Climate Change Policy Making.

Introduction

Climate positive means a process when an activity not only achieves net-zero carbon emissions, but it goes beyond that and removes additional carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and this process benefits the environment. 

The size of the climate threat facing mankind cannot be underestimated. Communities around the world also experience the effects of man-made climate change. This can be seen in the shape of rising sea levels, ocean acidification, melting glaciers, and more extreme and recurrent heatwaves, flooding, hurricanes, and droughts. The number of severe weather incidents has quadrupled in 50 years. The effects of climate change are happening more rapidly and are now affecting populations harder than expected. The outcomes include shifts in farming practices, challenges to livelihoods, and disputes over the soil, water, and other services.

Rich developed countries are blamed for climate crisis-historically, lawfully, and socially. Greenhouse gasses produced in the past tend to fuel the atmosphere and will do so for thousands of years. Industrialized nations, like Europe, must continue the transition to a fossil-free environment and raising their use and regulation of the earth's energy. Governments will make drastic reductions in carbon at home, while simultaneously having sufficient funds and development transfers to help countries in the Global South curb their carbon and respond to the impacts of climate change. So they must not do so by fake ideas that tend to benefit the wealthy minority of the world’s population.

What is Climate Justice?

Those who are least responsible for causing the crisis are the most painfully conscious of the consequences of climate change around the world. Populations I the global South as well as low-income communities in the developed North face the brunt of overconsumption of our planet’s wealth by rich countries. We are those who have the least access to finance and technologies to respond to the consequences and to move to reduce their pollution. Climate justice means solving the climate crisis but simultaneously making strides towards sustainability and the security and enforcement of human rights. 

Global justice ties human rights and sustainability to pursue a people-centered solution, protect the interests of the most vulnerable, and distribute the costs and advantages of climate change and its effects equally and reasonably. Climate justice is driven by research, reacts to research, and acknowledges the need for fair use of the world's capital.

The heart of climate justice is recognizing that the immediate steps taken to avoid climate change must be focused on community-led approaches and the well-being of local populations, aboriginal people, and the world's vulnerable, as well as biodiversity and resilient habitats. Environmental justice is the belief that if we don't reform the neo-liberal, corporate-based culture that prevents us from creating sustainable economies we won't be able to combat climate change. It is the belief that the globalization of businesses has to be stopped. The historic responsibility for the vast bulk of greenhouse gas emissions lies with the Global North developed nations. Although the primary responsibility of the North to reduce emissions has been recognized in the United Nations Climate Convention, the production and consumption patterns of industrialized countries such as the United States continue to threaten the survival of humanity and biodiversity worldwide. The North must move urgently towards a low-carbon economy. At the same time, to avoid damaging the carbon-intensive industrialization model, the countries of the Global South have the right to use resources and technology to make a transition to a low-carbon economy that does not continue to be subject to poverty reduction.

We can see from these points that to achieve climate justice, climate positive is very important. Unless we achieve climate positive, it is not possible to achieve climate justice as the carbon emissions will not get reduced and it would eventually increase.

Opposing false solutions

Governments, financial institutions, and multinationals are pushing bogus approaches to the climate crisis. Reliance on offsetting and carbon markets does not promote climate justice. Nor should tax measures that raise social inequality, innovation in 'clean energy' technologies, the return of nuclear power, quotas for agrofuel consumption, export liberalization, privatization, or forest carbon markets. These are fake ideas that must be rejected at the state, regional, and international levels. Subsidies for incorrect technical approaches will be phased out entirely.

Climate Change

Climate change may well be the greatest challenge facing humanity. It is a situation that needs to be resolved urgently if catastrophe is to be avoided. Millions are already feeling the impacts on the most vulnerable and marginalized communities in the world. Climate change is at once a matter of social and environmental justice, an ecological issue, and an issue of economic and political domination. As such, it needs to be tackled through large and innovative alliances. To tackle the climate crisis effectively, we need to recognize and resolve the deep-rooted ties that connect it to the myriad other crisis we face, as well as the interconnected food, water, and biodiversity depletion crisis. Such problems are united by their shared origins in an economic environment that allows banks and businesses to disregard ethical and moral standards and to gamble with resources, people's lives, and our collective future in the name of higher profits. Successfully combating climate change would entail a radical transformation of our culture that, if thoughtfully undertaken, will lay a new basis that will at the same time help us attain both social justice and ecological sustainability.

The world's poor are particularly vulnerable to environmental disasters, including the adverse effects of climate change. This poses a problem for climate change activists who aim to ensure that those least responsible for climate change do not face undesired mitigation burdens. One way to encourage climate change may be to pay special attention to the public policy needs of people from smaller, less-emitting nations. This paper explores opinions on environmental-economic trade-offs and the ability to make personal financial commitments to protect the environment among citizens of 42 developed and developing countries, using data from the 2005-2008 World Values Survey, the 2010 Climate Risk Index and the World Bank Growth Indicators. Results show that individuals in developing countries are less likely to support policies that give priority to environmental protection over economic growth, but are more willing to donate personal income for environmental efforts compared to citizens of more developed nations.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, 1992, describes climate change as a “climate change that is directly or indirectly due to human action that changes the structure of the global environment and which, in addition to natural climate variation, has been observed over comparable periods of time.” Reports suggest that there has been a 40 percent increase in CO2, a 150 percent increase in methane, and a 20 percent increase in atmospheric nitrous oxide (Royal Society).

Underprivileged communities are the worst affected by the climate crisis, particularly in terms of agricultural livelihoods and related activities, and are vulnerable to extreme weather events such as floods and droughts. Given the high stakes of our societies, this calls for greater commitment to the discourse on climate justice.  

Climate change and the migration of vulnerable groups

The correct identification of vulnerable groups is an integral part of climate justice. It is not always convenient for societies or people to recognize whether they are at risk or danger of climate change or global warming. As far as we know, people or communities living in isolation are expected to be more valuable to the risks of changing climates in the near future. Today, billions of disadvantaged people are expected to live in unhealthy environments, unhygienic areas, and less protection from climate change than others, leaving them more vulnerable to threats. The next stage of danger arose as other metrics include class, age, health status, caste, ethnicity, and demographic locations. As we can see, mainly disadvantaged populations and few marginalized groups are forced to the edges of cities where they have to deal with all sorts of noise, low quality of life, and restricted exposure relative to those living in the city with improved quality of life.

The most important field of sexism is gender inequality, which is responsible for widely-known inequalities in political, social, and economic processes. Still today, women have a less strong voice in politics, restricted access to the services required, and reduced ability to assert fundamental rights. According to the IPCC reports, in extreme weather conditions and natural disasters caused by climate change, women die at a higher rate than men, indicating their vulnerability. The two most critical services most vulnerable to climate change are drinking water and fuel, and women are the ones who gather and use freshwater in most rural areas and gather the fuel supplies required to cook food at home. It is analyzed that women are more dependant on agriculture for food and basic requirements in rural areas. This is one of the reasons why women need more access to electricity and related resources for housework in both rural and urban areas. In certain regions, women are responsible for maintaining forest resources and make a major contribution to forestry or agricultural activities. 

Indigenous people are the most vulnerable groups to climate change impacts. The population is heavily dependant on natural resources, such as trees, soil, rivers, and mountains, for their day-to-day life, and these resources are most affected by climate change. Ytterstad and Russell (2012) clarified that communities who do not have suitable tribal territories have suffered abuses of human rights as a result of renewable energy generation projects. While the UN climate conference in Copenhagen in 2009 called for climate change and its appeal to mass media, now is the time to illustrate this in the national media relating this to aboriginal communities in particular.

Conclusion

Some have argued that the existence of scientific uncertainties prevents policymakers from taking action today in anticipation of climate change. It's not real. Indeed, despite the existence of uncertainties, policymakers, resource managers and other stakeholders make decisions daily. The outcome of these decisions may be affected by climate change. Or decisions may provide for future opportunities to adapt to climate change. Decision-makers will also benefit from knowledge on the possible effects of climate change. An educated judgment is still safer than an uninformed one.

Care must be taken to respect the boundary between evaluation and policy development. The purpose of the policy-oriented evaluation is to advise decision-makers and not to make concrete policy decisions.