CfP: Climate change and vulnerability – 5th annual Just Climate Transitions Conference
University of Potsdam
17 and 18 June 2025
This year’s Just Climate Transitions conference focuses on questions of vulnerability and justice in the context of climate change. As climate change accelerates it produces new vulnerable groups or heightens vulnerability for already disadvantaged groups. For example, heat waves are predicted to cause many deaths among the elderly and homeless, more extreme weather events will hit subsistence farmers especially hard and increase their precarity, and rising sea levels and desertification will displace whole communities. These scenarios raise questions about how such vulnerabilities can be assessed, alleviated, and prevented in a just manner. They also highlight the need to distribute the burdens of climate change fairly and question current power relations that produce inequalities and make minorities suffer disproportionally from climate change.
We are interested in exploring questions such as
• What notion of vulnerability is best suited for discussions in the context of climate change?
• Is climate change vulnerability worse than other forms of vulnerability and if so, why?
• Does it matter from a point of view of justice whether climate change policies produce a ‘new’ vulnerable group or keeps already vulnerable groups such as Indigenous peoples and subsistence farmers in their position?
• How should concerns about a group’s climate vulnerability be balanced with other justice concerns, such as distributive justice, democratic participation etc.? Where might these concerns be connected and where do they come apart?
• Which duties have different actors to prevent or mitigate climate vulnerability?
• How might different theoretical approaches, such as feminist theory, decolonial studies, or critical theory, help us conceptualize climate vulnerability?
Please send abstracts of 300 words that engage with any of these or similar questions by March, 31 to justclimatetransitions@gmail.com. You can expect a decision on your abstract by the end of April.
We have limited funding to support early-career scholars. If you fall into this category and need funding to attend the conference, please indicate this in your email and let us know how much funding would be needed for you to be able to attend.