Environmental justice and climate change policies

Abstract

Climate change is an environmental justice issue because it is likely to cause disproportionate harm to low-income countries and low-income populations in higher-income countries. While climate change mitigation and adaptation policies may be able to minimize these harms, they could make them worse unless they are developed and implemented with an eye toward promoting justice and fairness. Those who view climate change as an environmental justice issue should be wary of endorsing policies that sound like they promote the cause of social and economic justice, but in fact do not. While climate change policies may help to mitigate the effects of climate change on poor people, there is no guarantee that they will be just at the local, national, or global level. Those who care about global climate justice must remain actively engaged in policy formation and implementation to ensure that justice does not get shortchanged in the response to global warming.

1 ∣. INTRODUCTION

The quest for environmental justice has its roots in the civil rights movement of the 1960s.¹ At the outset, environmental justice advocates and researchers focused on local environmental disparities related to race, ethnicity, and income. A defining moment for environmental justice occurred in 1982, when thousands of residents of Shocco Township, a low-income community of color in Warren County, North Carolina, protested against the state's decision to locate a disposal site in their vicinity for dirt that a private company had contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyl.² Although the residents did not stop the state from locating the waste site in their neighborhood, their efforts helped launch a national, grassroots social and economic justice movement.³ In the ensuing decades, hundreds of scientific studies have described disproportionate exposures to environmental hazards and conditions that can create health risks, including air and water pollution, hazardous and municipal waste, industrial chemicals, pesticides, lead, noise, unsafe housing, and automobile traffic.⁴ Environmental justice discourse and scholarship has expanded beyond a focus on race, ethnicity, and income to address environmental health inequalities related to age, occupation, and infirmity, as well as inequalities at the national and international level.⁵ Today, the environmental justice movement is a powerful social and political force and environmental justice considerations have been incorporated into US government laws and policies at the federal and state level.⁶

Since the early 2000s, climate change has emerged as an important environmental justice issue because (a) it is caused, in part, by human activities that produce greenhouse gas emissions (such as combustion of fossil fuels) or reduce the biosphere's capacity to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (such as deforestation); and (b) it disproportionally burdens low-income populations and countries, which tend to produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions than high-income populations and countries.⁷ Unless drastic measures are taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, global average surface temperatures are expected to rise between 2.1 and 3.5 °C by 2100. Climate change has numerous environmental and public health impacts, including increased flooding, droughts, heat waves, forest fires, tropical storms, and infectious diseases; and decreased biodiversity, food security, and safe drinking water supplies.⁸

In 2004, Hurricane Katrina brought climate justice issues to the forefront of public policy discussions, when it decimated the US Gulf Coast, killing 986 people and causing billions of dollars in property damage.⁹ The hurricane did most of its damage by causing massive flooding, which disproportionally impacted low-income communities and communities of color because they were living in flood-prone areas and lacked the social and economic resources to protect themselves from harm or recover from it.¹⁰ The mortality rate due to the hurricane for African Americans was 1.7 to 4 times higher than for Caucasians and 51% of the deceased were African American.¹¹ Scientists hypothesized that abnormally-high water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico, due, in part to global warming, contributed to the size and force of the hurricane, which intensified from a Category 3 to a Category 5 while moving across the Gulf.¹² Scholars and advocates argued that Hurricane Katrina exposed injustices related to race, ethnicity, and income and that mitigating and adapting to climate change should be a key objective in the struggle for social and economic justice.¹³

Other devasting natural disasters around the globe have also illuminated the connection between climate change and environmental justice.¹⁴ In 2010, for example, flooding caused by heavy monsoon rains covered 20% of Pakistan's land area, displaced 20 million people, and killed over 5,000 people. An analysis of atmospheric conditions indicated that the flooding in 2010 was part of a trend toward heavier monsoon rains caused by climate change.¹⁵ Pakistan is the 34th poorest country in the world; 24.3% of the population is below the poverty level.¹⁶

While there is little doubt that climate change raises issues of environmental justice, policy proposals designed to address climate change may impede the goals of the environmental justice movement if they are not developed and implemented with an eye toward reducing socioeconomic inequalities.¹⁷ According to Schlosberg and Collins:

In any climate policy debate, environmental justice activists are suspicious of corporate or consumerist responses to climate change; they see such approaches as catering to those with wealth, rather than the already vulnerable. More specifically, there has been tension around the key policy suggested by mainstream environmental organizations—to raise the price and/or limit the supply of carbon-based energy. The concern is that any policy to reduce carbon emissions…will inevitably raise the price of energy. That, of course, hurts the poor most.¹⁸

In the early 1990s, tensions between the environmental justice movement and global environmental organizations emerged when environmental justice advocates asserted that international environmental organizations were racist and elitist and more concerned with protecting endangered species, the wilderness, and the climate than with promoting social and economic justice.¹⁹ Leaders of the Gulf Coast Tenant Leadership Development Project and the Southwest Organizing Project sent letters to 10 environmental organizations accusing them of not representing their interests and supporting policies that disrupt their communities. The letters advocated for opening a dialogue that could lead to the advancement of overlapping environmental agendas.²⁰ Although climate change policy was not the only issue that created friction between environmental justice groups and international environmental organizations, it was a key concern.²¹

In this article, I will examine potential conflicts between climate change policies and environmental justice. While environmental justice groups and environmental organizations have been working together toward common goals for at least a decade now,²² environmental justice advocacy groups were right to be concerned that international environmental organizations might not protect their interests, because promoting environmental justice requires assiduous attention to the development and implementation of policies that reduce—or at least do not increase—socioeconomic and health-related inequalities. To ensure that climate policies promote environmental justice, environmental justice advocates and leaders should be engaged in the policy-making process so their concerns are addressed, and they should be wary of signing on to policies that sound good in theory but do not, in the end, promote social and economic justice.

2 ∣. WHAT IS ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE?

Before beginning this analysis, we need to say a few words about the concept of environmental justice. Justice is about fairness concerning the distribution of benefits and burdens or fairness with respect to the procedures (or processes) that distribute benefits and burdens.²³ Benefits include things that most people would want in order to have a fulfilling life, such as nutrition, shelter, health, income, opportunities, safety, and fundamental rights; burdens include things that undermine benefits, such as malnutrition, disease, poverty, crime, discrimination, and so on.²⁴ Environmental justice can therefore be understood as fairness concerning the distribution of environmental benefits and burdens or fairness concerning the procedures or processes that distribute environmental benefits and burdens.²⁵ Environmental burdens could encompass many things that can adversely impact health and well-being, including air and water pollution, pesticides, industrial chemicals, infectious diseases, flooding, noise pollution, racial or ethnic discrimination, and crime. Environmental benefits could include access to greenspaces, safe housing, nutrition food, or health care.²⁶

Given this conceptual framework, environmental injustice could arise because a community, population, or entire nation is unfairly impacted by environmental burdens or has little meaningful input into decisions related to those burdens, both of which happened in the Shocco case. Another well-known example of environmental injustice is Louisiana's infamous “cancer alley,” an 85-mile-long strip of land stretching from Baton Rouge to New Orleans that contains 150 petrochemical companies. People who live in this area are exposed to above average levels of toxic air pollutants from the petrochemical industry, including formaldehyde, benzene, and ethyl oxide. Most of the residents of this area are people of color with an income near the poverty line or below.²⁷ The area became known as cancer alley because studies have shown that incidences of some types of cancer among people living in the area are significantly above the national average. Also, the region contains numerous cancer clusters in smaller areas.²⁸ However, some studies have shown that cancer rates in the region are not above average rates in Louisiana or the United States, and that other factors, including poverty and lifestyle, may explain observed differences in the rates of some types of cancer.²⁹ Even if adverse health outcomes cannot be conclusively proven, residents of cancer alley are clearly victims of procedural injustice, because they have not had significant input into land use decisions that can affect their health, due to their lack of political and economic power.³⁰

3 ∣. THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CLIMATE CHANGE POLICIES AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE

As discussed above, climate change is environmental justice issue because it is likely to disproportionally and adversely impact poor people throughout the world.³¹ It seems reasonable to assume, therefore, that policies that aim to mitigate climate change or help people adapt to it are likely to promote social and economic justice, which is what many scholars initially thought was the case.³² However, as economists, social scientists, and political theorists began to examine climate change policy proposals more closely, they realized that these policies might not promote social and economic justice and might even have the opposite effect.

Consider, for example, proposals that seek to reduce the use of fossil fuels. Fossil fuel emissions, chiefly carbon dioxide, contribute to global warming by means of the greenhouse effect.³³ Other products of fossil fuel extraction and use, such as methane, are also potent greenhouse gases.³⁴ Most climate change policy experts agree that to mitigate climate change the world must shift away from an economy the depends on fossil fuels toward one that relies on alternative sources of energy, such as wind, solar, hydroelectric, geothermal, or nuclear power, that is, a “green economy.”³⁵ To achieve this transition, it will be necessary to adopt policies that drastically reduce the use of fossil fuels through such strategies as imposing high taxes on fossil fuels, or implementing carbon emission cap and trade system for larger emitters (such as electric utilities and factories).³⁶ However, these strategies are likely to substantially increase the costs of energy and decrease economic growth, both of which disproportionally harm poor people.³⁷ Because poor people spend a larger percentage of their income on energy than rich people, policies that increase the costs of energy are inherently regressive.³⁸ Lack of affordable energy is a significant factor in poverty, malnutrition, and disease.³⁹ Climate change mitigation experts also argue for phasing out fossil fuel production, which could put millions of low-income, low-skill people out of work and devastate local economies.⁴⁰ Another proposal for mitigating climate change is to increase the use of biofuels derived from corn, soybeans, sugarcane, and other crops. However, using agricultural commodities to produce fuel can drive up the cost of food, which also has a regressive impact.⁴¹

It is worth noting that some economists and policy analysts argue that climate change mitigation policies will not disproportionately impact low-income populations in the long run because the environmental, public health, and economic benefits of climate change mitigation will far outweigh short-term economic harms. However, most researchers who have studied the issue have concluded that climate change mitigation policies will disproportionally harm low-income populations unless measures are taken to shield them from the disruptive and inequitable impacts of these policies.⁴²

Because climate change adaptation does not involve major transformations of the economy, it will probably have less of an impact on socioeconomic inequalities than climate change mitigation.⁴³ Nevertheless, climate change adaptation policies also raise issues concerning justice because adaptation projects—and their effects—may be distributed unequally.⁴⁴ For example, erecting levees to control flooding may protect high-property value areas but exacerbate flooding in low-property value areas, as has happened in Louisiana since it was first settled by Europeans.⁴⁵ Building codes designed to protect people from natural disasters related to climate change can drive up the cost of housing, which disproportionally impacts poor people.⁴⁶ Greenspaces built to combat urban heating could benefit-rich neighborhoods more than poor ones, unless they are planned with an eye toward equity.⁴⁷

By calling attention to the possible unjust effects of climate change policies, I do not mean to imply that there are not good reasons for addressing climate change, since injustice within and among nations is likely to get much worse if we do not take effective action to deal with climate change. Also, climate change is likely to have adverse impacts on the entire human population and biosphere, irrespective of justice concerns.⁴⁸ To promote justice at the local, national, and international level, climate change policies must be developed and implemented in a manner that protects the interests of low-income nations and low-income people in higher income nations.⁴⁹ Is this likely to occur? Let's consider this question from the perspective of international and national justice.

4 ∣. CLIMATE CHANGE POLICIES AND INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE

To understand the relationship between climate change policies and international justice, it is important to discuss two opposing views of international justice, cosmopolitanism and nationalism. While it may seem obvious to most readers of this article that climate change is unjust at the global level, not everyone shares this viewpoint. Those who believe that we should take steps to mitigate climate change, as a matter of international justice, assume a particular view of justice known as cosmopolitanism, i.e., the view that justice is relationship among people, regardless of where they happen to live in the world.⁵⁰ Nationalism, by contrast, is the view that justice is relationship among people living within an autonomous nation or state.⁵¹ Nationalism has a long history dating back to ancient Greek philosophy, and has been defended by social contract theorists, including Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, and as well as contemporary theorists, such as Rawls and Nagel.⁵² Cosmopolitanism, which is a more recent development, has been defended by Beitz, Nussbaum, Pogge, Singer, and others.⁵³

I will not take a stance on the dispute between nationalism and cosmopolitanism. I would like to point out, however, that this is not merely an academic debate because it has implications for how political leaders and engaged citizens think about questions of international justice.⁵⁴ While nations are free to act on their own to address climate change, and many have, climate change mitigation requires a high degree of international cooperation, because it is a global phenomenon. Nationalist political leaders tend to evaluate climate change policies in terms of the interests of their nation. For most countries, mitigating climate change coincides with the national interest. However, some nations at northern latitudes, such as Canada, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, and Sweden, may benefit from global warming.⁵⁵ Even nations that do not benefit from climate change may put their national interests far above the interests of other nations when it comes to climate change policy, as has happened during climate change treaty negotiations.⁵⁶Widespread acceptance of the nationalist approach could therefore make it difficult to achieve international cooperation on climate change issues. The cosmopolitan approach, by contrast, has very different implications for international relations because political leaders who adopt this approach may be willing to take actions that promote international justice at the expense of their own nation's interests. It should come as little surprise, therefore, that scholars, scientists, and activists who view climate change as a matter of global justice lean toward a cosmopolitan view of justice.⁵⁷

One of the main critiques of cosmopolitanism is that it is an ideal theory that is out of step with geopolitical realities, such as the problems with achieving international cooperation and the influence of nationalism.⁵⁸ For cosmopolitanism to be an effective approach to international justice, a strong form of global governance is needed to enforce treaties and basic human rights, deter warfare, and transfer wealth from rich to poor countries.⁵⁹ However, the world currently does not have a global governance system that is capable of promoting cosmopolitan ideals, and none is likely to emerge in the foreseeable future, because nationalism remains an important political movement and is on the rise in many parts of the world.⁶⁰

Because cosmopolitanism is not uniformly accepted as an approach to international justice, it may be difficult to develop and implement climate change agreements that promote global justice. Political and economic rivalries that have influenced the formation and implementation of agreements designed to minimize global warming may interfere with efforts to ensure that climate change mitigation agreements are just at a global level. For example, the Kyoto Protocol required developed nations to meet greenhouse gas emission targets but exempted developing nations to allow these countries to burn fossil fuels at current levels to support their economies.⁶¹ The rationale for including this provision in the treaty was to protect developing nations from the adverse economic effects of reducing their greenhouse gas emissions. However, this provision proved to be controversial, and many countries argued that all nations, not just developed nations, should do their part to mitigate climate change.⁶² India, for example, was exempted from the Kyoto Protocol, but India is a highly industrialized developing nation that produces huge amounts of greenhouse gases.⁶³ While China was not exempted from the Kyoto Protocol, political leaders in the United States and other countries were concerned that China would not live up to the requirements of the treaty and would use it to gain an economic advantage over countries that abide by the treaty.⁶⁴

Political and economic tensions impacted the drafting of the Paris Agreement in 2015, which does not exempt any signatory countries. The Paris Agreement is more flexible than the Kyoto Protocol because it does not require signatory countries to accept specific greenhouse gas emissions targets. The Paris Agreement sets a goal of preventing the global climate from warming more than 1.5 °C above by 2100 and calls upon signatory countries to abide by their own, nationally defined contributions toward this goal.⁶⁵ During the Copenhagen Climate Conference in 2009, high-income countries pledged to provide $100 billion to low- and middle-income countries to help them adapt to climate change. However, this pledge has not been met. Although high-income countries reaffirmed their pledge at the recent Glasgow Climate Conference, the prospects for meeting this financial commitment are not good, especially given the global economic recession caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.⁶⁶

5 ∣. CLIMATE CHANGE ADAPTATION POLICIES AND NATIONAL JUSTICE

Climate change policies also pose challenges for promoting justice within nations. As noted earlier, policies that attempt to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels are likely to disproportionally impact the poor by increasing energy prices, which will have wide-ranging impacts on the costs of transportation, electricity, heating, food, and consumer goods. Also, reducing the use of coal and other fossil fuels will lead to job losses for millions of low-skilled, low-income people, the erosion of taxes bases, and the devastation of local economies built around fossil fuel extraction.

Environmentalists, economists, and policy analysts have become increasingly aware of these uneven effects of climate change mitigation policies and have argued that there needs to be a just transition to a green economy. While there is no universally accepted notion of what constitute a “just transition,” policies that seek to promote this goal include funding to retrain or reeducate displaced workers to prepare them for green energy jobs or other types of employment; funding for social services for displaced workers and their families; and income subsidies or tax credits for poor people to offset rising energy costs.⁶⁷

A just transition to a green economy may be difficult to achieve due to lack of knowledge about the social, psychological, and economic impacts of the transition, unintended consequences of well-meaning policies (such as fraud, abuse, and corruption), and lack of political will to adopt policies that shield the poor from the impacts of the transition. Also, powerful economic and political forces, such as oil, coal, and electric companies, as well as leaders from states or regions likely to be harmed by the phasing out of fossil fuels, are likely to oppose just transition policies every step of the way. Environmental groups that make public pronouncements about supporting a just transition to a green economy may ultimately be more concerned about lowering carbon emissions than protecting the poor.

There is widespread agreement that a transition away from dependence on fossil fuels to alternative forms of energy is inevitable, since supplies of oil, coal, and natural gas will not last forever. The main areas of ethical/policy disagreement are how fast this transition should occur and how much it should be driven by social and economic policies, as opposed to market forces and the natural course of scientific discovery and technical innovation. To take effective action to mitigate climate change, the transition must occur in the next 20 years or so.⁶⁸ However, there is a trade-off between speed and equity, and the faster the transition occurs the more likely it is to have inequitable impacts. The unavoidable reality is that major transformations in the economy, such as the industrial revolution and the globalization of manufacturing, are extremely disruptive and often have outcomes that many would view as unfair or unjust. This is likely to occur when the world transitions toward a green economy, despite the adoption of well-meaning policies aimed at softening the blow.

Before concluding this section, it is also important to mention that there may also be some difficulties with developing and implementing equitable climate adaptation policies, because wealthy and powerful groups may seek to protect their interests at the expense of socioeconomically disadvantaged groups. As mentioned previously, the construction of levees in Louisiana protected properties with high values at the expense of lower-value properties and contributed to the environmental injustice brought about by Hurricane Katrina. The same type of power dynamic is likely to play out repeatedly, as towns, cities, counties, and states make decisions about efforts adapt to climate change, such as building structures to prevent erosion and flooding, such as seawalls, dams, dikes, jetties, canals; locating populations away from areas prone to flooding, mudslides, or wildfires; preserving and restoring forests and wetlands; protecting fisheries; and building greenspaces.⁶⁹ To promote justice in climate change adaptation, it is important to protect the interests of marginalized groups and to curb the influence of powerful groups on these decisions.⁷⁰

6 ∣. CONCLUSION

Climate change is an environmental justice issue because it is likely to cause disproportionate harm to low-income countries and low-income populations in higher-income countries. While climate change mitigation and adaptation policies may be able to minimize these harms, they could make them worse unless they are developed and implemented with an eye toward promoting justice and equity. The quest for environmental justice is part of the larger struggle for social, political, and economic justice.⁷¹ Those who view climate change as an environmental justice issue should be wary of endorsing policies that sound like they promote the cause of social and economic justice, but in fact do not. While climate change policies may help to mitigate the effects of climate change on poor people, there is no guarantee that they will be just at the local, national, or global level. Those who care about global climate justice must remain actively engaged in policy formation and implementation to ensure that justice does not get shortchanged in the response to global warming.

Because climate change policies are likely to have various economic, social, environmental, and public health effects that have differential impacts on communities, populations, and nations, public discourse and scholarly inquiry should identify and describe these effects and consider the fairness of different distributions of benefits and burdens and trade-offs among competing values. Representatives from socioeconomically disadvantaged and vulnerable groups need to have a prominent place in these discussions so that their concerns will be addressed, otherwise climate change policies may not advance the cause of environmental justice.

Biography

David B. Resnik is a Bioethicist at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, National Institutes of Health. Dr. Resnik has published over 300 articles and 10 books on various topics on ethical, philosophical, and legal issues in science, technology, and medicine and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He serves on several editorial boards and is an Associate Editor of the journal Accountability in Research.