Injustices in Climate Policy: Assessing Responses to Climate Risks in Democratic States

As climate change and its effects are set to worsen in the coming decades (IPCC, 2023), there is an urgent need to manage the risks associated with it. Due to its nature and geographical incidence, climate change inevitably places higher levels of risks and burdens onto specific individuals and communities, exacerbating existing levels of disadvantage and inability to adapt (Schlosberg, 2007; Gardiner et al., 2010). Members of specific communities (e.g. resource-dependent communities, Indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities) are often more vulnerable to climate change than their fellow citizens and likely to bear some among its highest costs. Instead of mitigating such an unfair distribution of risks, many policies currently promoted in democratic states to tackle climate change place additional burdens on particularly vulnerable individuals and communities. Climate policies often create “risk-classes” (Curran, 2017), namely groups of individuals who are more exposed to risks as a result of policy interventions precisely aimed at managing them. This situation strains existing models of democratic risk-sharing associated with the welfare state and threatens to undermine the very foundation of democratic solidarity. This paper investigates this situation and addresses the following questions: What can we learn from current climate policies that place unjustifiable burdens on specific individual and communities? How should climate policies be drafted to respect relations of equality among citizens (Anderson, 1999)? The first paper’s aim is diagnostic. I focus on three paradigmatic cases of climate mitigation, relocation, and extreme weather events: (1) the installation of windmills in the Fosen region in Norway, a region traditionally used by the Saami (Mósesdóttir, 2024); (2) the planned “managed retreat” of the population of Fairbourne in the UK, a community threatened by the risk of sea-level rise (Hilson and Arnall, 2024); (3) the management of hurricanes and floodings in the US coasts and the unequal risk exposure of vulnerable communities (Mazumder et al., 2022). I take relational egalitarianism as the background framework to discuss the normative desirability of climate policies and I evaluate when climate policy is not justifiable to citizens of a democratic state who stand in relations of equality to each other. Throughout the analysis, I adopt a capabilities-based view to assess the differential vulnerability of individuals and communities to climate change and their resilience (Holland, 2008; Murphy and Gardoni, 2012; Shepherd and Dissart, 2022). I then proceed to sketch some normative guidelines for the implementation of fairer climate policies that would strengthen democratic solidarity and address social cleavages rather than enhance them. Although allocating equal levels of exposure to risks among all individuals is practically unfeasible, when a policy unjustifiably exposes specific individuals and communities to weightier environmental risks, it constitutes an injustice. A fair policy should first ensure that the affected individuals do not fall below a threshold of acceptable exposure. In addition, policies should strive to be equality-promoting, thus contributing to offsetting existing situations of disadvantage. This might imply widening the affected communities’ participation in decision-making or providing potential veto powers over particularly damaging policies to structurally disadvantaged communities.