David P. Turner / November 19, 2024
Recent commentary on paths to global sustainability has advocated for Earth system justice (ESJ), specifically for an Earth system that is just as well as safe.
A safe Earth system is one in which both the biosphere and the technosphere thrive. Current threats to the biosphere and technosphere come in the form of well-documented anthropogenic impacts on Earth’s energy balance, the global biogeochemical cycles, and the biota. Earth system scientists have identified a set of planetary boundaries – such as an atmospheric CO2 concentration and associated increase in global mean temperature – beyond which Earth system characteristics such as climate will be destabilized, thereby putting at risk the welfare of both humans and other species.
A just Earth system is more difficult to define. Historically, justice has largely been concerned with how people treat each other. The formulation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was an outstanding achievement in the struggle for social justice. However, the advent of the Anthropocene era has generated new questions about equality and fairness.
One of the key observations relevant to defining ESJ is that the people most impacted by climate change (e.g. impacts from a greater frequency and intensity of extreme weather events) are often not the people who have made the biggest contribution to causing climate change. The basis of this distributional inequity is that relatively wealthy people usually have high per capita greenhouse gas emissions, but their wealth also buffers them from the consequences of climate change. To account for this differential exposure, Earth system scientists have begun to estimate just planetary boundaries that would protect even the relatively vulnerable.
While distributional inequity can be considered in the current time period (intragenerational), we must also consider inequity through time (intergenerational justice). Recent generations have greatly benefited from fossil fuel combustion, but it is future generations that will mostly pay the costs as climate disruption becomes manifest. In a just world, each generation would leave the planetary life support system in as good or better a condition than the condition in which they inherited it. Following that principle would require much larger investments in greenhouse gas emission mitigation than are currently being made.
The Earth system justice concept also raises the issue of interspecies justice. What give Homo sapiens the right to drive other species extinct? Since we have clearly entered the Anthropocene era (with its associated 6th Great Extinction), humanity now has a responsibility to care for other species, and indeed for the biosphere as a whole.
Achieving ESJ is a daunting challenge because, even when considering just the biogeochemical aspects of Earth system function, the technical and environmental questions about how to address global environmental change issues are already complex. To add the related issues associated with intragenerational justice, intergenerational justice, and interspecies justice makes finding answers even more difficult ( e.g. the hydrologic cycle as it relates to meeting basic human needs while factoring in protection of aquatic ecosystems).
There are policies that could help make the Earth system safe but would not make it more just, such as appropriating land from indigenous people to create carbon sinks. Likewise, there are policies that could help make the Earth system more just, but would not make it safer, such as building coal burning power plants in developing countries that provide relatively cheap and reliable energy but also emit large quantities of greenhouse gases. So, although the objective of reducing global greenhouse gas emissions is straightforward, the questions of who has responsibility, how to go about it, and where to prioritize the efforts, are more nuanced.
Given the many trade-offs among safe planetary boundaries and just planetary boundaries, political decisions must be made. In the political realm (at least when there is some semblance of democracy), there is generally both a forum at which the stakeholders on any given issue can express their positions, and a societal decision-making mechanism that attempts to account for, or reconcile, the various interests. In the case of climate change mitigation, we are fortunate that many mitigation policies can also serve to promote social justice. Investments to manage land for the purposes of carbon sequestration and biodiversity conservation could also serve to maintain homelands for vulnerable Indigenous people. Investments in education and provision of family planning services improve quality of life, and also serve to tamp down population growth and hence total greenhouse gas emissions.
An important practical rationale for addressing inequity as part of addressing global environmental change is that impoverished people may be pushed to live in marginal environments and will exploit any available natural resources to survive. They don’t have the luxury of worrying about whether the environment is being degraded.
More generally, many global environmental change problems require global scale solutions. That means humanity as a collective must address them. A major problem with respect to inequity is that it erodes feelings of solidarity. Inequity prevents the organization of humanity as a “we”.
Achieving a safe and just Earth system will require leaders who understand the issues elaborated here, as well as the building of Earth system governance institutions that allow relevant policies to be debated and promulgated both nationally and globally. The Great Transition to a sustainable global civilization needs technological advances like a renewable energy revolution, but also efforts to mitigate multiple forms of injustice.
