Climate Injustice Research Articles

The impact of climate disaster on international trade: Evidence from developed and developing countries

A climate disaster can be devastating, but its challenges and losses provide some opportunities to other countries. Therefore, in this paper, we examine the impact of climate risk on international trade with a particular focus on developed and developing countries. Using a large sample of 160 countries between 2006 and 2019, we find that climate disaster is positively associated with high international trade. An increase in the climate disaster index will lead to an increase of about 5.9% in imports as a proportion of GDP. This is significant given that the mean of imports of the sample countries is 48%. Regarding the flow of trade, importation is likely to increase by about 6.7% and export to decrease by 0.65% after the occurrence of climate disasters in developing countries. Conversely, we did not find significant changes in imports and a weak association with exports for developed countries. We attribute this differential impact of climate disasters between developed and developing countries to the preparedness and risk mitigation mechanism in developed countries. The result suggests that the long-term effect of climate disasters increasing overall international trade is due to increasing imports in developing countries. Additional analyses demonstrate the robustness of these results to different model specifications and measurements of variables. Our results imply that climate change and its associated natural disasters offer more trade opportunities for developed countries than developing countries, highlighting the climate injustices between the high and low climate change contributors.

Determining spatial disparities and similarities regarding heat exposure, green provision, and social structure of urban areas - A study on the city district level in the Ruhr area, Germany

Heat islands and ongoing urbanization make cities places where the negative impacts of global climate change on society are becoming increasingly evident. Especially the interplay and potential multiplication of heat, low green provision, and the presence of socially deprived urban dwellers constitutes complex challenges. Emerging climate injustices and potential health issues require a powerful counter-reaction in form of adaptation action. For our study, we consider eight cities located in the densely populated and historically highly segregated Ruhr area in Western Germany, which is one of the largest metropolitan areas in Europe with a heterogeneous distribution of socio-spatial problems, economic potential, heat stress, and green infrastructures. We use land surface temperature (LST), data on green provision (normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI)), and social indicators to reveal the relationships between these indicators on the city district level (n = 275). Therefore, we first analyze the data regarding spatial autocorrelation (Moran's I) and clustering (Gi*) before calculating study area wide and city specific correlations between the three factors regarded. Finally, we conduct a cluster analysis (k-means) to disclose similar areas with or without multiple burdens. Our results show distinct disparities in heat exposure, green availability, and social status between city districts of the study area. We find strong negative correlations between LST and NDVI as well as between NDVI and social status. The relationship between LST and our social indicator remains ambiguous, affirming the necessity of further detailed studies. The cluster analysis furthermore allows for the visualization and classification of districts featuring similar characteristics regarding the researched components. We can discern in parts pronounced climate injustice in the studied cities, with a majority of people living in unfavorable environmental and socio-economic conditions. Our analysis supports governments and those responsible for urban planning in addressing climate injustice in the future.

Epistemic silences in settler‐colonial infrastructure governance literature

AbstractThe existing landscape of infrastructure governance discourses tends to focus on closing “governance gaps” commonly based on fractured and opaque neoliberal planning and delivery processes, privatisation and financialisation issues, and inequitable distribution and undemocratic decision‐making processes. These gaps represent a deeply troubling erosion of infrastructure’s capacity to serve public interests or confront crises of climate injustice. However, the literature rarely confronts the uncomfortable politics of decolonising infrastructure or acknowledges ongoing permutations of settler‐coloniality, implicating infrastructural framings of land, development, property, ownership, and decision‐making power. This paper reflects on the current state of infrastructure governance literature about ongoing settler‐colonial legacies in urban planning and development. Explaining some of the ways unceded Indigenous land has been exploited to facilitate settler state infrastructure development in major Australian cities, we then draw a line to the complicities of contemporary infrastructure governance. This foundation is considered using a systematic method to review infrastructure governance literature and reveal stark gaps in engagement with settler‐coloniality and the politics of decolonisation. In light of these silences, we reflect on disciplinary responsibilities to redress research practices and suggest two reflexive approaches centred on to truth‐telling and deep listening.

Multilevel intergroup conflict at the core of climate (in)justice: Psychological challenges and ways forward

AbstractAlthough developed countries have been historically responsible for causing climate change, developing countries are more vulnerable to its current and future effects and being asked to commit to levels of climate action that exceed their responsibilities and capabilities. Climate change exacerbates existing social inequities by disproportionately impacting certain groups (including women, racial minorities, and the poor) more than others. Powerful institutions such as the government and the academy have a responsibility to alter this course and advance climate justice but are themselves marred by inequities. Given these disparities, the question of how the burden of climate change mitigation should be justly distributed amongst stakeholders is of paramount importance to international and domestic climate negotiations. Insights from the social identity and group processes literatures explain how experiences of inequity along geographical and sociodemographic dimensions generate identities and groups. As group members, people are sensitive to threats to the ingroup, experience collective emotions on behalf of the group, and differentially apply morality to in‐ versus outgroups. Members are also incentivized to protect and further their group's interests relative to outgroups. Social psychology offers some promising avenues of research for potential solutions to mitigate the multilevel intergroup conflict posing as a barrier to climate justice. Climate governance recommendations to policymakers and negotiators include incentivizing integrative solutions and fully considering the justice implications of climate policy. Climate scholars are encouraged to pursue interdisciplinary collaborations, improve diversity within the academy and in research samples, and prioritize climate adaptation in developing contexts.This article is categorized under: Climate, History, Society, Culture > Disciplinary Perspectives Climate, Nature, and Ethics > Climate Change and Global Justice

Investigating the Links between Climate Injustice and Ableism: A Measurement of Green Space Access Inequalities within Disability Subgroups.

Investigating the Links between Climate Injustice and Ableism: A Measurement of Green Space Access Inequalities within Disability Subgroups.

An Indian Green Deal: Greening our way out of the pandemic

The Indian economy is facing a crisis at three different levels — health, economic and climate-change related. This ongoing crisis has given India an opportunity to change the course of development, a model where people, not profits, form the core. Based on the Indian economy’s employment-generating capacity, we propose an Indian Green Deal (IGD) that generates jobs and fundamentally alters the carbon footprint of the economy. The programme is divided into three components – care economy, infrastructure, and green energy transition – to address the triple crises, respectively. We show that for the same amount spent, 3.5 jobs will be generated in green energy programme compared to one job in the fossil fuel sector. If the amount promised under the Covid package of the Indian government are spent on IGD, it would generate 22.7 million jobs every year. It also provides disaggregated evidence on the quality of jobs as well as gender and caste representation. As for financing, there are two ways in which it can be financed — an international carbon fund and/or domestic sources. An IGD, financed through these sources, addresses both the questions of the climate crisis and climate injustice in one go.

Reparations

Reparations should be central to political-economic analyses of inequality. But, books on inequality usually demur from a systematic analysis of reparations. Britain's Black Debt (Hilary McD. Beckles) , From Here to Equality (William A Darity Jr and A Kirsten Mullen) , and Reconsidering Reparations (Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò) are three respectable exceptions. Distinct but interlinked, might these books unearth more, if re-viewed together? Combined, what do these books reveal about the three most important questions about reparations? Why are reparations needed, what are the reasons for the limited support for the payment of reparations, and how might reparations be redesigned? Using these books as case studies, this article addresses these research questions. A synthesis of the evidence shows that reparations are urgently needed not only for past injustices, as commonly claimed, but also for present, and future reasons. Persistent myths, ideologies, and institutions tend to be obstructive, but these impediments can be resolved. Even so, reparationists need to also consider new ways of ensuring that, if existing inequalities and social stratification are addressed, the fission will not re-open. Closure must also challenge ecological and economic imperialism, not simply climate injustice.

A Mighty Cooperative

A Mighty Cooperative

“We’re fighting for our lives”: Centering affective, collective and systemic approaches to climate justice education as a youth mental health imperative

Young people’s ongoing, necessary confrontation with painful and distressing realities exacerbated by ecological precarity in diverse contexts has profound implications for formal education systems. Additionally, educational policy in many contexts has been slow to respond to the urgency of addressing climate change, nor has most policy robustly conceptualized a vision for climate justice education. Centering the voices of three young climate justice activists (ages 16–20) in Canada through a qualitative study, this paper explores possible educational responses that recognize the embodied consequences of climate injustice and inaction on youth mental health and well-being. Through their encounters with activism in collective, justice-centered movements, these young people articulate how their commitments to creating more life-affirming and equitable realities by challenging current economic and political structures and discourses are integral dimensions of their efforts to be and feel well (hopeful and purposeful) in a context of pronounced uncertainty and distress. Despite these possibilities, youth participants describe the overwhelming and complex emotions they are grappling with as they face dispiriting projections for the future. These growing challenges are an opportunity to reconsider common “apolitical” and individualized approaches to citizenship, climate and environmental education. Findings suggest that supporting youth to act thoughtfully and impactfully in transforming cultural, economic and political structures and systems that reproduce harm can be a way to nurture meaning, purpose and hope. Additionally, youth participants advocate for integrating robust resources and support within formal education institutions to assist in collectively processing the emotional and psychological impacts of climate injustice. At the same time, findings suggest that the participating youth did not yet integrate conceptions of ecological interrelationship or interconnection in their approaches, offering possible avenues for further pedagogical development.

Unincorporated and Underserved: Critical Stormwater Infrastructure Challenges in South Texas Colonias

Most strategies for addressing environmental and climate injustices in the United States are predicated on strong local governance tools, oftentimes tied to land use and zoning. There is, however, no right to local governance in the United States—a serious issue considering an estimated one-third of residents live in unincorporated areas. As a result, many unincorporated communities struggle to receive adequate stormwater management, particularly in the face of climate change. In this article, the effects of unincorporated status are examined in relation to (in)equitable access to stormwater management in the Lower Río Grande Valley of South Texas. Within this region, low-income unincorporated communities known as “colonias,” unincorporated neighborhoods along the U.S./Mexico border that historically lack access to basic services and infrastructure, form the primary focus of this case study. Recently, several major rainstorms provoked the Texas Water Development Board to identify the scope and source of colonia flooding through a flooding survey. Evaluating this assessment against interviews and participant observations from 2014 to 2020, the source of flood injustice in rural communities emerges as limited available flood mitigation strategies, consistent “no's” from government agencies at all levels, and complex flooding sources complicating equitably addressing flood risks. From this case study, the article suggests how planners and policymakers can provide a path forward to equitably protect unincorporated low-income communities from risks and hazards. Primarily, the lack of mitigation strategies for unincorporated communities constitutes a major injustice when addressing environmental risks and hazards.

Certificated exclusion: forest carbon sequestration project in Southwest China

ABSTRACT This research presents a case study of a high-profile carbon forest sequestration project in Southwest China, which claims to achieve ‘triple-win’ outcomes for livelihoods, biodiversity and climate change. However, over the last 15 years, each household that participated in the project has only received 10–20 USD (about 0.67–1.33 USD annually), despite the requirement for farmers to convert their agricultural land into tree plantations. We argue that contemporary capitalism engaged in climate change mitigation efforts has effectively recast the rural governance of land from a territorial arrangement to multiple actors exerting control over carbon credit certification, which creates a new form of climate injustice and social exclusion in agrarian change.

From greening the climate-adaptive city to green climate gentrification? Civic perceptions of short-lived benefits and exclusionary protection in Boston, Philadelphia, Amsterdam and Barcelona

Municipal governments are increasingly promoting green climate-adaptive infrastructure projects to address climate threats and impacts while maximizing multiple socio-environmental benefits. Although these strategies are repeatedly advanced as “win-win” solutions for all, recent literature has drawn attention to numerous negative effects, especially the displacement and exclusion of vulnerable social groups, pointing at yet another layer of climate injustice. In this article, we focus our analysis on the experienced and/or perceived negative social effects of greening interventions for climate adaptation on historically marginalized groups through a cross-case qualitative comparison of four neighborhoods in North American and European cities (Boston, Philadelphia, Amsterdam and Barcelona). Interviews conducted among a diverse sample of civic groups related to each neighborhood reveal that most respondents highly value green resilient infrastructures for their socio-environmental benefits. However, unless these green interventions are implemented alongside policies that guarantee equitable outcomes for all, then civic respondents mostly identify negative social impacts on marginalized residents, making those benefits short-lived. Most prominent negative impacts include physical displacement and the related threat of more displacement together with risks that new (green) real estate developments and resilient greening will remain exclusionary for marginalized groups. Such similar findings across different socio-political contexts point to the need for bolder policies that guarantee that investments in green climate adaptation interventions secure both environmental and social benefits in underinvested and environmentally neglected neighborhoods and mitigate the negative impacts of such interventions, namely sociocultural and physical displacement and overall exclusionary climate protection.

Separate but equal in the protection against climate change? The legal framework of climate justice for the Caribbean part of the Kingdom of The Netherlands

AbstractThe experiences of overseas territories and how their varying degrees of self‐governance influence climate (in)action are overlooked topics, even though these places are often highly impacted by climate change. Analysing the situation of the Dutch Kingdom demonstrates some of these challenges. The Kingdom consists of the European Netherlands and the Caribbean islands of Aruba, Curacao, St Maarten, Bonaire, St Eustatius and Saba. Out of these, the Caribbean islands are the most vulnerable to climate change, while the European Netherlands has contributed the most to it. This can be seen as climate injustice. Access to mitigation and adaptation mechanisms mentioned in international agreements could be beneficial to these Caribbean islands. However, the international climate change agreements have only entered into force for the European part of the Kingdom and not the Caribbean part due to a territorial limitation. This has several consequences, and this paper highlights two. First, the requirement that greenhouse gas emissions should be reduced does not apply to the islands, which leaves room for unsustainable activities but also overlooks their need for adaptation and compensation for loss and damage. Second, access to climate finance instruments is limited as the Dutch Caribbean islands are seen as part of the Kingdom and therefore do not qualify for international assistance. Within the European Union, funds are available but access to these is not guaranteed, as the experience with recovery after Hurricane Irma demonstrates. These examples show that the issues around climate justice have been insufficiently resolved. There is a need for a long‐term climate strategy within the Kingdom along with complementary funding. Until then, climate litigation could assist in enforcing a duty of care by local governments and the Kingdom to protect inhabitants by using the human rights framework. This would also create a roadmap for other territories in similar circumstances.

(Dis)order and (in)justice in a heating world

Abstract Conventional accounts of the relationship between international order and justice treat order as necessarily prior to justice because it is a precondition for the management of conflict and for collective debates about justice. This contribution takes the climate change challenge as an opportunity to challenge and enlarge this account from the perspective of critical political ecology. This approach highlights the more fundamental socio-ecological conditions that are necessary for the stability and possibility of political order itself. It also directs more systematic attention to how orders themselves disorder the climate in ways that also constitute climate injustices. Structurally generated injustices of this kind cannot be addressed solely at the level of a single regime (via the Paris Agreement). They also require a transformation of the constitutive norms and practices of the international liberal economic order in which the climate regime is embedded so that the order serves the objectives and principles of the regime. However, this is unlikely, and the contribution reflects on the implications for the legitimacy and functional viability of states and the international order in a heating world.

The right to a healthy environment and social and economic rights—responding to climate change in Australia

ABSTRACT The United Nations General Assembly recently recognised the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment. This new right offers to reorient human rights to better address the interdependent relationship of humans and the environment. At the same time, it provides a novel lens to ensure that laws related to the environment account for injustices confronting humans within it. In the context of climate change, and the complex inequalities that it generates, environmental and human rights laws are converging. Social and economic rights, while limited and underexplored in Australia, offer some possibilities, in concert with the right to a healthy environment, to tackle climate injustices. The article suggests that efforts to realise the right to a healthy environment, including via existing legislative articulations of social and economic rights, may provide both opportunities for direct impact through the courts and, more indirectly, support an ontological reframing of the law’s conception of the environment and our relationship with it.

"Unbuilding"—the Remedy for Modern "Slum Problems"

Slums, a distinct social and architectural spatialization, as constantly perceived as squalid, overcrowded regions inhabited by residents widely suffering from economic deprivation, reflect beyond the assumed simple reason of indigence, acting instead as an intricate end-product generated by intertwining societal issues. By proposing the questions of "how do unbuilt (invisible) barriers between climate injustice, race, and social hierarchy inform both the formation and unbuilding of slums?" and "what are the characteristics of slums that determine the regional differences and similarities between slum types?", the paper intends to discuss through the extracted values of the slum presences to foster a direct relation to the city growth. Examining the sophisticated slum dilemma with the method of "unbuilding," the method implies that a genuine scrutinization of the initial causes will be required to discern the phenomenon comprehensively. By cataloging the existing slum into four distinctive categories utilizing the axial determinants of "hope," "despair," "escalator," and "non-escalator," the paper proposed peculiar solutions for the slum formations in Guayaquil, Boston, Chicago, and New Orlean, under the operation of "unbuilding." Thus, throughout the contention over the so-called "Slum Problem" and the pursuit of remedies, the paper purported an elevated understanding of society's natural selection process, racial segregation, and climate injustice that have previously informed the social discordance.

Transnational Insights for Climate Litigation at the European Court of Human Rights: A South-North Perspective in Pursuit of Climate Justice

The global climate crisis is increasingly recognised as an issue of climate injustice, including because it is causing (and worsening) inequalities and human rights violations. Moreover, responsibility for emissions and vulnerability to climate impacts are not evenly distributed. They vary among and within states. In order to tackle these issues of justice both within and among states, litigants have taken to domestic and regional courts to engage in climate litigation. A body of transnational climate jurisprudence is emerging in which courts are increasingly looking to laws beyond their relevant state or region, engaging with the moral aims of human rights law, and solidifying international climate commitments. In adjudicating climate cases, courts have become important sites of climate justice. The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) is currently adjudicating several important climate cases and could become a key player in responding to the climate crisis. From the point of departure that in a time of climate crisis courts have a crucial role to play in advancing climate justice, we conceptualise climate (in)justice and its significance in climate adjudication. Then, we examine how, in addressing questions of standing and transboundary harm, looking beyond the European Convention on Human Rights legal regime to the Global South (South Africa and the Inter-American System of Human Rights, respectively) could offer valuable transnational insights as the ECtHR adjudicates climate cases. In doing so we hope to contribute to the ongoing transnationalisation of climate jurisprudence.

Hope, Pessimism, and the Shape of a Just Climate Future

AbstractThe urgency of climate change has never been greater, nor the moral case for responding to it more compelling. This review essay critically compares Darrel Moellendorf's Mobilizing Hope and Catriona McKinnon's Climate Change and Political Theory. Moellendorf's book defends the moral importance of poverty alleviation through sustainable economic growth and argues for a mass climate movement based on the promise of a more prosperous future. By contrast, McKinnon provides a political vocabulary to articulate the many faces of climate injustice, and to critically examine proposed policy solutions—notably including the indefinite pursuit of economic growth. While both find reasons to be hopeful, their wide-ranging accounts reflect different visions of what a just and sustainable future might look like. They reflect different understandings of sustainable development and the significance of environmental values; the scope of permissible climate activism; and the ethics of geoengineering. Building upon them, I argue in favor of a more pluralistic vision of a just climate future, one that is capable of speaking to the range of moral interests bearing upon the climate and biodiversity crises, and that supports sustainable development that is inclusive of diverse human-nature relationships.

Spatial Hierarchy of Climate Injustice

Background: Climate justice has emerged as an organising frame in the attempt at addressing the challenge of climate change. The principle that there should be no disproportionality in the burden of climate change, which underlies climate justice, is widely accepted. Be that as it may, climate justice analysis is usually based on an assumption that the global climate system is the norm. This article, based on facts and figures, makes the case for a spatial hierarchical organization of climate justice analysis. Methods: Data from four sources are used. These are published researches, position papers by climate change related organizations, statistical bulletins/abstracts of relevant organizations, and field observations/field records. A descriptive approach is the basic information/data analysis method from which conclusions are derived. Results and Discussion: Three spatial tiers of climate change and associated climate injustice (global, regional, and local) are identified, characterized and analyzed. The global one, which is the usual one discussed by extant works, though couched in terms of anthropogenic climate change, has a natural dimension. In contradistinction, the regional and the local ones are purely anthropogenic. The regional component examined is regional transborder pollution and the associated challenge of acid precipitation. Gas flaring in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria and the associated challenges form the basis of the local dimension. Conclusion: Climate (in)justice cannot be analyzed simply from the perspective of the global climate system. A spatial hierarchical organization is possible. Such a framework could be employed in other cases beyond the examples used here.

Advocacy journalism and climate justice in a Global Southern country

ABSTRACT Being among the world’s most affected countries by climate change, Pakistan is facing a variety of cases of climate injustice committed by internal and external drivers. Waisbord’s referred “Advocate-journalist” model carries a good potential to advocate these injustices to stimulate democratic dialogue among the audience that eventually pushes leadership to make eco-friendly policies. This study critically analyses advocacy journalism coverage of cases of local and regional climate injustice in the editorial contents of mainstream Pakistani newspapers by using the quantitative content analysis method. Results reveal that selected newspapers gave inappropriate coverage to climate injustice issues both in quantity and quality. Besides muddled local and regional climate injustice issues’ priorities, editorialists also excessively recommended dirty energy solutions to the policymakers. The final analysis suggests that the findings of climate and energy-related scientific studies were not being reflected in the advocacy journalism contents as well. This failure of “advocate-journalist” model to perform its normative role of potentially advocating the cases of climate injustice with compelling scientific evidence seems to attribute to the political economy of the press or editorial inattention. As a way out of this journalistic lack, Waisbord’s endorsed “civic advocacy” groups must intervene to plug the loopholes.