GCC 3013/5013: Climate Change: Science, Art and Agency

This edited textbook explores the seventeen UN SDGs through twelve works from the humanities, including films, novels, and photographic collections. It provides students with the knowledge and understanding of how the humanities engage in broader social, political, economic and environmental dialogue, offering a global perspective that crosses national and continental borders. The book takes students through the UN SDGs from a theoretical perspective through to practical applications, first through specific global humanities examples and then through students' own final projects and reflections. Centred around three major themes of planet, people and prosperity, the textbook encourages students to explore and apply the Goals using a place-based, culturally rooted approach while simultaneously acknowledging and understanding their global importance.

International in scope, this volume brings together leading and emerging voices working at the intersection of contemporary art, visual culture, activism, and climate change, and addresses key questions, such as: why and how do art and visual culture, and their ethics and values, matter with regard to a world increasingly shaped by climate breakdown? Foregrounding a decolonial and climate-justice-based approach, this book joins efforts within the environmental humanities in seeking to widen considerations of climate change as it intersects with social, political, and cultural realms. It simultaneously expands the nascent branches of ecocritical art history and visual culture, and builds toward the advancement of a robust and critical interdisciplinarity appropriate to the complex entanglements of climate change. This book will be of special interest to scholars and practitioners of contemporary art and visual culture, environmental studies, cultural geography, and political ecology.

In Allegories of the Anthropocene Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey traces how indigenous and postcolonial peoples in the Caribbean and Pacific Islands grapple with the enormity of colonialism and anthropogenic climate change through art, poetry, and literature. In these works, authors and artists use allegory as a means to understand the multiscalar complexities of the Anthropocene and to critique the violence of capitalism, militarism, and the postcolonial state. DeLoughrey examines the work of a wide range of artists and writers--including poets Kamau Brathwaite and Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, Dominican installation artist Tony Capellán, and authors Keri Hulme and Erna Brodber--whose work addresses Caribbean plantations, irradiated Pacific atolls, global flows of waste, and allegorical representations of the ocean and the island. In examining how island writers and artists address the experience of finding themselves at the forefront of the existential threat posed by climate change, DeLoughrey demonstrates how the Anthropocene and empire are mutually constitutive and establishes the vital importance of  allegorical art and literature in understanding our global environmental crisis.

In Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics, Lisa E. Bloom considers the ways artists, filmmakers, and activists engaged with the Arctic and Antarctic to represent our current environmental crises and reconstruct public understandings of them. Bloom engages feminist, Black, Indigenous, and non-Western perspectives to address the exigencies of the experience of the Anthropocene and its attendant ecosystem failures, rising sea levels, and climate-led migrations. As opposed to mainstream media depictions of climate change that feature apocalyptic spectacles of distant melting ice and desperate polar bears, artists such as Katja Aglert, Subhankar Banerjee, Joyce Campbell, Judit Hersko, Roni Horn, Isaac Julien, Zacharias Kunuk, Connie Samaras, and activist art collectives take a more complex poetic and political approach. In their films and visual and conceptual art, these artists link climate change to its social roots in colonialism and capitalism while challenging the suppression of information about environmental destruction and critiquing Western art institutions for their complicity. Bloom's examination and contextualization of new polar aesthetics makes environmental degradation more legible while demonstrating that our own political agency is central to imagining and constructing a better world.

Beginning in the second half of the twentieth century, the impacts of climate change have been fierce, causing loss of human life and irreparable destruction to natural and man-made infrastructure in many parts of the world. The difference between climate change now and in the past is that of sudden and disproportionate disruption of the natural energy dynamics by the changing consumption patterns of billions of human beings who have polluted terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. The picture that emerges from the exhaustive analysis of international data drawn from the most reliable sources indicates that we have possibly gained access to the gateway of extinction and it is time that we take corrective steps immediately. Global climate change is further altering our relationship with the environment, modifying relatively stable climatic factors and making them uncertain, unpredictable, and threatening. Changes in land use and an increasing demand for water resources due to climate change have affected the capacity of ecosystems to sustain food production, ensure the supply of freshwater resources, provide ecosystem services, and promote rural multi-functionality. Ensuring food production does not just depend on increasing water efficiency, promoting climate resilient crop production, or reducing land-use competition for urbanization but also on a more suitable and stable climate as the changes in climatic factors like precipitation, temperature, radiation, evaporation, and wind bring about some major shifts in global food supplies.

Engaged Research for Community Resilience to Climate Change is a guide to successfully integrating science into urban, regional, and coastal planning activities to build truly sustainable communities that can withstand climate change. It calls for a shift in academic researchers' traditional thinking by working across disciplines to solve complex societal and environmental problems, focusing on the real-world human impacts of climate change, and providing an overview of how science can be used to advocate for institutional change. Engaged Research for Community Resilience to Climate Change appeals to a wide variety of audiences, including university administrators looking to create and sustain interdisciplinary research groups, community and state officials, non-profit and community advocates, and community organizers seeking guidance for generating and growing meaningful, productive relationships with university researchers to support change in their communities. Focuses on the process of building a successful, active partnership between climate change researchers and climate resilience professionals Provides case studies of university-community partnerships in building climate resilience Includes interviews and contributors from a wide variety of disciplines engaged in climate resilience partnerships

This book provides insight on the concept of social value and social return on investment (SROI) - or measures to evaluate the social outcomes from interventions, beyond simply jobs and income. It offers a new and holistic perspective on the values generated from environmental stewardship and forest governance, and focuses on the methods, approaches and outcomes for understanding social value and SROI. The book offers new directions in social value and SROI, including cultural and spiritual outcomes, gender equity, and health and well-being, and provides pathways for implementing interventions and measuring social impact. It includes state of the art approaches from diverse and interdisciplinary experts drawn from academia and professional practice, including the voices and perspectives of Indigenous Peoples and local communities involved in programs, with a focus on environmental stewardship. Social value and SROI are increasingly used to assess outcomes from conservation and this book broadens the conversation on the impact and business case for these interventions.