By Brynne Wilcox (MA ’22)

As the world attributes more disasters to climate change, Dr. Jesse Ribot, a professor at American University, joins his colleagues in asking what this narrative is missing. As it turns out, quite a bit. What fuels Dr. Ribot’s frustration, though, is the omission of lasting legacies of colonialism and racism in connection with climate impacts.

Based in Washington, D.C., Dr. Ribot studies the relationships between people, place, and environment, with a focus on environmental justice and rural wellbeing. His research covers a lot of ground, but he is particularly interested in the causes of vulnerability, often in the context of climate impacts and climate mobility, and particularly in eastern Senegal.

We spoke on the phone as he drove up to his new house in the Catskill Mountains in New York. While this backdrop involved some distractions from reckless drivers on the I-95, his first visit to his new house provided a curious frame for our conversation about climate attribution and mobility. 

You reference in your work notions of a “snapshot of vulnerability,” and that this is how we often view vulnerability, specifically in climate research. Can you talk a bit about what this means to you and how it falls short of capturing the full image of a vulnerable population?

The question that we need to ask is: why are those people vulnerable? Each group will have a different history of why they’re vulnerable, and the importance of this question is simple. It is from understanding the causes of people’s vulnerability, not just the fact that they’re vulnerable, that helps us understand how we can reduce that vulnerability in the long run, and how we can prevent it from being reproduced. 

Understanding who is vulnerable helps us target people, and get there so that we can keep them [from] falling off the cliff at the last moment. My question is: how did they get on that damn cliff in the first place? 

It’s very easy to go in and map, with indicators, who is vulnerable. 

What indicators?

Indicators can include such variables as the food security index, which measures assets and stocks of food. Indicators such as the existence of social security systems. In short, proximate indicators include things like amount of grain in the granary, cash on hand, etc. 

The most vulnerable tend to be the people with the lowest income, the fewest savings, the fewest stocks of goods like food and fuel — whatever they need to survive. So, they're also the people who are most exposed with the least well-constructed houses, living on floodplains and the like.

Now that we know who is vulnerable, that is just the snapshot of the situation.

How do you see this emphasis on causes that you’re arguing for appearing in climate activism and in the climate justice movement, or not?

The climate information that is picked up by the media tends to come in moments of crisis, not from the long-term analysis of what’s causing vulnerability. If there’s a crisis, someone might study it for four or five years, and then write something. You might want to read Margaret Somers, for example, on [Hurricane] Katrina. You have to understand a lot to understand that Katrina was not a climate crisis. 

But, after the fact, you’re going to get the media that's going to see the crisis and the immediate cost. That's a snapshot. Katrina came and [the] Lower Ninth Ward flooded. The drought came, and [the] poorest villagers went hungry, and some migrated out. Not to mention, they migrated out in the good year because they had more money and could migrate. But that, people forget.

Migration after a drought is a convincing story. This is partly because the media itself desires to fight the good battle of demonstrating that climate change is a problem. And I applaud them for that. That is a laudable thing [to] want to do, but it is not a complete picture.

In fact, what they're doing by blaming the climate is missing that these people probably would not be facing the same damages, even from a more extreme climate event, if they have not been made vulnerable by a long history of political, economic, and social marginalization, like the racism in the failure to maintain the levees that would have protected the Lower Ninth Ward.

So do we stop blaming climate change?

The media is confronted with a real challenge. They don't want to be associated with climate change deniers and they shouldn't be. But what’s called attribution science, which is the science of telling us what portion of a weather event is attributable to anthropogenic, or human-caused, climate change — it’s an inexact science. 

Even when you can say that a storm was, say, 10% anthropogenic, it does not tell you how much that storm is responsible for the damages that follow, because the damages that follow are dependent on the degree of vulnerability. So, a 10% stronger storm in a very secure, well-protected, non-vulnerable population may cause zero additional damage, and a 10% stronger storm in a really vulnerable community may cause thirty times more damage.

How does this narrative that the damages are solely results of climate change impact the people facing these challenges on the frontline?

If you begin to blame climate change for things that local people know damn well were caused by the negligence of their politicians, then they too will be climate deniers, right?

If somebody is beaten to the ground by low prices for their charcoal and their peanuts and their cotton, and then the drought comes along, and everyone says, "Oh my God, poor you! The drought, the anthropogenic climate change caused your suffering.”

Then these people think, “What? This wasn’t the climate change. This was the cotton industry giving us low prices. This was the politicians screwing around with the price of peanuts. This was the fact that our ethnic group doesn’t have the same access to the market as others do.” 

And they'll think, "Screw climate change. I'm going to deny its very existence.”

So, what are the first steps in restructuring that narrative, unveiling those histories?

You tell the stories.

I mean, the narrative that Africans are poor, “left-behind" people — let me give you one example. If you’ve worked in international development, you know that capacity building is the most commonly recommended thing anywhere, ever.

What do you mean by capacity building?

Trainings. People are trained over and over to do all kinds of things when all they really need are resources and means. They will figure out how to do things if they have the resources.

Yeah, you know what? Africans that I work with, every damn one of them has a sh—tload of capacity, lots of capacity, more capacity than you know what to do with, but nothing to do with it. They don’t need capacity. It’s a patronizing, infantilizing, and old colonial strategy.

This does not mean education is a bad thing. It means that people already have knowledge and skill, and what they need more is opportunity. 

In your work, you discuss how climate adaptation aid and development aid are often seen as two different things, but you seem to think that there’s a need for integration here. What does that look like to you?

You know, I’m of many minds on international development. It is a good thing. It is almost like, and should serve partly as, reparations. But, besides that, we all owe all others basic human rights, dignified work and conditions, the ability to hope for a future. 

This is what strikes me most about the young migrants I work with. They really want a life, and they feel that their life at home is very limited and bleak, and not because it’s bleak living there. They want that to be their home. That’s where they want to live, but it’s because they don’t have the social roles, and they can’t be productive in a way that they can support their family, healthily. 

These are really major things that we can all contribute to in various ways. I just don’t think there’s a hell of a lot in the aid world that wouldn’t already, if well done, buffer against climate change.

So, I’m just trying to say that I don’t see the big difference. I think “climate proofing,” is a bit of a distraction, and much of the “climate proofing” that’s done could be done without climate change. It’s probably water storage, and dykes, and things that were already needed anyway. I think that any investment in reducing vulnerability today will help people to manage different climate conditions of the future.

If you could give one piece of advice to young climate advocates today, what would it be?

Follow your passion. That would be my advice. 

And stay hopeful. I think most of us know what to do, ultimately. Despite seeing really crazy, wacky people out there in the world, I also see a lot of good. 

Brynne Wilcox is a master's candidate at Columbia University's Climate School.