Relativistic Approach to ‘Climate Justice’ in the Paris Agreement

The Paris Agreement is the first international climate agreement using the term ‘climate justice’ (13th preambular recital of the Paris Agreement). ‘Justice’ means ‘impartial adjustment of conflicting claims’, ‘conformity to truth, fact, or reason’ (Gove 1986, 1228), ‘morally right and fair’, and ‘fair and reasonable’ (Pearsall and Hanks 2001, 992–993). It refers to the moral foundations of conduct, political institutions, distribution, or minimum standards for individual rights (Beitz 1999, 270). Justice has a strong normative component that persists independently of individual convictions.

The idea of objective criteria that define justice has caused and continues to cause heated debates across disciplines, within and beyond the climate context (Gajevic Sayegh 2018; Murphy 2019, 80–82; Mi et al. 2019). This analysis seeks only to clarify the term ‘climate justice’ in the context of the Paris Agreement, not to review one of the biggest questions of the humanities. Still, it should be complex enough to capture the problem of justice in the broader climate context, covering the substantive (distributional) and procedural dimensions of justice.

The justice theory of Amartya Sen (2009) is well suited to understanding the ‘climate justice’ of the Paris Agreement, even though originally, Sen's approach is based on natural persons, not states. First, like the Paris Agreement, Sen recognizes more than one measure for justice (Sen 2009, 239–241, 272–290, 298, 395). Second, his approach does not depend on a final answer to universal justice questions; Sen rather provides orientation on how to increase justice in situations of incomplete information and uncertain weights of different measures of justice (Sen 2009, 259, 266–267, 398–400).