scholarly journals Climate Change, Human Rights and Justice

The global climate crisis is not just a matter of fixing industry so that it can produce profitably and contaminate less. There is a far more pressing issue facing us: how to address the negative climate impacts of development that is irresponsible in terms of its human and environmental costs. Mitigation and adaptation are two fundamental pillars of the climate debate. Technological equity and efficiency (mitigation) and the capacity of communities to brace themselves in the face of climate change (adaptation), are both fundamental to advance international climate change negotiations.

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 379-395
Author(s):  
Marcela Cardoso Guilles Da Conceição ◽  
Renato de Aragão Ribeiro Rodrigues ◽  
Fernanda Reis Cordeiro ◽  
Fernando Vieira Cesário ◽  
Gracie Verde Selva ◽  
...  

The increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere raises the average temperature of the planet, triggering problems that threaten the survival of humans. Protecting the global climate from the effects of climate change is an essential condition for sustaining life. For this reason, governments, scientists, and society are joining forces to propose better solutions that could well-rounded environmentally, social and economic development relationships. International climate change negotiations involve many countries in establishing strategies to mitigate the problem. Therefore, understanding international negotiation processes and how ratified agreements impact a country is of fundamental importance. The purpose of this paper is to systematize information about how climate negotiations have progressed, detailing key moments and results, analyzing the role that Brazil played in the course of these negotiations and the country’s future perspectives.


2020 ◽  
Vol 97 (4) ◽  
pp. 679-692
Author(s):  
Simon Hollnaicher

Abstract According to a well-known problem in climate ethics, individual actions cannot be wrong due to their impact on climate change since the individual act does not make a difference. By referring to the practical interpretation of the categorical imperative, the author argues that certain actions lead to a contradiction in conception in light of the climate crisis. Universalizing these actions would cause foreseeable climate impacts, making it impossible to pursue the original maxim effectively. According to the practical interpretation, such actions are morally wrong. The wrongness of these actions does not depend on making a difference, rather these actions are wrong because they make it impossible for others to act accordingly. Thus, apart from imperfect duties, for which has been argued convincingly elsewhere (Henning 2016; Alberzart 2019), we also have perfect duties to refrain from certain actions in the face of the climate crisis.


2016 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 356-372 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward A Page ◽  
Clare Heyward

With the adoption of the Warsaw International Mechanism in 2013, the international community recognised that anthropogenic climate change will result in a range of adverse effects despite policies of mitigation and adaptation. Addressing these climatic ‘losses and damages’ is now a key dimension of international climate change negotiations. This article presents a normative framework for thinking about loss and damage designed to inform, and give meaning to, these negotiations. It argues that policies addressing loss and damage, particularly those targeting developing countries, should respect norms of compensatory justice which aim to make victims of unwarranted climatic disruptions ‘whole again’. The article develops a typology of different kinds of climate change disruption and uses it to (1) explain the differences between ‘losses’ and ‘damages’, (2) assign priorities among compensatory measures seeking to address loss and damage and (3) explore a range of equitable responses to loss and damage.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chui-Ling Tam ◽  
Suzanne Chew ◽  
Anabela Carvalho ◽  
Julie Doyle

The Arctic and its animals figure prominently as icons of climate change in Western imaginaries. Persuasive storytelling centred on compelling animal icons, like the polar bear, is a powerful strategy to frame environmental challenges, mobilizing collective global efforts to resist environmental degradation and species endangerment. The power of the polar bear in Western climate imagery is in part derived from the perceived “environmental sacredness” of the animal that has gained a totem-like status. In dominant “global” discourses, this connotation often works to the detriment of Indigenous peoples, for whom animals signify complex socio-ecological relations and cultural histories. This Perspective article offers a reflexive analysis on the symbolic power of the polar bear totem and the discursive exclusion of Indigenous peoples, informed by attendance during 2015–2017 at annual global climate change negotiations and research during 2016–2018 in Canada’s Nunavut Territory. The polar bear’s totem-like status in Western imaginaries exposes three discursive tensions that infuse climate change perception, activism, representation and Indigenous citizenship. The first tension concerns the global climate crisis, and its perceived threat to ecologically significant or sacred species, contrasted with locally lived realities. The second tension concerns a perceived sacred Arctic that is global, pristine, fragile and “contemplated,” but simultaneously local, hazardous, sustaining and lived. The third tension concerns Indigenization, distorted under a global climate gaze that reimagines the role of Indigenous peoples. Current discursive hegemony over the Arctic serves to place Indigenous peoples in stasis and restricts the space for Arctic Indigenous engagement and voice.


2021 ◽  
pp. 365-377
Author(s):  
Nikola Strachová

One of the effects of globalization is the increasing number of transnational ties that central governments not only ceased to control but also ceased to participate in; therefore, in recent decades, cities have been increasingly motivated to respond to international issues and initiate various contacts with foreign economic, cultural, and political centres. This article examines practices of city diplomacy in light of the current climate crisis. Albeit cities could be in conflict with their central government, they are executing the global climate agenda. Nonetheless, how do we frame cities’ autonomous activities in the global governance agenda? The article seeks to determine whether the framework of hybrid multilateralism is the niche for cities to assume the role of the central government in defending common global values such as preservation of the environment when the state fails to do so. Based on a dataset consisting of various subnational initiatives responding to climate change, we suggest a remarkable growth in the pledges to the international climate agreements’ commitments involving many subnational actors. Through these pledges, cities enter the international negotiations with various partners under hybrid policy architecture. Cities hold an enormous potential to influence the global conversation on climate change agenda. Furthermore, we conclude that cities are taking on the states’ role in global issues when they identify the inadequacy of the central governments’ action. Their conflict position forces them to carry out autonomous activities and fosters the new phenomenon of hybrid multilateralism.


Author(s):  
Brenna Owen

The science on climate change is in: legitimate scientists have been unable to provide serious scientific evidence that casts doubt on the fact that anthropogenic, that is, human-caused climate change is occurring. Less clear are the speed of climate change and the extent of damages to environmental and human health if emissions from fossil fuels continue unabated. The most recent international conference on the environment, namely the 2013 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) or Conference of the Parties (COP) 19, was characterized by bitter intergovernmental negotiations and non-committal by major emitters to watered-down agreements. COP 19 exemplifies the inadequacies inherent in the current international system, which render it incapable of effectively addressing climate change; in other words, the international community remains unable to come to an agreement or agreements that mitigate the effects of climate change now, while establishing adaptation mechanisms for the future as the effects of climate change become increasingly pronounced. The efficacy of the current regime is impeded not only by its singular, non-binding approach to emissions reduction, but also by the ability of a small number of major emitters’ ability to hinder agreements. In order to make rising to the challenge of the global climate crisis politically feasible, the international climate regime must abandon the current emissions cap approach and adopt an incremental approach to negotiations, crafting sector-specific agreements that aim to gradually reduce emissions in a viable and equitable manner.


2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 300-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward A. Page

This article focuses on the normative problem of establishing how the burdens associated with implementing policies designed to prevent, or manage, climate change should be shared amongst states involved in ongoing international climate change negotiations. This problem has three key features: identifying the nature and extent of the burdens that need to be borne; identifying the type of agent that should be allocated these burdens; and distributing amongst the particular ‘tokens’ of the relevant ‘agent type’ climatic burdens according to principles that none could reasonably reject. The article defends a key role in climatic burden-sharing policy for the principle that states benefiting most from activities that cause climate change should bear the greatest burden in terms of the costs of preventing dangerous climate change. I outline two versions of this ‘beneficiary pays’ principle; examine the strengths and weakness of each version; and explore how the most plausible version (which I call the ‘unjust enrichment’ principle) could be operationalized in the context of global climate governance.


2013 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 177-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
HAYLEY STEVENSON

AbstractIn recent years, the post-neoliberal bloc of Latin America countries, ALBA, has fashioned a role for itself in international climate change negotiations as representing the voice of ‘the people’. In this article I draw on innovative theorising of representation to critically examine this claim. I argue that although ALBA has sought to construct a constituency based on the malleable notion of ‘the people’, its function is better understood as ‘discursive representation’, and specifically as representation of Green Radical discourses. Such forms of representation are potentially important in global governance given the challenges of capturing the interests of all affected parties. I critically evaluate this case of discursive representation in terms of its rhetorical efficacy; accountability; consistency; and legitimacy. Although certain favourable elements emerge from this evaluation, this case also points to the hazards of transmitting a public discourse through a state-based representative in multilateral settings.


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