Overview

Warming oceans, rising sea levels, changes in marine and coastal environments, and other climate stressors exert uneven impacts on vulnerable and marginalized populations. CJV² is a collaborative effort to investigate how a varied sample of coastal and sea-facing populations—past and present—have related to coastal lands and waters and how contemporary climate change and warming oceans intersect and compound the uneven landscapes of value and vulnerability within which they exist.

The project addresses two main questions:

How are vulnerable and historically marginalized populations affected by warming oceans and changing climates?
What competing notions of value are embedded in the ways people and communities engage the ocean, envision a good life, and weigh livelihood strategies in the face of enduring colonial approaches to the ocean as a place for extraction?

CJV² is intentionally multi-scalar and geographically broad to unravel how the exploitation of oceans, lands, and people are intricately linked across time and place. The project foregrounds the experiences and knowledge systems of communities at the front of the climate crisis—including Indigenous coastal communities, climate refugees, indentured labourers, seafarers, and migrant farm and seafood plant workers in Atlantic Canada and the Americas—with the goal of informing just climate action policies.

Research benefits

Integration of Indigenous, marginalized and vulnerable communities’ perspectives into climate justice scholarship and policy debates;
critical examination of coloniality as a cause of the ecological crisis and as an obstacle for just and ecologically viable futures;
documentation and historization of Mi’kmaq water governance practices and challenges, contributing to policy discussions;
assessment of socioecological vulnerabilities and the state of human rights in fishing and maritime shipping industries in the Atlantic region;
development of policy tools and adaptation strategies to support sustainable, abuse-free marine value chains;
elucidate the role of climate stressors in the motivations to migrate, working conditions, health and wellbeing of temporary foreign workers employed in agriculture and fish processing in Atlantic Canada, contributing to understanding the political ecology of temporary labour mobility programs;
contribute to policy responses and legal frameworks to address climate change-induced forced displacement to and within Canada.