All That Is Solid Melts into the Bay: Anticipatory Ruination and Climate Change Adaptation

Abstract

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The climate change of your desires: Climate migration and imaginaries of urban and rural climate futures

“…16 Town as India's first "Green City." 18 While these visions reflect substantive differences between India's major BJP and Congress parties over equity in urban development, water rights, and 15 This reflects a pattern of cyclical debt and dispossession through microcredit observed elsewhere in rural Bangladesh (Paprocki, 2016). 16 I avoid naming the specific neighborhoods inhabited by Bangladeshi migrants in New Town to protect the identities of my informants.…”

“…The empirical dynamics I investigate here are collectively constituted within what I have elsewhere called an adaptation regime, a socially and historically specific configuration of power that governs the landscape of possible intervention in the face of climate change (Paprocki 2018). In this article I investigate the epistemic and material dynamics through which the adaptation regime promotes a vision of transition away from agrarian livelihoods toward urban, export-oriented production, necessitating rural decay for the sake of urban expansion.…”

“…For several decades, social movements led by farmers in this coastal region have mobilized to defend continued agricultural production in their villages, resisting a transition toward commercial shrimp aquaculture and the agrarian dispossessions it entails (Adnan 2013;Paprocki and Huq 2018). Today these movements continue to gain traction, not only supporting continued rice production, but also championing a return to rice agriculture in communities that had earlier transitioned to shrimp (Afroz, Cramb, and Grünbühel 2017;Paprocki 2019). Their alternative visions of the persistence of agrarian futures contrast sharply with visions and discourses of rural decline.…”

“…Harris 2014;Szczepanski, Sedlar, and Shalant 2018). Consequently, shrimp aquaculture has been proposed as a climate change adaptation strategy by many within the development and donor communities in Bangladesh who suggest that the use of salinated and water logged agricultural lands for shrimp is a logical and lucrative adaptive response to the current ecological crisis(Paprocki 2018).…”

Adaptation and Carbon Removal

“…32 An extreme example is what Kasia Paprocki calls ''anticipatory ruination,'' in her analysis of shrimp cultivation in Bangladesh: the expansion of shrimp aquaculture in southwestern Bangladesh, promoted as an anticipatory adaptive response to rising sea levels, has brought social and ecological destruction in its wake, rendering other futures, such as rice farming, unviable. 33 Indeed, both mitigation and adaptation have been linked to exacerbating social and ecological threats, including environmentally induced displacement from forest carbon, biofuel, or climate-related development projects, 34,35 agrarian institutions that create new political vulnerabilities for the rural poor, 36 or adaptation projects that redistribute vulnerability more gener-ally. 37,38 Carbon removal practices could also result in these failure modes.…”