Geographies of Inequalities: Reflections on My First RGS Annual International Conference

Climate, place, education, justice, humour and some of the ideas I am taking back into my work with schools.

From 1 to 4 September 2026, I attended the RGS-IBG Annual International Conference, held across the Royal Geographical Society and Imperial College London. It was my first time attending, and the scale of the programme was remarkable. Hundreds of sessions unfolded across dozens of parallel stages, covering an extraordinary range of geographical research and practice.

The Chair’s theme for 2026, selected by Professor Peter Hopkins, was “Geographies of inequalities: towards just places.”. It invited participants to explore the complexities of spatial inequality and injustice across society, culture, politics, the economy, community, development, climate and the environment. It also drew attention to what geographers can do about those inequalities, through research, teaching, policy, public engagement, advocacy and practice.

That theme moved through many of the sessions I found most interesting. Housing foundations, flood defences, urban trees, school grounds, climate communication, community energy and outer-space infrastructure might initially appear to belong to quite different geographical conversations. Yet similar questions kept surfacing:

• Who is most exposed to environmental change?
• Who has the resources and power to respond?
• Whose knowledge and experience are recognised?
• Who participates in decisions about the future of a place?
• What would make that future genuinely more just?

No single person could have experienced more than a fraction of what the conference offered, so this really isn’t an attempt to summarise the event as a whole. It’s a personal reflection on the presentations that stayed with me, the connections I began to make between them, and some of the ideas I am taking back into my work with schools and climate education.

Climate change is already part of ordinary life

One of the strongest threads running through the conference was the way climate change is becoming woven into ordinary life. It may be most visible during spectacular disasters, but its effects also accumulate slowly through homes, infrastructure, landscapes, finances and people’s sense of security.

A presentation on climate change-induced housing insecurity in Bordeaux and Rotterdam by Judith Keller of Humboldt University of Berlin, explored how changes in heat, rainfall, groundwater and soil conditions are affecting building foundations.

This may initially sound like a technical or engineering problem, but an unstable foundation quickly becomes a financial and social one. Questions arise about responsibility, insurance, repair costs and whether affected homes or even whole neighbourhoods can remain viable.

The presentation made visible something that usually remains hidden beneath our feet. As foundations shift, so too can assumptions about permanence, ownership, safety and home.

I found myself connecting this with Anne Schiffer’s research into the aftermath of the 2021 flooding in Germany’s Ahr Valley. The flood caused devastating loss of life and extensive physical destruction, although the presentation focused particularly on what followed: contamination by heating oil and household chemicals, the removal of trees, changing relationships with rivers and streams, and the long process of rebuilding.

Familiar parts of the landscape acquired different meanings. Trees could be blamed for collecting debris against bridges, while their subsequent removal was also mourned. Rivers and streams became sources of vigilance, even as residents wanted children to retain some sense of connection with the water and landscape around them.

Across both presentations, adaptation emerged as something lived through memory, trust, identity, attachment and people’s sense of safety. Physical infrastructure matters enormously, although the experience of climate disruption doesn’t stop when the water recedes or when the repair work begins.

Weather, heritage and knowledge rooted in place

I was particularly interested in Isabel Sturges’ presentation on weather heritage in the East Anglian Fens.

Weather is often framed as local and short term, while climate is described as global and long term. Through a physical and statistical lens, that distinction is useful. The research presented here asked us to look beyond that, exploring how weather knowledge, memories, objects and stories help people make sense of environmental change.

The Fens are a profoundly modified landscape, shaped by centuries of drainage, pumping, farming and peat subsidence. Hotter and drier summers, warmer and wetter winters, flooding and drought enter a much longer story about environmental intervention and changing relationships with water.

As somebody based in East Anglia, and having engaged with many different stakeholders in the Fens, this resonated strongly. Climate change meets the histories, livelihoods and identities already embedded in a landscape. People understand new conditions partly through what they remember, what previous generations have passed down, and what the land has allowed them to do.

A related presentation by Sophie Wynne-Jones of Bangor University examined farmers’ experiences of climate adaptation in Wales. Farmers described environmental change through grass growth, waterlogged or drought-stressed soils, pests, livestock health, vegetation and the declining reliability of seasonal patterns.

This knowledge has developed through repeated encounters with land, animals and weather. Farmers were already experimenting with grazing systems, planting, soil management, breeds, water provision and farm infrastructure, while economic pressures, policy decisions and uncertainty shaped what was possible.

It raised a familiar but important question about whose knowledge is recognised. Scientific data and climate projections are essential, but adaptation also requires the situated knowledge of people who work with changing conditions day after day.

Risk does not disappear when defences are built

Research by Danny McNally of Teesside University on living with flooding in Morpeth introduced the idea of “geo-intensities” to describe the shifting presence of flood risk.

Flooding can surge into attention through heavy rain, a rising river, a submerged path, a warning message or uncertainty about whether floodgates have been activated. At other times, it fades into the background. It hasn’t gone away, just become less intense in that moment.

One of the most useful insights was that flood defences can reorganise risk and anxiety. Concern moves between the river, the infrastructure and the people or organisations responsible for it:

• Will the floodgates operate in time?
• Who is responsible for activating them?
• Can the infrastructure be trusted?
• Will protection designed for present conditions remain sufficient as the climate changes?

For me, this has clear relevance for educational settings. Drainage improvements, shading, flood barriers and ventilation can all make schools safer, but resilience also depends on trusted information, clear responsibilities, understood warning thresholds and opportunities to practise how people will respond.

A comparative study of climate adaptation plans in 90 European cities, presented by Lydia Finzel of Humboldt University Berlin, developed this thinking further. The plans were generally internally consistent, with identified risks tending to be reflected in proposed measures. Their responsiveness to hazards previously experienced was more variable.

There is a difficult balance here. Planning should learn from previous events, but it cannot rely only on institutional memory. Climate change is altering the frequency, intensity and combination of hazards. A school or community that has never previously flooded or overheated would be foolish to assume that its past experience represents its future risk. Nostalgia isn’t risk assessment.

Climate Action Plans need to look forwards as well as backwards, considering what could plausibly happen next, especially where risks are foreseeable.

When climate communication produces disaffection

The session on the politics of climate disaffection, presented by Amy Robson of Durham University, was one of the most thought-provoking parts of the conference.

Climate communication often centres intense emotions such as fear, outrage, anxiety and hope. Less attention is given to boredom, numbness, detachment, indifference and resignation. Yet these responses don’t necessarily mean that people don’t give a damn.

The research drew attention to three challenges:

1. Duration: people are being asked to sustain concern about an emergency unfolding over decades.
2. Attribution: climate change can become connected to so many problems that meaningful individual or collective agency becomes difficult to see.
3. Relevance: people may care about climate change while living with pressures that feel more immediate.

I found myself thinking about the common response to low engagement: more urgency, more alarming language, another turn of the emotional dial. If people are already overwhelmed, turning up the alarm might push them further away.

Research by Cameron Coakley of the University of Manchester on climate discussions on Reddit introduced another dimension. Digital platforms enable people to encounter, express and circulate hope, anxiety, anger, denial and despair. They can also allow feeling and action to be delegated. Reading, sharing or upvoting something may create a sense of participation without necessarily changing anything beyond the platform.

Digital engagement is a tricky minefield, but not meaningless. We do need to ask whether it builds agency or substitutes for it, however. This was also the first time I had heard the term “hopium”.

Christina Juhlin of Copenhagen Business School complicated matters further through research on “official hope” in participatory climate governance in Copenhagen. Community participation can be presented as energetic, pragmatic and positive, while institutions remain more interested in making people feel active than in sharing meaningful influence.

Hope needs somewhere to stand. It needs agency, resources, trusted relationships, participation, visible progress and, for me, honesty too.

This matters for climate communication. Strong messages and clear reasons for concern have their place, but people also need practical, credible routes into action. Without those routes, urgency can become another burden rather than an invitation to participate.

Place matters, but place is never only local

Several presentations challenged simplified ideas about place-based climate action.

Research by Joshua Blamire of the University of Wolverhampton into community energy projects showed how engagement often grows through trusted organisations and relationships built over many years.

In Walsall, local organisations were helping residents with energy bills, fuel poverty and inefficient homes, creating opportunities for wider conversations about climate action along the way. Their credibility came partly from understanding local circumstances, household dynamics and why residents might distrust unfamiliar organisations or official institutions.

The work was also shaped by national funding, wider networks and changes in local political leadership. The local was never isolated. Relationships and decisions operating elsewhere continued to influence what happened within the community.

Elizabeth Barron of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology offered another way into this through Emplaced Sustainability. Instead of imagining sustainability as a standard destination reached by following the same route everywhere, emplacement approaches it as a continuing dialogue grounded in relationships, belonging and different ways of knowing.

This feels particularly relevant to school and community climate action. While they need a reliable evidence base and some shared expectations, each sits within its own combination of buildings, grounds, histories, communities, hazards, resources and relationships. A meaningful Climate Action Plan grows from those realities.

I also enjoyed Lena Popova’s presentation on “invisible space” in Sakha Indigenous knowledge, particularly given my interest in supporting decolonial geographies. The presentation explored aspects of place that may not be directly visible or measurable but are nevertheless understood as meaningful and real. It also raised questions about what happens when Indigenous knowledge encounters scientific traditions expecting phenomena to be observed and represented in particular ways.

Stories, memories, sensory experiences, cultural meanings, relationships and intergenerational knowledge all influence how people understand and care for a place. A map or dataset can reveal a great deal, but can’t hold everything.

Environmental justice is about more than exposure

The conference also helped deepen my thinking about environmental inequality.

Research by Ben Wheeler of the University of Exeter mapping urban tree canopy across the UK found significant socioeconomic differences. In Wales, the most deprived urban neighbourhoods had around 17 per cent tree canopy cover, compared with approximately 25 per cent in the least deprived neighbourhoods.

Trees help reduce heat and air pollution while supporting biodiversity, health and wellbeing. Unequal tree cover therefore contributes to unequal access to protection and environmental benefit. Planting trees, however, isn’t automatically a just intervention. Local needs, maintenance, access and participation all shape who eventually benefits.

It reminded me of a project shared by my dear friend and geography teacher Alistair Hamill, whose students were empowered to pursue local change through a tree-mapping GIS project. The local council was impressed by the students’ work and pledged to collaborate with them to improve tree coverage in the area.

School grounds brought this conversation very close to my own work. Julia Neidig of the BC3 Basque Centre for Climate Change presented research on schoolyard renaturalisation in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain.

Greening school grounds can improve access to nature, support biodiversity and make sites more resilient to heat and heavy rainfall. The research warned against using relatively small greening projects as a “magic carrot” for much larger structural inequalities. Schools and communities cannot be handed responsibility without the resources or influence needed to carry it.

School grounds can instead become relational spaces where children, communities and nature develop practices of care. This is one reason centrally funded initiatives such as the National Education Nature Park are so important. They need to be maintained, properly supported and widely taken up.

Across these presentations, environmental justice involved at least three connected dimensions:

• Distributive justice: who receives environmental benefits and who faces environmental risks?
• Procedural justice: who can participate meaningfully in decisions?
• Recognition justice: whose experiences, identities and knowledge are taken seriously?

These questions are just as relevant to a school site as to a neighbourhood or city. Counting trees, measuring temperatures and mapping flood risk can tell us a great deal, but we also need to know who uses a space, who is most exposed, who faces barriers to participation and whose voice is missing from the plan.

Children as geographers and knowledge producers

One of my favourite education presentations concerned a place-based mapping project in Greenock and Gourock, led by Angela Curley, Alice Lacsny and Heather Kerr of the University of Glasgow.

Primary pupils developed mapping and compass skills, explored their school grounds, investigated local identity and interviewed people working in nearby shops and services. They became “roving reporters”, gathering and contributing knowledge rather than receiving a finished account of their area.

For some pupils, a short bus journey into a neighbouring town significantly expanded their geographical experience. Two places may appear close together on a map without being equally familiar or accessible in people’s lives. The mapping became part of how the children developed curiosity, confidence, voice and belonging.

The presentation also included an activity in which us delegates were asked to draw a house and then assessed against criteria they had not been given. It was playful, but the point landed. Hidden expectations can make learning and assessment inaccessible even when the task itself seems simple.

Another presentation was given by Laura Shillington of John Abbott College in Quebec and her 17-year-old daughter, Mila Berdichevsky. Mila appeared in a video speaking to her peers about young people as modern-day “cyborgs”, drawing on Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto. Smartphones, social media and AI are no longer easily separated from everyday life; they can become extensions of how people remember, communicate, navigate and experience the world.

Laura connected this with the importance of sense-making. During an outdoor geography activity, some students photographed the landscape and observed the image instead of their surroundings, while others tried to use generative AI to produce the observations. This raised questions about whether young people trust technology more than their own senses, and what that might mean for curiosity, critical thinking and their relationship with the world around them.

The presentation called for a more intentional relationship with technology. Geographical education can combine digital tools with direct observation, supporting young people to become thoughtful “cyborgs” with confidence in their own senses, judgement and capacity to make meaning.

Who gets represented in educational materials?

Research by Astrid Jehle of Utrecht University on gender and ethnic representation in European school textbooks showed how educational materials communicate much more than their formal subject content. They also send messages about who belongs, whose knowledge carries authority and which roles different people are expected to occupy.

Across the textbooks examined, male characters were overrepresented. Minoritised characters appeared less frequently than their presence within national populations would suggest, while occupational depictions continued to reproduce gendered patterns.

It made me think about climate education materials. Who appears as the scientist, engineer, farmer, activist, community leader or decision-maker? Who is presented as vulnerable, and who is shown creating solutions? Are children visible only as future victims or individual behaviour-changers, or as people already capable of contributing to decisions?

The images and stories children encounter help shape the futures they can imagine for themselves and one another.

Geography beyond Earth

The sessions on the critical geographies of outer space took me well beyond my usual professional territory which, for a space and science-fiction geek like me, was part of their appeal.

Presentations on a proposed spaceport in Talara, Peru, by Evelyn Salas Alfaro of the Swedish Defence University, and the Luigi Broglio Space Centre in Kenya, by Yidan Karel Li of SOAS, challenged the idea that space exploration takes place somewhere separate from Earth.

Spaceports require land, labour, infrastructure, political agreements and relationships with communities. Their development can carry colonial histories and geopolitical inequalities forwards. Even the geographical advantages attached to particular locations, such as proximity to the equator, become entangled with sovereignty, ownership, national development and unequal international partnerships.

Research by Janine Heim of Maastricht University on meteorite collecting and markets showed how outer space is already part of terrestrial systems of ownership and value. Meteorites circulate as scientific specimens, museum objects, luxury commodities and symbols of status, raising questions about who can discover, claim, remove and sell them.

Outer space is not an empty and neutral frontier. It remains connected to Earthly geographies of extraction, inequality, law and power.

Perhaps these presentations might also inform the work of my exogeography Trekkie alter ego?

Taking humour seriously, but not too seriously

The final session I attended explored climate justice, creativity and humour. It was convened by my friend and former research colleague Catherine Walker of Newcastle University, with whom I previously co-authored work on creative, sensitive and inclusive climate change education.

It was also a particular joy to see my dear friend Meryl Batchelder, who hosted the GroundEd conference, among the presenters.

The session explored how humour can make difficult ideas more approachable, help sustain engagement and create space for imagining alternatives.

Research presented by Candice Satchwell and Bob Walley of the University of Lancashire included children’s climate stories featuring an eco-hero powered by pineapple pizza, a heroic goat responding to drought, and an octopus helping an island protect nature and build sea walls. Research with a Vietnamese youth climate organisation explored how memes, games, emojis and playful online rituals could support learning and belonging. I could tell presenter Chau Cong Anh Nguyen enjoyed that one!

I have made my own attempts to use humorous memes to communicate a serious message, so there was plenty here that felt familiar.

Meryl’s aptly titled “No Room for Gloom” brought out her teacher-journalist alter ego, Melody Bird, alongside green hats, mock climate negotiations and climate-themed Top Trumps. These activities gave pupils a way into questions of global power, responsibility and injustice without requiring the learning to arrive with a permanently furrowed brow.

Jen Simpson of Coventry University explored creative subversive agency and the many jobs humour can do. It can hook attention, explain, hold up a mirror, disrupt a dominant story, help people feel more capable, or simply provide some much-needed relief. What works depends heavily on audience and context. A joke that creates solidarity in one setting might alienate people in another.

After several days of discussing climate risk, inequality and injustice, it felt fitting to end with permission to be playful. Sometimes a green hat, a heroic goat or a pizza-powered eco-warrior might be exactly what is needed.

What I am taking back into my work

I left my first RGS-IBG Annual International Conference with a mixture of new ideas, refinements to existing ones and reminders of things I don’t want to lose sight of.

Start with lived experience

Climate hazards are encountered through homes, school buildings, routines, relationships, memories and landscapes. Data helps us understand the risk, while people’s experiences show us what that risk means.

Recognise climate disruption as a safeguarding and equity issue

Heat, flooding, storms, drought, water shortages and infrastructure failure can compound existing disadvantage and affect children’s safety, health, attendance and access to education. Climate-related hazards and disruption belong within the contextual safeguarding landscape around a school. They cannot be confined to estates management or environmental performance.

Make adaptation place-sensitive

Schools need evidence-based support, but their Climate Action Plans should reflect their buildings, grounds, communities, hazards, histories and capacities.

Communicate with emotional intelligence

More alarming messages do not automatically produce more action. Relevance, agency, honesty and credible pathways all matter.

Give hope somewhere to stand

Hope becomes meaningful through resources, relationships, participation and visible progress. People need opportunities to influence what happens, rather than simply being encouraged to feel positive about it.

Treat children as contributors

Children can observe, map, interview, interpret, question, create and communicate geographical knowledge. Climate education should give them opportunities to contribute to what is known about a place.

Use technology deliberately

Digital tools and AI can extend geographical enquiry, but learners also need confidence in direct observation, sensory experience and critical judgement.

Keep asking justice questions

Who benefits? Who participates? Whose knowledge is recognised? Who carries the cost or responsibility? Does an intervention redistribute protection and opportunity, or leave existing inequalities largely untouched?

Leave room for humour

Playfulness can support learning, solidarity, critical thinking and emotional resilience, provided it is used with care for the audience and context.

Protect the breadth of geography

The conference demonstrated geography’s ability to move between environment, society, place, politics, education and justice, without pretending that any of these can be neatly separated from the others.

Leaving with more questions, and that is a good thing

My first RGS-IBG Annual International Conference was intellectually stretching, occasionally overwhelming and professionally energising.

The presentations that stayed with me tended to complicate familiar ideas. Resilience did not end when a defence was built. Community participation did not always mean influence. Hope needed honesty and agency. Place contained much more than could be mapped. Technology could extend young people’s experience of the world while also filtering it.

Across housing foundations, flood defences, farm practices, school grounds, digital platforms, textbooks and even outer space, environmental change remained bound up with power, inequality, identity and belonging.

The people within these studies were rarely passive figures waiting for experts to arrive. Children mapped and interviewed. Farmers experimented. Residents reinterpreted changed landscapes. Community organisations built trust. Educators found ways to use stories, humour and play to keep difficult conversations open.

I came away thinking that meaningful climate action has to grow from the places and relationships through which people experience change. It needs to be socially just, emotionally intelligent and participatory, but those qualities are not a finished checklist. They are questions to keep asking as plans are made, resources allocated and decisions taken.

The conference theme invited us to think about what it means to move towards just places. Perhaps part of geography’s contribution is its insistence that we keep looking at the connections: between climate and inequality, infrastructure and trust, knowledge and power, global processes and ordinary life.

Those connections don’t always lead to neat conclusions. They do, however, help us ask better questions about the places we are creating and who is being enabled to shape them.

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This reflection is based on the sessions, abstracts and presentations I attended at the RGS-IBG Annual International Conference 2026. It represents my own selection and interpretation of the ideas presented. Any errors or omissions are my own, please don’t hesitate to get in touch if corrections are needed.