In my humble opinion, there really isn’t anything more important than fairness. And I know I’m not alone: it’s a deep sense of injustice that provides the animating force for so much climate campaigning.
The people who have done the least to cause climate change are so often the ones first in line when it comes to extreme weather and climate impacts. This is certainly true internationally, with entire countries placed at greater risk because of the actions of people who live in other, wealthier parts of the world.
But it’s also true domestically.
In a country like the UK, marked by vast disparities in wealth and income, the fairness of climate policies often comes down to a ‘postcode lottery’: where you live determines the chance you’ll get hit hardest by not only the impacts of climate change but by the costs of climate solutions. That’s why I’m so glad to be joining the JUST Centre as a Simon Industrial Professional Fellow on behalf of Climate Barometer.
The JUST Centre starts from the premise that inequality runs through climate policy like the lettering in a stick of rock.
If your energy bills are outpacing your income, then installing solar panels may not yet be viable. If you have to drive around a city - for a mobile hairdressing job, or a caring role - then public transport may not always be doable.
This doesn’t mean sustainable energy or transport choices are only for the well-off. But it does mean sustainable energy and transport choices need to be made more affordable for all. The JUST Centre is focused on exactly this challenge, and examines sustainability through a place-based lens.
Local opposition to poorly designed climate policies has too often been derided as NIMBYism. But what if it was the T&Cs of the policies themselves, rather than their local ‘opponents’ who were in the wrong?
Titled ‘When ‘popular’ climate policies don’t land’, our collaboration will involve linking national public opinion data, including Climate Barometer’s bi-annual public and MP surveys, with the hyper-local data that the JUST Centre team is collecting across the North of England.
Focusing on some key locations in the regions the JUST Centre team is working in, we’ll connect with the local stakeholders who know their communities and constituents the best, engage with wider research on contestation around local climate policies, and consult with climate groups increasingly operating across the national-local divide.
The case studies produced will focus on the drivers of local politics around the energy transition, and pilot a method of layering local and national data in this way, that could be applied across the country.
I’m hoping to link up not only with JUST Centre researchers but also place-based specialists like the Local Storytelling Exchange to dig deeper into the lived reality of climate policies ‘on the ground’ and help inform policy making that works in practice as well as in principle.
Get in touch if this sounds of interest for your work, or you’d like to connect on any of it.
