Mitigating Climate Change Without Exacerbating Climate Injustice

Mitigating climate change and social injustice are critical, interwoven challenges. The result of elevated greenhouse gas emissions, climate change is driven by grossly unequal emissions among individuals, socioeconomic groups, and nations. Yet its deleterious impacts disproportionately affect poor and less powerful nations, and the poor and the less powerful within each nation. This climate injustice prompts a call for mitigation strategies that buffer the poorest and the most vulnerable against climate change impacts. Unfortunately, all emissions mitigation strategies also reshape social, economic, political, and ecological processes in ways that may create climate change mitigation injusticesi.e., a unique set of injustices not caused by climate change, but by the strategies designed to stem it. Failing to stop climate change is not an answerthis will swamp all adverse impacts of even unjust mitigation in terms of the scope and scale of disastrous consequences. However, mitigation without justice will create uniquely negative consequences for the more vulnerable. The ensuing analysis systematically assesses how climate change mitigation strategies can generate or ameliorate injustices. We first examine how climate science and social justice interact within and among countries.