The charade of climate resilience
The 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP26, ended last Friday. One of the most contentious points that came out of the conference surrounded disaster aid, or funding that would be provided to vulnerable populations to help manage environmental disasters fueled by climate change. Tangential provisions have been included in previous climate deals to help nations adapt to a quickly warming environment.
These finance streams meet the demands of poorer countries — that suffer disproportionately from the impacts of climate change — for richer countries to pay their fair share from their greater carbon and methane outputs. But although these calls for funding are certainly much needed in the short term, as natural disasters grow in volume and intensity, they ignore the causes of climate change that have gotten us to this point in the first place, driven by capitalistic factors like overproduction, outsourcing of labor, and globalised demand. The emphasis placed on building adaptability and resiliency implicitly accepts these root causes, and instead of trying to uproot and change them, looks to place a bandage over their worst effects.
It’s no wonder that several of the world’s largest multinational corporations directly sponsored the COP Resilience Hub. These companies, like Google, JP Morgan Chase, and Deloitte, have vested interests in maintaining the capitalistic status quo that has allowed them to amass such wealth and global influence.
These companies are certainly capable of adaptation and building resilience technologies, like Google’s development of a global flood mapping tool using the Google Earth platform. But often pledges for adaptation are imperceptible from forms of greenwashing modern companies use to appease shareholders in the short term without altering their core business practices. And even further, it is critical to ask what the use is for such technologies like Google’s flood map. If these floods are still decimating the lives of millions of people around the world each year, especially those in the global south, what instrumental, climate change-altering good is there in mapping them?
Google’s flood map is only one example. Much of the language used throughout the COP26 summit incentivizes such technological developments, as long as they “focus on helping the most vulnerable, frontline communities to build resilience and adapt to the physical impacts of climate change,” in light of increasing natural disasters and warming trends. Such language fails to advocate for tangible overhauls and exculpates many of the factors that have driven and will continue to drive these drastic events that necessitate such resilience in the first place.
As I was putting together a literature review for my upcoming research paper, I stumbled upon an article that radically shifted my views on climate resilience and that inspired this little editorial. Published in the journal Antipode in 2019 by Malini Ranganathan from American University and Eve Bratman from Franklin and Marshall College, “From Urban Resilience to Abolitionist Climate Justice in Washington, DC” reimagines resilience “through an abolitionist framework.” The two authors write in their abstract, about resilience as a solution to climate change vulnerabilities, “this prescription tends to focus on adaptation to future external threats, subtly validating embedded processes of racial capitalism that have historically dehumanised and endangered residents and their environments in the first place.”
When I read that sentence, I felt as if my thoughts and feelings about commonplace approaches to mitigating climate change were instantly validated. I had always been internally skeptical of national and international climate pledges pronounced by massive corporations and federal governments alike. The majority of climate activists my age share similar feelings, having expressed outrage in Glasgow led by youth celebrity activist Greta Thunberg. “This is no longer a climate conference. This is now a global north greenwash festival, a two week long celebration of business as usual and blah blah blah,” Thunberg said outside the COP26 conference to a crowd of hundreds as world leaders deliberated climate adaptation and resilience strategies inside. Skepticism seems the natural response when we’ve lived our entire lives fearful of the growing threat of a warming climate while watching those in power do nothing to avert such catastrophe.
Ranganathan and Bratman’s article, although being focused on the District of Columbia, offers sentiments that echo the type of transformative change that is needed, and that is currently lacking, to halt climate change, restore the earth’s environment, and re-enfranchise indigenous populations that have for centuries suffered harms “through settler colonialism yoked to industrial capitalism.” The two authors cite another article by four researchers from UCLA and the University of Sydney, Australia that explains a “global urban resilience complex” that produces “norms that circulate globally, creating assessment tools rendering urban resilience technical and managerial, and commodifying urban resilience such that private sector involvement becomes integral to urban development planning and governance.”
Again, it is no wonder that several of the world’s biggest corporations sponsored the resilience hub at the globe’s largest international conference on climate change. These private companies and public-private partnerships have found a way to directly benefit from forms of resilience that have become commonplace response strategies against climate change that is only perpetuated by the capitalist system they uphold.
I don’t consider myself a particularly radical person, nor am I usually outspoken. But when it comes to climate change, it’s hard not to become radicalized. When international conferences like COP26 are lauded for their ability to foster a “green vortex” of climate action, it’s impossible not to become cynical. Accepting pledges not backed by policy and cross-national agreements that fail to define any clear plan forward as meaningful solutions to a crisis that displaces tens of millions of people every year and causes billions of dollars of disaster-related damages is nothing short of insanity.
Maybe insanity is the best way to describe the whole charade of climate resiliency. Albert Einstein’s definition of the term gets thrown around a lot — doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. But it seems particularly applicable here. Scientific consensus is quite clear in the fact that systems of energy consumption and transportation that drive capitalistic markets around the world are the primary causes of a rapidly changing climate. So without altering these fundamental systems of consumption, we won’t see any meaningful reduction in global warming trends.
Yet, again and again, the outcomes of global conferences like COP26 always uphold such systems, with only minor tweaks for adaptability and resilience. To see real change, we have to move past the praxis of climate resilience and reshape our collective understanding of what it means to operate in an environmentally-friendly world.
