The Many Injustices of Climate Change

These volumes constitute part of an emerging literature addressing thorny problems of fairness and justice associated with human-induced climate change. Going beyond simplistic characterizations of responsibility and suffering, the authors employ a variety of methods and approaches to explore issues of climate injustice, with a particular focus on developing countries and future generations. In doing so, they provide a rich array of arguments, evidence, and policy recommendations for those interested in achieving a more equitable and more effective climate change regime.

All three works argue that greater attention to issues of fairness and justice is necessary to move beyond stalemates in international negotiations and improve national-level policy-making. Roberts and Parks' A Climate of Injustice is a bold bid to situate climate injustice in enduring and emerging inequalities in the international political economy. They elaborate and test a set of causal mechanisms associated with globally unequal development that render developing countries vulnerable to climate impacts, limit options for less carbon-intensive development paths, and constrain possibilities for North-South cooperation. The volume edited by Adger et al. presents a range of perspectives, both normative and positive, on how to incorporate procedural and distributive justice into adaptation policies. Page's Climate Change, Justice, and Future Generations, is a work of analytic philosophy, showing how theories of distributive justice can provide compelling ethical rationales for present generations to take seriously the adverse impacts of climate change on future generations.

Each of these works tackles broad inequalities associated with human-induced climate change: unequal distribution of impacts, unequal responsibility for climate change, and unequal costs for mitigation and adaptation (what Roberts and Parks refer to as the "triple inequality," p. 7). In doing so, these works identify antecedent and accompanying forms of injustice that have received less attention in the climate change literature, such as unequal participation in the international economy (Roberts and Parks) and procedural inequities in national planning for adaptation (Adger et al., eds.).

Most of the chapters in Fairness in Adaptation to Climate Change cluster around the theme that socio-economic and political factors, rather than biophysical processes, shape vulnerability to climate change and capacities for adaptation. The contribution by Barnett, for instance, shows that violent conflict destroys and damages the resources and institutions needed to buffer populations from biophysical changes. Barnett highlights how displaced populations, reduced food production, destroyed infrastructure, disrupted internal and external markets, and other features of post-conflict societies already render populations vulnerable to natural occurrences of droughts, floods, and other climate-related events. Climate adaptation strategies and funds, he argues, should incorporate the immediate needs of post-conflict societies, as these measures can help regenerate some of the social, ecological, and human capital needed to cope with climate change impacts.

The chapter by Schneider and Lane in Fairness in Adaptation to Climate Change introduces five "numeraires," or metrics, in order to move beyond conventional cost-benefit analyses to more adequately capture the effects of climate change on social and ecological systems. Rather than relying solely on economic impacts (expressed as $ costs per tonne of C), Schneider and Lane present four additional metrics—accounting for human lives lost (persons per tonne of C), biodiversity loss (species per tonne of C), welfare impact (income redistribution per tonne of C) and quality of life (loss of heritage sites, forced migration, disturbed cultural amenities, etc per tonne of C)—that more explicitly highlight the inequitable distributions and impacts of climate change (p. 30–32). The chapter by Leichenko and O'Brien goes further in this respect, launching a thoughtful critique of how the IPCC Assessment Reports and other climate change assessments portray adverse impacts on humans as "natural, inevitable, and evolutionary (NIE) outcomes of environmental processes . . . a view in which climate sensitivity and biophysical...