The shifting geographies of climate change justice: mobile vulnerabilities in and across Indian cities

This chapter takes the cases of Bangalore and Surat in India to examine how the reorganisation of labour, together with its associating economic networks and spatial infrastructure, is emblematic of the shifting interconnections between uncertain climate change risks and experiences of local economic transformations. Through documenting migrants’ exposure to varying forms of vulnerability, the chapter illustrates the mobility of climate injustice across space via pathways of labour informality and environmental marginality. The chapter theorises the shifting geographies of climate injustice within and across the ill-defined boundaries of the ‘urban’ in the Global South. It concludes that first, spatially and temporally ‘static’ definitions of climate justice fail to account for the mobility of people and transfer of vulnerabilities across space. Second, climate justice theories must encompass priorities to transform economic structures underlying economic informality. Future research must therefore examine the multiple intersections of urban labour, identity politics, and economic marginalisation under climate change in the Global South.