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Our research

While the international community is struggling to limit global warming to 1.5°C, the IPCC has confirmed that “climate change is already affecting people, ecosystems and livelihoods all around the world” and set to intensify throughout the 21st century (IPCC 2018, v). Unprecedented fires in Australia, devastating typhoons in the Phillipines, record floods in China, are some examples of impacts thought to be linked to climate change. The implications are wide ranging: impacting crop yields and potentially undermining food security (Wheeler and von Braun 2013), both slow and rapid environmental displacement of populations (Jayawardhan 2017), smoke-filled skies exacerbating air quality already degraded by greenhouse gas emissions (Kinney 2018), and algal blooms in fresh water supplies rendering it undrinkable (Michalak 2016). These are just a few indications of how the basic social and environmental determinants of health (clean air, water, food and shelter) stand to be impacted. Mitigation of further aggravation of the climate crisis is essential, but no longer sufficient.

The need for adaptation to the impacts already underway has brought increased attention to understanding how to achieve climate resilience. Given that over half of the world’s population now lives in cities, which are disproportionately located along the coasts and rivers—the frontlines of climate crisis—climate change resilience in urban areas is an especially important challenge for policy makers around the world. Resilience suggests the capacity to adapt some things so that other processes can continue. However, what should change and what should stay the same is a highly debated and political question.

This project contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the politics of resilience, which is important for at least two reasons. First, the impacts of climate change, though potentially serious for people’s livelihoods and health, are not evenly distributed, and can mean different things in different contexts for different groups (Nordhaus 1994). This is partly because overall warming results in different ecological outcomes in different locations. For example, increased rainfall might have different impacts in different locations, causing flooding in one, improving agricultural productivity in another.

Second, in the face of negative impacts, not everyone suffers equally and diverse needs emerge. Being able to systematically understand diverse needs, common responses to adaptation policies, the conditions in which they arise and gain support and why, is as much an understudied theoretical and empirical challenge, as it is an urgently needed tool to help policymakers develop resilient climate adaptation strategies. Our interest in this project is to better understand resilience in the face of negative impacts of climate change. Thus, it is necessary to focus on a specific phenomenon with a near uniformly negative impact. The rise of “global mean sea-level…is a central consequence of warming Earth’s climate” (Bittermann et al. 2017, 1) and it offers such a focus.

Climate change is causing sea levels to rise within a context of growing income inequality (IPCC 2018; Piketty 2014). Since adaptation is a political issue (Adger et al. 2009), some expect growing conflict between poor and affluent groups resembling the fight to escape the Titanic (Swyngedouw 2013). For others, the magnitude of climate change risks renders ‘class based’ theories obsolete (Chakrabarty 2017). Instead, they expect humanity will look beyond its differences to cooperate because, as Kofi Annan argued, “we sink or swim together” (Sherriff 2015).

The differing levels of vulnerability and resilience of different communities are functions of many types of inequalities (Adger and Brown 2009), the significance of which in the context of adaptation efforts this project aims to document and theorize in order to develop an analytical framework capable of guiding policy decisions towards greater resilience in the face of climate crisis.

East and Southeast Asia are especially at risk to sea level rise: home to four out of every five people impacted by sea level rise by 2050 (Holder et al. 2017). Eleven out of the top 15 cities most at risk of sinking are located in Asia (Sutrisno 2020). The capital city of Indonesia, in particular, represents an urban context that is on the frontlines of the already rapidly advancing impacts—and adaptations—to climate change. There, the issue of rising seas is compounded by the rapid sinking (or subsidence) of the land upon which Jakarta is built. Rising seas combined with land subsidence means more frequent flooding, storm damage, erosion, and salination of aquifers (Sutrisno 2020).

Adaptation is urgently needed, but since Jakarta is set to be one of the world’s first megacities to be overtaken by the sea, there is no map charting the way forward, nor consensus among greater Jakarta’s roughly 30 million residents about which steps to take first.

References

Adger, W.N. and K. Brown. 2009. Vulnerability and Resilience to Environmental Change: Ecological and Social Perspectives. In: A Companion to Environmental Geography. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, pp. 109–22.

Bittermann, K., S. Rahmstorf, R.E. Kopp, and A.C. Kemp. 2017. Global Mean Sea-level Rise in a World Agreed Upon in Paris. Environmental Research Letters, 12(12), 124010.

Chakrabarty, D. 2017. The Politics of Climate Change Is More Than the Politics of Capitalism. Theory, Culture & Society, 34(2–3), 25–37.

Holder, J., N. Kommenda, and J. Watts. 2017. The Three-degree World: The Cities That Will Be Drowned by Global Warming. The Guardian, 3 Nov.

IPCC .2018: Global Warming of 1.5°C. An IPCC Special Report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above preindustrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty [Masson-Delmotte, V., P. Zhai, H.-O. Pörtner, D. Roberts, J. Skea, P.R. Shukla, A. Pirani, W. Moufouma-Okia, C. Péan, R. Pidcock, S. Connors, J.B.R. Matthews, Y. Chen, X. Zhou, M.I. Gomis, E. Lonnoy, T. Maycock, M. Tignor, and T. Waterfield (eds.)].

Jayawardhan, S. 2017. Vulnerability and Climate Change Induced Human Displacement. Consilience, (17), 103–42.

Kinney, P.L. 2018. Interactions of Climate Change, Air Pollution, and Human Health. Current Environmental Health Reports, 5(1), 179–86.

Michalak, A.M. 2016. Study Role of Climate Change in Extreme Threats to Water Quality. Nature, 535(7612), 349–50.

Piketty, T. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Sherriff, L. 2015. ‘We Will Sink Or Swim Together’ Over Climate Change, Warns Kofi Annan. HuffPost UK, 19 Nov.

Sutrisno, B. 2020. Jakarta Among Cities Most Threatened by Rising Sea Levels, Extreme Weather: Report. The Jakarta Post, 29 Feb.

Swyngedouw, E. 2013. Apocalypse Now! Fear and Doomsday Pleasures. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 24(1), 9–18.

Wheeler, T. and J. von Braun. 2013. Climate Change Impacts on Global Food Security. Science, 341(6145), 508–13.

project objectives

The objective of this project is to develop an innovate assessment framework for resilient adaptation to climate change. To do this, we study if adaptation to climate change will create more conflict or cooperation between unequal social groups in four neighbourhoods of the greater Jakarta area facing catastrophic sea level rise. The project will:

Systematize empirical knowledge of adaptation outcomes (e.g. construction of dykes; abandoning of coastal areas) to detect patterns of conflict and cooperation in terms of various forms of inequality (e.g. wealth/income, gender, race, age, religion).
Develop a new theoretical model on the relationship between multiple forms of inequality and responses to climate adaptation policies.
Create a policy toolbox for navigating the politics of climate resilience.