Climate change justice and global resource commons: local and global postcolonial political ecologies

摘要

Although the global climate crisis rages on, making life on Earth more difficult, with concerted efforts, the planet can be habitable. This is clear from the sixth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for 2022, if there are drastic cuts in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and many human adaptations 1. The Glasgow Climate Pact, from the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) of 2021 in Scotland, emphasised the need to phase out fossil fuels, but the modalities are not clear. Issues of climate change justice and the inherent global resource commons impede concerted efforts. There is little to see of the common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities (CBDRRC) since the 1992 Rio Summit made this a principle. At the recent COP26, there were efforts to make the richer countries bear the greater responsibility and provide funding to the less developed countries to adapt to climate change. Countries from the Global South have decried the hegemony of the Global North in their call for climate justice through equitable sharing of responsibility in attending to the climate crisis. This book focuses on these issues. In the introductory chapter (pp. 1-22), Joshi shows the worsening climate situation, manifested through recent widespread and devastating climate-induced impacts and other significant developments in 2020. One such development in 2020 was the move from the Kyoto Protocol to the Paris Agreement and contemplating what it means for, 'global climate justice, for US exceptionalism in climate negotiations, and beyond' (p. 1). The United States of America, greatly contributing to the pollution of the global atmospheric commons, had not ratified the Kyoto Protocol and, under President Donald Trump, withdrew from the Paris Agreement in recent years. Yet, (though not referred to in the book) the 2020 US presidential election yielded Joe Biden, a president who prioritised climate change, thus re-accepting the Paris Agreement. Joshi notes that America's 'role in international treaty negotiations has been marked by unilateralism, exceptionalism, market-ization, obstructionism, abandonment, and most recently by a shameless disregard for treating the universe as a global commons' (p. 1). Chapters 2 and 3 give intricate details of climate politics at the global level particularly the North/South divide in international climate treaty negotiations (pp. 23-78).