Causal connections between climate change and disaster: the politics of ‘victimhood’ framing and blaming

Abstract

Popular climate change narratives often identify climate change as the prime trigger of all environmental hazards. Consistent and harmonised framing of this relationship by public media, epistemic communities and established institutions continually shapes and reinforces such narratives. These dominant narratives may present an image of an apocalyptic future beyond the coping capacity of ‘climate victims’ (often identified – implicitly or explicitly – as the poor and those living in the majority work) while rendering climate change responsible for all disaster-related miseries. Such ‘doomsday’, ‘victimhood’, and ‘common villain’ strings of a convergent narrative use selective and occasional recourse to science to support a generic understanding of the challenge of climate change. Drawing on examples of recent environmental stresses in Bangladesh, we call for local accountability and highlight the ‘scale effect’ of politics of vulnerability framing.