Sharing Our Earth: Focus on Climate - seminar by Joyeeta Gupta

Without a just approach it will be impossible to address climate change. Just approaches are needed within rich and poor countries and between them. This presentation presents the overlapping climate injustices over the last thirty years including highlighting the challenge of stranded assets and resources. Addressing climate change requires a radical change to how we run our economies and our societies. Like climate change, water, biosphere, nutrients and aerosols have safe boundaries beyond which irreversible changes occur. But they also have just boundaries that reduce significant harm for people. At present we are outside these boundaries. And we have not yet met the minimum needs of people worldwide. Meeting the minimum needs of people worldwide has a significant pressure on the Earth Systems. By calculating this pressure using the same units as the boundaries we can quantify the corridor in between. 

Our research shows that meeting the minimum needs of the poorest has a pressure equivalent to the pressure of the top four percent. It is urgent that we first meet the minimum needs of all people and then reallocate the remaining ‘ecospace’ – or environmental utilization space. But this requires a radical transformation. Addressing climate change in the context of all these other environmental challenges requires us to challenge the way our societies are run. It requires us to move away from rational actor models to social practice models – it requires us to think about how we share our Earth. It requires us to think about global Constitutionalism.

Joyeeta Gupta is Professor of Environment and Development of the Global South at the University of Amsterdam and Professor of Law and Policy in Water Resources and Environment at IHE Delft. She is also a member of the Earth Commission's working group on transformations. As such, she co-chaired ground-breaking research warning governments and civil society that the planet will only be able to support basic living standards for all if economic systems change dramatically. The research, co-authored by 60 leading natural and social scientists, was published in Lancet Planetary Health earlier this year.