Climate Action and Climate Justice

Vanessa Nakate is a 25-year-old woman of colour and climate activist from Uganda, currently fighting for the climate justice of the Congo Basin Rainforests. The rainforest stretches around parts of six countries and is home to around 150 ethnic communities, including the indigenous tribes of Batwa and Bambuti. Around 75 million people depend on it. The damage to this forest, along with interconnected climate disasters of water scarcity, drought, heat waves and cyclones, is present across the entirety of Africa. One might ask: why does a continent that has already suffered from colonisation, exploitation, and racial discrimination also bear the greatest burden of climate change, considering it is only responsible for 3% of global emissions?

To properly grasp the concept of climate justice, it helps to first understand climate injustice. Annually, the average American pollutes 20 times more than the average Nigerian. While the common person in India, China and Nigeria adds around one to seven tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere, an American adds around seventeen. Historical emissions are equally important to consider: the Global North has emitted 92% of the CO2 that pushed the planet beyond safe levels, while Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America have emitted just 8%. Additionally, the degradation and overuse of natural resources has always been associated with the exploitation of people of colour. Colonialism was essentially a system for exploiting the natural resources of other countries through force, and climate change is in many ways its natural consequence. The developing world has done the least damage, yet it is the most affected.

The racial dimension of climate injustice runs deeper still. For too long, those who cared about racial justice treated environmental justice as though it were elitist, while leaders who focused on climate change were usually white and rarely enlisted the support of voices of colour. Black Americans are exposed to 56% more pollution than they cause, while White Americans breathe 17% less air pollution than they produce. It gives a whole new meaning to the Black Lives Matter slogan "I can't breathe." It is because of these reasons that climate change is known to be a unique case of historical injustice, cutting across many intersections of global and intergenerational harm.

Climate justice is a type of environmental justice in which all people are treated fairly and without prejudice in the development of policies and projects to address climate change, as well as the systems that cause climate change and perpetuate discrimination. The term was first used in academic literature by Henry Shue in a 1992 contribution to the landmark book The International Politics of the Environment by Hurrell and Kingsbury. The consequences of climate change are being felt by the entire world, by animals, plants and humans everywhere, but they are not being felt in equal measure. Economically developing countries, agrarian countries, and the most vulnerable people within them are the most affected, yet they are not the ones causing most of the damage. Climate justice advocates are working to confront these injustices through long-term mitigation and adaptation initiatives.

Climate justice is, however, a complex concept. Placing responsibility for climate change goes beyond simply measuring who produces the most emissions. Responsibility for exposing people to climate damages also lies with those who contribute, possibly wrongfully, to vulnerability. A fuller treatment of compensatory justice in climate change would have to include those who enhance vulnerability. One way of accounting for past emissions would be to focus not on the emissions themselves but on the benefits of those emissions; since the industrialisation of the ancestors of people currently living in the North yields benefits to this day, and far more so for people of the North than the South, this has to be taken into account even if the original emissions were caused by people who are now dead.

There are three possible principles through which compensation and responsibility can be handled. The most natural duty bearer for compensatory payments is the emitter, giving rise to the Emitter Pays Principle (EmPP). A second version identifies the beneficiary of wrongful emissions as responsible for providing compensation: the Beneficiary Pays Principle (BePP). A third version ascribes the duty to the wrongdoing community: the Community Pays Principle (CoPP). On closer inspection, however, none of these principles fully ensures compensatory justice. The answer lies, then, in climate action.

Climate Action is one of the Sustainable Development Goals established by the UN in 2015. It is defined as the stepped-up effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and strengthen resilience and adaptive capacity to climate-induced impacts, including climate-related hazards in all countries, integrating climate change measures into national policies, and improving education, awareness-raising and institutional capacity with respect to climate change mitigation, adaptation, impact reduction and early warning. Four practices define this field. Mitigation refers to efforts to decrease or counteract the greenhouse effect, such as increasing the capacity of carbon sinks and geo-engineering. Compensation is a viable strategy now that climate change has progressed so far that mitigation alone can no longer stop it, though it remains difficult to implement given the complexities of assigning responsibility. Early warning is essentially prevention: reading the foreboding signs and taking preventive measures before large-scale calamities unfold. Institutional reform is required to take climate action to a larger scale, enabling the collective action that awareness-raising and education initiatives require in order to come into effect.

Among the most prominent policies in this space, the Paris Agreement stands as a landmark. It is a legally binding treaty centred on climate change that has made its course internationally, based on the goal of limiting global warming to a maximum of 2°C. It is the first treaty that constitutes a binding agreement, causing nations to work together to combat climate change on all fronts. The Paris Agreement functions on a five-year cycle requiring countries to submit their NDCs, Nationally Determined Contributions, for climate action. It emphasises climate finance on behalf of developed countries for mitigating adverse effects of climate change and adapting to its long-term consequences. While the treaty still has a long way to go, since it came into force new markets and low-carbon solutions have sparked, and more areas are achieving carbon neutrality, most visibly in the power and transport sectors of developed countries.

India's National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC), released in 2018, outlines a path to maximise the ecological sustainability of India's development. Eight National Plans form its core, focusing on adaptation, mitigation and understanding climate change. These include the National Solar Mission, the National Mission for Enhanced Energy Efficiency, the National Mission on Sustainable Habitat, the National Water Mission, the National Mission for Sustaining the Himalayan Ecosystem, the National Mission for a Green India, the National Mission for Sustainable Agriculture, and the National Mission on Strategic Knowledge for Climate Change. The NAPCC has been in full effect since early 2019 and has seen significant impact on each of its individual projects, though goals have been delayed by challenges including the pandemic. If followed consistently, the NAPCC lays a strong foundation for climate action in India.

The Green New Deal, a term first used by Thomas Friedman in January 2007, has been a topic of discussion in several policy debates since its ideological debut. Its motive is to change the fundamental nature of the electricity grid, running on the principle of First World countries moving from harmful sources of energy to renewable sources. There have been several renditions of the Green New Deal since 2007, proposed by different climate activists, and like the other frameworks it has seen its small victories.

Climate change is one of the defining challenges of our time. Its consequences range from the ecosystemic to the global, and its impacts affect every sector of society. While a fair share of irreversible damage has been done, the emergence of frameworks like those described above, and of young voices like Vanessa Nakate's, gives reason to hope.