Relatively little scholarship has compared the ecological impact of acute climate-related events versus chronic human pressures. Despite mounting pressures from climate change and rapid tourism development across the Caribbean, even less research has assessed the relative impacts of biophysical versus anthropogenic pressures on the region’s island landscapes. We compare the effects of an extreme climate event in the years immediately following Hurricane Mitch in 1998 relative to thirty years of rapid urbanization and tourism development on Roatán, Honduras. Results from a random forest classifier applied to thirteen Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) and Operational Land Imager (OLI) scenes, indicate that between 1985 and 2015 urban area increased by 982.8 ha (227.7%), with 224.1 ha (-19.1%) of mangroves converted to urban areas. This compares to a 37% (384.9 ha) decrease in mangroves immediately following Hurricane Mitch. Mangroves in protected areas have fully recovered since Mitch, demonstrating their resiliency. Despite being illegal, mangrove deforestation across all unprotected areas accelerated to accommodate increasing urban area. Given that mangroves provide vital protection to an island’s coastline and represent a major carbon-sink, and that extreme hurricanes in the Caribbean are projected to double in the coming decades due to climate change, this research suggests that rapid urbanization and tourism development in the Caribbean may decrease island ecosystem resiliency to environmental stressors.

This dissertation is an examination of the environmental and health impacts of the migration process at multiple scales: individual, muncipio, biome, national, and regional/continental. It seeks to address the questions: Whose health benefits or worsens when people migrate? Under what conditions? Through this, I hope to further the understanding of the complex effects of migration upon the places and people who participate in this process.

Migration affects the natural environment directly through the changes produced in sending communities: Rural depopulation occurs as people migrate to seek wage labor in urban and international destinations. This can lead to a diverse set of outcomes: forest cover returning on abandoned small farms, or forest cover declining as remissions allow for investment in agriculture or as empty smallholdings are replaced with large industrial farms. Migration also contributes to changes in the natural environment indirectly: Most migration occurs up the development continuum from rural to urban, and/or developing to the developed world. As people move up the development continuum they almost invariably consume more resources, including high-resource food in the form of meat, animal products, and prepared and processed foods. Migration also directly affects the health of the individual. In addition to the stresses and dangers of the migration process itself, changes in location result in changes in access to health related resources, changes in health behaviors, and health-related acculturation. As Mexican migrants move from rural to urban places, and to the U.S., they often move to less stable or less family based living environments, and they commonly eat in a less healthy manner, resulting in higher risk for nutrition-related chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer.

This dissertation consists of a four chapters that seek to explore this complex relationship. A ‘theoretical’ or ‘literature’ chapter, three ‘empirical’ chapters, and a conclusion. Each chapter has been formatted as stand-alone, publication-ready manuscripts, and each contain their own literature sections. The first chapter makes two principal arguments: first, that research on migration should be included in the emerging academic topic of “Planetary Health”, and second, that this dissertation is part of an emerging theme within the subfield of nutritional geography, “the geography of malnutrition”. Chapter 2 is an examination of the relationship between population trends (including migration), agricultural land use, and food at multiple scales, using data from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The chapter examines trends from recent decades in population change and distribution, as well as patterns of agricultural expansion and intensification at the global region scale and the national scale for Latin America. We also examine agricultural intensification vs production in Latin America, and discuss three case studies to highlight how space and place context are critical in understanding the population-food-environment nexus. Chapter 3 is an examination of the relationships between migration, population, and economic processes, and forest cover change in Mexico from 2000 to 2010. Using multiple regression analyses with remotely-sensed, significant (p > 0.10) change in woody vegetation from 2000 to 2010 as our dependent variable, we explore the effects of a suite of environmental, demographic, and economic indicators at the national and regional biome scales. Results highlight the importance of international migration on forest change across various scales, and that internal migration and other demographic and economic variables contribute at particular scales and regions. Chapter 4 examines how migration history influences diet and diet-related health among recent internal migrants to Tijuana, Mexico. We investigate characteristics of migrants’ origin influence their health and diet, finding that migrants from rural places and of indigenous status have better diet-related health, but have undergone more diet change than other groups. These results indicate the importance of migration history and geographic variables in health related research with migrants.

Communities around the world are already facing the impacts of climate change. In this 1°C warmer world, many of those who have already endured impacts have little recourse, while ‘big emitters’ have largely externalized costs of their activities. The field of climate accountability has emerged as a response to this uneven distribution of harms and gains. The question—who ultimately is responsible for climate impacts?—has been asked with increasing frequency over the past decade in both policy spheres and litigation as extreme events have increased in both likelihood and intensity. In this dissertation, I interrogate this broader field of climate accountability, leveraging cross-disciplinary methodologies to build evidence for—and identify gaps in—this field. The central question underpinning the dissertation is: who is responsible for climate impacts, and how can the field of climate accountability best serve impacted communities?

To do so, I build a conceptual framework to guide allocating causal responsibility (Chapter 1). Identifying causality for impacts is an insufficient and yet necessary component of all proposed climate accountability mechanisms. The bulk of this dissertation then tests this conceptual framework by conducting ‘end-to-end attribution’—or attributing climate impacts to sources of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions—by focusing on climate change-related drought impacts in the Southwestern United States. End-to-end attribution broadly includes three components: extreme event attribution (Chapter 2), impact attribution (Chapter 3), and source attribution (Chapter 4). Chapter 2 presents two detection and attribution (D&A) analyses, quantifying the impact of increased temperatures from anthropogenic climate change on local vapor pressure deficit (VPD) and vegetation health in the Four Corners region of the Southwest. The studies find that anthropogenic forcing increased temperatures, corresponding to sizeable increases in VPD and substantial impacts on vegetation health. Chapter 3 examines climate-related drought impacts for A:shiwi—or the Zuni Tribe—in New Mexico. The chapter presents the results of ethnographic field work and archival analysis, outlining the types and extent of climate impacts faced by the tribe, conceptions of causality for those impacts, and lessons learned for appropriate approaches to responsibility. Finally, Chapter 4 conducts source attribution by tracing nation-state, industrial, and consumer-based contributions to GHG emissions and the actions, attitudes, and omissions which have accompanied those emissions. It furthermore presents a systematic analysis of climate denial, doubt, and delay messaging from the American electric utility industry. This dissertation concludes by reflecting on the challenges associated with end-to-end attribution, including where current approaches may advance versus hinder the pursuit of climate justice.

Amazonia is fundamental for climate change action: it stores an important amount of the planet’s carbon emissions, while also emitting carbon due to deforestation. With higher proportions of primary forest cover, and lower rates of deforestation, Indigenous territories are crucial for climate change mitigation. Yet, the extractive development models of Amazonian countries are threatening the lives and lifeways of Indigenous peoples.

This dissertation demonstrates how climate change has become a politically significant object for Amazonian Indigenous organizations. Analyses of Indigenous-led transnational—and plurinational—climate strategies are scarce in the literature. I illustrate how Indigenous climate initiatives in Amazonia incorporate ontological and territorial politics, ancestral knowledges (AK) and the agency of more-than-human beings beyond local scales to global climate politics. To do so, I draw from critical and digital geography, science and technology studies, decolonial and Indigenous studies. My methodology integrates a political ecology of scale approach—i.e., four scales of Indigenous political organization—and Indigenous methods—e.g., open-ended interviews and sharing circles. Fourteen months of fieldwork further involved volunteering with the Coordinator of Indigenous Organization of the Amazon Basin (COICA) and the OPIAC School of Political Training in Colombia.

I argue that Amazonian Indigenous climate initiatives are founded on what I call integral territorial ontologies—or conceptions of territories as indivisible entities or lifeworlds that encompass multiple relationships not only between humans and other living beings, but also among more-than-human beings.

This dissertation is organized into three articles. In Article I, I analyze COICA’s Amazon Indigenous Initiative to Reduce Emissions from Deforestation (RIA) and argue that RIA is founded on integral territorial ontologies and incorporates more-than-human agency. As such, RIA is tied to territorial defense and challenges understandings of forest/territorial vitality and ordering, as well as the processes of that facilitate the commodification of nature. Article II examines how, through boundary-work—i.e., drawing boundaries around AK—, Indigenous leaders and climate initiatives simultaneously reinforce and move beyond binaries like traditional/modern, local/global, while also scaling-up territorial knowledges. RIA and the OPIAC School take AK beyond the local scale to global climate politics, while also upholding their inextricable link to territories as lifeworlds. In Article III, I argue that forest monitoring programs and technologies co-produce forms of climate and territorial politics in Amazonia. Indigenous organizations imagine and enact territorial defense and autonomy—e.g., incorporating the agency of more-than-human beings in digital tools for territorial planning. But the programs also reinforce a politics of open-access information, strict territorial boundaries, and exclusive rights—that can threaten Indigenous autonomy.

In conclusion, this dissertation calls into question what global environmental politics are, and who participates in them. I demonstrate how the central role of Indigenous peoples in global climate politics becomes essential to their purposes of defending Amazonian territories and life itself. Given the urgent and multidimensional threats of climate change, this research begins to shed light on how strategies that emerge from historically marginalized peoples and their lifeways can expand our horizon of imaginable solutions.

The U.S. Forest Service is now required to include the concept of ecosystem services - defined as the idea that humankind receives a variety of tangible and intangible benefits from ecosystems - in National Forest planning. Pacific Northwest National Forests, however, are only in the early stages of considering ecosystem services within individual forest plans. This doctoral dissertation focuses on investigating how the identification and mapping of ecosystem services using participatory methods can be used to more effectively and equitably inform ecosystem service-based management in the National Forest context. This type of management-relevant, bottom-up identification and mapping of priority ecosystem services, integrating cultural values of diverse groups, is widely called for in the literature, yet case studies on U.S. public lands are lacking.

Semi-structured interviews and participatory mapping exercises were conducted with National Forest planners, managers, and involved stakeholders to better understand perceptions of the ecosystem services concept and the perceived value of ecosystem services to individuals and society. First, interviews with National Forest planners and managers elicited insight on the understanding of the ecosystem services concept and the implications of the concept for management in the US National Forest context. Then, semi-structured interviews and participatory mapping exercises conducted with representatives of groups that are actively involved in stewardship and management of National Forest lands demonstrated methods that can be used for better understanding the wide range of uses, values, and benefits connected to National Forests.

Results indicate that there has been only limited application of the ecosystem services concept in National Forest management and that there are several perspectives among managers regarding what it means to manage for ecosystem services. Stakeholder interviews and mapping exercises revealed which uses, benefits, and values were most highly valued, where they were valued, and the reasons they were valued by participants. Analysis of identified use, value, and benefit categories indicated that while several cultural and provisioning ecosystem services were most highly valued, subcategories therein were complex, resulting in ambiguity, multiple interpretations, and overlapping meanings. Mapping of use, benefit, and value categories demonstrated the spatial distribution of valued categories, highlighting how these distributions appear complementary overall. However, they also pointed to specific areas of potential conflicts and synergies among categories. This dissertation provides useful data for updating National Forest plans to include ecosystem services, broadly, and cultural values toward ecosystem services, specifically. It also demonstrates methods that can used for fulfilling the requirement for National Forests to include ecosystem services throughout the Pacific Northwest and beyond.