Three Faces of Climate Justice

Seminar abstract

Climate change is the most profound challenge facing humanity. Yet, climate policies face resistance because they impose local costs for a global, nonexcludable benefit, and distribute these costs asymmetrically across economic sectors and groups.

Analytically, there are three dimensions of climate injustice;

1. Exposure to Climate Bads: Rising sea levels, prolonged droughts, and the higher frequency and intensity of extreme weather events will impose disproportionate costs on the underprivileged
2. Access to Climate Adaptation Policies: Societies have taken steps to enhance climate resilience. But structural and agentic factors create asymmetries in who benefits from resilience policies.
3. Costs Imposed by Climate Mitigation Policies: Transitioning to a low carbon economy will hurt workers in sectors such as fossil fuels. Carbon taxes disproportionately hurt poor people, who spend a higher percentage of their incomes on energy. A quick transition to renewable energy will create a huge demand for “critical minerals,” many of which will need to be mined overseas, often in developing countries.

The political challenge is to devise policies that are sensitive to equity implications. In the short run, these may not be the most effective or economically optimal policies. But justice-sensitive policies will create the necessary political buy-in for sustained and deep decarbonization and enhancing climate resilience.

Booking

This seminar is free to attend with no need to book in advance.

We warmly invite you to join this seminar online on Thursday 20 May at 4pm.

Speaker bio

Professor Prakash studies environmental policy, climate governance, NGOs and nonprofits, and voluntary/private regulation.

He is the author of; 

• Greening the Firm: The Politics of Corporate Environmentalism (Cambridge, 2000),

the co-author of;

• The Voluntary Environmentalists: Green Clubs, ISO 14001, and Voluntary Environmental Regulations (Cambridge, 2006),
• Advocacy Organizations and Collective Action (Cambridge, 2010),
• Voluntary Regulations of NGOs and Nonprofits: An Accountability Club Framework (Cambridge, 2010),
• Voluntary Programs: A Club Theory Perspective (The MIT Press, 2009),
• Coping with Globalization (Routledge, 2000),
• Responding to Globalization (Routledge, 2000),
• Globalization and Governance (Routledge, 1999).

In addition to guest editing several journal symposia, he has published in leading journals of political science, international relations, public policy, regulatory studies, nonprofit studies, and business ethics. With Nives Dolsak, he has a byline in Forbes.com. He also publishes on platforms such as the Conversation, Huffpost, the Hill, Slate, and the Washington Post.