In the past couple of months, the most iconic image of climate change is no longer the lonely hungry polar bear trapped on ice floes, but a 15-year-old girl clad in a yellow rain jacket sitting on the steps of Sweden’s parliament building in Stockholm. Since September 2018, Greta Thunberg has spent most of her Fridays out of school protesting the inaction of the Swedish government to undertake radical steps to tackle climate change. Inspired by the Parkland student protests and after a string of well delivered speeches at UN Climate Change COP24 Conference and at Davos, Greta Thunberg has inspired an unprecedented youth mobilization in support for measurable and urgent action to address contemporary and future impacts of climate change.

The Youth Strike 4 Climate movement brings to focus issues of intergenerational equity, social justice and environmental sustainability. This nexus implies that climate justice rests on interrelated and simultaneously deployed measures that take into consideration issues of distribution, recognition, and participation together. Indeed, the IPCC special report published in October 2018, underlined the linkages between mitigation options relevant for limiting global warming to 1.5ºC and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The report states, “limiting the risks from global warming of 1.5°C in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication implies system transitions that can be enabled by an increase of adaptation and mitigation investments, policy instruments, the acceleration of technological innovation and behaviour changes”.

Thus, this special issue of the Journal of Urban Anthropology explores sustainability as the intersection of a multiplicity of transitions (technological, behavioral, political and discursive) deployed both in developed and developing contexts, as well as at various levels (local, national and global). We are encouraging papers that take into consideration gender, cultural or ecosystemic perspectives that include but are not limited to the following themes:

  • Decision making for sustainable development and public policy
  • Urban agriculture and food sovereignty
  • Climate change adaptation and mitigation
  • Social movements and citizen led initiatives for climate change
  • Health and environment in urban contexts

Guest Editor: Ioana Radu, PhD (Concordia University, School of Community and Public Affairs)

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