Climate (In)Justice

Hi, my name is Anniek and I am currently an affiliate student at UCL. This blog is part of the module “Water and Development in Africa”. The relationship between water and environmental change is central to my blog. This first blog post will mostly be an introduction to this subject. I will begin by explaining the concepts of environmental justice and climate justice. This will be followed by highlighting climate injustice between the global north and the global south. After this, I will introduce environmental (in)justice in Africa, as a result of climate change, which will be the starting point for the rest of my blog.

Who pays the price?

This week is a week full of Extinction Rebellion protests, a protest group rebelling for a better world. For the last couple of months, there have been plenty of marches and protests by students and schoolchildren. The most shared vision of Extinction Rebellion and other protest groups are “creating a world that is fit for generations to come” (extinction rebellion, n.d.).  This is an easy starting point in beginning to understand the concept of climate injustice. Environmental justice is a term used to bridge the divide between society and nature. The term highlights the human-environmental relationship (Moseley et al., 2014). Climate justice, as part of environmental justice, is used in the same way. It is used to shed light on the unequal distribution of the costs of climate change. The Extinction Rebellion slogan emphasizes the intergenerational injustice aspect of climate change. However, this is not the only way of looking at climate change justice. Whereas the wealthy world, mostly in the global north, generates almost all the carbon dioxide emissions, It is the developing countries that suffer from the effects of climate change the most. The whole of Africa is vulnerable because of both high exposure and low adaptive capacity. Over the past 50 to 100 years, the surface temperatures have increased by 0.5 degrees or more in most parts of Africa. The surface temperature rise is, besides, expected to rise faster than the global average. Other projected problems include an increase in heatwave days in northwestern Sahara, an increase in extreme precipitation changes over eastern Africa with both droughts and heavy rainfall and high risk of to droughts in Southwestern regions (Niang et al., 2014).

Even though this is just a grasp of all the projected changes in Africa, it does already show the variety of challenges the continent has to deal with. These challenges vary both spatially and socially. Disparities in, among other things, access to safe water and sanitation therefore still exist in high levels. This is both in terms of geographical differences between regions but also smaller spatial differences within a region such as between urban and rural and large- and medium- and small-sized cities.  Besides, certain population groups will be exposed more to the risks of climate change than others. African women, for example, are for a great part responsible for subsistence agriculture and are therefore extra vulnerable as this agriculture which will likely be affected by climate change Niang et al., 2014).

In conclusion: the people affected the most by climate change are located in Africa, even though they are least responsible for emitting carbon dioxide. However, within Africa, there are also differences in risk exposure to the effects of climate change. In my next blog post, I will start to introduce a case to investigate climate justice in Africa.