Climate Justice and Human Rights

Over a time span of just a century and a half, humanity has become a formidable geological force of change in its own right, altering the Earth’s atmosphere and natural landscape in ways that are unprecedented. For the first time, the outer limits of Nature’s capacities to adapt to the destruction of its natural cycles of carbon, phosphorous, and nitrogen are in sight (see Rockstrӧm et al. 2009). The overall rate of temperature increase has nearly doubled (NASA Earth Observatory 2015) in the last 50 years. Global average surface temperatures have risen to 0.9 degrees Celsius while in the oceans, warming has occurred from the surface to a depth of roughly 2300 feet where most marine life dwells (National Geographic 2016), causing sea levels to rise. On land, global net yields of stable food crops are declining steadily in direct proportion to temperature increases (see International Scientific Congress on Climate Change, March 2009). According to the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) AR5 Working Group II Report on Food Security and Food Production Systems (2014b), there is a critical climatic threshold beyond which point essential food crops will not grow. If the current pace in global warming is not decelerated, the likelihood is that climate change will eventually overpower our capacities to adapt and large-scale humanitarian disaster will ensue.¹ So grave are these dangers that many scientists believe humanity has entered a new geological age known as the Anthropocene (Oldfield 2015). The core idea of the Anthropocene is that the climate risks we face today are essentially our own doing. The human species in effect has overtaken other forces of nature to become the most significant driver of destruction of the Earth’s biosphere. Knowledge of this event forces a compelling reframing of more traditional assumptions regarding the relationship between humanity and nature in favour of a cognitive framework that assigns a determining role to humanity in shaping the direction of future changes in the biophysical and biological systems of planet Earth. Humanity is tasked with deciding how the future of this planet will unfold. Not only must an objectivist account of nature’s outer limits and a complementary scientific understanding of its biological, chemical, and physical substance, be mastered, but humanity now must also begin to reflexively engage in a hermeneutic reconstruction of how it has arrived at this point of destruction in its historical development (Strydom 2015)? As the most significant metanarrative of human development in the twenty-first century, the arrival of Anthropocene forces us to think again about how human interests are best defined and the political will found to forge a better system of planetary stewardship for the future (Berkhout 2014: 1).

This chapter explores what effects a greater public knowledge of deteriorating climate conditions has on societally shared ideas of justice. In particular, it considers whether such knowledge prompts a more urgent need for a justification of those institutional practices that centrally shape the ecological fate of current and future generations. One guiding assumption of liberal democratic societies is that justice owes its validity to continuing procedures of democratic justification. Of key importance is the degree to which current procedures for addressing climate change issues have secured their political credibility through a genuinely intersubjective justification process open to all affected parties. Rawls’ distinction between an ‘ideal justice’ suited to a well-ordered society (Rawls 1971: 215) and ‘non-ideal’ scenarios offers a useful starting point when attempting to answer this question. The political, legal, and economic structures of liberal capitalist regimes claim to rest on generally and reciprocally valid principles of justice that have been ‘earned’ fairly over time. Indeed, what is said to be peculiar to such regimes is an ongoing intersubjective justification of justice conditions that have been achieved in common. The understanding, therefore, is that all possible conceptions of justice have been accounted for and reviewed through procedures of intersubjective reflection and public debate before a fully valid and discursively grounded ‘reflective equilibrium’ (Rawls 1999) is established on justice principles.¹

According to various climate justice coalitions, the ideas of justice that support the current international climate regime are not sufficiently grounded in procedures of democratic justification to qualify as fair to all interests concerned. In the absence of truly equitable international climate justice conditions, the Anthropocene enters a qualitatively new phase, one of radical inequality. Major asymmetries emerge between those who shape the nature of the global risks associated with ongoing climate destruction (i.e., decision-makers) and those who pay the ultimate price for those decisions without ever having the opportunity to prevent major catastrophes from occurring (e.g., the peoples of the Philippines, Nepal, Senegal, or Sri Lanka). The fragile nature of our dependence on the environment is such that acts of extreme resource depletion not only represent forms of ecological destruction, they also seriously delimit the capacity of humanity to secure its collective survival. Global capitalism’s insatiable appetite for natural resources promotes capability failure, that is, a restriction of the capacities of growing numbers to withstand the shocks of global climate change and prevent ‘various ills from happening to them’ (Pettit 1999: 67). The relationship between exposure to climate risk and domination could not be more explicit today. It follows a clear line with those inhabiting poorer, more underdeveloped regions exercising least control over their ecological fate and abilities to adapt. Newer generations, born into climate conditions shaped by forces over which they have little, if no authority, are severely disadvantaged through no specific fault of their own, yet their future continues to be represented in international political discourse as largely determined by the internal structures of ‘closed state systems’ (Rawls 1971: 8). In this setting, justice is seen as governed by the distribution of mutual advantages among ‘rough equals’ (Rawls 1971), not by factors beyond the immediate control of any one state community.

A total of 1.2 billion people worldwide reside in states likely to experience some form of ‘climate-induced political instability’ in the decades ahead (International Alert 2007: 3, 2009: 8, 2015: 1). New patterns of extreme weather conditions such as intense heat waves, prolonged drought, or storm surges are not only destructive in ecological terms. They also adversely affect social relations among those forced to compete for depleting reserves of fresh water and food. In areas as diverse as the southern Sindh Province in Pakistan, the northern Balkh region of Afghanistan, or the southern regions of Somalia, tensions are fuelled by the sharp decline in levels of rainfall, increased risk of seasonal drought, and the unequal distribution of water rights. The risk of conflict in these areas over scarce resource supplies and their mismanagement is never too far away (see The Robert S. Strauss Center, Social Conflict in Africa Database (SCAD) 2011). Yet as research conducted by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) (2009) reveals, less than a quarter of peace negotiations aiming to resolve conflicts linked to natural resources to date have addressed resource management mechanisms.¹ Desertification is proving to be another major initiator of hostility. In Africa’s Sahel region, desertification is steadily reducing the availability of cultivatable land, leading to more frequent clashes between herders and farmers (see International Alert 2009: 8). In Darfur, deserts have spread southwards by an average of 100 kilometres over the last four decades. Together with a decline in patterns of rainfall, as well as the loss of nearly 12 % of forest cover, these developments have contributed to a notable deterioration in communal relations (see Sudan Post-Conflict Environmental Assessment 2007). As Achim Steiner, Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme’s investigation of the causes of conflict in Sudan (2007) points out, uncontrolled depletion of natural resources such as water, soil, and forests, allied with other climate change impacts, is not just a tragedy for a few, less fortunately positioned states but ‘a window’ to a wider world beginning to feel the destabilizing effects of growing natural resource scarcity. Similarly, the EU (2009) predicts that scenes of increasing political instability and ‘radicalization’ will spread to other regions as ‘tensions over natural resources and energy supplies’ continue to grow internationally. These occurrences are said to have implications for all in the form of mass migratory movements, a greater incidence of regional conflicts, terrorist activity, and other forms of violence in the decades ahead (see also the US Department of Defense in its 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review of US State Defense Strategies and Priorities, p. 8).

There is a notably unequal quality to the global ecological interdependencies created today by climate change (Waldron 2002: 137). The misfortunes of those who are displaced by its worst effects, that is, those ‘forced to leave their homes, lands and livelihoods because they have been destroyed by the effects of climate change’ (United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs Reliefweb 2015) are manufactured by society as a whole. The suffering of the displaced is induced by practices that are collectively sustained yet individually encountered by some more readily than others. Of critical importance is how we choose to respond to this condition of forced intimacy. Will the illusion of ‘distant suffering’ (Boltanski 1999) continue to be the primary strategy used by states to deny the immanent nature of ecological threat or will the reality of large-scale displacement sharpen global normative consciousness of suffering and generate a more cosmopolitan outlook on our common fate? With nearly 25 % of current global migratory movements triggered by extreme hydro-meteorological events, including violent storms, intense flooding, or heat waves (see The German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU) 2007) and one in every 45 of the world’s populations expected to be displaced by climate change affects by the year 2050 (see Myers 2005; see also the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007), the era of climate ‘effect publics’ has well and truly arrived, producing in the process a more intense politicization of freedom of movement and human rights commitments. Communities that traditionally have tended to migrate temporarily as a form of adaptation to seasonal weather patterns are now being forced by necessity to flee lands rendered uninhabitable. Unable to meet basic subsistence needs within their own country of origin, such people, undeterred by restricted border access, migrate illegally, if necessary, to escape their destitution. Forced ‘involuntarily’ to leave home and frequently country due to declining resource conditions, the climate migrant is denied both the opportunity and the choice aspects of their freedom (Sen 2010: 371). Freedom from interference is denied when the climate displaced are deprived of the power of agency to prevent various ills from happening to them (e.g., excessive carbon pollution leading to further ecological devastation). Not only is the ability to secure one’s freedom from ecological persecution denied but also, one’s fate as a victim of ecological destruction is made contingent upon the circumstances in which one acts (if the individual is an inhabitant of a poorer, most climate vulnerable region in the world and flees his or her ecological victimization across state borders illegally, he or she relinquishes essential legal protections). The consequential links connecting the individual’s capacity to choose the circumstances in which he or she acts and the experience of being free is thereby severed.

Many of the elements that have traditionally supported state-level normative self-organization, most notably territory, are being actively undermined today by rising sea levels, flooding, desertification, and other climate change effects. As more and more states are reclassified as ‘disappearing’, that is, states losing their territories to the natural environment through no specific fault of their own, a question arises as to how displaced communities will be assisted in their desire (and right) to continue to practice principles of self-determination and self-government. Because this question is of growing practical significance, the assumption that a unified or largely unchanging model of the liberal democratic state (Österdahl 2003) can continue to be viable into the future has to be reconsidered. Indeed, a more likely scenario is that a series of alternative ontological models of sovereign community will be explored in response to deepening problems of land scarcity, as well as a higher incidence of natural disaster (see Norwegian Refugee Council 2009). But how might collective agreement be reached on the legitimacy of a range of new models of statehood when territory can no longer be assumed to be a fixed component of state identity? This chapter considers how a democratic reform of statehood might proceed in the years ahead under deteriorating climate conditions and resettlement agreements for displaced communities agreed upon. Preserving peaceful sovereign relations as the Anthropocene age progresses, arguably, requires a radical extension of established traditions of democratic compromise, human rights solidarity, and cosmopolitan justice.

In 2012, the United Nations Development Group initiated a series of thematic consultations with over a million people from around the world in an effort to clarify what are the contemporary concerns of the global community and assess what themes ought to be prioritized by a successor framework to the Millennium Development Goals beyond 2015 (see the United Nations Development Group, ‘A Million Voices: The World We Want’, July 2013: 3). The results of this ‘global conversation’ (Ban Ki-moon, September 2013) suggested a strong convergence on the need to advance a more equitable response to global challenges like poverty, climate change, and increasing resource scarcity. In its official report on the findings of this global public consultation (2013), the UN underscored the necessity of ‘concrete and urgent actions’ to address pressing concerns, actions that ‘can only be achieved’, it added, ‘with a broad alliance of people, governments, civil society, and the private sector, all working together to secure a sustainable management of common resources, including fisheries, forests, freshwater resources, oceans, and soils’ (UN A/RES/66/288 2012a: 20). Diminished resource availability worldwide is thought to necessitate a new level of ‘global partnership’ (UN 2012a: 8) not seen before, one that relativizes the importance of distinctions such as that between present and future humanity, citizen and non-citizen, or national and non-national in the interests of ‘our common future’ and increasing vulnerability to ecological disaster (see UN 2012, Back to Our Common Future).

Transnationally felt, deteriorating global climate conditions have the effect of making individual sovereign states appear too small to resolve the growing range of problems they present to humanity at large. The era of the Anthropocene has ushered in a series of geological and social transformations that do not apply exclusively to any one corner of the globe but represent a level of threat that every state is required to internalize. Although clearly limited in its own isolated capacities to halt the intensity of a globally relevant environmental destruction, the contemporary sovereign state, nevertheless, continues to be an important enabler of transformative potentials even as it also proves a major hindrance to efforts to address climate change problems. States acting consistently in self-interest have shown themselves to be a serious obstacle to the formation of more co-operative arrangements on issues such as resource sharing, accommodating displaced persons, or devising a collective plan of co-operative action to reduce rates of global warming, as we have seen throughout this book. That said, the modern democratic state still remains a main site of democratic governance (Habermas 2008: 447) and for that reason must play a prominent role in the future implementation of solutions to these problems. Although much of the analysis presented in this book assesses the various hindrances created by a state-bound outlook on deepening ecological challenges, it also has tried to draw attention to the significant potentialities created for a reform of this perspective by states’ legal endorsement of the universal validity of basic democratic principles.