Climate justice

What is climate justice?

Climate justice is about ensuring fairness and equity when tackling climate change and its impacts. Climate action—such as mitigation efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and financing climate adaptation measures—should be the main responsibility of those who contribute the most to global warming: the wealthy, industrialised economies. Climate change impacts people living in fragile and conflict-affected settings the most, yet they have contributed the least to global warming.

Climate justice isn’t just about moral responsibility; as the UN Human Rights Council declared in October 2021, supporting those affected the most is mandatory under international law.

The principles of climate justice

Based on the principles of equity, human rights, and responsibility, climate justice links environmental, economic, social, and intergenerational justice.

Environmental justice
Although climate change concerns everyone, its causes and effects are unevenly spread. The people contributing the least to climate change bear the brunt of the world’s most polluting economies.

Economic justice
A fair distribution of the costs and benefits of transitioning to a low-carbon economy is needed. The costs of climate action should not fall disproportionately on those least able to afford them.

Social justice
Climate policies and programmes have to accommodate the diverse needs and perspectives of all communities, especially those that have been historically marginalised.

Intergenerational justice
Current generations are responsible for ensuring future generations inherit a sustainable, liveable planet.

Cordaid’s approach

Cordaid and its partners have worked in fragile and conflict-affected settings for over 120 years. In the past decade, our programmes have started tackling the impacts of the climate crisis.

In many regions, the impacts of climate change and environmental degradation frustrate efforts to consolidate peace and stability. Floods, deforestation, reduced agricultural land, and extreme weather events displace communities, destroy livelihoods, and feed intercommunal tensions in ways that fuel, deepen, or prolong conflicts.

Climate and conflict hazards are thus increasingly interrelated, as shown by the Climate-Conflict Vulnerability Index.

Over the past years, the connection between the climate crisis, conflict, and fragility has become a determining factor in Cordaid’s work. In this video, a relief worker from our Ethiopian office discusses the challenges the people of Borena are facing with climate change and how this relates to conflict and displacement:

Striving for climate justice in fragile and conflict-affected settings demands a specific approach. The Climate-Peace-Security nexus is about understanding the interlinkages between climate and peace & security. These linkages are now widely acknowledged and increasingly addressed through development cooperation.

This is why Cordaid adopts a climate-transformative approach in all its activities. Science, local knowledge, and the protection of human dignity work in tandem to change behaviours that harm the environment. 

Definitions: ‘Climate crisis’ vs. ‘Climate change’

Words matter. Here’s how Cordaid understands and applies climate-related terminology:

• Climate change: the long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns. Such shifts can be natural, but since the 1800s, human activity has been the main driver, due mainly to the burning of fossil fuels.  
• Climate crisis: the emergency caused by continuing greenhouse gas emissions/ human-driven climate change and global warming, having devastating effects on the earth and humans.
• Climate justice: the need to address the disproportionate effects of climate change impacting the people who contributed the least to emissions and the world’s climate crisis.
• Climate action: measures taken to limit global heating, prevent catastrophic climate breakdown, and limit the effects of the climate crisis, prioritising mitigation and adaptation in poorer regions.
• Climate mitigation actions: measures taken to diminish structural and systemic causes of climate change.
• Climate adaptation actions: measures taken to diminish the negative effects of climate change on people, communities, society and the environment. 

Cordaid’s Climate Policy Brief

Our climate policy is built on 4 distinct strategies:

• Our programme work on supporting viable and inclusive climate
  change adaptation and mitigation activities.
• Our advocacy work in the Netherlands, in Europe, and globally
  with like-minded organisations and networks (see L&A section below).
• The effort to reduce Cordaid’s own carbon footprint and to
  compensate for our remaining carbon emissions by investing
  in fair, inclusive, and sustainable climate action projects
  developed via FairClimateFund.
• Involving our constituency of more than 300,000 donors in our
  work and inviting them to make sustainable lifestyle choices
  that help tackle climate change.

Climate and Health

The climate crisis is intricately connected to major health challenges. According to the WHO, every year, 13 million deaths are linked to avoidable environmental causes. Protecting the environment is protecting the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the earth on which we grow our food to nourish our bodies and lead healthy lives.

In particularly fragile parts of the world, the climate crisis is also a health crisis. Therefore, high-income donor countries and development partners should align with country priorities and long-term plans to contribute to health systems. The key to mitigating the health impacts of a changing climate is to make sure health systems are resilient, especially where climate change is most severe. Devex published our opinion on why financing climate-resilient health systems needs a greater international focus.

Proper funding is needed to strengthen health systems around the world and help them cope with climate change’s impacts. Results-based financing (RBF) is one such funding method that can improve pandemic and epidemic preparedness at the local health level.

Senior health expert Jos Dusseljee explains how results-based financing can help health facilities prepare for changing conditions and outbreak risks as the climate changes.

Climate and Gender

The climate crisis isn’t ‘gender neutral’. In many world regions, women bear the brunt of the crisis. First, they take primary responsibility for securing food, water, and fuel in many parts of the world. Second, climate change is a threat multiplier. It compounds or even escalates existing social, political, and economic tensions, particularly in fragile and conflict-affected settings. In these disaster settings, women are most at risk.

According to UN Women, women are 14 times more likely to die during a disaster than men, and up to 80% of people displaced by climate change are women. The policies and processes developed to address climate change must involve women, who (overwhelmingly) have less access to resources and decision-making processes which could help them adapt to the effects of climate change.

The Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance wrote a report on this, Women Speak: The Lived Nexus Between Climate, Gender, and Security.

Success story: Birds, Bees & Business

Millions of migratory birds fly yearly from the Netherlands to West Africa, where they spend the winter among the shea trees. The fruits of these trees are used to make shea butter, also known as ‘Women’s Gold’, which is used in skincare products all over the world.

However, this ecosystem faces desertification due to climate change, ‘slash and burn’ agriculture, grazing, and illegal wood chopping. Soils have become less fertile and more prone to erosion, endangering the shea tree and its winter tenants.

An estimated 20 million women are directly involved in the shea sector in West and East Africa. Even though they work at the beginning of the production chain, many are not (yet) connected to global supply chains.

That’s where Birds, Bees & Business comes in. Through the project, 440,000 trees (including shea) are planted to attract bees, insects, and birds. By creating a diverse, mosaic landscape in Burkina Faso, biodiversity can be restored, and this helps the shea trees flourish.

In tandem, the project helps women organise themselves into cooperatives to ensure the quality of their shea butter meets international standards and find ways to connect with regional and international markets, where they will receive a fair price for their products.

Lobby & Advocacy

In the countries where Cordaid operates, from Yemen to South Sudan, climate change is already causing major problems, such as soil depletion, extreme drought and floods. This affects the lives of many millions of people.

That’s why Cordaid joins citizens, social movements, faith groups, and local and international civil society organisations to call on world leaders to tackle the climate & ecological crisis. To achieve climate justice, Cordaid advocates for:

• climate-resilient agri-food systems;
• a fair transition to zero-carbon economies;
• fair and balanced climate finance;
• better protection of internally displaced people;
• gender equality in all climate policies, strategies & actions;
• operationalisation of the Loss and Damage Fund.

Loss and Damage Fund

COP27 (2022) agreed to new financing schemes for climate damage, including establishing a Climate Damage Fund. Alongside 16 other Dutch development organisations, we signed a letter to Dutch parliamentarians outlining recommendations on how the Netherlands can take a leading role in upcoming negotiations on the design of these financing schemes for climate damage:

Non-economic Loss and damage (NELD)

Beyond calling for the operationalisation of the Loss and Damage Fund, many networks are advocating for the acknowledgement of non-economic losses and damages (NELDs) at COP28. Caritas Internationalis defines NELDs as ‘loss of, or damage to, things which people value and that cannot be replaced or repaired through market transactions’.

Fossielvrij NL

The industrial world needs to radically change course so that global CO2 emissions are reduced substantially. To this end, subsidies and investments in fossil industries must be phased out as soon as possible. Large financial institutions like ING have a key position in this.

Cordaid has joined the #INGFossielvrij appeal to demand that the Dutch bank stop financing oil, coal, and gas. ING continues to engage in dialogue. Follow the updates on this campaign and sign the petition:

Our key partners, networks and subsidiaries

Our mission is to advocate for climate justice, limit global warming, and combat the adverse effects of climate change alongside those most affected. Partnerships and alliances are critical for that. Together, we can and must act.

Faith-based networks

Working in alliances with integrated approaches is promoted by the Christian traditions Cordaid is rooted in, something we also recognise in other faith traditions and worldviews. Pope Francis’s recent encyclic highlights the necessity of such global alliances to achieve climate justice: “…a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in debates on climate change and the environment, to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.”

These are the faith-based networks that strive for climate justice and of which Cordaid is a member:

FairClimateFund

FairClimateFund is a social venture established in 2009, of which Cordaid is the sole shareholder. Its mission is to work towards a fair climate in which those who contribute most to climate change invest in CO₂ reduction projects that benefit people most vulnerable to its effects.

Together with its partners, FairClimateFund focuses on sustainable household energy projects and nature-based solutions. These climate projects reduce CO₂ emissions and deforestation and improve the living conditions of the communities.

FairClimateFund also advocates for a ‘Fair Race to Net-Zero’, to ensure that the transition to a net zero carbon economy is just. Read their position paper here.

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