Climate talk: Rights, poverty and justice

Climate change is one of the central challenges facing African countries and their

people. Unless concerted efforts are made worldwide very soon to reduce emissions,

climate change impacts are likely to be devastating. Higher-end temperature

scenarios present a dark future jeopardising secure access to basic needs such as

water, food, housing and a healthy environment, as well as adding to the stressors

on natural resources.

Those who will suffer the most from the challenges posed by climate change have

contributed the least to the problem in the first place: the poor and vulnerable,

especially in developing countries. To make matters worse, these are the same

people who have benefited the least from modernisation and industrialisation and

have a relatively small carbon footprint. This is a double injustice.

While climate justice and social justice are difficult to disentangle, neither the legal

systems nor the main actors framing the dominant climate change narratives seem

sufficiently attentive to the double-edged justice questions posed by the impacts of

climate change on poor communities.

This book attempts to fill some of the gaps in climate change scholarship by focusing

on the climate narratives emerging in and around South Africa - how they relate to

broader issues of social justice and resource allocation, and the role of rights talk

and legal strategies in the framing of the problems and solutions. In doing so, the

book contributes to developing rights- and justice-based strategies for translating

knowledge into action.

The authors approach the issues from different discourses and practices, but all have

in common the integration between fairness related to environmental issues and

fairness related to socio-economic issues.