Since the Industrial Revolution, when global warming was set into motion, nations have been slow to address its effects. Before 1960, the global community ignored its dangers. Even now, when carbon-consuming nations urge climate action, their solutions brush aside poorer communities and nations which endure the most severe consequences. At a time when warming is nearly unescapable, this injustice merits international attention.
Scholarly consensus now argues that the Earth’s climate is a global common held by no nation. But this begs two questions: Should carbon-emitting nations be held accountable, and if so, how? How too should poor nations, who are the most climate-vulnerable, seek justice?
Since 2015, rich nations have spent nearly $3.3 trillion on fossil fuel industries but only $1.5 billion on the poorest nations. Wealthy states bear an inherent responsibility to maintain a healthy climate. Yet, historically, they’ve exploited poor lands for fossil fuels and labour, using them to pollute Earth. But that’s only half of the story. As industrial nations enjoy fossil fuels, poorer nations face the greatest consequences today—floods, heatwaves, droughts, etc.
Climate change should be considered an issue of imbalanced power. The three main conditions of distributive justice show why rich nations owe poor nations for their climate misconduct. Furthermore, a crop of international legislation obligates rich nations to pay climate debt. Nonetheless, few, if any, rich nations have taken accountability for their exorbitant carbon emissions.
Distributive Justice
The broader principles of international distributive justice can guide a discussion of why rich nations owe poor nations. All three speak to why rich nations must pay off their debt.
The most basic is reasoned in Mallard’s Politics of Reparations. Typically, rich countries owe reparations to poor nations for their past misdeeds. Second, political theorist David A. Richards argues that nations have a ‘natural duty of mutual aid.’ For example, if a poor nation suffers from deprivation (e.g. starvation) or faces disproportionate effects from a tragedy, rich nations are obligated to provide aid. Third, Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature suggests that when unfair trades or one-sided reciprocity occur between nations, wealth redistribution is necessary. In other words, if one nation doesn’t engage in fair play, they owe the other.
Reparations are triggered by injustice. Throughout history, wealthy industrialized nations have released over three times more greenhouse gasses than developing countries. One glaring example: the US has produced 20% of historical emissions while Sub-Saharan Africa, home to a billion people, has produced a mere 1% of emissions. In fact, according to David Wallace-Wells, ‘the average Ugandan produces less carbon than the average American refrigerator.’
Wealthy countries have conceded that these ongoing emissions are a danger to the global climate. Nonetheless, no sturdy reparations have been made. Poor countries that suffer acutely from climate change are also those who are the least responsible. This fits Mallard’s definition of a misdeed that requires rich nations to make reparations to the poor. It also exemplifies climate privilege. Wealthy nations can use the global ecosphere—a common for poor and rich nations—as a carbon dump without repercussions.
In a climate context, Richard’s theory of mutual aid applies when one country is disproportionately affected by warming. Because poorer countries are typically located around the equator and in the Global South, they are more susceptible to warming. An S&P study found that poorer countries will be ‘four times more exposed to the risks of climate change than their rich peers by 2050.’ Already, sub-Saharan Africa has been made 10% poorer by climate change. Meanwhile, India is 31% poorer, thanks to climate change.
Geography doesn’t only inflate the risks. In itself, extreme poverty in countries exacerbates the effects of climate change. Developing nations with less diversified economies, a lack of infrastructure, and weaker institutions cannot combat rising sea levels, dwindling crops, and destructive storms. Therefore, there is a clear climate bias towards poor nations on two fronts: geography and capacity. Regardless of whether rich nations caused climate change, the theory of mutual aid mandates that they help poor nations, who disproportionately endure the most damage.
The causation of climate change is a story of one-sided trades, unrestrained power, investment, and land-grabbing. Hume’s theory posits that richer nations who create these unfair trades owe the disadvantaged, poorer nations. Throughout the European colonial era, rich nations used violence and exploitation to conduct deeply unfair trades with poor nations. Looted land, labour, and natural resources were used to stoke European industrial revolutions—the cause of global warming.
Maxine Burkett finds that current investment agreements provide rich nations ‘with unfettered access to natural resources by restricting the ability of [poor] states to adopt health, safety, labor, and human rights standards.’ In effect, this prevents a poor nation from adapting to climate change and facilitates a rich nation’s overconsumption of carbon.
The most modern iteration of such unfair trades places a further burden on poorer, oil-rich nations. To avoid pollution domestically, rich nations finance “dirty business overseas” and build “smokestack industries” in poorer countries. Such smokestacks directly contaminate air quality and cause lung damage in poor nations. To that end, these single-sided and unjust trades require rich nations to compensate the poor, according to Humean theory.
Ultimately, poor nations experience structural violence from rich nations and climate change. Structural violence refers to an unfair distribution of privilege, power, or necessity that harms a group of people. In this case, rich nations have exercised their power to exploit poor nations and pollute the climate. This privilege engineers the systematic subordination of poor nations, pushing them into dire conditions. Using structural violence and the three pillars of distributive justice, Cynthia D. Moe-Lobeda’s Climate-Debt theory concludes that ‘the costs of adapting to climate change and mitigating it are the responsibility of the rich countries that created the crisis and [have the resources to end it].’
Legislative Obligations
Scholars have come to accept two legislative frameworks for holding rich nations accountable for climate wrongdoings: customary international law and environmental legislation.
As stated in the Harvard Law Review, the No Harm principle of international law holds that ‘no state may, in exploiting its territory, cause injury to the territory, property, or persons of another.’ Under this principle, wealthy states cannot disruptively consume carbon. Some scholars of customary international legislation also argue that the atmosphere falls under a “common concern of mankind.” Through the doctrine of state responsibility, each nation is liable for its own affairs with the climate. Simply put, the polluter must pay.
Environmental treaties also obligate rich nations to pay off their climate debt. The Paris Agreement finds that rich nations are responsible for the damage climate change inflicts on poor nations. Article 3 of the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) requires rich nations to lead efforts to combat climate change and compensate poorer nations—yet, few nations have followed this decree. The UNFCCC has also defined loss and damage as ‘the potential…impacts associated with climate change in developing countries.’
Despite all these legislative obligations, few, if any, rich nations have taken accountability and repaid suffering poor nations. Perhaps a new, more direct mechanism will be needed to catalyze redistributive justice.
Compensating Poorer Nations
Because the effects of climate change are so extensive and injustice runs deep, rich nations owe many things. A one-time payment does not encompass a permanent solution or redress. Wealthy nations must steward their economic power toward poor nations in four ways: emission-based compensation, infrastructure, providing a safe haven, and reparation.
Rich nations owe it to poor nations to limit carbon emissions as much as possible since developing nations disproportionately suffer the effects of global warming. But since this hasn’t happened, rich nations should proportionally pay poorer nations according to their own per capita carbon footprint. That way, poor nations that are most affected are served justice while rich nations are held accountable according to their emissions, not population.
Several scholars, including climate scientist Jon Rosales, have concluded that emission-based compensation would ‘implement the ethical maxim that all people should have equal rights to use the global commons.’ In the broader scheme, this protocol should encourage rich nations to decrease their emissions by setting caps, investing in clean energy, and creating carbon tariffs.
Quite simply, emission-based compensation is an impetus for climate action. Rich nations also owe poor nations a contribution to the UN’s ‘Green Climate Fund,‘ which provides ‘economic assistance to low-income countries detrimentally affected by climate change.’
Reduced emissions and compensation, though, will not entirely alleviate the gaping burden low-income nations bear. Wealthy nations owe technological and climate infrastructure to poorer nations. By deploying the resources for climate change adaptation— such as air purification, water management, flood prevention, storm preparation, and agricultural maintenance—rich nations can ease the dire conditions in poor nations they’ve created. Wealthy nations should also work towards decarbonization and climate mitigation in gas-dependent developing nations. They owe renewable energy and clean infrastructure, especially to the oil-pipeline nations that they financed.
In the past 30 years, the number of people living in coastal, poor countries has increased to 260 million. But due to climate change, many will be displaced by violent weather hazards. These climate refugees are likely to increase, and the Institute for Economics & Peace predicts that by 2050 they will amount to around 1.2 billion people. So far, rich nations and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees have refused to grant refugee status to those displaced by global warming. Rich nations owe the citizens of their poorer counterparts a safe haven. In other words, rich nations have wreaked climate havoc on poorer nations, and the 24 million people that have fled such environmental disasters, at the very least, deserve refuge. Large, rich nations can pay off their climate debt by reforming their immigration policies to house climate refugees permanently.
By virtue of historical climate injustice, poor nations have recently called for reparations. Maxine Burkett articulates that ‘a reparations framework for the climate vulnerable [is] a means of truly grappling with the profound moral problems that anthropogenic climate change has introduced.’ A reparatory framework would address the various factors that prompted climate change—slavery, colonialism, and imperialism—for which many poor countries have yet to receive the reparations they have long deserved. Fully reimbursing poorer nations would finally balance a history of an unrestrained imbalance of power. Citizens of wealthy nations argue that they shouldn’t be responsible for their ancestors’ wrongdoings. However, such wrongdoings give them the resources to thrive at the expense of poorer nations. Reparations, according to political strategist Tamara T. O’laughin, ‘respond to the ethical, financial, and civic necessity to wrestle with what the past has brought us.’
It is well past time that rich nations start acknowledging their climate wrongs and acting on them. Redistributive mechanisms must be built in this spirit of mea culpa. The smoke that fuelled the British Empire now drowns the marshlands of Bangladesh. And thanks to the United States, the Middle East is now composed of oil-pipeline nations—scorched every year by unbearable temperatures. As the effects of climate change become more severe, climate compensation becomes ever more important.