Ecological Justice in the Greenhouse

To date, the international community’s response to the problem of global climate changehas been preoccupied with concerns of markets, profit and efficiency, rather than social andenvironmental justice. The absence of explicit operational commitments to justice ininternational efforts to realize a stable future particularly cloud any possibility of global support for the fledgling market-based management approaches that were created in the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 to implement the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC). Because the Kyoto market mechanisms aim to transform the atmosphere from a common resource, where it is available to all in perpetuity, into private property, the social and ecological implications of global negotiations cannot be ignored. Our assessment of the impacts of an atmospheric property system on social and environmental justice lead us to reject proposed market-based strategies and to support, instead, an equity- and sustainability-based policy response to the prospect of climate change