreting religious texts in the context of environmental crisis that are threatening life on Earth. The chapters interrogate how biblical texts and African cultural resources imagine the Earth and our relationship with the Earth: Do these texts offer readers windows of hope for re-imagining liberating relationship with the Earth? How do they intersect with gender, race, empire, ethnicity, sexuality among others? Beginning with Genesis, journeying through Exodus, Ruth, Ecclesiastes and the Gospel of John, the authors seek to read in solidarity with the Earth, for the healing of the whole Earth community.


2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-121
Author(s):  
Abdul Quddus

This paper examined the ecological concept and its implication at Nurul Haramain NW Lombok Islamic boarding school in response to the world climate crisis. Boarding schools have the potentials to bridge the environmental conservation initiative amid the secular science phenomena. This study employed a descriptive-explorative approach using a qualitative methodology. Thus, theoretically, this study was anchored in Mary Evelyn Tucker and Vasudha Narayan's theories of eco-theology in addressing the climate crisis. The findings showed that Nurul Haramain NW Lombok Islamic boarding school had implemented a sustainable lifestyle based on the ecological values in the Al-Quran and Hadith, in which Tuan Guru as the environmental conservation foreman.   Keywords: Eco-Pesantren, Climate Change, Environmental Crisis, Educational Theology, Eco Theology


Author(s):  
Jukka Mikkonen

Global climate change has been characterised as the crisis of reason (Val Plumwood), imagination (Amitav Ghosh) and language (Elizabeth Rush), to mention some. The ‘everything change’, as Margaret Atwood calls it, arguably also impacts on how we aesthetically perceive, interpret and appreciate nature. This article looks at philosophical theories of nature appreciation against global environmental change. The article examines how human-induced global climate change affects the ‘scientific’ approaches to nature appreciation which base aesthetic judgment on scientific knowledge and the competing ‘non-scientific’ approaches which emphasise the role of emotions, imagination and stories in the aesthetic understanding of environment. The author claims that both approaches are threatened by global climate change and cannot continue as usual. In particular, he explores aesthetic imagination in contemporary times when our visions about environment are thoroughly coloured by worry and uncertainty and there seems to be little room for awe and wonder, which have traditionally characterised the aesthetic experience of nature. Finally, he proposes that art could stimulate environmental imagining in this age of uncertainty.


Author(s):  
Erin R. Graham

International relations scholarship on climate change exists primarily in the field of Global Environmental Politics (GEP) and outside the substantive purview of mainstream International Political Economy (IPE). This chapter argues that the climate crisis is fundamentally an IPE problem, and it requires attention from IPE scholars as a primary subject of interest. To facilitate engagement, the chapter reviews a diverse literature at the intersection of IPE and climate across three substantive areas: the global climate regime, trade, and renewable energy transitions. Each section offers avenues for research, and provides ideas on how to put concepts and ideas from IPE to work in climate crisis scholarship.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rubén D. Manzanedo ◽  
Peter Manning

The ongoing COVID-19 outbreak pandemic is now a global crisis. It has caused 1.6+ million confirmed cases and 100 000+ deaths at the time of writing and triggered unprecedented preventative measures that have put a substantial portion of the global population under confinement, imposed isolation, and established ‘social distancing’ as a new global behavioral norm. The COVID-19 crisis has affected all aspects of everyday life and work, while also threatening the health of the global economy. This crisis offers also an unprecedented view of what the global climate crisis may look like. In fact, some of the parallels between the COVID-19 crisis and what we expect from the looming global climate emergency are remarkable. Reflecting upon the most challenging aspects of today’s crisis and how they compare with those expected from the climate change emergency may help us better prepare for the future.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (24) ◽  
pp. 10676
Author(s):  
Yih-Ren Lin ◽  
Pagung Tomi ◽  
Hsinya Huang ◽  
Chia-Hua Lin ◽  
Ysanne Chen

Whereas indigenous people are on the frontlines of global environmental challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and numerous other forms of critical planetary deterioration, the indigenous experiences, responses, and cultural practices have been underestimated in the mainstream frameworks of environmental studies. This paper aims to articulate a meaningful response to recent calls to indigenous and local knowledge on food as a source of resilience in the face of global climate change. By retrieving the values and practices indigenous people of Taiwan, specifically Tayal women, associate with human and non-human ecologies, our collaborative work with the indigenous community explores indigenous resilience and its relevance to indigenous cultural knowledge and global environmental concerns. Pivoting on the “Millet Ark” action, a Tayal conservation initiative of the bio-cultural diversity of millets, this study revolves around issues of how Tayal communities adapt to the climate change, how to reclaim their voice, heritage, knowledge, place, and land through food, and how to narrate indigenous “counter-stories” of resilience and sustainability. The cultural narrative of “Millet Ark” investigates indigenous way of preserving millet bio-cultural diversity and restoring the land and community heritage, inquiring into how Tayal people are adaptive and resilient to change and therefore sustainable through the cultural and social life of millets.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graeme Auld ◽  
Steven Bernstein ◽  
Benjamin Cashore ◽  
Kelly Levin

AbstractCOVID-19 has caused 100s of millions of infections and millions of deaths worldwide, overwhelming health and economic capacities in many countries and at multiple scales. The immediacy and magnitude of this crisis has resulted in government officials, practitioners and applied scholars turning to reflexive learning exercises to generate insights for managing the reverberating effects of this disease as well as the next inevitable pandemic. We contribute to both tasks by assessing COVID-19 as a “super wicked” problem denoted by four features we originally formulated to describe the climate crisis: time is running out, no central authority, those causing the problem also want to solve it, and policies irrationally discount the future (Levin et al. in Playing it forward: path dependency, progressive incrementalism, and the “super wicked” problem of global climate change, 2007; Levin et al. in Playing it forward: Path dependency, progressive incrementalism, and the "super wicked" problem of global climate change, 2009; Levin et al. in Policy Sci 45(2):123–152, 2012). Doing so leads us to identify three overarching imperatives critical for pandemic management. First, similar to requirements to address the climate crisis, policy makers must establish and maintain durable policy objectives. Second, in contrast to climate, management responses must always allow for swift changes in policy settings and calibrations given rapid and evolving knowledge about a particular disease’s epidemiology. Third, analogous to, but with swifter effects than climate, wide-ranging global efforts, if well designed, will dramatically reduce domestic costs and resource requirements by curbing the spread of the disease and/or fostering relevant knowledge for managing containment and eradication. Accomplishing these tasks requires building the analytic capacity for engaging in reflexive anticipatory policy design exercises aimed at maintaining, or building, life-saving thermostatic institutions at the global and domestic levels.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elle Turnbull

Purpose The purpose of this study is to explore Islamic contributions to discussions on climate change action and environmental justice. The author argues that Islamic approaches to this issue provide a unique cultural and religious perspective which can effectively address the issue of climate change. Design/methodology/approach Beginning with a discussion of the concepts central to this essay, the author moves to discuss why she has chosen to move away from approaches founded in criminal law, instead of arguing that it is important to focus on culturally specific approaches to environmental justice. The author then explores some of the approaches taken by mainstream Muslim organisations working towards environmental justice. In particular, the Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change and responses from Islamic Relief Worldwide, considering both the benefits and flaws of these approaches. Findings The author concludes by arguing that Sharīʿah has potential for developing Muslim environmental justice further, using Islamic legal rulings from Indonesia as an example. In this way, Islamic contributions can further aid global environmental justice. The author finds that culturally specific approaches to climate change, founded in legal mechanisms such as the Islamic juridical process (fiqh), have vast potential in securing environmental justice across the globe. Originality/value Islamic contributions to climate change are often relegated to the background, while approaches from the perspective of legal mechanisms and criminal law have been favoured. The author believes that an Islamic approach is not only a starkly different approach, but also one which can provide an impetus for change. This is particularly true for the contributions of Islamic jurists.


Author(s):  
David G. Anderson ◽  
Kirk A. Maasch

As the twenty-first century winds onward, it is becoming increasingly clear that understanding how climate affects human cultural systems is critically important. Indeed, it has been argued by many researchers that how we respond to changing global climate is one of the greatest scientific and political challenges facing our planetary technological civilization, comparable and closely intertwined with concerns about biological or nuclear warfare, famine, disease, overpopulation, or environmental degradation. By any reasonable evaluation of the evidence, this century, and likely the several centuries that follow it, will be characterized by dramatic climate change, perhaps as significant in terms of its impact on our species as any climatic episodes that have occurred in the past. What we don’t know with much certainty is how these environmental changes will play out across the planet, and how individuals as well as nation states will respond to them. Archaeology has a major role to play in helping us move through this period of crisis, however, by showing us how human cultures in the past responded to dramatic changes in climate. As the work of many archaeological scholars has shown, climate change has not invariably proven to be a bad thing: it is how people respond to it that is critical (e.g. Anderson et al. 2007b; Cooper and Sheets 2012; Crumley 2000, 2006, 2007; Hardesty 2007; McAnany and Yoffee 2010; McIntosh et al. 2000; Redman 2004a; Sandweiss and Quilter 2008; Sassaman and Anderson 1996; Tainter 2000). Archaeology working in tandem with a host of palaeoenvironmental and historical disciplines has lessons for our modern world and, as this volume demonstrates, we as a profession are making great strides in getting our message out. Perhaps the most important lesson from the past is that people, through their actions, are the drivers of cultural change, including response to climate change. Societies are not, however, monolithic entities that ‘chose’ to succeed or fail; people as individuals, groups, or factions through their actions generate outcomes, and often some demonstrate remarkable flexibility and resilience (Cooper and Sheets 2012; Diamond 2005; McAnany and Yoffee 2010).


2006 ◽  
Vol 19 (02) ◽  
pp. 255-278 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Caney

The paper has the following structure. In Section I, I introduce some important methodological preliminaries by asking: How should one reason about global environmental justice in general and global climate change in particular? Section II introduces the key normative argument; it argues that global climate change damages some fundamental human interests and results in a state of affairs in which the rights of many are unprotected: as such it is unjust. Section III addresses the complexities that arise from the fact that some of the ill effects of global climate change will fall on the members of future generations. Section IV shows that some prevailing approaches are unable to deal satisfactorily with the challenges posed by global climate change. If the argument of this paper is correct, it follows that those who contribute to global climate change through high emissions are guilty of human rights violations and they should be condemned as such.


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