3.2 Climate Justice Movements

Principles of Climate Justice: Root Causes and Unequal Burdens

There is no single definition of climate justice. Different groups—from trade unions to Indigenous federations and student strikers—emphasise different priorities. Yet they all share one core conviction: global warming cannot be solved by carbon accounting alone. It is bound up with questions of equity, ethics, and power.

The basic injustice is clear. Wealthy, industrialised countries in the Global North, alongside multinational fossil fuel corporations, built their wealth by burning coal, oil, and gas for two centuries. Meanwhile, communities in the Global South produced negligible emissions but face the worst floods, droughts, and heatwaves.

Why Impacts Fall Unevenly

Applied Learning Task 2 points out that extreme weather does not land on an equal world. Existing social and economic divides decide who survives and who loses everything. The course highlights six factors:

• Geography: Low-lying coastlines, small island nations, and arid drylands face physical hazards first. The Philippines sits right in the Pacific typhoon belt; Ireland enjoys a sheltered maritime climate.
• Income and perceived social status: Money buys solid housing, insurance, air conditioning, and a way out when disaster hits. Low-income families often live in informal settlements on steep hillsides or river floodplains because safer land is unaffordable.
• Age: Children and older people suffer most from heat exhaustion, contaminated water, and diseases like dengue fever. Young people also face decades of escalating future disruption, which forms the ethical ground for intergenerational justice.
• Gender: In many rural societies across the Global South, women gather food, collect firewood, and haul water. Prolonged droughts add miles to their daily walk. When floods strike, displacement drastically increases their risk of poverty and violence.
• Citizenship: People driven from their homes by creeping desertification or coastline loss cannot claim refugee status under current international law. Without legal recognition, they cross borders without guaranteed human rights.
• Ethnicity and Indigenous status: Indigenous peoples depend directly on healthy local ecosystems for their culture, food, and medicines. When forests are cut down or rivers polluted, their way of life is wrecked. Their lands are also regularly targeted for resource extraction without free, prior, and informed consent.

Root Causes Versus Symptoms

Climate justice groups refuse to spend all their energy fighting symptoms. A symptomatic response reacts to destruction after the fact: building a taller sea wall, clearing flood mud, or shipping emergency food boxes. While relief matters during a crisis, it leaves the machinery that caused the disaster intact.

Addressing root causes means challenging the economic and political systems driving the breakdown: fossil fuel reliance, corporate lobbying, unequal global trade, and extractivism—an economic model built on draining raw materials (oil, minerals, timber) out of poorer territories to generate corporate profits abroad, leaving local communities with pollution and scarred landscapes.

Mitigation, Adaptation, and the Debt Framework

To understand activist demands, you need to see how standard climate terms take on a sharper meaning through a justice lens.

• Mitigation means stopping emissions before they happen or pulling carbon out of the air. Examples include building offshore wind farms, retrofitting homes with insulation, expanding train networks, and rewetting bogs.
• Adaptation means changing how we live and build to survive warming that is already locked in. Examples include breeding drought-hardy crops, building storm-surge barriers, setting up early-warning sirens, and planting street trees for shade.

The Justice Angle on Mitigation and Adaptation

Through a justice lens, these terms are about fairness, not just engineering:

1. Mitigation is about historical responsibility: Under the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities, countries that grew wealthy from 200 years of fossil fuels must cut emissions first and deepest. Demanding identical percentage cuts from Ireland and Mozambique treats unequal histories as equal.
2. Adaptation is about who pays: Poorer nations need billions of euro to adapt to a changing climate they did not cause. Activists demand this money as direct grants, not loans. Handing out loans forces struggling nations into sovereign debt traps simply to rebuild after storms.
3. Adaptation has hard limits: When an island sinks beneath rising tides or salt ruins a freshwater aquifer, adaptation is finished. That is where loss and damage takes over.
4. Beware of maladaptation: This occurs when a project protects one group but pushes greater harm onto another. Think of a private sea wall built to protect a five-star hotel that deflects storm waves straight into an unfortified fishing village next door.

Climate Debt and Ecological Debt

Activists do not view financial transfers to the Global South as charitable aid. They frame them as the repayment of an outstanding debt.

Climate debt is what high-emitting industrialised nations owe the Global South for having exhausted the planet's atmospheric carbon space to fund their own development.

Ecological debt is broader. It covers centuries of historical plundering: the extraction of minerals, timber, rubber, and crops, along with the dumping of toxic electronic waste and industrial pollution across developing nations.

Core Demands of International Movements

From local community halls to UN summits, climate justice coalitions rally around six consistent demands:

1. Rapid, Fair Emissions Cuts

The Paris Agreement (2015) commits states to holding warming well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels while pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5 °C. Climate justice movements demand national plans consistent with the tougher 1.5 °C figure, with wealthy countries cutting first and deepest.

2. Common but Differentiated Responsibilities

Industrialised states must provide clean technology and grant-based finance to developing nations, alongside cancelling unjust debts so poorer countries do not spend their national income servicing foreign loans after climate disasters.

3. Human Rights at the Centre

Climate solutions cannot ride roughshod over basic needs. Clean energy transitions must safeguard rights to food, water, and shelter. Clean energy infrastructure, like giant lithium mines or hydroelectric dams, must not trample Indigenous land rights.

4. An End to Fossil Fuels and Extractivism

Governments must stop granting oil and gas exploration licences, end public subsidies to fossil fuel companies, and invest directly in community-owned renewable energy systems.

5. Dedicated Loss and Damage Finance

Polluters must fund repair for irreversible harm. This includes economic damage (smashed bridges, ruined crops, flattened houses) and non-economic loss (submerged burial grounds, lost Indigenous languages, destroyed ecosystems, and displaced communities).

6. Inclusive Democratic Decision-Making

The people most affected—youth, smallholder farmers, trade unions, and Indigenous groups—must sit at the main decision-making tables, blocking fossil fuel lobbyists from scripting international policy.

Strategies for Change: Methods, Knowledge, and Sources

Campaigners pick their methods based on their political power, legal rights, and physical safety. The course highlights seven main strategies:

• Lobbying: Meeting politicians, submitting evidence to parliamentary committees, and helping draft bills.
• Community organising: Knocking on doors, holding local meetings, and uniting neighbours to fight a polluting project or build a community energy cooperative.
• Trade union organising (Just Transition): Securing collective bargaining, retraining, and protected pensions so workers in fossil fuel industries are not abandoned as peat bogs or coal mines close.
• Legal actions: Taking governments or fossil corporations to court to enforce national emissions laws or establish liability for human rights harms.
• Civil disobedience: Peacefully breaking specific rules or laws—such as blocking a road or walking out of school—to disrupt everyday business and spotlight government inaction.
• Boycott: Refusing to buy goods from, work for, or invest in damaging companies, including pushing universities and pension funds to divest from fossil fuels.
• Creative arts expression: Using street theatre, protest banners, music, and online short films to make complex scientific and human issues emotionally relatable.

The Strategic Role of Local Knowledge

Effective campaigns rarely start in academic libraries. They start from lived experience. In the Philippines, artisanal fishers tracked shifts in seasonal winds and fish migration over generations. When communities took major oil firms to the human rights commission, that local knowledge served as empirical testimony, grounding abstract climate science in everyday reality.

Evaluating Movement Evidence

When you research social movements for exam questions or your Action Project Journal, watch out for source reliability:

1. Perspective and bias: Corporate sustainability reports downplay harms; campaign press releases sometimes exaggerate their singular influence. Always check independent sources.
2. Dates and status: Do not mix up an early hearing with a final judgment. In the Philippines, the Commission on Human Rights announced preliminary findings in 2019 but did not issue its final report until May 2022.
3. Missing context: Notice what a source leaves out. A report celebrating a million-person march needs to be balanced by checking whether the government actually amended its energy policy.

Case Study 1: Global North — Fridays for Future

Origins and Context

In August 2018, fifteen-year-old Greta Thunberg sat outside the Swedish parliament (Riksdag) on a solitary school strike holding a hand-painted sign: Skolstrejk för klimatet. Her point was biting in its simplicity: why study for a future that politicians were burning away? The strike went viral, sparking Fridays for Future (FFF). By September 2019, coordinated global strikes brought an estimated four million people onto streets across 150 countries on a single day, with over six million across the full week of action, including tens of thousands of Irish school students.

Demands

• National mitigation plans strictly aligned with the Agreement's 1.5 °C figure.
• An immediate stop to all fossil fuel exploration, investments, and government subsidies.
• Intergenerational equity, giving young people a direct voice in environmental policymaking.

Strategies Deployed

Fridays for Future relied on civil disobedience (unauthorised school strikes) and creative arts expression (protest signs, speeches, digital video campaigns). They later moved into direct parliamentary lobbying and backed youth-led legal actions.

Key Achievements

• Shifting the political agenda: The school strikes pushed climate breakdown from the science pages to prime-time news. In May 2019, Dáil Éireann declared a national climate emergency, making Ireland the second country in the world to do so.
• Shaping policy: Sustained youth pressure helped build European support for the European Green Deal and the binding European Climate Law.
• Legal breakthrough (Neubauer v Germany, 2021):* German youth activists, supported by environmental groups, challenged their federal climate law in court. The Federal Constitutional Court ruled that delaying emissions cuts offloaded drastic sacrifices onto the future, violating the constitutional freedoms of younger generations. The German government had to bring its net-zero target forward from 2050 to 2045.

Limitations

Declaring a climate emergency is symbolic; it does not automatically cut greenhouse gas emissions. European emissions did not fall overnight because of the strikes. Furthermore, early Western media coverage heavily spotlighted white, middle-class European students while ignoring frontline activists doing identical work across the Global South.

Exam Essentials to Memorise

• Base: Sweden (2018), spreading worldwide.
• Two demands: 1.5 °C target alignment; end fossil fuel subsidies.
• Two strategies: Civil disobedience (school walkouts); creative arts and digital messaging.
• Three achievements: Millions mobilized (Sept 2019); Dáil climate emergency declaration (May 2019); Neubauer constitutional court ruling in Germany (2021).
• One limitation: Street protests did not immediately translate into falling national emissions.

Case Study 2: Global North Alternative — The Irish Fossil Fuel Divestment Campaign

Because Ireland is an industrialised Global North economy, Irish domestic campaigns illustrate how local civil society confronts institutional power.

Origins and Context

Between 2016 and 2018, a coalition led by Trócaire, alongside grassroots campaign groups like Not Here Not Anywhere and student unions, campaigned to stop the Irish state from investing public money in fossil fuels.

Demands

• Complete divestment of public funds held in the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund (ISIF) from fossil fuel exploration and extraction companies.
• A permanent, legally binding ban on any future state investments in oil, gas, and coal undertakings.

Strategies Deployed

The coalition combined parliamentary lobbying (drafting legislative amendments and working closely with independent TD Thomas Pringle on a Private Members' Bill) with financial boycott through divestment, backed by petition drives and constituent pressure on local TDs.

Key Achievements

In 2018, the Oireachtas passed the Fossil Fuel Divestment Act 2018. This landmark law made Ireland one of the first countries in the world to statutorily require its national sovereign investment fund to pull public money out of fossil fuel enterprises. The Act required ISIF to divest its holdings in fossil fuel undertakings and barred future investment in them.

Limitations

The legislation applies strictly to public sovereign wealth. It does not stop private commercial banks, investment houses, or multinational funds operating in Ireland from financing fossil fuel projects abroad.

Exam Essentials to Memorise

• Base: Ireland (2016–2018), run by Trócaire and civil society partners.
• Two demands: Total state divestment from fossil fuel companies; a statutory ban on future fossil investments.
• Two strategies: Legislative lobbying; capital boycott (divestment).
• Three achievements: Enactment of the Fossil Fuel Divestment Act 2018; world-first national legislative precedent; mandatory sell-off of ISIF fossil holdings.
• One limitation: Governs only public state funds, leaving private banks unregulated.

Case Study 3: Global South — The Philippine Climate Justice Movement

Origins and Context

The Philippines emits less than 0.5% of annual global greenhouse gases, yet it is one of the most storm-battered nations in the world. In November 2013, Super Typhoon Haiyan (locally called Yolanda) slammed into the central islands with winds exceeding 300 km/h. It claimed over 6,000 lives and displaced four million people. Instead of accepting the destruction as inevitable, survivors, artisanal fishers, farmers, and human rights groups banded together to hold corporate polluters accountable.

Demands

• Corporate liability and climate reparations: Multinational fossil fuel producers must pay for the human rights damage caused by their historical emissions.
• Loss and damage grant funding: Wealthy countries must provide non-repayable grants to help vulnerable communities rebuild and adapt.
• Halting domestic coal: An immediate moratorium on new coal-fired power plants, shifting money toward community-owned solar and micro-hydro grids.

Strategies Deployed

The movement united community organising among typhoon survivors with strategic legal actions before statutory human rights bodies and diplomatic lobbying at UN climate conferences.

Key Achievements

• Landmark human rights inquiry: In 2015, typhoon survivors and Greenpeace Southeast Asia petitioned the Commission on Human Rights of the Philippines (CHR). In May 2022, the CHR published its final inquiry report. It found that 47 of the world's largest investor-owned fossil fuel and cement producers, named in the petition from the Carbon Majors research, hold clear moral and legal responsibility for climate-driven human rights violations. The CHR concluded that affected citizens have valid legal grounds to take these corporations to court for damages.
• Domestic energy block: Community resistance forced the Philippine Department of Energy to declare a national moratorium on new greenfield coal power plants in 2020.
• Securing the UN Loss and Damage Fund: Filipino negotiators and civil society leaders pushed hard within the G77 coalition at COP27 in 2022, helping secure the historic international agreement to establish a dedicated UN Loss and Damage Fund.

Limitations

The CHR is a national human rights body, not a criminal or civil court. It cannot order corporations to pay compensation, freeze company accounts, or jail executives. Moreover, state-owned fossil fuel firms fell outside the inquiry's remit.

Exam Essentials to Memorise

• Base: Philippines (2013–present), led by typhoon survivors, artisanal fishers, and local NGOs.
• Two demands: Corporate liability for Carbon Majors; a halt to domestic coal construction.
• Two strategies: Community organising; strategic human rights petitions.
• Three achievements: CHR landmark inquiry report (2022); national coal moratorium (2020); diplomatic push establishing the UN Loss and Damage Fund at COP27 (2022).
• One limitation: The CHR lacks judicial powers to award financial damages.

Comparing Global North and Global South Movements

Movements across both regions share fundamental goals, but their immediate priorities reflect their differing resources and physical realities.

Do not make the mistake of viewing the Global South as passive victims waiting for help. Frontline communities are leading the intellectual and legal charge—pioneering human rights litigation against the Carbon Majors and forcing the loss and damage agenda into international treaties. Effective global action connects both: youth strikers in the North push their banks to cut off finance, while grassroots groups in the South defend their communities on the ground.

Evaluating Effective Action and Coursework Links

The Leaving Certificate specification identifies six hallmarks of effective climate action. Keep these in mind when answering evaluation questions on the written paper or writing Section A of your Action Project Journal:

1. Collective in nature: Does it organise people together, moving beyond individual habits like recycling or switching light bulbs?
2. Addresses root causes: Does it challenge structural drivers (corporate power, extractivism, fossil fuel dependence) rather than merely managing symptoms?
3. Considers power: Does it identify who holds power (politicians, corporate boards, judges) and apply clear leverage?
4. Based on solidarity: Does it stand with frontline communities most harmed by climate impacts?
5. Empowering and participatory: Does it give ordinary people, especially marginalised groups, an authentic voice and active role?
6. Transforms global inequalities: Does it redistribute resources and help close the gap between high-emitting and low-emitting societies?

Connecting to Your Action Project Journal (Section A)

The 2027 Action Project brief focuses on reducing Ireland's greenhouse gas emissions. In Section A (Research to inform action, 30 marks), you must evaluate an action taken by another group.

• Group chosen: Friends of the Irish Environment (FIE).
• Why chosen: FIE targeted the state's weak mitigation policy using clear, publicly accessible legal records.
• Action taken: Strategic climate litigation (Friends of the Irish Environment v Government of Ireland, 2020, commonly known as Climate Case Ireland), seeking judicial review of the government's 2017 National Mitigation Plan.
• Was it appropriate? Yes. FIE wanted to force the government to write a transparent, legally compliant emissions plan. Because the cabinet had adopted a vague strategy, using the courts to test statutory compliance was a sensible lever.
• Evaluation of success: In July 2020, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down the National Mitigation Plan. The court ruled that the plan was excessively vague and breached the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development Act 2015. While the court declined to create an unwritten constitutional 'right to an environment', the case was an enormous procedural success. The ruling added strong legal and political pressure for the stronger framework that followed, including the legally binding carbon budgets introduced by the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development (Amendment) Act 2021 — though the Act had other drivers too, and emissions did not fall on the day of the judgment.

Key terms

Climate Justice

An ethical approach that views climate change as a crisis of human rights and inequality, highlighting that those who did the least to cause emissions suffer first and worst.

Root Causes

The structural, economic, and political drivers of environmental degradation—such as fossil fuel extraction, corporate lobbying, and endless growth models—rather than surface symptoms.

Extractivism

An economic model that removes raw natural resources (oil, minerals, timber) from an area for export, sending profits elsewhere while leaving behind pollution and social damage.

Common but Differentiated Responsibilities

The principle in international law that all states must tackle global warming, but developed nations must move first and fastest due to their historical emissions and wealth.

Mitigation

Actions that cut or prevent greenhouse gas emissions or expand carbon sinks, such as expanding wind power, insulating homes, or rewetting degraded bogs.

Adaptation

Adjusting human systems and infrastructure to cope with unavoidable climate impacts, such as building coastal flood walls or developing drought-tolerant crops.

Maladaptation

An adaptation measure that accidentally increases vulnerability, shifts climate hazards onto another community, or locks in unsustainable practices.

Loss and Damage

Permanent, unavoidable climate harms that cannot be prevented by mitigation or handled by adaptation, covering both economic and non-economic destruction.

Climate Debt

The historical obligation wealthy, high-emitting countries owe developing nations for using up the safe global atmospheric carbon budget during industrialisation.

Ecological Debt

The cumulative debt industrialised nations owe the Global South for centuries of resource extraction, ecosystem destruction, and unequal waste dumping.

Carbon Majors

A group of investor-owned and state-owned fossil fuel and cement companies responsible for the majority of global industrial greenhouse gas emissions since the Industrial Revolution; the Carbon Majors set includes state-owned producers; the Philippine inquiry examined only the investor-owned companies named in the petition.

Just Transition

A framework that guarantees retraining, secure well-paid jobs, and social protection for workers and communities as high-carbon industries shut down.

Civil Disobedience

The peaceful, deliberate refusal to obey specific laws or institutional rules—such as unauthorized school strikes—to draw public attention to an injustice.

Boycott

A coordinated refusal to buy products from, work for, or hold financial investments in targeted companies to force a change in their conduct.