**5. Rethinking the Scale Frame of Risk Landscapes**

There is extraordinary complexity in the contemporary risk landscapes that are affected by anthropogenic climate change. There is also extraordinary complexity in the contemporary risk landscapes negotiated by Indigenous groups whose right to exist, to retain language, culture and a

place in contemporary space and time is so profoundly challenged by the logic of settler-colonialism. It is important to recognize that vulnerability and resilience sit side by side in those risk landscapes, and that strategies to respond and adapt to changing circumstances are never simply technical.

Climate risks (along with disaster risks, health risks, and broader societal, environmental and political risks), and responses to them are experienced, reconsidered and enacted in locally contingent landscapes. Climate injustice is just one element of the broader context of injustice constructing the risk landscapes many Indigenous groups negotiate in their everyday lives. Current circumstances in Indigenous Australia reflect histories of dispossession, denial and erasure [43]. The unfolding climate emergency challenges not only our understanding of our shared place in rapidly changing social, economic and political circumstances, but also in planetary scale systems. In particular places, the climate emergency unfolds as much as a crisis of belonging as a crisis of survival. At the planetary scale, any sense of belonging-together-in-place which underpins the possibility of common risk and common futures is constantly threatened by the economics, politics, and philosophies of competition, privilege and entitlement in globalizing human systems.

Dominant academic and political discourses frame the risks of climate change as pre-eminently global. That is, those discourses frame the most urgent risk landscape as being embedded in a singular global system whose complexity requires world-class experts to be privileged in decision-making. Technological optimists fantasize geo-engineering solutions at global and even greater-than-global scales [44,45], and the politics of negotiation affirm the primacy of nation states in producing solutions (see e.g., [46,47]). Even the most recalcitrant state actors are given more influence than even the wisest non-state Indigenous actors (see e.g., [47]).

Crisis narratives encompass the ecological, financial, political and climatic dimensions of coupled human and natural systems. Human societies (and those with whom we share the planet) face once-unimaginable risks, but in framing these as 'global', they risk being disconnected from the scales of conventional human sociality. Human societies approach thresholds for apocalyptic failure in planetary scale systems that are crucial to survival [48]. Our survival and prosperity are complexly dependent on these coupled human and natural systems that are on the brink of irreversible and consequential change. In these new global risk landscapes, crisis narratives offer glimpses of the possibility of an ending of the world. New technologies extend (or collapse) time horizons. New globalized spatial links shift the cumulative impacts of changing human–human and human–nature relationships, and combine them in ways that threaten multiple extinctions and even human and planetary survival. But narratives of growth and progress have been so naturalized and normalized that they obscure the lived experiences of Indigenous peoples. Even the crime of genocide and the wickedness of ecocide have been made invisible.

While the global disaster narratives reflect important truths, the everyday landscapes of risk continue to reflect the mundane issues of disease, poverty, food security, violence and marginalization of particular groups of people in specific places. The Covid-19 crisis has reminded us that there is always a risk that these everyday risks will intrude into global geopolitics. This is not to evoke the site-focused or flattened ontology advocated by Marston and her colleagues [49]. Rather, it is a call to recognize that the places and systems drawn into our contemporary risk landscapes are always scaled—spatially and temporally. The time horizons of everyday risks are often framed in terms of much shorter-term survival from day-to-day and week-to-week, rather than in terms of epochal shifts to an Anthropocene [50]. It is in these everyday risk landscapes that Indigenous peoples' vulnerabilities and resilience are generally performed. Despite the plethora of threats and repeated predictions of their imminent demise in many places across the world, Indigenous Peoples survive, adapt and persist. Their survival challenges colonizing narratives of their extinction, disappearance, absorption, inferiority, or irrelevance. The celebration of survival should not, of course, diminish the risks and very real violence experienced by Indigenous peoples in specific places under various forms of colonial governance. Nor can the need to recognize and address the genocide, inhumanity and criminality in the relations between various state and corporate actors and Indigenous groups be avoided or delayed.

In considering the narratives of impending catastrophe, however, it is worth acknowledging that Indigenous survival speaks loudly to narratives of sustained resilience, survival, adaptation and responsiveness.
