15 - Governance: Climate Change and Land Use in the Anthropocene

Summary

Introduction

Climate change governance is a crucial issue for contemporary economic geographers as climate change is disrupting the fundamental conditions of human life. Its impacts are also profoundly unequal. Climate change exacerbates existing inequities by placing further burdens on communities that are already vulnerable. While some individuals and communities will have the resources to adapt to or avoid the worst impacts of climate change, others will find their homes becoming uninhabitable, their livelihoods vanishing, and their health and security threatened (Oppenheimer and Antilla-Hughes, 2016). Sea level rise alone will create up to 1 billion climate refugees by 2100 (Hauer et al, 2020). While such inequities are routinely noted, scholars and policy makers have largely failed to grasp the magnitude of their impact or to craft commensurate responses.

For economic geographers the nature of the problem poses questions of how communities, industries and infrastructure will be reconfigured to respond to the worst impacts (see Chapters 27 and 29 in this volume). Solutions that aim to increase resilience often focus on technological fixes and economic metrics rather than on the social and ecological complexities of the problem and the ways in which solutions require holistic approaches. For problems, such as climate change and environmental degradation, siloization of the problem suggests that it can be addressed through the privatization of rights to the environment (Bumpus and Liverman, 2008), and the free exchange of these rights on a market system (Knox-Hayes, 2013). The problem is reduced to a series of pricing metrics – the allocation of rights to emit greenhouse gases – and the enablement of the exchange of these credits. In contrast, an economic geography approach suggests the consideration of the interconnected dynamics between resource and social systems.

These issues are apparent within the main critiques within economic geography which question how commensuration and privatization influence the establishment of more equitable climate responses. Governance regimes operating under neoliberalism reduce the social norms and ideals of democracy, such as contestation and deliberation to a series of economic measurements and assessments of profitability. In this regard a range of values – as well as the processes under which such values might be considered, weighted and distributed in the allocation of governance – are reduced to exchange value and weighted only according to perceived profitability. Privatization diminishes the influence of a range of social considerations.