People-Centered Climate Justice: Working Across Disciplines can Increase Climate Resilience

Making progress under such constraints will require strategies that capitalize on the resources and capacities of seemingly disparate policy arenas. The impacts of climate change sit across humanitarian, development, and peace interests alike. People—and their rights—are what bind these interests together. At this critical juncture in the climate movement, expanding interdisciplinary coalitions can put peoples’ lived experiences at the center of policymaking—acting as a node that links the benefits of well-intended interventions. 

Building on the shift in recent years to complement institutional views on climate justice—that often focuses on state-to-state inequities and reparations—with a ground-up approach, the climate and people-centered justice (PCJ) movements need to work together to ensure peoples’ rights are upheld in the face of climate impacts and green transitions. 

The announcement of a Loss and Damage Fund at COP27, while similarly underfunded, was a key moment in the climate justice movement. However, left out of this achievement was a primacy on climate justice as a proactive and adaptive tool. Climate justice cannot only be a response to harm, a means to redress grievances, or an accountability mechanism. It must also be used to prevent climate-induced human rights violations from occurring and increase society’s resilience to shock and change. As the Prevention Project at NYU’s Center of Human Rights and Global Justice puts it, “human rights law is not merely designed as a redress mechanism or means of reaction, ex post, to human rights violations, but importantly, as protective measures to avoid ex ante human rights harms.” While necessary as a grievance mechanism, justice can also be a tool for prevention and rights-based adaptation. In doing so, justice can increase resilience in the face of climate change.

Climate Change and Injustice

Climate change is a multiplier of individual injustice, burdening the global justice gap of 5.1 billion and undermining the achievement of global peace and development ambitions. Climate change creates justice problems related to loss of livelihood, food and water insecurity, resource conflicts, and labor disruptions. Climate displacement and migration often lead to urbanization and can overstretch government systems with human rights mandates to supply health, housing, and education—while displaced populations often face challenges related to accessing services, exploitation, and discrimination, among others. 

The solutions to many of these challenges sit at the nexus of climate policy and justice interventions. They require greater collaboration between stakeholders in the two sectors to ensure peoples’ rights are upheld in the face of the climate crisis. When justice services are inadequate to respond inclusively to peoples’ climate-induced justice needs, well-intended climate resilience interventions risk leaving the rights of some behind. If efforts to facilitate a just transition fail to uphold human rights, environmental outcomes will be impacted. This failure could lead to “social and political dislocation,” undermining long-term climate ambitions. Ensuring access to justice and supporting people through the impacts of climate change are mutually reinforcing goals. 

PCJ is a key approach to engaging with these intersecting challenges. This approach seeks to move policymakers from a sole focus on institutions, courts, and lawyers to putting people’s needs and experiences at the center of justice. By placing a premium on data and evidence, people’s lived experiences, empowerment, prevention, and outcomes, PCJ works to resolve justice problems that people face in their day-to-day lives. Such an approach lends itself to addressing the confluence of interrelated challenges induced by climate change because it centers lived experiences, which sit across artificial policy silos, to ensure human rights are upheld, and livelihoods are maintained.   

PCJ and Resilience: A framework for the climate sector

Today’s resilience frameworks call for the global community to move from a needs-based international assistance landscape to one focused on addressing the risks, vulnerabilities, and root causes of fragility. This approach aims to increase institutional, economic, and societal capacities to respond to crises. This way of thinking is complementary to prevention approaches, which seek to address the root causes of human rights violations and thereby institute policy that can increase society’s ability to prevent violations from occurring in the first place. 

Resilience is commonly used as an approach in fragile and conflict-affected states. However, its essence is also reflected in Article 7 of the Paris Agreement, in which parties “establish the global goal on adaptation of enhancing adaptive capacity, strengthening resilience and reducing vulnerability to climate change.” Whether in fragile, conflict-affected, or climate-impacted settings, resilience seeks to strengthen society’s ability to withstand shocks and maintain a long-term trajectory towards growth, development, and peace.

Resilience has a natural alignment with PCJ. Pathfinders’ recently published PCJ-Resilience Framework argues that, 

“The role of PCJ is to put people at the center of formal and non-formal justice systems to transform these systems and support the best existing solutions to understand, prevent, or resolve people’s justice problems. As a result, PCJ offers an emerging, pragmatic, and essential approach to strengthening people’s resilience by unlocking their access to public resources and raising their voices among decision-makers for responsive action to address their vulnerabilities, priorities, and rights in the face of looming risks and complex crises.”

In the climate space, resilience orbits around three key areas: people and livelihoods, businesses and economies, and environmental systems. PCJ is essential. Investing in justice can increase pathways for people to access services that prevent and resolve new daily problems while empowering them to use the law to their benefit. It can ensure economic inclusion and business sustainability strengthened by full access to remedy. And it can sit across formal, customary, and informal legal frameworks to adaptively support environmental rights, protections, and healthy ecological systems. Through this, PCJ can increase an individual’s and society’s capacity to cope with crises, adapt to change, and absorb the impacts of climate change. 

By integrating justice into existing resilient frameworks and applying this approach to the climate sector more broadly, people’s risks, vulnerabilities, and needs are placed at the center of policy intervention to ensure rights and livelihoods are upheld through sweeping adaptation, mitigation, and resilience interventions. This approach builds upon evidence of the utility of using justice to ensure rights, livelihoods, and resilience in environmental contexts. 

For example, Colombia’s Constitutional Court recently decided that climate-induced internal displacement is cause for special protection, the guarantee of victims’ rights, and special assistance—therefore recognizing the need to understand the distinct experience of climate displacement to ensure people’s rights and livelihoods are upheld. In Sierra Leone, dual Customary Land Rights and National Land Commission laws ensure Free Prior Informed Consent for local communities in the case of industrial development projects and empower more women to take part in community land management. In Kenya, environmental human rights defenders have successfully litigated to ensure public participation in the creation of laws, regulations, and guidelines for logging activities, therefore increasing transparency and accountability to local communities. Evident in these cases and others are the mutually reinforcing outcomes of climate resilience and access to justice movements.  

Conclusion

The climate financing agreement at COP29 has fallen short of the global need. This reality requires policymakers, activists, civil society, and academia to continue searching for new climate action approaches. With this, policymakers must look for opportunities to bridge traditional disciplinary silos and build coalitions of invested stakeholders with disparate methodologies and funding streams but common interests. When it comes to meeting the risks, vulnerabilities, and needs of the people on the frontlines of climate impacts, working with the PCJ movement to increase resilience capacities in climate-impacted communities would be a strategic way to ensure human rights are upheld, and people are empowered no matter what comes next.