Concept Of Environmental Justice Research Articles

Ecology and Justice: From Environmental Justice to Integral Ecology of «Laudato si’»

Until recently, in the social teaching of the Church, the principle of social justice has been primarily related to issues of poverty, social inequalities, wealth distribution, and goods. Pope Francis extends this understanding to environmental issues. While diagnosing and describing the contemporary ecological crisis (our inability to resolve it in particular), he identifies the same mindset and mechanisms underlying both the social and ecological crises. Pope Francis's encyclical Laudato si’ is, therefore, a revolutionary text, which, based on integral ecology, reintroduces justice (similarly to Rerum Novarum over 130 years ago) as the key to addressing a new social issue – the contemporary ecological crisis. The comprehensive perspective on the contemporary global crisis as a socio-ecological crisis, in Laudato si’ finds its reference in the developed concept of Environmental Justice – an ecological justice as a new type of social justice. The viewpoint of a moral theologian allows us to perceive the duties associated with it not only as a legal obligation (debitum iuridicum) but also more deeply as a moral obligation (debitum morale).

Creating pathways to just and sustainable food systems with citizen assemblies

Food systems affect and are affected by the interrelated crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, resource depletion and health, amongst others. Transforming to sustainable approaches is vital, yet entangled with uncertainties, complexity and a great value diversion with stakeholders. Deliberative processes such as citizen assemblies offer a valuable contribution to such a transformation, since the crises and their responses affect everyday life, and therefore inviting individual and collective action. Still, who is included and whose knowledge counts affects outcomes. Theoretically anchored in concepts of environmental justice, our study analyses three nation-wide citizens’ assemblies on climate change and food systems from Western Europe. It assesses (a) how citizens’ assemblies can incorporate a broad set of viewpoints and design more substantive political answers to current crises, and (b) whether citizens’ assemblies include environmental justice aspects to facilitate social change. The paper argues that systematic and methodologically reflected inclusion of various positionalities can inspire decision-making processes in that they incorporate procedural, recognition, and distributional justice to address problems of climate change or modern food systems. It concludes with offering further approaches to include more than scientific knowledge in deliberative processes for a just transformation towards sustainability.

Beyond Protection, toward Respect: Struggle for Environmental Justice in the Kendeng Mountains

The cement industry is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than international air traffic, it takes up massive amounts of water and energy in the production process and creates highly destructive stone pit mines. The case we are presenting here stands for a complex transnational struggle for environmental justice involving the indigenous Sedelur Sikep community and a subsidiary of the German HeidelbergCement AG linking the Javanese lime stone landscapes of the Kendeng mountains with nodes of decision-making in Jakarta and Germany. The Kendeng mountains on the island of Java are important sites of social and cultural reproduction for the Sedelur Sikep, providing important ecosystem services. The community rejects the market economy and in particular the trading of products they have not produced themselves. Their practices have contributed to the conservation of this biodiversity rich landscapes for centuries. The plans of the HeidelbergCement AG to construct a cement factory raises concerns among the Sedelur Sikep. The group worries that the factory and the stone pit mine alter the hydrological cycle affecting their wet-rice fields and ultimately their lifestyles. Despite protests by Sedelur Sikep and allied conservation and human-rights organizations, the subsidiary of Heidelberg Cement AG hold son to its plans, referring to a completed environmental impact assessment and related permits.Building on the concepts of environmental justice and epistemic justice, we investigate how the Sedelur Sikep, together with conservation and human-rights organizations have (so far) successfully prevented the construction of the cement factory by challenging the procedural aspects of the permit process, stressing their role as indigenous communities and by challenging dominant forms of knowledge production used in environmental impact assessments. We show how successful resistance is organized employing the mainstream nature conservation narrative. We also show that the employment of different knowledge system is part of a strategy, while the groups own understanding of respecting and living with the mountain goes beyond this mainstream narrative.

Analyzing Ecotheology from The Perspective of Islam and Christianity

Religious teachings are closely related to the ecological dimension which, after being reinterpreted, eventually led to the term ecotheology. Through previous studies, it was found that one of the religions that contain these values ​​is Islam and Christianity. This study aims to answer the formulation of the problem in the form of how the concept of ecotheology exists in Islam and Christianity and how to compare the concept of ecotheology in the two religions in the study of Soren Kierkegaard's existentialist philosophy. This research is a literature study with a comparative approach. The findings of this study conclude that in both religions there is a strong emphasis on the role of humans as guardians of the environment, the concept of environmental justice, the position of God as giver of responsibility, the existence of collectivity, and spiritual values. in the ecological role of humans. In Islam itself, through the Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah organizations, the collectivity is very visible. The main difference between the two lies in the doctrinal footing and organization of the movement.

Environmental justice and ecological civilization in the Pearl River Delta, China

ABSTRACT The central government of China aims to transform the Pearl River Delta (PRD) from a polluting and low value-added global factory to a sustainable region. The transformative vision of the PRD is underpinned by the ecological civilization concept. While ecological civilization represents a significant initiative in moving toward sustainable development, China’s top-down and command-and-control mode of environmental governance may fall short of addressing multi-dimensional and multi-scalar social and environmental justice issues of the PRD cities. The authors therefore suggest embracing the concept of environmental justice to enhance ecological civilization, with the aim of benefiting every stratum of society. The concept of environmental justice is multi-faceted, embracing recognition, procedural, distribution and compensatory justice at different geographical scales, often calling for institutional changes. Without environmental justice, a harmonious and sustainable PRD would not be possible. In recent years, China has made unprecedented institutional adjustments to deal with environmental issues, such as conducting annual “health screening” and five-yearly thorough evaluations to monitor conservation and development. To embrace environmental justice, legislative changes are required to recognize individual environmental rights through collective action and public participation, incorporating citizens’ inputs to the appraisal of cadres, and establishing intergovernmental institutionalized organizations.

Advancing Sustainability and Social Justice in the Global South

Harmful anthropogenic activities adversely affect Indigenous populations, such as the Inuit people and Nigeria’s Ogoni people. Environmental degradation disparately burdens such communities, thus making them to seek for environmental justice. Tribunals at all levels have affirmed that failing to safeguard the environment violates human rights, especially for Indigenous people who need a healthy environment, food, and access to resources to survive. The Global South continues to grapple with a plethora of issues, including ecological unsustainability, poverty, and inequality, but issues of justice are often disregarded in sustainability-oriented projects. Therefore, there is a need for countries in this region to integrate social justice into environmental sustainability. The concept of environmental justice traces its origins to the US during the 1980s when scholars used it to describe the unequal effect of industrial pollution on the country’s racial minorities. The idea has significantly blossomed during the last five decades, expanding historically and geographically to cover various global environmental struggles. This article explores why the concept of social justice has resonance and usefulness for advancing sustainability and why it is timely for the concept to be considered for the Global South. It delves into these issues with a specific focus on the Global South, examining case studies from various countries in the region and exploring key insights from the Global North.

A LEGAL DISCOURSE ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CRIMINALITY AND ENVIRONMENT

There is no doubt that crime is one of the most serious challenges ever mankind faced with, it is the general feeling that the curse of crime is increasing and the situation is deteriorating. Though attempts have been made to reduce the ratio of crime from many angles like through policy implementation and punishments, but this paper tries to highlight the relationship between crime and environment. The paper commence with a brief overview of environment; how human being interacts and changes the environment, and goes further providing a brief discussion about the interaction between crime and both natural as well as physical environmental factors. The paper is focused on the concept of environmental justice and examines the complex relation between crime and environment and leads to control crime through environmental design. It is hoped that this information should help in developing the new and innovative ways to better serve our community.

Environmental justice in South Africa: the dilemma of informal settlement residents

The concept of environmental justice is well established in the literature; however, scholars still battle to agree on what it really means. This concept has become more relevant to the studies of informal settlements amongst others. The location and environmental variables in informal settlements suggests a variety of injustices that comes with location, limited access to water, poor or lack of sanitation, challenges with transport availability, accessibility, affordability, and lack of other social amenities. These and many other socio-economic needs forms part of the value chain of environmental justice debates across the world. This paper deals with environmental justice in the informal settlements of Kosmos, in the Madibeng Local Municipality, Bojanala Region in the North-West Province of South Africa. The paper highlights some of the environmental challenges faced by the informal settlement residents such as pollution, waste management (landfill sites, waste collection) sanitation and water provision. The paper explores how the Kosmos informal settlement community has been excluded from decision making processes regarding their own environment and considers the levels of environmental injustices commonly associated with this kind of practice.

Using anticipation to unveil drivers of local livelihoods in Transfrontier Conservation Areas: A call for more environmental justice

AbstractCalling on the concept of environmental justice in its distributive, procedural and recognition dimensions, we implemented a coelaborative scenario building approach to explore sustainable livelihoods pathways in four sites belonging to two Transfrontier Conservation Areas (TFCAs) in southern Africa.Grounded on participation and transdisciplinarity, as a foundation for decolonised anticipatory action research, we aimed at stimulating knowledge exchange and providing insights on the future of local livelihoods engaging experts living within these TFCAs.Our results show that wildlife and wildlife‐related activities are not seen as the primary drivers of local livelihoods, despite the focus and investments of dominant stakeholders in these sectors. Instead, local governance and land use regulations emerged as key drivers in the four study sites. The state of natural resources, including water, and appropriate farming systems also appeared critical to sustain future livelihoods in TFCAs, together with the recognition of indigenous culture, knowledge and value systems.Nature conservation, especially in Africa, is rooted in its colonial past and struggles to free or decolonise itself from the habits of this past despite decades of reconsideration. To date, the enduring coloniality of conservation prevents local citizens from truly participating in the planning and designing of the TFCAs they live in, leaving room for limited benefits to local citizens and often limiting Indigenous people's capacity to conserve.A practical way forward is to consider environmental justice as a cement between the two pillars of the TFCA concept, that is, nature conservation and socio‐economic development of local or neighbouring communities, as part of a more broadly and urgent need to rethink the relationships between people in, and with, the rest of nature.Read the freePlain Language Summaryfor this article on the Journal blog.

Where is environmental justice? A review of US urban forest management plans

The distribution of trees and access to nature is rarely equitable across urban neighborhoods. This injustice is present in many cities, and its origins are predominantly rooted in enduring procedural and recognitional injustices. The purpose of this research was to systematically investigate Urban Forest Management Plans (UFMPs) prepared by municipalities across the United States (107 total) for their mention and explanation of environmental justice themes relevant to urban forestry. UFMPs describe municipal urban tree-planting and stewardship goals as well as pathways for both implementation and monitoring. Using a mixed-method approach that combines qualitative content analysis and quantitative measurement, we interrogated UFMPs for reference to three specific environmental justice pillars: distribution, procedure, and recognition. Mentions and explanations of these concepts were identified and counted for all UFMPs. Summary counts were then investigated for association with a UFMP’s publication year, its municipal population, and its racial composition. The frequency of reference to environmental justice themes was greater in UFMPs published more recently and whose authoring municipalities have a larger population. A positive association exists between the proportion of Black residents in a city with an UFMP and the frequency of identified distributional justice explanations. While a positive association with procedural justice mentions was found with the proportion of white residents in UFMP authoring cities, environmental justice, overall, is not a central theme across most UFMPs published to date. More generally, we discovered that where UFMPs referenced environmental justice concepts, it was often brief and lacking in substance; recognitional justice themes were absent in almost all documents. Improving environmental justice goals and implementation strategies in UFMPs that validate the perspectives and experiences of residents can strengthen accountability between urban foresters and the communities they serve.

한국 환경정의 증진을 위한 관련 법·제도 및 정책의 환경정의성 평가 및 개선방향

This study aimed to evaluate environmental laws, institutions, and policies to promote environmental justice and suggest improvements based on the results. We defined the concept of environmental justice in Korea, evaluated the law, system, and policies according to the evaluation framework that they are based on, and suggested a direction of improvement. The main results of our evaluation are summarized as follows: 1) various policies, laws, and institutions that cause environmental problems in Korea do not consider the social weak or consider enough; 2) there was a lack of strategic plans to release the negative distribution effects of the selection and operation of environmental policies; 3) the sustainability of environmental policies and businesses, which includes the concept of environmental justice, has not been assessed and diagnosed. Based on our evaluation, directions for improving environmental justice were suggested.

Beyond fairness: the Covid-19 pandemic as an expression of environmental injustice

ABSTRACT The paper sets out to explore the significance of the concept of environmental justice for a critical study of the Covid-19 pandemic. This task involves questioning the prevailing equation of justice with fairness, the limits of which have become manifest during the pandemic. In its place, a more holistic conceptualization is required, which registers the material environment as a constitutive dimension of the actuality of justice. It is toward such a holistic conceptualization that environmental justice discourse points. Yet, to fully meet its critical potential, the notion of environmental justice needs to widen its scope beyond problems of unequal distribution and disproportionate exposure of disenfranchized groups. Moreover, it must confront its own distributional logic, which ends up reducing the concept's potency and actuality to an ethical judgment on the current state of the world, whose failure to live up to a set ideal is seen as leading to environmental disaster. This critical confrontation will be accomplished through a materialist theorization of justice as a diagrammatic process of environment-making. Looking at the Covid-19 pandemic through this theoretical lens, it will be conceived as an ‘ethological accident’, which expresses in its very contingency an injustice that is integral to capitalist environments.

Social Studies Teacher Candidates’ Views on Environmental Justice

Environmental justice, which is related to the concept of social justice; It can be defined as the equal protection of everyone from harmful environmental influences, regardless of their age, culture, ethnicity, gender and race. Therefore, the right to live in a safe and healthy environment is the main emphasis of environmental justice. In addition, the participation of citizens in the decisions to be taken on environmental issues and taking into account their concerns about the environment are important aspects of the concept of environmental justice. The focus of the social studies course on daily life, its geographical, human and social analysis of environmental issues and its aim of citizenship education carry this course to an important place in gaining the understanding of environmental justice to individuals. For this reason, social studies teachers are expected to be aware of the concept of environmental justice and to carry out activities that can improve this concept in their students. The aim of this research is to determine the environmental justice views of social studies teacher candidates. The data of this study, which was carried out in the basic qualitative research design, were obtained through semi-structured interviews. The data were analyzed inductively. It is seen that social studies teacher candidates define environmental justice as fair distribution of resources, protection of natural resources and animals, high quality of life and being equidistant from dangers. Pre-service teachers who stated that environmental justice education will raise conscious and environmentally friendly individuals think that this concept is directly related to social studies. In line with the results of the study, pre-service teachers suggest placing the concept of environmental justice in the social studies curriculum and creating examples of activities that teachers can benefit from in line with this concept.

Understanding Pollution in China through the Lens of Environmental Justice

Environmental Justice is based on the principle that all people have a right to be protected from environmental pollution, and to live in and enjoy a clean and healthful environment, in which the essence of the theory is about the fair distribution of environmental benefits and responsibilities. Taking mass incidents in China from the 1990s to the beginning of the 21st century as examples, this paper illustrates that the lack of understanding and demonstration of three dimensions of environmental justice: distribution, political administration, and social recognition, has fundamentally led to severe environmental conditions in China, notably in the form of heavy environmental pollution. This paper suggests to highlight the "injustice" embedded in Chinese pollution issues, which usually hidden behind the common "excuse" of rapid urbanization and economic development, through establishing the concept of environmental justice, paying attention to economic and environmental policies and focusing on humanistic concerns.

A Dozen Images Made in or Near Youngstown, Ohio, That Show Why People Need Both Jobs and Fish

Economy vs. ecology. That’s one way to frame the debate that once raged in Youngstown, Ohio, between those who focused on the health of the Mahoning River and those who gave priority to the health of the local economy and the jobs it provided. The latter point of view was often stated in terms of ‘Jobs, not fish!’ and its proponents asked: Compared to jobs in steel mills, which make it possible for workers to have homes and a decent way of life, what does it matter that fish can’t live in the river? Initially, the steel industry benefitted a surprisingly small number of people, mostly owners and investors who treated workers as a resource to be exploited, much like the air and water. But later, thanks to union struggles, workers lived well in the Mahoning Valley, and environmental problems, such as a dirty river, were viewed as a necessary evil. In fact, the foulness of the river assured residents that the mills were going strong and were a source of prosperity. In Youngstown today, deindustrialization has made economic insecurity a fact of life, and the Mahoning, once known as the dirtiest river in the United States, is home to many species of fish. The story of the changes that have taken place in the river landscape centers around the supposed incompatibility of having both jobs along the river’s banks and fish in its waters. Ideas from cultural geography can teach us how to view a landscape where so much conflict has played out.
 When geographer James S. Duncan presented the idea of a landscape as texts which communicate and transmit information, he also argued that reading the landscape can reveal how power relations have played out in a given region. Sherry Lee Linkon and John Russo built on similar notions in Steeltown USA: Work and Memory in Youngstown as they showed how people's memories, experiences, and struggles are represented in the landscape.  Linkon & Russo also noted that conflict and landscape have a reciprocal relationship. ‘Landscapes not only are constructed by economic and social conflict,’ they stated, ‘but also reinforce such divisions of power.’ ( Linkon & Russo, 2002, pp. 15-16). Such a reading of the Mahoning River landscape yields a complex story about the ways people transformed the natural world in order to benefit from it and then lived with the environmental consequences of that transformation. Though this story is very much about how power and class relations have played out there, in the twentieth century such conflict was often overshadowed by tensions between advocates for steel workers and advocates for the river. Recently, however, the growing understanding of the concept of environmental justice, which has been applied to working-class issues by, among others, Christina Robertson & Jennifer Westerman in their call for a working-class ecology (Robertson & Westerman, 2015) and Karen Bell in her agenda for a just transition to sustainability (Bell, 2020), lays the groundwork for alliances between environmentalists and working-class people that were not present when the Mahoning River was an ‘industrial stream.’ Cultural geographers have also shown us that depictions of a landscape contribute to its meaning(s). Building on such ideas,  Linkon & Russo examined the landscape of Youngstown through the lens of images and stories, and this essay will view the more specific landscape of the Mahoning River by examining a dozen images created in or near Youngstown since the early twentieth century. Not all of these images depict the river itself, yet all help to clarify the way the conflict between economy and ecology has played out in the Mahoning Valley.

Measuring socio-economic disparities in green space availability in post-socialist cities

Since the collapse of communism, countries in Central and Eastern Europe have experienced significant socio-economic changes that have affected the urban landscape and the spatial organization of cities. These processes have also generated significant changes in the availability of urban green spaces for local residents, resulting in new forms of inequalities. In the light of recent debate on socio-spatial segregation, the concept of environmental justice has gained increasing attention. Using three Hungarian post-socialist cities as case studies, this paper explores the relationship between different types of residential areas in terms of the age, education, and income level of people, and the availability of urban green spaces. To do this, we introduce a demand-supply composite index that contains featured indicators of urban green space availability. The results show that in terms of UGS availability, major disparities exist both among different socio-economic groups and different types of neighbourhoods in the investigated cities. Although legacies of the past are still important, the emerging disparities of green space availability can be linked to new forms of segregation including highly segregated neighbourhoods of urban poor and the new upmarket housing developments of the affluent. Our results also suggest that regardless of local governments’ recebt efforts to provide residents with equal access to urban green spaces, environmental justice remains a concern for urban planning in post-socialist cities.

Environmental justice and park accessibility in urban China: Evidence from Shanghai

This article applies the pluralistic concept of environmental justice to the issue of park accessibility between people across different socioeconomic strata in the metropolitan region of Shanghai. Data were obtained from China's 2000 and 2010 population census, Shanghai Landscaping and City Appearance Administrative Bureau, semi‐structured interviews and secondary sources. The article finds significant environmental injustice between foreign citizens and Chinese citizens (including people from Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan and mainland people with and without Shanghai hukou) and between blue collar, white collar and wealthy white collar people from distributive, recognition, participatory and procedural justice perspectives. The article then discusses why such injustice is the result of urban China's unique authoritarian mode of governance, power structure, neoliberal practice and globalisation development. The findings offer insights into the development of the concept of environmental justice in the Chinese context and the country's objective to build an impartial society.

Model of integrated territorial assessment for environmental justice applied to sanitation

Equitable access to water and sanitation is still a challenge worldwide and in Brazil. In this sense, the concept of environmental justice was used in this paper as a basis for establishing an Integrated Territorial Assessment Model for Environmental Justice Applied to Sanitation. This research aims to give scientific support for the State Government to improve public policies and promote the universalization of water and sanitation services as established by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This study was based on a quali-quantitative methodology. Secondary data were selected as key information to analyze environmental justice in sanitation, including the following: hydric vulnerability (IV), water supply (WS); untreated sewage collection (SC); sewage collection with treatment (ST); water supply investments (WSI); sewage system investments (SSI); municipal per capita income (MPI); and municipal human development index (MHDI). The data were presented in maps by overlapping the State official regional division and the discussion was carried out based on regional differences and similarities. The repetition of a pattern was noted, in which unfavorable rates were concentrated in the North and Jequitinhonha-Mucuri regions: water vulnerability, sewage system with collection and without treatment, total investment, average investment, per capita income and municipal human development index. Both also have low rates of the sewage system and water supply when compared to others. On the other hand, Zona da Mata and Triângulo regions have favorable rates for hydric vulnerability, sewage system with collection and without treatment and water supply. The Triângulo Mineiro region also presented favorable rates of total investment, average investment, per capita income, and municipal human development index. It is concluded that the inequality between the regions is, initially, of natural origin, and reinforced by the social context and inequality in sanitation investments in the different regions.

Implementation of Timber Legality Verification System for Forest Processed Wood Products Based on Ecological Justice

This study aims to analyze the application of the Timber Legality Verification System (SVLK) for forest processed wood products, namely furniture in Jepara Regency. SVLK is enforced to maintain harmony between environmental ecosystems and business ecosystems, this is in accordance with the concept of environmental justice which harmonizes environmental, economic and social in Jepara Regency. The research method used is normative-empirical (applied law research). The results showed that the importance of implementing SVLK on furniture in the Jepara Regency can increase the selling value in the global market and guarantee its legality. SVLK is regulated in the Regulation of the Minister of Forestry of the Republic of Indonesia Number: P.38/Menhut-II/2009 concerning Standards and Guidelines for Assessment of Performance of Sustainable Production Forest Management and Verification of Timber Legality in License Holders or in Private Forests. The implementation of SVLK in Jepara Regency for processed forest timber has not been optimal, because many IKMs do not yet have SLKs due to high costs and complicated procedures

Clean development or the development of dispossession? The political economy of wind parks in Southern Mexico

Through an investigation of the political economy of wind park development in Oaxaca, southern Mexico, I explore the contested meaning of environmental justice. I contend that, despite their seemingly benign image, wind parks in Oaxaca operate within a spatially abstracted, colonial epistemology of capital-centred development. This involves a remaking of space and an appropriation of nature on behalf of capital. Concomitantly, it also involves a process of dispossession for Indigenous communities, foreclosing alternative pathways of development. I contrast this project of place-making with a subaltern-centred conception of environmental justice informed by Indigenous resistance.