Global Climate Justice

(4 Credits)

Climate justice, which aims to address the disproportionate impacts that the climate crisis is having on the world’s most vulnerable communities, has become a ubiquitous term in climate policy and activism. How is climate justice defined by communities with lived experience of the destructive impacts of the climate crisis? How is it defined by advocates, activists, policymakers, scholars, and writers? How do these definitions shape law and policy, and how do law and policy respond to the demands and expectations of climate justice advocates? We will analyze climate justice through themes including health and disability, race, gender, Indigenous perspectives, and others. We will address the roles of climate negotiations and international forums such as the UN Climate Change Conferences (COP), and will analyze how climate justice relates to mitigation, adaptation, resilience, loss and damage, and reparations. We will assess how to distinguish between greenwashing and efforts that are authentically grounded in principles of justice and equity, and will discuss how climate fiction depicts dystopia and resistance to climate injustice. In analyzing these issues, we will reflect on obligations to future generations and will examine how climate science can be communicated to non-scientific audiences. Our efforts will all focus on these central questions: What is climate justice? Who gets to define climate justice? How can climate justice efforts respond to the human rights and needs of the world’s most vulnerable communities?