Contesting climate justice in the city: Examining politics and practice in urban climate change experiments

Debates about climate justice have mainly occurred at the international scale, and have focussed on the rights and responsibilities of nation-states to either be protected from the effects of climate change, or to take action to reduce emissions or support adaptation. In this paper, we argue that it is both productive and necessary to examine how climate justice is being pursued at the urban scale, which brings into focus the need for attention to issues of recognition as well as rights and responsibilities. Building on work from environmental justice, which has conceptualized justice as trivalent, we propose that climate justice can be understood as a pyramid, the faces of which are distributions, procedures, rights, responsibilities and recognition. We then apply this conceptual framework to examine climate change interventions in five cities; Bangalore, Monterrey, Hong Kong, Philadelphia and Berlin. Arguing that the politics and practices of urban climate change interventions are constantly engaging with and refracting the idea of justice, we examine how justice was articulated, practiced and contested across our cases. The perspective of recognition emerges as a particularly useful entry point through which to explore the types of rights, responsibilities, distributions and procedures required to respond justly to climate change. We conclude by reflecting on our framework, arguing that it is useful both as an analytical device to interrogate climate justice and to shape the design of climate change interventions which seek to ensure climate justice.     

国外应对气候变化的立法进展与启示

国外应对气候变化立法进程与国际社会对气候变化问题的关注度呈正相关性。目前,欧盟、英国、德国、法国、芬兰、丹麦、瑞士、韩国、日本、菲律宾、新西兰、墨西哥和南非均正式颁布或完成起草了应对气候变化或低碳发展相关法律。文中通过系统研究发现,国外已开展应对气候变化立法的国家和地区均通过立法明确了其应对气候变化管理机构的法律地位和职责,将温室气体减排目标和配套制度纳入法律,确定了应对气候变化的宗旨和原则,成为其高水平履行国际气候条约的重要保障。中国启动国家应对气候变化立法工作已有10年,可借鉴国外立法在减排目标、管理体制、减排措施、应对气候变化的法律原则等方面的立法经验,尽快推进国内立法进程。     

Climate justice and global cities: Mapping the emerging discourses

Ever since climate change came to be a matter of political concern, questions of justice have been at the forefront of academic and policy debates in the international arena. Curiously, as attention has shifted to other sites and scales of climate change politics matters of justice have tended to be neglected. In this paper, we examine how discourses of justice are emerging within urban responses to climate change. Drawing on a database of initiatives taking place in 100 global cities and qualitative case-study research in Philadelphia, Quito and Toronto, we examine how notions of distributive and procedural justice are articulated in climate change projects and plans in relation to both adaptation and mitigation. We find that there is limited explicit concern with justice at the urban level. However, where discourses of justice are evident there are important differences emerging between urban responses to adaptation and mitigation, and between those in the north and in the south. Adaptation responses tend to stress the distribution of ‘rights’ to protection, although those in the South also stress the importance of procedural justice. Mitigation responses also stress ‘rights’ to the benefits of responding to climate change, with limited concern for ‘responsibilities’ or for procedural justice. Intriguingly, while adaptation responses tend to stress the rights of individuals, we also find discourses of collective rights emerging in relation to mitigation.     

A linked vulnerability and resilience framework for adaptation pathways in remote disadvantaged communities

We develop a systems framework for exploring adaptation pathways to climate change among people in remote and marginalized regions. The framework builds on two common and seemingly paradoxical narratives about people in remote regions. The first is recognition that people in remote regions demonstrate significant resilience to climate and resource variability, and may therefore be among the best equipped to adapt to climate change. The second narrative is that many people in remote regions are chronically disadvantaged and therefore are among the most vulnerable to climate change impacts. These narratives, taken in isolation and in extremis, can have significant maladaptive policy and practice implications. From a systems perspective, both narratives may be valid, because they form elements of latent and dominant feedback loops that require articulation for a nuanced understanding of vulnerability-reducing and resilience-building responses in a joint framework. Through literature review and community engagement across three remote regions on different continents, we test the potential of the framework to assist dialogue about adaptation pathways in remote marginalized communities. In an adaptation pathway view, short-term responses to vulnerability can risk locking in a pathway that increases specific resilience but creates greater vulnerability in the long-term. Equally, longer-term actions towards increasing desirable forms of resilience need to take account of short-term realities to respond to acute and multiple needs of marginalized remote communities. The framework was useful in uniting vulnerability and resilience narratives, and broadening the scope for adaptation policy and action on adaptation pathways for remote regions.     

Climate displacement and resettlement: the importance of claims-making ‘from below’

Climate-induced population displacement and resettlement is an ongoing problem around the world, and one that is being exacerbated by climate change. To date, most attempts to address this problem have taken a top-down approach in which international justice, legal and humanitarian frameworks are extended ‘downwards’ by policymakers and governments to local populations. However, there has been limited systematic work that emphasizes the abilities of affected peoples themselves to develop and formulate their own justice-based solutions. This paper presents an analytical framework for thinking about ‘bottom-up’ claims-making that emphasizes naming, blaming, claiming and framing. The framework enables claims-making to be distinguished from other forms of community-based agency, such as adaptation. The paper also suggests a normative framework to support policymakers and practitioners in helping communities facing displacement to make claims. The normative framework focuses on the barriers to, and opportunities for, claims-making ‘from below’.     

Experiences of host communities with carbon market projects: towards multi-level climate justice

The literature on equity and justice in climate change mitigation has largely focused on North–South relations and equity between states. However, some initiatives (e.g. the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation programme (REDD), and voluntary carbon markets (VCMs)) are already establishing multi-level governance structures that involve communities from developing countries in global mitigation efforts. This poses new equity and justice dilemmas: how the burdens and benefits of mitigation are shared across various levels and how host communities are positioned in multi-level governance structures. A review of the existing literature is used to distill a framework for distinguishing between four axes of climate justice from the perspective of communities. Empirical evidence from African and Asian carbon market projects is used to assess the distributive and procedural justice implications for host communities. The evidence suggests that host communities often benefit little from carbon market projects and find it difficult to protect their interests. Capacity building, attention to local power relations, supervision of business practices, promotion of projects with primarily development aims and an active involvement of non-state actors as bridges between local communities and the national/international levels could potentially contribute towards addressing some of the key justice concerns.Policy relevance International negotiations on the institutional frameworks that are envisaged to govern carbon markets are proceeding at a rather slow pace. As a consequence, host countries and private-sector actors are making their own arrangements to safeguard the interests of local communities. While several standards have emerged to guide carbon market activity on the ground, distributive as well as procedural justice concerns nevertheless remain salient. Four empirical case studies across Asia and Africa show that within the multi-scale and multi-actor carbon market governance, local-level actors often lack sufficient agency to advance their claims and protect their interests. This evidence suggests that ameliorating policy reforms are needed to enhance the positioning of local communities. Doing so is important to ensure future acceptability of carbon market activity in potential host communities as well as for ensuring their broader legitimacy.     

Firm relocation as adaptive response to climate change and weather extremes

Growing scientific evidence suggests that human-induced climate change will bring about large-scale environmental changes such as sea-level rise and coastal flooding, extreme weather events and agricultural disruptions. The speed and extent of these changes and the expected impacts on social and corresponding economic and industrial systems are now moving to the forefront of debates. In this paper, we argue that climate change will lead to significant disruptions to firms which might ultimately create the necessity of a geographical shift of firm and industrial activities away from regions highly affected by climate change. Such a shift might become necessary due to (1) direct disruptions through climate change impacts on firm operations, for instance through droughts, floods, or sea level rise, and due to (2) disruptions in a firm's supplier, buyer or resource base that lead to flow-on effects and adverse consequences for a firm. We propose a framework for integrating firm relocation decisions into firm adaptive responses to climate change. The framework consists of three assessment steps: the level of risk from climate change impacts at a firm's location, the feasibility of relocation, and associated costs and benefits. We apply the framework to two case examples. The first case of electricity distribution firms in Victoria/Australia illustrates how the relocation (undergrounding) of cables could decrease the vulnerability of distribution networks to bushfires and the risk of electricity-caused fires, but would require significant investments. The second case of firms in the Australian pastoral industry points to geographic diversification of pastoral land holdings as possible adaptation option, but also to constraints in form of availability of suitable properties, ties to local communities, and adverse impacts on biodiversity. Implications for adaptation research and practice are outlined.     

Conceptualizations of justice in climate policy

Distributive justice in climate change has been of interest both to the ethics and to the climate policy communities, but the two have remained relatively isolated. By combining an applied ethics approach with a focus on the details of a wide range of proposed international climate policies, this article proposes two arguments. First, three categories of proposals are identified, each characterized by its assumptions about the nature of the ‘problem’ of climate change, the burdens that this problem imposes, and its application of distribution rules. Each category presents potential implications for distributive justice. The second, related, argument is that assumptions about technology, sovereignty, substitution and public perceptions of ethics shape the distributive justice outcomes of proposed policies even though these areas have largely been overlooked in discussions of the subject in either literature. The final lesson of this study is that the definition, measurement and distribution of burdens are all critical variables for distributive justice in climate policy.     

An assessment of climate change impacts and adaptation for the Torres Strait Islands, Australia

Adaptive practices are taking place in a range of sectors and regions in Australia in response to existing climate impacts, and in anticipation of future unavoidable impacts. For a rich economy such as Australia’s, the majority of human systems have considerable adaptive capacity. However, the impacts on human systems at the intra-nation level are not homogenous due to their differing levels of exposure, sensitivity and capacity to adapt to climate change. Despite past resilience to changing climates, many Indigenous communities located in remote areas are currently identified as highly vulnerable to climate impacts due to their high level of exposure and sensitivity, but low capacity to adapt. In particular, communities located on low-lying islands have particular vulnerability to sea level rise and increasingly intense storm surges caused by more extreme weather. Several Torres Strait Island community leaders have been increasingly concerned about these issues, and the ongoing risks to these communities’ health and well-being posed by direct and indirect climate impacts. A government agency is beginning to develop short-term and long-term adaptation plans for the region. This work, however, is being developed without adequate scientific assessment of likely ‘climate changed futures.’ This is because the role that anthropogenic climate change has played, or will play, on extreme weather events for this region is not currently clear. This paper draws together regional climate data to enable a more accurate assessment of the islands’ exposure to climate impacts. Understanding the level of exposure and uncertainty around specific impacts is vital to gauge the nature of these islands’ vulnerability, in so doing, to inform decisions about how best to develop anticipatory adaptation strategies over various time horizons, and to address islanders’ concerns about the likely resilience and viability of their communities in the longer term.     

Catching sea cucumber fever in coastal communities: Conceptualizing the impacts of shocks versus trends on social-ecological systems

Research on vulnerability and adaptation in social-ecological systems (SES) has largely centered on climate change and associated biophysical stressors. Key implications of this are twofold. First, there has been limited engagement with the impacts of social drivers of change on communities and linked SES. Second, the focus on climate effects often assumes slower drivers of change and fails to differentiate the implications of change occurring at different timescales. This has resulted in a body of SES scholarship that is under-theorized in terms of how communities experience and respond to fast versus slow change. Yet, social and economic processes at global scales increasingly emerge as ‘shocks’ for local systems, driving rapid and often surprising forms of change distinct from and yet interacting with the impacts of slow, ongoing ‘trends’. This research seeks to understand the nature and impacts of social shocks as opposed to or in concert with trends through the lens of a qualitative case study of a coastal community in Mexico, where demand from international seafood markets has spurred rapid development of a sea cucumber fishery. Specifically, we examined what different social-ecological changes are being experienced by the community, how the impacts of the sea cucumber fishery are distinct from and interacting with slower ongoing trends and how these processes are affecting system vulnerability, adaptations and adaptive capacity. We begin by proposing a novel framework for conceptualizing impacts on social systems, as comprised of structures, functions, and feedbacks. Our results illustrate how the rapid-onset of this fishery has driven dramatic changes in the community. New challenges such as the ‘gold-rush-style’ arrival of new actors, money, and livelihoods, the rapid over-exploitation of fish stocks, and increases in poaching and armed violence have emerged, exacerbating pressures from ongoing trends in immigration, overfishing and tourism development. We argue that there is a need to better understand and differentiate the social and ecological implications of shocks, which present novel challenges for the vulnerability and adaptive capacity of communities and the sustainability of marine ecosystems.     

Climate change vulnerability and social development for remote indigenous communities of South Australia

There is a strong contemporary research and policy focus on climate change risk to communities, places and systems. While the need to understand how climate change will impact on society is valid, the challenge for many vulnerable communities, especially some of the most marginalised, such as remote indigenous communities of north-west South Australia, need to be couched in the context of both immediate risks to livelihoods and long-term challenges of sustainable development. An integrated review of climate change vulnerability for the Alinytjara Wilurara Natural Resources Management region, with a focus on the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara lands, suggests that targeted analysis of climate change impacts and adaptation options can overlook broader needs both for people and the environment. Climate change will add to a range of complex challenges for indigenous communities, especially in relation to hazards, such as fire and floods, and local environmental management issues, especially in association with invasive species. To respond to future socio-ecological risk, some targeted responses will need to focus on climate change impacts, but there also needs to be a better understanding of what risk is already apparent within socio-ecosystems and how climate interacts with such systems. Other environmental, social and economic risks may need to be prioritised, or at least strongly integrated into climate change vulnerability assessments. As the capacity to learn how to adapt to risk is developed, the value attributed to traditional ecological knowledge and local indigenous natural resource management must increase, both to provide opportunities for strong local engagement with the adaptation response and to provide broader social development opportunities.     

Including indigenous peoples in climate change mitigation: addressing issues of scale,knowledge and power

Involving indigenous peoples in the development of mitigation measures for climate change presents procedural, conceptual and structural challenges. Here, we reflect on some of these challenges and ways of overcoming them, as suggested by collaborative approaches to policy and decision making. We specifically focus on issues of scale, knowledge and power, and how they interrelate to act as a barrier or opportunity for the involvement of indigenous groups. We argue that multi-scalar negotiations, blended knowledge and power-sharing structures are all necessary to include indigenous communities as valuable partners in climate change mitigation, and we suggest strategies and recommendations for actively accomplishing this inclusion. Examples from recent literature about the inclusion of indigenous communities in different sectors, are used to illustrate and provide evidence of the current problematic and the need for collaborative solutions. Overall, the ideas expressed here, serve as a conceptual framework to better understand and support the inclusion of indigenous communities in policy and decision making processes.     

Public Views on Climate Change: European and USA Perspectives

If uncontrolled, human influences on the climate system may generate changes that will endanger various aspects of life on Earth. The precise implications of the scientific claims about climate change, and the extent to which they pose dangers to various populations, are becoming intensely debated at many levels in relation to policy. How `danger' is interpreted will ultimately affect which actions are taken. In this paper, we examine how climate change is conceptualised by publics in Europe and in the USA. Although there is widespread concern about climate change, it is of secondary importance in comparison to other issues in people's daily lives. Most individuals relate to climate change through personal experience, knowledge, the balance of benefits and costs, and trust in other societal actors. We analyse these factors through findings from various surveys and studies, which highlight both the distinctiveness and some shared perspectives at a generalised level. We reflect upon these in relation to trust and responsibility for climate change action, and risk communication, supporting the call for discourses about climate change to also be situated in people's locality, as a means of increasing its saliency.     

Triggering transformative change: a development path approach to climate change response in communities

While climate change action plans are becoming more common, it is still unclear whether communities have the capacity, tools, and targets in place to trigger the transformative levels of change required to build fundamentally low-carbon, resilient, healthy communities. Evidence increasingly supports the finding that this transformation is not triggered by climate policy alone, but rather is shaped by a broad array of decisions and practices that are rooted in underlying patterns of development. Even so, these findings have rarely penetrated the domain of practice, which often remains squarely focused on a relatively narrow set of climate-specific policies. This article builds a conceptual framework for understanding the dynamics of community-level development path transformations that may both dramatically reduce GHG emissions and significantly enhance community resilience. This framework illuminates eight critical enablers of innovation on climate change, each of which is illustrated by compelling examples of community-level experimentation on climate change across the province of British Columbia, Canada. It is concluded that community-based climate (or sustainability) policy might be more likely to trigger development path shifts if it employs a longer time horizon, recognition of adaptability and feedbacks, integrated decision making, and systems thinking.     

Synergies and trade-offs between adaptation,mitigation and development

To succeed in meeting carbon emissions reduction targets to limit projected climate change impacts, it is imperative that improved synergies be developed between mitigation and adaptation strategies. This is especially important in development policy among remote indigenous communities, where demands for development have often not been accompanied by commensurate efforts to respond to future climate change impacts. Here we explore how mitigation and adaptation pathways can be combined to transform rural indigenous communities toward sustainability. Case studies from communities in Alaska and Nepal are introduced to illustrate current and potential synergies and trade-offs and how these might be harnessed to maximize beneficial outcomes. The adaptation pathways approach and a framework for transformational adaptation are proposed to unpack these issues and develop understanding of how positive transformational change can be supported.     

Ecosystem Evaluation, Climate Change and Water Resources Planning

This paper considers ecosystem evaluation under conditions of climate change in the context both of the U.S. Water Resources Council's Principles and Guidelines (P&G) and the more general Federal regulations governing environmental evaluation. Federal water agencies have responsibilities for protecting aquatic ecosystems through their regulatory programs and operations and planning missions. The primary concern of water resources and aquatic ecosystems planning in the United States is on the riparian or floodplain corridors of river systems. In the context of climate change, planning for these systems focusses on adaptation options both for current climate variability and for that engendered by potential climate change.Ecosystems appear to be highly vulnerable to climate change, as described in IPCC reports. Aquatic ecosystems are likely to be doubly affected, first by thermally induced changes of global warming and second by changes in the hydrologic regime. Perhaps as much as any of the issues dealt with in this issue, the evaluation of ecosystems is linked to fundamental questions of criteria as well as to the details of the Federal environmental planning system. That system is a densely woven, interlocking system of environmental protection legislation, criteria and regulations that includes a self-contained evaluation system driven by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) procedural guidelines (United States Council on Environmental Quality, 1978) and Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) requirements. The Corps of Engineers must use both the P&G and the NEPA/EIS system in discharging its responsibilities.If U.S. Federal agencies are to take the lead in formulating and evaluating adaptation options, there needs to be a reexamination of existing evaluation approaches. Among the elements of the P&G that may require rethinking in view of the prospects of global climate change are those relating to risk and uncertainty, nonstationarity, interest rates, and multiple objectives. Within the government planning process, efforts must be made to resolve inconsistencies and constraints in order to permit the optimal evaluation of water-based ecosystems under global climate change. The interrelationships of the two systems are described in this paper, and alternative ways of viewing the planning process are discussed. Strategic planning and management at the watershed level provides an effective approach to many of the issues. Current NEPA/EIS impact analysis does not provide a suitable framework for environmental impact analysis under climate uncertainty, and site-specific water resources evaluation relating to climate change appears difficult at current levels of knowledge about climate change. The IPCC Technical Guidelines, however, provide a useful beginning for assessing the impacts of future climate states.     

Rancher and farmer perceptions of climate change in Nevada, USA

Farming and ranching communities in arid lands are vulnerable to the adverse impacts of climate change. We surveyed Nevada ranchers and farmers (n?=?481) during 2009–2010 to assess climate change related knowledge, assumptions, and perceptions. The large majority of this group agreed that we are in a period of climate change; however, only 29 % of them believed that human activity is playing a significant role. Female ranchers and farmers hold more scientifically accurate knowledge about climate change than do their male counterparts, regardless of Democratic or Republican affiliation. Partisan affiliation, political ideology, and gender have strong impacts on climate change knowledge and perceptions. Republican, conservative and male rural residents view climate change as a low national priority, less important to themselves, and less harmful to their communities. Female ranchers and farmers are more concerned about the negative impacts of climate change. We found that only 4 % of our subjects (n?=?299) attribute local environment changes to climate change or global warming. The knowledge gained from this study will help researchers and natural resource managers understand how to best communicate about climate change with rural communities, and support policy makers in identifying potentially effective adaptation and mitigation policies and outreach programs.     

On matryoshkas and meaning-making: Understanding the plasticity of climate change

Climate change is a complex issue and means different things to different people. Numerous scholars in history, philosophy, and psychology have explored these multiple meanings, referred to as the plasticity of climate change. Building on psychological research that seeks to explain why meanings differ, I present an analytical framework that draws on adult developmental psychology to explore how meaning is constructed, and how it may become increasingly more complex across a lifespan in a nested manner, much like Russian dolls (or matryoshkas). I then use the framework to analyze photo voice data from a case study about local perspectives on climate change in El Salvador. The main finding from this analysis is that a developmental approach can help to make sense of why there is such plasticity of meanings about climate change. Using photos and their interpretations to illustrate these findings, I examine how perspective-taking capacities arrive at different meanings about climate change, based on the object of awareness, complexity of thought, and scope of time. I then discuss implications of this preliminary work on how developmental psychology could help climate change scholar-practitioners to understand and align with different climate change meanings and support local actors to translate their own meanings about climate change into locally-owned actions.     

A verification framework for interannual-to-decadal predictions experiments

Decadal predictions have a high profile in the climate science community and beyond, yet very little is known about their skill. Nor is there any agreed protocol for estimating their skill. This paper proposes a sound and coordinated framework for verification of decadal hindcast experiments. The framework is illustrated for decadal hindcasts tailored to meet the requirements and specifications of CMIP5 (Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5). The chosen metrics address key questions about the information content in initialized decadal hindcasts. These questions are: (1) Do the initial conditions in the hindcasts lead to more accurate predictions of the climate, compared to un-initialized climate change projections? and (2) Is the prediction model’s ensemble spread an appropriate representation of forecast uncertainty on average? The first question is addressed through deterministic metrics that compare the initialized and uninitialized hindcasts. The second question is addressed through a probabilistic metric applied to the initialized hindcasts and comparing different ways to ascribe forecast uncertainty. Verification is advocated at smoothed regional scales that can illuminate broad areas of predictability, as well as at the grid scale, since many users of the decadal prediction experiments who feed the climate data into applications or decision models will use the data at grid scale, or downscale it to even higher resolution. An overall statement on skill of CMIP5 decadal hindcasts is not the aim of this paper. The results presented are only illustrative of the framework, which would enable such studies. However, broad conclusions that are beginning to emerge from the CMIP5 results include (1) Most predictability at the interannual-to-decadal scale, relative to climatological averages, comes from external forcing, particularly for temperature; (2) though moderate, additional skill is added by the initial conditions over what is imparted by external forcing alone; however, the impact of initialization may result in overall worse predictions in some regions than provided by uninitialized climate change projections; (3) limited hindcast records and the dearth of climate-quality observational data impede our ability to quantify expected skill as well as model biases; and (4) as is common to seasonal-to-interannual model predictions, the spread of the ensemble members is not necessarily a good representation of forecast uncertainty. The authors recommend that this framework be adopted to serve as a starting point to compare prediction quality across prediction systems. The framework can provide a baseline against which future improvements can be quantified. The framework also provides guidance on the use of these model predictions, which differ in fundamental ways from the climate change projections that much of the community has become familiar with, including adjustment of mean and conditional biases, and consideration of how to best approach forecast uncertainty.     

Vulnerability of Himalayan transhumant communities to climate change

Climate change vulnerability depends on who you are, where you are and what you do. The indigenous communities who primarily depend on natural resources for subsistence livelihoods are among the first and most affected by climate change. Climate models have predicted pronounced warming in high altitude regions of the Himalayas. The transhumant communities of the Himalayas follow traditional lifestyles based on seasonal livestock rearing and subsistence agriculture. There is however, no information on how vulnerable transhumant communities are to climate change, and how vulnerability of transhumant herders differs across the mountainous areas of Nepal. Based on semi-structured interviews with transhumant herders and using the IPCC climate change vulnerability framework, this study assessed and compared the vulnerability of transhumant communities from three districts representing Eastern, Central and Western mountainous region of Nepal. The results showed that the livelihood vulnerability and the climate change vulnerability differ across sites; both of them having lowest index values in the Central region. The vulnerability dimensions viz. exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity are largely influenced by diversity in livelihood strategies, income sources and crops, and access to food, water and health facilities. The findings will inform the design of policies and programmes to reduce vulnerability and enhance adaptive capacity of indigenous communities in general and the transhumant communities of the Himalayas in particular.