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Guy Jackson is looking at camera with mountainous terrain in the background.

Guy Jackson

Guest researcher

Guy Jackson is looking at camera with mountainous terrain in the background.

Environmental subjectivities and experiences of climate extreme-driven loss and damage in northern Australia

Author

  • Guy Jackson

Summary, in English

Australia has objectively suffered climate extreme-driven loss and damage—climate change impacts that cannot or will not be avoided. Recent national surveys demonstrate a growing awareness of the link between climate change and climate extremes. However, climate extremes interact with existing environmental subjectivities (i.e., how people perceive, understand, and relate to the environment), which leads to different social, cultural, and political responses. For example, people in northern Australia are familiar with climate extremes, with the heat, humidity, fires, floods, storms, and droughts intimately connected to identities and sense of place. In this climate ethnography, I demonstrate the value of undertaking environmental subjectivities analyses for research on climate-society relations. I detail how environmental subjectivities influence people’s experiences, or non-experiences, of climate extreme-driven loss and damage in northern Australia. I identify a growing concern for climate change and climate extremes are influencing environmental subjectivities. Yet, many northern Australians—even people concerned about climate change—are not, for now, connecting extreme events to climate change. A widespread subjectivity of anticipatory loss supplied people with an imagined temporal buffer, which contributes to non-urgency in political responses. Together with more structural political-economic barriers and a sense of helplessness to affect progressive change, limited action beyond individual consumer decisions and small-scale advocacy are occurring. These, amongst other, findings extend research on the role of climate extremes in climate opinion, lived experiences of loss and damage in affluent contexts, and the environmental value-action gap.

Department/s

  • LUCSUS (Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies)

Publishing year

2023

Language

English

Publication/Series

Climatic Change

Volume

176

Issue

7

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Springer

Topic

  • Human Geography
  • Climate Research

Keywords

  • Climate change
  • climate extremes
  • loss and damage
  • environmental subjectivities
  • Australia

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 1573-1480