Uneven Earth: Policies and Governance for a Just and Sustainable World

A third-generation Bangladeshi fisherman, now a climate refugee, ekes out a living in one of Dhaka’s five thousand slums, hundreds of kilometres from the sea. A mother comforts her child whose lungs are choked with poisoned dust from abandoned gold mines across the South African Rand. A young boy sorts through electronic waste with his bare hands in Agbogbloshie, Ghana one of the ten most polluted sites in the world, where some waste pickers die of cancer in their twenties. These living testimonies illustrate the unequal impact of the climate and ecological crises.

They show that while the burden of climate and environmental breakdown will impact everyone on the planet, some will bear it more heavily than others. While their languages, cultures, and histories differ, their stories tell a collective tale of how the costs of pollution, climate change, and biodiversity loss hit communities and people experiencing the sharp edges of inequalities, the hardest. After the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos in January 2024, Fight Inequality Alliance noted that while ‘economic elites talk about rebuilding trust, the people talk about system change’, the deep changes required to address the crises already impacting those ‘at the frontlines of inequality around the world.’

Over the last three decades, the message on the climate crisis has become more urgent: Act now or face an increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather. With an ever-narrowing window of opportunity to mitigate and adapt to the impacts of climate change globally, commitments and actions remain wholly insufficient to avert a climate catastrophe. Yet not all countries and people have contributed equally to climate change. But those who have contributed the least will face the greatest consequences.

Uneven Earth, Unequal Impacts

Given that the organisation of human life, our economies and societies, is fundamentally underpinned by the stability, health, and resilience of nature, inaction on the ecological crisis seems outright irrational. Yet nature is disappearing at an alarming rate. A global assessment of planetary health found that one million plant and animal species are at risk of extinction and over 75% of Earth’s land areas are substantially degraded, putting humanity’s shared future at risk. Even more alarmingly, the world continues to bankroll this extinction, subsidising the destruction of nature to the tune of $1.8 trillion every year. After a half-century of biodiversity and environment policymaking, only a few countries abide by these rules and even fewer polluters actually pay. This is despite the fact that every national priority: jobs, health, food, and water, for instance, will be impacted if nature recedes.

Furthermore, those who face multiple, intersecting forms of inequalities, discrimination, or marginalisation including, among others, discrimination on the basis of gender, age, income, class, or race, are likely to be disproportionally affected by climate and ecological breakdown. But, as the Environmental Justice Foundation asserts, these existing inequalities are rooted in and reinforced by ‘social, cultural, economic, historical, and political contexts, relations and practices’ that continue to shape the distribution of and access to resources and power.

One example of a climate and ecological injustice is the potential unsustainability of the clean energy transition. The transition from fossil fuel to clean energy will require more than three billion tons of metals and minerals over the next 30 years according to the World Bank. We will need them to power and manufacture the renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies so critical to climate action. But communities and activists, concerned about a repetition of the well-documented social and environmental impacts of mining, are sounding alarm bells. They are calling for a just energy transition — one that ‘doesn’t further entrench the same extractivist practices that have caused the climate emergency in the first place, nor one in which the health of certain communities is sacrificed to allow for [the] continued over-consumption of others’.

Therefore, climate and nature action need to recognise these uneven impacts and prevent and tackle rather than reproduce inequalities. Energy transitions need to restore trust rather than erode it further. This requires policies and ideas that connect the climate and inequality agendas and deliver integrated and inclusive approaches to policymaking and governance.

Eco-Social Policy Transformations

Whilst ten years ago green policymaking had only just started to make some reference to social inclusion, equity and justice, today, most countries aspire to develop climate and nature policies that deliver social justice outcomes. No country yet exemplifies fully integrated and transformative eco-social policymaking, but many are heading in the right direction. 

One of these countries is Spain, whose just transition policy centres on the integration of equity in climate action, ensuring that vulnerable and impacted groups in society, such as workers in sectors impacted by economic transitions, communities at the frontline of climate impacts, and marginalised and vulnerable groups, have a say and a stake in climate response measures. Similarly, sectoral economic and industry transitions – such as Morocco’s renewable energy plans, are developing policies and regulations to ensure that local people benefit, not only from the energy but the jobs and services emerging from green transitions. And globally, climate citizens’ assemblies and people’s plans for nature, such as those in France and the UK, are being convened for citizens to learn about, discuss, and make recommendations for a whole-of-society transition to a just and sustainable world.

As governments, institutions, and businesses broadly recognise the need for addressing inequality in climate and environmental policy, they are increasingly developing socially transformative policies and innovations that address inequalities and offer solutions that can advance both the green and equality agendas, proving that green can be fair. The Green Economy Tracker, produced through a collaborative process among civil society actors, currently tracks 21 policies that are driving change towards a safer and sustainable future. It shows that eco-social policies already exist around the world, can drive systemic change in economies, and most importantly of all are working.

Moving Towards a Social Contract for a Just and Sustainable Future

Sustainability transformations thinking and practice has thankfully evolved from the ‘flat earth’ thinking where governance and policymaking were impervious to inequalities. It is now rooted in ideas and actions that recognise that growing and intersecting inequalities and injustices, such as extreme wealth, indecent work, or racism, scar and scour the landscapes and seascapes of our planet.

The emergence of strategic policies and plans, such as green new deals, just transition strategies, and net zero and nature-positive pledges, and new institutions such as climate assemblies, or climate committees, illustrate this eco-social turn. They reflect not only the ambitious societal and economic transformations needed but also the centrality of the social mandate to halt climate and ecological breakdown. At the core of the transformation is a growing movement engaging afresh with the social contract as a basis for reframing and re-imagining a more inclusive and equitable society where policy and governance address the climate crisis, bridge the ecological divide and fight inequality. More of this is needed.

The views expressed in this post are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity programme, the International Inequalities Institute, or the London School of Economics and Political Science.