Configuring climate responsibility in the city: carbon footprints and climate justice in Hong Kong

Abstract

Climate action is increasingly marked by the responsibilisation of individuals. In this context, carbon footprints have gained traction as a means of both quantifying individual responsibility for climate change and for motivating individual action through changes in behaviour. However, these mechanisms raise questions for climate justice in terms of how such moral and political responsibility is configured and distributed within the city. Drawing on a case study of Hong Kong, this paper explores the ways in which carbon footprinting configures responsibility for climate action by juxtaposing carbon footprints and the associated techniques of quantification alongside a discussion of the everyday practices of residents in a low‐income neighbourhood. It argues that carbon footprints offer important opportunities for measuring the impacts of carbon‐intensive activities and generating discussions about the allocation of responsibility for addressing climate change. However, it also demonstrates that individual carbon footprints ignore the uneven nature of carbon emissions in cities as well as obscuring important questions about the roles and responsibilities of other actors. In conclusion, the paper calls for an approach centred on common but differentiated responsibilities for carbon production and consumption to enable a more nuanced configuration of climate justice in the city.

The urban material politics of decarbonization in Stockholm, London and San Francisco

“…If practices appropriate for exceptional urban space cannot make the leap to universal application, decarbonization may be another force of ecogentrification with concerning implications for uneven development. This finding connects to critical approaches to urban green re-development that have pointed out the "intensification of environmental and economic inequalities in the geographies of eco-urbanism" (Caprotti, 2014), contested the flattening of complex socio-natures for green building retrofit certification (Knuth, 2015), critiqued the rise of "luxury ecologies" or urban environmental developments benefitting the professional class and related businesses (Cohen, 2017), and questioned configurations of moral and political responsibilities for urban climate action (Fuller, 2017) Finally, agency is a key factor influencing how urban decarbonization actors pursue buildingenergy transformations. An emerging pattern in decarbonization practice is the individualization of decarbonization responsibility.…”

A Fair Distribution of Responsibility for Climate Adaptation-Translating Principles of Distribution from an International to a Local Context

“…If conceived only within a local context, the principle comes with other problems. As highlighted by Fuller [54], in regard to climate change mitigation, a distribution among individuals will only lead to other agents not having to take responsibility for their emissions. She highlights further that individuals do not have equal possibilities to decrease their emissions.…”

Towards a politics of urban climate responsibility: Insights from Hong Kong and Singapore

“…This is despite the existence of structural constraints – for example, Hong Kong’s status as a Special Administrative Region of China which arguably undermines the capacity of local institutions to act on climate change (Lo and Francesch-Huidobro, 2017). There was less reflection about the challenges of attributing responsibility within the city – which is important as research suggests that climate interventions based on calculative devices can create a problem of undifferentiated responsibility through a failure to account for socio-spatial differences (Fuller, 2017; Newell et al, 2015; Rice, 2016).…”