Climate Risk, Climate Justice, and Why We Need Stronger Climate Governance

1. Introduction

In 2022, Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s state oil company, and ExxonMobil, the world’s largest private oil company, earned record profits, respectively, of $161 billion and $56 billion [1, 2].¹ Also in 2022 floods submerged one-third of Pakistan, with thousands killed, over $30 billion in damages and economic losses, and more than eight million people pushed into poverty [3]. In 2023, after Somalia’s rains failed for a fifth season, 3.8 million people—over a fifth of the population—were living as internally displaced persons, forced from their homes by drought and violence [4].

Back in 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that “[r]esponding to climate change involves an iterative risk management approach that includes both mitigation and adaptation and takes account of climate change damages, co-benefits, sustainability, equity and attitudes toward risk [5].” Although this finding has framed much of the subsequent negotiations on climate change policy under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), to think that this risk management process is determined by rational, science-based assessment of costs and benefits would be a mistake. Rather, the political power of beneficiaries like Aramco and ExxonMobil and the weakness of victims like Pakistani farmers and nomadic Somali pastoralists are important factors in systems for planning mitigation and adaptation.

From a social justice perspective, climate change looms largely as a set of negative international and intergenerational externalities, as beneficiaries of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in richer countries impose costs on victims in poorer countries and, in all probability, on future generations. Oil company executives are likely to perceive different risks from climate migrants and to have greater powers to influence these risks. Since carbon pollution is global, the most significant planning for managing it and its effects—planning for mitigation and adaptation—takes place at the global level, formally through the UNFCCC. The international system of nation-states, however, is anarchic, with each state promoting its own national interests. The determination of national interests, in turn, depends on power structures within each country. While major carbon polluters often have significant influence on the articulation of national interests, victims of climate change tend to be concentrated among politically weaker sections in politically weaker countries. This has led to mitigation and adaptation policies that fail to hold polluters accountable for the harm they impose on others and that also fail to adequately protect the interests of current victims and increase risks for vulnerable populations in the future.

Unfortunately, there is no way to empower climate change victims in future generations, and it would be hard to empower current victims in low-income countries. In this context, the fundamental cause of weak mitigation and adaptation needs to be traced back to the anarchic system of nation-states, and solutions need to be found to strengthen global governance. To enforce fair mitigation policies and to protect the rights, for example, of climate migrants, the UNFCCC needs to build institutions that can enforce fair limits on carbon polluters, secure adequate resources from recalcitrant countries, and establish much more significant protections and supports, especially in more vulnerable countries. While this agenda presents great political challenges, it represents the most viable pathway to reducing future risks and achieving a degree of climate justice.

2. A Rawlsian approach to climate justice

To appreciate the challenges posed by climate justice it is important to recognize that domestic and international justice normally operate in separate spheres. The degree of separation can be seen in how John Rawls, often considered the leading political theorist of the twentieth century, frames the problem of social justice for each sphere.

In his groundbreaking book, A Theory of Justice (1971), Rawls asks what principles free and equal individual persons in a constitutional democracy would adopt to regulate costs and benefits arising from their social cooperation. To address this question, he argues that we should imagine that we do not know our position in society—whether we are rich or poor, male or female, black or white, and so on. He argues that from this “original position” we would want to establish conditions in which all citizens have access to basic resources needed to pursue a life they choose, and this reasoning leads to his well-known principles of justice:

• First: Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive scheme of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for others.

• Second: Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) reasonably expected to be to everyone’s advantage, and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all [6]².

In Rawls’ conception of a just society, while the courts protect freedoms of speech, belief, and political participation, the legislature provides for education, health care, and a basic income. To defend equal opportunity and the fair value of liberties, the legislature also establishes provisions to avoid excessive inequalities, such as through progressive income and inheritance taxes [6].

While A Theory of Justice proposes principles of justice for individual countries, in The Law of Peoples (1999) Rawls follows a similar approach to propose principles for international relations. Now to identify principles for free and equal countries, to “protect their political independence and their free culture with its civil liberties, [and] to guarantee their security, territory, and the well-being of their citizens [7],” Rawls imagines a second original position. In this case, rather than not knowing our position in society, we are to imagine that principles are chosen as if we did not know the relative position of each country: the size of its territory or population, its economic or military strength, or its natural resources.

In this second original position, Rawls argues that eight familiar and traditional principles of justice among free peoples would be affirmed. Most relevant to climate justice are:

1. People are free and independent, and their freedom and independence are to be respected by other people.

2. People are to observe treaties and undertakings.

3. People are to observe a duty of nonintervention.

4. People have a duty to assist other people living under unfavorable conditions that prevent them from having a just or decent political and social regime [7].

These principles that Rawls proposes for domestic and international justice and his approach to developing them represent the most prominent contribution to the philosophical discourse on justice in the recent past. Also, his framework, with one system for domestic and another for international justice, reflects the basic structure of the world order. Countries or states are the primary units for international justice as individual persons are for domestic justice. In international relations, how each country manages its commitments internally, distributing costs and benefits among its citizens, is normally not an issue for other governments.

We can note that while supporting everyone’s participation in the system, Rawls’ principles for both domestic and international justice give particular attention to those who are less advantaged. In the domestic case, for social and economic inequalities to be to everyone’s advantage requires more advantaged members of society to promote their own interests in ways that also help others, and in the international case, the duty of assistance requires stronger states to support weaker states. In both systems we anticipate significant inequalities, but to support the participation of all, justice requires particular attention to those who are more vulnerable.

When it comes to climate change, however, the well-established framework that separates international from domestic justice is deeply inadequate. It is individuals who directly experience costs and benefits from GHG emissions, but national governments negotiate the central framework for managing these costs and benefits. Once we take account of power relations, it is clear that the interests of victims are likely to be underrepresented twice, within each country and in negotiations between countries. Heavy polluters, however, are likely to avoid responsibility twice, among citizens and again among countries.

Given the distribution of costs and benefits from GHG emissions, to identify principles for climate justice we need to construct a third original position, once again populated with individual persons as in the domestic case, but now imagining that we do not know what country we live in or our social position. Wealthier persons and countries tend to have achieved their wealth partly from activities that produce higher cumulative emissions, while harms from these emissions tend to fall more heavily on persons and countries with lower emissions. What principles for climate change mitigation and adaptation would be fair to Pakistani farmers, to nomadic Somali pastoralists, to oil company executives, and to future generations?

The “veil of ignorance” is the image Rawls uses to represent constraints on information in the original position leading to the selection of principles that are fair. Behind the veil, besides not knowing our place in society for domestic justice or our country for international justice, the “time of entry” is also hidden. For our third original position, besides now not knowing our place in the world, this means selecting principles as if we also did not know the date, from now through the indefinite future. Principles to be applied today should be acceptable to people at any future time, such that for mitigation, for example, the principles should describe an emissions trajectory that is justifiable at each time. This is complicated by uncertainty in levels of risk associated with different emissions trajectories, requiring, as the IPCC notes, “iterative risk management,” based both on effects revealed over time and on evolving projections as knowledge improves. The UNFCCC and other authorities generally rely on IPCC projections for risk estimates, but these tend to have wide confidence intervals, and the IPCC’s most recent assessment report (AR6 in 2021) projects greater risks than earlier reports [8]. A significant minority of climate scientists, notably James Hansen [9], argue that true risks are mostly greater than IPCC estimates, while many policymakers underestimate or fail to grasp risks due to climate science denial and/or to conceptual and analytic complexities of risks and policy responses [10].

In the original position for climate justice, we consider the structure of costs and benefits from GHG emissions starting from the present situation. Historic emissions have increased global atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide from 280 to 419 parts per million from pre-industrial times to 2023, and annual emissions continue to rise [11]. We need to identify a global carbon budget for additional GHG emissions, a just pathway for reducing emissions to net-zero, and plans for adaptation and for addressing residual harms. Failure to reduce GHG emissions increases the need for adaptation and failed adaptation increases residual harm, so institutions in all three areas must be considered as a unified system. Following the UNFCCC, we focus on two sets of countries—developed or industrialized and developing (including most small island states)—but we also attend to gains and risks among individuals. As with domestic and international justice, an original position for climate justice highlights concern for the more vulnerable. As a first principle, not knowing our position in the world, it is clear that we would want to protect persons whose basic needs climate change threatens. Everyone is at risk from climate change, but victims whose life prospects are severely harmed or at greater risk particularly deserve institutional support.

3. The UNFCCC is inadequate for just mitigation

The current international agreement for managing climate change, the Paris Agreement, aims to hold “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and [to pursue] efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels [12].” According to IPCC projections, this implies a carbon budget from 2024 of 353 Gt for 1.5°C and 1003 Gt for 2°C, while annual emissions were 37.5 Gt in 2023 [13, 14]. Given harm from climate change to innocent victims, in our third original position I will argue that we would want to endorse this goal. There is considerable evidence, however, that the 1.5°C target is no longer feasible in any plausible scenario. While it is technically feasible to reach the 2°C target, its institutional feasibility remains uncertain. Institutional feasibility depends, however, mainly on levels of effort from industrialized countries to reduce their own emissions and to support developing countries in reducing theirs. 2°C probably would be feasible if industrialized countries were held responsible for adaptation costs and residual harms that they impose on others. The central political inadequacy of the UNFCCC is found in its failure to impose this responsibility.

Political foundations of weak mitigation have been evident since talks leading up to the establishment of the UNFCCC in 1992. In the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) that prepared the text for the UNFCCC, small island states, particularly vulnerable to sea level rise, tried to include a principle of responsibility based on GHG emissions, but this was adamantly opposed by industrialized countries, particularly by the United States.

The phrase “common but differentiated responsibilities” (CBDR) finally adopted in the 1992 convention avoids assigning legal responsibility. In clarifying the meaning of CBDR, the convention states: “Accordingly, the developed country Parties should take the lead in combatting climate change and the adverse effects thereof [16],” and that this includes financial and technical support to developing countries, but only as statements of principle.

Since 1992, therefore, although industrialized countries grown rich with higher GHG emissions are expected to take the lead in mitigation and adaptation, there have been no enforced limits on further emissions or mandated support for victims of adverse effects. It was not until 2015 when the 21st meeting of the Conference of Parties to the UNFCCC (COP 21) reached the Paris Agreement, that targets for limiting global warming were finally quantified, and this agreement continues to avoid legal requirements. Instead, it allows each participating country to set its own “nationally determined contribution” to reducing GHG emissions. The agreement recognizes the need to support developing country Parties [12] but with no consequences for limited action in mitigation or adaptation. An addendum clarifying the terms of the Paris Agreement explicitly states that “the Agreement does not involve or provide a basis for any liability or compensation [17].”

The original 1992 convention actually does state an aim for the developed countries to return their GHG emissions “individually or jointly to their 1990 levels” by the year 2000 [16]. A plan to implement reductions in developed country emissions, however, was not completed until 1997 when COP 3 proposed the Kyoto Protocol, and in the interim American oil companies became aware of the threat such policies would pose to their profits. Once it became clear from negotiations leading to the Kyoto Protocol that it would require developed countries to reduce their GHG emissions, ExxonMobil and other oil companies spent millions of dollars building a coalition to lobby the US Senate against it [18]. Although then-US President Clinton signed the Kyoto Protocol, and despite the US being a Party to the 1992 UNFCCC, the US Senate refused to ratify it [19]. The absence of the leading superpower took the air out of the Kyoto Protocol process, and global GHG emissions continued to increase almost every year not only from 1992 to 2000 but through to 2021 when the Covid-19 pandemic caused a temporary reduction [20].

It is impossible to untangle the influence of oil companies, other high-carbon polluters, and governments of high-polluting countries on these governments’ rejection of responsibility for their national pollution. While the US and major oil exporting countries like Saudi Arabia are routinely cited as opposing strong limits on GHG emissions and legal responsibility for their effects [21], interests of individuals, firms, and governments in financial and economic gains and in political power overlap in contributing to opposition to legal responsibility.

Countries with strong political commitments to climate action such as Denmark, Scotland, and Sweden demonstrate that it has been possible to implement Paris Agreement-consistent energy policies without compromising national living standards [22], and the International Energy Agency has published a roadmap showing how it is technically feasible for the international community to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 without significantly harming economic growth [23]. With good management, heavy carbon polluters could be required to reduce emissions in line with the IPCC’s carbon budget for the 2°C target without suffering inordinate harm, but great suffering from the effects of climate change cannot be avoided even with the greatest feasible efforts at prevention. The 1992 Convention and the Paris Agreement already articulate broad principles of rights and responsibilities among developed and developing countries that would largely be supported in the original position. Where these principles fall short is in failing to specify detailed responsibilities, failing to sanction noncompliance, and failing to address the needs of individual victims. Demands in these areas, in turn, require stronger institutions than the UNFCCC has so far established. It probably is not feasible to hold developed countries legally liable for their full share of responsibility for adaptation costs and residual harms based on levels of carbon pollution (even if this responsibility could be specified), but climate justice depends on connecting polluters’ responsibilities to victims’ levels of risk. A central task from the original position for climate justice is to sketch this connection.

Victimization from climate change involves harms already experienced, harms “in the pipeline” due to inevitable increases in atmospheric levels of GHGs, and risk profiles for future climate scenarios. Although unprecedented heat waves, droughts, floods, and other extreme weather events have become the stuff of our daily news, as other chapters in this volume attest, the state of knowledge does not permit precise aggregation of harms due to climate change. For example, Ballester et al. estimate 61,672 heat-related deaths during Europe’s hottest season on record in 2022 [24], but while all of India’s warmest years on record have occurred in the past decade, de Bont et al. attribute only about 1116 Indian deaths a year to heatwaves [25], and public health experts note that heat-related deaths are systematically undercounted in India [26]. A brief review of the evidence demonstrates, however, along with examples discussed above, that victimization from climate change is already substantial and will become more so.

Bangladesh suffers from climate-induced displacement due to coastal hazards from storms and sea level rise and due to river erosion and flooding. Based on household survey data from the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics, Ahmed estimates that there were about two million permanent climate migrants within Bangladesh from 2001 to 2011 [27], and families forced from their homes by storm surges or flooded rivers typically face dire conditions as they resettle in urban slums [28, 29]. At the global level, Li, Yuan, and Copp find that with 1°C global warming, the number of people exposed to life-threatening combinations of heat and humidity at least one day per year has risen from 97 million to 279 million, and it projected to rise to 508 million at 1.5°C [30]. The annual number of recorded internally displaced persons (IDPs) worldwide never exceeded 10 million from 2000 to 2005, but since then it has risen almost every year to 57 million in 2022 [31]. These include internal displacements (excluding people who cross national borders) due to both conflict and violence and to weather disasters, but weather disasters typically makeup at least half the total and sometimes contribute to conflict and violence. Bilal and Känzig find worldwide macroeconomic damages from climate change six times larger than most previous estimates, indicating “that world GDP per capita would be 37% higher today had no warming occurred between 1960 and 2019 instead of the 0.75°C observed increase in global mean temperature [32].” While earlier economic studies are based on variations in local temperatures, they find increases in global temperature to cause much greater economic harm. The strongest negative effects are found “in relatively hot regions such as Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa,” while Central and East Asia, with many colder countries, experienced economic gains [32].

Although methodological questions can be raised about quantitative estimates of climate change impacts from each of these examples, together they demonstrate a burden of past victimization that cannot be justified, and risks will inevitably increase as global temperatures continue to rise. From the perspective of the original position, with developed countries and China having contributed over 70 percent of historic carbon emissions [33], global GHG emissions on their current trajectory are clearly unjust. Future climate change scenarios reinforce the urgency of achieving net-zero emissions and subsequently removing GHGs from Earth’s atmosphere. While die-offs of the world’s coral reefs [34] and the Amazon rainforest [35], a slow-down of the Gulf Stream [36], melting glaciers [36], and reductions in biodiversity [37] are among many potentially catastrophic impacts, perhaps the most iconic long-term risk is found in rising sea levels.

The IPCC’s AR6 finds that “[c]onsidering only processes for which projections can be made with at least medium confidence,” gross mean sea level is likely to rise by between 0.28 and 1.01 meters by 2100 relative to the period 1995–2014 and by up to 16 meters by 2300 in the most unfavorable scenario. The report notes, however, that sea level rise involves deep uncertainties, particularly in the speed at which Antarctic ice sheets may collapse, and it offers a storyline in which sea level rises by 2.3 meters by 2100 [36]. A meter of sea level rise would devastate cities across the world home to many millions of people, particularly in Asia [38]. The Mekong Delta, Vietnam’s breadbasket and home to 21 million people, has an average altitude of less than a meter above sea level and would be largely submerged [39]. Hansen et al. argue, however, based in part on sea level rise of 6 to 9 meters above current levels in the most recent interglacial period when Earth was less than 1°C warmer than today, that sea level rise could reach several meters over a timescale of 50–150 years [40]. Physical processes leading to sea level rise simply are not well understood, and, as in other areas, it appears that uncertainties in IPCC projections fall mainly on the dangerous side. Several meters of sea level rise in this century would be economically catastrophic for many countries and the forced migrations it would cause would create unprecedented social tensions. Responsibilities to people in future centuries also weigh heavily, as we do not know at what point many meters of sea level rise become unavoidable.

Based on past and ongoing victimization and future risks, the Paris Agreement target to keep global warming well below 2°C would clearly be endorsed from an original position for climate justice, but the system of nationally determined contributions (NDCs) is unlikely to achieve this target and the distribution of GHG emissions is unlikely to be just. Emissions reductions are a global public good, but with each country setting its own national target and no sanctions for missing targets, levels of commitment depend on each country’s internal politics or political pressures outside the UNFCCC framework. The UN Environment Program estimates that globally, current policies lead to about 3°C global warming, falling to 2.5°C if all countries meet both conditional and unconditional commitments in their NDCs [41]. Conditional commitments, mostly by developing countries, depend on financial and/or technical support from developed countries. Of 168 NDCs submitted by 2016, mitigation targets for 110 were wholly or partially conditional [42].

Developed countries are responsible for reducing their own emissions and for helping developing countries to reduce theirs. The potential fragility of developed countries’ mitigation commitments is demonstrated by US President Trump’s 2017 move to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement [43] and his canceling mitigation policies from the prior Obama administration [44]. Many European countries have seen political backlashes against policies to transition to renewable energy, and when Russia cut natural gas supplies to Europe (hoping to weaken European support for Ukraine after Russia’s invasion) many European countries “return[ed] to their coal plants with a vengeance,” reversing prior reductions in GHG emissions [45].

With the Paris Agreement, developed countries reaffirmed their commitment to provide $100 billion in annual support for mitigation and adaptation by developing countries from 2020, with funding to be balanced between mitigation and adaptation. Pauw et al. estimate, however, that it would cost $2.8 trillion to fund all conditional mitigation commitments in NDCs from 2021 to 2030 [44], compared to $0.5 trillion if $50 billion a year were devoted to NDCs’ mitigation in line with Paris commitments. In the event, developed countries’ reported climate financial commitments did not reach $100 billion until 2022, and Oxfam finds that due to dishonest and misleading accounting, “[t]he true value of climate finance is a third of what developed countries report [46].” While the quality and comparability of NDC estimates do not support reliable aggregation, funding commitments for developing countries’ mitigation are clearly inadequate.

From the original position for climate justice developing countries’ economic development and poverty reduction goals retain priority with respect to mitigation goals, and this is also the view taken by the 1992 convention and the Paris Agreement. The International Energy Agency’s roadmap for net-zero emissions by 2050 has global electricity demand more than doubling by 2050, as electricity substitutes for carbon-based fuels but also as many households in developing countries gain access to electricity for the first time and as industry expands [23]. Besides being underfunded, however, institutions for implementing developed countries’ support for developing countries’ mitigation are critically insufficient and often inefficient.

For the most part, developed countries’ support for climate action in developing countries is channeled through dozens of pre-established bilateral and multilateral development agencies, such as the US Agency for International Development, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the Global Environment Facility housed at the World Bank. This structure precludes rational management of the enormous expansion of institutional capacity needed to build developing country capacities to implement mitigation goals, and the agencies’ political and organizational interests often conflict with development goals. Funds are usually committed in response to project proposals, but (as we discuss below) the most vulnerable countries typically have weaker infrastructure for preparing proposals and for project implementation.

An obvious project metric would seem to be the cost per ton of carbon dioxide emissions avoided (often in the context of increasing electricity use), but this metric is often not found in project proposals. For example, neither plans for the Global Environment Facility’s project for Promoting Low-carbon Electric Bus Transport in Mauritius [47] nor for the African Development Fund’s Mini Grid and Solar PV Net Metering project in Ghana [48] presents the cost per ton of carbon dioxide emissions avoided. The project in Mauritius aims to replace 30 diesel busses with electric busses at a cost of $21 million. It expects to avoid 10,950 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions as direct benefits and another 18,250 metric tons in indirect benefits as additional electric busses are added in the future. The project in Ghana aims to install 12,000 solar rooftop PV units and to build 35 mini-electric grids at a cost of $85 million, with 718,590 tons of carbon dioxide emissions avoided per year compared to the alternative powered by oil and natural gas. With a standard estimate of 25 years of benefits for solar rooftop units, the project would avoid 17,964,750 tons of emissions over its lifetime. Without discounting, the cost per ton of emissions avoided by the electric bus project in Mauritius is $720, compared to about $5 for the solar rooftop PV and mini-grid project in Ghana. These calculations indicate that increasing solar units in countries like Ghana is likely to be far more cost-effective in mitigating carbon emissions than switching from diesel to electric busses in countries like Mauritius, but the donor agencies are not highlighting data that would support such conclusions.

At this writing, global temperatures have exceeded 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels over the last 12-month period [49]. Since Paris targets are based on long-term averages this does not imply that the 1.5°C target has been breached, but it supports the view that IPCC carbon budgets are optimistic. If we accept the IPCC’s 1003 Gt carbon budget for the 2°C target as a working estimate, from an original position for climate justice we would want to divide this budget among the world’s countries on some fair basis and apply sanctions to countries that exceed their national budget. Developed countries would also be required to provide adequate funds to support developing countries’ transitions to renewable energy, as well as funding adaptation and efforts to address residual harms as discussed below. Developing countries’ carbon budgets would come with the proviso that they receive adequate financial and technical support.

While the original position for climate justice focuses on the conditions of individual persons, for mitigation it is reasonable to address the obligations of national governments. Given political realities, national governments are unlikely to impose mitigation costs fairly, but the UNFCCC could not be expected to supervise national tax codes or infrastructure development plans. The domestic justice of national mitigation plans is grounded in the wider social justice (or injustice) of national institutions.

In order to implement sanctions for noncompliance and support developing countries’ mitigation, the UNFCCC and its supporting organizations need greater legal powers and institutional capacity than they currently possess. As they also need greater capacity to support adaptation and to address residual harms, these matters are addressed together in our conclusion. The greatest risks from climate change come from failing to limit carbon emissions with sufficient and secure national commitments.

4. The UNFCCC is inadequate for just adaptation

Whereas mitigation aims to reduce the extent of climate change, adaptation aims to limit its risks to persons, whether by preventing the effects of climate change from causing harm or by reducing levels of harm that nevertheless occur. Since mitigation involves incurring national costs for a global public good, it often requires external motivation such as sanctions. Adaptation, by contrast, aims to reduce risks to actors within a national territory. In principle, national actors should be willing to undertake adaptation efforts up to the point at which their costs exceed the savings they yield.

The extent of adaptation that is needed depends, of course, on global levels of atmospheric GHGs that come mostly from industrialized countries. Besides industrialized countries’ being unwilling to fund all the adaptation they have necessitated, I will argue that channels of support from developed to developing countries also do not allocate adaptation resources fairly or efficiently. Also, whether in developed or developing countries, adaptation often requires long-term investments that cross jurisdictions and involve great uncertainties. Climate change undermines land and property values, but adaptation is inevitably uneven in whose assets it protects or restores. Political processes underlying the allocation of adaptation resources are likely to favor established powers, particularly in more vulnerable countries.

The weak focus on more vulnerable persons in support of adaptation, and, as we discuss below, the weak support for addressing residual harms from climate change, offer the strongest evidence of the injustice of the anarchic, state-based system that is the UNFCCC. These weaknesses also demonstrate the inadequacy of the state-based focus of Rawls’ Law of Peoples for climate justice. A conception of a just law of peoples must also idealize the roles of governments in representing their peoples’ interests. Since international relations are mainly worked out by national governments, an ideal conception of international relations such as found in a conception of a just law of peoples necessarily imagines as a counterpoint domestic justice among people who support this law. UNFCCC agreements similarly assume implicitly that each government will implement its domestic obligations, if not with perfect justice, at least without excessive injustice.

Among the principles in Rawls’ Law of Peoples, there is “a duty of assistance to other peoples living under unfavorable conditions that prevent their having a just or decent political regime” (Principle #8). Contrary to some analyses by scholars of Rawls (e.g., [50]), this is not the source of the obligation to support individual persons victimized by climate change. Since their victimization is largely caused by unjust levels of GHG emissions from developed countries, the obligation arises rather from these countries’ violation of Principle #4, that “[p]eoples are to observe a duty of non-intervention.” In light of normal political processes, however, governments of developing countries cannot generally be relied upon adequately to represent the interests of persons who face greater risks among their citizens. In this context climate justice needs to be worked out not from the perspective of peoples or states as The Law of Peoples has it, but from the perspective of individual persons, as in our third original position. Here we see that the obligation to protect the interests of victimized persons reverts to the international body governing responses to climate change, the UNFCCC.

It is widely recognized, however, that the UNFCCC has failed to mobilize adequate resources for adaptation. The UN Environment Program, in its Adaptation Gap Report 2023 entitled Underfinanced. Underprepared. Inadequate investment and planning on climate adaptation leaves the world exposed, finds that:

Similarly, the Global Commission on Adaptation led by Ban Ki-moon, 8th Secretary-General of the United Nations, Bill Gates, then co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Kristalina Georgieva, then CEO of World Bank, in its 2019 flagship report entitled Adapt now: A global call for leadership on climate resilience, finds that although “investing $1.8 trillion globally in five areas from 2020 to 2030 could generate $7.1 trillion in total net benefits,” in 2015–2016, “global public financing for adaptation was [only] about $22 billion per year [52].” The Climate Policy Institute, in its comprehensive assessment of global climate finance in 2021/2022 including both public and private sources, finds that from the total average annual climate finance of $1.27 trillion, only $63 billion, about five percent, was devoted to adaptation, compared to $1150 billion for mitigation and $51 billion for “overlap” investments with dual-benefits [53]. The IPCC’s AR6 finds that despite progress since AR5,

While climate change requires adaptation across the spectrum of human activities and AR6 discusses adaptation “options” in 23 areas, the Global Commission on Adaptation’s breakdown of adaptation programs into six areas offers a convenient summary. These include (1) food security and livelihoods of small-scale producers, (2) natural environment, (3) water, (4) cities and urban areas, (5) infrastructure, and (6) disaster risk management [54]. For example, increasing drought and heat threaten farmers around the world, and the possibility of multiple simultaneous production crises threatens global food security. Protecting forests and mangroves provides important environmental services while also sequestering carbon. Mismanagement of agricultural and urban water systems has long been widespread, offering significant opportunities for reform. Defenses can be built to protect cities from sea level rise, stronger storms, and heat waves, and roads, airports, seaports, and electric grids can be upgraded. Precautions can be taken everywhere to prevent hazards from becoming disasters.

In 2001 the UNFCCC started to encourage and support the least developed countries to develop National Adaptation Programs of Action (NAPAs) and in 2010 it launched a National Adaptation Plan (NAP) process with developed and developing countries [55]. It supports funding for developing countries’ adaptation through a Least Developed Countries Fund (2002), a Special Climate Change Fund (2004), an Adaptation Fund (2008), and a Green Climate Fund (2015) that also funds mitigation projects [56] (year operationalized in parentheses). All these funds are managed by the World Bank, the first two through its Global Environment Facility, and the World Bank also independently funds many climates change-related projects. Despite the substantial role of the World Bank and other multilateral agencies in adaptation finance, the majority of official adaptation finance is channeled through bilateral development agencies [53]. Beyond official finance, many people respond autonomously to changing climatic conditions (for example, see Ref. [57]). It is reasonable to expect that considerable adaptation is undertaken independently by households, firms, and sub-national government units and that most of this is not reflected in statistics on adaptation finance.

The overwhelming majority of official adaptation finance is channeled through projects managed largely in accordance with long-established organizational practices of the official international development community. While donor agencies have incentives to “move money” and typically aim to expand their budgets (the classic analysis is [58]), governments and a host of other organizations based in developing countries often depend on accessing donor funds. Given the systematic properties of the energy sector, mitigation generally lends itself to rational planning. By contrast, it is possible to imagine almost any development project as contributing somehow to adaptation. Proposals requesting adaptation resources may often be opportunistic, and it is often difficult to estimate a proposed project’s contribution to reducing risks. Not only are adaptation funds greatly insufficient; but bureaucratic systems for managing these funds are also generally too weak to allocate resources efficiently with respect to risks.

Since most adaptation funds are allocated in response to project proposals, governments and other entities that are better at writing proposals and with greater project implementation capacities tend to get more funds. As Garshagen and Doshi find in their analysis of the Green Climate Fund:

In his analysis of funding for over 100,000 climate action projects in 133 countries from 2000 to 2018, Islam finds that “countries within the Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia regions, despite their higher climatic vulnerabilities, were likely to receive significantly less adaptation and overlap fundings.” Also, the countries most at risk in his analysis, including DR Congo, Solomon Islands, Mali, Liberia, Sudan, Chad, Guinea-Bissau, Micronesia, Niger, and Somalia, tended to receive less adaptation and overlap funds than moderately vulnerable countries. Islam finds that more vulnerable countries often failed to present their funding proposals convincingly to donors and that their “ability to successfully implement climate-related interventions” was often questionable [59].

Although the UNFCCC and donor agencies have carried out many programs to strengthen adaptation planning and implementation capabilities in developing countries, as the quote above from the IPCC’s AR6 suggests, they are far from sufficient for effective risk management. Given weak political representation, uneven bureaucratic capacities, and widespread corruption often found in low-income countries, challenges in programming adaptation resources should not be underestimated. In a comprehensive review of the literature on adaptation projects including 34 empirical studies of adaptation implementation, Eriksen et al. find that “[e]vidence for elite capture and manipulation exists from around the world [60].” Many projects, they find, “inadvertently reinforce, redistribute, or create new sources of vulnerability” through four mechanisms:

• Shallow understanding of the vulnerability context

• Inequitable stakeholder participation in both design and implementation

• A retrofitting of adaptation into existing development agendas, and

• A lack of critical engagement with how ‘adaptation success’ is defined

In this context, they argue that “learning processes within organizations and with marginalized populations must be placed at the centre of adaptation objectives [60].” Pisor et al. argue that standard, top-down donor approaches to project design often led to unsustainable outcomes and that both the equity and the efficiency of climate change adaptation depend on involving frontline communities themselves in developing adaptation strategies [61]. While most of Eriksen et al.’s and Pisor et al.’s concerns about donor agency practices are not new, their relevance is magnified by the relatively great management challenges inherent in the adaptation “sector”.

Inadequate adaptation funding and inefficient programming lead to greater residual harm from climate change. While our focus has been on adaptation in developing countries, developed countries also face adaptation challenges. On the whole, however, particularly in light of their greater vulnerability, the depth and breadth of residual harms to persons is likely to be far greater in developing countries. In the original position for climate justice, we find that the UNFCCC must require developed countries to provide much greater funding for adaptation and that systems for supporting adaptation need to be rethought and redesigned.

5. The UNFCCC fails to support justice for victims of residual harms from climate change

The inadequacy for climate justice of both Rawls’ Law of Peoples and the UNFCCC is particularly due to their weak representation of the interests of persons. In both cases, representatives of governments or of peoples are the main negotiating agents, hypothetically in The Law of Peoples and in practice in the UNFCCC. The UNFCCC’s actual failures in defending the interests of persons illustrate the routine inadequacy of vulnerable states in representing the interests of their more vulnerable citizens.

In the original position for climate justice, I have argued that a first principle is to defend basic needs. Not knowing our place in the world or in time, we would prioritize avoiding conditions that place our fundamental well-being at great risk. While this first requires mitigation, institutions for adaptation and for addressing residual harms would be viewed together in terms of risk profiles and institutions’ collective efficiency in reducing these risks. As resources are insufficient to address all harms, basic needs in principle have priority. Although basic needs need to be defined and there is no simple metric for comparing different harms from climate change, this principle has wide and intuitive applications. For example, the poor should generally be defended before the nonpoor, and the health of pregnant and lactating women and young children should often be prioritized. Recognizing the significance of cultural resources, small island states vulnerable to sea level rise should also often receive priority.

Beyond direct harm to persons, residual harms from climate change (occurring despite adaptation efforts) include economic harm to states, such as Pakistan’s economic losses from the 2022 floods. From the original position, these harms need to be assessed in terms of how they undermine state capacities to address residents’ basic needs. There is no simple formula for comparing these harms to direct harms to persons, but assessing the relative priority of economic harms is among the judgments climate justice requires.

Besides the loss of life, the most substantial risk to persons from climate change arguably arises from forced displacements. While climate change drives many deeper into hunger, poverty, and ill health, and risks from heat waves, water shortages, and uncertainty and anxiety are clearly significant, the loss of home, livelihood, and community commonly caused by forced displacement, and the harsh conditions that often follow it, are particularly severe harms. For example, comparing climate-induced and non-climate-induced migrants almost a decade after they arrived in Dhaka’s Korail slum, in the capital of Bangladesh, Adri and Simon find that climate-induced migrants were living on $0.60 per person per day on average compared to $1.80 for non-climate-induced migrants. Climate migrants faced greater hunger and unemployment, had far fewer assets, tended to have more menial jobs, and all wished to return to their home villages [29].

Climate migrants worldwide face predictable deficits in basic needs, and programmatic challenges in addressing these needs tend to be less severe than in adaptation generally. It is important to recognize in this context that restoring climate migrants’ capacities to secure decent livelihoods is critical not only to their own well-being but also to their ongoing participation in and contributions to the wider society. It is not their choice to leave their homes, and many arrive destitute with livelihood skills unsuited to their new environments. No doubt a fortunate few can launch new careers unaided, but many are left to unskilled employment and mired in poverty. As human potential is a collective as well as private good, restoring this potential not only corrects an injustice but also serves the community interest.

Despite limitations in data on climate migration, we know that there are tens of millions of climate-displaced persons worldwide and that displacements are sure to increase in the coming years. Nevertheless, the UNFCCC has largely ignored their needs. Compared to $100 billion per year for mitigation and adaptation, the UNFCCC’s Task Force on Displacement established with the Paris Agreement has only 14 members and no program budget [62]. In principle, the needs of climate migrants could be addressed under adaptation, but in practice, adaptation has generally been understood as addressing more direct effects of climate change. None of the 513 priority projects from National Adaptation Programs of Action [63], 229 projects supported by the UNFCCC’s Adaptation Fund [64], or 2459 climate change projects in the Global Environment Facility’s projects database [65] has a title indicating support for climate migrants or persons displaced by climate change. (The Adaptation Fund supports a project titled “Increasing the resilience of both displaced persons and host communities to climate change-related water challenges in Jordan and Lebanon,” but it supports people displaced by conflict). In 2023 the UNFCCC launched a Loss and Damage Fund that aims to “provide support for responding to economic and non-economic loss and damage associated with the adverse effects of climate change.” While its terms of reference include addressing challenges from displacement, relocation, and migration, they also include challenges from climate-related emergencies, sea level rise, insufficient climate information and data, and climate-resilient reconstruction and recovery [66]. Also, with only $661 million in commitments as of March 2024 [67], the institutional strength of this fund remains uncertain.

In the absence of support from the family of climate change institutions, what official support climate migrants receive comes mostly from international humanitarian aid agencies and home country governments. International humanitarian aid, however, mostly supports IDP camps, refugee camps for people who cross national borders, and resettlement of persons accepted as refugees into advanced countries. IDP camps conventionally expect residents to return home when the weather disaster or conflict has abated, but many people displaced by climate change have no home to return to. Support for basic needs in IDP and refugee camps has fallen increasingly short as more people are displaced globally than at any time in history, as their numbers continue to rise, and as other crises such as COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine compete for resources [68]. Climate migrants in more vulnerable countries generally cannot rely on their home country governments to secure their basic needs. With no major international agency dedicated to supporting climate-displaced persons who move to find a new home, they are often left largely to their own devices.

Besides the human costs to migrants themselves, climate migration also imposes costs on host communities. We know that the overwhelming majority of climate migrants remain in their countries of origin [69], but we do not know how many cross borders, enter refugee camps, or seek employment in new home countries. Whether they relocate domestically or internationally, however, as their numbers increase, without adequate official support their presence is often politically destabilizing. Injustice due to neglect of polluters’ responsibilities involves not only victimization of climate migrants themselves but also political conflict and other effects on receiving communities.

Climate migrants are not, of course, the only persons who experience great risk from climate change who are neglected by UNFCCC systems, but their neglect is particularly egregious. Although industrialized countries are largely responsible for the causes of climate migration, with most de facto institutional support for climate migrants coming from humanitarian aid agencies and from governments of more vulnerable countries, the public discourse surrounding migrants driven by climate change often fails to recognize industrialized countries’ responsibility and the role of climate change as a driver.

Besides climate migrants being unable to press their governments to represent their interests in proposals for official adaptation support, their governments often have less influence over the substance of these proposals than the international development agencies involved in allocating funds and in implementing projects. Weak support for climate migrants’ well-being is due not only to their own political weakness in their home countries but also to their home countries’ weakness in the international arena. Resource competitions that begin with oil companies opposing developed countries’ responsibility for GHG emissions and proceed through UNFCCC negotiations that reflect governments’ relative geopolitical powers are finally worked out through bureaucratic processes that reflect the long history of competing interests in the international development community.

In the original position for climate justice, by contrast, the basic needs of climate migrants are considered side by side with other adaptation needs. Here it is apparent that the victimization climate migrants have already experienced is a great injustice and that the reduction of future risks requires major institutional reforms.

6. Conclusion: Stronger global governance is needed for climate justice

From the original position, we see that climate justice starts with dividing the 1003 Gt working carbon budget (at this writing) for limiting global warming to well below 2°C among the world’s countries. Additional funds are needed from developed countries to help developing countries stay within their carbon budgets while in most cases continuing to industrialize and expand reliable access to electricity to their entire populations. Institutions for supporting developing countries’ transitions to renewable energy need to be greatly strengthened. The UNFCCC needs to be empowered to tax developed countries for their fair share of costs and sanctions need to be devised to deter countries from exceeding their carbon budgets.

Just adaptation starts with assessing present and future risks to persons and to states from the effects of climate change and with strategies for reducing these risks. Although countries with high cumulative and current GHG emissions need to be held responsible for preventing significant deficits in basic needs, this does not excuse developing country governments and households from making their own prudent provisions. In principle, developed countries are to be held responsible for deficits that remain after reasonable adaptation efforts by developing country governments and their citizens or residents. If the burden of this support were to undermine the satisfaction of basic needs in advanced countries, levels of responsibility would be reduced. Since exceeding the global carbon budget would increase developed countries’ burden of support for developing countries’ adaptation, this gives developed countries an incentive to support the international carbon budget system.

Just adaptation clearly requires adaptation funding to be greatly increased and implementing institutions to be greatly strengthened. Assessing adaptation in terms of outcomes rather than levels of spending establishes incentives for enhancing the efficiency of adaptation spending and its associated institutions.

Implementing climate justice requires overcoming difficulties in defining terms, measuring key variables, building reasonably effective implementing institutions, assessing results, and applying stipulated sanctions (although hopefully, the threat of sanctions would be sufficient to secure compliance), not to mention securing developed countries’ participation. The increase needed from the established $100 billion commitment could approach an order of magnitude. Considering that world military expenditures in 2023 were $2443 billion, about 2.3% of global gross domestic product (GDP) [70], the proposed reforms would probably require a reorientation in conceptions of national security as well as increased international cooperation.

If the UNFCCC were to secure powers to tax developed countries on the order of 0.5 to 1 percent of global GDP and to oversee fair adaptation, particularly in developing countries, it would constitute the strongest global government in history. While it would be in the service of climate justice, Rawls and other philosophers such as Immanuel Kant have been skeptical of global government, fearing that it would either become despotic or face constant rebellions on the periphery [7]. Although the powers envisaged fall far short of those held by national governments, such as holding a monopoly on legitimate violence within the national territory, constraints to its power and checks and balances among its constituent institutions and between it and national governments would need to be carefully devised and maintained. Losses entailed in national powers can only be justified by threats the climate crisis presents to people’s liberty and autonomy, to international peace, and to the well-being of present and future generations.

The proposed reforms would also generate incentives for finding technical solutions for reducing atmospheric levels of GHGs more efficiently and for reducing harms from climate change, such as through geoengineering. Should relatively safe geoengineering “solutions” be found, a stronger UNFCCC would be better placed to secure the international agreement and global governance needed to legitimate their implementation.

While the IPCC calls for an “iterative risk management approach,” we have seen that present institutions for climate governance cannot be expected to carry out such a process rationally or fairly. Effective risk management can only be achieved by significantly enhancing the powers of the UNFCCC and its associated institutions.