Climate Justice in the Global South

Litigating the Climate Emergency: How Human Rights, Courts, and Legal Mobilization Can Bolster Climate Action, 2022

Imagine a Bolivian farmer whose livelihood depends on the continuing flow of a river, without which he cannot water his crops. Due to climate change, glaciers that used to feed local rivers are retreating, leading to a substantial reduction in water availability. After a couple of years, the farmer sees in the local newspaper that a fellow citizen, a concerned industrial farmer, won a constitutional lawsuit against the state of Bolivia for failing to meet its state duty to mitigate CO 2 emissions. The court ordered the state to stop producing natural gas as it pollutes the atmosphere and exacerbates the climate crisis. Suddenly, this first lawsuit creates a snowball effect, and people of all ages start to inundate the already cramped and overburdened domestic courts with similar lawsuits. These lawsuits offer a mosaic of legal arguments and are geographically diverse, demonstrating in stark terms how people's homes are almost uninhabitable due to the effects of the climate crisis. As a result, the state decides to raise taxes, search for new sources of finance to secure public debt, and intensify mining activities to meet its increasing judicial obligations. Does this approach comport with the tenets of climate justice? Is it fair that a country that only marginally contributed to the climate crisis now has to shoulder it? What options, if any, do courts in developing countries have to provide remedies that also tackle climate justice issues? This chapter will attempt to address these questions.

Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 2010

Contestations over justice and equity in the climate regime provide the most striking evidence of the quest by relevant actors to ensure that institutions for global environmental governance are based on widely shared ethical standards of responsibility and fairness. This review article examines recent policy debates and literature on distributive justice and the climate regime and highlights some areas of key research. The review indicates that while discussions on climate justice have gained ascendency within the international regime circle with noticeable impacts, a lot remains to be clarified about the status of justice concepts and how to best design polices that reconcile moral ideals and power politics. Hence, although the current regime performs well in terms of recognizing the need for and incorporating concepts of distributive justice between the rich and poor countries; it has not provided a basis to sufficiently upset the underlying forces and abiding structures of global inequality. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website

South African Journal of Philosophy, 2019

While a relativist view of environmental ethics could be quite difficult to justify, it is also difficult to be so strict about the quest for global environmental justice. At the same time, even though the reality of environmental degradation is plain to see, most African traditional communities, and even their respective states at large, still wallow in poverty such that they remain in need of developing themselves if they are to reach the level of development of the countries in the global North. More so, the majority of indigenous and mostly poor and underrepresented African people in the global South are faced with disproportionate amounts of environmental benefits and burdens compared to their counterparts in the global North. In this article, I therefore seek to examine a normative framework for conceptualising global environmental justice within different environmental, social, political and economic contexts. I consider how best environmental benefits and burdens could be fairly distributed across communities with different environmental, social, political and economic advantages. In the end, I appeal to John Rawls's conception of distributive justice as a framework for arriving at an acceptable view of global environmental justice that takes into account the circumstances of the global South.

2016

Climate change is a serious global issue, as it affects all components of the Earth, including humanity. This book deals with the obvious difficulties at the time of guaranteeing the existence of climate justice, given the heterogeneity of the availability of resources, and the prioritisation of the interests of certain countries regarding those of others.

In this article, I examine matters concerning justice and climate change in light of current work in global justice. I briefly discuss some of the most important contemporary work by political philosophers and theorist on global justice and relate it to various considerations regarding justice and climate change. After briefly surveying the international treaty context, I critically discuss several issues, including climate change and human rights, responsibility for historical emissions and the polluter-pays principle, the ability to pay principle, grandfathering entitlements to emit greenhouse gasses, equal per capita emissions entitlements, the right to sustainable development, and responsibility for financing adaptation to climate change. This set of issues does not exhaust the list of considerations of global justice and climate change, but it includes some of the most important of those considerations.

Climate Prospects, 2022

One of the persistent claims among the diverse debates and struggles in climate change is climate justice. Although climate change is impacting the globe wholly, it does not impact all nations and groups equally. Not only that, but also the very contribution to the formation, increase, and continuity of greenhouse gases differs among countries, as not all states contribute equally to the global emissions of greenhouse gases. Even within states, claims of climate justice are raised by MAPA (Most Affected Peoples and Areas)1 as climate changes hit disproportionately across the unequal lines of income, social status, gender, and urbanity. An extra demand was introduced to the climate justice sophisticated dilemmas: the temporal/climate justice or intergenerational justice that considers the demands of youth and the fate of future generations. However, through these entangled lines of debates, the discourse of climate justice tends more and more to forget its main mission. It is to understand the needs of underdeveloped counties to develop and industrialise, and this requires slower paces for curbing climate changes unlike the developed world. Yet, the current global discourse on climate justice tends to ignore this demand and press more for a concerted global action using new and challenging claims for climate justice.

Geography Compass

There has been a recent increase of interest within the academic literature on the justice issues posed by climate change and the human responses to its present and forecasted effects. In two parts (here and in a previous article), we review and synthesize the recent literature by asking what climate justice concerns have been identified within three related realms: (i) the characterization of climate change itself and the assignment of responsibility for that change; (ii) the differential or uneven impacts of climate change; and (iii) the actions taken to address the problems associated with climate change, including both mitigation and adaptation. Here in Part 2, we focus on the justice concerns of climate action, examining the scholarship on climate change mitigation mechanisms formulated at the international level (i.e., REDD+, CDM) and climate change adaptation projects and finance. We argue that geographers are well-positioned to conduct (and already well engaged in) research on the local climate justice paradoxes emerging from the currently uncritical focus of climate action policy on justice at the level of the national state.

2014

It is widely recognized that Climate Change (CC) is a multidimensional, spatiotemporal and multi scale problem. These features raise an issue of framing: this means that it is difficult to conceptualize such a problem. Hence we shall discuss whether to approach it as a global or an international issue and whether or not it encompasses features of global justice. In order to do so we shall define a typical issue of Global Justice to see if CC falls into such a definition. The argument of this paper is that even though these two issues share some characteristics, the latter is a wicked problem that entails issues related to collective action and future generations. If the old paradigms have failed in recognizing such an aspect, then CC must be addressed through a new perspective into the larger framework of Sustainable Development (SD). Still a constructive debate on which actors should be involved is needed. The thesis of this paper is that if Global Governance has failed a new agent must be selected and this agent must be the community of people who is more efficient when pushing governments in acting against CC. At the end the problems related to our theory will be set forth.

Brazilian Political Science Review, 2025

This article explores and evaluates recent conceptual and theoretical developments in the literature on climate justice. Initially shaped by the first generation of IPCC reports and rooted in applied ethics, early climate justice debates framed the climate crisis mainly as a mitigation issue, exacerbated by global and intergenerational collective action dilemmas, requiring ethical principles for resolution. However, with increasingly dire climate forecasts and the policy inertia of the past three decades, climate justice theories have shifted toward a political economy-centered approach. This shift reframes the issue from simply setting just emissions standards to addressing questions of productive justice within a historically situated global energy regime. The article concludes by addressing two critical challenges for productionfocused climate justice theories: how to implement radical political action and how to reconceptualize our normative relationship with future generations.

The Cambridge Handbook of Environmental Justice and Sustainable Development, edited by SA Atapattu, CG Gonzalez & SL Seck, 2021

We are witnessing environmental change unseen in millions of years: The sixth mass extinction of species, the changing climate, the dying oceans and dwindling forests, the spreading deserts, the increasing toxicity of our water, air and soil, and the complex interrelatedness between these phenomena. In attempting to formulate adequate responses, communities, activists, technical experts, academics, as well as law and policymakers, are increasingly turning to the notion of environmental justice for guidance. Before examining reasons for such a turn, it is worth stating that I am among those making this move, and this Chapter is self-reflexive participation in constructing what environmental justice means for the Global South. I am an international law scholar and practitioner in the Global South and part of the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) movement. My assessment of environmental justice is colored by my location, profession, and politics. I judge the utility of environmental justice against the backdrop of how effective international law has heretofore been for addressing the environmental concerns of the Global South. The concept of environmental justice has its origins in the United States in the 1980s when it was used to describe the unequal impact of industrial pollution on racial minorities. From these beginnings, over the last four decades the idea has blossomed, expanding both geographically and historically to encompass variegated environmental struggles worldwide, including those from centuries past. Why does this concept have such resonance and wherein lies its usefulness? This chapter examines these questions from the point of view of the Global South. I begin with some background on what is meant by the Global South and by environmental justice. I then use the customary four-pillar formulation of environmental justice – distributive justice, procedural justice, corrective justice, and social justice – to explain the different theoretical and practical ways in which this concept is helpful for understanding environmental struggles across the Global South.