EMERGING NARRATIVES
1 The language
The language in which people talk about both episodic and everyday climate change is mediated through their lifeworlds, i.e. places, work, bodies, histories, cultures and tongues.
How much you know about something is also a product of what you think worth considering and articulating. Within deep vulnerability, what is worth knowing is always in some parts linked to what you feel you can do something about. The lesser the latter, the lighter the former.
People know that climate is changing. They can feel it. Their articulations are not just idiomatic but also technical – they can hold both and need both registers. It is both legend and fact; lyrical and literal; subjective and objective. But the language exists. ‘Awareness’ isn’t the issue.
2 Climate change must be emplaced.
It settles into vulnerable settlements in particular ways, moving along existing fault lines of risk and vulnerability.
The way you feel the absence of a storm water drain in an informal settlement changes when the nature of rain and floods change. The drain was always missing, but the meaning of that absence is what deepens.
Risk needs a language that has the smell, touch, feel, form of what is present. Place can make different forms of risk feel tangible – it can hold scale, time, and abstraction and translate each in a way that feels real as well as makes sense. Speaking about something like climate change needs this.
Just because risks are multiple, simultaneous and intertwined doesn’t mean people can’t pull them apart in their stories. Heat in a waste workers settlement is different when the heat waves come more often, even if heat is otherwise also a constant.
3 Climate change and its health effects need to be layered...
...with other determinants of health and illness in vulnerable settlements – these are knotted and intertwined with each other.
Illness is not new to these worlds. It is constant. Climate change’s ‘delta’ or addition or difference here is harder to pull apart when risk and vulnerability are so near universal. It can feel cruel to notice this only because of climate change – we should be looking anyways.
But, in realpolitik: Climate change may get us in the door to talk about health, to talk about vulnerability, to talk about place. Maybe this is the drum whose beats will finally get heard.
4 In vulnerable settlements...
Responding, coping and flourishing to these intertwined risks and vulnerabilities are a mix of individual and collective agency; spatial and infrastructural opportunity; as well as Health system responses. These are ‘and’ factors – you need all three. Each aids the other when they work, and weakens the other when they don’t.
Solving one end of the puzzle will never undo the whole knot. And, and, and. The opposite of “where should we start?” is “anywhere is fine as long as you get through the whole round!”
New and even more reasons to do what’s right: upgrade, improve, repair, retrofit.
