Prof. Petra Tschakert, a key figure in climate change vulnerability and adaptation research, will talk about heat risk management and inclusive adaptation.
Petra Tschakert, Professor of Geography and Global Futures in the School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry is trained as a human-environment geographer and applied anthropologist. Her research is mainly on climate change adaptation and everyday limits, structural and intersectional inequalities, and loss, grief, and hope, drawing from scholarship grounded in feminist political ecology, environmental humanities, and social, climate, and energy justice. She is the main lead on an Australia-India Research Partnership project that looks at urban heat inequalities and energy precarity in Perth Metro and Delhi and a contributor to the WACOSS-led Heat Vulnerability Mapping project in Perth, Western Australia. Tschakert was Coordinating Lead Author with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), for the Fifth Assessment Report (2014), Working Group II, and the Special Report on 1.5°C Global Warming (2018) with key input on multidimensional vulnerabilities and climate-resilient development pathways.
Her aim is to make visible and tangible intersectional disadvantage and embodied experiences with heat in Perth, Western Australia. She illustrates how the neoliberal context of Australia’s emergency management and the threshold-driven warning systems normalise racialised practices of exclusion. Drawing upon the corporeal struggles among Aboriginal Peoples, rough sleepers, and citizens with disability and complex health needs, She argues in favour of inclusive and equitable urban heat action planning that is centred on better weathering and novel efforts to foster commoning coolth.