Urban Climate Justice

Course description

While climate change is manifested at a global level through increases in average temperatures, the consequences are experienced very differently around the world, between different cities, and for different people. At the same time, an increasingly complex global framework has emerged that provides legal, financial, and practical responses to climate change – incorporating mitigation, adaptation, loss-and-damage and finance. These are made even more complicated as we approach a period of climate overshoot which will result in more severe impacts and further urgency for deep decarbonisation.  

Both climate change itself and responses to this have significant distributional issues, with equity implications at multiple scales. Differentials in hazards, exposure and vulnerability mean that certain cities (many of which are in low- and middle-income countries) are most susceptible to harm; while intersectional characteristics of individuals shape how they will be affected. Simultaneously, mitigation and adaptation agendas are being coopted by elite interests, who justify evictions and forced displacement as means of reducing risk; or who benefit disproportionately from tariffs and subsidies intended to encourage lower carbon transportation and housing.  

Climate justice provides an appropriate conceptual framing to assess, understand, analyse – and ultimately address – these consequences of differential climate impacts and responses. The module also engages with literature on intersectionality and decolonial urban practices as means of understanding the underlying urban processes that shape risk and responses to it. Empirically, the course pays particular attention to cities in the Global South, and to residents of informal settlements, but also engages with inequality and risk in European and North American cities.  

 Learning objectives

At the end of the course, successful participants will: 

• Understand the distributional consequences of climate impacts and responses in cities from a range of contexts 
• Be able to describe and distinguish between different approaches to environmental justice and how these have been applied in relation to climate change 
• Be able to assess different conceptual models for climate justice, and examine their implications in policy and practice 
• Have the potential to engage in the development of urban policies that incorporate climate justice principles  

Session themes

1. Framing climate impacts, adaptation and mitigation in cities
2. What do we mean by urban justice, climate justice, and urban climate justice? 
3. Climate justice and the rights of nature 
4. Distribution of urban climate impacts: from the neighbourhood to the global scale 
5. Legal perspectives on climate justice
6. Achieving just adaptation outcomes: lessons from practice 
7. Towards net-zero cities: justice and distributional considerations 
8. Guest sessions and practical exercises: climate justice in Rotterdam; climate justice in Nairobi