Speaking of the weather

Author(s):  
Klaus Bruhn Jensen

Climate change raises the stakes of human communication to the existential level of the species and the planet. This article presents an empirical study of how users make sense of climate change as they traverse the contemporary digital media environment. Departing from a baseline survey and drawing on the tradition of reception analysis, focus groups of different ages and with various political and religious affiliations identified distinctive themes, narratives, and arguments regarding the natural environment as represented and received across different media. Climate change appears out of scale – incommensurable not only with established media formats and genres but also with common frames of human cognition and communication. In conclusion, the article addresses climate change from the perspective of human rights and social justice, under the recent heading of climate justice.

2010 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Rinderle

AbstractThe aim of this paper is to question the utilitarian hegemony in recent discussions about global climate change by defending the possibility of a contractualist alternative. More particularly, I will raise and try to answer two questions. First: How can we justify principles of climate justice? As opposed to the utilitarian concern with maximizing general welfare, a contractualist will look at the question whether certain principles are generally acceptable or could not reasonably be rejected. Second: What do we owe to future generations in these matters? Three principles of climate justice are suggested: a sufficiency principle securing basic human rights, a principle of justice giving each generation a right to realize its conception of justice, and a principle of reciprocity requiring us to take responsibility for the reception of benefits and the causation of harm.


2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 27-46
Author(s):  
Tim Cadman ◽  
Klaus Radunsky ◽  
Andrea Simonelli ◽  
Tek Maraseni

This article tracks the intergovernmental negotiations aimed at combatting human-induced greenhouse gas emissions under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change from COP21 and the creation of the Paris Agreement in 2015 to COP24 in Katowice, Poland in 2018. These conferences are explored in detail, focusing on the Paris Rulebook negotiations around how to implement market- and nonmarket-based approaches to mitigating climate change, as set out in Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, and the tensions regarding the inclusion of negotiating text safeguarding human rights. A concluding section comments on the collapse of Article 6 discussions and the implications for climate justice and social quality for the Paris Agreement going forward.


2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-295 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Schapper

Climate change as well as climate policies can have adverse effects on the human rights of certain population groups – and can exacerbate situations of injustice. As it stands today, the human rights regime is not set to sufficiently address these situations of climate injustice. In this article, I suggest a systematization of the normative climate justice literature that can be used as an analytical framework to evaluate current developments in human rights law and policy, and their potential to diminish inter-national, intra-societal and inter-generational climate injustice. I argue that further advancing procedural and substantive human rights obligations and corresponding enforcement mechanisms constitute one important way of establishing climate justice practices. Moreover, I suggest that the normative climate justice literature can be fruitfully used in International Relations to evaluate policy developments at the intersection between climate change and other policy fields.


2019 ◽  
Vol 113 ◽  
pp. 197-201
Author(s):  
Kristin Casper

People around the world are already experiencing the impacts of climate change, and their human rights are under threat. Greenpeace's Climate Justice and Liability Campaign is collaborating with a growing number of communities to reclaim their rights through strategic climate litigation. Three themes run throughout these efforts. First, the climate breakdown is a human rights crisis. Second, political and business leaders must take immediate action or risk being sued. Third, there is mounting evidence that the fossil fuel industry is significantly responsible for the climate crisis and will ultimately be held accountable. Before exploring these themes, it is useful to understand the origins of Greenpeace International's climate justice efforts.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evan Gach

While climate change has been framed as an environmental issue from the very beginning of United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations, over the years the concept has expanded to further emphasize it as a fundamental issue of human rights and global justice. This paper examines the evolution of the conception of climate change since 2009, arguing that the issue framing utilized by UNFCCC member states has increasingly trended toward some aspects of the climate justice frame, including disparities in vulnerability to climate change (loss and damage), human rights impacts, and social inequalities. This shift also extends to the framing adopted by civil society organizations in the form of the Climate Action Network (CAN International), in which a larger focus on issues of climate justice can be seen in recent years. These trends are then reviewed alongside the objectives, mechanisms, and language of the ratified text of the Paris Agreement in order to evaluate the status of the growing international norm of climate justice.


2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mhairi Aitken ◽  
Ben Christman ◽  
Mike Bonaventura ◽  
Dan van der Horst ◽  
Julian Holbrook

In March 2012 the Scottish Parliament unanimously passed a motion ‘strongly endors[ing] the opportunity for Scotland to champion climate justice’. To date, discussions around climate justice within Scottish policy have largely focussed on international dimensions. Questions remain as to what climate justice means at home in Scotland. This article aims to engage with such questions. It begins with an overview of the theoretical underpinnings of climate justice discourses and discusses the various ways that climate justice is framed and understood. We then introduce a categorisation of three broad approaches to climate justice which are being seen globally: conceptual, pragmatic and transformative. We discuss how climate justice has been pursued in practice to illustrate the different forms that can occur under a climate justice banner, and the implications of different understandings of the concept. Using the human rights based approach to climate change as an illustration of the malleable nature of climate justice, we categorise and critique the dominant approach to climate justice used in Scotland. We find that climate justice is a label which can be applied to a range of practices, with differing results. It is hoped that this article encourages further reflection and debate on the particular flavour of climate justice which has been chosen in Scotland and its implications.


Author(s):  
Michel Bourban

In this paper, I discuss some of the human rights that are threatened by the impact of global warming and the problem of motivation to comply with the duties of climate justice. I explain in what sense human rights can be violated by climate change and try to show that there are not only moral reasons to address this problem, but also more prudential motives, which I refer to as quasi-moral and non-moral reasons. I also assess some implications of potentially catastrophic impacts driven by this ecological issue. My aim is to locate, by outlining a normative perspective based on sound empirical findings, urgent climate injustices, and explain why well-off citizens in developed countries have strong reasons to avert the potentially massive violation of the rights of present and future victims of climate change.


Author(s):  
Megan Blomfield

This chapter introduces climate change as a problem of natural resource justice by outlining some real-world examples of resource conflicts that are being generated, or exacerbated, by climate change. It then provides some necessary background for the discussion to follow. The science and predicted impacts of climate change are explained, along with the options for responding to this problem, such as mitigation and adaptation. The chapter then briefly introduces the debate about global justice and climate change, as it has appeared in the political philosophy literature, looking at the human rights approach, the distributive justice approach, and the key methodological distinctions between integrationism and isolationism and ideal versus nonideal theory. After providing further characterization of, and motivation for, the natural resources approach to climate justice that is taken in the work, it concludes with an outline of the chapters to follow.


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