Climate Justice & Environmental Justice

While, in its initial formulations beginning 1989 (Schlosberg and Collins 2014: 364), climate justice has centred historically on theories of justice and formulation of climate policy, environmental justice could well be described as climate justice viewed through a more grassroots-oriented lens, with emphases on issues such as impacts on and experiences of local communities, the inequity in vulnerabilities, and community concerns and autonomy (Schlosberg and Collins 2014: 359).

Environmental justice advocates expand the notion, within traditional climate justice circles, of the “environment” as wilderness or nature, into places where people engage in livelihoods, home life, or generally recreation (Schlosberg and Collins 2014: 360).

Similarly, the concept of justice as conceived within the earlier paradigm of climate justice, meaning compensation for past and future wrongdoings in terms of environmental losses, gains, and circumstances, has been broadened to include inquiry into the ways in which inequities are constructed and reconstructed (Schlosberg and Collins 2014: 361).

While emission reduction is a key mitigatory approach in the inceptive understandings of climate justice, environmental justice activism also considers the need for compensation for the unjust impacts of those emissions (Schlosberg and Collins 2014: 364).

Finally, proponents of environmental justice build upon climate justice-related arguments on adaptation and adaptive capacity, by proposing that adaptive capacity can and ought to be achieved by the reduction of poverty and vulnerability (Schlosberg and Collins 2014: 368).

It is possible to argue that climate justice principles then began to evolve out of environmental justice in or around 1999, with a shift toward the historical responsibility approach and the highlighting of local impacts (Schlosberg and Collins 2014: 366).

In my view, the guiding principles of climate justice today are as set out by the Climate Justice Action network and Klimaforum in 2009, as developed at the World People's Conference at Cochabamba in 2010 (Schlosberg and Collins 2014: 367).

As such, the principles are the cessation of fossil fuel usage, compensation from developed to developing countries for the formers' role in engendering the climate crisis, autonomy of food and land for vulnerable groups, and movement away from climate policies which focus only on market-related measures (Schlosberg and Collins 2014: 367); with the acknowledgement that the present climate emergency has originated from unfettered growth aspirations, especially of transnational energy corporations and their host governments, causing exploitation of both human and nonhuman elements (Schlosberg and Collins 2014: 367).

Reference: Schlosberg, D. and L.B. Collins. (2014). ‘From environmental to climate justice: climate change and the discourse of environmental justice’. WIREs Clim Change 2014, 5:359–374. doi: 10.1002/wcc.275