ABSTRACT
Climate justice scholars have called for equity to serve as a guiding ideal in international responses to climate change, typically noting that the countries and peoples most vulnerable to climate change are often among the least responsible for causing it. Typically, vulnerability to climate change has been associated with claims on international adaptation finance to facilitate vulnerability reduction, but extreme vulnerability (i.e. a very high impact on social and economic systems of climate variation) may resist standard adaptation measures. Whereas extreme vulnerability has in the climate justice literature been associated primarily with small island states or coastal regions that are vulnerable to sea level rise, in sub-Saharan Africa, it challenges the notions of how vulnerability is to be treated under equity norms, since it involves disruption to different systems and requires different kinds of remedies. Here, I consider how sub-Saharan Africa's vulnerabilities compare and contrast with those of more commonly theorised regions or peoples and propose several ways of accommodating the unique nature of its dependence on a stable climate system.
