Papers by Farhana Sultana
Nature Climate Change, 2025
In this commentary we explore the confluence of factors shaping climateinduced migration and the ... more In this commentary we explore the confluence of factors shaping climateinduced migration and the need for comprehensive solutions grounded in historical and systemic understandings. We argue that climate change, colonial legacies, and geopolitical policies significantly influence migration patterns, particularly for historically marginalised communities. We call for scholars to develop holistic frameworks that consider environmental, political, historical, and economic factors while advocating for the legal recognition and protection of migrants and people displaced by climate impacts. Drawing on examples of internal migration and displacement in the United States and refugee camps globally, we highlight the complexities of resettlement. We propose integrated approaches that include legal reforms, economic reparations, and community-based solutions to address the root causes and effects of climate-induced migration. Our commentary emphasises the importance of interdisciplinary strategies to promote climate resilience and self-determination for affected communities. We advocate for narrative shifts and structural transformations to meet the global challenge, and opportunities, of climate-induced migration.
Ecology and Society, 2024
Declarations of water crises have been ubiquitous in water policy and practice for decades. In th... more Declarations of water crises have been ubiquitous in water policy and practice for decades. In the face of unprecedented human-caused climate change, the circulation of water crisis discourses has increased in frequency. How crises are defined and made meaningful, however, is often assumed to be commonly agreed upon. Reviewing scholarship at the intersections of water and climate, we show that crisis discourses are inherently political because they depend both on the authority and legitimacy to delineate exceptions from norms, and on the powers to mobilize resources to respond to constructions of crisis. Engaging with crisis as an explicitly normative concept helps situate analyses within the social, historical, political, and geographic particularities of water-climate systems. We identify three interrelated analytical frames that assist with this task: relationality, spatiality, and temporality. Our review hopes to better position researchers, policy makers, and activists to critically engage with crisis narratives. Doing so can effectively advance more critical, creative, and imaginative crisis responses.
Nature Cities, 2024
Managing climate change-related risks requires robust and actionable insights into future climate... more Managing climate change-related risks requires robust and actionable insights into future climates. Here we develop the plural climate storylines framework to complement existing physical climate storylines, which have strengthened the usability of climate projections yet struggled to generate action for just climate futures. By taking urban adaptation as a case in point, we illustrate the plural climate storylines framework through four complementary methodological schools that bring together multiple knowledges on complex social and climatic processes: power-sensitive storylines, decolonizing storylines, co-producing storylines and aspirational storylines. Our framework generates storylines with the potential to advance transformative policies and new pathways towards climate-just futures. Under anthropogenic climate change, what today is considered an unprecedented climate extreme may quickly become the norm. People globally are experiencing an increase in heavy precipitation events 1 , extreme floods and droughts 2 , and prolonged heatwaves 3 . This has already generated several adverse impacts, which disproportionately affect the most vulnerable populations, especially in the Global South 4 . Managing these intensifying climate-related risks requires information that generates robust and actionable insights into future climates , and that is perceived as useful 7 , salient 6 , meaningful 8 , credible and legitimate 9 . Two key challenges in providing actionable information on future climates are ensuring that policymakers can utilize these scientific insights and tailoring the data's spatiotemporal scale to its intended use. Numerical climate models are used to develop climate projections-a driving force behind the physical understanding of anthropogenic climate change-that provide robust and abundant information (Fig. ). This information may, however, not be actionable
ACME, 2024
Addressing academic mobilities in a time of climate breakdown requires a transformation in social... more Addressing academic mobilities in a time of climate breakdown requires a transformation in social values, behaviors, and systems. Our related task is twofold. First, scholars must foster knowledge production and circulation that 1) challenge a status quo that stems from colonial, capitalist, and racist histories and 2) are consistent with an inclusive, equitable, and low-impact academy. Second, we must strive for just geographies in an unjust world of climate, socioecological, and academic disparities. Such goals necessitate working for far-reaching changes within academic institutions as well as for systemic change in the broader world. Keywords academic mobilities, climate change, conferencing, social justice Concerns around academic mobilities necessitate a deep dive into who travels, under which conditions, at what career stage, and for what purposes. This exploration is not merely about movement or its absence but intricately tied to power hierarchies, knowledge production, and the overarching theme of justice (Hopkins, 2023). Transformative changes in social values, behaviors, and systems are needed for climate justice, and academics can demonstrate leadership in this. Embracing alternative modes of conferencing, and challenging the colonial biases in knowledge production, dissemination, and circulation, are now essential. 1 However, while large place-based conferences raise concerns around our
Nature, 2025
Ten of Nature's contributors share their current book obsessions.
Local Environment, 2025
In this commentary we explore the confluence of factors shaping climateinduced migration and the ... more In this commentary we explore the confluence of factors shaping climateinduced migration and the need for comprehensive solutions grounded in historical and systemic understandings. We argue that climate change, colonial legacies, and geopolitical policies significantly influence migration patterns, particularly for historically marginalised communities. We call for scholars to develop holistic frameworks that consider environmental, political, historical, and economic factors while advocating for the legal recognition and protection of migrants and people displaced by climate impacts. Drawing on examples of internal migration and displacement in the United States and refugee camps globally, we highlight the complexities of resettlement. We propose integrated approaches that include legal reforms, economic reparations, and community-based solutions to address the root causes and effects of climate-induced migration. Our commentary emphasises the importance of interdisciplinary strategies to promote climate resilience and self-determination for affected communities. We advocate for narrative shifts and structural transformations to meet the global challenge, and opportunities, of climate-induced migration.
AAG Review of Books, 2025
Environmental Research Letters, 2025
Annals of the American Association of Geographers ISSN: 2469-4452 (Print) 2469-4460 (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/raag21 Elevating the Discipline: Creating Pathways for Geographers as Public Scholars Lisa Schamess, Ivan J. Ramírez, Thomas Bales, Rajiv Ghimire, Zhiying Li..., 2026
Geographers are well suited to be public scholars, due to their specialized training and interdis... more Geographers are well suited to be public scholars, due to their specialized training and interdisciplinary perspectives, which equip them to "ground-truth" and convey knowledge on a wide variety of trends and issues to the public and policymakers. Although institutional recognition of public scholarship has increased over the past twenty years, it remains an underdeveloped area of practice for geographers, often fraught with professional and personal pitfalls. The gap in public relevance for geographers, relative to other disciplinarians, has been documented for decades. Current trends of greater public engagement indicate cause for cautious optimism, albeit plagued by risks to individual geographers, particularly those who might be marginalized in public discourse due to their identities, their stances, or both. Drawing on the lessons learned from the first-ever media and advocacy training cohort at the American Association of Geographers (AAG), entitled Elevate the Discipline, this article examines the skills and attributes geographers bring to the public arena, as well as the obstacles to such work. Although some universities address the need for public scholarship development through training and support, geographers might need very specific components around elements of their practice such as mapping and visualization tools, or bringing multifaceted messages into focus. The experience with AAG's yearlong Elevate the Discipline, which culminated in a week of in-person training, demonstrates that a relatively modest training can instill confidence and skills in geographers to weigh in on ever-more crucial science communication and engagement with the public.
GEO: Geography and Environment, 2025
Climate change intensifies existing inequities, disproportionately impacting marginalised populat... more Climate change intensifies existing inequities, disproportionately impacting marginalised populations, particularly in the Global South and Indigenous communities. This is maintained through inequitable global climate governance, policies and solutions. The paper argues that climate coloniality, the complex entanglements of colonial legacies with contemporary climate and ecological changes, operates through systemic knowledge-based marginalisation or epistemic injustice, serving as a key mechanism in the uneven production and distribution of climate harms. Beyond the more commonly discussed material dimensions of loss and damage, epistemic injustices arise from silencing critical voices and devaluing knowledge systems. The paper extends the scope of loss and damage debates by drawing attention to epistemic losses: the erasure of worldviews, ontologies and practices that are vital for just and sustainable climate futures. It critically examines the intersections of power, pedagogy and praxis in (re)producing epistemic injustices, while simultaneously revealing counter-narratives of refusal, resurgence and relationality. By engaging Indigenous and Global South scholarship, the paper underscores the need to decolonise knowledge systems that reproduce dominant climate narratives and heed the epistemological alternatives offered by land- and kinship-based knowledge systems. Advancing climate justice depends on confronting epistemic injustice as both a form of loss and a condition of possibility: centring Global South and Indigenous perspectives is essential for cultivating pluriversal, decolonial and just climate frameworks and futures.
Confronting Climate Coloniality: Decolonizing Pathways for Climate Justice, 2025
This chapter unpacks the concept of climate coloniality, a critical framework for understanding t... more This chapter unpacks the concept of climate coloniality, a critical framework for understanding the contemporary climate crisis. It exposes how legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism co-produce and worsen the climate crisis and related ecological devastations. Climate coloniality disproportionately burdens those who contributed least to environmental problems, while shaping global and local responses. Climate coloniality is perpetuated through processes of neoliberalism, racial capitalism, development interventions, economic growth models, media, and education. Confronting it demands a decolonization of climate discourses and practices. This entails challenging dominant narratives and policies; interrogating material, geopolitical, and institutional arrangements for tackling the climate crisis; and, centering Global South and Indigenous knowledge, experiences, strategies, and solutions. This chapter demonstrates the fundamental necessity of decolonial and anti-colonial approaches to climate justice that address the material, epistemic, and policy aspects of climate coloniality. The chapter thereafter provides an overview of the book’s contributions that chart pathways for transformative action and foster deeper understandings of the structural injustices embedded within climate governance, framings, policies, responses, and praxis. Highlighting interdisciplinary collaborations that illuminate alternative frameworks and insights, the chapter and the collection outline decolonized approaches to pursue more meaningful climate justice.
Human Geography , 2025
This article advances the concept of hydro-coercion to analyze how asymmetric power relations sha... more This article advances the concept of hydro-coercion to analyze how asymmetric power relations shape transboundary water governance between India and Bangladesh, with broader implications for political geography, environmental justice, and the geographies of state power. Focusing on the Ganges, Teesta, and Brahmaputra rivers, the article argues that India's upstream dominance enables it to exercise coercive control over shared water resources through material infrastructure, institutional stalling, and ideational narratives of water nationalism. These practices exacerbate ecological degradation and human vulnerability in downstream Bangladesh, weaponizing transboundary rivers as geopolitical leverage. Drawing on critical hydro-politics, theories of power, and empirical case studies, the article illustrates how control over rivers reconfigures hydro-social territories, deepens regional precarity, and reveals the limitations of existing treaties and institutional mechanisms. The analysis situates these dynamics within broader regional transformations, including China's upstream interventions that complicate India's dominance and the increasing impacts from accelerating climate change, all of which intensify risks for Bangladesh's deltaic socioecologies. The article posits that a fundamental rethinking of transboundary water governance is imperative, toward a transformed governance paradigm that moves beyond technocratic bilateralism toward multilateral, ecologically just, and politically accountable frameworks. By centering lived experiences of precarity in downstream regions and theorizing hydro-coercion as a mechanism of escalating spatial and geopolitical domination, I emphasize the need for decolonial, rightsbased, and ecologically grounded approaches to shared water governance in an era of intensifying climate and political uncertainty.
Oxford Handbook on Comparative Environmental Politics, 2023
The 2010 United Nations resolution on the human right to water urged the global com munity to acc... more The 2010 United Nations resolution on the human right to water urged the global com munity to accept and implement equitable access to safe clean water for all. In addition, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the development targets for the global com munity between 2016 and 2030, articulated the importance of two interconnected and im portant SGDs: the connections between gender equity (SDG5) and access to water (SDG6). Given these global policy imperatives, countries face normative goals of achiev ing difficult and complex sets of rights and justices regarding water and gender equity. As a result, how policy prescriptions and ambitions are materialized on the ground require closer attention to the ways that gender-water relations are co-constitutive of broader is sues of development and social justice in any given context. More significant action is thus needed to address the socioecological issues that affect access to, control over, and rights to water, which have intersectional gendered implications and impact the lived re alities of water justice and injustice on the ground. The chapter investigates the compara tive politics around the human right to water and the increasing commodification of wa ter through a gendered lens to interrogate broader sustainable development goals. The author argues that implementing the human right to water can help achieve broader is sues of gender equity and gender justice when carried out with better intersectional un derstanding of gender.
Journal of Political Ecology, 2023
Environmental governance (EG) has become a hegemonic concept for understanding and transforming e... more Environmental governance (EG) has become a hegemonic concept for understanding and transforming environmental decision-making processes that operate beyond the state. However, political ecologists, drawing from a diverse set of theoretical frameworks, have critiqued the concept for being malleable, vague, and apolitical, which has enabled its appropriation in ways that conceal inequality and difference, advocate techno-managerial fixes, and espouse neoliberal solutions. Political ecologists have approached EG more critically with the conceptual tools of neoliberal natures, environmental regulation, and eco-governmentality. In this article, we contend that these conceptualizations, while theoretically rich, are limited in their capacity to capture a diversity of governance contexts, processes, and actors and to drive both scholarly analysis and radical change. Thus, we put forward a conceptual framework of relational environmental governance (REG) that captures the dynamic and unequal interactions among heterogeneous human and non-human actors by which socio-ecological arrangements are structured, controlled, and transformed. Drawing from a variety of relational traditions, the framework comprises four key "moves" related to i) ontological understandings of EG processes as full of unequal power relations and heterogeneous actors, ii) epistemological privileging of intersections among racialized, gendered, queer and/or alternative or Indigenous knowledges in EG processes, iii) methodological emphasis on conducting research relationally with diverse EG actors, and iv) a praxis of engagement with EG processes to change how socio-ecologies are controlled and address crises of sustainability.
Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility, 2023
Progress in Human Geography, 2023
Praxis is central to political ecology scholarship but replete with tensions and ambiguities. Thi... more Praxis is central to political ecology scholarship but replete with tensions and ambiguities. This report explores advancements in praxis across epistemological, methodological, pedagogical, and political dimensions. Praxis in political ecology has benefited from detailed insights drawn from Indigenous, decolonial, postcolonial, feminist, anti-racist, and multi-species scholarship, among others. Attention to praxis allows for enriched research that has the potential to be useful and transformational for marginalized communities and better inform policymaking. Political ecology can remain relevant and meaningful when praxis is foregrounded and reflexively interrogated and performed for both intellectual advancements and radical socio-ecological justice.
Environmental Politics, 2023
In this intervention, we call for extending the critical lens of intersectionality to the field o... more In this intervention, we call for extending the critical lens of intersectionality to the field of climate justice. We do so by identifying the theoretical and methodological links through which intersectionality can benefit climate change studies. These include common roots in radical theory, a focus on marginalized populations, challenging dominant epistemologies and ontologies, similar strategies for pursuing social justice, de-emphasizing of positivist methodologies, while at the same time deploying similar research methods, embracing crossscalar and spatio-temporal analysis, and strong emphasis on interdisciplinarity and cross-sectoral alliances. We conclude with a number of potential questions to inform future research on these linkages and to encourage fellow scholars to consider what we see as an indispensable theoretical and methodological synergy of intersectionality and climate justice for a more equitable present and future.
Political Geography, 2022
Resplendent care-full climate revolutions ☆ Farhana Sultana "Caring for myself is not self-indulg... more Resplendent care-full climate revolutions ☆ Farhana Sultana "Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare."-Audre Lorde ☆ Political Geography Plenary response paper (on Climate Coloniality).
Uploads
Papers by Farhana Sultana