SELECTED PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLES

Climate-changed development: Organizing climate risk and response through an economic growth lens

Erin Friedman

Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 2023

Abstract: Climate-changed development describes how climate change affects the way global South policymakers conceptualize and implement capitalist development into national policies and plans. It signals a different form of development emerging where national governments in the global South play a prominent role in controlling national economic activities through climate resilient development policy and financing interventions. This specific manifestation of climate resilient development organizes national responses to climate risk through an economic growth lens. This article examines current critical perspectives on these economizing processes within the context of climate resilient development. It finds three significant patterns of economization occurring across climate decision-making: capitalizing upon hazards and vulnerability, restructuring national governance, and transitioning to sustainable economies. The review calls for further research that draws attention to national governments’ discursive and technological work to construct profitable climate risk responses.

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Constructing the Adaptation economy: Climate resilient development and the economization of vulnerability

Erin Friedman

Global Environmental Change, 2023

Abstract: Climate resilient development is emerging as a global policy strategy that integrates climate adaptation and mitigation into sustainable development decisions. For the Caribbean small island developing state (SIDS) of Antigua and Barbuda, the national government is pursuing climate resilient development through multilateral climate funds to protect economic growth from climate and weather-related disasters. Critical adaptation literature argues that interpreting climate vulnerability through an economic growth lens prioritizes economic solutions over other development concerns, which can further the uneven distribution of climate vulnerability and risk. Despite revealing the consequences of market-based climate actions, research has yet to fully under- stand the economization of vulnerability, which describes the political techniques that render and reconfigure vulnerability in calculated ways. By tracing the discursive interactions between multilateral climate financial institutions and the Antigua and Barbuda national government, this paper empirically examines how vulnera- bility is economized through climate resilient development. Findings identify the construction of ‘adaptation economies’ in watershed areas, which are economies that can capitalize upon climate challenges within areas of highest vulnerability through fee-for-climate services. The results illustrate that economic growth rationalities characterize climate vulnerability problematizations, which incentivize solutions that enforce the economic development of areas with the highest disaster impacts. Based on these findings, this study emphasizes a need to critically evaluate national actor efforts to re-organize development under climate financing rationales, and its vulnerability-inducing effects.

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Linking quality of life and climate change adaptation through the use of the macro-adaptation resilience toolkit

Erin Friedman, William Solecki, Tiffany G. Troxler, and Zachary Paganini

Climate Risk Management, 2023

Abstract: Climate change is affecting the quality of life and well-being of residents of U.S. communities and neighborhoods, posing a critical challenge for municipalities attempting to simultaneously address competing economic interests and public welfare concerns through climate adaptation policies. In response to this tension, this paper presents an innovative decision-making support toolkit — the Macro-Adaptation Resilience Toolkit (MART) — that is designed to explicitly address and overcome emerging tensions associated with community level climate adaptation policy development and ongoing and varied quality of life concerns of residents. In piloting the use of the toolkit in Miami-Dade County, we illustrate how climate adaptation can be situated within broader quality of life discussions with community stakeholders and formulate trans- formative strategies that could better align climate risk and adaptation and resilience actions with local quality of life issues. Findings from participant dialogues illustrate that socioeconomic in- equalities of urbanization, such as gentrification, affect the kinds of climate risks that are considered of most concern to communities. Within this framework, participants formed trans- formational adaptation strategies that focused on improving quality of life in the long-term via conceptualizing large-scale shifts in the local governance, financing and economic structure thereby re-imaging daily life in the region.

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At the Water's Edge: Coastal Settlement, Transformative Adaptation, and Well-Being in an Era of Dynamic Climate Risk

William Solecki and Erin Friedman

Annual Review of Public Health, 2021

Abstract: With accelerating climate change, US coastal communities are experiencing increased flood risk intensity, resulting from accelerated sea level rise and stronger storms. These conditions place pressure on municipalities and local residents to consider a range of new disaster risk reduction programs, climate resilience initiatives, and in some cases transformative adaptation strategies (e.g., managed retreat and relocation from highly vulnerable, low-elevation locations). Researchers have increasingly understood that these climate risks and adaptation actions have significant impacts on the quality of life, well-being, and mental health of urban coastal residents. We explore these relationships and define conditions under which adaptation practices will affect communities and residents. Specifically, we assess climate and environmental stressors, community change, and well-being by utilizing the growing climate change literature and the parallel social science literature on risk and hazards, environmental psychology, and urban geography work, heretofore not widely integrated into work on climate adaptation.

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The Resilience of Land Tenure Regimes During Hurricane Irma: How Colonial Legacies Impact Disaster Response and Recovery in Antigua and Barbuda

Cory Look, Erin Friedman, Geneviève Godbout

Journal of Extreme Events, 2019

Abstract: Antiguans and Barbudans have both raised concerns over the disaster recovery solutions put in place to mitigate damages sustained during Hurricane Irma in September 2017. In Barbuda, the potential loss of commonhold land ownership and the possibility of a land grab by foreign investors has tended to portray the island as a victim of disaster capitalism rather than as a resilient community. At the same time, neither island has addressed its vulnerabilities to future extreme events through any substantive legislative response, or immediate policy shifts. While it is vital that we attend to the exploitation of vulnerable populations and the efforts of economic restructuring that follow a disaster to better un- derstand the impact of major weather events, we propose that the threat to commonhold land tenure in Barbuda and the legislative overreach of Antigua’s government on the matter following Hurricane Irma can be understood in terms of various landscape legacies and continuities rooted in ongoing struggles over land in Antigua and Barbuda spanning the periods of slavery, emancipation, and post-colonial independence. This paper situates the past with distinction in order to understand the resilience of land tenure regimes, and the ways in which this resilience affects the quality of post-disaster response in thepost-Irma era. Using path dependency theory, we examine the tensions over land tenure in response to Hurricane Irma within the framework of colonial legacies of land rights. More specifically, this paper attempts to examine how these land tenure regimes took shape, and in what ways it has been contested and resisted over time. Our findings demonstrate how the imposition of modern land-use solutions atop a landscape shaped by 18th- and 19th- century practices complicates the mandate to plan for and mitigate the impacts of future disasters. The impact of Hurricane Irma on Barbuda further shows how resistance to legislative change might result in a form of ecological restraint rooted in social-cohesion and commonhold land tenure that is now coming under threat.

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