Supertyphoons have become the norm for the Philippines as climate change has become a reality for most parts of the world. We have seen its impact in North and South America, Europe and other countries in between.
The concept of climate justice has evolved because the primary polluters are the major industrialized countries, collectively known as the G7. The large group, which includes the developing countries, is the the G20.
The carbon footprint of the industrialized countries is the major cause of climate change along with the environmental impact of development. The growing global population has led to increased demand for living space which has resulted in the destruction of habitats for animals which form an integral part of the global ecosystem.
As animals have been driven out of their natural homes, their existence has been threatened and the same is with ecosystem which constitutes the food chain. The rate of extinction among species has increased. The polar ice caps are melting resulting in higher ocean levels which threatens coastal communities. The world’s largest cities have evolved out of river systems which were the primary means of transport, livelihood and food source.
What is climate justice?
Climate justice is a concept that addresses the ethical dimensions of climate change. Applied ethics, research and activism using the term approach anthropogenic climate change as an ethical, legal and political issue, rather than one that is purely environmental or physical in nature. This is done by relating the causes and effects of climate change to concepts of justice, particularly environmental justice and social justice. Climate justice examines concepts such as equality, human rights, collective rights, and the historical responsibilities for climate change. Climate justice actions can include the growing global body of legal action on climate change issues. In 2017, a report of the United Nations Environment Programme identified 894 ongoing legal actions worldwide.
Use and popularity of climate justice language has increased dramatically in recent years, yet climate justice is understood in many ways, and the different meanings are sometimes contested. At its simplest, conceptions of climate justice can be grouped along the lines of procedural justice, which emphasizes fair, transparent and inclusive decision making, and distributive justice, which places the emphasis on who bears the costs of both climate change and the actions taken to address it.
A main factor in the increased popularity and consideration of climate justice was the rise of grassroots movements – such as Fridays for Future, Ende Gelände or Extinction Rebellion. A special focus is placed on the role of Most Affected People and Areas (MAPA), i.e., groups overall disproportionately vulnerable to or affected by climate change, such as women, racial minorities, young, older and poorer people. Historically marginalized communities, such as low income, indigenous communities and communities of color often face the worst consequences of climate change: in effect the least responsible for climate change broadly suffer its gravest consequences. They might also be further disadvantaged by responses to climate change which might reproduce or exacerbate existing inequalities, which has been labeled the ‘triple injustices’ of climate change.
Some climate justice approaches promote transformative justice where advocates focus on how vulnerability to climate change reflects various structural injustices in society, such as the exclusion of marginalized groups from climate resilient livelihoods, and that climate action must explicitly address these structural power imbalances. For these advocates, at a minimum, priority is placed on ensuring that responses to climate change do not repeat or reinforce existing injustices, which has both distributive justice and procedural justice dimensions. Other conceptions frame climate justice in terms of the need to curb climate change within certain limits, like the Paris Agreement targets of 1.5 °C, as otherwise the impacts of climate change on natural ecosystems will be so severe as to preclude the possibility of justice for many generations and populations. Moreover, others argue that failure to address social implications of climate change mitigation transitions could result in profound economic and social tensions and delay necessary changes while ways that reduce greenhouse gas emissions in a socially just way – called a ‘just transition‘ – are possible, preferable, in better agreement with contemporary human rights, fairer, more ethical as well as possibly more effective.
The responsibility for anthropogenic climate change differs substantially between individuals and groups. Studies found that the most affluent citizens of the world are responsible for most environmental impacts and may be necessary – in terms of contemporary influence – for prospects of moving towards safer environmental conditions.
According to a report by Oxfam and the Stockholm Environment Institute, the richest 1 % of the global population have caused twice as much carbon emissions as the poorest 50 % for 25 years, and 15 % of emissions in 2015 while the world’s poorest 50 % were assessed to be responsible for 7 %.
The bottom half of the population is directly-responsible for less than 20 % of energy footprints and consume less than the top 5 % in terms of trade-corrected energy. High-income individuals usually have higher energy footprints as they disproportionally use their larger financial resources – which they can usually spend freely in their entirety for any purpose as long as the end user purchase is legal – for energy-intensive goods. In particular, the largest disproportionality was identified to be in the domain of transport, where e.g. the top 10% consume 56% of vehicle fuel and conduct 70% of vehicle purchases.
Aggravating the problem of injustice from disproportionate causality, many of the people and nations most affected by climate change are some of the least responsible for it. A study projected that, depending on scenarios, regions inhabited by 1 to 3 billion people could become as hot as the hottest parts of the Sahara (a MAT of >29 °C) within 50 years without a change in patterns of population growth, without limiting climate change to below 1.5 °C and without these people migrating. It found most of these affected regions have little adaptive capacity as of 2020. One of the problems could be increased drought severity worldwide.
While certain companies – e.g. fossil fuel companies – are often blamed for deemed responsibility for anthropogenic climate change, their influence and negative effects on the environment may mainly stem from consumers purchasing their products (e.g. cars and meat-centric diets), structures that accordingly distribute power and wealth towards them, a lack of public and contemporary free private investment into sustainable development, a lack of approximating alternatives (e.g. public transport infrastructure and advanced sustainable energy grids) and a lack of policies that reduce their consumption or their harmful effects or change development (e.g. adequate facilitation of research into how such could be achieved efficiently, eco-tariffs, adjustments of processes relevant to policy-making, regulations, enabling legislation, standards, enabling tests of new socioeconomic designs, facilitation of education, monitoring, subsidization-changes, changes to financial allocations and enabling scientific certifications), all of which could be modulated, facilitated or resolved directly or indirectly by decisions policy-makers could enact. However, many policies (and contemporary private endeavours such as voluntary ones by billionaires or asset managers) while possibly often having well-intentioned substantial positive environmental effects, may amount to (or have the purpose of) greenwashing or fall short not only of climate goals but also of implementing necessary steps towards more efficient, just and effective policies not only because politics is often based on compromise.
The public has generally read about the Paris Agreement and the recently held COP 26 in Glasgow. Those who are in the know about climate change are often confused due to the complicated nature of the issue. Recall how President Duterte described the Paris Agreement as useless because there is absolute commitment from the world’s industrialized countries to offer compensation to countries which don’t have the same amount of emissions but are the most affected by climate change, such as the Philippines.
CLIMATE CHANGE IMPACTS
Philippines is the third most vulnerable country to climate change according to the 2017 world risk report. Impacts of climate change in the Philippines are immense, including: annual losses in GDP, changes in rainfall patterns and distribution, droughts, threats to biodiversity and food security, sea level rise, public health risks, and endangerment of vulnerable groups such as women and indigenous people.
Philippines to lose 6% GDP anually by 2100
The latest IPCC Assessment Report concluded that climate change will create new poor between now and 2100. Poverty breeds disaster vulnerability, and those who have least in life risk like most.
Based on a study by the Asian Development Bank on the economics of climate change, the country stands to lose 6% of its GDP annually by 2100 if it disregards climate change risks. This same study found that if the Philippines invests 0.5% of its GDP by 2020 in climate change adaptation, it can avert losses of up to 4% of its GDP by 2100—clearly a short-term investment with a long-term eight-fold gain.
Major rainfall changes in patterns and distributions
A 2011 PAGASA report suggests a decrease in rainfall by 2020 in most parts of the country except Luzon. As far as extreme rainfall is concerned, however, the number of days with heavy rainfall (e.g., greater than 200 mm) is expected to increase with global warming by the year 2020 and 2050.
Threats to natural ecosystems
Approximately 1 million hectares of grasslands in the Philippines are highly vulnerable to climate change in the future. Most grasslands in the uplands are prone to fires particularly during extended periods of dryness and lack of rainfall during summer.
Coral Loss The 2016 Low Carbon Monitor Report foresees that 98 percent of coral reefs in Southeast Asia will die by 2050, practically an extinction by the end of the century if current global warming trends will continue. The IPCC projects that by years 2051 to 2060, the maximum fish catch potential of Philippine seas will decrease by as much as 50% compared to 2001-2010 levels.
Declining rice yields An analysis of temperature trends and irrigated field experiments at the International Rice Research Institute shows that grain yield decreased by at least 10% for each 1°C increase in growing-season minimum temperature in the dry season.
More intense droughts Global warming exacerbates the effects of El Niño the most recent of which was experienced in the country from 2015 to 2016. The Department of Agriculture estimated that 413,456 farmers have been directly affected by El Niño-associated drought and dry spells during the last El Niño period.
Higher sea level rise Observed sea level rise is remarkably highest at 60 centimeters in the Philippines, about three times that of the global average of 19 centimeters. This puts at risk 60% of LGUs covering 64 coastal provinces, 822 coastal municipalities, 25 major coastal cities, and an estimated 13.6 million Filipinos that would need relocation.
Water scarcity Climate change, rapid urbanization, and population growth drives water scarcity worldwide. A study conducted by the World Resources Institute predicts that Philippines will experience a ‘high’ degree of water shortage by the year 2040. The country ranked 57th likely most water stressed country in 2040 out of 167 countries. The sector that will bear the brunt of water shortage by that year is agriculture, a major component of the country’s economy and which currently employs x% of the country’s workforce.
Labor productivity declined According to a 2016 United Nations study, climate change-induced heat in the workplace is projected to render 1% loss in working hours by 2025, 2% by 2050, and 4% by 2085.
More public health emergencies Higher temperatures also trigger the surge of diseases such as dengue, malaria, cholera, and typhoid. In 1998, when the Philippines experienced the strongest El Nino phenomenon to-date, almost 40,000 dengue cases, 1,200 cholera cases, and nearly 1,000 typhoid fever cases, were recorded nationwide.
More women endangered and killed A paper released by the World Health Organization (WHO) examining gender, climate change, and health, stated that the impacts of natural hazards such as droughts, floods and storms affect more women than men, and tend to affect women at a younger age. Climate-sensitive and gender-specific health impacts affect women disproportionately than men.
The government reportedly spent over P1B to pursue the arbitration case against China in the South China Sea dispute. It’s high time that our leaders allocate funding to study the possibility of initiating litigation in order to receive compensation from the countries which contribute to climate change the most in order to fund projects for resiliency and sustainability in the country.
Since Haiyan/Yolanda in 2013, supertyphoons have become the norm resulting in huge damage to agriculture, infrastructure and the loss of lives. Climate justice is a viable option because we are hardest hit by the effects of climate change and extremely vulnerable to the same in terms of food security.
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