Mara Benadusi¹

8 de setembro de 2026

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Este escrito compõe a Série Especial do Boletim Lua Nova, em conjunto com pesquisadores e pesquisadoras vinculados à rede internacional Justice in the XXI Century: A Perspective from Latin America (JUSTLA). O projeto, coordenado pela Universidade de Catania (Itália) e financiado pela União Europeia no âmbito da ação HORIZON–Marie Skłodowska-Curie Staff Exchanges, reúne integrantes de instituições da América Latina e da União Europeia.

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Introduction: When is climate change “urgent”?

In recent years, climate change has increasingly been framed as an emergency. Political leaders, activists, and scientists speak of a “climate crisis” that demands immediate action. Yet what counts as urgent—and for whom—is far from self-evident.

Climate change can become perceptible through sudden disasters—floods, landslides, or extreme storms that disrupt everyday life overnight—but also through gradual processes such as soil degradation, water scarcity, or the slow abandonment of agricultural lands. These temporalities often coexist, yet they do not attract the same forms of attention, recognition, or response. This matters because it shapes how climate change is understood and whether particular experiences enter wider debates on climate justice.

This piece brings together research from Southern Italy and Sri Lanka to explore different ways of living climate change. Rather than treating the two settings as contrasting models, I bring them into conversation to ask how climate urgency becomes perceptible, narratable, and politically actionable under different historical and institutional conditions. Considering them together shows how globally articulated climate urgency takes different forms as it enters particular histories, institutions, and ways of knowing.

Understanding climate through lived experience

Authoritative knowledge about climate change is produced through a heterogeneous scientific infrastructure: long-term instrumental records, satellite observations, paleoclimate archives, attribution studies, scenario modelling, and large-scale assessments such as those of the IPCC². Taken together, these forms of evidence establish an exceptionally robust consensus on anthropogenic climate change and its accelerating effects. Scientific communication has itself become increasingly urgent. The 2025 State of the Climate Report describes a planet “on the brink,” documenting accelerated warming and record levels across many of the Earth’s vital signs³. The World Meteorological Organization similarly confirms that 2015–2025 were the eleven warmest years on record (WMO 2026⁴).

Yet indispensable as these forms of knowledge are, they cannot by themselves tell us how environmental transformations are encountered, interpreted, and acted upon in particular places. Ethnography offers a complementary mode of inquiry based on prolonged and situated engagement with people in their everyday environments, combining participant observation, conversations, interviews, and direct involvement in ordinary activities. Its purpose is not simply to document local responses to processes defined elsewhere, but to understand how environmental change becomes part of lived experience and how people distinguish, connect, and give meaning to the transformations around them.

From this perspective, the issue is not only what climate change is, but when and how particular environmental transformations come to be recognised as climate problems. Eco-ethnography⁵, in particular, draws attention to the histories, forms of knowledge, temporalities, and institutional relations through which some changes become matters of concern while others remain in the background. It can therefore help explain why a problem framed globally as urgent does not acquire the same visibility, meaning, or capacity to mobilise action everywhere.

Southern Italy: Entangled slow and fast urgencies

Southern Italy complicates the spatial categories through which environmental vulnerability and climate urgency are often understood. Its position within the Global North has coexisted with histories in which industrialisation, resource exploitation, infrastructural development, and environmental degradation have distributed benefits and harms very unevenly across territories and populations. Environmental damage, from this perspective, is not simply the consequence of incomplete development or peripheral marginality; it has also been produced through trajectories of development that have made some places and forms of life more exposed, expendable, or available for extraction than others. Climate change enters these already differentiated socio-ecological landscapes, intersecting with histories of pollution, economic dependency, contested development, and environmental struggle. The question is therefore not only how climate change affects Southern Italy, but how a globally defined climate urgency takes shape in territories where environmental harm and claims for justice already have their own histories and political languages.

My research has developed mainly in Sicily, across two different but connected settings. In both cases, I coordinated interdisciplinary teams including anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, and ecologists. Earlier fieldwork focused on the petrochemical area of Augusta–Priolo–Melilli and on the social and material afterlives of industrialisation⁶. More recently, this work has continued in the Simeto River Valley⁷, an agricultural and riverine territory undergoing significant ecological and infrastructural transformations. These two settings make it possible to examine climate urgency in territories where environmental change is already embedded in longer histories, expectations, and conflicts.

In Augusta–Priolo–Melilli, the petrochemical complex cannot be understood simply as a source of accumulated pollution. Its rapid expansion after the Second World War was bound up with powerful promises of modernisation, employment, mobility, and prosperity, while at the same time profoundly transforming landscapes, livelihoods, bodies, and social relations. Oil has therefore occupied an ambivalent place in local life: both a source of economic security and a source of long-term ecological and health damage. As the petrochemical sector entered successive phases of crisis and restructuring from the 1970s onwards, this promise did not simply disappear. Industrial plants continued to dominate the territory even as employment contracted, productive units were restructured or divested, and remediation remained largely unfinished. The result is better described as a late-industrial landscape than as a post-industrial one: fossil infrastructures persist materially and economically while their promised future has become increasingly uncertain.

This temporal ambiguity is also important for understanding urgency. Environmental damage in the petrochemical corridor often takes the form of a diffuse and cumulative catastrophe whose effects become familiar through repetition: contaminated air, soil and water, illness, industrial risk, abandoned or deteriorating infrastructures. Such conditions may be deeply present in everyday life while at the same time becoming difficult to perceive precisely because they have been lived with for decades. Local environmental struggles have therefore involved not only denouncing pollution but also making damaged landscapes perceptible again, challenging habituation to industrial ruination and reopening questions about what these places might become. Climate change and the transition away from fossil fuels enter this already crowded political field, alongside older demands for health protection, remediation, employment, and ecological repair⁸.

The Simeto Valley presents a different configuration. Here climate-related pressures intersect less with the afterlife of a single dominant industrial system than with overlapping transformations in agriculture, water management, biodiversity, and energy production. Recurrent drought, increasingly uncertain rainfall, and longstanding difficulties in accessing and managing water are reshaping agricultural practices and expectations about the future of farming. At the same time, photovoltaic and agrivoltaic infrastructures are expanding across agricultural land in the name of the transition away from fossil fuels. Climate urgency therefore appears here in a particularly complex form: not only through the effects of climate change, but also through the territorial consequences of responses designed to address it. What is presented at the global level as an urgent transition can become, locally, another source of uncertainty and contestation over land, water, livelihoods, and ecological futures.

Across these two settings, cumulative transformations increasingly intersect with sudden climate-related events. In recent years, Sicily has experienced intense storms, floods, landslides, prolonged drought, and extreme heat, often accompanied by declarations of emergency and calls for “urgent” action. Such events generate what we might call “fast urgencies”: moments in which environmental disruption becomes suddenly visible, politically salient, and demanding of immediate response. Yet this heightened attention often recedes once the dramatic episode has passed. By contrast, “slow urgencies” emerge through cumulative transformations—water scarcity, agricultural decline, pollution, biodiversity loss, and the long afterlives of fossil-fuel industrialisation—that may be no less consequential but are more easily absorbed into the background of everyday life.

The distinction, however, is not absolute. Slow and fast urgencies coexist and continually intersect. Prolonged drought may culminate in an acute water emergency; decades of ecological degradation may intensify the effects of an extreme event; and the urgency of the energy transition may itself accelerate territorial transformations through the rapid expansion of renewable-energy infrastructures. A response to one form of slow-moving environmental crisis may thus generate new and comparatively rapid transformations elsewhere. Sicily therefore does not belong to a single temporal regime of climate crisis. Rather, it reveals how different urgencies acquire different rhythms, forms of visibility, and capacities to mobilise political action.

Climate change is therefore neither absent from everyday life nor necessarily perceived as a discrete problem. Its urgency can be difficult to sustain politically: exceptional events concentrate attention, while cumulative transformations are more easily absorbed into the background of ongoing struggles. Thinking in terms of slow and fast urgencies shifts attention from whether climate change is experienced as urgent to how environmental transformations come to demand action, at what speed, and with what degree of public and political visibility.

Sri Lanka: The uneven visibility of climate urgency

My research in Sri Lanka has developed over more than two decades. I first began working there in the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, following processes of humanitarian intervention, reconstruction, and the reorganisation of everyday life in affected communities. That research drew my attention to the temporal and political life of disaster: to the ways a sudden catastrophic event continues long beyond the moment of impact, becomes entangled with longer histories of conflict, displacement, uneven development, and humanitarian intervention, and is translated into categories such as vulnerability, resilience, recovery, and risk. It also showed how emergencies generate particular forms of visibility and intervention, making some needs and subjects recognisable while leaving others at the margins.

More recently, my engagement with Sri Lanka has continued through C-URGE: The Anthropology of Global Climate Urgency⁹, a wider comparative research programme in which I serve as a Co-Principal Investigator. Through ten doctoral ethnographic projects conducted across Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Europe, C-URGE asks what happens when climate change is framed as requiring urgent action. Rather than taking urgency as a self-evident response to environmental threat, the project examines how it is perceived and produced, which forms of knowledge and anticipation make it recognisable, and how particular environmental futures become translated into policies, interventions, and everyday decisions.

Sri Lanka offers a particularly productive setting from which to explore these questions because climate change does not enter a socially or environmentally empty landscape. Monsoon variability, recurrent droughts and floods, coastal transformations, pressures on agricultural and aquatic ecosystems, and longer histories of colonial development and environmental governance intersect with expanding climate adaptation, conservation, forecasting, and resilience-building. Environmental change is therefore encountered through institutions and practices that long predate the contemporary language of climate urgency: agricultural calendars and irrigation systems, coastal livelihoods, conservation regimes, development programmes, and situated ways of anticipating weather and ecological change. Climate-related interventions enter these arrangements rather than replacing them, sometimes reinforcing existing concerns and at other times reorganising which risks, forms of knowledge, and futures acquire institutional attention. Ethnographically, this means asking how particular transformations become recognisable as climate problems, through which forms of knowledge they are made legible, and whose interpretations shape intervention. What is vivid in everyday experience may remain weakly recognised institutionally, while anticipated risks can acquire political force before their effects are directly experienced.

Two doctoral projects that I supervise within C-URGE make these dynamics particularly tangible. In the dry-zone agricultural landscapes studied by Avishka Sendanayake¹⁰, farmers must decide when to cultivate as monsoon rhythms become increasingly difficult to anticipate. Climatic change becomes perceptible through shifts in rainfall, flooding, biological indicators, bodily sensations, crop development, and the changing reliability of inherited ways of reading the weather. Yet these forms of situated knowledge coexist with meteorological forecasts, agricultural calendars, irrigation infrastructures, village institutions, and internationally funded adaptation projects. During the 2024–2025 cultivation season, delayed rains intersected with the postponement of the village meeting through which agricultural activities are collectively coordinated. Some farmers waited for institutional coordination; others acted on embodied and generational readings of environmental signs. When floods later affected fields at different stages of growth, vulnerability reflected not only climatic disruption but also the uneven coordination of different forms of anticipation.

Suranga Lakmal Kiri Hennadige’s research¹¹ in the Negombo Lagoon brings the politics of visibility into even sharper focus. Small-scale fishers perceive ecological change through close attention to tides, lunar cycles, mangrove recovery, species, catches, and the changing conditions of the lagoon. Their observations make environmental transformation highly visible within everyday livelihood practices. At the same time, mangroves have acquired increasing visibility within conservation, coastal-protection, carbon, and climate-adaptation agendas. Scientific assessments, regulations, and policy frameworks can translate anticipated ecological harms into categories and interventions with institutional force. Fishers also anticipate the future of the lagoon, deciding when to cut, when to leave mangroves to recover, and how to sustain future catches, but their anticipations do not necessarily travel through the same institutional channels or acquire the same authority. Formal governance therefore turns not simply on whether environmental change is seen, but on which ways of seeing and anticipating it acquire institutional force.

These two projects point to uneven regimes of visibility and authority. Some transformations become salient through spectacular events, scientific indicators, policy categories, or programmes; others are evident in everyday life yet remain weakly legible in formal governance. Visibility is not the same as recognition, and recognition does not automatically confer authority. Climate urgency therefore concerns not only what becomes perceptible, but whose knowledge and anticipated futures can become consequential.

Why context matters

A broader point emerges when Southern Italy and Sri Lanka are brought into conversation: neither can be reduced to a single temporal pattern of environmental crisis. In both, cumulative transformations coexist with sudden disruptive events, but speed does not determine visibility or political salience. A gradual change may be acutely perceived in everyday life yet remain weakly recognised institutionally; a sudden event may generate intense attention that quickly fades. Slow and fast urgencies and uneven visibility are therefore best understood as intersecting dimensions rather than as fixed types.

What becomes urgent depends not only on the pace of environmental change, but on how change is sensed, named, made legible, and channelled through institutions. Farmers and fishers may register transformations that never enter formal decision-making, while anticipated risks can become actionable through policy before their consequences are directly experienced. Climate urgency is thus shaped by relations among perception, knowledge, recognition, and the capacity to authorise intervention.

This has direct implications for climate justice. Inequality concerns not only differential exposure to environmental harm, but also unequal capacities to have harms recognised, to make situated knowledge consequential beyond the places where it is produced, and to influence which futures become objects of intervention. Climate justice therefore requires attention to how some experiences and anticipations acquire public and political weight while others do not.

These considerations also complicate the familiar language of Global North and Global South. The distinction remains important for thinking about historically produced asymmetries in responsibility, resources, and political power, but it should not obscure the internal differentiation of the contexts grouped under these categories. Sri Lanka’s colonial and postcolonial trajectories and Southern Italy’s position within the Italian state and the European political economy are historically and geopolitically distinct. At the same time, Southern Italy shows how peripheralisation, extractive development, infrastructural inequality, and disproportionate environmental burdens can also be produced within the Global North. The notion of “internal Souths” is useful in this limited, relational sense: not to collapse different histories into a common condition, but to examine how centre–periphery relations are reproduced within distinct geopolitical settings. Bringing Sicily and Sri Lanka into conversation can therefore clarify how environmental change acquires the force of urgency through different histories, forms of knowledge, institutional arrangements, and political relations. Across contexts, what travels most productively are questions about temporality, visibility, recognition, and the power to make environmental futures politically consequential.

Conclusion: From urgency to understanding

Scientific evidence makes the need for climate action undeniable. Yet declaring a global climate emergency does not tell us how urgency enters people’s lives, how it becomes attached to particular problems, or why some environmental transformations generate sustained action while others are normalised or pushed into the background.

The cases discussed here suggest that urgency is not simply a measure of environmental severity. It is also a social and political relation: between events and longer histories, between different ways of knowing environmental change, and between those who experience transformations and those able to define how they should be addressed. Attending to these relations can help explain why responses that appear necessary at one scale become contested, reinterpreted, or produce unforeseen effects at another.

This is where ethnography has a particular contribution to make. By staying close to situations in which environmental change is lived, interpreted, and acted upon, it allows us to follow climate urgency across scientific knowledge, institutions, landscapes, and everyday practices. It also shows that people are not simply recipients of climate policies: they produce knowledge, anticipate futures, evaluate interventions, and formulate claims about what should be protected and which futures are worth sustaining.

For audiences in Latin America and beyond, Sicily and Sri Lanka offer no ready-made model. Their value lies in the questions they make possible. These questions are also part of the broader conversation developed within JUSTLA¹², where climate justice is one of the lines through which justice in the twenty-first century is being reconsidered in dialogue between European and Latin American scholars. JUSTLA is particularly relevant to the argument developed here because this exchange does not treat Latin America simply as a setting in which established concepts of justice are applied. It creates a space in which different histories, political experiences, and intellectual traditions can reshape the questions through which justice itself is approached.

My recent JUSTLA secondments have brought the reflections developed in this article into direct exchange with scholars and students working on environmental and climate justice. In Brazil, my lectures on the afterlives of oil in Sicily prompted a wider conversation around the region’s extractive histories, socio-environmental disasters, responsibility, reparation, care, and multispecies justice. Participants brought into the discussion locally and nationally significant experiences, including the Fundão dam collapse in Mariana and its consequences for the Rio Doce basin, as well as questions of non-human vulnerability and public visibility raised, among other examples, by the 2024 floods in Rio Grande do Sul. These exchanges do more than extend the discussion geographically: they keep the meaning of climate urgency itself open to questioning as it encounters other environmental histories and claims for justice¹³. In this sense, the present article is part of an ongoing JUSTLA conversation: how does climate urgency become a situated political problem when it encounters other histories of environmental harm? And how can planetary climate action remain attentive to the histories, inequalities, forms of life, and demands for justice through which environmental change is actually lived?

* Este texto não reflete necessariamente as opiniões do Boletim Lua Nova ou do CEDEC. Gosta do nosso trabalho? Apoie o Boletim Lua Nova!¹⁴

1. Mara Benadusi is an anthropologist at the Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Catania, Italy. Her research explores how environmental and climatic transformations are lived, interpreted, and contested, with particular attention to industrial and extractive landscapes, climate urgency, and environmental justice. ↩︎
2. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the leading United Nations body responsible for assessing the science related to climate change. ↩︎
3. See: Ripple et al. 2025. “The 2025 State of the Climate Report: A Planet on the Brink.” BioScience 75 (12): 1016–1027. https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biaf149. ↩︎
4. World Meteorological Organization (WMO). 2026. State of the Global Climate 2025. Geneva: World Meteorological Organization, https://wmo.int/publication-series/state-of-global-climate/state-of-global-climate-2025 ↩︎
5. Eco-ethnography refers here to an ethnographic approach that examines environmental change through the entanglement of social relations, ecological processes, material environments, more-than-human life, and different forms of knowledge and perception. Rather than treating the environment as a backdrop to human experience, it attends to how these relations shape the ways environmental transformations are sensed, interpreted, and acted upon. See the Eco-Ethnography Protocol developed within C-URGE – The Anthropology of Global Climate Urgency. For further discussion of eco-ethnography, consult Grace-McCaskey, Cynthia A., Briana Iatarola, Alex K. Manda, and J. Randall Etheridge. 2019. “Eco-Ethnography and Citizen Science: Lessons from Within.” Society & Natural Resources 32 (10): 1123–1138. https://doi.org/10.1080/08941920.2019.1584343. ↩︎
6. This research was conducted within Eco-frictions of the Anthropocene (2015–2019), funded under the Italian PRIN (Projects of Relevant National Interest) programme. The project examined political and environmental transformations associated with industrialisation and industrial reconversion and adopted a broader comparative framework that brought Southern Italy into dialogue with Latin American contexts. ↩︎
7. The research in the Simeto River Valley is conducted within BIOTraCes – Biodiversity and Transformative Change for Plural and Nature-Positive Societies, a Horizon Europe project funded by the European Union under Grant Agreement No. 101081923 (2022–2026). See the project website: www.biotraces.eu. ↩︎
8. For further discussion of the petrochemical area of Augusta–Priolo–Melilli and its environmental and social afterlives, see Benadusi, Mara. 2018. “Oil in Sicily: Petrocapitalist Imaginaries in the Shadow of Old Smokestacks.” Economic Anthropology 5 (1): 45–58. https://doi.org/10.1002/sea2.12101; Benadusi, Mara. 2019. “Sicilian Futures in the Making: Living Species and the Latency of Biological and Environmental Threats.” Nature and Culture 14 (1): 79–104. https://doi.org/10.3167/nc.2019.140105; and Benadusi, Mara. 2025. “Scratching: Sicilian Residual Landscapes in the Afterlife of Oil Production.” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 30 (1): 35–57. https://doi.org/10.1080/1354571X.2024.2424093. ↩︎
9. C-URGE – The Anthropology of Global Climate Urgency – is a Horizon Europe Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral Network (2023–2027). See the project website: www.c-urge.eu. ↩︎
10. More information on Avishka Sendanayake’s doctoral project within C-URGE is available on her researcher profile: https://www.c-urge.eu/avishka-sendanayake. ↩︎
11. For further details on Suranga Lakmal Hennadige’s doctoral research within C-URGE, see his researcher profile on the project website: https://www.c-urge.eu/surangalakmalhennadige. ↩︎
12. JUSTLA – Justice in the XXI Century: A Perspective from Latin America – is a Horizon Europe Marie Skłodowska-Curie Staff Exchanges project (2025–2028) fostering exchange between European and Latin American scholars around emerging questions of justice, including climate justice. See the project website: www.justla.eu. ↩︎
13. The reflections developed here have been discussed during research secondments undertaken within JUSTLA, including exchanges at the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning (CEBRAP) in São Paulo and at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) in Belo Horizonte. ↩︎
14. Referência Imagética: Isaac Cordal, Waiting for Climate Change, 2012. Photo: FaceMePLS, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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