ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

“Hunger in a heating world”: Oxfam, famine aid and climate science

• In Event: Contested Knowledges of Climate, Food and Famine

English Abstract

In 2022, International NGO Oxfam released a media briefing entitled ‘Hunger in a Heating World: How the climate crisis is fuelling hunger in an already hungry world’. The report characterises climate change as a threat multiplier for those already vulnerable to hunger, and highlights the interaction of multiple causes. The publication integrates reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the World Meteorological Organization, but has limited engagement with research directly from individual scientists. In the 1970s and early 1980s, before the founding of the IPCC, two competing epistemological frameworks laid claim to famine causation – the emerging science of climate change, and political science understandings of famine as man-made. These two epistemic frameworks shaped academic research in different disciplines, but their impact on the actual work of responding to hunger is unclear. Oxfam’s long history of humanitarian action to address hunger and its prominence, make it an ideal case study of the ways in which varying understandings of the causes of famine impacted on the ground action. This paper explores how Oxfam interacted with, utilised, and understood the emerging science of climate change and the political science of famine causation from the 1970s onwards in its public facing reports and on-the-ground programmes.

Author

• Eleanor Shaw