Insufficient and lopsided green transitions

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Given that 2024 was the hottest year on record, and that climate disasters are continuing to cause havoc around the world with increasing severity, the need to take climate change seriously is obvious. Yet, curbing carbon emissions is not proving easy.

Powerful fossil fuel lobbies continue resisting the need to curb carbon emissions. Being unable to secure the net-zero emission targets, the last climate summit in Dubai settled on trying to transition away from fossil fuels instead. This much more fluid goal of decreasing carbon emissions seems callous given the stress being placed on varied natural systems, which enable life to exist on our planet.

However, climate deniers seem to enjoy popular support even in the most powerful countries in the world. After winning the US elections, President Trump has again pulled his country out of the already floundering Paris climate agreement and even cut back aid to help poorer countries become climate resilient.

The desire to continue making profits has taken precedence over the need to allow Earth to recuperate from the intensifying human assault on its delicate eco-systems. Unfortunately, prominent strategies to contend with climate change are mostly based on market-based imperatives, which seek to offer win-win solutions whereby profit-making can continue taking place alongside any proposed solutions to contend with climate change.

Emphasis is being placed on minimising productivity losses, for instance, and allowing companies to pay poorer countries to help offset their carbon footprint via undertaking reforestation drives. Such half-hearted efforts relying on businesses to make economies greener are not sufficient. Yet, deploying neoliberal logic to contend with climate change leads to reliance on the powerful actors, such as large corporations, that have triggered climate change.

Conversely, the notion of climate justice points to the unequal impacts of climate change on marginalised populations, and it seeks to identify climate solutions which ease the burdens of climate impacts on marginalised communities, while enhancing their participation in the efforts to mitigate climate threats.

Ensuring climate justice in practice, however, is not easy. There is a so-called 'tragedy of the commons' at play when it comes to preservation of natural resources, which refers to the tendency of individuals to overuse a shared resource to maximise their own self-interest.

For instance, despite their reliance on forests, the need for fuel, grazing livestock and growing more crops to earn an income have led to massive deforestation by the same poor communities which then suffer most from deforestation impacts, such as increased heat, soil erosion, desertification and flooding.

A similar problem is now becoming apparent with the profusion of solar panels that are enabling smallholder farmers who lack access to irrigated water to exploit fast depleting groundwater sources.

Operationalising climate justice within efforts to mitigate against climate threats is not easy. However, ignoring the need for climate justice is even more problematic as it can further compound the miseries of those already facing the brunt of climate change. Myopic approaches to conservation in the past have produced a range of problematic outcomes.

Consider, for instance, disturbing reports of conservation rangers using violent means to prevent local communities from encroaching on nature reserves in Africa.

However, many resource-starved governments in poorer countries are presently struggling to secure climate finance and investments that overtly rely on market-based strategies. In Sindh, for instance, a public-private partnership model is being used to restore mangroves to earn carbon credits.

While mangrove regrowth is immensely beneficial, the extent to which a business-driven revenue generating model trying to maximise regrowth to earn cash via carbon trading can adequately look after the communities dependent on mangroves remains a contested issue. The need to pay more attention to climate justice issues by those who formulate climate mitigation policies thus remains imperative.