Compounding vulnerability: impacts of climate change on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank

Coping with (and adapting to) climatological hazards is commonly understood in intergovernmental and aid agency fora as a purely technical matter. This article examines the UN Development Programme’s stakeholder consultations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in order to challenge the donor-driven technical-managerial framing of Palestinian climate vulnerability by showing how Israeli occupation practices exacerbate environmental stresses. While emphasizing the importance of social, economic, and political contexts in shaping populations’ responses to climate change in general, the authors demonstrate the multiple ways in which the occupation specifically compounds hazards reveals it as constitutive of Palestinian climate vulnerability.