By Annikki Herranen-Tabibi, Harvard Medical School, United States
On a sweltering afternoon in the congested Expo City of Dubai, I entered the COP28 Visitor Center to collect my attendee swag: a metro card and a sleekly designed, insulated water bottle in a soothing forest green, with the text “COP28 UAE” rendered in bold white. The bottle was emblazoned with harmonious and inspirational images of lush vegetation alongside interspecies and intergenerational encounters, interspersed with images of technological progress: solar panels, satellites, wind turbines, and soaring airplanes. This summit-sponsored gesture of branded sustainability – imagistically rendered the sleek techno-optimism that permeated the summit. More than that, this reusable vessel for life-giving hydration held in plain view the contradictions of this so-called “Health COP” (Global Climate and Health Alliance 2023a). After all, the summit took place in a setting physically shaped by many of the most urgent climate-health threats: the fossil fuel industry, air pollution, extreme heat, and stark socioeconomic inequality (see e.g. Ngeh 2021)
COP28 was hailed in many quarters as “historic” (e.g. Health Care Without Harm, 2023) for its introduction of a thematic day devoted to health, accompanied by intensified health-related programming throughout the summit’s first week. Indeed, the prominence of health on the summit’s agenda saw an unprecedented attendance of the global health community and of high-level national health representatives, and a declaration on climate and health endorsed by 148 countries (Choudhary 2023; Global Climate and Health Alliance 2023b; Global Climate and Health Alliance 2024; COP28 UAE 2023). This declaration was framed around a number of key objectives, including partnership-based, comprehensive, and multisectoral work intended to “maximize the health gains from mitigation and adaptation actions and prevent worsening health impacts from climate change” in “vulnerable” populations, resilience and emissions reductions in the health sector, and addressing the interplay of “human, animal, environment and climate health,” and the mainstreaming of health “in the context of relevant Paris Agreement and UNFCCC processes” (COP28 UAE 2023).
As a medical anthropologist observing the proceedings as part of the American Anthropological Association delegation and the Harvard Climate and Health Cohort, I had an opportunity to peer beyond these buzzwords and into the more unruly, less celebratory elements of discussions at the climate-health nexus. These observations led me to consider the potential and limitations of anthropologists’ contributions and methodological repertoires in research at the climate-health nexus. Most crucially, they reaffirmed to me the imperative for anthropological climate-health research to center equitable community partnerships and humility in order to ensure that our research reflects locally grounded understandings of histories, social structures, and relations that shape both experiences of and responses to climate change. In ruptured climate worlds, such an approach is vital in order for anthropological knowledge to be of service to those with the most at stake in the phenomena we study.
Medical anthropology has seen, over the past two decades, repeated calls for medical anthropologists to play a more active role in discussions of climate and health. These calls have variously cited anthropologists’ aptitude for thinking across scales, our long-term research relationships that allow for observing change in specific context, and the potential for scholars to stand in solidarity with affected communities (Trostle 2010; Singer 2014; Cartwright 2019). Indeed, as anthropologists, we are well positioned to participate in these processes in the spirit of advocacy and accompaniment, but more than that, to participate with awareness of the contradictions and areas of contestation that emerge from everyday lives at the frontlines of struggles for climate and health justice. Such contradictions were particularly evident when one stepped beyond the explicitly health-oriented programming in Expo City Dubai.
In Sápmi, the transborder homeland of the Indigenous Sámi people where my ethnographic work for the past decade has been situated, climate mitigation efforts have frequently taken troubling manifestations with respect to Indigenous health and well-being. For example, discussions at COP28 on climate mitigation solutions in the Arctic saw the celebration of “sustainable mining” of rare earth elements in the Scandinavian Arctic. The celebratory remarks centered on the discovery, in the in Indigenous Sámi community of Giron (Kiruna) in Sweden, of rare earth minerals in 2023 (Frost, 2023; Reed, 2023). Proponents of mining at COP28 celebrated this discovery as essential for advancing the green transition – the move away from fossil fuel-based energy systems and economies – in the Arctic region. Indeed, the phasing out of fossil fuels and moving to “clean” energy sources is vital to making progress in addressing climate change’s health effects across the globe (c.f. Luyter et al. 2023). And yet, Giron is already home to the world’s largest underground iron ore mine, and over a century of mining there is already experienced as destabilizing for human and more-than-human health and well-being – in terms of contamination of land and waterways, in terms of mining-related subsidence creating hazards and forcing entire towns to relocate, and in terms of disruption of land-based livelihoods like reindeer husbandry by mining operations (Rankin 2023; Cockerell 2023).
Similar concerns about the disruption of subsistence livelihoods and well-being surround the construction of large-scale wind farms on Indigenous Sámi land in Finland and Norway. As with mining, the wind farms are a key component of national and regional striving for the green transition, but are widely criticized locally as threats to Indigenous rights, biodiversity, subsistence livelihoods, food systems – and, thereby, physical and psychosocial health in Sápmi (Yle Sápmi 2017; Reid-Collins 2020; Retter 2021; Fjellheim 2022; Kassam and Niranjan 2023).
These localized contradictions of global climate measures brought me to consider the implications of two conflicting calls to knowledge that ricocheted through the sessions I attended at COP28. The first call was crystallized in recurring statements from, or vocalized on behalf of, frontline communities: “the time for research is over, the time for solutions is now.” It stood in contrast with the second call, most often those from governmental and funding agencies that “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” and “without data, you can’t finance.” David Ripin, Chief Scientific Officer with the Clinton Health Access Initiative, put a finer point on these contrasts at a Resilience Hub event, “Birth in a Burning World: Action for Maternal and Newborn Health & Justice,” on December 5, 2023:
“I am absolutely thrilled to hear how we are specifically focused on actions we can take now and what we are doing as opposed to talking about studying a problem and understanding it. And yet, I feel I have been in many meetings where donors, when presented with the enormity of the climate and health interface area, tend to start talking about studying and prioritizing.”
Such deferral of action to studies upon studies by donors could become a way to delay climate-health action, including the scaling up of proven-to-be-effective interventions based upon existing primary health care infrastructure, for which Dr. Revati Phalkey, Global Director Health and Nutrition with Save the Children International, advocated during the event.
Observing these competing claims surrounding knowledge production crystallized what I view as crucial to anthropological work at the climate-health nexus, particularly in light of the frequent invocation that “[h]ealth is the human face of climate change” (Dr. Courtney Howard in Global Climate and Health Alliance 2023b; see also Duschek 2017; Feldscher 2016). Among social scientists, our long-term fieldwork grounded in participant-observation without a doubt positions anthropologists particularly well for peering into this “human face”: we build intimate familiarity with specific sites and people, and can witness changes in the visage of climate change longitudinally through the long-term research relations we often establish. Indeed, anthropology may appear to be a privileged portal to “experience-near” knowledge (sensu Geertz 1974) by virtue of anthropologists’ close observations of our interlocutors’ daily lives and our own direct participation in them. And yet, if we simply elevate our own observational faculties in anthropological engagements with individual and community experiences of climate worlds, we will be missing a whole lot. Our research must not replicate the historical model of “autonomous and unaccountable researchers” (Gone 2023: 288) who work without regard for community needs, values, priorities, and knowledge systems – a model with long roots among social scientists in general, and anthropologists in particular. Anthropologists have seldom gone it alone, and building cultures of equitable collaboration with our interlocutors is critical for our ability to engage with the wider forces that shape how climate change and its health effects are experienced, understood, and addressed in the contexts in which we work.
Here, my on-site observations of COP28’s unprecedented centering of health – and the conflicting calls to knowledge therein – brought me back to the historian Joan Scott’s famous critique of what scholars consider “evidence of experience” (Scott 1991). In her essay, Scott raised concern that historical and humanistic renderings of social experience, particularly the experiences of marginalized groups, was often “un-problematized” (Scott 1991: 780) – that is, it was treated as if one could grasp that experience simply by witnessing it in the flesh or in text. Such renderings, Scott, argued, not only effaced the scholar’s interpretive choices, but crucially were also devoid of attention to histories, structures, and relations, and forms of contestation that create both experience and interpretations thereof. As Scott argued:
“Making visible the experience of a different group exposes the existence of repressive mechanisms, but not their inner workings or logics; we know that difference exists, but we don’t understand it as relationally constituted” (Scott 1991: 779).
Considering Scott’s critique alongside recent years’ elevation of health as “the human face of climate change” thus reaffirmed for me the importance of ensuring that those who have the most at stake in the phenomena we study have not just a voice but an appropriately resourced and recognized role in leading and shaping work on experiences of climate change, from research design to interpretation. Accordingly, while anthropological scholarship on climate change and, more specifically, on the climate-health nexus, appropriately assumes a multitude of methodological forms, it is vital for the discipline to prioritize training and research oriented toward collaborative research grounded in equitable research partnerships with the communities with which we work (see Gone, 2023). My approach to this topic is informed by the proliferating calls across the Circumpolar Arctic to hold Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous peoples in an equal position with scientific knowledge and scientists in the design, conduct, and funding of research (Bahnke et al 2020; Bronen and Cochran 2021; Inuit Circumpolar Council 2021; Herrmann et al 2023; Valtioneuvosto 2023). Indeed, in my encounters as an observer at COP28, these regionally situated demands found resonance with calls for greater investment in community-based studies at the climate-health nexus. Thus, during the aforementioned “Birth in a Burning World” event, Dr. Phalkey advocated for “locally led adaptation” that goes beyond “tokenistic inclusion of vulnerable groups such as women, children, Indigenous groups.” Such tokenistic inclusion has remained commonplace even as the language of partnership and collaboration has proliferated across research fields and funding mechanisms (Bahnke et al 2020) – a reality that has led to trenchant calls to, in Robin Bronen and Patricia Cochran’s (2021) terms, “decolonize climate adaptation research.” As anthropologists continue to observe at COPs to come, what kinds of research cultures do we represent, cultivate, and undo?
In sum, then, the unprecedented elevation of health on COP28’s agenda was accompanied by calls to action and to knowledge production. Considering the potential and limitations of anthropological contributions to knowledge at the climate-health nexus, I suggest that it is vital to advance cultures of anthropological research training and practice centered on equitable and appropriately resourced partnerships with frontline communities. This is of specific importance in order for anthropological knowledge to be of service in understanding and addressing the cascading health impacts of climate change, and in seeking progress toward the global climate-health objectives emerging from COP28.
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Annikki Herranen-Tabibi (she/her) is a medical and environmental anthropologist of the Circumpolar Arctic. She is engaged in long-term ethnographic research in Sápmi, the transborder homeland of the Indigenous Sámi people. She currently serves as a Burke Climate and Health Fellow with Harvard Global Health Institute and Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability at Harvard, and as a Research Fellow in Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
