Global Justice and Climate Change: Bridging the Gap Between Theory and Practice

Climate change is one of the most significant problems facing humanity today. As scientific evidence continues to accumulate, it is becoming increasingly apparent that climate change requires an urgent global response. Without such a response, rising sea levels, severe weather patterns, and the spread of deadly diseases threaten the lives of both present and future generations. And yet, action on climate change has been characterized by lack of progress and break downs in communication. It is widely assumed that the global response to climate change has so far been inadequate. Alarmed by this lack of progress, the thesis aims to explore exactly why we should consider current global climate change action as inadequate, and what normative principles must underwrite a more just global response to climate change. More specifically, the thesis will conduct a global justice based assessment of multilateral and networked climate change governance. This normative assessment of current practice is not only urgently needed in order to clarify the inadequacies of the climate change response, but also serves the purpose of bridging the gap between political theorists who concern themselves with the ethical dimensions of climate change, and scholars who focus on climate change governance practice. The thesis aims to illustrate that climate justice theorists can provide normative insights into current practice, which can inform the field of climate change governance and ultimately contribute to assessing how the response to climate change can become more just. In this way, the thesis provides a starting point for a discussion between two fields, which have traditionally been concerned with complementary, yet separate, research agendas. The thesis demonstrates that the bridging of these two fields can underwrite future thinking about a more just global response to climate change

Politics, Voice, and Just Transition: Who has a Say in Climate Change Decision Making, and Who Does Not

The city of Bristol, UK, set out to pursue a just transition to climate change in 2020. This paper explores what happened next. We set out to study how just transition is unfolding politically on the ground, focusing on procedural justice. Over the course of a year, we conducted interviews and observations to study decision making at three levels – public sector, private sector and civil society. We found that not only is it difficult to define what just transition means, even for experts, but that the process of deciding how to pursue such a transition is highly exclusionary, especially to women and ethnic minorities. We therefore argue there is an urgency to revise decision-making procedures and ensure that there is ample opportunity to feed into decision-making processes by those who are typically excluded. Inclusive decision making must be embedded into the process of just transition from the beginning and throughout its implementation – it is not a step that can be ‘ticked off’ and then abandoned, but rather an ongoing process that must be consistently returned to. Finally, we conclude that cities have the unique opportunity to pilot bottom-up participatory approaches and to feed into the process of how a just transition might be pursued at the global level – for example, through their participation in the United Nations Framework for the Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties (COP) processes

Bristol advisory committee on climate change: One City climate strategy progress review - February 2023

This report from the Bristol Advisory Committee on Climate Change (BACCC) reviews citywide progress on tackling the climate crisis and concludes that, although there is some positive progress, the city is still way off meeting its 2030 carbon neutral and climate resilient targets.BACCC is an independent committee which provides expert advice on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to the impacts of a changing climate. Their latest report is an assessment of progress against the One City Climate Strategy which was launched by the Environment Board in March 2020, setting out the pathway for the city to reduce carbon emissions and build resilience to a changing climate by 2030