Climate Change, Corrective Justice, and Sustainable Transitions

• In Event: Subversive Habits: Resistance and Democratic Challenges

Abstract

Normative analyses of climate justice remedies most typically invoke corrective justice in theorizing liability for polluters (i.e. how much states or other parties should pay for their role in causing climate injustice) or rectification for the victims of climate change (i.e. how much those adversely affected by anthropogenic environmental harm are owed for their imposed suffering or vulnerability). In conceiving the latter, philosophers and political theorists tend to pay attention to the actual or expected loss and damage directly suffered by those vulnerable to climate-related harm, so that the remedy is best described as compensation for failed mitigation. In view of this, the former corrective justice question is often conceptually associated with the latter: because climate change unjustly harms victims, those unjustly causing it should pay those victims a compensation for their injury, according to their (common but differentiated) liability for it. But a third category of corrective justice applications arises through efforts to adapt to a changing climate, as adaptation itself or the transition to sustainable human-natural systems also creates injustice that warrants some consideration of its proper rectification. This paper raises an example of such an adaptation issue and treats it through a corrective justice lens.

Among the impacts of climate change upon human and natural systems is increased drought in regions that already suffer from water scarcity but now face intensified scarcity through which many valid claims to water resources will in the future be impossible to satisfy. While principles of distributive justice can inform decisions regarding the allocation of scarce resources like water in times of drought, they are unable to fully account for the justice issues that arise under this kind of planned adaptation to anthropogenic environmental change. Transition to a sustainable water resource management system is likely to have pernicious impacts upon disadvantaged parties that invite analysis from a corrective justice perspective.

In this paper, I shall consider proposals to equitably ration water resources from the Colorado River basin in the western United States, which aim to respond to increasing scarcity (as the result of climate change) of water in the river through the use of an equity lens in allocating those resources among users and uses. A residual problem for justice arises when a just allocation of water leads to adverse impacts upon those already disadvantaged, for example for those residing in rural agricultural areas where irrigated agriculture may no longer be possible under a just allocation of the river’s flows. Here, a view of corrective justice is needed to supplement the distributive analysis, where injury results not from climate change itself but rather from efforts to equitably respond to its environmental impacts. Due to this different dynamic, I shall argue that the liability formulae often used for climate-related compensation don’t apply, and that another basis for providing such compensation is needed, which I shall aim in the paper to develop.

Author

• Steven J. Vanderheiden, University of Colorado, Boulder