Prefiguring Multispecies Justice: How Communities Are Challenging and Transfiguring Care, Labour, and Belonging in the Midst of Climate Catastrophe

Formal disaster management plans and institutions are systematically neglectful of the impacts of climate-change-exacerbated disasters on animals, with few exceptions. While animals' exclusion in this context is consistent with their status as property, or parts of ecosystems with no independent ethical value, differently located humans and animals contest this status and the types of institutions that follow from it. In this article, we draw on research conducted with Australian communities whose witness of animals' suffering during the 2019-20 Black Summer fires, and the failure of state-led disaster responses to attend to this, led them to autonomously organise to care for wild and domesticated animals. Their efforts have been largely classified, and dismissed, as volunteerism and (feminised) care. They might instead be understood as prefigurative institutionalisations of Multispecies Justice, specifically as forms of care labour, and integrated within theorisations of, and movement-building toward, just futures oriented around socio-ecological care.