Policing in a Climate Crisis: Comparative Perspectives

Session Submission Type: Pre-arranged Panel

Abstract

Climate change is the ‘defining issue of our time’ and human societies face extraordinary and growing hazards that threaten public safety, social cohesion, and the economy. Heatwaves, wildfires, droughts, floods, and coastal erosion are projected to increase in frequency and severity and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2014) has long called upon societies around the world to urgently improve their capacity ‘to moderate or avoid harm’. Until recently, climate change as a new and emerging 'harm landscape' (to borrow from Julie Berg and Clifford Shearing) has attracted very little attention from police and policing scholars. This panel brings together leading experts on policing and climate change from around the world to collectively examine how police and their partners are impacted by, and working to manage, the disruptive and catastrophic effects of acute, chronic and cascading hazards associated with climate change in different liberal democracies. This includes consideration of the mentalities, functions, and capabilities of police in a climate crisis, their position within broader disaster management networks, their adaptive capacity at an institutional level, and the potentially transformative effects of the Anthropocene on the policing profession.

Subtopic

• Topic 5: Social Control and Criminal Justice / Policing and Law enforcement (Policing WG)

Chair

• Jenny Fleming, University of Southampton

Individual Presentations

• Adaptive Policing for a Climate Crisis: An Introduction - Jarrett Blaustein, Australian National University

• Climate change, policing and community resilience in the UK: emotion and experience in local emergency planning and response.  - Ali Malik, University of Leeds

• Are today’s police services ready for tomorrow’s climate-driven challenges and why do we need eco-cops more than ever? - Anna Matczak, The Hague University of Applied Science

• Adaptive Policing and Climate Change in Australia: Making Sense of Divergent Trajectories - Jarrett Blaustein, Australian National University