Transformative approaches to address climate change and achieve climate justice

Toward transformative climate justice: An emerging research agenda

“…Climate justice has a diverse historical trajectory, but is typically understood either as justice in relation to the responsibility for climate change and its impacts, or as justice regarding the effects of responses to climate change. Some point to the “triple injustices” of climate change: that the people least responsible for carbon emissions are also those most vulnerable to its impacts, while at the same time are often further disadvantaged by responses to climate change which may either reproduce or worsen current inequalities (Krause, 2018; United Nations Research Institute for Social Development [UNRISD], 2016). While the term “climate justice” was coined in 1989 (Schlosberg & Collins, 2014), its precursors go back much further.…”

“…This has been increasingly influenced by EJ and local articulations of resource injustice(s) (Hughes & Hoffmann, 2020; Krause, 2018). Even before climate justice emerged as a concept, resource‐centric and place‐based studies were already exploring issues of water, forestry and food (in)justice.…”

“…However, there is a divide between the elite organizations in the global North that can often work at cross‐purposes with grassroots organizations that are critical of top‐down, techno‐centric global reforms pushed by elite institutions mostly from the global North (see Bond & Dorsey, 2010). Krause (2018: 515) refers to this as the discrepancy between an “arrangement focused conception of justice and social realizations of it.”…”

“…Over recent years, the focus of adaptation and resilience thinking has increasingly moved away from a focus on incremental change—that is, adapting to climate impacts within existing governance structures—to more transformative approaches which consider how deeper social, economic and political structures create and reinforce vulnerability and hence are part of the problem (Few et al, 2017; O'Brien, 2012; Pelling, 2010). However, evidence of how this could be achieved remains thin in the context of climate change (Krause, 2018). Many scholars have also emphasized the darker sides of transformation and called for more transgressive approaches and radical methods to disrupt power relations driving inequalities (Blythe et al, 2018; Lotz‐Sisitka et al, 2016) and which help to build a more transformative account of climate justice.…”

“…We, therefore, argue that a framing of transformative climate justice is a useful way to tackle both current and practical justice needs for different social groups as well as attend to more structural causes of injustice across scales. This necessitates identifying the institutions and structures that cause climate change as well as ensuring that responses do not reproduce, reinforce or exacerbate inequalities or injustice (Krause, 2018; Meikle et al, 2016).…”