Conceptualising Structural Climate Change: A System of Structural Processes

Over the past two decades, the attention placed on climate change has consistently increased. This was accompanied by a growing understanding that climate change is not only harmful but wrong in some way, with increasing certainty that something about it is unjust. However, pinpointing what exactly this injustice is and where it appears has been difficult. Some recurrent themes that make attributions and explanations of injustice difficult are the diffuse and overdetermined production of climate change, the fact that natural processes play a central role, and the difficulty to attribute any phenomena with certainty to climate change. One source of difficulty is that these themes are in part structural, and as such conflict with the conventional theoretical approaches that centre interactions in their analysis. In response, theorists have applied structural injustice theory to climate change processes, often arguing that climate change is itself a structural injustice. However, these arguments typically treat climate change monolithically and have mixed success in locating and explaining climate injustice. I argue that these gaps can be filled by treating climate change as a system instead of monolithically. Using structural injustice and intersectional theory, I analyse climate change as a system of structural processes and injustices, grouping processes of the creation/maintenance of global warming; of the production of climate phenomena; and of the shaping of climate change effects as experienced by groups and individuals. This approach provides two central advantages: firstly, conceptualising climate change as a system in this way places the natural processes of climate change in the context of the social-structural processes relevant to climate change origins and effects. This collapses the conventional divide between the environment and the social by showing that the latter is embedded within the former. As such, the environment becomes internal to questions of (in)justice. Secondly, this conceptualisation allows to show how climate change processes necessarily intersect with existing structural injustices or privilege, as climate phenomena are mediated by structural positions when they are experienced as effects. This interaction both highlights the relevance of intersectional analysis and provides an avenue for locating and explaining climate change injustices. As such, the proposed exploration aims to contribute to theoretical and conceptual clarity, arguing for a means of locating and explaining climate injustices and adding to the theoretical toolkit.