Environmental Justice from a Political Science Perspective

Abstract

Mapping Climate Justice proposes a 3-dimensional environmental justice approach to share economic benefits and the burden of climate change right, just and fair around the globe. Scientific data is backed by ethical imperatives. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) gains and losses of a warming globe are captured to be distributed unequal around the world. The ethical climatorial imperative demands for an equalization of the gains of climate change around the globe in order to offset losses incurred due to climate change (Kant, 1783/1993; Puaschunder, 2017b, c; Rawls, 1971). First, climate justice within a country should pay tribute to the fact that low- and high-income households carry the same burden proportional to their disposable income, for instance, enabled through a progressive carbon taxation, consumption tax to curb harmful behavior and/or corporate inheritance tax to reap benefits of past wealth accumulation that may have caused climate change (Puaschunder, 2017c). Secondly, fair climate change change burden sharing between countries ensures those countries benefiting more from a warmer environment also bear a higher responsibility regarding climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts (Puaschunder, 2019). Thirdly, climate justice over time is proposed in an innovative climate change burden sharing bonds strategy, which distributes the benefits and burdens of a warming earth Pareto-optimal among generations (Puaschunder, 2016a). All these recommendations are aimed at sharing the burden but also the benefits of climate change within society in an economically efficient, legally equitable and practically feasible way now and also between generations. Future Climate Wealth of Nations is derived from climate flexibility defined as the range of temperature variation of a country. In a changing climate, temperature range flexibility is portrayed as a future asset for production flexibility and international trade of commodities leading to comparative advantages of countries. A broad spectrum of climate zones has never been defined as asset and comparative edge in free trade. But future climate change will require territories being more flexible in terms of changing economic production possibilities on a warming globe. The more climate variation a nation state possesses, this novel project argues, the more degrees of freedom a country has in terms of GDP production capabilities in a changing climate. Modeling and empirical validation: These preliminary insights aid in answering what commodity prices, financial flows and trade patterns we can expect given predictions the earth will become hotter. Climate variation based on cyclical changes or climate zones will become subject to scrutiny for associations with climate-based advantages and risks. Economic modeling, cross-sectional world country comparisons, time series and panel regressions will scrutinize temperature data in relation to production in order to derive inferences for future Climate Wealth of Nations. Already now, the degree of climate flexibility is found to be related to human migration inflows. The previously defined climate change winner and loser index is blended with the novel insights on climate flexibility, leading to an unprecedented outlook on future Climate Wealth of Nations in a climate changing world. Lastly, future climate change induced market changes are planned to be derived from scarcity of agriculture production. Individual commodities price distributions will become the foundation for commodity price expectation estimates in the environmental domain back-tested on actual data. In honor of Natasha Chichilnisky-Heal, special attention will be paid to the role international institutions play to alleviate anti-corruption in commodity pricing and trade wars.