Climate justice

• 1. Introduction

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  Climate justice names something specific: the gap between who caused climate change and who suffers from it. A 2020 report by Oxfam and the Stockholm Environment Institute found that the richest 1% of the global population produced twice as many carbon emissions as the poorest 50% during the 25 years from 1990 to 2015. Yet the people least responsible for those emissions live on the frontlines of the consequences. That tension, between cause and burden, is the engine of the entire movement.

  The concept arrived in formal international law before it had a common name. By the time it did acquire one, it had already shaped global climate negotiations in fundamental ways. What exactly is climate justice asking for? Who counts as a victim? Who counts as responsible? And how do you build legal and political systems that can answer those questions fairly? These are the threads the rest of this documentary will pull apart.

• 2. A Framework in Two Parts

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  Climate justice is not a single demand. Scholars group its core concerns along two lines. The first is procedural justice, which asks whether decision-making about climate policy is fair, transparent, and inclusive. The second is distributive justice, which asks who bears the costs of climate change itself and who bears the costs of fixing it.

  Under distributive justice, three principles have emerged to guide burden-sharing. The first places the heaviest obligations on those who most caused the problem. The second asks those with the greatest capacity to carry more of the weight. The third targets those who have profited most from the activities that produced emissions in the first place. A 2023 study applied these principles to estimate that the top 21 fossil fuel companies would owe cumulative climate reparations of $5.4 trillion over the period 2025-2050.

  The economic burden of mitigation itself is estimated by some researchers at roughly 1% to 2% of GDP. But that aggregate figure obscures deep unevenness. Out of approximately 195 countries in the world, 152 are classified as developing countries. Average income in North America runs about 16 times higher than in sub-Saharan Africa. Cities like Barcelona have already begun applying these principles in concrete ways, implementing intersectional climate measures that include regulating short-term rentals, providing property tax support, and requiring 30% of new housing developments to be social housing.

• 3. Who Suffers Most

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  The top 10% of income earners account for more than half of global carbon emissions. In transport alone, that group consumes 56% of vehicle fuel and conducts 70% of vehicle purchases. Meanwhile, the bottom half of the global population is responsible for less than 20% of energy footprints.

  That imbalance tracks onto geography in a stark way. Developed countries in the Global North have contributed roughly 45% of cumulative greenhouse gas emissions since 1850. Developing countries in the Global South face the brunt of the resulting climate disruption while often lacking the resources to respond. On the Carteret Islands and Bougainville in Papua New Guinea, in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, rising sea levels are shrinking the land. Taro root agriculture is the main food source there. As more of the island is submerged, less farmland remains and hunger follows.

  A 2023 review article projected that a 2 degrees Celsius temperature rise by 2100 would kill roughly 1 billion primarily poor people as a result of primarily wealthy people's greenhouse gas emissions. Children born in 2020, what demographers sometimes call Generation Alpha, are projected to experience 2-7 times as many heat waves over their lifetimes compared to people born in 1960. These projections attach a name to a formal concept: intergenerational equity, the idea that one generation's emissions can lock in damage for generations that had no say in producing them.

  The Amazon rainforest represents a concrete instance of the stakes. The climate system contains tipping points, including a threshold amount of deforestation beyond which the Amazon's decline becomes irreversible. A generation that drives the climate past such points inflicts injustice on multiple future generations who will live with the consequences.

• 4. Disadvantaged Groups and Compounding Harm

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  Disadvantaged groups face a compounding problem: they are the most exposed to climate harm and the least included in the planning meant to address it. They are often the last to receive emergency relief and are rarely included in local, national, or international planning processes.

  Indigenous communities illustrate this layering clearly. In the United States, Indigenous land is frequently targeted for resource extraction, including oil drilling and critical minerals. Historically, legislation like the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the Dawes Act of 1887 removed Indigenous peoples from their land, leaving those communities with fewer legal and economic tools to resist subsequent exploitation. Their land has also served as a dumping ground for hazardous materials, including nuclear waste.

  Women face particular vulnerabilities around oil infrastructure. Pipeline construction often involves isolated worker camps, and those camps have been documented as bringing higher rates of gender-based violence into surrounding communities, particularly for Indigenous women.

  Low-income communities frequently bear the burden of industrial siting decisions. Norco, Louisiana, where multiple oil refineries operate, has been called "cancer alley." Communities like it face disproportionate exposure to heat waves, poor air quality, and extreme weather. The source of that disparity often traces to redlining and other historical policies that constrained where low-income and communities of color could live, and then constrained their ability to fight back.

  The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has framed this directly. Its stated goal in the climate space is to dismantle misinformation by reclaiming environmental storytelling through the voices, leadership, and lived experiences of Black communities. When those most harmed by climate change are also harmed by the responses to it, researchers have called this the "triple injustice" of climate change.

• 5. How the Movement Was Built

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  In December 1990, the United Nations appointed an Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee to draft what became the Framework Convention on Climate Change, adopted at the UN Conference on the Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992. The core tension was unavoidable: any agreement had to decide how to share responsibility between developed and developing nations. The language the negotiators settled on became Article 3.1 of the convention, which established that parties should protect the climate system on the basis of equity and in accordance with their "common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities," and that developed countries should take the lead.

  In 2000, at the same time as the Sixth Conference of the Parties in The Hague, the first Climate Justice Summit took place. It aimed to affirm that climate change is a rights issue and to build alliances across state borders.

  Two years later, international environmental groups met in Johannesburg for the Earth Summit, also known as Rio+10 because it fell ten years after the 1992 meeting. There, the Bali Principles of Climate Justice were adopted, framing climate justice explicitly as a social and human rights issue rather than a technical or logistical problem. In 2004, the Durban Group for Climate Justice was formed at a meeting in South Africa. In 2007, at the 13th Conference of the Parties in Bali, the coalition Climate Justice Now! was founded.

  By April 2010, the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth took place in Tiquipaya, Bolivia, hosted by the Bolivian government. In December 2018, the People's Demands for Climate Justice, signed by 292,000 individuals and 366 organizations, called on government delegates at COP24 to honor their "Fair Shares" for climate finance. By December 2022, the number of climate-related lawsuits worldwide had grown to 2,180, more than half of them in the United States.

• 6. Specific Crises on the Ground

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  In August 2019, Honduras declared a state of emergency after a drought destroyed 72% of its corn and 75% of its beans in the southern part of the country. Maize is the only grain still produced as a sustenance crop on small farms across Latin America, and it is central to food security in communities with little or no access to food markets as a backup. Projections suggest that by 2070, corn yields in Central America may fall by 10%, beans by 29%, and rice by 14%. In a region where corn makes up 70%, beans 25%, and rice 6% of staple crop consumption, those declines carry serious consequences for rural communities.

  In 2022, catastrophic flooding in Pakistan affected more than 33 million people. Monsoon rains reached over 190% of normal levels in July and August of that year, and melting glaciers compounded the inundation, submerging one-third of the country. Pakistan contributes less than 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions. The government, which was already managing an economic crisis marked by high inflation and low productivity, sent ambulances, medicines, and excavators to the Swabi district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Many vehicles could not enter affected communities at all. Villagers removed debris with their hands to recover the dead.

  In the French Antilles, the islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe have lived with a different kind of contamination. Chlordecone, a synthetic pesticide known as Kepone, was banned in the United States in the 1970s. But from 1972 to 1993 it was used heavily in banana plantations on those islands. The Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants banned it globally in 2009. A 2014 study by French health agencies estimated that 90% of inhabitants of the French Antilles had chlordecone in their blood. Scientists have found that the pesticide can persist in soil for up to 600 years, and the French Antilles record the highest rates of prostate cancer in France. The French government did not add prostate cancer to the list of occupational diseases linked to pesticide exposure until 2021.

• 7. Barriers and Contested Ground

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  Climate justice does not operate in a vacuum. Sociologist David Pellow and critical geographer Laura Pulido have argued that the state is often complicit in environmental justice issues because governments benefit economically from ignoring them. That dynamic creates a structural barrier: it is harder to make progress through lawmaking and protest when the institutions you are appealing to have a stake in the status quo.

  The Bali Principles of Climate Justice were written partly in response to that pattern. They call for the importance of communities coming together precisely in moments when the state remains complicit.

  There is also real disagreement about what fairness requires. Fundamental principles of responsibility, capability, and rights point different countries toward different conclusions about who owes what. Oil-dependent states have obstructed climate negotiations, and debates continue about whether wealthy fossil-fuel-exporting nations should receive financial transition support or fund their own transformations.

  At a June 2023 climate finance summit in Paris, the World Bank agreed to allow low-income countries to temporarily pause debt repayments if they are hit by a climate disaster. Around $300 billion was pledged in financial help over the coming years, though researchers estimate that trillions are needed to address the problem. More than 100 leading economists signed a letter calling for a 2% tax on extreme wealth, which they projected could generate roughly $2.5 trillion and serve as a loss-and-damage mechanism. A May 2023 study published through Social Science Research Network found that 76% of Europeans and 54% of Americans supported transferring money from rich to poor nations through a global emissions trading scheme. Turning that support into enforceable agreements remains the open question that the next round of international negotiations will need to face.