Geography Compass

While it is generally recognized that the projected changes in the global climate will have serious negative consequences for the Caribbean as a whole, it is becoming more and more evident that the impacts of climate change will not be uniformly felt across the region. The primary aim of this paper is to provide a review of the Caribbean climate change literature. The paper begins with a brief discussion on the shifting nature of Caribbean vulnerability within the context of the region's longstanding and continued exposure to forces of global economic and environmental change. Particular attention is paid to both the practical and discursive dimensions of vulnerability, and the specific ways the term has been understood and framed in relation to other crosscutting themes such as adaptation and resilience in the broader academic literature. In addition to providing an overview of the regional climate change science literature, the paper offers a critical review of the existing climate change impacts literature for the Caribbean. By drawing on, and taking stock of this growing body of impact studies, the paper seeks to shed light on the differential and multi-scalar drivers of social and economic vulnerabilities to climate variability and change in the Caribbean as well as highlight some of the existing knowledge gaps that need to be addressed. The paper ends by providing some brief reflections on the emerging themes arising from the discussion and highlights a few key areas for future academic research for the Caribbean in light of existing knowledge gaps observed in the regional climate change impact literature.

The ‘nexus’ between water, energy and food (WEF) has gained increasing attention globally in research, business and policy spheres. We review the premise of recent initiatives framed around the nexus, examine the challenge of achieving the type of disciplinary boundary crossing promoted by the nexus agenda and consider how to operationalise what has to date been a largely paper exercise. The WEF nexus has been promoted through international meetings and calls for new research agendas. It is clear from the literature that many aims of nexus approaches pre-date the recent nexus agenda; these have encountered significant barriers to progress, including challenges to cross-disciplinary collaboration, complexity, political economy (often perceived to be under-represented in nexus research) and incompatibility of current institutional structures. Indeed, the ambitious aims of the nexus—the desire to capture multiple interdependencies across three major sectors, across disciplines and across scales—could become its downfall. However, greater recognition of interdependencies across state and non-state actors, more sophisticated modelling systems to assess and quantify WEF linkages and the sheer scale of WEF resource use globally, could create enough momentum to overcome historical barriers and establish nexus approaches as part of a wider repertoire of responses to global environmental change.

This article lays out a set of arguments about natural resources, the material economy, and resource geography. It explains the productive position resources occupy in the organization of knowledge and establishes ‘natural resources’ as a potent social category for designating parts of the non-human world to which value is attached. The article then elaborates two claims: (1) that we live in a material world in which ‘the economy’ is fundamentally – although not exclusively – a process of material transformation through which natural resources are converted into a vast array of commodities and by-product wastes; and (2) that the material economy of resource production, transformation and consumption is one of contradiction and paradox. The bulk of the article outlines seven specific resource paradoxes: scale/quality, complexity/risk, scarcity/abundance, value/intensity, diversity/dependence, wealth/poverty, intimacy/ignorance – and explains what they reveal about the geographical and historical dynamics of resource production and consumption.