2 - The Grounds of Climate Justice

Summary

INTRODUCTION

This book aims to evaluate the global response to climate change. An important part of this evaluation is the development of a climate justice account. One cannot assess what is going right and wrong if one does not define what the right, or rather just, response to climate change would look like in the first place. Who will be most affected, what exactly is at stake, what action must be taken in the face of climate change, and who should be responsible for this action are all important questions that must be answered. The previous chapter focused on the first question – who will be most affected – and argued that the scope of justice should be relational and non-relational in order to include the primary victims of climate change in the realm of moral concern. This current chapter now turns to the second question – what exactly is at stake – by setting out the grounds of climate justice. Defining the grounds of justice is a key task for any climate justice account because it allows readers to understand what must be normatively prioritised. The grounds of justice in this sense represent the moral underpinnings of the climate justice account, a normative subfloor that must not be crossed. The final two questions – what action must be taken in the face of climate change, and who should be responsible for this action – will be the subject of Chapter 3, which sets out three demands of climate justice in order to clarify what exactly is expected from the global response to climate change.

The previous chapter defended a mixed scope of justice that has both relational and non-relational elements. It was explained that the nonrelational side of the account serves to set a minimum moral threshold that applies to all individuals, no matter the time or place of birth. The book must therefore now define this minimal moral threshold, which will constitute the grounds of climate justice: the human right to health. Health experts are confident that climate change will contribute to the global burden of disease and premature death, and have deleterious consequences for human health (Hansen et al. 2013: 8).