Why Climate Justice Matters
At Wood & Co., our mission statement centers on a dedication to environmental stewardship through improving both the state of our environment and the communities we serve. Communities are, of course, everywhere. Every community will be impacted by climate change. However, not every community will feel the burden of climate change in the same way. This unavoidable reality underpins the importance of climate justice in our society.
Unequal Burdens: Who Suffers Most from Climate Change?
Justice is a matter of social science. Climate change is a matter of environmental science. How could the two intersect? Differing societal identities and characteristics mean different things for peoples’ futures in our world, whose climate is changing. Consider the Global South, a category simplified more closely according to geopolitics than to geography itself. It includes countries whose economies are less established or “developing.” Most humans reside in the Global South (Waisbich et al.). These nations have contributed less to anthropogenic climate change than Global North nations but will bear the brunt of its consequences.
The same can be said on the local level for the poorest communities within each country, for indigenous communities, and for rural communities. Each of these groups will suffer climate change more severely, despite their lesser carbon footprints. When we consider the domestic wealth disparities in the United States, we also see that the poorest states find themselves concentrated in the Deep South (Abadi), where climate change has had and will continue to have a particularly catastrophic impact. The financial, logistical, and emotional costs of severe weather events like hurricanes, drought, and extreme heat will take an immeasurable toll on poor and working-class Americans in southern states who cannot afford it (EPA.gov). This is what we mean when we say that not every community will feel the burden of climate change in the same way.
The Path to Justice: What Can Be Done?
This is a complex problem. How do we solve it? For whom and how must justice be done?
There is a notion of a “just transition” that guides leaders in enacting useful climate policies. The Climate Justice Alliance defines a just transition as an equitable process that redresses past harms and creates “new relationships of power for the future.” The CJA refers to the field of environmental justice (the umbrella term within which climate justice finds itself) in emphasizing “bottom-up organizing, centering the voices of those most impacted, and shared community leadership” (CJA).
Case Studies: Real-World Solutions and Shortcomings
What does a just transition look like? There are examples we can look to for reference and inspiration as well as lessons from which to learn.
Case Study 1
At the 2024 U.N. Climate Change Conference, known as COP29 held in Azerbaijan, attending leaders reached a new agreement called the New Collective Quantified Goal on Climate Finance (NCQG). This agreement included a commitment to finance $300 billion annually to developing nations by 2035.
The NCQG was successful in that it was a positive step for climate financing. Its aim to assist the Global South monetarily is a goal rooted in climate justice. The major limitation of the NCQG, however, is that the $300 billion is far less than the $1.3 trillion that developing countries have requested. Another shortcoming of the NCQG is its timing. It aims to reach $300 billion in contributions for climate financing for developing nations by 2035. Right now, the adaptation gap – a measure of the amount of money developing nations need to adapt to/mitigate against climate change – “is estimated to be up to $359 billion per year.”
Developed countries are not even remotely close to the $300 billion 2035 goal or the current need of $359 billion. In 2022, with help from private sector cash, developed countries contributed just $22 billion to public adaptation financing flows.
Case Study 2
A second case study to which we can turn is called “Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries” — handily shortened as REDD+ — and was established as part of the Paris Agreement (a landmark international treaty signed in 2016 which covers climate change mitigation, adaptation, and finance, and which has been joined and abandoned twice as political control of the White House has changed). REDD+ is set up so that “developing countries can receive results-based payments for emission reductions when they reduce deforestation.”
There has been tangible success since the implementation of REDD+. In the last ten years, a total of 63 developing countries have participated, and “23 of these countries reported a reduction of almost 14 billion tons of carbon dioxide, about 2.5 times the amount of net greenhouse gas emissions from the United States in 2022, and are now eligible to seek results-based finance” (UNFCCC).
This success is valuable. Still, though REDD+ was created to take into account the imbalance between developed and developing nations, some important climate justice measures were overlooked.
The scope of climate justice must include both national issues and local ones. Within developing nations, many people (particularly indigenous) depend on forests for their livelihoods. Those who are sacrificing their livelihoods to meet their nation’s REDD+ targets are not receiving commensurate benefits from the program. If REDD+ is to achieve its goal of climate justice, it must avoid undermining autonomy in communities around the world. Full participation from and benefits for Indigenous and local communities can help ensure that.
Moving Forward: A Commitment to Climate Justice
A national organization called Community Work Ireland once wrote very succinctly why justice and climate change are so inextricably tied to one another:
“While we all face this threat [of climate change], the burden will fall first and worst on those who have done the least to cause the problem and who have the least resources to adapt to or to mitigate against the worst effects. This is the significant injustice at the heart of climate change” (Community Work Ireland).
We must protect ourselves, each other, and our world, which has nurtured and nourished us. At Wood & Co, this is one of our many driving forces in each project and with every client.
