Between Climate Realities and Just Climate Futures: Critical Social Work Imaginaries

We do not imagine the fires. They are real, and year after year, they arrive. They appear fast, descending with a furious, devastating, and uneven force (National Aeronautics and Space Administration [NASA], n.d.). The floodwaters, too, erase entire towns and villages, some that will never be rebuilt. We watch people leave who will never come back. Even the smell of the earth is changing forever (Jampel, 2026; Yuan et al., 2009). We know that these are not “natural” disasters. These are the predictable outcomes of a human-made, capitalist-driven climate crisis formed and propelled by consumption, extraction, militarization, and inequality throughout the globe. This is ecocide. This is the result of the large-scale destruction of ecosystems. This is the undermining of the very conditions for life itself (Higgins, 2010; Short, 2016).

What were once dystopian possibilities are now all-too-real manifestations of environmental breakdown. In them, we can delineate unequal political power and social vulnerability around the world. Our shared climate crisis, in which we are all now deeply steeped, carries not only ecological roots but also social and political ones. As gendered and racialized hierarchies intensify, and authoritarian structures proliferate, all of us are pressed against the brutal limits of anthropocentric (human-centered) frameworks. Our current structures and practices are not meeting the demands of the climate crisis and they cannot get us out of it.

We need to act. We have to reckon with and respond to both the material and ideological conditions of our climate realities. We must commit to the creation of collective climate futures conditioned on a vision of interconnectedness with our environment and one another. At a time when the ecological and humanitarian stakes are so high, there is no other ethical choice. For social work, this means an ecopraxis that brings together relational worldviews with new imaginaries.

The Stakes of the Climate Crisis

The record-breaking wildfires, the extreme heatwaves, the floods, and the droughts, climate crisis after crisis, are setting us on an irreversible path of damage to our environment (Armstrong McKay et al., 2022; Dakos, 2024; NASA, n.d.). These conditions do not emerge in isolation but rather as an interconnected manifestation of systemic ecological destabilization. We have long established that anthropogenic (human) activities –most significantly our ongoing fossil fuel dependance, prolific deforestation, and militarized conflict – have incited and accelerated global overheating and environmental degradation (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC], 2022). While often unmentioned, the ecological toll of warfare cannot be overstated. Recent analyses estimate that major military operations generate tens of millions of tons of carbon emissions (Levy, 2025; Neimark et al., 2026). The integration of AI into our everyday lives also carries a drastic environmental impact. Training modern AI models and operating large data centers requires immense computational power, leading to high electricity consumption and significant carbon emissions (Budennyy et al., 2022). Beyond emissions, this infrastructure also places heavy demands on water and energy resources, as data centers use vast amounts of electricity and millions of gallons of water for cooling, raising broader sustainability concerns (Tanner et al., 2026). Underpinning such human activities is our global political economy, which permits, incentivizes, and normalizes this consumption and destruction.

Climate disruption is fundamentally an issue of environmental justice that interweaves with experiences of migration. Described as the “threat multiplier”, scholars highlight that the burden of our environmental consequences disproportionately falls on those who are already marginalized: those who are in poverty, vulnerable due to age, gender, race, geography, and those experiencing political exclusion (Goodman, 2024). Destroying our planetary ecosystem threatens social and political conditions that are critical to everyone's survival, but too many attempt to use this moment to justify and expand securitization, border militarization, and state control (Rahman, 2025). While the Global North disproportionately drives the conditions of climate change, it bears less of the impact; moreover, many of those who live there frame climate-induced migration as a security threat. They use this collective crisis to legitimize restrictive immigration policies and surveillance infrastructures, and as displacement accelerates, “climate refugees” encounter intensified violence, where state management of human mobility intersects with authoritarian governance (Bettini, 2013; Boas et al., 2019; Hartmann, 2010). The repression of protest movements, particularly those that advocate for climate justice, operates through similar logics of control (Trombetta, 2008). Moreover, under the framing of scarcity of resources, food, water, and energy, as well as prolonged states of emergency, states consolidate authority over essential resources while curtailing rights and civil liberties (United Nations Interagency Framework Team for Preventative Action, 2012).

The gendered dynamics of climate change, too, are stark. Women and girls, especially those in the Global South and from racialized and low-income communities, face heightened risk as a result of climate change (Dankelman, 2010; IPCC, 2022). The impact of climate change increases social and economic stressors, which fuel gender-based violence. Women and girls are less likely to survive natural disasters because they are too often denied access to information, resources, mobility, and decision-making power (Azcona et al., 2025). When women and girls are displaced due to environmental degradation, they then continue to experience increased exposure to gender-based violence, exploitation, and trafficking. This is particularly so in contexts where their legal protections are weak or absent (Freedman, 2016; Neumayer & Plümper, 2007). At the same time, climate-induced resource scarcity contributes to unpaid care burdens for women and girls, and constrains their access to education, healthcare, and livelihood (Ameyaw et al., 2025; Azcona et al., 2025). Ecofeminist scholars describe the experiences of the impact of climate change and the unique gendered consequences as “twin violences” enacted against both the earth and feminized bodies, the interconnectedness of ecocide and gender oppression (Mies & Shiva, 1993; Warren, 2000).

Life is Relational: The Paradigm We Need to Return to

While social work has historically focused on anthropocentric responses to the climate crisis, these are limited to mitigating the climate crisis and prioritizing human over ecological wellbeing and sustainability (Hawkins, 2023; Klemmer & McNamara, 2020). Alternatively, through approaches that tear down the boundaries between humans and nature and which recognize the interconnectedness of life, we can develop social work scholarship and practice that respond to the demands of climate realities. Across Indigenous epistemologies, cosmovision, ecofeminism, environmental ethics, and ecological science, the premise that life is relational challenges the dominant Western notion of the autonomous individual (Bell et al., 2022; Klemmer & McNamara, 2020; Richter, 2025). Instead, human and non-human life are embedded within interconnected ecological, social, and biological systems. In other words, to understand and respond to climate realities in a meaningful way requires a fundamental rethinking of how humans relate to each other, to non-human life, and to systems of power and domination. These relational ontological views of human and nature offer critical social work a pathway forward. However, we must also be collectively willing to imagine these possibilities.

Take, for example, evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis and feminist scholar Donna Haraway. Margulis demonstrated that life evolves through symbiosis and cooperation, not merely competition, challenging the boundaries between self and other (Margulis, 1998; Sapp, 1994). For feminist scholar Donna Haraway (2016), these insights were critical to her reconceptualization of identity as fundamentally interconnected, thus destabilizing the binaries that underpin systems of domination. Haraway (2008, 2016) argues that identities are relational and that beings are constituted through networks of human and more-than-human connections rather than existing as autonomous individuals. These perspectives troubled the dominant Western ontologies that privilege notions of individualism and separation.

Indigenous knowledges are crucial to our relationship with the environment. The Kichwa principle Sumak Kawsay holds a central value: nature is alive (Hidalgo-Capitán et al., 2014). Sumak Kawsay centers collective well-being, reciprocity, and harmony with the natural world as alternatives to the ideologies of extractivism, development, and expansion (Richter, 2025). The nation-states Ecuador and Bolivia have incorporated Sumak Kawsay into their national constitutions, politically reconceptualized as el Buen Vivir; because nature is alive, nature has rights (Pérez Orozco, 2014; Richter, 2025).

From ecofeminist and environmental ethics, we can draw the contrast between anthropocentric and ecocentric paradigms. Philosopher Arne Næss’ term “shallow ecology”, like anthropocentrism, is the more dominant view, and positions nature as valuable primarily for human use. “Deep ecology” asserts the intrinsic value of all living beings, calls for a reconfiguration of human relationships to the biosphere, and is incompatible with the current industrial capitalist structures (Naess, 1973).

Future Imaginaries for Critical Praxis

What is the path forward for ecosocial work? First, we must collectively accept our climate realities. We have to act now, we have to act collectively, and we have to act decisively. Second, overcoming our climate crisis requires a collective vision of desirable futures. How can we forge a response if we cannot collectively envision what a healthy relational future would look like? Third, we must look to solutions that connect humans more deeply to one another and to the environment. To act, we must agree on a shared vision of our current needs and the future that we want.

Relational frameworks can inform socio-climatic imaginaries – these are our collectively held visions of the future, the environment, and social change (Milkoreit, 2017). To manage any transformational paradigm shift, argues W. Patrick McCray (2012), is not just technical; it is political too, and requires an explicit vision of a desirable, sustainable future. Levy and Spicer (2013) further argue that to have a meaningful and stable response to climate change, society must create a shared vision about the climate crisis, shared values for the desired future, and shared plans for how we will proceed. Levy and Spicer (2013) identified four core competing imaginaries that shape climate action, each reflecting assumptions about the environment, technology, and economic change. The first, Fossil Fuel Forever, promotes continued reliance on fossil fuels, limited systemic change, trust in technology, and deregulation. The second, Climate Apocalypse, advocates for radical political action, warning of catastrophic outcomes if we do not shift gears. The third, Techno-Market, looks optimistically toward market-based, technologically driven solutions and promotes investment in green technologies, carbon taxes, and carbon capture. The fourth, Sustainable Lifestyles, strives to reduce consumption, produce major structural and cultural change, move to plant-based diets, reduce travel, and implement cooperative models (Levy & Spicer, 2013).

Creating a climate imaginary is an inherently political act that involves “laying claims” to the future, understanding the political actors, powers, and structures in play (Jasanoff, 2015; Milkoreit, 2017). Relational frameworks challenge our longstanding over-investment in individualism, extraction, and global hierarchy (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015; Milkoreit, 2017). Critical imaginaries open up possibilities and allow us to recognize the complexities between the social and natural systems and consider a spectrum of desirable or undesirable outcomes. As social workers, critical imaginaries are what we need if we are going to respond to the realities that surround us. They should inform our scholarship, our teaching, and our practice.

In the last few years, Affilia has published a range of articles on social work responses to the climate crisis (see, e.g., Bell et al., 2022; Bhuyan et al., 2019; BlackDeer, 2023; Klemmer & McNamara, 2020). We invite you all to contribute to this conversation. As the world burns around us, we need to hear from ecofeminists, social activists, critical social work practitioners, Indigenous scholars, and all others who have knowledge and visions to share.