Environmental Justice

The United Nations climate change summit, taking place this December in Copenhagen, Denmark, will be one of the great tests of our generation.  All eyes are turned towards reaching an ambitious, just and equitable post-2012 agreement of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).  What must be achieved in Copenhagen?

Wealthy countries, like Canada, produce the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions, which have brought the planet to its present state of peril. For that reason we, and others in the industrialized North, should take decisive steps to shift to a low-carbon economy.  Canada should also to help developing countries in their efforts to avoid a similarly damaging carbon-intensive model of industrialization. We need to commit resources and technology to support this transition. 

The countries least responsible for climate change are those who are suffering most from its adverse impacts including: humanitarian disasters stemming from extreme weather events, droughts, sea levels rising and food insecurity.  Canada should work to mitigate climate change, but it should also generously fund adaptation and disaster risk reduction – efforts to assist the poorest to reduce their vulnerability to climate hazards. The World Bank estimates US $61 billion a year between 2010 to 2050 for adaptation financing. Canada’s share would be US $2.2 billion a year.

This is really not about charity. It’s about justice.  Many movements and networks in the global South are rightly demanding that those responsible for environmental damage repay their ecological debt – a debt to the countries and people of the South for decades of resource plundering, destroyed biodiversity, waste dumping, industrial development and energy consumption, which have driven global warming.

Humanitarian organizations predict increasing intensity and frequency of climate-related natural disasters such as floods, droughts, and cyclones.  Massive displacement, disease, and lost livelihoods will further burden already limited state capacity.  In conflict-affected fragile states, the impacts of climate change will contribute to social tensions and heighten conflicts, eroding the resilience of marginalized communities. 

The Copenhagen negotiations have to be more than a technical exercise – though they will be filled with talk of machinery and mechanisms.  At the centre of the climate crisis are violations of human rights on a massive scale, from the right to food and water, to a clean environment, to employment, education, a livelihood, political participation, and freedom from living in fear and violence.  The outcome of the negotiations must set the standards for taking action in defense of the human rights of those most affected by climate change: Indigenous peoples, peasant communities, political and economically marginalized groups, and women.  These actors are not just helpless victims of the climate; they are powerful agents of change, whose sustainable practices should be seen as offering the real solutions to climate change.  Their leadership is critical.

Environmental justice must over-reach the Denmark discussions.  We need an agenda for action that takes account of the whole of this complex challenge.  Trade, for example, is part of that challenge. A week before Copenhagen, governments will meet in Geneva for the 7^th World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial meeting of the Doha Round (trade negotiations that were to focus on developing country needs). 

The world’s trade and investment regime must be reoriented away from facilitating energy-intensive industrial sectors, fossil fuels, and intensive large-scale agriculture towards sustainable production and alternative energies.  Canada can help at the WTO by pressing for trade measures that support small-scale farmers and their sustainable practices. Canada should support relaxed intellectual property rights regimes so developing countries have access to appropriate climate-friendly technologies that can support their development. 

As we approach these key moments of engagement: the climate change meetings in Copenhagen in December 2009, the WTO meeting in Geneva on November 30, or the G20/G8 meetings in Canada in 2010, let’s make sure the emphasis is put on equity, justice and rights.

It’s up to us to ensure Canada lives up to its historic responsibilities, puts environmental justice at the core of the debate and reforms the policies governing our climate system and global economy.  It’s time to stop exploiting the livelihoods and lives of the world’s most marginalized people and start putting their solutions at the heart of the debate, starting at the UN climate summit in Copenhagen.

Gerry Barr
President-CEO

Canadian Council for International Co-operation