34. Disentangling the Nature of Compound in Environmental Disasters
Rodolfo Andres Hernandez, Texas Tech University; Jennifer J Henderson, Texas Tech University
Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês, Spanish/Español/Espanhol
The dynamic complexity and intensity of current environmental disasters are expressed by a new arrangement of policy regulations and institutional configurations trying to cope with overlapping risks, threats, and hazards impacting humanity at multiple scales (Orimoyole et al., 2020). With the backstage of the global pandemic of COVID-19, scholars might be tempted to consider this reality as the new normal or business as usual, with few considerations on the emergence of novel links between multi-temporal and multi-phenomena elements shaping life on Earth (Felsenstein et al., 2020). Taking the form of structural disasters (Matsumoto, 2013), renewed questions for unknown or less explored features of environmental disasters become relevant because of the amalgam of various concurring ecological, economic, health, and political effects. This open panel proposes to discuss how compound events and related denominations (concurrent, overlapping, interconnected, etc.) are shaping the present understanding of environmental disasters, not only in the material world, as well as from the epistemic basis. We invite papers that reflect theoretical innovations or case studies that illuminate new insights considering the present and future of environmental disaster studies from an STS perspective (Fortun et al., 2016; Tironi et al., 2014). Examples such as, but not limited to, social and environmental co-occurrent events associated with climate change, global warming, deforestation, habitat and natural resources degradation are highly welcome to take part in this discussion.
