Engineered Climate Risk: Using Flood Exposure Risk in Jamaica to Build a Case for Reparative Engineering

• In Event: New Horizons in Black Geographies: Charting Unexplored Terrains of Diaspora, Ecology, and Resistance

Description for Program

Engineering is “the act of creating artifacts, processes, or systems that advance technology and address human needs using principles of the sciences, mathematics, computing, and operations.”(1) Civil and environmental engineers are specifically responsible for critical civil infrastructures, such as water, energy, transportation, waste, and more recently climate change adaptation. However, engineering's technocentric and apolitical culture exacerbates structural violence experienced by marginalized communities, especially through the design and implementation of built infrastructure. Engineering devoid of concern for repair and justice fortifies a violent world order rooted in genocide, transatlantic slavery, and colonialism. (2-13) Climate adaptation infrastructure that does not acknowledge that climate change vulnerability is “a result both of coloniality in the past and of neocolonial restructuring” does not effectively minimize vulnerability (14)

This paper argues that (1) climate coloniality leads vulnerable populations such as people living in the Caribbean to bear disproportionate climate change effects despite negligibly contributing (2) engineers who are tasked with designing and implementing climate adaptation reinforce the world built on the foundations of the plantation through epistemic and infrastructure violence. The paper uses the case of frequently flooded roadways in Jamaica to highlight the plantation roads that have been paved over, concretizing plantation logic into the “post-colonial” era. Web scraping will be used to underscore the frequency of transit-disruptive flood events. The proximity of people, roadway infrastructure, and riverways to plantations in Jamaica will be analyzed using ArcGIS to highlight the importance of considering historical context and climate justice and repair in engineering solutions.

Author

• J'Anna-Mare Lue, University of California, Berkeley