Climate Justice
How climate change intersects with inequality, colonialism, and human rights, and why the world's poorest bear the greatest burden of a crisis they did least to cause.
An Unequal Crisis
Climate change is often described as a global problem, but its causes and consequences are profoundly unequal. The richest 10 percent of the world's population is responsible for roughly half of all emissions, while the poorest 50 percent contributes around 10 percent. Yet it is the poorest who suffer most: subsistence farmers in the Sahel whose rains no longer come, fishing communities in Bangladesh flooded by rising seas, and indigenous peoples in the Amazon whose forests are burning.
Climate justice is a framework that addresses this inequality. It argues that climate change cannot be treated as a purely technical or economic problem; it must be understood through the lens of justice, rights, and historical responsibility. The countries that industrialized first, powered by fossil fuels, created the atmospheric conditions that now threaten the lives and livelihoods of people who never benefited from that industrialization. This is not just a scientific fact but a moral one.
