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6
Overview
What are the choices of climate action that are implemented, by which actors, and
with what effects and consequences? In this chapter we highlight distributional
impacts of some climate mitigation options. It is well-known that insufficient climate
mitigation measures today will have negative impacts for future generations. However,
it is often not known that the choices of measures also have serious distributional
impacts among people who live today. Nevertheless, some governments in the Global
North are eager to outsource climate mitigation to countries in the Global South,
and forest-based climate mitigation is a common example of this.
In this chapter, we present a case study of such outsourcing from Norway to
Tanzania, and we examine consequences as well as causes. We look at climate
mitigation choices in terms of what is said and written about these choices in leading
discourses, and we compare claims about the various practices with our own studies
that examine aspects of the actual practices and reasons why they were chosen for
climate mitigation. We also introduce the notion of climate justice, which we discuss
in relation to specific climate options.
6.1 The Climate Crisis
Each country has its own history of climate emissions from the industrial revolution to the present. CO 2 is the gas that provides the largest contribution to the
greenhouse effect. Historical contributions to greenhouse gas emissions since the
mid-nineteenth century accumulate in the atmosphere and cause temperatures to
increase. In the last few decades and for the first time in 800,000 years, the CO 2
content in the atmosphere has exceeded 300 parts per million, and the last few
years it has even passed 400 parts per million (Ritchie and Roser 2017/2019).
The carbon budget reflects the remaining emissions that can be made without
causing the global temperature to pass 1.5 or 2 °C. The industrialized nations in the
Global North are responsible for enormous historical emissions of climate gases,
while China, India and other more recently industrialized countries have modest
historical emissions, but huge increases during the last decades. People who live in
absolute poverty in either low or medium income countries have, however, scarcely
contributed to the climate crisis (. Fig. 6.1).
6.2 Choices of Emission Cuts and Climate Justice in Time
and Space
Climate justice is a subfield of the normative tradition of environmental justice
that we introduced in 7 Chap. 2. We argue that ‘temporal’ and ‘spatial’ justices are
two principal dimensions of climate justice (Svarstad 2021). These two dimensions
together provide climate justice in line with the definition by the Brundtland
Commission (WCED 1987) of sustainable development as development that meets
Chapter 6 · Climate Mitigation Choices: Reducing Deforestation ...
6
Overview
What are the choices of climate action that are implemented, by which actors, and
with what effects and consequences? In this chapter we highlight distributional
impacts of some climate mitigation options. It is well-known that insufficient climate
mitigation measures today will have negative impacts for future generations. However,
it is often not known that the choices of measures also have serious distributional
impacts among people who live today. Nevertheless, some governments in the Global
North are eager to outsource climate mitigation to countries in the Global South,
and forest-based climate mitigation is a common example of this.
In this chapter, we present a case study of such outsourcing from Norway to
Tanzania, and we examine consequences as well as causes. We look at climate
mitigation choices in terms of what is said and written about these choices in leading
discourses, and we compare claims about the various practices with our own studies
that examine aspects of the actual practices and reasons why they were chosen for
climate mitigation. We also introduce the notion of climate justice, which we discuss
in relation to specific climate options.
6.1 The Climate Crisis
Each country has its own history of climate emissions from the industrial revolution to the present. CO 2 is the gas that provides the largest contribution to the
greenhouse effect. Historical contributions to greenhouse gas emissions since the
mid-nineteenth century accumulate in the atmosphere and cause temperatures to
increase. In the last few decades and for the first time in 800,000 years, the CO 2
content in the atmosphere has exceeded 300 parts per million, and the last few
years it has even passed 400 parts per million (Ritchie and Roser 2017/2019).
The carbon budget reflects the remaining emissions that can be made without
causing the global temperature to pass 1.5 or 2 °C. The industrialized nations in the
Global North are responsible for enormous historical emissions of climate gases,
while China, India and other more recently industrialized countries have modest
historical emissions, but huge increases during the last decades. People who live in
absolute poverty in either low or medium income countries have, however, scarcely
contributed to the climate crisis (. Fig. 6.1).
6.2 Choices of Emission Cuts and Climate Justice in Time
and Space
Climate justice is a subfield of the normative tradition of environmental justice
that we introduced in 7 Chap. 2. We argue that ‘temporal’ and ‘spatial’ justices are
two principal dimensions of climate justice (Svarstad 2021). These two dimensions
together provide climate justice in line with the definition by the Brundtland
Commission (WCED 1987) of sustainable development as development that meets
Chapter 6 · Climate Mitigation Choices: Reducing Deforestation ...