The Rise Of Restorative Justice In The Energy Transition And For Climate Mitigation

This book presents advances the importance of restorative justice in today’s energy transition across the world. It emphasizes the importance of a fair, equitable and inclusive shift towards a low-carbon economy. It recognizes climate change as the primary global challenge and advocates for an urgent and comprehensive energy transition where restorative justice is centrally utilised. Restorative justice focuses on identifying harm, assigning responsibility, protecting those affected, repairing damage, preventing future occurrences and providing a crucial foundation for seeking justice. It encompasses various forms of harm (economic, environmental, and social) and includes all stakeholders, including individuals, communities, and the environment. By providing a secure and structured platform for dialogue, restorative justice allows for diverse perspectives, challenging conversations and action for a just and sustainable world.

Energy justice has emerged over the last decade as a matter of vital concern in energy law, which can be seen in the attention directed to energy poverty, and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. There are energy justice concerns in areas of law as diverse as human rights, consumer protection, international law and trade, and in many forms of regional and national energy law and regulation. This edited collection explores in detail at four kinds of energy justice. The first, distributive justice, relates to the equitable distribution of the benefits and burdens of energy activities, which is challenged by the existence of people suffering from energy poverty. Secondly, procedural (or participation) justice consists of the right of all communities to participate in decision-making regarding energy projects and policies that affect them. This dimension of energy justice often includes procedural rights to information and access to courts. Under the concept of reparation (or restorative) justice, the book looks at even-handed enforcement of energy statutes and regulations, as well as access to remedies when legal rights are violated. Finally, the collection addresses social justice, with the recognition that energy injustice cannot be separated from other social ills, such as poverty and subordination based on race, gender, or indigeneity. These issues feed into a wider conversation about how we achieve a 'just' energy transition, as the world confronts the urgent challenges of climate change.

Written by one of the world’s leading scholars in the field, this book provides a unique perspective on the connections between energy justice and human rights. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the author offers an accessible discussion about the implementation of energy justice in practice. The book explores the rise of justice issues in the energy sector, the interdisciplinary nature of energy justice, the economics of energy justice and provides a practical case study on distributive justice. The penultimate chapter focuses on human rights and energy justice in a world first, and explores the topic from the perspective of the opportunity of last resort. This ‘opportunity of last resort’ is the national courts and is the place where societies can seek to have justice enforced through a variety of human rights being protected. Finally, energy justice risks are highlighted alongside the author’s proposed framework for the next generation of energy justice scholars.

This book states that sustainable development has become an influential discourse worldwide. Climate change is not only an urgent problem, but it is also a fundamental spiritual question concerning social justice and sustainable peace development as well as solidarity among people of various religious backgrounds and different countries. Thus, this global problem must be faced and recognized for future actions and strategies. However, the politics of fear must be replaced with a culture of peace, hope, and compassion, and this urgent problem must be faced with an optimistic attitude and a certain degree of preparedness. Climate change is evident in many forms, such as, for example, the most obvious—recent weather fluctuations that happen around the world. Floods, droughts, and hurricanes are those visible signs of climate change. Human-caused climate change is projected to greatly impact marine, freshwater, and terrestrial life. Temperatures in Alaska and the Arctic have increased over the last 50 years at a rate more than twice as fast as the global average temperature. Poor people are vulnerable to man-made climate change and respond rapidly to its impacts. Diverse knowledge of and approaches to climate change help understand this growing problem; global average air temperature has increased in the recent past by approximately 1.0°C (1.8°F). According to the Climate Science Special Report, the last several years have been record-breaking, and the period of 1901–2016 is the warmest. Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are still rising, with damaging effects on the Earth’s climate. At the moment, the concentration of CO2 is higher than at any point in time—at least the past 800,000 years. However, carbon dioxide (CO2) is not the only GHG that impacts human-induced climate change.

This book re-conceptualizes energy justice as a unifying agenda for scholars and practitioners working on the issues faced in the trilemna of energy security, poverty and climate change. McCauley argues that justice should be central to the rebalancing of the global energy system and also provides an assessment of the key injustices in our global energy systems of production and consumption. Energy Justice develops a new innovative analytical framework underpinned by principles of justice designed for investigating unfairness and inequalities in energy availability, accessibility and sustainability. It applies this framework to fossil fuel and alternative low carbon energy systems with reference to multiple case studies throughout the world. McCauley also presents an energy justice roadmap that inspires new solutions to the energy trilemna. This includes how we redistribute the benefits and burdens of energy developments, how to engage the new energy ‘prosumer’ and how to recognise the unrepresented. This book will appeal to academics and students interested in issues of security and justice within global energy decision-making.

This open access book focuses on the energy sector and will make a significant contribution to its continued evolution. For many years, the energy sector has been missing a raison d’etre and now finally there are increased calls for that to be justice. Hence, this book will develop the concept of energy justice and how it needs to be formalised in a new ‘social contract’ with all stakeholders in society. The focus will be on improving legal systems at local, national and international levels while ensuring that justice is a core issue within energy law, the legal system and more broadly in society.

This handbook explores the dynamic new field of Environmental Restorative Justice. Authors from diverse disciplines discuss how principles and practices of restorative justice can be used to address the threats and harms facing the environment today. The book covers a wide variety of subjects, from theoretical discussions about how to incorporate the voice of future generations, nature, and more-than-human animals and plants in processes of justice and repair, through to detailed descriptions of actual practices of Environmental Restorative Justice. The case studies explored in the volume are situated in a wide range of countries and in the context of varied forms of environmental harm – from small local pollution incidents, to endemic ongoing issues such as wildlife poaching, to cataclysmic environmental catastrophes resulting in cascades of harm to entire ecosystems. Throughout, it reveals how the relational and caring character of a restorative ethos can be conducive to finding solutions to problems through sharing stories, listening, healing, and holding people and organisations accountable for prevention and repairing of harm. It speaks to scholars in Criminology, Sociology, Law, and Environmental Justice and to practitioners, policy-makers, think-tanks and activists interested in the environment.

Energy justice is one of the most critical, and yet least developed, concepts associated with sustainability. Much has been written about the sustainability of low-carbon energy systems and policies - with an emphasis on environmental, economic and geopolitical issues. However, less attention has been directed at the social and equity implications of these dynamic relations between energy and low-carbon objectives - the complexity of injustice associated with whole energy systems (from extractive industries, through to consumption and waste) that transcend national boundaries and the social, political-economic and material processes driving the experience of energy injustice and vulnerability. Drawing on a substantial body of original research from an international collaboration of experts this unique collection addresses energy poverty, just innovation, aesthetic justice and the justice implications of low-carbon energy systems and technologies. The book offers new thinking on how interactions between climate change, energy policy, and equity and social justice can be understood and develops a critical agenda for energy justice research.