Again, thanks for listening to our little intro. Climate Justice is a biiig topic that could easily fill the hour of our show with important content and still be quite superficial, but that’s not the character of the show so I had to select a few things to talk about.
At it’s core, climate justice just mirrors issues of social justice and gives a new perspective on it and so everywhere where people have a systemic disadvantage in our societies, they will probably be harder hit by the climate crisis as well. That’s the nature of our modern capitalist societies that are much better at protecting the rich and powerful than the disadvantaged and poor. How big that disadvantage is differs from country to country (and in general, Europe seems to do better in that regard than, say, the USA), but the patterns and the general direction are similar.
I am somewhat disappointed in myself that I forgot to mention that this is (for many people somewhat counterintuitively) also true for gender inequality. Women, especially in countries of the global south are often dependent on natural resources for subsistence and income and thus will be impacted by climate change stronger. But as we’re seeing in the current crisis during the Covid-19 pandemic, it is generally true that women are more impacted in times of crisis - They shoulder the most of so-called care work, they do a lot of the “essential workers” jobs in health care and other areas and are paid less money in these important jobs than their male counterparts - any form of crisis can easily tip this already skewed scale completely off balance.
My understanding of Climate Justice comes from reading a lot of different things, so here’s some links:
The Wikipedia Article actually does a pretty decent job of summarising the various angles.
A good resource I more or less found by accident are the Peoples Demands for Climate Justice.
Also, I’ve listed a bunch of resources at the end of my text on the “Kohleausstieg” show.
Let me close this out with a text written by Nemonte Nenquimo, an indigenuous leader from Equador which needs no further words: This is my message to the western world – your civilisation is killing life on Earth.