The intensifying warming of the planet over the past several decades is a manifestation of centuries of uneven and inequitable extractive economies. This warming is well known to be the main force driving shifts in climatological conditions and extreme weather events leading to increasingly severe impacts on planetary systems. Every year, more locations on earth are experiencing heat waves, intense droughts, longer and larger fire seasons, increased tropical storm intensity, and sea level rise at rates that would have been unthinkable a generation ago while near daily news reports document the increasing toll that this changing climate plays in exacerbating social and ecological vulnerabilities. Just this year, at the start of the Northern Hemisphere summer of 2023, a massive tropical cyclone has killed over 145 people in Bangladesh and Myanmar, western Canada has already seen as much forest burned in a few days as it does in an entire summer, drastically diminishing air quality over half a continent, the Po River Valley in Italy has been ravaged by floods after experiencing two years of extreme drought, and California has experienced deadly and pervasive atmospheric rivers after years of record-setting fire seasons and water shortages. In this special issue, rather than prioritizing benign and depoliticized notions of adaptive capacity and resilience, as is far too common within mainstream discussions of climate change, we highlight the theme of flood and fire to examine these events as compounding contemporary crises and responses to phenomena that are devastating, transforming, and reformulating communities, ecologies, and governing processes around the planet.

The fact that we are witnessing greater variability in climate extremes in the past couple of decades due to anthropogenic loading of carbon in the atmosphere is well documented. Tropical storms (hurricanes, typhoons, and cyclones) are increasing in intensity due to increased ocean temperatures, which are allowing storms to become stronger, last longer, and release more precipitation, and combined with sea level rise, producing more storm surge when they come onshore (Kossin et al. 2020; Maxwell et al. 2021; Murakami et al. 2017). At the same time that a warming planet has increased oceanic temperatures bringing greater precipitation to some regions, it has also resulted in more extreme droughts (Mukherjee et al. 2018). In some areas, the cycling of heavy rainfall with drought increases the amount of flammable materials resulting in more intense fires. Not only have fires intensified, but in many parts of the world fire seasons are extending in duration (Cattau et al. 2020; Jain et al. 2017). These fires release greater amounts of carbon into the atmosphere affecting all these processes, initiating multiple feedback mechanisms (Young et al. 2016).

The contributors to this issue take us around North America and the world, bringing us cases and concepts that help develop our understanding of what it means for various communities to attempt to live within such intensifying conditions. One of the key themes to arise from this collection is the exploration of the multifaceted and complex, non-linear dynamics that play out between communities and environments in the face of extremes. In other words, people are not just adapting to and mitigating the impacts of a changing climate in simple cause-and-effect ways. In fact, nearly all the contributions to this volume trace the enduring effects of capitalism and settler colonialism on increasing vulnerability to extreme weather events, be it wealthy homeowners in Southern California concerned about property values or Indigenous or marginalized communities forced to live in situations of environmental precarity. As such, the contributors highlight the importance of coupling political ecology, in which capitalism, state policies, and institutional actors shape ecological processes, with research into the natural sciences.

Our collection opens with a deluge. Eric Hirsch's “Forced Emplacement” asks readers to reconsider what they know about movement and mobility as aspects of daily life for many Indigenous and islander communities. Using case studies of Peru and the Maldives, Hirsch shows us how immobility has arisen as a product of settler colonialism and ongoing forms of climate injustice, creating devastating conditions for people who cannot migrate away from increasingly flood prone areas. This theme is complicated in Ryan Anderson's “Time, Seawalls, and Money,” which reviews the anthropology of sea level rise, examining the creation of sea walls as one response to the sense that relocation is not an option due to people's attachments to place, be they Alaskan Natives or wealthy, white Californians arguing for “financial” sea walls to protect their property values. Theodore Hilton and Sheehan Moore's “Futures on Dry Ground” explores the uneven politics of levees in Louisiana and the role of oil and gas capitalism in shaping these new and potentially reductive geographies of coastal planning. Our conversation about flooding is completed by Sara Delany's “Who to Call after the Storm?” which investigates flooding within fruit and vegetable agriculture and the negative effects of too much water on crop production in New England. Focusing on the experiences of farmers dealing with shifting rainfall patterns, she shows how precipitation and emotion effect possibilities for adaptation.

The second half of our collection is burning. Cynthia Fowler's “Pyrosociality” leverages science and technology studies and gender studies approaches to revisit the political ecology of fire in the Blue Ridge Mountains. She asks, “When centering fire, what facts, truths, complexities, and subtleties come to light?” This theme is continued, spatially, with Michael Cary's “Pyropolitics and the Production of Territory.” His piece reviews the concept of territory and territoriality to argue that both are essential to state making and the control of resources, and he shows that fire management is a political process that cannot be decoupled from these concepts. In Deepti Chatti and Sayd Randle's “Disrupting the Grid,” the authors ask readers to think about the relationships between energy grids and climate change, and to notice the ways in which grid development can reinscribe existing social inequalities. They look specifically at public safety power shutoffs related to fires in Northern California, examining how different communities experience events where fires reach beyond borders with smoke, the inability to use electricity, and medical issues. Questions of fire sovereignty arise explicitly in our final piece by Deniss J. Martinez, Bruno Seraphin, Tony Marks Block, Peter Nelson, and Kirsten Vinyeta, “Indigenous Fire Futures,” which focuses directly on relationships between sovereignty, settler colonialism, and fire regimes in California. These authors review research on Indigenous burning as a means to subvert colonial power relations, and they conclude with call for fire studies to center regenerative Indigenous futures. It is our hope that we may all take this message to heart and recenter our practices around “more viable, regenerative futures,” whether we study floods, fires, or other forms of local and global change.