Urban nullius? Urban Indigenous People and Climate Change

Abstract

Climate change is impacting cities and urban regions in significant ways, and people living within them must work out how to live with and adapt to the changes they bring. Indigenous peoples are increasingly moving to and living in cities, yet how they experience climate change within them is not understood. While literature explores Indigenous experiences of climate change and how Indigenous knowledge is being used to combat it, this work is geographically located in rural and remote Indigenous territories—not cities. This paper presents the results of a review that sought to find out why this is the case. Our aim was to identify scholarship that discussed how Indigenous people are affected by climate change in cities. To do so, we undertake a narrative literature review, which analyses content to distil key concepts in the literature, which are then presented in the paper to form a narrative. We find a significant gap in the literature addressing Indigenous experiences and voices concerning climate change in cities. We argue that this is due to the ongoing legacy of settler colonization, which has erased Indigenous peoples from urban territories to the extent that even when they are visible, urban Indigenous people are characterized as inauthentic and vulnerable. We call for action to overturn this insidious form of urban nullius to reclaim and assert Indigenous voices on and about climate change and policy in cities.