Revisiting Capabilities and Climate Justice: How Climate Turbulence Undermines Capabilities, and How to Design Just Adaptation in Response

Climate change is deeply unsettling—both ecologically, as reflected in the rise of climate disasters and biodiversity loss, and materially, as seen in the widespread disruptions and displacements it causes. The impacts of climate change are increasingly experienced as constant and material impact on bodies, and the disruption and displacement of connections to place and entangled environments. This continuous turbulence is creating an experience of being unmoored, disconnected from attachments, both human and environmental. This essay will address both the reality of climate turbulence and the growing intersection of such turbulence and conceptions of environmental, ecological, and climate justice. How and why can the changed, disrupted, turbulent life of climate change, specifically, be understood as a unique form of climate injustice? A variety of conceptions of climate justice are addressed, with a particular focus on the way that climate turbulence unsettles individual and community capabilities and functioning in multiple ways. The essay addresses how a more just response to climate turbulence means more inclusive and capabilities-based approaches to climate justice.