Climate justice must drive climate action

Context: Alarming climate change disaster on Global village and comparable response mechanism.

Four elements to mitigate the disaster 

• Credibility of the warnings: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has successfully indicated five assessments so far presented and their early indications of the sixth assessment have strengthened the scientific consensus on the facts and the projections.
• Sense of emergency shared: 200 nations set up two mechanisms for this purpose.
• A scientific body for building a consensus on the facts and projections about climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
• A negotiating process aimed at deciding what each nation should do that led to a global treaty, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
• Joint responsibility: It is reflected in the commitment to “common but differentiated responsibility” embodied in the climate treaty.
• Higher authority capable: An authority capable of enforcing restraint and liability on those most responsible for the risk is absent at present.

Challenges

• Doubts about reliability of warnings: It is now limited to fringe groups, generally associated with those who have a commercial interest in fossil fuels.
• Principles of climate justice: Important to govern the differentiation of responsibility have never been spelt out.
  • No agreement on whether the term responsibility should be interpreted as culpability or as duty.
• Lack of a consensus on climate justice and the absence of a supra-national authority: It has led to a negotiating process driven largely by the articulation of narrow national interests and a three part power structure in the climate negotiations.
  • Two big emitters: China and the US.
  • Second part: 18-20 countries, each one of which accounts for 1 per cent or more of the global carbon emissions, who matter but, individually, they do not have the de facto veto power that the two big emitters have.
  • Third part: The 180 countries that are at the receiving end of what the big players decide.

Conclusion: The climate of the earth is the same for all humans and all living beings. An independent national mechanism in every country for ensuring credibility and accountability, is what to pursue now.

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