Elsevier

Ecological Economics

Volume 56, Issue 4, 1 April 2006, Pages 594-609
Ecological Economics

Analysis
Fair adaptation to climate change

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2005.03.015Get rights and content

Abstract

This article identifies social justice dilemmas associated with the necessity to adapt to climate change, examines how they are currently addressed by the climate change regime, and proposes solutions to overcome prevailing gaps and ambiguities. We argue that the key justice dilemmas of adaptation include responsibility for climate change impacts, the level and burden sharing of assistance to vulnerable countries for adaptation, distribution of assistance between recipient countries and adaptation measures, and fair participation in planning and making decisions on adaptation. We demonstrate how the climate change regime largely omits responsibility but makes a general commitment to assistance. However, the regime has so far failed to operationalise assistance and has made only minor progress towards eliminating obstacles for fair participation. We propose the adoption of four principles for fair adaptation in the climate change regime. These include avoiding dangerous climate change, forward-looking responsibility, putting the most vulnerable first and equal participation of all. We argue that a safe maximum standard of 400–500 ppm of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere and a carbon tax of $20–50 per carbon equivalent ton could provide the initial instruments for operationalising the principles.

Introduction

Adaptation to climate change presents formidable dilemmas of justice to the international community, ones which are more complex and no less important than those presented by mitigation. Anthropogenic climate change is caused mainly by greenhouse gases emitted by developed countries but climate change impacts will disproportionately burden developing countries. While climate change impacts are often presented and projected at the global, continental or national levels, they are ultimately felt at the local level. This makes distributive considerations difficult because communities that are burdened by climate change impacts have different vulnerabilities within each country (O'Brien et al., 2004). Moreover, national governments do not protect the interests of all of their citizens equally—the most vulnerable people often have the least voice. This underlines the importance of fair processes which recognise and enable the participation of affected communities in planning and decisions regarding collective adaptation measures.

In the past decade, debates on climate justice have focused on mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions because of the urgency of promoting international action to reduce the causes of human induced climate change. Another reason is that mitigation presents a well-delineated dilemma to the global community: that of how to allocate rights to emit greenhouse gases to the global atmospheric sinks between countries. Several proposals have been made for fair sharing of the burden of mitigation (Arler, 2001, Azar, 2000, Helm and Simonis, 2001, Jamieson, 2001, Müller, 2001, Paterson, 2001, Ringius et al., 2002, Rose et al., 1998). One possibility is to acknowledge current levels of greenhouse gas emissions (or a proportion of them) as rights as implied by the Kyoto Protocol. Secondly, the contraction and convergence argument proposes a transition from the current income-based distribution of emissions to an equal per capita distribution. Thirdly, it is possible to allocate emission rights according to the countries' historical responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions (see Neumayer, 2000).

All of these proposals have their own problems. For example, the moral force of “the first come, first served” principle which underlies acknowledgement of present levels of emissions as rights is dubious. Equal per capita emission rights may initially appear just but they ignore: 1) responsibility for past emissions; 2) geographical and historical coincidences that influence the size of emissions and sinks, and; 3) present levels of development. Acknowledgement of present levels of emissions as rights and equal per capita emissions are also solutions which treat burden sharing in mitigation a problem of only distributive justice and omit whether a solution can be negotiated fairly under the pertinent international treaties. That is, they ignore what processes for making decisions on burden sharing would be fair.

But even more importantly, most discussions on climate justice ignore the incidence of climate change impacts and adaptation to them. The long-standing unease in the policy community with regard to adaptation originates from fears that the acknowledgement of a possibility of adaptation could distract international efforts to mitigate climate change. These fears do injustice to those who have no other option but to adapt to climate changes to which they have not contributed (see Parry et al., 1998, Adger, 2004, King, 2004). Even an optimistic climate change scenario predicts a minimum increase of 2 °C in the global mean temperature and altered patterns of rainfall and extreme weather events throughout the world during the 21st century. Moreover, climate would continue to change for decades and to precipitate adverse climate change impacts across the globe even if all anthropogenic CO2 emissions ceased immediately.

Adaptation to climate change thus presents several justice dilemmas to the global community which include: 1) What is the responsibility of developed countries for climate change impacts? 2) How much should developed countries give assistance to developing countries for adapting to climate change and how should the burden be distributed among developed countries? 3) How should assistance be distributed between recipient countries and adaptation measures? 4) What procedures are fair in planning and making decisions on adaptation? We review how and to what extent international environmental law governing adaptation resolves these dilemmas, arguing that its guidance is insufficient. We explore theories of justice in order to identify concepts, principles and rules that would help to resolve the dilemmas of justice, arguing that “avoiding dangerous climate change”, ”forward-looking responsibility”, “putting the most vulnerable first” and “equal participation of all” are the four most important principles that can help the international community make headway in fair adaptation.

The following section discusses adaptation to climate change in some detail to pinpoint the justice dilemmas. The third section discusses how international environmental law governs adaptation and analyses the ambiguities and gaps in the ways in which it seeks to resolve the justice dilemmas. The fourth section reviews theories of justice and outlines our proposal for dealing with justice dilemmas involved in adapting to climate change.

Section snippets

Climate change impacts and adaptation

Climate change impacts will burden especially those populations who are already vulnerable and struggle with current climate variability and extreme weather events (O'Brien et al., 2004, Adger et al., 2003). Differential impacts of present-day extreme weather events illustrate this point. Older Black males who were living alone and who were not well made up a disproportionate share of excess deaths caused by the 1996 heat wave in Chicago (Klinenberg, 2002). The 2003 heat wave in Europe caused

Multi-level governance of adaptation

Adaptation to climate change is governed by international environmental law, including the pertinent provisions of the UN Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Kyoto Protocol (KP), the decisions of the Conferences of the Parties (COPs) (Melkas, 2002, Verheyen, 2002) as well as by the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, international custom and national legislation. We focus on the “climate change regime” as the collection of “principles, norms, rules, and decision-making

Approaches to climate justice

As outlined above, adaptation to climate change consists of individual and collective choices taken at different levels of decision-making in the context of present and predicted climate change impacts, other social concerns and priorities, and the existing institutional framework that engenders a particular distribution of resources, wealth and power. All of these choices are moral in the sense that they are informed by some values that guide the comparison of alternatives and choice between

Acknowledgements

We thank the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and the UK Economic and Social Research Council for funding and the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) and the Foundation for International Environmental Law and Development (FIELD) for collaboration. Neil Adger thanks the Leverhulme Trust for additional support. We also thank the three referees, Suraje Dessai, Mike Hulme, Saleemul Huq, Jürgen Lefevere and Benito Müller for comments, suggestions and discussions

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