ABSTRACT
Climate change will result in an increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events such as droughts, heatwaves and floods. These events cause death, ill-health, hunger, displacement and social dislocation. Lives and livelihoods are put at risk and lost. These impacts on life and well-being will be unevenly distributed. Drought, heatwave and floods are not new. Neither are the questions of justice raised by the uneven impacts of these events (Blaikie et al., 1994; Klinenberg, 2002). Floods, heatwaves and droughts have a long history quite independent of human-induced climate change. However, with climate change their frequency and intensity will increase. This chapter will address questions concerned with the identification of those individuals and communities who will be most disadvantaged by climate change. Doing so matters for climate adaptation policy since it has implications for how responses can be best focused on those who need them most. Identification of climate disadvantage also matters for the framing of climate justice. It turns out that within a society, those most disadvantaged by climate impacts are also typically among those who are least responsible for the emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs), have least voice and power in framing and shaping decisions, and are often most adversely affected by policy responses to climate change. These different dimensions of inequality produce compounded injustices. This chapter defends a particular multi-dimensional approach to climate disadvantage. Both the dimensions of well-being that are put at risk by climate change and the personal, environmental and social factors that determine how badly different groups are affected by climate change are plural. One important consequence of looking at climate disadvantage in this multi-dimensional way is to refocus considerations of justice and climate change to include questions of class, inequality, gender and ethnicity that are lost in much of the standard academic and policy discussion on climate change that focus only or primarily on maldistributions across nations and generations.
