Behind the newspaper headlines, often an international organization can be discerned. Sometimes the connection remains somewhat hidden. When the USA chides Turkey for procuring weapons from Russia, it suggests that US manufacturers should be privileged because Turkey is a member state of NATO, the US-driven Atlantic security organization. When Poland aims to withdraw from the Istanbul Convention, outlawing domestic violence, the Council of Europe expresses concern, if only because the Istanbul Convention was concluded under its auspices. And when it turns out that mailing parcels from certain countries is cheaper than mailing similar parcels domestically, it is not always immediately realized that this may have something to do with postal rates negotiated within the Universal Postal Union.

Within a context of cultural- and land-based Indigenous resurgence, contemporary Indigenous writers, artists, theorists, and activists have made the settler-state and extraction economy of Canada a flashpoint of the global climate emergency. Indigenous peoples often exist on the front lines of climate change, finding their lives and livelihoods threatened by the effects of rising temperatures even as they have been excluded from many of the benefits afforded by carbon-intensive economies. This chapter examines how Indigenous writers place climate change within a long, ongoing history of colonial resource appropriations, ecological loss, and violent suppression of Indigenous bodies and cultures in Canada. The chapter also addresses the diverse ways they respond to its challenges, including: crafting texts and practices of political dissent, solidarity-building, and land reoccupation; grounding present experiences in enduring stories of Indigenous response to environmental and political change; and refashioning genres such as science fiction, horror, or post-apocalyptic imaginaries to explore Indigenous futurisms in a climate-altered world. Above all, Indigenous writers make clear that climate change cannot be extricated from decolonisation and matters of sovereignty. The restoration of Indigenous lands and land-based ways of knowing is the starting point for the pursuit of climate justice.

This introduction sets out the volume’s main contention that any analysis of climate and literature must not only deal with the many ways in which climate has been conceptualised but also frame those conceptualisations as a pre-history to climate emergency. It chronicles first the vexed genealogy of climate and literature, showing how this history proceeds unevenly through expectations around, variously, climate’s agency as a felt presence, its status as data or index, and its betokening of an impossibly complex global system. It thenconsiders the literary and literary-critical fields, arguing for the need to contextualise these both in the here and now of climate crisis and in the longer pre-history of climate concepts. It then introduces the chapters in this volume, which simultaneously look back on this terrain and forward into a fraught world. Ultimately, if the history of climate and literature is one of climate’s various conceptualisations as agency, index, and system, this introduction, like the volume as a whole, argues for the potential of literature to depict systems conversion – not merely the future potential for disastrous global environmental failure but rather the means to reinvent it.

This study looks at fiction based in Australia, one of many places severely affected by anthropogenic global warming in the Global South. Texts chosen for this chapter (Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia (1939), Gabrielle Lord’s Salt (1990), Ellen Van Neerven’s Heat and Light (2014)) understand aspects of global warming as ‘simultaneously real, discursive, and social’, but also as spaces within the larger arc of climatic history that might incorporate sensitivity to non-human agency as felt in Oceania. This chapter incorporates flashes of fictocriticism to integrate the component of animacy that seeks out affective intensities that pass through and between human and non-human bodies. This genre permits writers to foreground personal meditations on the ongoing experiencing of climate catastrophe, and it discloses a space for dialogue between scholarly abstractions and personal ones. The unfolding cultural story that comes from these impulses is one of witness and embodiment that portends representations of climate as an intra-active being.

Some of the most vital contributions to recent climate change literature come not in the form of cli-fi fiction but in stories of speculative science written by Indigenous and Black women. Making Indigenous knowledge foundational to literary experimentation, Robin Wall Kimmerer (Citizen Potawatomi Nation) builds on Indigenous sciences, place-based knowledge, Indigenous storytelling traditions, and futuristic internet forms, connecting ecological and climate change literature to cultural practices inextricable from activism. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, on the other hand, centres Black and women of colour feminist knowledge-production in her contributions to transforming the literary, rethinking racial ecologies, and imagining different worlds in the face of colonialism, extractive racial capitalism, and climate change. In their experimental, activist, speculative science stories, these writers remember the knowledge of ancestors and the more-than-human world and imagine collective futures that swerve off the tracks of extractive capitalism’s never-ending disaster story and facile hopes for a techno-fix.

The absence of explicit lawmaking authority has not prevented international organizations from producing ‘standards’ that deviate from the ways the traditional sources of international law – treaties, custom, general principles – are usually understood. Despite the fact the UN was not given plenary authority to conclude treaties,1 a functionalist ‘principle of speciality’ imposes subject matter limits on UN system organizations,2 and entities charged with progressively developing or codifying the law (such as the International Law Commission (ILC)) can only make recommendations, the extent of standard-setting by international organizations vastly exceeds what might be expected from such limitations.3

This essay analyses how material formations of class are related to its symbolic trappings and why such an analysis may be currently relevant. Ecocriticism’s tendency to avoid work-based class analysis may be an effect of petroculture, whose flowing, accommodating logic reduces analysis to critique and reduces intervention to consumer choices. This essay argues that a confrontation between work, class, environmentalism, and narrative could be accomplished via the genre of the ‘boom narrative’. Boom narratives deal with signs of class stratification as well as the labour involved in resource extraction. Those based on actual events, such as the natural gas boom in North Dakota, travel widely, into journalistic and documentary coverage, and this coverage draws on and sometimes subverts boom narrative conventions. Television shows, including The Beverly Hillbillies and Dallas, helped instal petrocultural logic. An understanding of boom narratives’ appeal, and how their conventions get deployed, critiqued, and subverted intervenes in the flow of petrologic. Such intervention would require keeping work the focus of class, and keeping material effects of class the focus of narrative analysis. Intervention may also require more ecumenical approaches to genre, and rethinking scholarly modes of critique.

Climate justice is a term used for framing global warming and its manifold consequences as not only an environmental issue but also as involving ethical and political questions. In this chapter, I examine the usefulness of imaginative literatures from the Global South that focus on climate catastrophes and analyse them to probe the ways in which they add value. My central argument is undergirded by the idea that to achieve climate justice, it is necessary to involve disenfranchised groups in the policy-making process, for which imaginative literatures emerging from situated locations that give voice to their troubles become most pertinent.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) is a strange creature within the constellation of international organizations involved in migration matters. It is both a leader and an outsider, within the system and outside it. The reasons for its ambiguous stance are numerous, be they political, legal, institutional or cultural. The agility of the IOM and its perpetual adaptation to its changing environment are a legacy of its turbulent history. Still today, its hybrid nature represents a key marker of its elusive mandate and its ambivalent relations with the United Nations (UN).

This chapter examines the relationship between climate stress, Indigenous sustainability, and sovereignty in the trans-Pacific context. Using the work of Keri Hulme (Maori), Craig Santos Perez (Chamorro Guam), Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner (Marshall Islands), Nequo Soqluman (Bunun Taiwan), Rimuy Aki (Atayal Taiwan) as counter-narratives, I challenge readers to reconsider the centrality of the Indigenous subject by retrieving overlooked trans-Pacific Indigenous experiences. Instead of ‘small islands in the remote sea’, as Epili Hau’ofa puts it, the Pacific/Oceania should be re-visioned as ‘a sea of islands’, giving rise to unique Indigenous ways of life expressed through outstanding cultural landscapes and seascapes in the intangible heritage of traditions, knowledge, and stories. The Pacific Islanders are united in their concerns of rising ocean levels, the connection between militarisation and colonialisation of the seas, and the ecological impacts of climate change on the ocean. I argue that narratives and poetry from Pacific Indigenous communities forge a constellation of resistant practices in the era of global climate crisis. Indigenous texts from the trans-Pacific propel us to reconsider human transformation of planetary networks in which Indigenous agency plays an important role. They formulate Anthropocene problems and reconceptualise connectivity between humans and other species, lands and waters, as possible solutions.

International organizations engage in a vast range of activities that can be classified as ‘operational’. The United Nations’ administration of East Timor and Kosovo; inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); election observation by institutions such as the Commonwealth and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE); the deployment of troops on peacekeeping operations by the United Nations (UN), the African Union (AU) and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS); the assessment of refugee status and the management of refugee camps by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR); the distribution of food aid by the World Food Programme (WFP); the deployment of experts by the World Health Organization (WHO) during a disease outbreak; and the conduct of Environmental Impact Assessments for development projects by the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) all fall within this description.