‘Justice’ takes centre stage in the latest Earth Commission report

Subject :Environment

Section: Climate change

Context:

The latest Earth Commission Report attached a “justice” framework to its earlier discourse of “safe” planetary boundaries, which are the environmental limits within which humans can safely operate.

Details:

The new paper, titled Safe and Just Earth System Boundaries expands the scope of “planetary boundaries” and calls them “earth system boundaries” (ESBs) instead, as it looks at wise resource use not just at the global level, but also at the regional and local levels.

About the report:

In 2009, a global team of scientists defined planetary boundaries for nine earth system processes to define the safe threshold within which humans can function and grow, beyond which there will be a devastating effect on the safety and health of the planet.
A recent report in the series modifies the term planetary boundaries to earth system boundaries and attempts to quantify human minimum needs both at global and sub-global levels and the resultant emissions from meeting those needs.
The new report adopts a justice lens to view earth system boundaries by acknowledging that inequalities and unjust distribution of resources exist.
As a next step, the authors will come up with measures for a just transformation across all earth system boundaries which would require a leap in the understanding of how justice, economics, technology and global cooperation can be furthered, for a safe and just future.

What are Earth System Boundaries (ESB):

In 2009, a global team of scientists, that later constituted the Earth Commission, came together to identify thresholds or boundaries for nine earth system processes which, if breached, could have devastating and irreversible environmental changes.
The nine processes identified were

The idea was to define a safe operating space for humanity within a set of interlinked thresholds in these earth system processes.
At the time of the 2009 report, three of the nine boundaries — climate change, biosphere integrity and altered biogeochemical cycles — had already been overstepped.
In 2015, one more boundary- Land Use– has been breached.
The 2015 paper also identified ‘climate change’ and ‘biosphere integrity’ as the ‘core boundaries’, upon which other boundaries are dependent.

“Just” threshold to address inequalities and unjust distribution of resources:

The three-justice criteria or the “3Is” include interspecies justice and earth system stability; intergenerational justice that stems from the thought that we need to recognise the potential long-term consequences of short-term actions and associated trade-offs and synergies across time; and intragenerational justice between countries, communities and individuals as well as intersectional justice that considers multiple and overlapping social identities and categories like gender, race, age, etc.