The (in)visible health risks of climate change

This paper scrutinizes the assertion that knowledge gaps concerning the health risks from climate change are unjust, and must be addressed, because they hinder evidence-led interventions to protect vulnerable populations. First, we propose a taxonomy of six inter-related forms of invisibility (social marginalization, forced invisibility by migrants, spatial marginalization, neglected diseases, mental health, uneven climatic monitoring and forecasting) which underlie systematic biases in current understanding of these risks in Latin America, and therefore advocate an approach to climate-health research that draws on intersectionality theory to address these inter-relations. Then, we contend these invisibilities should be understood as outcomes of structural imbalances in power and resources, rather than haphazard blind-spots in scientific and state knowledge. Our thesis, emerging from theorizing of governmentality, is that a context-dependent and socially-constructed tension shapes whether the benefits of making vulnerable populations and their risks legible to the state outweigh the costs. To be seen is to be politically counted and receive rights, yet political theory and empirical evidence demonstrate the perils of visibility to people at the margins. For example, flood-relief efforts in remote Amazonia expose marginalized urban river-dwellers to the traumatic prospect of forced relocation and social and economic upheaval. Finally, drawing on recent work on citizenship in post-colonial settings, we conceptualize climate change as an ‘open moment’ of political rupture, and propose strategies of social accountability, empowerment and trans-disciplinary research which should enable the marginalized to reach out for greater power. These achievements, we conclude, would reduce the costs of state legibility and facilitate socially-just governmental action on climate change adaptation that promotes health for all.