People across the planet experience ice loss and climate change differently, with profoundly unequal effects for people based on racial, class, gender, age, regional, and other social differences. Understanding these “inequalities of ice loss,” as Glacier Lab members Carey and Moulton put it in 2023, is urgent and spans into several areas, not just for people living near glaciers but also for researchers who face system inequalities, such as gender discrimination, within the field of glaciology.
In the Glacier Lab, we work toward what lab members called “glacier justice” in an article the lab published in 2020. Glacier justice seeks not only to recognize inequalities of ice loss but also strives to create more just and equitable relationships by promoting community-led research, valuing more diverse forms of knowledge, and understanding deep roots of systemic inequalities that create social vulnerabilities.
Some examples of Glacier Lab research on glacier justice include:
Mark Carey and Holly Moulton, “Inequalities of ice loss: A framework for addressing sociocryospheric change,” Annals of Glaciology (2023): https://doi.org/10.1017/aog.2023.44, pp. 1-10.
Mark Carey, Holly Moulton, Jordan Barton, Dara Craig, Zac Provant, Casey Shoop, Jenna Travers, Jeremy Trombley, and Adriana Uscanga, “Justicia glaciar en Los Andes y más allá,” Ambiente, Comportamiento y Sociedad 3, no. 2 (2020): 28-38.
Henry P. Huntington, Mark Carey, Charlene Apok, Bruce C. Forbes, Shari Fox, Lene K. Holm, Aitalina Ivanova, Jacob Jaypoody, George Noongwook, Florian Stammler, “Climate change in context: putting people first in the Arctic,” Regional Environmental Change 19, no. 4 (2019): 1217–1223.
Mark Carey, M. Jackson, Alessandro Antonello, and Jaclyn Rushing, “Glaciers, Gender, and Science: A Feminist Glaciology Framework for Global Environmental Change Research”, Progress in Human Geography 40, no. 6 (2016), 770-793.