Climate Justice

• Alexander I. Stingl ^[1]
  1. [1] University of Warwick

     University of Warwick

     Reino Unido

     
• Localización: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions / Walter Leal Filho (ed. lit.), Anabela Marisa Azul (ed. lit.), Luciana Brandli (ed. lit.), Amanda Lange Salvia (ed. lit.), Pinar Gökcin Özuyar (ed. lit.), Tony Wall (ed. lit.), 2020, ISBN 978-3-319-71066-2
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Climate justice is at once (i) a particular field within environmental justice (Walker 2012; Sze 2018), (ii) a discourse on fair distribution of (interrelated and interdependent) benefits, responsibility, obligations, and harm, and finally (iii) a social movement. It can also be known as climate change justice (Moellendorf 2015), for the issue arises due to the consequences of climate change. Given the global impact of climate change, which is impacting if not threatening all regions of the planet generally, but with severe local differences in its effects, it can be argued that it is one of the most pressing issues in environmental justice but also one of the reasons why and how it differs from other issues of environmental justice. The two main strategies for dealing with climate change, adaptation (i.e., finding ways of coping with the no longer avoidable impact of climate change) or mitigation (the reduction of climate change-inducing emissions), are entangled with different scenarios for climate justice (Schlosberg and Collins 2014; Moellendorf 2015). The struggle for taking seriously climate justice in general and/or any respective claims made by nations, regions, and groups unfairly affected is why climate justice is also social movement (Sze 2018). Climate justice includes, importantly, epistemic justice (Code 2014), referring to different cultures and ways of knowing the world and thus differences in experiencing climate change (Zellentin 2015; Jurt et al. 2015). Similar to other issues in environmental justice, climate justice takes into account that there are intra- and intergenerational dimensions, meaning that one aspect of the problem is that injustice affects people of the present differently (intragenerational), while some aspects of the problem require us to balance the interests of the presently living generation of people against future generations (intergenerational). Furthermore, it has been shown that there are significant inequities and injustice effects in terms of gender and race. One of the largest issues for resolving the problem of justice in climate change is its historicity, namely, that Global Northern, highly industrialized nations have in the past significantly contributed to climate change in the effort to build up their own wealth and welfare, often by using resources extracted from the Global South and, thus, creating significant global inequality (Boatcă 2016). In order to close this gap, nations in what is called the Global South, who are often also hardest hit by the effects of climate change, would have to increase industry and, subsequently, their contribution to climate change emissions. This complex dilemma, when viewed as a political, legal, and ethical issue, can be described as the general problem of climate (change) justice.