Climate Justice can’t be redefined just to fit within the Paris agreement

Photo credit to Louise Breaux

The Paris climate talks are about to kick off. While global social and environmental movements have coalesced around the strategy of using Paris as a moment to build movements, the more reactionary elements of the climate movement are taking the media opportunity to double down on misinformation and victim-blaming. For what it’s worth, here are few things to get really clear when anyone who tries to appropriate the term climate justice to advance their own agenda or starts saying “we need to get over this crazy idea there’s a difference between a developed and a developing country.”

When I hear fellow climate activists (from developed countries) arguing for the need to redefine climate justice so that it could “include us all” and that “climate justice cannot be taken in isolation,” I hear a fundamental lack of respect or compassion for people in the global south. There is no need to redefine climate justice, other forms of justice have always been an integral part of how movements have defined climate justice. It wouldn’t be a call for justice if it didn’t mean fighting against all forms of injustices, and that is why an intersectional approach is indispensable, everywhere and all the time. These sort of confusions and misinterpretations are not rare among climate activists, especially among those who have never actually experienced environmental injustice first hand. Redefining climate justice for the interests of the global north isn’t just victim blaming, it’s not grounded in facts.

The key to understanding climate justice is to understand equity. There is a threshold, lets call it a development threshold, after which people can fulfil all their basic needs. Needless to say, despite all the economic growth accomplished over the past five decades, billions of people are still below that threshold. Most of the wealth has been unfairly appropriated by rich nations, and in turn by their powerful elites. Global inequality has gotten worse since globalization. In the context of the UNFCCC, an equity based approach is used as a criteria to evaluate a country’s capacity to assume additional costs related to adaptation or mitigation efforts. That capacity is measured by the percentage of its population living above the development threshold ($7,500/year in PPP), as shown in this graph.

This graph clearly shows that in China and India most people (hundreds of millions) have not yet reached the development threshold, unlike in the US, where more than half its population is beyond the luxuriously threshold. Despites of being the wealthiest nation in the world, there are still many people living below the threshold. Climate justice means justice for these people as well. The North-South divide,equity and development

While it is true that there are new powerful elites emerging in developing countries, this fact is a poor indicator of a country’s capacity to assume new mitigation responsibilities or to shoulder a the financial and technological burden. Imposing new climate obligations in countries that are disproportionately struggling to address challenges like poverty, food insecurity, and energy poverty without providing adequate finance and technology wouldn’t only be unjust, it wouldn’t work. Additional burdens in their already limited and overstretched budgets could reverse achieved progress towards development.

So, yes there is a “North in the South” in terms of elites in developing countries, and there is a “South in the North” in terms of worsening poverty and increasing inequality that we see in Europe and the US; but when we’re at the UN and talking about nation-states, the substantial and undeniable difference between developing and developed nations is the inequity that we’re fighting against — that’s what it means to demand climate justice at the UNFCCC.

Many developing countries have come a long way since 1992, but they are not even close to catching up to their former masters and colonizers. By the time emissions must peak, income per capita will be half of that in the developed world. The North-South divide, equity and development.

Western mainstream media have the terrible tendency of mindlessly charging against China, India, Brazil, and others for the lack of progress at the international level. Blaming these countries for causing climate change or for not doing enough evidences the double standards and racist perspective in their analysis. But it’s not just the conservative media, northern NGOs and activists are often too eager to adopt this view and rage against the convention’s distinction between developed and developing countries. In doing so, many people mistakenly reference CBDR (Common But Differentiated Responsibilities) as the firewall between developing and developed countries (Annex 1 and non Annex1). CBDR is a principle of international law that is enshrined in the text of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and a firewall between Annex 1 and non-Annex 1 countries is only one way of implementing that principle. You can have CBDR without the firewall, as long as every country is doing its fair share. What you cannot do is discard principles of international law that are in the convention you are negotiating under. This is what climate justice activists mean when they say that the principles of the convention are not up for negotiation.

The COP in Paris will begin next week, but we already know no fair agreement will come out of it because three main reasons. First, a large group of developing countries, lead by the Alliance of Small Island States have strongly called for a 1.5C target to stay alive. However, the stated mitigation objective of this negotiations is to limit greenhouse gasses emissions into the atmosphere equivalent to a 50–50 chance of avoiding 2C of global warming by the end of this century. Basically, a death sentence for millions of people living in coastal communities. Second, as if a 50–50 chance (i.e. tossing a coin) of avoiding climate catastrophe wasn’t already the most reckless bet on humanity’s future, there is still a huge gap between pledged mitigation efforts and what a 2C-trajectory dictates. Unless developed countries take their obligations seriously, we will continue to move on the fast-track to a 3C world. Third, the INDC framework is effectively transferring mitigation obligations from developed countries to developing ones, but without any additional financial compensation or credible mechanism for technology transfer.

Climate justice will not be achieved at the end of the negotiations. Yet, a more “realistic”(and sadistic?) take on the COP would suggest that there are different degrees of fairness that can be achieved over the next two weeks, and we should aspire for the highest possible standard of fairness in outcome. After all, every degree of warming means more death and devastation. As climate activists privileged enough to be at the negotiation, showing solidarity with the global climate justice movement means fighting for the best possible outcome. And if (when) that outcome fails to address injustices, showing solidarity means calling that out, not redefining the terms of climate justice to match whatever the outcome is.