How tangible is Climate Justice?

In my opinion, the concept of climate justice is pragmatically useful if applied to the policy making of adaptation and mitigation. It falls into a continuous loop of re-theorizing its boundaries and definitions if constraint to the academic discourse. The empirical analysis must be prioritized in order to concretely understand the implications and outcomes of specific frameworks of climate justice (Fisher, 2015). This can help us in supporting one pathway with respect to another and aim at the highest yield of diversely equitable adaptation according to the distinct needs of each community. 

Climate justice has the duty to shift its focus to closing the gaps in development disparities, vulnerable groups, governance and resources in order to alleviate current inequities and trigger the start of a meaningful progress (Adams 2009).

A fair and consequential structure should be developed in order to create a clear connection between climate justice and compensation. A suggestion could be to develop a broader and more intersectional concept of vulnerability which could be the main consideration in allocation funding of climate justice and thus climate financing. Nonetheless, such framework has been found to prioritize countries' vulnerability in terms of adaptation rather than mitigation funding (Islam, 2022), proving once again the need for a more intense focus on empirical research for climate justice models.

We can notice that COP27 in November 2022 is already trying to move the global discussion towards a more just climate fight by implementing the loss and damage fund (UNFCCC, 2022). However, the decisions made in the next months on how to implement such project will represent the actual deliberation of international organizations and developing countries towards the local scales of climate justice in order to achieve the most integrated, nuanced and inclusive results.


References:

Fisher, S. 'The emerging geographies of climate justice’, The Geographical Journal 181(1) 2015, pp.73–82.  

Adams, Barbara and Gretchen Luchsinger. 'Climate justice for a changing planet: a primer for policy makers and NGOs.', 2009.

Islam, Md. Mofakkarul. 'Distributive justice in global climate finance – Recipients’ climate vulnerability and the allocation of climate funds'. Global environmental change (0959-3780), 2022.

UNFCCC, Sharm el-Sheikh Climate Change Conference, November 2022

Helen Briggs, 'Carbon: How calls for climate justice are shaking the world', Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-56941979, BBC News (Accessed: December 12, 2022)

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