Climate Justice: A New Social Movement for Atmospheric Rights

negotiations are frustrated. The global policy process is moving too slowly in relation to the scale of the problem. Political will is lacking, not only in the North and particularly in the USA, as is well known, but now increasingly in the South as well, in response to the North’s foot-dragging, to Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) pressure, as to perceptions that economic growth will suffer. Civil society coalitions, in the North and the South, are as yet too weak to bring sufficient pressure. ‘The chances of our getting anywhere near where we need to be with international diplomacy are grim,’ one policy advocate said. ‘We need other forces. What might these be and what are the chances of mobilising them?’ This article asks what social movements are emerging as a force for action on climate change, to reinforce the efforts of sympathetic non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and diplomats. Specifically, it asks how such social movements might urge international development actors to move more squarely into the arena from their stance on the sidelines and to recognise climate change as one of the greatest risks to poor people – a force capable of literally “undoing” decades of development. There is also a need to reconcile the sometimes conflicting messages and objectives of civil society coalitions working on the issue in the North and South and to move from protest and criticism to concrete proposals. In the North, civil society has concentrated on climate change more exclusively as an environmental issue, by environmental NGOs and researchers and has focused on scientific and technical solutions such as emissions controls and carbon credits. In the South, however, climate change has emerged primarily as a sustainable development issue, whose solutions are seen as inseparable from larger issues of poverty, trade and globalisation. These messages have yet to appear in Northern development discourses and in the policies of international NGOs, though these have begun to address issues of poverty impacts and adaptability (Newell 2000). Climate change is already on the agenda for many marginalised people concerned with protecting their social and economic rights, North and South. From a rapid review of the landscape, they are making links between poverty and climate change in ways that differ from the mainstream international development community. Some social movements are articulating their messages within the theme of antiglobalisation, connecting climate change with unjust North/South economic relations. Others build on long-standing traditions of “environmental justice” campaigns, which have been concerned with the hugely disproportionate impact of pollution and ecological degradation on poor communities. Together, these diverse social forces have adopted “climate justice” as a rallying cry. The climate justice message is that poor people have not been “waiting for the science” on global warming. They have been living with it – and with many other forms of pollution and degradation – for many years, as “social sinks” for the externalisation of environmental costs. Articulated in the language of rights, their foremost concern about climate change is with who is responsible for this enormous new threat to their survival. Rather than asking how we can mobilise them on climate issues, a more important question may be how they can further mobilise and align themselves as a global political force with influence at multiple levels – and perhaps in doing so compel those of us in the poverty industry to take a much stronger stand both on the life-threatening poverty effects of climate change