I am working on my first book which draws on my dissertation research. “Erosion: A Global Story of Adaptation to Climate Change in Everyday Life” offers a bird’s-eye view into the daily lives of people on the frontlines of climate change worldwide.
This ethnographic book uses fieldwork I conducted over four years in rural Colombia, coastal North Carolina, and in the megacity of Lagos, Nigeria to illustrate the shared daily realities, investments, and consequences of living with climate change. I use insights from across these cases to build a theory of the “Climate Safety Net” – a combination of physical resilience (built environment/engineering), social infrastructure, and policy relief – that enables continued settlement in zones of climate stress. Through narrative accounts of life in climate stressed communities, I demonstrate the consequences of gaps in institutional protections for climate hazards in vulnerable communities left to shoulder the daily burden of adaptation. I argue that a global process of the erasure of marginalized communities and livelihoods is happening in vulnerable areas left to adapt on their own, outside of the climate safety net.
