E3G

The Quest for Climate Justice

By John Ashton

Climate Change

Nowhere is this challenge more stark than in the case of climate change.  I know of no issue in international relations that so brings us face to face, over such distances of place and time, with the consequences for others of our actions.

The problem we have created is itself an affront to most notions of equity. If I benefit from behaviour that harms my neighbour, and if I know I am causing harm or at least likely to be causing it, then I should change my behaviour and compensate my neighbour for the damage already caused. In most of the countries whose wealth has been based on emitting greenhouse gases, such a principle is widely accepted – indeed in many cases it is enshrined in national laws.

Any response to the climate problem also raises difficult dilemmas of equity. At least in the early stages, there will be costs associated with action. There are many reasons to suspect that these costs will not be as great as is sometimes alleged by those who have their own reasons not to act. But nevertheless there will be a burden to be borne. How, within any particular nation or across the international community, can it be fairly distributed? And what help is due to those likely, through no fault of their own, to suffer as a result of climate change?

Before looking more closely at some of these questions, let me make a few more general observations about the climate problem. Human actions are releasing heat trapping gases into the atmosphere. This is happening to a significant, and accelerating, extent – because there are so many of us, and because we have inadvertently come to depend on technologies that release in a few years stocks of carbon that were laid down as coal, oil and gas over millions of years.

This squeezes more energy into the climate system, at a rate well beyond the bounds of natural variation. That is already having noticeable consequences, which threaten to become increasingly unpleasant for ever larger numbers of people. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “tens of millions …face risk of displacement” -  that is, of becoming refugees - as a result of storm surges and rising sea level over coming decades.

Climatic disruption is now inevitable. The shared sense of equity to which I referred suggests that we therefore need to ensure that it causes as little suffering as possible by adjusting to it as well as we can. And to minimize the danger of truly catastrophic consequences we need to learn as quickly as possible how to keep providing rising real incomes for six rising to eight or nine billion people with no net emissions of greenhouse gases.

There is no more urgent nor more daunting challenge in human affairs. It calls on us to change the way in which we meet our needs for energy and mobility, and the way we use land. It reaches into every sector of decision making, and demands a complete restructuring of the global economy (as well as a radically new approach to foreign policy).

Most diplomatic problems have no externally fixed timetable. We might choose to impose one, but this is our choice:  if it slips, we can try again, as we often do for example in the case of trade negotiations. But with climate change, we can hear the ticking clock – and there is no snooze button to reach out for.

As the moments pass, so do the points of no return at which each natural consequence becomes inevitable whatever we do next. We do not know for example if there is still time to prevent the collapse through the combined effects of a warmer and more acidic ocean surface of the world’s shallow water tropical reef systems. Even if there is, there will come a moment, unless we can bring our carbon emissions rapidly under control, when this will become inevitable. This will not only rob us all of a wonderful part of our natural heritage: such reefs are the world’s most diverse marine ecosystems. They are also the main source of protein for millions of the world’s poorest people.