Megan Blomfield's new book on climate justice and natural resource rights - Global Justice, Natural Resources, and Climate Change - has been published by Oxford University Press.
To address climate change fairly, many conflicting claims over natural resources must be balanced against one another. For example, claims to continue exploiting fossil fuels and using the atmosphere as a dump for greenhouse gases must be weighed against claims for land and other resources to be protected from climate impacts.
This makes climate change an instance of a broader, more enduring and – for many – all too familiar problem: the problem of human conflict over how the natural world should be cared for, protected, shared, used and managed.
This book develops a new theory of global egalitarianism concerning natural resources, rejecting both state sovereignty over resources and calls to divide the world’s resources into equal shares.
This account is then used to examine the problem of climate change, considering questions such as who should be permitted to emit greenhouse gases and who can be held responsible for the unavoided impacts of climate change.