Climate justice and the temporalities of social-ecological change

The proposition that intra- and inter-generational equity are fundamental to ecological and economic wellbeing was central to the concept of sustainability as popularised by the 1987 Brundtland Report. In contrast with the watering down of this proposition by notions such as ‘the triple bottom line’, discourses of climate justice have been mobilized to refocus attention on more fundamental equity issues implicated both inclimate change and in attempts to mitigate it. This paper argues that this refocussing has, however, for the most part been spatial; that is, it has focussed on intra-generational equity issues associated with the distribution of climate and policy-related impacts among populations and territories. It goes on argue that avoiding and/or adapting to dangerous socio-environmental transformation requires us to engage more reflexively with the conceptual frameworks, technologies and projects through which we attempt to comprehend and influence the temporal dynamics of climate and other earth-system processes. Climate modelling and scenario building, for example, has proven a powerful means through which to comprehend the temporality of climate change; to bring the future into the present in order to calculate responsibilities and plan responses. The focus of IPCC assessments on scenario building has generated a sense of urgency around mitigating greenhouse gas emissions that has tended, however, to crowd out serious attention to adaptation, other disruptions to earth-system processes such as biodiversity loss, and the possibility that climate will change in ways that undermine predominantly market-based policy responses. Scenario-dependence contributes to a disjuncture between discourses of future climate change and peoples’ experience of adapting to an already variable climate. The challenge is to bring these temporalities together in meaningful ways and thus to avoid false choices between adaptation and mitigation.