Time to rethink climate in/vulnerability

How we talk about climate vulnerability explains a lot about climate politics, and climate inaction. 

In my recent article Colonial fantasies of invulnerability to climate change, I argue that much of the reason for lack of action on climate change is because vulnerability is seen as a characteristic that is assumed to apply to the people and places where risk and danger is already geographically imagined to be. Understanding vulnerability in this way means that climate change will not alter patterns of suffering. 

The justifications used to defend these patterns can therefore remain in place. Power and wealth aren’t threatened, and so interests remain committed to maintaining the status quo. Climate change changes nothing.

What is vulnerability? 

Climate vulnerability is a concept that has prompted a massive amount of research, in part because it’s so important to UNFCCC and IPCC processes. Vulnerability is the concept that is usually used to discuss the distribution of climate effects, seen in a relationship between exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity. 

The ‘climate vulnerable’ also get a lot of research attention, in ways that have their own critiques. See for example the work of feminists and critical adaptation studies scholars. The overarching assumption is that being vulnerable to climate change is related to being vulnerable generally. So this usually means ‘small island’ and ‘undeveloped’ states, and it means women, and particularly women in the ‘Third World’. 

In order to unpack the politics of all of this, it’s useful to think about the difference between material and discursive vulnerability. Material vulnerability is proximity to climate change events – perhaps living in a flood plain, or in a high storm risk area. It is also about mobility – whether you can move out of the danger zone, it’s whether can you get insurance, how well connected you are to food networks, and who has the wealth to rebuild. 

Discursive vulnerability is more about geographic imaginations. That is why you see the repeated images of “a lone South Asian woman standing chest-high in rising flood waters” or an aerial shot of a low-lying island or even polar bears and melting ice. These are the images of climate vulnerability that have become iconic. 

The problem is, that all of this is simplification, and some of this is actively harmful. Material vulnerability is not just a matter of luck, it is something that is actively produced. On a global level, wealth distributions are not natural, they are caused by structures of colonial and racial capitalism. Similarly, these discourses have not emerged organically, but have been constructed. The iconic images are useful for those who don’t want climate action because they reassure us: climate vulnerability fits the global patterns of suffering that are ‘normal’. ‘You’ won’t suffer – ‘they’ will. 

I call the logics that lie behind this: ‘fantasies of invulnerability’.

Fantasies of invulnerability

Thinking about invulnerability offers us some tools to challenge these harmful assumptions, and contribute to a repoliticisation of climate politics. Usually, the opposite of vulnerability is thought of as resilience. However, I avoid this term as it implies neoliberal ideas of coping with harm rather than preventing it. I prefer invulnerability, as it can be used to trouble assumptions about material and discursive vulnerability. 

Material invulnerability is not real. Power, wealth, mobility, insurance, all of this helps of course. But at the levels of climate change we are facing, nobody is safe, even the extremely wealthy. Wealth can only protect you so much, in the face of escalating extreme weather events.

More importantly, vulnerability is not an individual characteristic. This is a feminist insight – our lives are not individual, we are not masters of our own universe. If global food production is affected by climate change, it doesn’t matter where we live. 

As Pacific diplomats have been telling us for years, a world in which islands become uninhabitable is not a world otherwise unchanged: 

“if you save the islands of the world, irrespective whether they're island states or the islands off the coast of the USA, if you save the islands of the world, you save everybody. You save New York. You save London. You save all the great ports. You save Bangladesh. So that's the bottom line. You save us, you save everybody else” Ronald Jumeau, speaking in 2010. 

So why does this idea of invulnerability persist? I argue it’s because the ‘First World’, a term I use to describe Europe and its settler colonies - the world of colonial wealth, ‘whiteness’, and capitalism – defines itself through its invulnerability. 

The First World is definitively the place that is safe. It does not experience war on its own soil. Any challenges to this imaginary, and we can think perhaps of September 11th or October 7th, days so aberrational their dates become shorthand, are met with massive aggression. 

Judith Butler argued this in 2015: when these states experience moments of vulnerability, they react with violence. Because fantasies of invulnerability are not benign, they are dangerous. Inaction in the face of climate change isn’t just complacency; it is a violent defence of power and wealth distributions that are in opposition to a safe and liveable world. 

Discursive invulnerability, then, is something that is bound up in imaginaries. And for the First World, this imagined invulnerability is bound to ideas of: 

• Modernity: development is a linear path that leads to invulnerability. Climate change is a development problem. 
• Mastery: technology can overcome any obstacle to perpetual domination over nature. Climate change is a technology problem. 
• Continentalism: Land and resources are endless, as long as you have the reach to take them. Climate change is a territory problem. 

This is why I call these fantasies of invulnerability colonial, and masculine: they rely on an imaginary of independence and control which can only be achieved through denying interdependence, or the role of the rest of the world in creating the First World’s wealth.

Conclusion

It’s time to rethink climate in/vulnerability. Climate change is too far advanced for wealth to provide a shield. We’re seeing evidence of this all the time: think of the LA fires, the Valencia floods… Materially then, we can research invulnerability and say there is no invulnerability to be found, unless it is created through violence.

But more crucial is understanding the unfolding politics of those trying to hang on to the fantasies of invulnerability. The development policies that conflate climate vulnerability with development, creating maladaptation. The techno-fixes that at best are unfeasible, and at worst accelerate climate change, and further vulnerabilise marginalised populations. The hunger of corporations and states who constantly seek to take more land, and explore new sites for extraction – be it the ocean, or space… All of this needs to be resisted. 

For those of us who want to fight for a liveable earth, we need to argue that climate change changes everything.

Author

Charlotte Weatherill is a Lecturer in Politics & International Studies at The Open University. Charlotte's research explores the concept of vulnerability in climate change politics, particularly in relation to Oceania and colonial discourses. Research interests include environment and climate politics, and critical theories of feminism, coloniality and racial capitalism. Charlotte is a co-founder and co-convenor of BISA's Environment and Climate Politics Working Group, and the Social Media Editor for the journal Environmental Politics. Find her on Twitter or Bluesky.

This blog post is part of a series that spotlights recently published work in environmental and climate politics. Do you have something to share? We'd love to hear from you - get in touch at ecp.group@bisa.ac.uk.

Photo by Michael M Stokes via Wikimedia Commons | Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic licence