Climate Justice, Gender, and Intersectionality

Women are generally more vulnerable than men to environmental disasters and extreme weather events due to four main factors, which are related to women’s gendered roles in society: women are economically disadvantaged in comparison to men and are more likely to live in poverty; sexual and reproductive health and physical demands on their bodies during pregnancy, child-bearing and rearing, and menopause put them at special risk; their lives tend to be longer and they spend more time as seniors / widows, with resulting economic and health implications; and their social options are restricted so that they often fill paid and unpaid roles related to physical and emotional caring that put them at special risk of environmental injustice. This means that environmental and climate injustice are gendered in both rich and poor countries, and this can be manifested in a variety of ways: housing, transportation, food insecurity, stress, mental illness, disability, heat exposure, interruptions of electricity and water services, violence against women, partner and elder violence, toxic exposure, health vulnerability, worker safety, political voice/agency/leadership, and many others. Gender also intersects with other categories of vulnerability such as ethnicity, ‘race,’ sexuality, dis/ability, etc. to heighten climate risk and injustice. The gendered effects of extreme weather events are often not disaggregated in government statistics and research literature, and an explicit gender focus, including attention to the access of women and marginalized people to participation in climate policy setting, has been minimal. Both at the local level and globally, climate change adaptation and response initiatives can downplay or suppress democratic, equity-enhancing politics.This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, FRN IDRC and SSHRC File Agreement No. 2017-0082 and IDRC GRANT NO. 106002-00

Education for Regeneration

It seems to me that we must think in terms of regeneration and resurgence, as Simpson says, not mere sustainability. Following centuries of colonization and imperialism, industrial “development”, toxic pollution, and carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels, the status quo is not to be sustained, but rather remediated. The impacts on the most vulnerable are crucially important for us all as a species. It is a myth that the rich will always be able to buy their way out of crises, and in any case, building an attractive future for humans requires regenerating the Earth for all life. One good place to start is by recognizing the heinous impacts of capitalist growth-driven economic systems. As someone who was trained as a neoclassical economist, I can state that the more you learn about economics, the more pernicious you realize it is. We need to admit the impossibility of privatizing all that is valuable, and the need to instead equitably govern the life-support systems (water, soil, air, forests, culture) that sustain humans and all life. This requires building education processes and systems that will be capable of transmitting skills for personal and collective responsibility, conflict resolution, “two-eyed seeing, 5 ” awareness of nature and others, and discerning appropriate behaviours. It also requires continually articulating for ourselves, and publicly, that individual greed is not deserving of respect or adulation; linking personal wealth with political power is not the only or the best way to run human systems; it always eventually leads to downfall. Humans can do better. An example of a sustainable way to culturally embed the redistribution of wealth, and balance material wealth against respect for long-term leadership (rather than allowing wealth and political/economic leadership to reinforce each other) is the potlatch ceremony traditional to several First Nations on the Pacific Coast

Commoning and climate justice

Commoning represents a dynamic and emergent means of risk-reduction and livelihood provision which can address the shortcomings of both market and state-oriented economic systems -- increasingly relevant as climate change threatens human subsistence worldwide. This paper brings together international examples of responses to climate-related threats that are collective (not privatizing), to provide preliminary empirical evidence about how and in what circumstances people may develop equitable communal institutions rather than ones that worsen community fragmentation. The examples include traditional and new forms of commons which help to meet local subsistence needs and develop communities’ social, political and economic resilience in the face of climate change, exploring how climate justice -- improving the local and global equity of climate change impacts and processes – can advance in parallel with commons development.This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, FRN IDRC and SSHRC File Agreement No. 2017-008

Equitable, Ecological Degrowth: Feminist Contributions

This paper uses feminist ecological economics and ecofeminist methodologies and theory to contribute to Degrowth in theory and practice. These feminist contributions involve highlighting unpaid work and ecological services, redistribution, and participatory processes as crucially important in developing the new paradigm and movement for equitable material Degrowth.This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canad

Ecofeminism, Commons, and Climate Justice

Much recent work in ecological economics, degrowth, climate justice, and political ecology focuses on ‘commons’ as an emergent paradigm for sustainable governance institutions to address or rectify ecological crisis. This paper summarizes definitions and typologies of commons, give some examples of commons which help to further climate justice, and discusses these ideas from an ecofeminist perspective.his research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, FRN IDRC and SSHRC File Agreement No. 2017-008

Environmental activism and gender

In the following sections, this chapter discusses and provides a number of examples from around the world to illustrate each of these aspects of environmental activism and gender — the empirical, theoretical, and dynamic—ending with a few concluding remarks.This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canad

University-Community Collaboration for Climate Justice Education and Organizing: Partnerships in Canada, Brazil, and Africa

In the coming decades, countries around the world will face increasingly severe challenges related to global climate change. While the details vary from country to country, the impacts will be especially grave for marginalized people, whose access to food, potable water, and safe shelter may be threatened due to fluctuations in rainfall and temperature and to disasters related to extreme weather events. International strategies for addressing climate change are in disarray. The complicated financial and carbon-trading mechanisms promoted by the United Nations and other global institutions are far too bureaucratic, weak, internally inconsistent, and scattered to represent meaningful solutions to climate change. Already the housing, health, and livelihoods of marginalized people worldwide are being threatened by the ramifications of climate change. This means that the marginalized in every community, by definition, have expertise in how priorities should be set to address climate change. Their experiences, knowledge, and views must be part of local, regional, national, and international governance—including urban planning and housing, water management, agriculture, health, and finance policies.This research was supported by the International Development Research Centre, grant number IDRC GRANT NO. 106002-00

Social diversity and the sustainability of community economies

Economic restructuring related to globalization is producing a bifurcation in economic activity throughout the OECD countries: a split between those workers/industries/areas which are competitive in the global market, and those which are being phased out. Partly in response, community economies -- which use local resources and labour to produce locally-needed goods and services -- are growing rapidly in some parts of North America and Europe. This paper discusses the relationship between these two macro trends, describing some typical institutions and characteristics of community economies and the requisites for their sustainability. The implications of this development in terms of the environmental impacts of economic change, meaning and value of social diversity, gender issues and educational needs, receive particular focus.This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canad

An overview of international institutional mechanisms for environmental management with refererence to Arctic pollution

Evidence is mounting of the environmental impact in the Far North of economic and industrial activity elsewhere in the world. While the sources of pollutants found in the Arctic are many and widespread, it is up to just a few countries - notably Canada,the former Soviet Union, Finland, Norway and Greenland - to assess the damage and deal with the impacts. This paper discusses the issue of Arctic pollution in the context of trends in world economic growth, globalization of economic activity, international trade and related institutional arrangements (such as trade and environmental agreements)T. he importance of tracing the sources of particular contaminants is stressed this is a first step towards internalization of environmental costs of production, and is also politically a key in efforts to control emissions. Trade and investment agreements commonly discuss rules for cross-border flows of goods, services, personnel and investment capital, as well as matters specific to particular economic sectors. Cross-border flows of pollutants and other ‘bads’ also merit detailed sectoral attention. This linkage would make explicit the connections between production and pollution (making possible the ‘polluter pays’ approach), and also widen the scope for redistribution of economic resources to equilibrate the situation (via trade and investment measures among others) if flows of goods are related directly to flows of ‘bads’. The paper examines the outlook for addressing Arctic pollution via international environmental agreements (along the lines of the Base1 Convention, the Montreal Protocol, CITES, etc.), existing and future trade agreements( such as GATT), or new institutional approaches

Local Economies, Trade, and Global Sustainability

Bioregional and "ecological economics" theory describes the growth of local economic linkages as vital to move post-industrial economies in the direction of sustainability. This involves expanding local stewardship over environmental and economic resources, so that progressively more production for local needs can be done within the community. Far from existing solely in the realm of theory, this is a pattern which is becoming more and more familiar in many parts of North America and Europe. The blossoming initiatives to create local, community-centred economies can be understood in light of the long history of environmental challenges faced by people living in the industrialized North, and the double economic blows of recession and trade liberalization/globalization exemplified by the passage of GATT and NAFTA and the development of the EC in the 1990s.This paper discusses the dynamic relationship between globalization and local economic development in the North from both theoretical and practical viewpoints. It provides examples from Toronto, Canada of the synergy among environmental awareness, community organizing and "alternative" employment creation (e.g. in environmental remediation and energy conservation activities) which can accompany recession or trade-induced worker layoffs. The resulting local economic patterns tend to be "greener" and more socially sustainable than the globally-tied economic linkages they replace.This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canad