Critical climate justice

Abstract

Climate change has had unequal and uneven burdens across places whereby the planetary crisis involves a common but differentiated responsibility. The injustices of intensifying climate breakdown have laid bare the fault lines of suffering across sites and scales. A climate justice framework helps us to think about and address these inequities. Climate justice fundamentally is about paying attention to how climate change impacts people differently, unevenly, and disproportionately, as well as redressing the resultant injustices in fair and equitable ways. Critical climate justice as a praxis of solidarity and collective action benefits from greater engagement with intersectional and international feminist scholarship. Incorporating insights from feminist climate justice bolsters solidarity praxis while enriching and reframing dominant climate change discussions for more impactful and accountable action.

Aboriginal Population and Climate Change in Australia: Implications for Health and Adaptation Planning

“…The increased exposures identified in this analysis, along with climate sensitivities already experienced by Aboriginal populations in NSW, such as socioeconomic and health inequalities, indicate that the potential health impacts of climate change are even more significant for those populations than it is for the non-Aboriginal populations in NSW. This combination of inequities in exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity to climate-related hazards in Aboriginal populations can be described as both climate and racial injustice [ 69 , 70 ], particularly as susceptibility to these is linked to structural inequalities in society. These injustices identified within Australia are analogous to those seen between countries whereby climate risks are inequitably borne by post-colonial lower-income countries and other First Nations communities [ 66 , 71 , 72 ].…”

Just Transitions: A Political Ecology Critique

“…It is here that we may find the makings of a counter-hegemonic project that can transform "segregated, minimally different peripheries into quests for spatial centrality and maximally different, non-capitalist forms of everyday life" (Kipfer 2008:206). But all efforts in this space have the daunting task of questioning how nature, society, and capitalism are enrolled in addressing the ongoing climate challenge, while revealing the social reproduction of existing economic, social, and gender inequalities through low-carbon interventions (Sultana 2021). There is no other alternative: the current political moment requires that we actively seek progressive tools to build low-carbon futures that are both disruptive and emancipatory.…”

Communicating climate change in ‘Don't Look Up’

“…In focusing upon the fictional stories of scientists, politicians and media celebrities, the film fails to centre any marginalised voices, continuing to privilege global north perspectives, even as these are satirised. Climate communication needs to keep in place both climate mitigation and adaptation, making the historical and structural inequalities of capitalism and colonialism the interconnected stories of both [Sultana, 2022]. Pezzullo states that, "Imagination is a performative survival technique" [2016, p. 804].…”