“Are you prepared or not?”: An intersectional analysis of a community-engaged climate change vulnerability assessment and adaptation planning process with Tsáá? Ché Ne Dane

• Published in: Environmental science & policy 2025-01, Vol.163, p.103984, Article 103984
• Main Authors: Sidloski, Michaela, Reed, Maureen G., Andrews-Key, Sheri
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Climate change adaptation; Climate change vulnerability assessment; Critical community-engaged scholarship; Intersectional feminism; Intersectionality; Social dimensions of climate change
• ISSN: 1462-9011
• DOI: 10.1016/j.envsci.2024.103984

Intersectional analyses of climate hazards have demonstrated that social dimensions play important roles in how people experience and respond to climate change and extreme weather events. Despite these insights, intersectional scholarship has faced criticism around its theoretical orientation and the resulting challenges of doing applied intersectional research to understand social dimensions of climate change. This article demonstrates the value of an intersectional feminist lens to community-level planning for climate change. Working with an Indigenous community in northern British Columbia, Canada, the research revealed that social dimensions including culture, age, gender, and spirituality combined in distinct and various ways to influence how the community framed the problem of climate change, expressed agency, understood impacts and vulnerability, and proposed responses. Attending to these dimensions throughout a community-engaged climate change vulnerability assessment and adaptation planning process illuminated differences among groups, while also exposing shared goals and areas of overlap among diverse perspectives and worldviews. Beyond exposing commonalities, consistent consideration of social dimensions also enhanced local adaptive capacity and shaped the planning and decision-making process by informing project framing and design, methods selection and participant recruitment, and developing meaningful outputs. We use this evidence to demonstrate the practical application of an intersectional lens and to explain how embedding consideration of social dimensions within climate change vulnerability assessment and adaptation planning processes can produce better contextualization, greater buy-in, and more meaningful outcomes for communities across Canada and beyond. •We apply an intersectional feminist lens to community-level climate change planning.•Key relevant social dimensions included culture, age, gender, and spirituality.•Attention to social dimensions helps build local adaptive capacity.•We offer an example of how intersectionality theory can be applied in practice.