Mitigating Climate Change and Climate Injustice Simultaneously

Abstract

Mitigating climate change and social injustice are critical, interwoven challenges facing humankind. Climate change is the result of grossly unequal greenhouse gas emissions by different societies and groups. Its impacts are also unjust, disproportionately affecting poor and less powerful nations, and the poor and the less powerful within each nation. While climate mitigation is essential, it reshapes the interacting socio-cultural, economic, political, physical and ecological processes that cause climate change, often with adverse outcomes for the most vulnerable. Answering the challenge of how to achieve climate mitigation alongside social justice mitigation and enhanced wellbeing will require improved understanding of the tradeoffs of alternative climate mitigation options with demonstrably different social justice outcomes.Herein, we present a broad framework to illustrate the interface between climate change and social justice, examining how economic, health, governance, social and policy dimensions interrelate both as cause and consequence of climate change, related emissions, and associated injustices. We then assess how specific mitigation interventions can address or exacerbate climate injustice, or more complexly, simultaneously worsen climate injustice for some and improve justice outcomes for others. In sorting through these possibilities, we identify a set of interventions that can both reduce emissions and enhance justice more broadly. These solutions highlight a range of possible ways forward, and include demographic choices, technology, a suite of natural solutions, and policy and governance. We also discuss political-economic obstacles to adoption and possible mechanisms that may support broader deployment. Addressing such possibilities has the potential to generate new ways of thinking about and mitigating inequity and power imbalance in the context of mitigating climate change.