Environmental and Climate Justice
🔵 See the programme prospectus
Today’s global political economy prioritizes unsustainable growth and profit over justice, equality and what our planet can sustain—triggering many interlinked social and environmental crises. Beyond the fundamental damage caused to our ecosystems and biodiversity, the climate crisis is one of social and environmental injustice: those who are least responsible for it face the greatest impacts and have the fewest resources to cope with it. Business-as-usual policies are not commensurate with the size of the task of averting the full effects of this crisis—they are not on track to deliver the rapid decarbonization that is needed, and are failing to tackle its underlying root causes. The Environmental and Climate Justice Programme analyses how these injustices are produced and manifested at all levels of governance, examine their interlinkages with inequality and discrimination (including those based on gender and race), and identify entry points for transformative change in policy and practice.
The programme’s work seeks to understand, analyse and engage with processes of policy change around the following types of questions.
- How are social, climate and environmental justice interlinked, and how do they contribute to rights-based development, equality and the creation of a new eco-social contract?
- How are environmental and climate injustices produced and manifested at all levels of governance, and how do they interact with inequalities and discrimination (including those based on gender and race)?
- What are the conflicts, contradictions and trade-offs between different social, economic and environmental objectives, and how can they be addressed?
- What are the entry points for transformative change in policy and practice that tackle the root causes of climate and environmental injustices?
Projects
Photo: Gustavo Quepón (public domain via Unsplash)