Global Disability Justice In Climate Disasters: Mobilizing People With Disabilities As Change Agents.

Disabled people are highly susceptible to climate change impacts and disasters, yet they often remain sidelined or largely invisible. Policy makers, humanitarian agencies, and governments need to address the climate-related vulnerabilities that disabled people encounter during acute events and in the course of more creeping forms of climate change. As deaf researchers, we call for integrating disability justice into climate and disaster preparedness policies and practices worldwide. A disability justice approach can embrace the strengths that disabled people bring to disaster planning and climate mitigation and advocacy efforts. In this article we present case studies from different global regions to illustrate how disability is overlooked in responding to climate-related health impacts and disaster planning. We also draw particular attention to mutual aid networks led by disabled people in adapting to climate-related health impacts. We then suggest questions to help policy makers and practitioners integrate disability justice into their work. Above all, disabled people, organizations, and service providers should take ownership over the process of developing policies and actions to better prevent, prepare for, and respond to climate disasters.

Woke Science and the 4th Industrial Revolution: Inside the Making of UNFSS Knowledge.

Understanding how science, technology, and innovation is produced by the UN Food Systems Summit process offers a lens into how dominant actors in global food policy continually rework their power and legitimacy. Focusing on discourses and material networks, the article shows that the Scientific Group makes appeals to inclusivity-of people of colour, women, youth, smallholders, and more-while extending old Green Revolution ideas through new 4th Industrial Revolution innovations and governance ambitions.

Characterizing the Networks of Digital Information that Support Collaborative Adaptive Forest Management in Sierra Nevada Forests.

Some of the factors that can contribute to the success of collaborative adaptive management--such as social learning, open communication, and trust--are built upon a foundation of the open exchange of information about science and management between participants and the public. Despite the importance of information transparency, the use and flow of information in collaborative adaptive management has not been characterized in detail in the literature, and currently there exist opportunities to develop strategies for increasing the exchange of information, as well as to track information flow in such contexts. As digital information channels and networks have been increased over the last decade, powerful new information monitoring tools have also been evolved allowing for the complete characterization of information products through their production, transport, use, and monitoring. This study uses these tools to investigate the use of various science and management information products in a case study--the Sierra Nevada Adaptive Management Project--using a mixed method (citation analysis, web analytics, and content analysis) research approach borrowed from the information processing and management field. The results from our case study show that information technologies greatly facilitate the flow and use of digital information, leading to multiparty collaborations such as knowledge transfer and public participation in science research. We conclude with recommendations for expanding information exchange in collaborative adaptive management by taking advantage of available information technologies and networks.

Greening chemistry: Emerging epistemic political tensions in California and the United States.

Green chemistry promises to make the global chemical industry more sustainable through redesigning chemical production. Nonetheless, many green chemists in the US have focused on persuading other chemists and industrial corporations to change through education and voluntary industry action. Green chemistry in the US may have stagnated relatively because of missing societal input and public scrutiny of chemistry choices. Using recent green chemistry policy experiments in California and the US, I explore how new epistemic political tensions over the roles of expertise, societal participation, and regulation may be creating new societal input and, perhaps, greater industry take-up. I consider whether the concept of socially robust knowledge can help illuminate California's experiments more broadly, and find that this concept needs to be expanded to include the politics of expertise and institutional innovations for increasing information flows between experts and societal actors.

Collaboration across disciplines for sustainability: green chemistry as an emerging multistakeholder community.

Sustainable solutions to our nation's material and energy needs must consider environmental, health, and social impacts while developing new technologies. Building a framework to support interdisciplinary interactions and incorporate sustainability goals into the research and development process will benefit green chemistry and other sciences. This paper explores the contributions that diverse disciplines can provide to the design of greener technologies. These interactions have the potential to create technologies that simultaneously minimize environmental and health impacts by drawing on the combined expertise of students and faculty in chemical sciences, engineering, environmental health, social sciences, public policy, and business.