the journal
2026 Inaugural Edition
Emerging Issues in Environment & Climate
Overview
The inaugural edition of Emerging Issues in Environment & Climate centers decolonial approaches to environmental and climate research.
Decolonial Transitions brings together scholarship, creative inquiry, and community-rooted knowledge that challenges dominant academic and policy frameworks shaping climate discourse today. This edition amplifies work that does not simply address climate change as a technical or carbon-reduction problem, but instead interrogates and reimagines the systems that produce environmental harm, including colonization, capitalism, extractivism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. We are particularly committed to amplifying Black and Indigenous researchers, knowledge holders, and community practitioners.
The journal is intentionally designed to translate complex research into accessible, creative, and community-facing formats.
“A World Where Many Worlds Fit”
Borrowing from the Zapatista notion of the pluriverse, this edition asks:
What becomes possible when climate transitions are guided by multiple worldviews — not just Western, technocratic, or market-based approaches?
We are seeking submissions that:
Engage decolonial research methods or frameworks
Challenge dominant climate policy paradigms
Center Indigenous sovereignty and land-based knowledge
Draw on ancestral, relational, or community-rooted epistemologies
Explore bottom-up, collective, or place-based transitions
Reimagine governance, infrastructure, or socio-technical systems beyond extractivism
Examine how climate change intersects with colonial and racialized power structures
This edition moves beyond decarbonization alone. It asks how transitions can be rooted in relational accountability, land stewardship, and systemic transformation.
Call for Submissions: ‘A World Where Many Worlds Fit’
Decolonial Transitions centers the actions and responses of communities navigating a changing environment. This edition explores how climate change intersects with colonization, capitalism, extractivism, white supremacy, and patriarchy—and highlights pathways toward renewal rooted in Indigenous sovereignty, land-based knowledge, ancestral connection, and community-driven change.
Moving beyond decarbonization, this issue invites readers into alternative worldviews and tangible, grounded actions that reimagine our collective futures.
“We believe that an unprecedented opportunity to uncover those alternative, marginalized worldviews lies in the current urgency to transform socio-technical systems towards more sustainable ones... a Zapatista notion of ‘a world where many worlds fit.’”
— Ghosh et al., 2021
We welcome submissions from writers, researchers, artists, and community members exploring creative, relational, and place-based responses to climate change — including artwork, poetry, and imagery that resonate with this theme.