Climate Change and Environmental Hazards: A Call for Climate Justice

Climate change is not just an environmental problem measured in degrees and parts per million. It is a question of fairness. The countries that have contributed the least to global warming are often the ones suffering its harshest consequences, while the heaviest polluters enjoyed decades of industrial growth powered by fossil fuels. This mismatch between responsibility and harm is the heart of climate justice, a framework that treats global warming as a political and ethical issue rather than a purely scientific one. Understanding it helps explain why international climate negotiations are so contentious and why phrases like “polluter pays” dominate global summits.

What is climate justice? 🔗

Climate justice reframes global warming as a matter of equity and human rights. It starts from a simple observation: the burdens of climate change and the responsibility for causing it are distributed unevenly across the world. Wealthier, industrialised nations released most of the greenhouse gases that warm the planet, yet poorer nations that burned far fewer fossil fuels bear the brunt of floods, droughts, and rising seas.

This injustice is both historical and ongoing. Developed economies built their prosperity over two centuries of unrestricted emissions. Developing countries, still working to lift millions out of poverty, are now told to curb their own growth to fix a crisis they did little to create. Climate justice argues that any fair solution must account for this difference in both responsibility and capacity. It is closely linked to the idea of redistributive justice, where those who caused the most harm and can most afford to pay should shoulder a greater share of the costs.

The disproportionate impact on developing countries 🔗

The unfairness becomes clear when you look at who actually suffers. According to the United Nations Development Programme, developing countries bear a disproportionate burden from rising sea levels and extreme weather. Small island nations face an existential threat, with some at risk of disappearing entirely as oceans rise.

The numbers expose the gap starkly. The G20 group of major economies accounts for roughly three-quarters of global greenhouse emissions, yet the African continent, which contributes the least, remains the most vulnerable. Pakistan offers a painful example: it emits less than one per cent of global emissions but suffered around 30 billion dollars in damages from catastrophic flooding in 2022.

Why poorer nations are more exposed 🔗

Vulnerability is not only about geography. It is also about resources. A wealthy country can build sea walls, fund disaster relief, and rebuild quickly. A low-income nation often cannot. This is why the impacts are unequally distributed, falling hardest on developing countries and vulnerable groups within them. The same storm that causes inconvenience in a rich nation can become a full humanitarian crisis in a poor one, destroying infrastructure and pushing fragile economies further into debt.

For India, this tension is especially sharp. As a developing country with a large population, it must balance the urgent need for economic growth and poverty reduction against the pressure to cut emissions. Its per-capita emissions remain low compared to industrialised nations, even though its total output is large because of its size and rapid industrialisation.

The principles guiding the debate 🔗

Climate justice is not just a moral sentiment. It is built on concrete principles that shape how responsibilities and costs are allocated in international negotiations. Three of these are central to almost every climate summit.

The polluter pays principle 🔗

The polluter pays principle (PPP) is the most intuitive of the three. It holds that whoever damages the environment should bear the cost of that damage. Originally an environmental policy guideline adopted by bodies like the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, it has become a cornerstone of climate finance debates. Applied globally, it means that the biggest emitters should shoulder their fair share of the costs of adaptation, mitigation, and repairing the harm already done.

In the climate context, this principle closely mirrors the demand that industrialised countries compensate developing nations in proportion to their historical contribution to carbon emissions. The challenge lies in applying a market-based idea to a shared global problem in a way that is also equitable.

The ability to pay principle 🔗

The polluter pays principle has a gap. What about emissions from the distant past, before anyone understood the harm, or emissions from poor communities simply trying to survive? This is where the ability to pay principle (APP) comes in. While the polluter pays principle is essentially a market rule, the ability to pay principle is a principle of justice and equity. It argues that those with the greatest capacity to bear the costs should do so, regardless of how much they personally polluted.

The philosopher Simon Caney is closely associated with this approach, proposing it as a complement to the polluter pays principle. Together, the two principles try to ensure that wealthy nations cannot escape responsibility for past emissions while still protecting the legitimate development needs of the world’s poorest people.

Common but differentiated responsibilities 🔗

The principle that ties everything together at the international level is Common but Differentiated Responsibilities and Respective Capabilities (CBDR-RC). First articulated in Principle 7 of the 1992 Rio Declaration and then enshrined in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, it holds that all nations share a duty to protect the climate, but not equally. As the UNFCCC states, developed countries should take the lead in combating climate change because they have contributed more to the problem and command greater financial and technological resources.

This principle gives developing nations both legal cover and a moral argument. India has consistently invoked CBDR-RC to justify its position in negotiations, arguing that developed countries bear historical responsibility and should undertake binding cuts while providing finance and technology to the Global South. The principle runs through the Kyoto Protocol, which imposed binding targets only on developed nations, and continues in the Paris Agreement, which adapts it to current realities through flexible, nationally determined contributions.

From principle to practice: the loss and damage fund 🔗

For decades these principles remained largely theoretical. The creation of the Loss and Damage Fund marked a turning point where the ideas of climate justice began translating into real money. Agreed at the COP27 summit in Egypt in 2022 and operationalised the following year, the fund is designed to help vulnerable nations cope with damage from climate-induced disasters that cannot be avoided through adaptation alone.

The fund directly embodies redistributive climate justice. It recognises that low-income communities, which contributed the least to the crisis, face its most severe effects. Yet it also reveals how difficult these principles are to apply. The pledges so far, while a start, fall far short of the hundreds of billions that vulnerable countries may need by 2030. One reason for the slow progress is that developed nations have feared that paying compensation could be read as an admission of legal liability, opening the door to large-scale lawsuits.

The persistent disagreements 🔗

Even with broad agreement on the principles, deep tensions remain. Developed countries increasingly argue that fast-growing economies like China and India must now take on greater emission cuts, since their total output has risen sharply. Developing countries counter that judging them by total emissions, rather than per-capita or historical figures, ignores the basic logic of fairness that CBDR-RC was built on. There are also genuine practical difficulties, such as quantifying historical responsibility and deciding exactly which countries qualify as the most vulnerable.

Carbon pricing offers one practical tool to put these principles into action. Mechanisms like a carbon tax or cap-and-trade systems aim to build the social cost of emissions into prices, generating revenue that can be redistributed to support a fairer transition. The debate over how to design these tools fairly continues at every major summit.

Why global cooperation is essential 🔗

Climate change does not respect political borders. A tonne of carbon emitted anywhere warms the entire planet. This is precisely why the problem demands collective action and why no single country can solve it alone. Advocates of climate justice argue that genuine cooperation must be built on fairness, not just on the urgency of cutting emissions.

This means more than financial transfers. It includes affordable access to clean technologies, with intellectual property barriers not standing in the way of developing nations adopting them. At recent summits, India has continued to stress that climate transitions should be people-centric, equitable, and just, helping to bridge the development gap between the Global North and South rather than widening it. Without this sense of fairness, poorer nations have little reason to trust a process they see as stacked against them, and cooperation breaks down.

Ultimately, climate justice asks a difficult but unavoidable question. If the planet’s resources and its capacity to absorb pollution are shared, how should the costs of protecting them be divided between those who profited from the damage and those who are paying the price? The principles of polluter pays, ability to pay, and common but differentiated responsibilities are imperfect attempts to answer it, but they keep the conversation anchored in fairness rather than power alone.

What do you think? Is it fairer to allocate climate responsibility based on a country’s historical emissions, or on its present-day capacity to pay? And as India grows into a major economy, how should it balance its developmental needs with the rising expectation that it take on greater climate commitments?

References

1. https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/raising-ambition/climate-finance
2. https://www.orfonline.org/research/the-loss-and-damage-fund-questions-concerns-and-suggestions
3. https://www.undp.org/belarus/stories/loss-and-damage-fund-developing-countries
4. https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/what-you-need-know-about-cop27-loss-and-damage-fund
5. https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/adelle-thomas-loss-and-damage
6. https://www.greenpeace.org/africa/en/blog/56455/embracing-the-polluter-pays-principle-a-defining-moment-for-climate-finance/
7. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282421393_Polluter-Pays-Principle_The_Cardinal_Instrument_for_Addressing_Climate_Change
8. https://legalresponse.org/resource/the-principle-of-common-but-differentiated-responsibilities-and-respective-capabilities-a-brief-summary/
9. https://www.cfr.org/articles/indias-new-climate-statecraft
10. https://www.wri.org/insights/loss-damage-climate-change
11. https://www.understandupsc.com/common-but-differentiated-responsibilities/
12. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13698230.2023.2243729
13. https://ddnews.gov.in/en/india-reaffirms-commitment-to-climate-justice-multilateralism-at-cop30-in-brazil/