Sustainability Academy: Justice in a Just Transition

COVID 19 further exposed the inequalities between the global North and South. The North spent about $16 trillion on COVID but has been unwilling to follow through with the $100 billion commitment to mitigate the climate crises that was made a decade ago. It is on record that for every $1 sent as aid to the global South, the global North gets $24 in return – leading to increased wealth for the rich by a third during the pandemic, while others have become even more impoverished.

The renewable energy transition being proposed, as good as it sounds will still end up at making more energy available to the global North, where citizens still consume 800X more energy than those of the global South.

For there to be justice in the proposed transition, the anchor should be on these four tests: Does the energy transition commit us to limiting temperatures to 1.5 degrees? Does it tackle economic inequality by ensuring everyone has a right to a living wage, social protection, free and universal public services? Does it put wellbeing and guarantee everyone the right to live with dignity, ahead of unsustainable growth and extractivism? Does it actively undo the embedded systems of injustice such as racism, patriarchy, racial economic systems?

This academy session will examine the need to decentralize energy systems, locating it within the circular economy. The session will also shine light on and unmasked the falsehood of some of the proposed solutions to the impacts of climate change while proposing a pathway to the urgently needed just transition, exploring solutions that are people-centered as well as in harmony with nature.

It will also critically weigh the proposed pathway to the transition against the four tests as proposed by Asad Rehman, making bare the need to not only view the climate crises from the perspective of people but of nature, recognizing its rights and that of the planet as a whole.