Addressing climate injustice

Amid a rising chorus of calls, the Conference of Parties (COP 27) convened by the United Nations recently resolved to institute a loss and damage fund to help developing countries address the increasing frequency, intensity, and duration of climate change-related events such as fires, heat waves, droughts, and floods. Many have hailed the launch of the fund as a success in addressing environmental justice. But we are less optimistic given the weak governance landscape globally, regionally, and at the level of local governments and utilities. For one, most developing countries at the forefront of the call for a loss and damage fund have weak institutions—plain speak for high levels of corruption and limited accountability and inclusivity in decision-making.

As experts including this author have opined, weak institutions are a recipe for disaster, as experience dating back to the Rio environment conference shows that in the absence of robust norms, funds can easily end up in the hands of dictators or chasing infrastructure projects that do little to improve the human condition.

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International aid that followed in the wake of major conferences made two assumptions that, in hindsight, have proven to be wrong. First, it was assumed that international aid could compensate for shortfalls in public financing sourced via taxes and tariffs. But our research on World Bank-supported water and sanitation projects in India, for example, showed that when international aid is made available, there is little incentive for local governments to seek out cost-effective infrastructure options financed from local taxes and tariffs. This promotes low accountability since it tends to undercut negotiations over national and regional budgets.

Second, it has been assumed that success can be measured by the extent to which we return to a pristine pre-industrial way of life characterised by lower emissions, better environmental quality, and manageable levels of displacement of people. But the reality, as demonstrated by the 2020 Climate Resilience Screening Index (CRSI) report of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), is that monitoring regimes must be designed for a gradation of climate resilience phases.

In other words, while the US may be suffering from a trend of increased climate events, restoration of system resilience must confront governance challenges. First, how does the federal government reconcile the heterogeneous effects that droughts, floods, and heat waves impose on diverse geographies to justify disbursement of funds under the Inflation Reduction Act? Further, adaptation plans at the level of US states must reconcile the disproportionate costs that climate events impose on historically marginalised communities, and climate science must be able to offer approaches and tools for decision-makers that distinguish between some losses that are reparable and other damages that are irreversible.

The idea of restorative justice is borne out of the tensions that arise at the intersection of these challenges. The experience of small island countries such as Vanavatu, for example, shows that damage to tuna habitats can destroy income and livelihood opportunities for local communities, with implications for public health and individual self-worth. And yet conventional compensation mechanisms that are tied to international aid, local taxes, and transfers from federal governments are woefully inadequate in terms of shifting the focus exclusively from infrastructure and emissions and towards issues of equity in the design of financing instruments and adaptation plans.

Given the enormity of the challenge, a loss and damage fund must be supported by climate science that is integrative, innovative, and inclusive for it to be effective. The Boundary Science that emerged from research supported by the National Science Foundation revealed that for financing to be effective in addressing climate change, UN member states and US states alike should draw upon the benefits offered by integrating data and models spanning disciplines as diverse as physical science, data analytics, and social science.

Further, especially since incremental change in policy must give way to transformative change in governance, producing individuals with cross-boundary skills ranging from basic research to stakeholder negotiation should become the focus of higher education the world over. In as much as solutions to intractable climate challenges may lie at the intersection of scientific disciplines, cooperation between scientists from the developed and developing world can also prove to be important in underpinning multidimensional models of restorative justice.

(The writer is co-director, The Climate Panel, Pennsylvania.)