Abstract
Scholars increasingly propose distributive justice as a means to foster effective and fair outcomes in climate adaptation. To advance the discussion on its place in climate policy, it is desirable to be able to quantitatively assess the effects of different principles of distribution on the well-being of unequally vulnerable individuals and groups. Here, we present an agent-based model of a stylized social–environmental system subject to an external stress such as a climate change impact, in which individuals with unequal access to resources attempt to fulfil an essential need through resource consumption. This causes environmental damage, and a balance must be found between the processes of resource consumption and environmental degradation to achieve well-being for people and stability for the environment. We operationalize different principles for redistributing resource access as interaction rules in the model and compare their tendency to allow such a balance to emerge. Our results indicate that while outcome patterns and effectiveness may vary among principles, redistribution generally improves well-being and system stability. We discuss some implications of our findings as they pertain to addressing the climate crisis and end by outlining the next steps for the research.
Highlights
We aimed for insight on which rules for reallocating access to the resource might improve well-being outcomes in the community and limit environmental degradation so as to avoid system collapse
Under our basic assumption that resource consumption leads to environmental degradation, it performs best as it moderates consumption from the most well-off and better facilitates the recovery of degraded resource systems
While our model is idealized and abstracts from some arbitrary contingencies, it does recognize the finiteness of ecosystems and is thereby more consistent with approaches that are built on the idea of planetary boundaries [49]. We present this as a useful approach for performing a broad quantitative exploration of the relative merit of different distributive principles in a climate adaptation context
Summary
The intensifying crises of climate and ecological breakdown have as their root cause increasing societal throughput of the Earth’s natural resources [1]. The bulk of this throughput is driven by high levels of consumption by a minority of the global population, with the attendant polluting emissions increasingly degrading the state of the global environmental commons [2,3]. Communities that have contributed little to these crises tend to bear the brunt of their impacts [4], and at the same time they often lack the resources needed to cope with them [5,6] Such inequities arise out of unequal socio-political, environmental, and personal circumstances, which render people and groups unequally able to access resources and exposed to risks [7,8]. These differences manifest both across and within societies, and for a climate adaptation context, they engender unequal vulnerability to climate change impacts and unequal ability to undertake adaptive actions [9,10]
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