climate change and justice

Climate justice movements took their inspiration from the environmental justice movements in the US recognising that specific groups of people based on race, gender and poverty were at the highest risk of suffering effects of climate change. However, unlike dumping on 'property' near an ethnic or impoverished community, climate pollution has no understanding of borders or location. Yet, the effects of climate change similarly have greater effects on poor and ethnic communities. Although climate justice movements are diverse, a fundamental principle lies at the heart of the different movements. This is the recognition that within the threats from climate change are unequal economic and social power relations, both globally and locally.

pollution trading and climate justice

A fundamental problem of emissions trading is its tendency to perpetuate and aggravate environmental injustice. The six greenhouse gases due to be traded all have toxic co-pollutant side effects. This aggravates other dimensions of social injustice inasmuch as polluting industries are disproportionately located in low-income areas and communities of colour. In the case of a sulphur dioxide trading scheme RECLAIM, in Los Angeles , localised pollution of the local Latino communities around factories involved in the scheme continued unabated. It is likely that this phenomenon will be widely replicated with global greenhouse gas trading. Reductions will not need to take place at their source, allowing factories to continue polluting locally. The communities affected are those with the least power to resist, thus ‘pollution ghettoes' will be created.

This phenomenon is likely to replicate itself in the UK . Friends of the Earth recently showed that the same patterns of environmental injustice exist in the siting of polluting industries in England and Wales . The poorest families are twice as likely to have a polluting factory close by, than those with average household incomes. Over ninety percent of London 's most polluting factories are located in communities of below average income. In an emissions trading scheme the fundamental principle of one party reducing and another continuing to pollute will hit the poorest hardest, as polluting industries continue to buy credits instead of making reductions locally. The impacts on local people living around industry are invisible to trading schemes and this is one example of the many dangers of taking such a narrow approach to climate change issues.

Emissions trading also exacerbates global environmental injustice as poorer countries will be manipulated into hosting CDM projects thus transferring the burden of resolving climate change to the South. Thus Northern polluters are enabled to continue to pollute, and even increase pollution through the new market in greenhouse gases.