Climate And Social Justice

This volume looks at the ways in which climate change education relates to broader ideas of justice, equity, and social transformation, and ultimately calls for a rapid response to the need for climate education reform. Highlighting the role of climate change in exacerbating existing societal injustices, this text explores the ethical and social dimensions of climate change education, including identity, agency, and societal structure, and in doing so problematizes climate change education as an equity concern. Chapters present empirical analysis, underpinned by a theoretical framework, and case studies which provide critical insights for the design of learning environments, curricula, and everyday climate change-related learning in schools. This text will benefit researchers, academics, educators, and policymakers with an interest in science education, social justice studies, and environmental sociology more broadly. Those specifically interested in climate education, curriculum studies, and climate adaption will also benefit from this book.

This edited volume advances our understanding of climate relocation (or planned retreat), an emerging topic in the fields of climate adaptation and hazard risk, and provides a platform for alternative voices and views on the subject. As the effects of climate change become more severe and widespread, there is a growing conversation about when, where and how people will move. Climate relocation is a controversial adaptation strategy, yet the process can also offer opportunity and hope. This collection grapples with the environmental and social justice dimensions from multiple perspectives, with cases drawn from Africa, Asia, Australia, Oceania, South America, and North America. The contributions throughout present unique perspectives, including community organizations, adaptation practitioners, geographers, lawyers, and landscape architects, reflecting on the potential harms and opportunities of climate-induced relocation. Works of art, photos, and quotes from flood survivors are also included, placed between sections to remind the reader of the human element in the adaptation debate. Blending art - photography, poetry, sculpture - with practical reflections and scholarly analyses, this volume provides new insights on a debate that touches us all: how we will live in the future and where? Challenging readers' pre-conceptions about planned retreat by juxtaposing different disciplines, lenses and media, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate change, environmental migration and displacement, and environmental justice and equity.

This collection sheds new light on the key ethical issues of climate change justice.

This book provides an accessible but intellectually rigorous introduction to the global social movement for ‘climate justice’ and addresses the socially uneven consequences of anthropogenic climate change. Deploying relational understandings of nature-society, space, and power, Brandon Derman shows that climate change has been co-produced with social inequality. Mismatching levels of responsibility and vulnerability, and institutions that emerged in tandem with those disproportionalities compose the terrain on which NGOs and social movements now contest climate injustice in a wide-ranging “politics of connection.” Case-based chapters explore the defining commitments of affected and allied communities, and how they have shaped specific struggles mobilizing human rights, international treaties, transnational activist forums, national and local constituencies, and broad-based demonstrations. Derman synthesizes these cases and similar efforts across the globe to identify and explore crosscutting themes in climate justice politics as well as the opportunities and dilemmas facing advocates and activists, and those who would ally with them going forward. How should we understand campaigns for climate justice? What do these initiatives share, and what differentiates them? What, in fact, does “climate justice” mean in these contexts? And what do the framing and progression of such efforts in different settings suggest about the broader conditions that produce and sustain climate injustice, how those conditions could be unmade, and what might take their place? Struggles for Climate Justice approaches these questions from an interdisciplinary perspective accessible to graduate and advanced undergraduate students as well as scholars of geography, social movements, environmental politics, policy, and socio-legal studies.

The impacts of climate change can already be felt in society and on the Earth itself. As new evidence of the environmental impact of climate change is constantly emerging, we are forced to confront the significance of our political decisions about who will pay the price of responding to a changing climate. In the rush to avoid or reduce the repercussions of climate change, we need to ensure that the burden is evenly distributed or run the risk of creating injustice. Climate Change and Social Justice demonstrates that the problem of how to distribute the costs of climate change is fundamentally a problem of justice. If we ignore the concerns addressed this book, the additional burdens of climate change will fall on the poor and vulnerable. Jeremy Moss brings together today's key thinkers in climate research, including Peter Singer, Ross Garnaut and David Karoly, to respond to these important issues.

This edited volume examines how climate action plans engage justice at the scale of the city. Recent events in the United States make the context particularly ripe for a discussion of justice in urban climate politics. On the one hand, the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, George Floyd’s death, and the prominence of racial discrimination in the public realm have mainstreamed the notion of justice. On the other hand, the dire consequences of increased frequency and severity of climate events on vulnerable segments of urban populations are undeniable. While some cities have been proactive about integrating justice in their climate action planning, in most places an explicit and systematic link between both spheres has been lacking. This book explores this interface as it seeks to understand how cities can respond to climate change in a just way and for just outcomes. While resilience strategies based on “development” may engage historic inequities, they may at the same time result in marginalizing certain populations through various processes, from mismatched solutions to outright exclusion and climate gentrification. By identifying how certain populations are included in or excluded from climate action planning practices, the chapters in this volume draw on case studies to outline the differential outcomes of climate action in American cities, also proposing a template for comparative work beyond the US. The authors tackle the debate about how justice is or is not integrated in climate action plans and assess practical implications, while also making theoretical and methodological contributions. As it fills a gap in the literature at the intersection of justice and climate action, the book produces new insights for a wide-ranging audience: students, practitioners, policy-makers, planners, the non-profit sector, and scholars in geography, urban planning, urban studies, environmental studies, ecology, political science, or anthropology. Along five axes of investigation―theory, resilience, equity, community, and comparison as method―the contributors offer various pathways into the intersection between urban climate action and different understandings of justice. Collectively, they invite a reflection that can lead to practical initiatives in climate mitigation, while also advancing the theorization of social justice to account for the urban as a node where (in)justice plays out and can be addressed with significant results.

As climate change has increasingly become the main focus of environmentalist activism since the late 1990s, the global economic drivers of CO2 emissions are now a major concern for radical greens. In turn, the emphasis on connected crises in both natural and social systems has attracted more activists to the Climate Justice movement and created a common cause between activists from the Global South and North. In the absence of a pervasive narrative of transnational or socialist economic planning to prevent catastrophic climate change, these activists have been eager to engage with advanced knowledge and ideas on political and economic structures that diminish risks and allow for new climate agency. This book breaks new ground by investigating what kind of economy the Climate Justice movement is calling for us to build and how the struggle for economic change has unfolded so far. Examining ecological debt, just transition, indigenous ecologies, social ecology, community economies and divestment among other topics, the authors provide a critical assessment and a common ground for future debate on economic innovation via social mobilization. Taking a transdisciplinary approach that synthesizes political economy, history, theory and ethnography, this volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate justice, environmental politics and policy, environmental economics and sustainable development.

This book shows that escalating climate destruction today is not the product of public indifference, but of the blocked democratic freedoms of peoples across the world to resist unwanted degrees of capitalist interference with their ecological fate or capacity to change the course of ecological disaster. The author assesses how this state of affairs might be reversed and the societal relevance of universal human rights rejuvenated. It explores how freedom from want, war, persecution and fear of ecological catastrophe might be better secured in the future through a democratic reorganization of procedures of natural resource management and problem resolution amongst self-determining communities. It looks at how increasing human vulnerability to climate destruction forms the basis of a new peoples-powered demand for greater climate justice, as well as a global movement for preventative action and reflexive societal learning.