Social justice in response to climate change Flashcards
(24 cards)
Why is social justice central to the climate crisis?
- Industrialised nations have contributed most to climate change
- Those least responsible (e.g. Global South, low-income groups) are most affected
- Injustice spans across generations, nations, and within nations
- Worst affected often have the least power to influence climate solutions
- Risk of exclusion from the benefits of a low-carbon transition unless justice is prioritised
What are some critiques of the term “Anthropocene”? (Davis & Todd, 2017)
- Start date should be the colonisation of the Americas: triggered global ecological and societal transformations.
- Indigenous scholars argue the climate crisis = continuation of colonial dispossession, not a new rupture
- Anthropos misleading - implied all humanity equally responsible, masking power imbalances.
- Ignores power, race, colonialism, capitalism
How is climate responsibility being re-evaluated to reflect historical injustice?
- Driven by recognition of climate injustice
Method:
- Set safe CO2 limit (350 ppm)
- Define each nation’s ‘fair share’ of emissions
- Use consumption-based accounting (not just production)
- Addresses embodied emissions
- Attribute responsibility based on overshoot beyond fair share
Highlights disproportionate responsibility of wealthier nations
What does Hickel (2020) argue about responsibility for climate breakdown?
- Western nations = 92% of emissions beyond safe CO2 limit (350 ppm)
- Described as “atmospheric colonisation”
High-income countries have:
- Appropriated atmospheric commons
- Relied on Global South’s resources & labour
- Caused disproportionate harm to Global South
- Hickel: Anthropologist critical of capitalism & colonialism
What did the IPCC (2023) find in terms of global inequalities
Worst impacts are felt by those least responsible:
Inverse relationship between national GHG emissions and climate vulnerability
What are examples of climate injustice within nations?
Urban heat exposure (Hsu, 2021):
- Studied 175 largest US cities
- Higher exposure in Black, Hispanic, and low-income households
- Ethnicity effect independent of poverty → linked to historic segregation (e.g., redlining)
Flooding from Hurricane Harvey (Chakraborty et al., 2019):
- Houston flood extent higher in Black & Hispanic areas
- Also correlated with social deprivation independently
= Greater exposure due to e.g outdoor occupation, or segregated housing + Worse impacts due to e.g access to healthcare, socioeconomic status
= reveals systemic racism
How does international trade reflect social injustice?
- Trade embodies social inequalities as well as environmental damage
- Employment footprint: Map shows Western nations have distant employment footprints
- Wealthy countries outsource labour to poorer nations
- Wage cost differences = key driver of globalisation
- Consumption-based accounting can expose social impacts of labour outsourcing (not just environmental
What is a wage footprint and what does it reveal about global inequality?
Wage footprint (Alsamawi et al., 2014):
- Ratio of domestic wages to wages of foreign workers making traded goodswages of foreign workers
- High in high-income countries:
- Domestic workers earn ~5x more than workers in low-income countries
How are bad labour practices emodied in international trade? and what sectors are they most common?
- Imports and exports of non-fatal accidents are embodied in international trade
- Most common in manufacturing and agriculture
- Agriculture has lots of poor labour practices e.g forced labour, child labour, low-skilled labour
What is a Social Life-Cycle Assessment (S-LCA)?
- Framework for evaluating social and socioeconomic impacts embodied in products
- Analogous to life-cycle assessment (LCA) for energy, carbon, environmental damage
- Formalised by the UN via international standards for methodology used
What is the IPCC perspective on equity in the climate crisis response?
Three dimensions of equity:
1. Intergenerational – fairness between present & future generations
2. International – fairness between states
3. National – fairness within countries (between individuals)
Types of justice involved:
- Procedural justice – fairness in how decisions are made
- e.g. Citizens’ assemblies = public participation in policy-making
- Distributive justice – fairness in how costs & benefits are shared
- e.g. equity in implementation of climate policies
What did Baltruszewicz et al. (2023) find about UK household energy and policy interventions?
- Major differences in transport emissions across income groups, esp: Car use, international flights
Policy recommendations:
- Target high emitters (e.g. tax on flights)
- Improve public transport (infrastructure & integration)
- Upgrade housing (insulation, heat pumps)
What are the two opposing views on economic progress in the context of climate action?
Green Growth:
- Decouple GDP growth from environmental harm
- Strategy: Invest in climate action (e.g. home insulation, heat pumps)
- Idea: Sustainability can drive economic growth (“green developmentalism”)
Degrowth:
- Shift away from GDP as a measure of progress
- Focus: Wellbeing, equity, and ecological limits
- Strategy: Reduce material and energy use, focus on sufficiency over consumption
- Hickel prominent supporter (argues GDP growth incompatible with ecological sustainability esp in HIN)
Describe the Indigenous environmental justice perspective
- Climate impacts are the latest in a series of injustices arising from European Colonisation
- Indigenous philosophy opposes the treatment of nature as commodity, rather the earth has agency and legal rights (rights of nature frameworks)
- Humans and non-humans and Earth have reciprocal rights and duties
Fundamentally different way of thinking to the perspective of western societies
What does Posey (1990) reveal about indigenous forest management systems
- Kayapo Amazonians integrate forest and agricultural management systems - making a continuum between agriculture and forestry
- Involve sp that are neither domesticates or timber sp but have been genetically selected to enhance and modify local ecosystems
- Create islands of forest or apete in the campo-cerrado savanna by manipulating micro-environ factors and concentrating useful varities
Describe Western cultural perspectives on nature
Nature as commodity
→ Western cultures often treat nature as property or resource for exploitation.
→ Reflected in language: natural resources, natural capital, ecosystem services.
Psychological distance from nature
→ Humans seen as separate from ecosystems.
→ Medin & Bang (2014): 98% of Google Images of “ecosystems” exclude people
Capitalist Realism
→ Parallels to Mark Fisher (2009): It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than a world where humans live within nature not under capitalism
→ Dominant mindset under capitalism reinforces human-nature separation.
Reality contradicts the myth
→ Most land biomes are anthropogenic (shaped by human activity), not untouched wilderness.
→ Ellis & Ramankutty (2008): Very little truly uninhabited land remains.
How is the idea of wilderness tied to Terra nullis?
- Legal concept “land belonging to no one”
- Introduced in the 19th C. by by colonial powers to justify claiming and colonising territories
- Argued land was unclaimed and was not being used in the way that powers deemed productive
- Instrumental in the colonisation of Australia - used to disregard Aboriginals sovereignty
What does Fletcher et al. (2021) argue about current conservation of tropical systems?
- Tropical landscapes = high value for biodiversity & human wellbeing
- Conservation seen through lens of ecosystem service = protectionism → humans seen as threats
- Ignores millennia of Indigenous management shaping these ecosystems
- “High-value” landscapes DO require human intervention to maintain biodiversity
How did the Enlightenment separate humans from nature?
Fletcher et al. (2021)
- The Enlightenment, beginning in 1685, coupled with the Scientific revolution had ideals of universiality and objectivity to push against religious dogma
- Fundamentally views humans as above and separate from nature
- Tied to European imperialism → sought to enlighten the world and conquer wildness by bringing order and rationality to ‘uncivilised’ people and nature
How has the enlightenment influenced todays wilderness conservation?
Fletcher et al. (2021)
- Enlightenment binaries remain today: space/time, mind/body, nature/culture, wild/domesticated, human/non-human
- Influenced the representation of pristine, people-free nature in conservation today
- Has little regard for indigenous and local ways of knowing
- Marketing that preserving pristine landscapes is the antidote to the Anthropocene
- Fortress conservation (e.g by WWF) mirrors the colonial displacement of indigenous peoples
What evidence do Fletcher et al. (2021) give that tropical forests are not pristine
- The Amazon, center of domestication for 80+ crop species (e.g., cassava, peanuts, chili, wild rice), which altered forest structure, soils, and biodiversity.
- Indigenous practice e.g Chagra systems in Colombia, create diverse, shifting landscapes that don’t align with rigid Western categories from satellite images “high-value forest” vs. “low-value non-forest.”
- Land use tied to spiritual, economic and cultural life
- E.g New Guinea areas have high linguistic diversity in the same place as earliest agriculture alongside biodiverse ecological communities - still today mapped as wilderness
What solutions do Fletcher et al. (2021) give to combat wilderness conservation
- No single “traditional knowledge” system each is unique and contextual
- Protect Indigenous languages & customs to preserve environmental knowledge
- Need legal support for Indigenous-led territories & decision-making
- Prioritize Indigenous knowledge & rights in national & international conservation policies
What are the key ideas and legal applications of the “Rights of Nature” movement?
- Grants legal rights to nature → treated as having rights like a human
- Earth-centered laws (e.g. Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth)
- Written into law in Ecuador (2008) and Bolivia (2011) → both led by Indigenous presidents
- Aims to shift from exploitative to interconnected human-nature relationship
- Rejects: Privatization and commodification of nature and destructive practices (e.g. deforestation, mining, oil extraction, carbon offsets)
- Recognizes intrinsic rights of ecosystems
Examples:
- Whanganui River, New Zealand (2017)
- All rivers in Bangladesh (2019)
Example: A company is polluting a river.
Compare the western legal framework and the rights of nature framework
Western legal framework
‘Safe limits’ for pollutants, financial penalties for transgressing them.
Rights of nature framework
River has the right to be clean, pollution must stop.
