2.2 & 2.3 Climate Injustice

Principles of Climate Justice and Capacity for Action

Climate change is often discussed as a scientific problem of rising temperatures and extreme weather, but it is equally a question of fairness. Climate justice views climate change as a human rights and ethical issue. It requires that the burdens, costs, and policy choices of climate action are shared equitably across society.

While the specification notes multiple definitions of climate justice, most models combine three core dimensions:

• Distributive justice: Who carries the cost? The communities that contributed least to historical emissions should not bear the heaviest losses or the highest bills for climate action. This reflects the polluter pays principle, which asserts that those responsible for pollution must pay to clean it up or repair the damage, rather than shifting the bill onto victims.
• Procedural justice: Who gets a say? Fair decision-making requires that the people affected by climate change have an active voice in planning defences and policies. If a council builds a flood defence scheme without consulting the local residents it affects, that decision breaches procedural justice even if the engineering works.
• Intergenerational justice: Who inherits the result? The emissions generated by past and present economic activity will cause warming and disruption experienced most acutely by young people and generations yet to be born, who had no role in making those decisions.

Global North and Global South

These dimensions operate on a global stage between the Global North and the Global South. These terms do not describe neat geography; they describe a country's economic standing, wealth, and history. The Global North comprises wealthier, industrialised countries—including Ireland—that built their wealth through early fossil fuel industrialisation and hold dominant voting power in global financial institutions. The Global South refers to lower-income countries, many of them former colonies, whose economies were structured around exporting raw commodities and whose populations face severe climate risks despite low emissions.

Frontline Communities and Capacity for Action

A frontline community is any group already experiencing direct climate impacts—such as coastal flooding, severe drought, or unliveable heatwaves—while possessing little institutional power over the activities causing the harm.

To understand why frontline communities struggle to respond, the syllabus focuses on capacity for action. The specification does not give a rigid definition, but in practice it reflects what an individual or community can practically do across three areas: adapting to hazards (such as building sea walls or retrofitting housing), mitigating emissions (such as switching to renewable heating), and influencing decisions (such as lobbying elected representatives or mounting planning appeals).

A helpful shorthand for this divide is the power paradox: the governments, corporations, and wealthy households with the highest emissions have the wealth to insulate themselves from harm, while the communities facing immediate disaster have the least power to change policy.

Measuring Responsibility for Emissions

Exam papers and data stimuli often present emissions statistics in different ways. Understanding the differences between these measures is essential for evaluating responsibility and spotting unfair arguments.

• Total (territorial) emissions: All greenhouse gases emitted inside a country's borders within a calendar year, usually measured in kilotonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO₂ eq). This metric converts other greenhouse gases, like methane and nitrous oxide, into the warming impact of carbon dioxide. Total emissions make populous nations appear exclusively responsible, even when the average citizen emits very little.
• Per-capita emissions: Total emissions divided by the national population. This reveals what the average individual emits. Ireland's per-capita emissions are among the highest in the European Union, largely driven by intensive agriculture, private car dependence, and poorly insulated housing.
• Historical (cumulative) emissions: The total volume of greenhouse gases a nation has added to the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution began around 1750. Carbon dioxide lingers in the atmosphere for centuries, meaning today's climate disruption is driven mainly by past emissions from early industrialised countries in the Global North. This metric underpins the concept of ecological debt—the ethical debt owed by wealthy industrialised countries to the Global South for consuming far more than their fair share of the global carbon budget.
• Consumption-based emissions: Emissions measured where finished goods are bought and used, rather than where factories made them. When Irish consumers purchase electronics, clothing, or manufactured items produced in Asia, the emissions from manufacturing appear in the exporting country's territorial total, even though Irish consumer demand drove the production.

Data Stimulus Exercise

Consider this simplified emissions breakdown:

If a commentator uses the total emissions column to argue that Ireland's emissions are negligible and should not require urgent action, their argument fails. While Ireland produces a small fraction of global emissions as a total figure, our per-capita emissions are more than twenty times higher than Mozambique's and well above the EU average. On a historical basis, Ireland has contributed to cumulative atmospheric warming since the nineteenth century, whereas Mozambique contributed almost nothing. Relying solely on territorial totals conceals unequal per-person responsibility.

Social Position, Vulnerability, and Capacity for Action

Social position describes a person's standing within society, shaped by socio-economic class, ethnicity, gender, age, disability, and citizenship status. Vulnerability is not simply being exposed to a storm or heatwave; it equals exposure to a hazard, plus sensitivity to damage, minus your ability to cope and recover.

Privilege provides structural advantages—such as savings, home ownership, legal rights, and political connections—that increase capacity for action. These inequalities determine how environmental harms are experienced:

• Socio-economic status and housing tenure: In Ireland, an affluent homeowner can access Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) grants to install a heat pump and solar panels, lowering both their carbon footprint and electricity bills. A private renter living next door cannot make structural upgrades to a property they do not own. If the home has a poor Building Energy Rating, the tenant is exposed to high fuel bills, creating energy poverty. Both households may care equally about the climate, but housing tenure gives them entirely different capacities to act.
• Transport poverty and rural geography: Where public transport is sparse or absent in rural Ireland, owning a car is not an optional lifestyle preference; it is an absolute necessity for reaching work, school, and medical care. A carbon tax increase on petrol or diesel falls heavily on rural commuters who lack alternative travel options, while urban residents with access to electrified bus and rail networks can adapt far more easily.
• Ethnicity and environmental racism: Environmental racism occurs when state policies, planning regulations, or industrial practices systematically place environmental hazards, polluting sites, and poor flood defences in areas populated by minority ethnic communities. Traveller organisations in Ireland have highlighted how local-authority halting sites are frequently placed beside motorways, landfills, and industrial brownfield lands, lacking adequate water and fire safety services.
• Citizenship and legal status: A person's capacity to challenge an environmental hazard depends on their legal rights. People living in the International Protection accommodation system have no vote in local authority planning decisions, no choice over where they reside, and limited transport options. Furthermore, climate-driven displacement is accelerating globally as droughts and sea-level rise destroy homes. Under the 1951 Refugee Convention, protection is granted to individuals fleeing persecution, not environmental devastation, meaning displaced people have no formal legal status as climate refugees.
• Age and disability: Older people face severe health risks during extreme heatwaves because the body regulates temperature less effectively with age. Similarly, a person who uses a wheelchair cannot evacuate a flood zone if emergency transport is not accessible or if alert warnings are issued only via sound-based alarms.

Intersectionality: How Disadvantages Compound

Vulnerabilities rarely act in isolation. Intersectionality, a concept introduced by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, describes how overlapping social identities—including gender, class, ethnicity, disability, and geography—interact to compound disadvantage or privilege.

Climate disruption functions as a threat multiplier. It magnifies existing social, economic, and legal inequalities rather than creating them from scratch.

Case Study: Cyclone Idai (Mozambique, 2019)

In March 2019, Cyclone Idai—one of the deadliest tropical cyclones recorded in the South-West Indian Ocean—struck Mozambique, Malawi, and Zimbabwe, devastating the coastal city of Beira.

• Unequal responsibility: Mozambique's historical contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions is negligible, standing at less than 0.1% of the global total.
• Infrastructure deficit: Because so much public money went on external debt repayments, the Mozambican state could not afford sea walls, a comprehensive early-warning network, or modern drainage systems capable of handling such an extreme storm.
• Intersectional harm on rural women: Over 700,000 hectares of crops were submerged. Rural women, who manage domestic food cultivation and water supply, had to walk much farther to find clean water, increasing cholera risks. In crowded temporary displacement shelters, women faced a documented rise in gender-based violence.

This disaster demonstrates that climate vulnerability is not an accident of nature; it is shaped by how global economic inequality, sovereign debt, and local social positions intersect during an extreme event.

The Root Causes of Climate Injustice

Learning Outcome 2.3 requires students to move beyond surface symptoms—such as flooded streets or crop failures—and identify the structural root causes of climate injustice. The specification notes that these causes emerge from the interplay of socio-economic, institutional, and technological activities: what the economy rewards, what institutions permit, and what physical infrastructure locks in.

To remember the root causes named in the syllabus, group them into three families:

• Economic drivers: Growth economy and capitalism, extractivism, and corporate power imbalances.
• Historical and identity-based causes: Colonialism, racism, environmental racism, and gender inequality.
• Structural conditions: Wealth inequality and the suppression of human rights.

When examining any root cause at Higher Level, follow a four-step framework: define the concept, explain how it causes environmental harm, identify who gains and who suffers, and provide a named real-world example.

1. Growth Economy and Capitalism

• Definition: Capitalism is an economic model based on private ownership of resources and production for profit. A growth economy treats the perpetual expansion of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as the primary measure of societal health.
• Harm mechanism: An economy that must grow endlessly must consume ever-increasing quantities of raw materials and energy, treating the biosphere as an infinite supply of inputs and a free dumping ground for carbon pollution.
• Gainers and losers: Financial profits flow to corporations and wealthy investors, while frontline communities absorb the resulting ecological damage, pollution, and climate disruptions.
• Example: Fast fashion business models rely on cheap fossil-fuel-derived polyester to manufacture disposable clothing, generating billions in corporate revenue while discarding millions of tonnes of textile waste onto coastal dumpsites in Ghana.

2. Extractivism

• Definition: Extractivism is an economic model based on removing large quantities of raw natural resources (such as oil, gas, timber, and minerals) primarily for export, with little processing or benefit for the local community.
• Harm mechanism: Extractivist operations degrade river networks, drive deforestation, and release massive volumes of greenhouse gases during extraction and refining.
• Gainers and losers: Transnational companies and host governments capture export revenues, while local inhabitants bear ruined farmland, water toxicity, and forced relocation.
• Example: In Ogoniland in the Niger Delta, decades of crude oil extraction by Shell resulted in widespread oil spills that ruined mangrove swamps, polluted drinking wells, and collapsed the local fishing economy, while the oil was exported to power foreign economies.

3. Corporations and Power Imbalance

• Definition: The vast gap in political, legal, and financial resources between multinational corporations and everyday citizens or sovereign states.
• Harm mechanism: Large companies spend heavily on political lobbying, shape environmental legislation, delay regulatory deadlines, and run public relations campaigns that deflect blame onto personal consumer choices.
• Gainers and losers: Fossil fuel and agribusiness firms protect their profits, while communities are left exposed to unchecked emissions.
• Example: Peer-reviewed archival research has shown that ExxonMobil had internal scientists accurately projecting global temperature rises from fossil fuel combustion as early as the 1970s and 1980s, yet the company publicly funded campaigns disputing climate science to delay carbon regulations.

4. Colonialism

• Definition: Colonialism is the subjugation, political control, and economic exploitation of a nation and its people by an imperial power.
• Harm mechanism: European colonisers replaced diverse, climate-resilient Indigenous food systems with large export-driven monoculture plantations (such as tea, cotton, and sugar). Rail and port networks were built solely to export raw materials. Today, many post-colonial nations remain locked into exporting cheap agricultural commodities while servicing high sovereign debts to international lenders, leaving them without the public funds needed for flood defences or irrigation.
• Gainers and losers: Imperial states built modern industrial economies using extracted colonial wealth, leaving former colonies with fragile, vulnerable economies.
• Example: Under British rule, vast swathes of India were converted from local food crops to cash-crop plantations, leaving millions vulnerable to severe famines when harvests failed. Ireland experienced a comparable system during the Great Famine, when food continued to be exported from large estates while tenant populations starved.

5. Racism and Environmental Racism

• Definition: Racism is institutional prejudice and structural disadvantage based on perceived racial or ethnic identity. Environmental racism is the specific practice of placing hazardous facilities, waste dumps, and polluting industries in minority communities.
• Harm mechanism: Planning authorities and industrial developers site undesirable developments in areas where residents lack the political connections or wealth to fight lengthy planning disputes.
• Gainers and losers: Industrial operators benefit from cheap land and weak resistance, while minority communities suffer elevated rates of asthma, cancer, and flood exposure.
• Example: The term environmental racism was highlighted by Benjamin Chavis following 1982 protests in Warren County, North Carolina, where state authorities dumped around 6,000 truckloads of soil contaminated with toxic PCBs into a predominantly African American, rural community.

6. Suppression of Human Rights

• Definition: The deliberate denial of fundamental freedoms—such as freedom of speech, assembly, and peaceful protest—often carried out through police violence, arbitrary arrest, or legal harassment.
• Harm mechanism: Silencing community activists removes the main social barrier preventing illegal logging, destructive mining, or polluting pipelines from invading sensitive ecosystems.
• Gainers and losers: Mining and logging consortiums operate without local oversight, while activists face criminalisation or death.
• Example: In 1995, Nigerian military authorities executed writer Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight fellow Ogoni leaders for peacefully protesting oil pollution caused by Shell. In 2016, Indigenous Lenca activist Berta Cáceres was assassinated in Honduras after leading community resistance against the Agua Zarca hydroelectric dam on the sacred Gualcarque River.

7. Wealth Inequality and Gender Inequality

• Definition: The unequal concentration of capital and property (wealth inequality), and the uneven distribution of rights, workloads, and decision-making power between genders (gender inequality).
• Harm mechanism: Research by Oxfam and the Stockholm Environment Institute revealed that the richest 1% of the world's population generated a greater share of carbon emissions over recent decades than the poorest 50% combined. Wealthy demographics consume high volumes of aviation and luxury goods while living in insulated homes. Meanwhile, women in rural areas often perform heavy domestic work like water hauling and food cultivation without holding formal land titles or access to bank loans.
• Example: The Chipko movement in 1970s northern India highlighted how rural women mobilised to defend communal forests from commercial loggers by physically hugging trees, protecting their watersheds from catastrophic landslides.

Personal Behaviour versus Collective Action for Systemic Change

A central distinction in Strand 2 is the difference between personal lifestyle adjustments and collective actions that pursue systemic transformation.

• Personal behaviours: Lifestyle actions carried out by an individual, such as cycling to work, eating less red meat, lowering home heating, or avoiding single-use plastics. These actions reduce your personal carbon footprint and help shift social attitudes, but their availability depends directly on personal privilege. You cannot commute by bicycle if there are no safe cycling lanes, and you cannot install attic insulation in a rented home.
• Collective action for systemic transformation: Coordinated action by groups targeting the institutions, laws, and market rules that cause emissions. Examples include trade unions negotiating workplace protections, citizen groups campaigning for public bus routes, or NGOs taking legal action.

Personal lifestyle choices cannot halt corporate lobbying or renegotiate sovereign debt on their own, but everyday people choose whether to organise and take collective action.

Building Capacity for Action: Climate Case Ireland

Citizens can build power and hold state institutions accountable. In Climate Case Ireland, the NGO Friends of the Irish Environment took legal action against the State. In July 2020, the Supreme Court quashed the Government's 2017 National Mitigation Plan, ruling that it did not set out in enough detail how Ireland would actually reduce its emissions, as required by the climate legislation then in force. (Ireland's climate law was strengthened afterwards by the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development (Amendment) Act 2021.) This demonstrates how collective, rights-based action can force institutional change.

(Note: How society fairly shares the costs of decarbonisation is studied under Just Transition in LO 2.8 and 2.9, which examines protecting workers and vulnerable communities during the shift away from fossil fuels).

Assessment Links and the Action Project

Your Leaving Certificate grade is based on two components: a written examination worth 60% (300 marks) and an Action Project worth 40% (200 marks). In the Higher Level written paper, marks are allocated across Section A (60 marks), Section B (160 marks), and Section C (80 marks).

Calibrating Your Exam Writing

Match the depth of your written answers to the official action verbs:

• Identify: State a specific fact or term in one accurate sentence, along with a named example.
• Outline: Provide the essential points without extra padding (definition, harm mechanism, and example in two or three sentences).
• Examine / Discuss / Evaluate: Use the complete four-step framework: define the cause, detail the harm mechanism, analyze winners and losers, and evaluate outcomes using a named case study.

The Action Project Bridge

The coursework brief for the Action Project asks students to complete an action project focused on reducing Ireland's greenhouse gas emissions across any sector, such as energy, transport, residential heating, or agriculture.

• Section A (Research to inform action): The SEC brief requires you to select one group that has taken action, justify your choice, describe the action, analyse whether it was appropriate to achieve their aim, and evaluate its success. The NCCA guidelines highlight that in researching an action taken by others, you should clarify how that action addresses a root cause of the issue—such as investigating whether an initiative tackles corporate lobbying or the housing tenure barriers that trap private renters in energy poverty.
• Section B (Planning for and taking action): Your action plan should target decision-makers who hold structural power (such as school management, local councils, or public transport operators) rather than relying exclusively on asking individuals to make lifestyle changes.
• Section C (Reflection and evaluation): Reflect on whether your action challenged systemic practices or engaged the community, using the project's Descriptors of Quality: planning and conducting the action, communication, and reflection.

Key terms

Climate Justice

The principle that climate change is an ethical and human rights issue, requiring that the burdens, costs, and decision-making power of climate action are shared equitably across society.

Climate Injustice

The structural disparity whereby communities and countries that contributed least to global emissions experience the most severe harms, while possessing the fewest resources to adapt.

Capacity for Action

The practical ability of an individual, group, or country to adapt to climate hazards, mitigate emissions, and influence environmental policy decisions, conditioned by wealth, social position, and institutional power.

Global North and Global South

Terms describing a country's economic standing, wealth, and historical industrialisation rather than geography: the Global North comprises wealthier high-emitting industrial nations, while the Global South comprises lower-income countries with lower per-capita emissions and higher vulnerability.

Frontline Community

A community directly experiencing immediate climate and environmental harms, such as sea-level rise, drought, or industrial pollution, while having minimal influence over the decisions that caused them.

Intersectionality

A framework describing how overlapping social categories—such as gender, ethnicity, class, disability, and age—interact to produce compound forms of discrimination or privilege.

Growth Economy

An economic model that prioritises the perpetual expansion of production and consumption, measured primarily by Gross Domestic Product (GDP), irrespective of ecological limits.

Capitalism

A socio-economic system built on private ownership of the means of production, market distribution, and the continuous accumulation of financial capital.

Extractivism

An economic model based on the large-scale extraction and export of raw, non-renewable natural resources with minimal local processing, leaving environmental destruction behind in the source territory.

Corporations and Power Imbalance

The immense disparity in influence between transnational companies and citizens, enabling corporate entities to lobby governments, delay environmental laws, and dilute climate targets.

Colonialism

The historical subjugation, political control, and economic exploitation of a nation and its people by a foreign imperial power, creating enduring trade dependencies and sovereign debts.

Racism

Systemic institutional structures, policies, and prejudices that subordinate and disadvantage groups based on perceived race or ethnic background.

Environmental Racism

Institutional directives, regulatory choices, or planning policies that disproportionately expose minority ethnic communities to environmental hazards, industrial pollution, and weak climate defences.

Suppression of Human Rights

The systematic silencing, criminalisation, physical intimidation, or violence directed against community members and environmental defenders who challenge destructive commercial activities.

Wealth Inequality

The unequal concentration of financial assets, land, and capital across populations, resulting in high carbon consumption among affluent groups and restricted adaptive capacity among the poor.

Gender Inequality

The unequal distribution of legal rights, economic resources, domestic workloads, and governance power between genders, leaving women particularly vulnerable to climate disruption.

Vulnerability

A measure of how exposed an individual or community is to an environmental hazard, how sensitive they are to its damage, and their capacity to cope, adapt, and recover.

Privilege

Structural, unearned advantages—such as financial capital, home ownership, legal status, and social influence—that enhance an individual's or community's capacity to act.

Ecological Debt

The cumulative debt owed by industrialised nations in the Global North to the Global South for historical over-consumption of the global carbon budget, resource extraction, and environmental destruction.

Energy Poverty

A condition in which a household cannot afford to heat, cool, or power their home adequately, driven by low incomes, high fuel prices, and poor residential energy efficiency.