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Torres Contreras and Roz Price July 2020 ids.ac.uk Working Paper Volume 2020 Number 540 4 Towards Transformative Climate Justice: Key Challenges and Future Directions for Research Towards Transformative Climate Justice: Key Challenges and Future Directions for Research Peter Newell, Shilpi Srivastava, Lars Otto Naess, Gerardo A. Torres Contreras and Roz Price Summary From forest fires in Australia and California to record floods in Jakarta and the UK, it is clear that no area of the world is immune from the effects of climate change. Many countries and cities have woken up to this fact and have declared climate emergencies. We have witnessed unprecedented social mobilisation around the issue, including the school strikes and the rise of direct-action movements such as the Extinction Rebellion. Mainstream discourses are increasingly framed around the recognition that climate change is fundamentally a question of justice, in terms of the responsibility for the problem and its mitigation; that vulnerabilities to the impacts of climate change are both a reflection of, and exacerbate, structural injustices; and that there will be residual impacts beyond the capacity to mitigate and adapt or what might be deemed ‘tolerable’ impacts. Climate justice is understood in a multitude of ways and reflects the fact that the causes and effects of climate change, as well as efforts to tackle it, raise ethical, equity and rights issues. The language of climate justice is increasingly omnipresent in the discourse of academia, civil society, social movements, some governments, cities and even some businesses. But the mechanisms for delivering it are weak and under- developed. This paper shows that definitions of what is covered by climate justice, at what scales, how it can be measured, and which are the best means to deliver it are all heavily contested. These differences in the understanding of climate justice matter because they have serious implications for those countries, regions and communities on the front line of the impacts of climate change and are increasingly apparent in efforts to accelerate decarbonisation. Given the closing window for effective responses to avoid the worst effects of climate change, we have to work with the institutions, policy processes, and economies we currently have to secure the best outcomes possible, while simultaneously advocating for and building alternatives that address deeper structural concerns. Towards this end, we suggest that transformative climate justice is a useful concept to focus attention on the need to disrupt power relations and shift decision-making processes which lock in and reproduce climate injustices. We propose it as a way of, first, moving beyond the ‘silos’ of mitigation and adaptation and, second, of bridging the gap between justice concerns in climate change funding and actual interventions on the ground. We argue that addressing structural root causes (historical injustices, land rights, political participation and governance) are key to achieving climate justice goals in the long term. ids.ac.uk Working Paper Volume 2020 Number 540 5 Towards Transformative Climate Justice: Key Challenges and Future Directions for Research Keywords Climate change, climate justice, procedural justice, distributive justice, mitigation, adaptation, transformation. Authors Peter Newell is Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex. He is a social scientist with more than 25 years’ experience of working on climate change. He has authored and co-authored four books on the topic of climate change and edited several others. He has also published in a wide range of leading journals such as Nature, Science, Nature Climate Change, Global Environmental Change, Climate Policy, Global Environmental Politics, and many others. He has worked on different aspects of climate justice including the ‘just transition’ (Newell and Mulvaney 2013), global environmental justice (Sikor and Newell 2014), and issues of energy justice. Shilpi Srivastava is a Research Fellow at IDS. Her research focuses on examining cross- sectoral relationships and impacts around water, health and climate; political economy of climate change adaptation and resource justice; and decision-making under conditions of climatic uncertainty. She has published on water resource management, climate change policy and adaptation in journals such as Regional Environmental Change, Nomadic Peoples and Transition Studies Review. She is currently co-editing a book on uncertainty and climate change in India for SAGE (India). Lars Otto Naess is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS). His current research centres on the social and institutional dimensions of adaptation to climate change, policy processes on climate change and agriculture at national and sub-national levels. He was contributing author to the Africa Chapter of the IPCC’s WGII Fifth Assessment Report, and he is currently domain editor for climate and development for WIREs Climate Change. Gerardo A. Torres Contreras is a final-year doctoral researcher at IDS. In his work, he explores land struggles, resistance, and processes of agrarian change resulting from renewable energy projects in Mexico. He previously obtained degrees in Political Science at UNAM, Mexico and an MPhil in Development Studies at the University of Oxford. More recently, he has also worked with Oxfam on issues of inequality and wellbeing in Mexico. Roz Price is a researcher at IDS. She has more than six years of work experience in the field of international climate policy, climate finance, and climate-related risks and vulnerability. She has worked with a number of intergovernmental organisations, donors, governments and NGOs on resilience and climate finance modalities, with a focus on small island developing states and least developed countries. ids.ac.uk Working Paper Volume 2020 Number 540 6 Towards Transformative Climate Justice: Key Challenges and Future Directions for Research Executive Summary This study was commissioned by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) to help identify gaps and future entry points for Southern-led research on climate justice. The report is written at a time of growing acknowledgement of the climate crisis. From forest fires in Australia and California to record floods in Jakarta and the UK, it is clear that no area of the world is immune from the effects of climate change. Many countries and cities have woken up to this fact and have declared climate emergencies. We have witnessed unprecedented social mobilisation around the issue, including the school strikes and the rise of direct action movements such as Extinction Rebellion. Mainstream discourses are increasingly framed around the recognition that climate change is fundamentally a question of justice, in terms of the responsibility for the problem and its mitigation; that vulnerabilities to the impacts of climate change are both a reflection of, and exacerbate, structural injustices; and that there will be residual impacts beyond the capacity to mitigate and adapt or what might be deemed ‘tolerable’ impacts. Yet the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Emissions Gap report for 2019, which was released during the writing of this report, outlined once again the yawning gap between actions that parties have committed to under their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and what the best available science suggests is necessary to keep the world average temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius (°C), let alone the more ambitious 1.5°C target. The 25th Conference of the Parties (COP 25) in Madrid failed to make any progress in areas such as loss and damage, an issue of vital concern particularly to least developed countries. Moreover, key decisions about the rules governing future carbon markets have now been postponed until the 2021 COP in Glasgow.
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