**3. Procedural Vulnerability**

Veland suggests that procedural vulnerability amplifies the risks many Indigenous groups face from anthropogenic climate change [8,9]. State agencies easily assume (or perhaps hope) that their administrative procedures will adequately address the needs of all their citizens. It might be more accurate to say that the settler-colonial state assumes that all its citizens should conform to the requirements of the state. In settler-colonial societies, histories of racism, misunderstanding and greed mean that that many state procedures and the policies that support them fail to recognize, acknowledge, or respond to realities that affect Indigenous peoples within their jurisdictions. Structural racism, historic injustices, dispossession, violence and the normal features of colonial contexts create very different risk landscapes for Indigenous peoples. Even well-intentioned actions reinforce and produce vulnerability [2,10–13].

Drawing largely on experience from Australia, this paper concludes that Indigenous vulnerability, resilience and adaptive responses need to be understood and engaged with in relation to the messy contexts of lived experience in settler-colonial societies, rather than either elegant social theories or didactic ideological politics. The diverse knowledges, ontologies and experiences of different Indigenous groups, along with the particular (scaled) geographies and histories of colonization, and their impacts on and consequences for both colonized and colonizers, need to be taken seriously—discussed, debated and considered carefully, rather than simply treasured or ignored. Climate change researchers need to take them seriously and engage with the histories, geographies and current processes of colonization affecting Indigenous groups as Indigenous groups themselves consider (and renegotiate) the risk landscapes that are woven around them by climate risk and policies, procedures and practices of disaster risk reduction. Scholars need to include Indigenous groups as part of their critical audience.

#### **4. Anthropogenic Climate Change Is a Colonial Legacy**

Anthropogenic climate change is a colonial legacy that is having transformative impacts on the coupled human-and-natural systems on which survival depends. Neither colonial nor conventional post-colonial frames that leave the deep colonizing of Indigenous domains unrecognized, unacknowledged and unchallenged will allow actions to address those impacts safely and sustainably.

In the southern summer of 2019–2020, even prior to the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic, Australia experienced a series of ecological tragedies. For example:


There was a chorus of inaction and denials from the national government that such events were linked in any way to anthropogenic climate change [19,24,25]. The subsequent emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic and its social and economic implications have further diffused the public debate of failing policies on climate, energy and environment as economic growth is again prioritized over environmental and social sustainability by neoliberal forces.

In responding to the unprecedented drought which threatens the water supply and continuing economic activity in multiple communities across Australia's Murray–Darling Basin, for example, governments have ordered scientists to relocate fish from the river to 'save' them. The market solutions entrenched by intergovernmental agreements, which have seen rich investors buy water rights to create profit, and zero allocation of water to the Barkindji people, whose native title rights to land in the basin were recognized in 2015 after 18 years of legal struggle [26], are under review. But the overallocation of water persists. Marketization has not resolved failed relationships within and between communities, their water sources and their economic viability under changing environmental conditions. This should, perhaps, come as no surprise [27,28]. But it certainly comes at a high social and environmental cost [21,29].

As communities are disconnected from reliable water supply, they fragment and dis-integrate. Some people leave, while the remaining groups and individuals compete for dwindling resources. People look for both saviors and scapegoats—and become depressed when neither can be found. In places where the scars of colonial racism run deep, these communities have never really shared common ground. They see the place they share differently. The deep understanding of environmental change embedded in Indigenous Australian cultures, and their resilience in adapting to change, in surviving, in remaining present, has rarely been acknowledged by the systems that colonization imposed to produce wealth for the settler-colonial society and its imperial (and, later, state and national) governments.

Historically, settler-colonial systems operated as if the erasure of Indigenous peoples from the physical landscape could secure colonial property systems and the wealth they would produce [30]. Contemporary market failures and the exhaustion of ecosystems, such as is occurring in inland Australia, underpins (yet another) phase of failure of colonization. Inland Australian landscapes were long misunderstood by their ambitious colonizers [31–34]. As elsewhere, Australia's European colonizers assumed that their arrival (and even their anticipated arrival—for example, in South Australia, the Crown sought to argue that native title in that state was extinguished two years before any colonial occupation by actions of the British Colonial Office in London [35]) marked the beginning of history [36], and gave them a right to possess places and dispossess (and annihilate) their peoples. They assumed that their presence superseded any existing system of governance in the ancient jurisdictions and gave them unchallenged ownership of the resources created in other times, such as underground water and energy resources.

The settlers, and the governments that created them, told stories that asserted that their hard work and sacrifice, and the risks they took in travelling so far into places that were unknown (to them), gave them a God-given, and therefore unchallengeable, right to possess, to exploit, to do as they wished. Wolfe reflected that:

*settlers generally have a lot to say about work, sacrifice, and earning things the hard way. The refrain is familiar, the implication constant: We deserve what we have–or, more pointedly: We have a right to this land* ... *As the settler takes over the territory, so does the territory take over the settler–hence the distinctive vascular condition of having the land run in one's blood. Land is settler colonialism's irreducible essence in ways that go well beyond real estate. Its seizure is not merely a change of ownership but a genesis, the onset of a whole new way of being–for both parties. Settlers are not born. They are made in the dispossessing, a ceaseless obligation that has to be maintained across the generations if the Natives are not to come back*. [37] (p. 1)

Therefore, let me ask this question: what is revealed when the monumental failure of colonial stewardship, responsibility and care in Australia is laid bare by such dramatic crises at the whole-of-landscape scale? If the genesis it underpins has failed, what is left? Such failure reveals the uncivilized, primitive, barbaric and ignorant actions perpetrated by settlers upon both the people and Country of First Nations in the name of civilization (and in the service of self-interest). Those actions, those original denials, laid foundations of failures that others continue to amplify into the present. Those empowered by Australia's colonizing systems refused to understand, value and protect fundamental connections between human and natural systems, between societies and environments, and between people and their places. They promulgated that failure as something to be admired, celebrated and continued when they advocated Australia's right (indeed necessity and even obligation) to maintain its fossil-fueled economic occupation of the southern continent in international climate change negotiations.

As the theme of this special issue suggests, the economic models of colonialism were always based on crossing spatial boundaries and collapsing temporal boundaries. But they did so without understanding the relationships that were threatened, or the forces being unleashed. The assumption underlying those models was that growth without limits (or at least systems in which the growth of wealth for some seemed to have no limits) was both desirable and possible. That was simply normal. Growth could be fostered by crossing spatial boundaries to continuously consume the resources of other people's places, other people's livelihoods. It could be fostered by collapsing space–time to convert the energy of bygone ages into political power over places and their populations, and into a future that sought to preclude any alternatives.

As growth was measured and celebrated, and as wealth was distributed to the deserving rich, it seemed that the pauperization of local populations and the degradation of their landscapes could be modelled and treated as an externality that did not affect the logic or resilience of the colonizers' systems. After all, under the conditions created by settler colonialism, environmental capital in general—and land, water, timber, minerals, and fossil fuels in particular—were free and effectively unlimited. They became the property of the sovereign settler-colonial states.

Australia's 18th Century European colonizers assumed that the customary owners of the diverse landscapes of the southern continent were simply too 'primitive' to be accorded rights or recognition. In the landscapes the colonizers coveted, they saw the bounty of nature (which was theirs to take) rather than the product of Aboriginal Australians' careful management and their civilizations' nurturing of the continuing connection between people, place and cosmos [38,39].

However, the Australian civilizations that were violently displaced by European colonialism were amongst the first human cultures to develop agriculture, baking and aquaculture. They were violated along with the landscape [38]. The colonizers dismissed those ancient jurisdictions and institutions as primitive and without law, culture, or civilization. The civilizations of the southern continent reflect some 65,000 years of human experience, thinking and adaptation [40] connected by continuing culture. They offer profound examples of what connecting-to and belonging-to place means in the context of large-scale environmental change.

What was achieved in those ancient jurisdictions was, in Gammage's words, a "majestic achievement":

*only in Australia did a mobile people organise a continent with such precision* ... *They sanctioned key principles: think long term; leave the world as it is; think globally, act locally; ally with fire; control population. They were active, not passive, striving for balance and continuity to make all life abundant, convenient and predictable. They put the mark of humanity firmly on every place. They kept the faith. The land lived* ... *This was possession in its most fundamental sense. If terra nullius exists anywhere in our country, it was made by the Europeans*. [39] (p. 323)

The profound failure of settler-colonial stewardship on the southern continent fundamentally reflects the same economic and geopolitical forces that are the drivers of anthropogenic climate change. The greed of imperial kleptocrats might have been replaced by global entrepreneurs whose unimaginable wealth has been so powerfully criticized in the efforts to address the climate emergency [41,42], but the risks imposed on Indigenous groups have remained and been amplified.
