International governance is increasingly characterized by the decline of formal intergovernmental organizations as the preferred sites of rule-making, as the growth rate of intergovernmental organization has declined by 20 per cent since the beginning of the twenty-first century.1 More than a decade after the debates about fragmentation2 and regime-collision in international law,3 it now seems clear that the key question is not that, as a professional experience, international law seems divided in sometimes incoherent specialized regimes, but that international lawyers have a more dense and diverse institutional landscape to deal with.

This chapter deals with the law on the internal matters of international organizations, and more particularly, with the relations between organs of an international organization. Issues include, among others, the power of self-regulation, financial relations between organs of an organization, the creation of subsidiary organs and the applicable legal rules thereto, as well as analysis of various procedures that require the collaboration between different organs of the same organization.1 The chapter will not deal with the legal relations between an international organization and its civil servants. It will equally steer clear of the legal relationships between organizations and their member states, third parties or other international organizations.

This chapter examines contemporary novels that grapple with species extinctions, including our own. The ‘zoo cli-fi’ here includes literature that does not necessarily mourn ‘our’ extinction, and may wean us off the idea that we are central to planetary survival. Zoo cli-fi that follows the broader ‘animal turn’ attributes greater significance to animals as beings-in-themselves and illustrates a powerful ‘point of view’ often missing: animals have their own ‘point of view’ that may or may not include ‘us’. The word extinction is taxonomic, working at the scale of population, and describes a condition of species death rather than the conditions under which death comes about. The distinction is important in a political and ethical sense because, as animal studies scholars have shown, how animal deaths are represented greatly influences how attached or distanced we are from the problem. The word extinction does little to bring home how humans are connected to what can seem a mere ‘biological’ process that occurs somehow outside of a cultural political context. Extinctions are cultural processes, not just biological events that happen offstage; indeed, they may represent a ‘choice’, to quote Margaret Atwood on a recent visit to Australia.

This chapter outlines three methods for reading climate and weather in literary texts while resisting both universalism and anachronism. First, climatological reading focuses on genre, while also drawing on the poststructuralist feminist and antiracist method of making specific absences present. In contrast, meteorological reading harnesses the rhetorical terms metaphor and metonymy to carefully parse the weather’s localised specificities. The concept ‘weathering’ is then introduced to bridge the historical spatial and temporal distinction between climate and weather. Throughout, the chapter demonstrates how to connect readings of power and difference to an analysis of climate and weather. The methods are described by engaging with a range of literary historians, theorists, and ecocritics and illustrated by way of the reading of two famously weatherworn canonical texts, Wuthering Heights and King Lear, and lesser-known pieces by Claudia Rankine and Simone de Beauvoir.

Rather than dwelling on routinely marked distinctions between realist and science fictional modes, this chapter identifies an emergent strand of writing about climate change that it calls ‘critical climate irrealism’. It builds on Michael Löwy’s ‘critical irrealism’ where the irreal – as in the fantastic, oneiric, or surrealistic – erupts within a predominantly realist text. ‘Critical irrealism’ describes fictions that do not follow realism’s ‘accurate representations of life as it really is’ but that are nevertheless critical of social reality. Critical irrealism is a notable feature of what World Literary Studies calls literature emerging from the ‘periphery’: territories that suffer from the violent extraction of labour and resources by the ‘core’ of the capitalist world system. This chapter argues that a comparable, and sometimes intersecting, process can be seen in contemporary fiction that uses the weird, the Gothic, the uncanny, and other modes of irrealism to engage with climate change. But it also suggests that climate change’s non-local effects and distorted temporalities complicate the core/periphery model. In bringing together ‘critical irrealism’ with a sense of ‘climate crisis’, ‘critical climate irrealism’ describes an important new trend, where the irreal negotiates radical environmental upheaval in a manner that realism’s recognisable individual experience cannot.

Science fiction has from its inception been interested in imagining climates and technologically sublime energy infrastructures, and in recent years has been adopted as a mode within many kinds of environmental writing addressing climate change. This chapter explores how the counter-cultural movement of ‘solarpunk’ is concerned with imagining both the technological and societal complexity of energy transition, and the conditions civilisations might face in adapting to living in damaged natural environments. Solarpunk operates across multiple disciplines and art forms, including architecture, art, and literature, and typically sees itself as utopian, decentralised, community-driven, and socially progressive. The chapter identifies some common themes and trends within solarpunk literature – including the predominance of the short-story form, the solastalgic aesthetics of the transformed landscape, and the normalisation of renewable energy technologies – and shows how these features aim to influence readers into climate action.

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