1245. Climate Change Mitigation and Justice

Climate change is caused by grossly unequal contributions to greenhouse gas emissions across individuals, socio-economic groups, and nations. However, its harmful effects fall disproportionately on poor and vulnerable countries, and on the poor and vulnerable within countries. These climate change injustices call for mitigation strategies that protect the poorest and most vulnerable from the effects of climate change. However, there are concerns that mitigation without justice will have uniquely adverse effects on the more vulnerable.

Climate change mitigation and social justice are important and intertwined issues. The recently published PNAS paper systematically evaluates how climate change mitigation strategies create or ameliorate injustice, and also offers a look at nature-based solutions in particular.

In general, climate change impacts tend to be more severe for the most vulnerable in low-income countries. First, impacts are likely to be greater in countries with high income inequality, high levels of corruption, challenges to democratic governance, low state capacity, and high state fragility. These country characteristics, combined with low per capita income, constrain climate policies that could support marginalized populations through investments in resilient infrastructure, safety nets, and social assistance programs. Second, the climate and geography of poor tropical countries, through interactions with the local environment, make people particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, such as sea-level rise, heat waves, droughts, biodiversity loss, and disease spread. For example, smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa will experience many of the adverse effects of climate change, due in part to their widespread reliance on rain-fed agriculture for food and income. Limited access to markets, lack of storage infrastructure, and weak crop insurance systems may further exacerbate the adverse impacts of climate change on household-level food and resource availability, while predisposing factors such as stunting due to early childhood nutritional stress may further reduce households’ ability to cope with stressors.

Several nature-based solutions (e.g., afforestation, peatland protection, grassland restoration, precision and regenerative agriculture, conservation grazing) have been proposed to reduce emissions and sequester more carbon, but are considered to have both promise and potential pitfalls from a climate mitigation justice perspective. For example, large-scale afforestation campaigns often do not consider the social-ecological complexities of landscapes that require transformation and other adverse climate-related feedbacks. The use of agricultural land for biofuel production and carbon sequestration may also exacerbate food price increases, increasing food insecurity and malnutrition, with adverse social justice implications. Agricultural intensification combined with associated land conservation to protect forests as carbon sinks has been proposed as an approach to mitigate climate change without sacrificing global food security. However, such agricultural intensification may have unequal outcomes in terms of biodiversity, food security, and sovereignty. The impacts on rural people (through land tenure) and nature (e.g. biodiversity) depend on socially and ecologically appropriate policy, land management, and carbon sequestration choices.

Despite concerns that many nature-based solutions may not be aligned with social justice, nature-based solutions remain an important tool in climate change mitigation because they have surprisingly high mitigation potential. For example, agricultural and forest land alone could theoretically mitigate 50% of the emissions that drive climate change, and many such interventions could be implemented without contributing to inequities. This high mitigation potential is due to the fact that soils and terrestrial plants exchange 10 times the amount of carbon with the atmosphere each year than is emitted from fossil fuel combustion, and they store 3-4 times as much carbon as the atmosphere. Thus, at the global scale, even small changes in soil and plant carbon stocks are large compared to emissions.

Recent analyses agree that there are sufficient areas of degraded non-agricultural forest land where reforestation alone has considerable potential in terms of carbon storage. Similarly, access to resources (improved varieties, including perennials) and sustainable practices can simultaneously reduce agricultural greenhouse gas emissions and enhance soil carbon sequestration through proper fertilizer use and forest fire management. Overall, improved agricultural practices (75% soil carbon enhancement through diverse pathways and 25% conversion of grasslands to silvopastoral through afforestation) could provide an additional sink of 2.8 GtCO2e per year by 2050, at a cost of less than half the annual increase in global GDP from climate change mitigation, and provide substantial economic benefits to smallholder farmers (assuming that wealthy countries and consumers are responsible for these carbon benefits).

To be sure, there are legitimate concerns about the biophysical, political, and justice dimensions of land-based climate change mitigation. But poor conception and implementation do not mean that more effective solutions cannot be developed. Realizing even a fraction of the mitigation benefits from nature-based strategies that address both climate and justice could slow the pace of climate change and avoid triggering multiple critical tipping points in the breakdown of the climate system.

Many strategies for storing carbon in forests and agricultural lands can provide co-benefits for local communities’ climate adaptation. For example, maintaining and restoring diverse plant communities can reduce local river and coastal flooding, increase carbon storage, and provide environmental (safety) and economic benefits to local people. Nature-based solutions that involve local communities and consider procedural and distributive justice have great potential to reduce emissions and inequity. These and other strategies could be deployed to feed 10 billion people while maintaining sustainable ecosystems that help cool the planet. Looking forward, these efforts could be implemented in different ways based on location, food preferences, connectivity, and environmental conditions, allowing land conservation goals for mitigation to be achieved simultaneously without sacrificing food sovereignty or local equity. 

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In relation to the above points, "Inclusion and Justice in Global Environmental Studies," edited by Prof. Taniguchi Masato, published in April 2025, examines issues surrounding the climate crisis and climate mitigation measures from the perspectives of inclusion and justice, and discusses them in a multidisciplinary style that crosses the humanities and sciences. Chapter 5, which I wrote, takes into account that the challenges of food innovations and social justice have changed over centuries, and discusses the need for food innovations that address the diversity of local production environments to the greatest extent possible in order to achieve social justice in the era of global boiling.

Chapter 1: Global environmental studies questioning how people live [Global environmental studies x sustainability]

Chapter 2: What is a restorative approach to environmental justice? [Global environmental studies x colonial studies]

Chapter 3: Global environmental issues and social justice in indigenous lands [Global environmental studies x indigenous studies] 

Chapter 4: "Invisibility of damage" as a reverse function of environmental and human rights governance - Localization of social relations surrounding production and consumption as an alternative [Global environmental studies x environmental sociology]

Chapter 5: Green revolution and social justice [Global environmental studies x international development studies]

Chapter 6: Human intervention in weather and climate and ELSI [Global environmental studies x ethics]

Chapter 7: Protection of the Amazon rainforest and people in the Global South [Global environmental studies x ethnology]

Chapter 8: Can humanity incorporate the existence of cities into the Earth system? - Our wisdom and everyday life practices that make us feel anxious about the future [Global environmental studies x urban-rural studies]

(References)
Reich, Peter B., Mitigation justice, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025).
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2411231122

Masato Taniguchi (ed.), Global Environmental Studies of Inclusion and Justice (Series: Designing Future Society I), ISBN978-4-7722-8128-7: Kokon Shoin (First edition April 2025)
https://www.kokon.co.jp/book/b659037.html

Contributor: Miyuki IIYAMA, Information Program