Reconceptualising risk in research: The call to do no harm goes far beyond the field.

A session at the Royal Geographical Society’s annual conference will explore the physical, emotional and reputational risks involved in doing research, with the hope that this will in turn, provide a starting point for a more comprehensive framework for understanding how risk operates. Amiera Sawas will be co-chairing the session and writes here on her experiences with risks in the field and beyond. She finds that protocols are undoubtedly robust on a wide range of physical threats, but more subtle threats, like sexual harassment, which cross psychological and physical lines, are not always explicitly dealt with

Unveiling the security concerns of low carbon development:climate security analysis of the undesirable and unintended effects of mitigation and adaptation

In debates of climate action, low carbon development has been widely advocated as an opportunity arising from climate change. This paper problematizes low carbon development, arguing that there are undesirable, unintended or perverse effects that give rise to distinct and serious security concerns. The literature on climate security has addressed the effects of climate threats on conflict but there is a notable paucity of research analysing the security implications of responses to climate change in the form of low carbon development. The paper presents critical analysis of the ways low carbon development yields new security concerns as well as entrenching existing ones. Five dimensions of security are examined: spatially uneven effects of low carbon development; violent imaginaries of the global south and the production of ‘ungoverned spaces’; non-violent yet harmful instances of conflict; marginalization and dispossession; depoliticized, techno-managerial effects of resilience. The paper shows that climate (in)security manifests in variegated ways between different populations and spatial scales. Consequently, how, when for whom low carbon development becomes a threat or opportunity is socially constructed and deeply political

Spotlight - How people of colour experience and engage with climate change in Britain

Climate change is a globally devastating phenomenon. Our response must therefore be a globally inclusive and creative transformation. Around the world, people of colour are disproportionately affected by climate change. Some of the most devastating effects occur outside the UK, such as extreme floods in Nigeria, Pakistan and Bangladesh; droughts in the African Sahel, cyclones in the Caribbean, and deadly heatwaves across South Asia. Our research shows that these global experiences of climate change are felt indirectly by people of colour residing in the UK. In addition, people of colour also feel the climate change impacts that are directly affecting the UK, such as severe heatwaves and flooding.The interconnections between climate change and racial (in)justice are becoming increasingly visible, especially in international political arenas where climate-vulnerable countries have been calling for the delivery of promised, but delayed, loss and damage finance. In the UK, there are also growing calls for a just and equitable response to climate change. Yet, work remains to be done in scholarship and education to help the British public recognise how cross-countrydisparities in greenhouse gas emissions are linked with British colonial legacies including historic forceful expropriation of resources from people of colour. Our research acknowledges the need to address intersecting racial and climate (in)justices, and to promote climate justice as a guiding principle for all attempts to develop a climate-resilient world.In attempting to support these aspirations, this study addresses a gap in research, particularly the understanding and personal experiences of climate change by people of colour in the UK. We engaged with 1008 adults across the UK who identify with non-white ethnic minority backgrounds. The sample was evenly distributed across ethnicity, age, political leaning, region, religious affiliation and household income. As a team of social scientists and practitioners -drawing broadly from psychology, geography, theology, education, policy, campaigning and ethics - we analyse the findings through a mix of approaches to generate insights into how people of colour are thinking about and responding to the climate crisis

Knowledge Priorities on Climate Change and Water in the Upper Indus Basin: A Horizon Scanning Exercise to Identify the Top 100 Research Questions in Social and Natural Sciences

River systems originating from the Upper Indus Basin (UIB) are dominated by runoff from snow and glacier melt and summer monsoonal rainfall. These water resources are highly stressed as huge populations of people living in this region depend on them, including for agriculture, domestic use, and energy production. Projections suggest that the UIB region will be affected by considerable (yet poorly quantified) changes to the seasonality and composition of runoff in the future, which are likely to have considerable impacts on these supplies. Given how directly and indirectly communities and ecosystems are dependent on these resources and the growing pressure on them due to ever-increasing demands, the impacts of climate change pose considerable adaptation challenges. The strong linkages between hydroclimate, cryosphere, water resources, and human activities within the UIB suggest that a multi- and inter-disciplinary research approach integrating the social and natural/environmental sciences is critical for successful adaptation to ongoing and future hydrological and climate change. Here we use a horizon scanning technique to identify the Top 100 questions related to the most pressing knowledge gaps and research priorities in social and natural sciences on climate change and water in the UIB. These questions are on the margins of current thinking and investigation and are clustered into 14 themes, covering three overarching topics of ‘governance, policy, and sustainable solutions’, ‘socioeconomic processes and livelihoods’, and ‘integrated Earth System processes’. Raising awareness of these cutting-edge knowledge gaps and opportunities will hopefully encourage researchers, funding bodies, practitioners, and policy makers to address them

‘Without Water, There is No Life’: Negotiating Everyday Risks and Gendered Insecurities in Karachi’s Informal Settlements

This article provides new insights into the politics of water provisioning in Karachi’s informal settlements, where water shortages and contaminations have pushed ordinary citizens to live on the knife edge of water scarcity. We turn our attention to the everyday practices that involve gendered insecurities of water in Karachi, which has been Pakistan’s security laboratory for decades. We explore four shifting security logics that strongly contribute to the crisis of water provisioning at the neighbourhood level and highlight an emergent landscape of ‘securitised water’. Gender maps the antagonisms between these security logics, so we discuss the impacts on ordinary women and men as they experience chronic water shortages. In Karachi, a patriarchal stereotype of the militant or terrorist-controlled water supply is wielded with the aim of upholding statist national security concerns that undermine women’s and men’s daily security in water provisioning whereby everyday issues of risk and insecurity appear politically inconsequential. We contend that risk has a very gendered nature and it is women that experience it both in the home and outside

Gender, Global Terror, and Everyday Violence in Urban Pakistan

We investigate the cross scalar linkages between every day violence and global war on terror in the context of urban Pakistan. We draw upon intensive research undertaken in the twin cities of Rawalpindi/Islamabad and Karachi to highlight how marginalized Pashtun and Bengali Rohingya communities experience state and everyday violence in the context of the global war on terror. Focusing on the gendered aspects of infrastructural and spectacular violence, we argue that every day violence too, is deeply politicised and inflected by national and global level geopolitics. Following Hannah Arendt, we conceptualize violence as a manifestation of a loss of power. Accordingly, drawing upon ethnographic evidence we demonstrate how even domestic violence takes on a public and a political valence. We argue that performances of masculinities and femininities are, in fact, imbricated with geographies of exclusion, marginalization and state policies. The routinization of violence in everyday spaces draws attention to the DNA like relationality of the local with the geopolitical at the global and national scales

Gender and Violence in Urban Pakistan

The experience of violence is pervasive in Pakistan; while residents of Rawalpindi-Islamabad face violence mostly from people they know, in Karachi, residents are more likely to experience violence from strangers i.e. criminal and political. The findings overwhelmingly point towards access to services and vulnerability profiles of households as major drivers of violence. Evidence and analysis is presented through narratives at the intersection of violence and gender, including themes of vulnerability, illness, mobility, service provision and access to services. The state has a major role in perpetrating violence and as well, is a cause of social violence

Urbanization, gender & violence in millennial Karachi : a scoping study

The study reviews academic and policy related literature, combined with media analysis of selected print and online newspapers, television and radio which are relevant to national and local discourses about violence in Rawalpindi-Islamabad and urban working class neighbourhoods of Karachi. Geographical dimensions of violence can be understood via the concept of vulnerability; the susceptibility to suffering damage from environmental hazards and extremes; and the ability of households and communities to recover from them. The Safe and Inclusive Cities (SAIC) project aims to understand drivers of violence in urban areas of the global South so as to inform evidence-based policy making