ABSTRACT
This chapter summarizes the links between climate change and disasters, and then charts the ways in which the theoretical underpinnings of anthropology of disaster extends to our interrogation of disasters precipitated by the planet’s changing climate. It reviews anthropological framing of risk and vulnerability that are particularly revealing of the ways in which islands are enmeshed in broader processes of planetary change, belying notions that islands are isolated or disconnected from broader ebbs and flows. Vulnerability encompasses many complex and interconnected cultural, social, economic, political, and environmental processes interacting over time and across space, making it difficult to define succinctly. Anthropologists treat vulnerability as the sum of multiple cultural, social, economic, and political processes and their interaction with environmental forces. The interrelated concepts of risk, vulnerability, and adaptation are particularly visible in the distinct island communities of the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu.
