2.1: Defining Climate Justice and Injustice

We are faced not with two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather with one complex crisis, which is both social and environmental. Strategies for a solution demand an integrated approach to combating poverty, restoring dignity to the excluded, and at the same time protecting nature.

His Holiness Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, ch. 4: 139

Climate change and the bottom 3 billion

Climate change is caused disproportionately by the energy consumption and production habits of the world’s richest populations. The richest 1 billion people on the planet are responsible for about 50% of greenhouse gas emissions, while the poorest 3 billion, without access to affordable fossil fuels, are responsible for about 5%, as P. Dasgupta and V. Ramanathan have found.

A crowd-sourced image of the world at night, Figure 2.1.1 demonstrates the disproportionate energy usage among the world’s richest and poorest populations. This image reveals that dark does not always mean “unpopulated.” Dark, densely populated areas are distributed across the world. They tend to be the most vulnerable zones on our planet, concentrated in the global South, among populations who don’t have access to fossil fuels. However, those in the dark typically suffer the greatest harms associated with climate change and will continue to be most affected by climate change into the future.

Figure 2.1.1 In Plain Sight. Installation designed for Dimensions of Citizenship, the US Pavilion at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, commissioned by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago. Installation by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Laura Kurgan, and Robert Gerard Pietrusko with the Center for Spatial Research.

In other words, those who contribute the least to the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change are now, and will continue to be, the most severely affected by it. This phenomenon is called climate injustice. These same vulnerable populations are also less capable of adapting to a warming climate, because they have less access to financial and other resources that might allow them to avoid harm. Climate justice, as a philosophy and a set of social movements, demands that we recognize the imbalances between responsibilities and harms and that we intervene to correct them.

While contributing the least of anyone to the causes of climate change, people of color, women, Indigenous communities, and global South nations often bear the brunt of climate disruption. Climate disruption is another term for climate change, one that emphasizes the way global warming disrupts climate systems and, along with them, environments, economies, and human health. Marginalized communities are among the first to experience the effects of climate disruption, which can include rising levels of respiratory illness and infectious disease, heat-related deaths, large increases in energy costs, and so-called natural disasters that climate change makes more frequent or severe. These communities also bear the burdens created by ill-conceived policies designed to prevent climate disruption.

Figure 2.1.2 People’s Climate March, Seattle, Washington, October 14, 2015. Photograph by John Duffy from Flickr.

The effects of climate injustice have been evident for years. Flooding from severe storms, rising sea levels, and melting glaciers affect millions in Asia and Latin America, while sub-Saharan Africa is experiencing sustained droughts. Scholars collectively call these areas of the world the global South in order to distinguish them from the global North, which includes Europe and the United States. Unlike older terms such as third-world versus first-world, or developing versus developed countries, these terms point to the historical colonization of much of the global South by nations in the global North.

Consider that nearly 75% the world’s annual carbon dioxide emissions come from the global North, where only 15% of the global population resides. If historic responsibility for climate change is taken into account, global North nations have emitted more than three times their share of the total greenhouse gases that we can safely put into the global atmosphere, while the poorest 10% of the world’s population has contributed less than 1% of emissions. Thus the struggle for racial, gender, and economic justice is inseparable from any effort to combat climate disruption.

Climate justice is a vision aimed at dissolving and alleviating the unequal burdens created by climate change (Figure 2.1.2). The topic of climate justice is a major point of contention in both US and international policy efforts to address climate disruption, because it would require wealthy nations that have contributed the most to the problem to take greater responsibility for solutions. For many observers, the path is clear: for humanity’s survival, for justice, and for sustainability, they maintain, we in the global North must reduce our emissions and consumption.

Why is justice so important?

Justice is a core principle of democracy and is tightly linked with environmental and climate protection. How so? Those communities, states, and nations with stronger protections for women and other marginalized communities also tend to have stronger environmental protections. In other words, those societies with healthier indicators of social equality, democracy, and justice tend to protect their environments better as well. If we want ecological sustainability and climate protection, we must work to strengthen our democracies, and that means strengthening social systems that facilitate justice for all. Let’s consider these claims in more detail.

Social scientists such as Liam Downey and Susan Strife have demonstrated that general measures of social and political inequality are strongly correlated with and contribute to greater levels of ecological harm. In addition, James Boyce finds that the level of egalitarianism in a society strongly predicts the degree of environmental harm it causes. That is, societies with higher levels of economic and political inequality are characterized by higher overall ecological harm, and the reverse is true for societies with more egalitarian structures. How does this relationship unfold? Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett conclude that rising levels of social inequality contribute to heightened competitive consumption among a given society’s citizens. This rising consumption, in turn, causes an increase in industrial activity that contributes to climate change in particular and to environmental harm in general.

Scholars have discovered that there are strong correlations between gender inequality and environmental harm as well. For example, Christina Ergas and Richard York find that carbon emissions are lower in nations where women have high political status. Thus efforts to improve gender equality and gender justice will likely be more effective if they work synergistically with campaigns to address climate change. Ergas and York also find that nations with greater military spending have higher carbon emissions than other nations, supporting the work of ecofeminist scholars, such as Greta Gaard, who have long argued that militaristic policymaking is linked to ecological harm.

Research on climate justice reveals that socially marginalized communities face the greatest threats from climate change but contribute the least to the problem. Going further, however, with respect to the causes of this crisis, we find that the contemporary “wicked problem” of global climate disruption has its roots in European conquests of Indigenous peoples and lands in the Americas, the enslavement and forced labor of vast swaths of people across the global South, and the Industrial Revolution. These major social, economic, and technological upheavals also ushered in the Anthropocene—the age in which human activity has begun to affect the planet so much that it is leaving marks in the geological record (Chapter 1).

Finally, while researchers have shown that marginalized populations tend to live in places that experience severe environmental harm, the driving forces behind this environmental violence require more investigation. Traci Brynne Voyles’s concept of “wastelanding” is immensely useful here. She shows how the concept of “wasteland” has been used to define certain human populations and landscapes as pollutable and expendable.

All the research summarized in this section sends a clear message: ideologies, policies, and practices that produce and enable human inequalities not only harm the people whom they target directly, but also drive climate change and environmental damage.

Climate justice: redistributing harms and responsibilities

In 2011, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon delivered an address to the General Assembly of the United Nations in which he voiced the same integral message:

Saving our planet, lifting people out of poverty, advancing economic growth—these are one and the same fight. We must connect the dots between climate change, water scarcity, energy shortages, global health, food scarcity, and women’s empowerment. Solutions to one problem must be solutions to all.

In 2013, Pope Francis launched his papacy with a similar commitment to tackling these urgencies together. In his inaugural Mass, he declared: “Let us be protectors of creation, protectors of God’s plan inscribed in nature, protectors of one another, and of the environment.” Soon after, in his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’, he issued perhaps the most integral and robust plea for climate justice the world had ever seen.* He linked the global fights against poverty and for tolerance and human dignity with the fight against climate change. For him, these urgent concerns go hand in hand:

Today we have to realize that a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach. It must integrate questions of justice and debates on the environment so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.

When Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland, was the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights from 1997 to 2002, she made climate change central in her human rights agenda. She argued that many of the human rights we value as a global community—women’s rights, children’s rights, immigrants’ rights, and the rights of all people to health and well-being, food and water, shelter, and education—are being undermined by climate change. After she left the United Nations, she founded the Mary Robinson Foundation–Climate Justice, a center for thought leadership, education, and advocacy on the struggle to secure justice for those who are vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Though such marginalized communities are disempowered and usually forgotten, they have a right to low-carbon development.

We need to consider both the intragenerational and intergenerational harms caused by the wealthy global minority through its energy consumption and production habits. Intragenerational harm refers to the disproportionate impact of climate change on vulnerable people within our own generation; it is the kind of harm discussed in the previous section. Climate justice means that we have an urgent ethical responsibility to help those who are suffering right now from the impacts of climate change. But we also have to think about intergenerational harm—that is, the harm that climate change will do to those who are not yet born, the populations of the future, who cannot consent to the planet that we are preparing for them. As a matter of climate justice, we need to reduce warming for our own grandchildren and for the grandchildren of all.

Viewed through the lens of human suffering, climate change becomes not only an environmental problem but also an urgent ethical one. Climate justice demands that those who cause harm, and especially those who benefit from that harm, bear primary responsibility for remedying it and for preventing further harm in the future.

In other words, climate justice is both backward looking and forward looking. The wealthy polluting population has an ethical responsibility to alleviate present-day human suffering caused by past acts and omissions, in part by providing aid to populations struggling to adapt. But the polluting population also has an ethical responsibility to mitigate future harm by doing everything we now know is necessary to mobilize a low-carbon global economy. This includes both helping people in developing countries to leapfrog a carbon-based economy and tempering the promotion of our own wasteful lifestyles as the epitome of human happiness.

It could be said that climate justice redistributes responsibilities and harms for the common good. The Mary Robinson Foundation–Climate Justice, the first international organization that committed to climate justice as a human right, frames this as “sharing benefits and burdens equitably”:

The benefits and burdens associated with climate change and its resolution must be fairly allocated.... In addition, those who have benefited and still benefit from emissions in the form of on-going economic development and increased wealth, mainly in industrialised countries, have an ethical obligation to share benefits with those who are today suffering from the effects of these emissions, mainly vulnerable people in developing countries. People in low income countries must have access to opportunities to adapt to the impacts of climate change and embrace low carbon development to avoid future environmental damage.

Figure 2.1.3 The co-author’s son “Marching for Science” in San Diego, California, April 22, 2017. Photograph by Fonna Forman.

There is no time to wait. Your generation will be most affected by the changes that are taking place—particularly the most vulnerable among your generation. Because of the climate disruption you will witness in your lifetimes, you have a valuable perspective on the intergenerational harms caused by climate change. Each of us needs to play our role and find creative ways to intervene in the crisis (Figure 2.1.3). Reading this book is a very good first start.

*Encyclical Letter, Laudato Si’ of the Holy Father Francis, on Care for Our Common Home, 2015. http://w2.vatican.va/content/frances...als/documents/ papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html.