Geographical Journal最新文献

Geographical place, socioeconomic status and citizenship matter in the context of climate change. The most vulnerable members of society are frequently the ones hardest hit by climate-induced extreme events. Vulnerable communities often live in climate-exposed locations, and have access to fewer resources to prepare for and respond to disasters. This is the case for Haitian migrants in The Bahamas—vulnerable communities located within a climate-vulnerable country. Haitian communities were the locus of the majority of deaths and missing people attributed to the 2019 Hurricane Dorian and faced a series of distributional, procedural and recognition injustices. We investigate the historical factors and contemporary conditions of Haitian communities in The Bahamas that resulted in significant inequities, disproportional impacts and infractions of human rights by the Bahamian government. We show how this experience complexifies discourse on loss and damage and climate-induced migration in small island developing states and exemplifies the need for human rights approaches to loss and damage that incorporate multi-scalar dimensions of climate justice.

This paper argues that acknowledging the wide diversity of current recreational practices on English wetlands enables governance practitioners and site managers to appreciate the full extent of contemporary human engagements with these watery ecosystems. These insights can assist those tasked with managing wetland resources to develop more inclusive and sustainable development plans to support a wide range of actors whose connections to wetland spaces are important for their health, wellbeing and sense of self. Enabling sustainable future uses of wetlands will involve recognising and engaging with differential articulations of place-making within these diverse waterscapes which themselves are in a constant state of transition. This calls our attention to the dynamic nature of wetlands, and the ways in which place-making in these spaces shifts and adapts to the changing topography and biota within these waterscapes; each encounter with the space is slightly reconfigured and recast every time. Wetlands' liminality also extends to the diverse and often esoteric uses of these ecosystems for recreation in its most encompassing sense; as leisure spaces, places of renewal and as locations of place-making practices. Drawing upon Barbara Bender's exploration of landscape as phenomenological palimpsest, this paper utilises empirical interview data drawn from a recent research project, ‘WetlandLIFE’, to explore how far contemporary human uses of wetlands engage with processes of restoration and reanimation. Making use of the different leisure narratives of the research participants across five English wetland sites, the paper explores the ways in which ‘place’ is differentially interpreted, enabled and enacted in these saturated spaces. These practises and performances can be functional, prosaic engagements with wetlands; painting, walking, photographing, sitting, reflecting. They can also be anarchic, counter-cultural and ‘delinquent’; wild-camping, raving, poaching, partying. The wide spectrum of behaviours and attitudes catalogued reveal the contested use and value of these waterscapes in contemporary contexts.

The hydrological patterns of all natural water bodies pulse in variable rhythms of high and low water. The biodiversity of these ecosystems is driven by the changing nature of the environment, allowing different life strategies to coexist, e.g., by the fast reuse of nutrients when aquatic biota flourish in the recently wetted zones and vice versa. Much of the human culture in hydroscapes has developed as an adaptation to this rhythm, e.g., by using the flood-fertilised floodplains for agriculture or fisheries, or by seasonal migration into or out of the floodplain (transhumance). Technological advances have allowed humans to control, change, or even eliminate this natural water rhythm by building dams, dikes, and canals. Consequently, important ecosystem functions fail, often resulting in failure of human life-support systems but also in the failure and decline of cultural activities. I argue that the loss of socio-cultural connectivity to the rhythms of rivers and other hydrosystems occurs in four phases: (i) loss of direct relationships (e.g., uses of waterborne resources), (ii) loss of indirect relationships (cultural activities that are connected to theses uses), (iii) turning away from the river/hydrosystem (often caused by decreased water quality), and (iv) total oblivion (caused by removal or burial of the hydrosystem). Reintegrating more riverine rhythms into human life would not mean to step back in time but rather to find a combination of revised traditional ecological knowledge, learning from nature, changing values in the context of use of natural resources, and innovations. This paper draws on social-environmental aspects of the River Culture Concept – which attempts to reintegrate respect for the pulsing nature of hydrosystems into modern, sustainable management – and on diverse case studies. Examples are presented on how River Culture Concept approaches may contribute to revitalising socio-ecological linkages to the rhythm of the waters.

The Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) annual Medals and Awards recognise achievements in researching, communicating and teaching a wide range of geographical knowledge. The speeches and citations are a record of the 2022 celebrations, which occurred at the Society on 6 June 2022, with contributions from Sir David Hempleman-Adams, Professor Dame Jane Francis, Professor Paul Cloke, Professor James Sidaway and Professor David Hannah.

In the Society's 191st Annual General M, the President of the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) Nigel Clifford offered some thoughts on the value of geography today and presented his ambitions for his presidency of the society. In particular, he reflected on the skills that geography provides for all industries and workplaces, and the need to make the Society both more representative of the wider community, and more agile so that it can respond to, and remain relevant within, the changing world that surrounds us.

The 2017 North Atlantic hurricane season brought many of the injustices faced by non-sovereign Caribbean States to the fore. These injustices, which positioned Caribbean people as expendable to colonial powers, highlighted the impact of historically enduring colonial structures of non-sovereignty on post-hurricane response and recovery efforts across the region. In this paper, we argue that Puerto Rico's status as a Commonwealth of the United States (U.S.) influenced the nature and outcome of the U.S. Federal Government's response to Hurricane Maria in 2017. Its response was marked by unnecessary delays, silence, and the withholding of information, and the prioritisation of bureaucracy, evidencing the disposability of Black and brown lives and bodies, and signalling the need to collectively leverage the power of an environmental justice agenda. For this to be achieved, we further argue, a people's right to sovereignty and indispensability must be centred.

River contracts (RCs) are voluntary agreements between stakeholders for managing water bodies and involve participatory, evidence-based action plans. Increasingly, European authorities recognise that effective water policies require bottom-up, inclusive decision-making. Despite widely held assumptions about the benefits of including stakeholders in river basin management and encouraging participatory mechanisms of decision-making, the growing rhetoric about the need for public engagement implies that this ‘new’ paradigm of water management remains filled with ambiguities. Adopting ethnographic methods and drawing on a variety of primary and secondary sources, this paper analyses three RCs in the Friuli Venezia Giulia region of Italy. These case studies reveal the potential for RCs as tools not only for water management, but also for increasing stakeholder involvement through place-making activities conceived as potential hydrophilic encounters. In order to understand whether RCs contribute to a fluvial sense of place, we looked at the effects of top-down versus participatory processes. We asked whether RCs were considered participatory processes designed to achieve a co-designed outcome or simply territorial management projects that objectify the river as something to be developed. We found that ratifying an RC was not, in itself, proof of an effective process; rather the nature and quality of an RC was determined by the degree and type of participation. We contend that participatory events and sharing information are not sufficient in themselves to achieve the active involvement of all stakeholders. We argue that the best framework for enabling place-making and enhancing a sense of place is to develop RCs within a process that includes a high degree of participation. This enables citizens to shift from simply being passive recipients of plans to becoming effective territorial actors.

In this commentary, using the UK as our example, we focus on what we describe as the borderlands of the science–policy interface (SPI) and use two case studies to sketch out where we think there are further opportunities for geographers and others interested in advocating and engaging. As authors we bring to the topic different professional backgrounds and experiences at the SPI, ranging from ex-Deputy Chief Scientist at Natural England with a recent secondment to Defra to two academic geographers who have worked with and for Defra to other roles including acting as specialist adviser to the Houses of Parliament. As geographers and environmental scientists, we believe that there is much to be gained by working with both policy development and practice in the pursuit of positive outcomes for economy, society and environment.

This paper critically assesses debt as a response to ecological, fiscal, and climate disasters that have emerged within the ‘blue economy’ agenda in the Caribbean. Caribbean countries routinely suffer major losses of life, internal social and economic displacement, increased debt burdens, and significant economic damages due to hurricanes and ecological disasters in the context of an ongoing fiscal crisis. In response, regional public and national agencies have proposed ‘blue economy’ initiatives to address the regional need for finance, to rejuvenate financial flows, and to compensate for extremely constrained fiscal resources and externally imposed austerity (or debt bondage). Major recent hurricanes and ecological shocks illustrate uneven and interconnected spatial histories of anti-Black dispossession, disenfranchisement, and deprivation, offering important empirical terrain from which to appreciate how contemporary ‘disasters’ have become new means to extend hierarchical plantation formations to the seascape through debt-driven finance and austerity. The paper demonstrates the ways in which coercive financial instruments like catastrophe insurance, debt swaps, ‘blue bonds’, and traditional public debt constitute tools to further integrate these societies differentially into racialised financial geographies and entrench a coloniality of being. As traditional plantation structures become exhausted and lack capacity to effectively ensure growth, these innovative finance mechanisms are required for ‘blue’ accumulation. We situate spiralling debt burdens and these new instruments spurred by socially produced and postcolonial disasters within postplantation ecologies that describe socio-political relations and spatial dependencies linked to interwoven logics of disaster-based financial capitalism that seek to extend the extractive capacity of the plantation anew. These arrangements tend to naturalise and render disaster, death, and debt as ordinary events and obligations arising from postcolonial statehood, and take for granted their origins in racialised plantation structures.