INTRODUCTION

The first part of this book focuses on developing a climate justice account that can be used for the evaluation of the global response to climate change. There has so far been no attempt to normatively assess and compare multilateral and transnational climate change responses. The book must therefore provide an account of climate justice to make this assessment possible in the first place. It is not feasible to simply apply or update an existing account, because there is no account that has attempted the kind of analysis conducted here. In order to develop a climate justice account, the book will focus on answering four key questions raised by the climate change problem: who will be most affected, what exactly is at stake, what action must be taken in the face of climate change and who should be responsible for this action? Chapter 1 concerns the first question – who will be most affected – by setting out a scope of justice, which clarifies who must be included in considerations of justice, or in other words how wide the net of justice should be cast. In the case of this book, the net is both wide and deep, because the scope of climate justice is both non-relational and relational. This allows the book to prioritise those most affected by climate change: future generations and those living in less developed countries.

Chapter 2 turns to the second question – what exactly is at stake – by setting out the grounds of climate justice, which allows readers to understand what must be normatively prioritised. In the case of this book, it is the human right to health, which forms a normative subfloor that must not be crossed. The final two questions – what action must be taken in the face of climate change, and who should be responsible for this action – will be the subject of Chapter 3, which sets out three demands of climate justice. It is important to define what climate justice demands because this clarifies what exactly is normatively expected from the global response to climate change. In the case of this book, the demands centre around who should be responsible for climate change and what action must be taken.