Chapter Synopsis

Preliminary page

Containining cover page, table of content and foreword: Climate Change as an Equity Issue by Ross Garnaut

Introduction

In the introduction,

Index

Book's Index.

Part 1 - Science, Fairness and Responsibility

Chapter 1: The Blame Game
Prof David Karoly

Concern about the adverse impacts of anthropogenic climate change has grown over the last decade, particularly as the scientific assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have provided higher confidence conclusions that recent warming of the climate system is unequivocal and that, at the global scale, most of this warming is due to human activity. The recent IPCC assessment in 2007 concluded 'Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations’. This conclusion refers to global-scale climate change, but it is the local and regional impacts of climate change that affect people, society and ecosystems. In addition, the important anthropogenic greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and halocarbons, have long atmospheric residence times and are well-mixed, so that increases in their concentrations are due to integrated emissions over extended periods. Blaming or assigning responsibility for specific regional impacts of climate change to different sources of anthropogenic greenhouse gases, such as individual countries or companies, is difficult but has been considered in principle. It involves linking changes in greenhouse gas concentrations to different sources of emissions and linking regional impacts of climate change to increases in greenhouse gas concentrations.

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Chapter 2: Climate Change as an Ethical Issue
Peter Singer

For most of human existence, people living only short distances apart might as well have been living in separate worlds. A river, a mountain range, a stretch of forest or desert: these were enough to cut people off from each other. As a result, human beings developed systems of ethics to deal with problems within our community, rather than with the impact of our actions on those far away. Responsibilities and harms were generally clear and well defined. We took the atmosphere and the oceans for granted, never thinking of them as limited resources we could use up, and so never developing inhibitions against making the fullest use of them.

Today people living on opposite sides of the world are linked in ways previously unimaginable. The fact that human activities are causing climate change has revealed bizarre new ways in which humans can harm each other. By driving your car, you could be releasing carbon dioxide that is part of a causal chain leading to a drought in Chad or lethal floods in Bangladesh. This change has revolutionary consequences for the way we think about our ethical obligations.

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Chapter 3: Climate Justice
Jeremy Moss

While new evidence is constantly emerging about the environmental impact of climate change, what is now apparent is the significance of our political decisions about who will pay for these impacts. In our efforts to avoid or reduce the more damaging effects of climate change we need to ensure that the burden falls on the right groups of people or run the risk of treating people unfairly. What this suggests is that the problem of how to distribute the costs of climate change is fundamentally a problem of justice. Responding to climate change as a matter of justice is important for at least two reasons. First, we need to avoid some of the pitfalls of leaving decisions at a purely personal level. For instance, we are often told that our response to climate change should lead us to change our behaviour: that we should adopt low emissions lifestyles; install extensive solar panels; buy local food; become a green consumer and so on. These are undoubtedly good things for the environment. But the danger associated with this approach is that such a response to climate change remains in the realm of personal ethics and does not provide a collective and fair allocation of costs.

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Chapter 4: Discounting and Intergenerational Equity
Professor John Quiggin

Economic debate over the appropriate response to climate change has turned largely on the question of discounting: that is, how should we compare flows of monetary costs (and benefits) or environmental damage (and improvements) occurring in the future with those occurring now. Within this debate, a crucial question relates to the concept of 'inherent time preference', that is, the claim that, in the absence of any other distinguishing features, a good received in the present should be valued more highly than the same (or an equal) good received in the future. This question is often phrased in terms of the relationship between current and future generations. In this paper, it is argued that the current/future generations distinction is misleading, since members of different generations are alive at the same time. Any distributional principle that is consistent with the Pareto principle (all changes that make some better off and none worse off are supported) and place equal weight on the lifetime utility of all people alive at any given time must preclude inherent time preference in relation to the provision and financing of public goods. This is true even if individual preferences display inherent time preference.

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Chapter 5: Some Distributional Issues in Greenhouse Gas Policy Design
Prof John Freebairn

The distribution of the benefits and costs of policy interventions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are important to the design of politically acceptable policies. It is important to focus not on the initial or statutory incidence of taxes on emissions or the allocation of tradable permits, but rather on their economic incidence once market prices and quantities have responded to the changed incentives. Further, given the very long time frame for policy to reduce the stock of greenhouses gases, the focus should be on the long run economic effects. This chapter argues that a high proportion of the economic costs of taxes or tradable permits to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will be passed forward to consumers, rather than to producers, and as a consequence much contemporary policy discussion and lobbying to compensate producers is exaggerated. An understanding of the distribution of the costs and benefits of policies to reduce greenhouse gases across different countries, and in particular between developed and developing countries, is important in designing a necessary global policy response.

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Chapter 6: Just Carbon Trading?
Professor Robyn Eckersley

Carbon trading schemes have emerged as the white knight of climate change policy at the international and national levels. Cap-and-trade schemes have been widely defended as more efficient and flexible than other policy instruments for achieving domestic emissions reductions, including carbon taxes and prescriptive regulation. The Kyoto Protocol's 'flexibility mechanisms'—emissions trading (ET), the Clean Development mechanism (CDM) and Joint Implementation (JI)—likewise provide countries and firms with the opportunity to seek out least-cost abatement options through international trading or offsetting through the elimination of territorial constraints. However, policy tools that pass the test of efficiency do not necessarily pass the test of fairness. This purpose of this chapter is to offer a critical stock-taking of carbon trading from the standpoint of justice. It seeks to evaluate to what extent carbon trading might serve as a vehicle for justice, on the one hand, or as a source of injustices, on the other.

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Part 2 - Climate Change and Vulnerable Groups

Chapter 7: Justice and Adaptation to Climate Change
Jon Barnett

In developed countries such as Australia almost all of the contemporary debates about climate change and justice relate to the distribution of costs associated with national efforts to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. These debates have arisen after international negotiations led to most developed countries accepting responsibility to reduce emissions under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and its Kyoto Protocol. Despite the present focus on domestic costs, the global-scale politics of climate justice have not gone away, and will soon reappear as developed and developing countries grapple with the allocation of emissions reductions targets in the second commitment period of Kyoto Protocol scheduled to begin in 2012.

However, there are other dimensions to climate justice beyond those associated with the costs of reducing emissions. One consideration is the unequal outcomes that may arise from the actions people and groups take to avoid climate change impacting on the things that they value. It is this issue of justice in adaptation that concerns this chapter. It has two parts: an overview of the justice dimensions of vulnerability and adaptation to climate change, and then an example of the potential injustices that may arise as a result of efforts to promote adaptation in the small island state of Niue.

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Chapter 8: Primary Health Care Responses to Climate Change
Grant Andrew Blashki, Helen Louise Berry, Michael Richard Kidd

In 2008, two anniversaries coincided and highlighted two major global public health challenges for this century: the 60th World Health Day, focused on ‘protecting health from climate change’, and the 30th anniversary of the Alma Ata declaration, which emphasized the importance of primary health care. Climate change is a serious global public health problem that, amongst other things, threatens attainment of the United Nations Millennium Goals of eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, reducing childhood mortality and combating endemic infectious diseases. The health burden of climate change is already distributed non-uniformly around the globe and is predicted to fall most heavily on poorer communities that are least able to adapt. One approach to limiting these inequities is to strengthen primary health care to respond to the effects of climate change. Primary health care also has important roles to play in public education about climate change and advocacy for mitigation. This chapter details these roles and the principles that underlie them.

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Chapter 9: Climate Refugees and New Understandings of Security
Cam Walker

A growing number of researchers are identifying that, without adequate action, there will almost certainly be massive displacement of people around the world due to global warming in coming decades. This presentation will consider the forces behind this displacement, where and how it is expected to occur, and how wealthy nations like Australia should respond. It argues for the need for the provision of adequate adaptation funding and the creation of a new refugee intake program for people displaced by global warming.

It will also consider how the reality of climate-induced human displacement must affect our traditional understandings of what constitutes national security, highlighting the need to adopt a broader understanding of the conditions which will be able to deliver 'security'.

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Part 3 - Policy Implications

Chapter 10: Climate Justice
Jess Fritze and John Wiseman

While new evidence is constantly emerging about the environmental impact of climate change, what is now apparent is the significance of our political decisions about who will pay for these impacts. In our efforts to avoid or reduce the more damaging effects of climate change we need to ensure that the burden falls on the right groups of people or run the risk of treating people unfairly. What this suggests is that the problem of how to distribute the costs of climate change is fundamentally a problem of justice. Responding to climate change as a matter of justice is important for at least two reasons. First, we need to avoid some of the pitfalls of leaving decisions at a purely personal level. For instance, we are often told that our response to climate change should lead us to change our behaviour: that we should adopt low emissions lifestyles; install extensive solar panels; buy local food; become a green consumer and so on. These are undoubtedly good things for the environment. But the danger associated with this approach is that such a response to climate change remains in the realm of personal ethics and does not provide a collective and fair allocation of costs.

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Chapter 11: More than Just Money
Charlotte L. Sterrett

There is deep injustice in the impacts of climate change. The rich countries that are largely responsible for causing the problem through many decades of unabated greenhouse gas emissions disproportionately reap the economic benefits of fossil-fuel-dependent growth. Yet poor countries are being worse affected, facing more severe droughts, floods, hunger, and disease, and with less capacity to adapt. Within international climate change policy this injustice is entrenched by inequities in power relations in international negotiations, an ongoing lack of consideration for affected communities by rich developed nations, and a disregard for equity and justice.

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Chapter 12: Equitable Climate Policy in a Dangerous World
Dr Benjamin Preston

Climate change is often posed as a modern incarnation of the classic tragedy of the commons paradox. The ultimate risk associated with greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and climate change is one that is borne by all. Yet, the benefits of the release of those emissions accrue solely to the individual emitter. Hence, those seeking to maximise their personal utility have strong incentives to continue to release emissions unabated, until the entire system, in this case the Earth system, approaches collapse.

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