Oct. 30, 2025: Talk by Terry Cannon: Intersecting injustices and competing narratives for climate changeh Dialogues

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Intersecting injustices and competing narratives for climate change

Terry Cannon, Institute of Development Studies at University of Sussex, UK

t.cannon@emeritus.ids.ac.uk

The climate crisis is at the intersection of two sets of injustice. The first is the obvious one, concerning the businesses and governments (historically in the West) that have caused the majority of carbon emissions. These affect the majority of people in the world who have played little or no part in causing it yet experience the worst of its impacts – the first injustice.

The second injustice is strangely less obvious and hardly discussed. Most of those same people who are badly affected by climate change are already poor and vulnerable. Climate change has not caused that poverty. They live within unjust systems of power that reduce their access to resources and production assets, income and welfare. The conventional way that organizations and academics deal with this is the idea that climate change is an intensifier or magnifier of existing poverty, vulnerability and inequality. But this avoids the need to analyse the causes of their longstanding poverty and vulnerability, which are related to power that allocates resources and income unfairly. If climate change is thought of simply as a magnifier of existing poverty and vulnerability, the causes tend to be disguised and effectively forgotten.

This is very convenient for those who have power and who want to avoid accepting that they are part of the problem. Governments of the ‘global South’ willingly emphasise the first injustice to avoid taking responsibility for the second. “Donors” (including the World Bank, Asian Development Bank) from the ‘global North’ join in this game. They do not want to comment on the causes of poverty and vulnerability in countries that suffer, because of their alliances with the governments. And yet it should be clear that dealing with climate change injustice without reducing or even eradicating existing causes of poverty and vulnerability is completely meaningless.

Terry Cannon is Emeritus Research Fellow of IDS, and until recently was teaching on the MSc Climate Change, Development and Policy. His main research focus is on rural adaptation, especially in relation to the social construction of vulnerability to natural hazards and climate change. He is also working on the politics of climate and development and the problems that emerge from dealing with both within existing systems of power locally and globally. He was lead author and editor of the Red Cross World Disasters Report: focus on culture and risk (Geneva 2014 – free to download) and works on local perception and cultural interpretations of risk.

Terry Cannon has been teaching and researching in development studies for many years. His background discipline is geography, with additional qualifications in economics and politics. At IDS he is teaching in the MSc Climate Change, Development and Policy. He also teaches at King’s College London (on both development studies and on climate change and disaster vulnerability), in the MSc Disaster Management at University of Copenhagen and lectures annually at Free University Brussels and KU Leuven (Belgium).

His main research focus is on rural livelihoods, disaster vulnerability and climate change adaptation, especially at the local level. He has recently focused on the significance of culture in relation to risk and people’s perception of hazards and climate change. This involved being a lead editor for the Red Cross World Disasters Report 2014: Focus on Culture and Risk. He is one of the co-authors of ‘At Risk: natural hazards, people’s vulnerability and disasters’, which has become one of the most widely cited and used books in the field, and translated into Spanish, Japanese and Chinese. He is also engaged in capacity building on these issues for NGOs and UNDP in several countries, including Bangladesh and Vietnam.