The Elusive Challenge of Climate Justice
Rebecca Marwege, Nikhar Gaikwad, and Joerg Schaefer
In a recent report, the World Meteorological Organization warned that Earth reached record heat levels in 2025. This alarming report is only one in a series of warnings about the dire state of the planet. With heat-trapping greenhouse gas concentrations at an all-time high, the demand for climate justice seems both naive and more important than ever. But what do we mean by “climate justice” in the first place?
When asked, most people have an intuitive understanding of the concept—stating, for example, that those who have contributed the least to climate change often suffer the most from its consequences. This is true and fundamentally unjust. However, beyond that simple truth, things quickly become more complicated. Achieving climate justice is much harder than stating the injustice of the impacts of the climate crisis. To pursue climate justice, we need to think about questions such as how we can deal with the climate crisis in equitable ways, how communities can be effectively included in climate adaptation measures, and what side effects and unintended consequences technological interventions to mitigate the effects of the climate crisis may have on different populations.
Consider geoengineering, for example. In recent years, proposals such as solar radiation management, which aims to reflect some sunlight back into space to cool the planet’s temperatures, have proliferated. Similarly, carbon dioxide removal and direct air capture have been heralded as potential solutions to the climate crisis. While these technologies may help to temporarily reduce temperatures or remove some carbon from the atmosphere, they come with significant risks and do not address the underlying problem of the climate crisis. Additionally, they raise ethical and political questions about who should employ these technologies and who should be held responsible for any unforeseen consequences.
Achieving climate justice is much harder than stating the injustice of the impacts of the climate crisis.
These debates point to the incredible complexity behind the simple demand for climate justice. To fully understand both the theoretical foundations of the concept of climate justice, as well as its real-life implications, we need to move beyond technical solutions and instead embrace an interdisciplinary approach that includes the environmental dimension of the climate crisis as well as the political, social, and ethical implications.
This is easier said than done. Academic institutions and research structures often incentivize and reward specialization and disciplinary boundaries. Climate change does not neatly map onto these boundaries, but requires us to move across them and bridge expertise from the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities.
The aim of Climate Justice Now is precisely that. This edited volume brings together a wide range of disciplines to explore the different faces of climate justice by scrutinizing the colonial histories that have shaped the climate crisis, investigating the unforeseen consequences of climate mitigation and adaptation strategies, and highlighting the different ways in which communities around the world experience and make sense of the crisis.
Each chapter of the book approaches climate justice from a different disciplinary perspective. While a lot of climate justice–related research looks at the political dimension of climate change, this book goes further by including a range of disciplines that are often overlooked in policy-oriented writing, such as religion, comparative literature, and anthropology. At the same time, natural scientists—including researchers in physics, oceanography, and atmospheric sciences—discuss the relationship of environmental research to ethical and political issues.
Climate justice, then, needs to be understood as a rapidly expanding environmental, political, social, and ethical challenge.
By bringing these disparate disciplines into conversation, the book seeks to bridge important theoretical discussions around the concept of climate justice—such as in political theory and sociology for example—with research that examines the lived experiences of the climate crisis. One chapter discusses the declining health of farmworkers in the United States as a result of extreme heat and inadequate labor protections. Another chapter discusses the impact of the climate crisis on migrants from South America and West Africa. These chapters underscore that the climate crisis is not an abstract academic concept but rather already a lived reality for many around the globe.
At the same time, the book discusses how knowledge itself is part of the problem, as the decision of which kind of expertise is included in climate discourses is deeply political. For instance, one chapter discusses how flood protection plans in New York and New Jersey at first failed to meaningfully include local communities and thereby sidelined the expertise they could bring to the table. Another chapter describes how Hakka-speaking pomelo farmers in China use terms such as “Heavenly Years” to describe unusual, and often extreme, weather conditions—and how these farmers have struggled to access government funding that would compensate them for their climate-induced losses because the terms they use do not align with official scientific language. This example underscores that there is not only a need for these communities to learn the official language to access funding, but also, conversely, a need for institutions to include the expertise and knowledge of those who are harmed by the climate crisis.
Climate justice, then, needs to be understood as a rapidly expanding environmental, political, social, and ethical challenge. We cannot respond to only one of its dimensions without taking into account the others. Pursuing climate justice requires embracing its complexity and expanding our disciplinary horizons to learn from each other and effectively demand political action. This book is a critical resource in showing how this can be achieved and a first step towards an all-hands-on-deck approach to the climate crisis. Let’s work together to achieve this!
Rebecca Marwege is an assistant professor of environmental politics at the American University of Paris. Nikhar Gaikwad is an assistant professor of political science and a member of the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University. Joerg Schaefer is Lamont Research Professor in the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and adjunct professor of earth and environmental sciences at Columbia University. They are the coeditors of Climate Justice Now: Crossing Disciplines to Combat Our Planetary Crisis.