Introduction

Data convey information about greenhouse gas emissions, financial flows, and climate impacts. Such information is used to give meaning to the unfolding climate crisis and global efforts to respond to it. Moreover, data are assumed to increase transparency and accountability (see Gupta and van Asselt 2019), and related reporting and disclosure mechanisms work to facilitate continuous engagement with relevant governance fora and processes (Heyvaert 2018, 110–111). Importantly, in addition to supporting meaningmaking, transparency, accountability, and engagement, data themselves have emerged as a central means of climate change governance. They have become operational elements of institutionalized mobilization, organizing, and steering. At the global level, the United Nations (UN) Climate Change Secretariat, for example, relies on data to strategically structure governance processes, animate implementation activity, and coordinate between actor groups (Mai and Elsässer 2022), and at the transnational level, cross-border climate governance initiatives have begun to collect local climate data to position cities as central players in climate change governance (Mai 2024). Thus, rather than merely supporting or being the outputs of governance processes, data, in a very real sense, do governing work. They constitute and restructure relations between actors, create and sustain novel forms of power and authority, and disrupt existing modes of claiming legitimacy (see Johns 2021). This chapter refers to such governing work as the ‘datafication’ of climate change governance. As data transform ‘what counts as known, probable, certain, and in the process’ (Hong 2020, 1), they powerfully reconfigure existing and give rise to alternative modalities for governing.

In Africa, heads of government and civil society representatives have linked climate resilience to the urgent need to address the continent's debt crisis. The African Leaders Nairobi Declaration on Climate Change has called for a restructuring and relief from the debt as being essential to achieving climate goals, along with access to health and education (African Union 2023). A 2023 statement clarifies that Africa is bearing the social and economic brunt of global warming despite not being responsible for it. Dealing with the catastrophic effects of climate change on lives, livelihoods, and economies through loans is further exacerbating the ‘great financial divide’ between wealthy nations and African countries. This is neither sustainable nor just.

These negotiations reflect historical processes of social exclusion, economic dominance, and political control that have marginalized not just specific communities but also entire geographies. The climate discourse is not spared from this and remains vulnerable to reproducing inequities. The most recent reflection of this is Papua New Guinea's decision to withdraw from the 29th Climate Conference of Parties (COP29) calling it a ‘total waste of time’ (Bush 2024), as there remains inaction on the part of big emitters to reform the economic models to reduce emissions and rich nations to ensure _nancing.

Climate Justice seeks that the climate discourse reject exclusion and recognize marginalization of people and places. In doing so, it creates a complex process of embedding questions of power, hierarchy, fairness, and relief as necessary to understand climate change.

Introduction

India ranks seventh in the 2021 Global Climate Risk Index (Germanwatch 2021), and in 2017, it was the second most-affected country in terms of casualties related to extreme weather (Germanwatch 2017). Water pollution, food and water shortages (Niti Aayog 2019), waste management, and biodiversity loss (Kumari, Wate, and Anil 2014, 107) are just some of India's problems. Its large population coupled with a severe economic dependency on agriculture (FAO 2023) exposes it to severe vulnerabilities. Owing to its geography and high economic dependence on climate-sensitive sectors, India is one of countries most vulnerable to climate change (Harjeet Singh 2015). ‘Food security of India may be at risk in the future due to the threat of climate change leading to an increase in the frequency and intensity of droughts and floods, thereby affecting production of small and marginal farms.’ (Ministry of Environment and Forest 2009, 78). As a protector of people's rights, Indian courts are legally bound to protect the environment.

The chapter's research method involves an analysis of the literature and review of the judicial precedent. The chapter aims to compare the judicial precedents of the Supreme Court of India and the National Green Tribunal (NGT) to understand the evolution of their response to environmental litigation.

Article 48A in the Constitution of India obliges the government to protect the environment and conserve the natural resources of the country.

Introduction

While initially piloted as the technology behind cryptocurrencies, the distributed ledger technology underlying Bitcoin, that is, blockchain, now extends to use cases beyond mere virtual currencies. Technologists and blockchain evangelists have been quick to overlook the excessive carbon footprint of Bitcoin, the world's first cryptocurrency, and have attempted to expand the use cases of blockchain to areas beyond virtual currencies, finance, and payments (Huang, O’Neill, and Tabuchi 2021). This technology that brings together characteristics of decentralization, peer-to-peer computing, hash functions, asymmetric public–private key cryptography, and consensus algorithms to form a shared, immutable, and non-repudiable database is considered to have tremendous potential in fields such as identity and access management, healthcare, supply chain tracking, climate change, and so on (De Filippi and Wright 2018). Therefore, unsurprisingly, blockchain technology is now touted as the Panglossian solution to a myriad of problems ranging from financial inclusion to aid and climate change (Marke 2018).

This chapter attempts to ascertain whether the claims of blockchain as a solutionist technology for climate change, in reality, reflect and entrench the incumbent power asymmetries and the global digital divide in the guise of disintermediation and collective capitalism. This chapter applies the extant concepts of techno-colonialism and data colonialism to critically examine blockchain-based initiatives in the climate change sector.

Climate change has been duly recognized as a common concern of humankind (UNGA 1988). Nevertheless, its effects are not commonly shared. Instead, marginalized individuals, especially women in the Global South,1 have been primarily acknowledged to bear the brunt of climate degradation despite being less responsible for its advancement than individuals and nations in the Global North (UNGA 1992, Principle 7; Kakota et al. 2011; Singh, Feroze, and Ray 2013; Pearse 2017; MacGregor 2017). Against this background, efforts for addressing the differentiated impacts of climate change on the lives and livelihoods of Southern women have been mobilized at the international level, including through the issuing of dedicated decisions and programmes for action under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) (see, among others, COP of the UNFCCC 2010, 2017, 2021).

Within this broader debate, however, feminists have been wary that a disproportionate focus on the specific vulnerability of women to climate change can produce inadvertent effects in terms of policy discourse, negotiation, and design (see MacGregor 2009; Arora-Jonsson 2011; Resurreccion 2013; MacGregor 2017). For instance, feminist scholars have highlighted that this narrative has limited feminist transnational activism on climate change by fixating the frames of reference for women as poor subjects more vulnerable to the impacts and risks of climate change (MacGregor 2009; Arora-Jonsson 2011; Resurreccion 2013; MacGregor 2017).

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).

Introduction

Climate change poses a formidable challenge in the 21st century, giving rise to complex issues of justice and equity within and between generations, as well as across global and economic divides (Doussa, Corkery, and Chartres 2007). Those least responsible for climate change often suffer the most from its impacts, with the world's poorest and lowest carbon-emitting countries facing heightened vulnerability. This exacerbates existing inequalities and disproportionately affects the poor, the disadvantaged, indigenous people, immigrants, and women—groups that are among the first to be impacted and the least equipped to adapt to a changing climate (Klein and Stefoff 2021; Kaur 2020).

The consequences of climate change manifest in more erratic and extreme weather patterns, resulting in chronic water, food, and financial insecurity for millions. This crisis further propels individuals into poverty, enflames conflict over depleting natural resources, forces migration, and compounds pre-existing gender discrimination (Matekair and Carey 2022).

Women, in particular, experience severe impacts on their livelihoods due to existing gender relations, including increased tensions within families and increased instances of gender-based violence. Droughts and flooding resulting from climate change contribute to food insecurity, pushing women and girls further into poverty and exposing them to transactional sex for goods, human trafficking for commercial sexual exploitation, and child and forced marriages (Njikho 2020).

Setting the Scene: Context in Snapshots from 2022, 2023, and 1900

Badin, Sindh, September 2022: She slaps her scrawny toddler across the face while she balances an infant on her frail hip. Tempers are running high in this building—sounds of shouting, slapping, screaming, and crying are recurring. It is a government school in the district of Badin, Sindh province, Pakistan. The school building serves as a shelter for flood affectees. Meals, medicines, and other aid are distributed sporadically by philanthropic initiatives, military men, political workers, religious groups, local landlords, or civil administrators. The food often arrives stale and causes illness. Approximately a thousand people seek refuge in a building whose sanitation facilities cannot keep pace. Some wish they had died instead of ending up here, while others choose to pick cotton from flooded fields, standing in toxic water for a higher wage, to try and escape this shelter.

Karachi, Sindh, August 2023: She works in the Korangi Industrial Area at a factory producing garments for a global clothing brand. She lives with her family in the Ibrahim Hyderi area of Karachi. Many of her neighbours are fisherfolk (Idrees, 2021). She also comes from a fishing community in Badin. Her family has not been fishing for over a generation. Water is either syphoned off by canals, barrages, and dams upstream, or polluted by untreated industrial waste. Fish are dying. Meanwhile, intimidation by Rangers, the Coast Guard (Shah 2005) and the Fisheries Department (Ahmad 2021) are thriving. In search of a livelihood, her family moved to Karachi years ago.

Introduction

The growing relevance of global administrative structures within transnational law is not an immediate space in which one would seek climate justice. The constraints of these structures have, in the past, prevented states from being able to achieve environmentally motivated regulatory changes. There are significant examples of corporate actors using investment treaties to protect their interests in the face of states’ environmentally focused law-making. However, there is a growing awareness of the environment in both treaty language and arbitral decisions in international investment law. An opening may be emerging for climate justice to extend into these global regulatory frameworks and even be elevated by the systems that had once constrained it. This chapter attempts to identify these openings.

Climate action, in its limited (albeit growing) possibilities within existing legal frameworks, is typically manifested by private actors bringing claims based on global, regional, or local climate concerns to courts. Despite the decidedly global nature of the issue, the litigation options are more common at the local and regional levels because of the laws available and jurisdictional limitations. Climate justice is often realized in domestic courts, applying local laws but often framed around broader international commitments. Many of these claims brought in the past years involve transnational litigants or issues, attempting to expose states’ or companies’ failures to implement environmentally sound policies (see infra chapter 12, Julia Stefanello Pires, ‘Leading Climate Cases Against Corporate Actors: Understanding Business Accountability for Human Rights Impacts Related to Climate Change’; for example, Milieudefensie et al. v Royal Dutch Shell plc., C/09/571932 / HA ZA 19-379, 26 May 2021; Urgenda Foundation v State of the Netherlands, HA ZA C/09/00456689, 13 January 2020).