Introduction

‘System Change Not Climate Change’ has become a more prominent slogan in recent years. It has sharpened public debate about the societal changes that are necessary to avoid climate disaster in ways creating an environmentally sustainable, socially just future. The demand for ‘system change’ directs attention at profit-driven, high-carbon production systems which cause climate change, other environmental harms, resource plunder and social injustices, along with policies which perpetuate them.

The slogan was promoted by the Climate Justice movement in the run-up to the 2009 Climate Summit in Copenhagen, where nearly 300 organizations launched a joint declaration for system change. Given the global elite's policy framework of carbon trading and carbon offsets, the signatories rejected such schemes as ‘false solutions’ (Klimaforum09, 2009). Back then, this confrontational approach was marginal within the wider climate movement.

Its mainstream organizations generally had accepted the elite's market-based policy framework, either reluctantly or enthusiastically. Representing the prevalent activism, the Climate Action Network (CAN) emphasized scientific imperatives for reducing greenhouse gases (GHG) reductions, along with fairness in the means. The latter meant the global North accepting more socially equitable targets and commitments within the UN Climate Convention (Hadden, 2015).

By contrast, the Climate Justice movement has linked diverse groups which see capitalism as a fundamental source of social injustice, climate change and wider environmental degradation. Climate Justice had antecedents and analogies with the ‘environmental justice’ movement departing from mainstream environmentalism. The latter attributes environmental degradation to specific actors (for example, companies, institutions or governments). By contrast, environmental justice perspectives attribute socio-environmental degradation to the neoliberal development paradigm, as the basis to confront complicit institutions (Šimunović et al, 2018). This diagnosis poses an imperative to transform production-consumption systems, moving from resistance to reconstruction (Schlosberg, 2013).

Extending that perspective, the Climate Justice movement opposed the official reliance on market-based measures to address climate change. It organized civil disobedience to confront the 2009 Climate Summit.