Brian Tokar
Just a few years into the current millennium, popular movements to address the emerging global climate crisis appeared to be at an impasse. Although scientific evidence was rapidly converging with respect to the nature and consequences of human‐derived climate changes, public attention to the issue lagged far behind, especially in the United States. Efforts to engage the public were most often limited to explaining the science of global warming and emphatically making the case that the phenomenon was real. This limitation was most apparent in Al Gore’s popular documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth, but appeared endemic to the movement as a whole.
Even in the aftermath of the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which declared that the evidence for human‐caused climate change was now “unequivocal,” global warming was most often viewed as a somewhat esoteric scientific concern, with consequences that would be felt at some indefinite future time and most dramatically affect the inhabitants of remote and uniquely endangered ecosystems. The most iconic symbol of this earlier wave of climate activism was the polar bear, struggling to stand its ground amidst shrinking ice flows in the Arctic north.
When tens of thousands of people converged on the streets of Copenhagen during the landmark UN climate conference in December of 2009, a different perspective was clearly emerging. Some activists still dressed as polar bears, while others aimed to focus the world’s attention on the need to reduce the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide to a maximum of 350 parts per million. But a far more urgent outlook on the climate crisis was also beginning to capture the world’s attention. This view, known as ‘climate justice,’ is rooted in vulnerable communities around the world that have experienced severe and destabilizing climate‐related disruptions to their lives and livelihoods. This chapter will examine the perspective of climate justice, its origins and scope, as well as some of its challenges in moving forward.
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When the UN’s annual climate conference was held in Bali in 2007, the Durban Group for Climate Justice and numerous allies from around the world gathered in significant numbers. Representatives of communities disproportionately affected by global inaction on climate presented a strong and unified showing both inside and outside the official proceedings, and a more formal worldwide network emerged under the slogan, ‘Climate Justice Now!’ At a series of side events, press conferences, and protests throughout the Bali conference, representatives of affected communities, Indigenous Peoples, women, peasant farmers, and their allies articulated their demands for:
A more detailed statement of principles for Climate Justice Now! (CJN!), developed the following year, begins in part:
From the perspective of climate justice, it is imperative that responsibility for reducing emissions and financing systemic transformation is taken by those who have benefited most from the past 250 years of economic development. Furthermore, any solutions to climate change must protect the most vulnerable, compensate those who are displaced, guarantee individual and collective rights, and respect peoples’ right to participate in decisions that impact on their lives.
By 2010, some 750 international organizations had joined the CJN! network, including numerous grassroots groups throughout the global South, and had become a clearinghouse for information and the continuing involvement of many groups seeking to further these goals. At the annual UN climate conferences, the network offers an inclusive meetingplace for critical perspectives on the unfolding international climate negotiations.
Over the past several years, climate justice has come to embody several distinct but largely complementary currents from various parts of the world. In the global South, demands for climate justice unite an impressive diversity of indigenous and other land‐based people’s movements. They include rainforest dwellers opposing new mega‐dams and palm oil plantations, African communities resisting land appropriations for industrial agriculture and agrofuel production, Pacific Islanders facing the loss of their homes due to rising seas, and peasant farmers fighting for food sovereignty and basic land rights. A statement to the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference from the worldwide confederation of peasant movements, La Vía Campesina, stated in part:
Climate change is already seriously impacting us. It brings floods, droughts and the outbreak of pests that are all causing harvest failures. I must point out that these harvest failures are something that the farmers did not create. Instead, it is the polluters who caused the emissions who destroy the natural cycles. … [W]e will not pay for their mistakes.
In the US, environmental justice activists continue to be the leading voices for climate justice – mainly representatives from African American, Latino, and Native American communities that have been resisting daily exposure to chemical toxins and other environmental hazards for more than 25 years. A conference in New York City in early 2009, organized by West Harlem Environmental Action (WEACT), brought together inner city activists, community and youth organizers, indigenous representatives and farmworker advocates with students, environmental lawyers, scientists, public health advocates, and government officials to discuss the relevance of the climate justice framework for communities of color and their allies across the US. Many speakers described the emerging climate justice movement as a continuation of the US civil rights legacy, and of their communities’ continuing “quest for fairness, equity and justice.” Others explained how, in recent years, the environmental justice movement has broadened its scope to areas of food justice, housing justice, and transportation justice, as well as opposition to the commodification of the atmosphere through global carbon markets. The national Grassroots Global Justice Alliance continues to bring delegations of US environmental justice activists to the annual UN climate conferences, while the Labor Network for Sustainability and allied groups work to raise support for climate justice among the ranks of organized labor in the US.
In much of Europe, climate justice emerged as a further evolution of the global justice and anticapitalist movements that arose in opposition to the World Trade Organization and annual G8 economic summits during the late 1990s and early 2000s. A March 2010 discussion paper from the European Climate Justice Action network (CJA) explained that “Climate Justice means linking all struggles together that reject neoliberal markets and working towards a world that puts autonomous decision making power in the hands of communities.” The paper concluded: “Fundamentally, we believe that we cannot prevent further global warming without addressing the way our societies are organized – the fight for climate justice and the fight for social justice are one and the same.” While Climate Justice Action proved to be relatively short‐lived, this approach is also expressed through ongoing networks such as Rising Tide – which was formed in the Netherlands and boasts chapters in the UK, US, Mexico, Ecuador, and Australia – as well as the UK Climate Camp movement, which organized high profile actions between 2006 and 2010 at major power plant sites, Heathrow Airport, London’s financial district, and the Edinburgh headquarters of the Royal Bank of Scotland.
While various organizational expressions have proved difficult to sustain, the outlook of climate justice continues to have significant appeal in many parts of the world, and the informal Climate Justice Now! network serves as a consistent point of contact among these disparate currents, especially around the ongoing UN climate negotiations. Between the UN conferences, people and groups collaborate through a variety of online forums to share news, debate perspectives and strategies, and further the scope of climate justice organizing. Demands for climate justice have recently been voiced by representatives of waste pickers in Durban, South Africa, migrant farmworkers in the hills of Vermont, and Rising Tide activists challenging the practice of “mountaintop removal” coal mining in the US state of West Virginia, among others. As the consequences of climate destabilization continue to be felt by people around the world, the disproportionate effects on those least responsible for excess greenhouse gas emissions continue to be a powerful motivator for engaged civil society actions.
The disproportionate impacts of a changing climate are most clearly illustrated by the marked increase in weather‐related disasters over the past half‐century. The stories of people affected by unprecedented droughts, floods, wildfires, and other such incidents have most shaped public perceptions of the case for climate justice. From Hurricane Katrina in the US to the flooding of the Indus River valley in Pakistan, uncontrollable wildfires in Russia, and years of protracted drought in the Horn of Africa, the stories of vulnerable and often helpless people facing increasingly dangerous and unanticipated weather events have stirred the conscience of people around the world.
While scientists may disagree to what extent particular events are attributable to climatic changes, three things are clear: first, that the rate of weather‐related disasters is increasing rapidly, upsetting even the authoritative projections of the global insurance industry; second, that these incidents are wholly consistent with the predictions of climate models for the behavior of a warmer, more turbulent atmosphere; and third, that when the climate contribution to particular weather events can be measured, the signal of global warming consistently stands out as an essential strong contributing factor.
The 2007 UN Human Development Report revealed that one out of every 19 people in the so‐called developing world was affected by a climate‐related disaster between 2000 and 2004, compared to one out of every 1,500 people in the OECD countries. A 2009 Oxfam study found that of nearly 250 million people who are now affected by natural disasters every year, 98 percent of them are falling victim to climate‐related events such as floods and droughts. They predict that this could increase to over 375 million people per year as soon as 2015. Columbia University’s International Earth Science Information Network predicts that by 2050 the world will see as many as 700 million climate refugees. The IPCC’s ongoing assessment of current climate research has confirmed these realities, while summarizing numerous studies of the potential impacts of observed trends. Their 2007 report predicted a worldwide decrease in crop productivity if global temperatures rise more than three degrees Celsius, and that crop yields from rain‐fed agriculture could be reduced by half as early as 2020. Current climate trends would expose between 75 million and 250 million people to “increased water stress” in Africa alone.
Some of the grimmest consequences for human rights are contained in the IPCC’s assessment of the health consequences of climate changes, which predicts
increases in malnutrition and consequent disorders …; increased deaths, disease and injury due to heatwaves, floods, storms, fires and droughts; the increased burden of diarrheal disease; the increased frequency of cardio‐respiratory diseases due to higher concentrations of ground‐level ozone …; and, the altered spatial distribution of some infectious disease vectors.
This will also include malaria. It is clear that those populations with “high exposure, high sensitivity and/or low adaptive capacity” will bear the greatest burdens; those who contribute the least to the problem of global warming will continue to face the most severe consequences.
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While movements for climate justice do not claim a unified political strategy, their praxis to date clearly falls into three main arenas: strategic interventions at the annual negotiations carried out under the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC); challenges to the expanding extraction of fossil fuels; and a variety of efforts to expose corporate‐driven ‘false solutions’ to the climate crisis. Even as fossil fuel companies and other transnational corporate interests underwrite efforts to deny the reality of global climate disruptions, they have simultaneously aimed to influence the debate over climate solutions. Several sectors of the global energy industry have proposed technological and policy measures purported to address the climate situation while assuring their continued hegemonic role in the global economy. Campaigns to challenge the false solutions to climate change focus mainly on these corporate initiatives. The false solutions framework has engaged those who identify with the messages of climate justice in opposition to a new generation of energy megaprojects, as well as the global proliferation of carbon markets and a variety of proposed geoengineering schemes.
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The technology of fracking for natural gas links opposition to conventional fossil fuels with the emerging opposition to false solutions to the climate crisis. Influential environmental NGOs in the US and beyond continue to view natural gas, with roughly 30 percent less carbon dioxide emitted than from burning oil, as a ‘bridge fuel’ to help facilitate the future expansion of renewable energy. But the hazards of modern gas extraction methods have sparked opposition in many regions, including some of the most politically conservative parts of the United States. Amid numerous reports of contaminated water, dying livestock, and hazards to human health, landowners are organizing to resist the pressure to sign drilling contracts, while towns and entire counties are enacting bans. Vermont passed a statewide ban on fracking in 2012, and New York’s governor proposed to prohibit the practice in most of the state.
False solutions to the climate crisis include a variety of technologies that are claimed to expand energy supplies without increasing greenhouse gas emissions, as well as market‐oriented policy measures such as carbon markets and offsets that aim to substitute for regulations against pollution. Technological false solutions include the expansion of nuclear power, which was widely advocated before Fukushima and will likely be considered again in the near future. Indigenous inhabitants of areas known to be rich in uranium, including the US Southwest and central Canada, are organizing against the expansion of mining in their territories. The false promise of ‘carbon capture and storage’ from new coal‐fired power plants is another important focus, as a new generation of purportedly ‘capture‐ready’ coal plants has been proposed in many countries, despite a scientific consensus that reliable underground carbon capture is many decades away, at best. Local activists tied to the Sierra Club have reportedly halted the construction of 132 new coal plants in the US in recent years. While utilities claim that new coal plants will replace older, less efficient ones and thus reduce the climate impact of US electricity production, activists argue that new construction will sustain the economy’s dependence on coal far into the future.
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While the principles of climate justice have the potential to unite a wide variety of people’s movements around the world, many groups engaged in local struggles against new energy developments still identify rather loosely with the climate justice movement. This is especially true in the US and Europe, where climate justice campaigns began to coalesce in the lead‐up to the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit, only to subside in the summit’s aftermath.
Indeed, some active participants have concluded that Copenhagen was the inadvertent peak of global efforts to create a unified climate justice movement. Some 50,000 people attended the alternative ‘Klimaforum’ people’s summit in Copenhagen, and over 100,000 marched in the streets during the conference, many conveying demands for climate justice and for ‘System Change, Not Climate Change.’ However, this proved far from sufficient to prevent a diplomatic meltdown inside the conference center. The Copenhagen effort, according to CJA activists Nicola Bullard and Tadzio Müller,
failed to establish an anti‐capitalist CJ‐discourse that was visible and understandable beyond the subcultures of activists and policy‐wonks, and thus failed to provide a visible alternative to despair; failed to establish a new ‘pole of attraction’ that would substantially reconfigure the political field around climate change; and failed to do anything to significantly advance the fight for climate justice. In some sense, the global CJM [Climate Justice Movement; emphasis in original] remained something more of a potential than a reality.
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Internationally, a significant effort to coalesce climate justice‐oriented movements was realized in Cochabamba, Bolivia during April 2010. At the end of the Copenhagen climate conference, Bolivian president Evo Morales invited participants to Bolivia for a People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. Some 30,000 representatives of civil society, indigenous peoples, and social movement actors from around the world, along with a delegation of public officials from Bolivia and allied countries, met in Cochabamba to develop a ‘People’s Agreement,’ assembled from the products of 17 onsite working groups.
In marked contrast to the rather empty ‘accord’ that came out of the UNFCCC negotiations in Copenhagen, the People’s Agreement was rooted in indigenous views of harmony, complementarity, and anticolonialism, and proposed a Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth. The document condemned carbon markets and the commodification of forests for carbon offsets; asserted the rights of climate migrants; and proposed an International Climate and Environmental Justice Tribunal to judge and punish activities that promote further climate change. However, the agreement fell short of endorsing the full climate justice agenda, most notably the call to keep fossil fuels in the ground. Popular movements critical of Bolivia’s economic dependence on resource extraction formed a separate working group, which was compelled to operate outside of the official proceedings.
Further public expressions of climate justice continued to manifest at the annual conferences of the UNFCCC in Cancún, Mexico at the end of 2010 and Durban, South Africa in 2011. In both instances, international NGOs affiliated with Climate Justice Now! brought representatives of popular movements from throughout the global South to the UN summits to testify at official side events and demonstrate outside of the proceedings. La Vía Campesina and its affiliated peasant farmer movements were in the forefront of public events in Cancún, challenging the limitations of the official proceedings. In Durban, conflicts between civil society groups participating in the UN conference and those who remained outside came to a head on the very last day during an Occupy‐style demonstration just outside the conference hall. While representatives of organizations such as Greenpeace and 350.org urged cooperation with UN security in clearing the building of protesters, several activists refused to leave and some were forcibly removed. Whereas many groups affiliated with Climate Justice Now! have had an increasingly difficult time airing their issues within the UN process – pointing to a concerted effort by officials to marginalize civil society voices – others remain hopeful about the potential for a coordinated inside/outside strategy around these annual events.
Where is the movement for climate justice today? Many groups continue to intervene under the banner of climate justice at the UN level, despite what some groups perceive to be diminishing returns on these efforts. But perhaps more important, local activists around the world continue to bring climate justice messages into their campaigns. Some activists have voiced concerns that the message of climate justice has been appropriated by large international NGOs, governments, and development agencies, while others celebrate the emergence of official climate justice initiatives, such as a £3 million fund announced by the Scottish government in 2012 to support water projects in eastern and central Africa. As awareness grows of increasingly erratic and extreme weather patterns throughout the world, the social justice dimensions of the climate crisis have proved increasingly difficult to overlook.
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Movements for climate justice continue to be multifaceted, and draw upon a perhaps unprecedented diversity of perspectives and strategies. In many ways, their diversity is their greatest strength, given the multiplicity of peoples affected by extreme weather events and increasing climate chaos, as well as the need to develop appropriate strategies for a wide variety of political contexts. But the climate crisis is also inherently global in scope, and the lack of progress toward global reductions in greenhouse pollution speaks to the need for ever greater coordination, determination, and commonality of vision.
Climate justice activists’ involvement at the UN level has helped to forge unique and encouraging alliances among people and organizations throughout the world, but the 2011 Durban Platform’s deferral of new mitigation measures until 2020 at the earliest helped further a lingering crisis of confidence in the entire process. The delay could spell a “death sentence for Africa, small island states, and the poor and vulnerable worldwide,” in the words of Friends of the Earth International chair Nnimmo Bassey, and increasing “climate racism, ecocide, and genocide,” according to Tom Goldtooth from the Indigenous Environmental Network. Perhaps the climate movement’s best hope lies in the combination of rising climate militancy in the North and the increasing international visibility of struggles in the South. Short of a comprehensive strategy to overturn the stalemate in global negotiations – in turn a product of the political hegemony of fossil fuel interests – South African analyst and activist Patrick Bond suggests that: “we should remind ourselves of the most important features of a future climate justice politics: in thinking locally, nationally and globally, and also acting in each sphere with the appropriate analysis, strategies, tactics and alliances.” Humanity’s future may rest on that somewhat tentative but undoubtedly essential prospect.