Climate Justice Research Articles

5.D. Scientific session: Climate Change and Inequalities: Addressing Intersections and Impacts

Abstract Climate change poses one of the greatest challenges of our time, with far-reaching implications for environmental sustainability, social equity, and economic development. In recent years, growing attention has been paid to the intersecting dynamics between climate change and inequalities, recognizing that vulnerable populations are disproportionately affected by climate-related risks and impacts. This workshop aims to explore the multifaceted relationship between climate change and inequalities and examine the root causes of disparities. In this workshop we will explore intersectionality by examining how climate change intersects with various forms of inequality, including socio-economic and health status, gender, age, indigenous status, and geography, shaping differential vulnerabilities and experiences of climate impacts. This workshop aims to facilitate dialogue, knowledge exchange, and collaboration among public health researchers and professionals. We offer a unique opportunity to deepen our understanding of the complex interplay between climate change and inequalities, shedding light on overlooked aspects [?]. By bringing together diverse perspectives and expertise, the workshop aims to generate actionable insights and solutions that promote social justice, sustainability, and human rights in the face of climate change. The presentations in this workshop are thematically interconnected, addressing key aspects of climate change and inequalities from multiple angles. Topics include: Gender and climate justice, Climate change adaptation equity, Legal perspectives on climate change and inequalities and Climate Change Impacts on Respiratory Health. In conclusion, this workshop serves as a critical platform for advancing understanding, dialogue, and action on the intersection of climate change and inequalities. Key messages • Climate change interacts with socio-economic, health, gender, age, indigenous status, and geography, influencing vulnerabilities and impacts. • Vulnerable populations bear a disproportionate burden of climate change effects, including individuals with pre-existing lung conditions and children.

International Climate Justice: What the People Think

International Climate Justice: What the People Think

The Interplay between Population Growth and Climate Change: A Critical Analysis

This paper critically examines the interrelationship between population growth and climate change, emphasizing the profound environmental and socio-economic impacts on human populations. Population growth exacerbates environmental degradation, contributing to resource depletion, greenhouse gas emissions, and biodiversity loss, which in turn intensifies climate change. Conversely, climate change directly affects populations by threatening health, livelihoods, food security, and prompting large-scale migration, particularly in vulnerable regions. The disproportionate impact on developing countries and marginalized communities highlights the need for climate justice and equitable solutions. This paper explores the health risks, economic impacts, and migration patterns driven by climate change, and evaluates the socio-economic inequalities exacerbated by both phenomena. It concludes by offering a range of recommendations, including the integration of climate adaptation into development plans, increased investment in climate resilience, sustainable population growth through education and family planning, and global cooperation to ensure climate justice. Urgent, coordinated action is required to mitigate the environmental and societal impacts of population growth and climate change, fostering a sustainable future for all.

Intergroup Conflict Over Climate Change: Problems and Solutions

ABSTRACTGlobal progress in combatting climate change is being slowed by intergroup conflict and tribalism. Addressing the intergroup tensions of today is a pre‐requisite for avoiding violent intergroup tensions in the future, tensions that may threaten societal structures we currently take for granted. This paper highlights five sources of intergroup conflict that compromise humans’ ability to effectively and swiftly respond to climate change: political tribalism, populist suspicion of elites, regional differences within nations, international conflicts, and tensions between and within activist identities. We then draw on established and emerging social psychological theorising to describe five strategies for constructively managing this intergroup conflict: maintaining climate justice, reducing disinformation and silencing bad‐faith actors, maintaining cohesion among progressive forces, focusing on trusted messengers, and empathic communication. Throughout we underscore the extent to which policy making and strategic communication can play roles in depolarising debate about climate change.

“It Can't Just Be the Younger People”: Exploring Young Activists' Perspectives on Intergenerational Tensions and Solidarities for Climate Justice

ABSTRACTYouth activism for climate justice is inherently intergenerational. Fundamentally, young activists demand urgent action by today's adult power‐holders for the security and well‐being of their own and future generations. Despite intergenerationality being core to the movement, few studies with young activists have explored their views and experiences of intergenerational relations and tensions and how to advance intergenerational solidarities for climate justice. Addressing these critical topics, the present study used in‐depth interviews with young activists (ages 15–17) in the climate justice movement across the US. Themes generated through reflexive thematic analysis centre on: (1) youths' adoption of “next generation” and “last generation” identities, respectively emphasising the heightened climate risks faced by their own and future generations, and the closing window of opportunity to prevent catastrophic climate breakdown; (2) their experiences of hostile and benevolent adultism; and (3) the need for adults to listen to, take seriously, centre, amplify, and—most importantly—respond to youths' demands. They urge adults, particularly those in powerful positions, to use their age‐based privilege, political enfranchisement, material resources, professional status, and decision‐making authority to uplift young people's voices and tangibly advance climate justice through solidarity‐driven intergenerational partnerships and action. Implications for youth‐centred research and policy are discussed.

Indigenous Peoples' Rights Discourse: Toward Hemispheric Indigenous Climate and Environmental Justice

Indigenous Peoples' Rights Discourse: Toward Hemispheric Indigenous Climate and Environmental Justice

The road (not) taken: implications of health-focused arguments for rights-based climate change litigation in Europe

ABSTRACT Rights-based climate change litigation has become central to advancing mitigation ambition across the globe. This article analyses trends in legal argumentation in such litigation at the supranational level and identifies two principal arguments commonly employed by litigants: the adverse effects of climate change on human health or culture. The study reveals that claims based on the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) almost exclusively engage with health-based arguments, while culture-based arguments are more prevalent in cases brought under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the American Convention on Human Rights. Various factors are explored to elucidate the reason for this distinction, including the types of applicants, the absence of an explicit right to culture in the ECHR, the European Court of Human Rights’ earlier environmental jurisprudence, and perceptions of justiciability. In doing so, the analysis sheds light on the potential implications of the differing approaches to rights-based climate change litigation before the European Court of Human Rights. This includes the Court’s landmark judgment in Verein KlimaSeniorinnen and others v Switzerland as well as implications for future cases. This research offers critical insights on the strategic direction of rights-based climate change litigation, including its possible limitations.

Litigating Indonesian Forests for Climate: Hendrikus Woro v Provincial Government of Papua

Abstract The forestry sector has been the biggest contributor to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in Indonesia. The palm oil industry has been highlighted because it defines how the country can achieve emissions reduction as pledged internationally. Domestically, however, the government continues to expand the industry further to Papua, the last forest frontier, which has been resisted by indigenous communities utilising climate litigation. This article reviews the climate change litigation case initiated by the Awyu Tribe of Papua and demonstrates its relevance to the debate on climate policy in the country. The article questions the legality of court rulings that sustain the validity of environmental approval without prior Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) review and the court’s refusal to examine climate impacts in the proposed project’s EIA document. Consequently, the court decision disrupts the newly established doctrine and practice to incorporate climate assessment within the country’s EIA system.

Climate-related loss and damage in contexts of agrarian change: differentiated sense of loss from extreme weather events in northeast Cambodia

The uneven burden of climate-related losses and damages and its implications for equity and social justice are receiving growing attention in science and policy. Smallholder farmers, indigenous groups, and ethnic minorities are often identified as particularly vulnerable and likely to experience a greater burden of climate-related loss and damage. However, limited attention has been paid to experiences of climate-related loss and damage in contexts of agrarian change and related struggles, especially around land. In this paper, we analyse experiences of climate-related loss amongst smallholder farmers in Ratanakiri province, northeast Cambodia. We derive an analytical framework from political economy of vulnerability and sociology of loss to explain farmers’ sense of loss from climate change and foreground intangible dimensions of climate-related loss. We use a mixed-methods approach with a hierarchical regression analysis of a household survey (n = 295), individual interviews, and focus group discussions across eleven villages. We find that a higher number of livelihood activities, greater values related to land, types of negative impacts experienced, and stronger perception of changes in extreme weather events are associated with a greater sense of loss. Meanwhile, a higher ability to repay loans and secure land tenure is associated with a lower sense of loss. Our results demonstrate how experiential, relational, and normative dimensions of climate-related loss are co-produced through processes of agrarian change such as financialization and histories of land struggles (i.e. through debt failure and fear of loss of access to land). This study contributes a deeper understanding of people’s lived experiences of loss arising from climate change impacts in agrarian contexts and their implications for climate justice.

Transitioning the grid for climate change: power transmission futures and grid justice

Abstract Amid the ongoing international boom in renewable power generation, debates over the future of the grid are gaining increasing attention in the United States and beyond. Climate change poses parallel but entangled questions for the large-scale movement of electricity. On the one hand, grid operation is a profoundly altered undertaking in renewables-dominated grids, bringing new management challenges around multi-directional flows, variability, bids for long-distance renewable power transmission, and more. On the other hand, electricity operators and users simultaneously face new climate-related disruptions, repair needs, and risks. In this paper, we explore an important set of energy and climate justice debates emerging around these combined decarbonization and grid resilience challenges, particularly concerns related to high-voltage transmission in the United States and other countries with developed but aging grids. We consider questions of transmission grid 1) access, 2) ownership, 3) siting, and 4) scale/rescaling. We illustrate these issues via the exemplary case of New York State, as the state has become a high-profile focus for debates around grid congestion, rising financial sector ownership of transmission projects, and siting justice issues, as well as for varying progressive alternatives in campaigns for both large-scale public power and decentralized ‘non-wires’ solutions.

Epistemic silences, subversive politics: post-disaster economic assessments as technologies of persistent coloniality and route to an emancipatory climate justice agenda in the Caribbean

ABSTRACT Economic analyses of losses and damages or post-disaster needs assessments (PDNAs) are silent about the longstanding reparatory claims related to the legacies of African enslavement, colonial violence and indigenous dispossession that compound uneven racialized geographies in the Caribbean. This paper unpacks these so-called ‘objective’ valuations drawing attention to their (neo)liberal framings, technocratic underpinnings, and historical origins in the Caribbean plantation economy. Using case studies of catastrophic hurricanes Matthew (2016), Irma (2017) and Dorian (2019) in Haiti, Antigua and Barbuda, and The Bahamas respectively, the paper exposes critical tensions, knowledge hierarchies, and contradictions embedded within empirical assessments that justify and prioritize preferred policies of powerful international development, financial and governance institutions. PDNAs under-value and neglect important community and local knowledge, solidarity practices, cultural institutions, and relational ethics in the face of climate disasters in these Caribbean islands. Taking a Black geographies and political economy approach, the paper addresses the limitations and risks associated with PDNAs, deemed political tools or technologies of climate disaster that reinforce oppression. To advance an emancipatory climate justice agenda to enable more radical reparative measures and possibilities, the paper suggests that analyses and political strategy must be grounded in people's history, cultural, ethical, and communal governance practices.

Climate justice beliefs related to climate action and policy support around the world

AbstractClimate justice is increasingly prominent in climate change communication and advocacy but little is known about public understanding of the concept or how widely it resonates with different groups. In our global survey of 5,627 adults in 11 countries spanning the global north and south, most participants (66.2%) had never heard of climate justice. Nonetheless, endorsement of climate justice beliefs was widespread (for example, acknowledging the disproportionate impact of climate change on poor people and the underpinning roles of capitalism and colonialism in the climate crisis). Climate justice beliefs were also associated with various indices of climate action and policy support. These associations tended to be stronger in countries with high GHG emissions and where social inequality is also more politically salient. The results highlight the value of climate justice as a motive for climate action across diverse geographical contexts.

Marginalised agrarian traditions as a tool for climate justice

Many marginalised communities have long-standing food-growing traditions, yet the climate crisis imperils global food security and disproportionately impacts marginalised communities. Increasingly, researchers posit that networks of decentralised peri-urban agriculture can strengthen food security. In this qualitative study, I ask: what can we learn from marginalised agrarian traditions that might be useful to those marginalised communities in collectively surviving climate change? To answer that question, I conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 23 marginalised food growers and community leaders in the deindustrialised city of Ypsilanti, Michigan, USA. I find that growing food helps to build resilience to food insecurity and climate change but is difficult because of land injustice. Policy and practice implications include the need for the following: (1) housing justice; (2) proactive planning in areas that are expected to serve as climate refuges; and (3) reparations and land rematriation to address the disparate impacts of climate disaster in marginalised communities.

Learning From Community-Based Efforts Toward Shared Responsibility for Climate and Environmental Justice

In this exploratory inquiry, the research team investigates community-based data practices in climate and environmental justice initiatives. We set out to learn from the long history and current activities of communities seeking to hold corporate and government actors responsible to enact care for the climate and environment (e.g., monitoring air quality and waterways affected by petrochemical industries). Through a critical intersectional care ethics lens, we follow how groups respond to harms to ecosystems and seek healing, positioning their epistemic authority as they work with data (e.g., Ottinger, 2023; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). This work draws insights from inquiries which have examined how communities engage with climate action and efforts toward environmental sustainability (e.g., dos Santos et al., 2024; Kaczmarek, 2023; Nathan, 2012). Through a poster reporting on preliminary research, we share early analyses highlighting communities’ labor of resisting corporate delay, denial, and other dis- and mal-information practices, which slow or block urgently needed action and truth-telling. Methods involve analysis of archival records created by and about communities affected by the Love Canal toxic waste crisis in Western New York. The project aims to appreciate differences and similarities in community-based data practices, identifying further possibilities for information professionals and libraries, archives, and museums to uphold these data practices and associated knowledge and memory work, research, and storytelling. In turn, the team proposes future work to trace the development of community-based practices with climate and environmental data over time.

Environmentally sustainable person-centred care: Occupational therapy students' attitudes, perceptions and self-perceived preparedness for practice.

Climate change threatens the environments in which person-centred occupational therapy occurs. Environmental sustainability is directly linked with the health and wellbeing of current and future generations, presenting occupational therapists with a unique advocacy and activist role. As practitioners of the future, there is an urgent need to understand students' attitudes, perceptions of, and self-perceived preparedness for, dealing with environmental determinants of health and intergenerational occupational and climate justice. A cross-sectional exploratory descriptive survey collected United Kingdom (UK) based allied health professional students' attitudes, perceptions, and self-perceived preparedness for advocating for environmental sustainability in the context of person-centred care. The survey was distributed to 48 gatekeepers in UK institutions with approved allied health professional training programmes (44 offered occupational therapy); 62 occupational therapy students responded. Descriptive and non-parametric inferential statistics were used to analyse quantitative data. Text and short answers were analysed qualitatively via inductive content analysis. The study was co-designed and implemented with MSc (pre-registration) occupational therapy students. Participants (94%) expressed concerns for climate change, with 84% feeling responsible for addressing environmental sustainability in health care. While 64.5% identified climate justice as a top priority, a perceived challenge emerged between person-centred care and sustainability, with only 18% of participants feeling prepared for environmental sustainability in occupational therapy practice. Participants requested education on personal and professional sustainability practices, as well as collective action. Sharing personal climate change experiences, advocating with family and friends, and facilitating connections for collective action were highlighted as potentially transformative educational tools in this area. Occupational therapy curricula should address environmental sustainability through pragmatic, critical, and ethical lenses to enhance students' preparedness for this advocacy and activist role. Reflection and continuous professional development for environmentally sustainable practices is recommended. Occupational therapists believe that it is important to support people to participate in occupations that matter to them. However, the activities that some people choose to participate in may have negative effects on the environment and the planet. It is important to ensure that when occupational therapists support people in their choices of activities, this does not lead to unequal access to healthy and meaningful occupations of others, now or in the future. That is because occupational therapists also have a responsibility to prevent occupational injustice. Occupational therapy students are the professionals of the future, so it is important to include them in research about this topic. They need to develop skills that allow them to simultaneously make sure that they are delivering person-centred care, which is not environmentally detrimental and that does not lead to occupational injustice. Making sure that occupational therapists provide person-centred care while also managing risks of occupational injustice may be seen as a profession-specific dilemma. In this study, occupational therapy students in the UK completed a survey about their feelings, views, and readiness for managing this dilemma. Results showed that most respondents are concerned about climate change, but do not feel that their occupational therapy education sufficiently prepared them to practise in an environmentally sustainable way. They were asked to propose ideas for addressing this issue, and the article discusses how occupational therapy curricula might be changed in accordance.

Against Climate Aid Colonialism: The Case for Climate Reparations and South-South Solidarity

Legacies of colonial rule, continuing neocolonial extraction, and excessive carbon dumping have meant that the majority of those living in the Global South experience many of the consequences of climate change more acutely than those in the Global North. As such, several countries in the Global North have committed to providing climate aid to decarbonise and reverse the alarming climate trajectory in the Global South. Yet, climate aid by and large discounts the internal competencies and resources within the Global South and aligns climate policies with neoliberal market agendas. In arguing against what has been called climate aid colonialism, we advocate for South-South solidarity and climate reparations, wherein climate justice articulated and advanced at the grassroots level from within the Global South is attuned to the socio-political requirements of decolonisation. Together, climate reparations and South-South solidarity can address the structures of coloniality that drive both climate change and climate aid.

Activism as education in and through the youth climate justice movement

AbstractYoung people worldwide are increasingly participating in a global movement for climate justice, yet to date, little research has examined how youth climate justice activists conceive of and experience activism as education. The present study used in‐depth, semi‐structured interviews with 16 US climate justice activists (aged 15–17) to address the research question: How do youth climate justice activists explain and experience the educative power of their activism? The results of reflective thematic analysis bring to light youths' dual roles as ‘learners of the movement’ and ‘climate justice educators’. As learners, youth described gaining awareness of climate justice directly from the movement, as well as learning a variety of skills (e.g., organising, communication, conflict resolution) through their activist engagement. Simultaneously, youth described their role as educators through a range of activities intended to raise awareness among adult and youth audiences, including educational workshops and trainings, school visits, teach‐ins, curriculum development, talk shows and interviews, creating digital resources, social media outreach and public protest (e.g., strikes, marches and demonstrations). Beyond spreading knowledge of climate in/justice, youth activists were also educators of action and social change processes—noting that learning about governmental institutions and political processes enabled them to exercise their democratic citizenship and equip and embolden other young people to do the same (e.g., via political advocacy trainings). The findings of the present study have implications for creating climate justice curricula that not only attend to the scientific and technological dimensions of the climate crisis, but also enable learners' justice‐driven action and democratic participation.

Fuzzy Universality in Climate Change Litigation

Abstract Climate change litigation is developing rapidly and pervasively, emerging as a space for legal innovation. Until now, this process has occurred mainly in national courts. The result is a decentralization of the interpretation of human rights relating to climate change. This article argues that such decentralization could, in principle, have a destabilizing impact on claims to the universality of human rights. However, close examination of this litigation shows that a prototype is emerging, certain features of which are becoming ‘hard wired’ through the process of judicial dialogue. By exploring the content of this prototype, its decentralized development, and its self-reinforcing nature, we see a legal space emerging in which environmental human rights sit between the universal and the contextual.

Collaborative climate labs: A youth-led methodology for co-creating community responses to climate change

This article presents the Collaborative Climate Laboratories (CiCli-Labs), a participatory research methodology that bridges citizenship, science and politics. This methodology is grounded on young people’s knowledge and experience about their communities and seeks to develop a strategy for co-designing climate solutions with local stakeholders. Carried out in schools, the CiCli-Labs engage scientists, activists, business owners, and politicians in discussing climate problems identified by young people. By bringing together different positionalities that emerge from people’s diverse social roles, the CiCli-Labs aim to foster conditions for democratic citizenship and climate justice, embracing the necessarily conflicting yet binding dimensions of politics that can produce transformative and reciprocal learning. Additionally, it responds to the growing demand within educational research for community-based approaches capable of tackling the shortcomings in promoting youth agentic power in participatory designs, often marked by one-off events and youth-washing practices. The CiCli-Labs’ methodology builds on community profiling, through which students identify climate-related issues that work as catalysts for broader dialogues with local actors, challenging traditional adult-centric power dynamics. The methodology evolves through a sequential design based on the adaptation of participatory tools and methods: i) Climate Problem Tree; ii) Climate Social Cartography; iii) Pros-and-Cons Circuit; iv) Solutions Funnel; v) Climate Speed Dating; vi) Hands on Earth and Eyes on Clouds. The methodology was implemented in eight schools in northern Portugal, involving more than 300 students (grades 8 to 12). We discuss the rationale and practicality of the CiCli-Labs while mobilising empirical illustrations of the methodological process and participants’ perceptions about it, thereby contributing to furthering the problematisation of democratic research practices with young people.

Socio-demographic disparities in the familiarity with coastal climate adaptation strategies: implications for coastal management and climate justice

AbstractPublic preferences for coastal climate adaptation strategies have been increasingly documented in the face of climate change and sea-level rise in coastal regions worldwide. However, empirical evidence of whether the public is familiar with these strategies remains unclear. In this study, we conducted an online survey among residents in three coastal counties in Southeast Florida, the United States to elicit households’ familiarity with different coastal climate adaptation strategies and examine the socio-demographic disparities. Using a multinomial logit model, we find that although most respondents are familiar with coastal climate adaptation strategies, socio-demographic disparities in the level of familiarity are evident. Specifically, Black respondents are significantly less likely to be familiar with coastal climate adaptation strategies when compared to their White counterparts. Moreover, having college degrees or more advanced degrees significantly increases the respondents’ probability of being very familiar with these strategies. Respondents’ risk perception and their awareness of current flood risk also significantly influence their familiarity with coastal climate adaptation strategies. Since adaptive planning often overlooks equitable access, and local support is essential for implementing climate adaptation strategies, our results can provide insightful policy implications for coastal management. A lack of familiarity with coastal climate adaptation strategies among marginalized and vulnerable populations can lead to insufficient support for these strategies aimed at mitigating climate risks, exacerbating the issue of climate justice.