Justice considerations in climate research

Abstract

Climate change and decarbonization raise complex justice questions that researchers and policymakers must address. The distributions of greenhouse gas emissions rights and mitigation efforts have dominated justice discourses within scenario research, an integrative element of the IPCC. However, the space of justice considerations is much larger. At present, there is no consistent approach to comprehensively incorporate and examine justice considerations. Here we propose a conceptual framework grounded in philosophical theory for this purpose. We apply this framework to climate mitigation scenarios literature as proof of concept, enabling a more holistic and multidimensional investigation of justice. We identify areas of future research, including new metrics of service provisioning essential for human well-being.The urgently required changes in human activity to tackle climate change and stay below 1.5 °C come with many justice implications 1 . This has led to vivid public and scientific debates on the design of just transitions 2-4 , differentiated impacts and responsibilities 5,6 .Different terms and indicators are used in the climate discourse to reflect diverse interpretations of justice. 'Justice', 'equity' and 'fairness' are often used interchangeably even though they pertain to different conceptual levels 7 . This leads to a lack of clarity, consistency and comparability. The absence of a broad shared understanding of justice makes communication among researchers and between researchers and users of research challenging 8,9 , and can result in misinterpretation and misunderstandings between researchers and users, who might focus on different challenges and scales 10 .To help researchers and policymakers navigate the justice landscape, we introduce a justice framework that clarifies key concepts and terminology grounded in philosophical theory. The novelty does not predominantly consist in the philosophical structure, but in the cross-disciplinary translation, the clarity of exposition and ease of application. We aim to bridge disciplinary boundaries, introduce shared terminology and raise awareness of justice considerations that have not gained sufficient attention thus far.As a proof of concept, we apply the framework to mitigation scenario research that has informed and influenced global climate policymaking and target-setting 11 . Scenarios are an integrative element across all working groups of the IPCC research domains and a way to explore plausible futures. This is a vital and influential literature to which we apply our justice framework. We explore the extent to which existing literature captures key concepts and has contributed insights on diverse justice considerations. Implicit and explicit justice considerations underpinning mitigation scenarios call for such a framework 12 . Justice is a moral issue important in and of itself. Furthermore, justice has been recognized as being conducive to more ambitious climate policy and its acceptability [13][14][15][16] . It is thus an urgent moral and prac...

A Novel Evaluation Approach for Emissions Mitigation Budgets and Planning towards 1.5 °C and Alternative Scenarios

“…In a follow-up study, Akpan J. et al [22] employed a fair sharing approach in simulating the emissions budgets of the same USA, EU, China, and, in addition, India's transition into the 1.5, 2.0 • C, and alternative scenarios. The emissions budgets, which are in line with the philosophy of Zimm C. et al's [79] recent work on justice consideration for climate change mitigation research, were then used in assessing the economic attractiveness and benefits, as presented in Section 4.3.…”

Residential energy demand, emissions, and expenditures at regional and income-decile level for alternative futures

“…The study also shows that modeling multiple dimensions of drivers of demand provides a more accurate representation of total consumption (figure S1). The implications of considering multiple socioeconomic groups, instead of a representative consumer, is a key research topic for the modelling community and has been recently discussed by different studies [29, [52][53][54].…”