Climate change can manifest its impacts on natural and cultural systems in extremely complex ways. Primary effects (e.g. floods, drought, melting glaciers) will have many more secondary effects (loss of nutrients, change in species composition, change in hydrology, etc.), which in turn have tertiary effects, etc. A focus on equity examines a subset of these direct and indirect effects, and one of the objectives of this symposium is to consider conceptual frameworks that can help guide that search for “climate justice.”
Results/Conclusions
A two part framework that considers primary effects on “media” (land, air, water) and “justice” (distributive and procedural) may be attractive for ecologically-oriented researchers as it starts with a familiar disciplinary organization of the world and connects it to a legal framework that also, at least initially, has an direct application to those media (clean air act, clean water act, etc.). The challenge, especially from a predictive point of view, is how to deal with novel and interactive impacts of climate change that might require preemptive action (e.g. warmer climate that might metabolize soil organic carbon that might lead to lower fertility decreasing harvests for poor communities without the ability to purchase fertilizers). Ecologists may be in the best position to anticipate these type of changes and thus assist with both preemptive and restorative climate justice, however, given the multitude of probable interactive impacts, where to start is a bit daunting. Assuming that climate change will impact all human populations, an additional framework that focuses on categories of resource dependent communities that are disempowered from mainstream political and economic activity may help guide climate justice research.