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climate change ethics

Climate change ethics is a field of study that explores the moral aspects of climate change. Climate change is often studied and addressed by scientists, economists, and policymakers in value neutral ways. However, philosophers such as Stephen M. Gardiner and the scientific authors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), argue that decisions related to climate change are moral issues and involve value judgment. Climate change involves difficult moral questions relating to global inequality and human development, who bears responsibility for past emissions, as well as the role of future generations, personal responsibility and many more. The two main ethical implications of climate change are related to its effects. The causes and effects of climate change are unrelated in time and space. Anthropogenic climate change is caused mainly by humans burning fossil fuels. The primary beneficiaries of fossil fuel burning are developed countries whereas the majority of climate impacts will be felt by the developing world. Further, climate change occurs on timescales much greater than a single generation of the human population, causing conflict between economic and political interests which are products of society and the interests of future people—an ethical and moral concept. Beginnings Climate change has become a concern for a number of disciplines due to its potentially catastrophic impacts on environmental systems, wildlife, nature, and humans. Climate change poses a serious threat to the global economy as economic development, especially in the West, has been largely dependent on the extraction and burning of fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution. Burning fossil fuels increases the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere which is the primary driver of current global anthropogenic climate change. This notion has led to the study of the economics of climate change. Climate change is also a deeply political issue as there are disagreements among actors on whether and to what extent society should act on climate change. Economics is insufficient to guide policymaking alone, however, as it is only capable making predictions regarding how different policy decisions will affect the economy and how to proceed along those different pathways; it cannot tell us which pathway to choose, that is determined by which values we act on as a society. Because of this, some philosophers have argued that climate change is “fundamentally an ethical issue” which raises questions about "how we ought to live, what kinds of societies we want, and how we should relate to nature and other forms of life.” Global justice Climate change can be considered a global justice issue because the actors with the largest contribution to climate change are not the ones suffering from the most severe impacts. Historically, wealthy, developed nations have been emitting, and currently emit, disproportionally large amounts of greenhouse gases compared to poorer developing nations. For example, Bangladesh is highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. The country's per capita emissions are 1/20th of the global average and 1/100th of the per capita emissions in the United States, but its low-lying topography makes it extremely vulnerable to sea level rise and cyclones—which are predicted to increase in frequency and intensity with climate change. Thus climate change can be seen as a global justice issue because the perpetrators of climate change impacts (developed nations) and the victims of those impacts (developing nations) are distinct actors.In addition to climate change being a global justice issue due to the disparities between the roles of developed and developing nations, the global justice issue can also be framed in terms of wealth. "Half the world’s carbon is emitted by the world’s richest 500 million people" meaning that regardless of where one lives, the higher their income, the higher their emissions. Although the United States has one of the highest per capita greenhouse gas emissions in the world, there are lower-income people in the U.S. with relatively lower emissions. Further, poorer people, regardless of where they live, are more likely to experience the effects of climate change because they have a reduced means to adapt compared to rich people. Intergenerational ethics The intergenerational ethics of climate change addresses the responsibility of current generations to be environmentally conscious to and ensure the sustainable use of environmental resources can continue for future generations. Moral responsibility is a crucial consideration in intergenerational climate change ethics. This responsibility extends to various interests, including humans, animals, future people, and nature. The interests of the current generation must be weighed against those of future generations, balancing current needs against future aspirations.The effects of climate change are dispersed temporally and spatially. Ethical implications due to spatial dispersion are those discussed in the previous section on global justice: those causing the problem are not in the same physical space as those experiencing the worst of its effects. Temporal ethical implications mainly relate to the fact that current greenhouse gas emissions will affect future generations more than they will affect current people. This notion of pushing climate change impacts on future people poses epistemic difficulties, making it hard to grasp cause and effect, which could undermine motivation to respond. Institutional inadequacy further complicates the issue. Democratic political institutions have relatively short time horizons which are at odds with the timescale of global climate change. Politicians are concerned about voter support for the next election, on a scale of a few years, whereas climate change operates on much longer timescales of hundreds to thousands of years. Therefore, climate change gets put on the back burner of political agendas because it won’t help politicians win the next election cycle. Economics Economists propose prioritizing adaptation over mitigation due to high costs associated with mitigation; however, conventional economic analyses have philosophical limitations. Such analyses discount future generations and prioritize human interests, failing to consider all relevant costs and benefits of climate change mitigation. Henry Shrue argues that the "No Harm Principle" gives us reason for acting on climate change, despite the uncertainty of future impacts. Temporal discounting The concept of temporal discounting in economics is relevant to climate change ethics due to the temporal dispersion of its effects. Economists use discount rates to determine the value of future goods because it is assumed that the global economy will continue to grow and future people will have more goods than current people. The more goods you have, the less valuable any one good is, hence, it is discounted. Using different discount rates, economists can arrive at very different conclusions regarding how much of the global budget should be dedicated to climate change mitigation, adaptation, or other things. Prioritarianism offers one ethical justification for imploring a high discount rate is that because future people will be better off than we are today, benefiting people today is more valuable than benefiting future people. Utilitarianism on the other hand, favors a lower discount rate (or none) under the idea that benefits to future people are equally valuable as benefits to current people. Human rights Climate change is a pressing issue that threatens the basic human rights of individuals and communities around the world. Climate change violates several human rights, including the right to life, health, food, water, and shelter. Climate change exacerbates existing inequalities and disproportionately affects vulnerable populations, such as low-income communities, indigenous peoples, and small island developing states. Adopting a rights-based approach to climate change that recognizes the link between climate change and human rights would provide significant improvements. A moral threshold approach to climate change that identifies the minimum standards to protect human rights. This approach involves identifying a set of moral principles that establish the minimum standards of protection required to ensure that human rights are not violated by climate change. The moral threshold approach also involves identifying the duties and responsibilities of different actors in addressing climate change, including states, corporations, and individuals. States can take action to address climate change, as they are the primary sources of greenhouse gas emissions. States can take measures to reduce their emissions and contribute to the global effort to limit the increase in global temperatures. Additionally, corporations have a responsibility to reduce their emissions and contribute to sustainable development. Individuals can play a role by adopting sustainable lifestyles and advocating for policies that address climate change. It is also an open moral question whether or not acts of civil disobedience by individuals or groups aimed at raising awareness of the climate crisis can be justified. Climate change is a human rights issue that requires action. There is a high need for a rights-based approach to climate change and proposes a moral threshold framework for addressing this issue. By recognizing the link between climate change and human rights, people can work towards a more just and equitable future for all. It is the responsibility of all actors, including states, corporations, and individuals, to take action to address climate change and protect human rights. == References ==

climate apocalypse

A climate apocalypse (or similar terms for the same concept) is a term used to denote a predicted scenario involving the global collapse of human civilization due to climate change. Such collapse is hypothesized to arrive through a set of interrelated concurrent factors such as famine, extreme weather, war and conflict, and disease.Some researchers have speculated that society cannot comprehend an accurate end of the world prediction, and instead, more governments would be willing to respond productively to prevent catastrophe if reports framed the matter as a smaller problem than it actually is.There are many terms in use that are similar to climate apocalypse, such as climate dystopia and a climate-induced collapse, climate endgame, climate catastrophe and so forth. Meaning of the term A "climate apocalypse" is hypothesized to arrive through a set of interrelated concurrent factors such as famine (crop loss, drought), extreme weather (hurricanes, floods), war (caused by the scarce resources) and conflict, systemic risk (relating to migration, famine, or conflict), and disease. Scientific consensus regarding likelihood Origin Rhetoric and belief centered on apocalypticism has deep roots in religious contexts, and similar rhetorical approaches undergird secular apocalyptic interpretations of climate. Historical interpretations fall into two visions of apocalypse: the tragic and the comic. Tragic apocalypticism frames a clearly divided good and evil, with preordained events. In contrast, comic framing emphasizes flawed human agency, and it tends to be characterized by an open-ended, episodic, and ongoing timeline. Some of the most significant books in environmentalism make use of either the tragic or comic apocalyptic framing: Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), Paul and Anne Ehrlich's The Population Bomb (1972), and Al Gore's Earth in the Balance (1992).There is a Western world tradition of describing a climate apocalypse with images and descriptions of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and other features of the apocalypse of the Christian faith. Usage In political conversations and media Political conversations about climate apocalypse (or similar terms) tend to describe how preventing it in the future would bring zero value for today, therefore the value of doing something today is zero. The lack of response to climate change despite it being an existential risk may be an indication that human society lacks an ability to understand a threat of this magnitude without some radical change in perspective.A 2013 report described how incorporating the concept of preventing catastrophe into public policy seems unprecedented and challenging to accomplish.Climate scientists may also downplay potentially disastrous scenarios in favor of more restrained predictions that are less likely to be rejected as alarmist or fatalist. Discussions of "tail-end" risks of temperatures rising beyond 3°C (5.4°F) are also often neglected in research more generally. In fiction Reception Some researchers have speculated that society cannot comprehend an accurate end of the world prediction, and instead, more governments would be willing to respond productively to prevent catastrophe if reports framed the matter as a smaller problem than it actually is. Talking about potential disaster can have a broad impact upon society by making many people feel that if the situation were truly horrible, then there must be good plans to prevent it so no further action is needed.The media presents many imagined apocalypse scenarios in a way that conflates them all. Related terminology There are many terms in use that are similar to climate apocalypse, such as climate dystopia and a climate-induced collapse, climate endgame, climate catastrophe and so forth. Climate endgame is a term used to refer to the risk of societal collapse and potential human extinction due to the effects of climate change. The usage of the term seeks to improve risk management by putting a higher priority on worst-case scenarios, to "galvanise action, improve resilience, and inform policy". The term endgame has been used in relation to climate change by other authors in the past, like in The Extinction Curve book by John van der Velden and Rob White, published in 2021. See also == References ==

climate change and gender

Climate change affects men and women differently. Climate change and gender examines how men and women access and use resources that are impacted by climate change and how they experience the resulting impacts. It examines how gender roles and cultural norms influence the ability of men and women to respond to climate change, and how women's and men's roles can be better integrated into climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies. It also considers how climate change intersects with other gender-related challenges, such as poverty, access to resources, and unequal power dynamics. Ultimately, the goal of this research is to ensure that climate change policies and initiatives are equitable, and that both women and men benefit from them. Climate change increases gender inequality, reduces women's ability to be financially independent, and has an overall negative impact on the social and political rights of women, especially in economies that are heavily based on agriculture. In many cases, gender inequality means that women are more vulnerable to the negative effects of climate change. This is due to gender roles, particularly in the developing world, which means that women are often dependent on the natural environment for subsistence and income. By further limiting women's already constrained access to physical, social, political, and fiscal resources, climate change often burdens women more than men and can magnify existing gender inequality.Gender-based differences have also been identified in relation to awareness, causation and response to climate change, and many countries have developed and implemented gender-based climate change strategies and action plans. For example, the government of Mozambique adopted a Gender, Environment and Climate Change Strategy and Action Plan in early 2010, being the first government in the world to do so.Analysis of gender in climate change, however, is not limited to women. It also means not only applying a binary male/female system of analysis on sets of quantitative data, but also scrutinizing discursive constructions that shapes power relations connected to climate change, and considering how gender, as a social factor that influences responses to climate change, intersects with other variables such as age, caste, marital status, and ethnicity. This binary also excludes individuals who are a part of the LGBTQ+ community, and those who are non-binary and do not fit into gender norms. Public opinion and actions A study of young people in Finland shows that concern over climate change has a higher impact on climate friendly consumption in women compared to men. A study done in the Czech Republic showcases this phenomenon as well. This may be incidental to differences in perception of climate change. Women tend to agree with the scientific opinion that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are mainly responsible for climate change (m: 56%, f: 64%) and are more concerned about its effects: 29% of men and 35% of women in the US "worry about global warming a great deal".Another study was conducted in 2016 using men and women from Brazil and Sweden to measure and inspect the effects of gender and political orientation on perceptions of climate change. Data was collected via online questionnaires from 367 participants from Brazil consisting of 151 men and 216 women, and 221 participants from Sweden with 75 men and 146 women. The results of the study showed a strong positive correlation between conservative men and denial of climate change in both groups (rSweden = .22, rBrazil = .19) indicating that men (typically with conservative political orientation) are more likely to deny the existence of climate change. Women in both groups mostly showed the opposite results, indicating that women are more likely to believe in the existence of climate change.A study published in 2020 found that there are also differences in the coping strategies. The study, conducted among rice farmers in Mazandaran Province in Iran, found that men tend to believe that better techniques for conservation management of land is a good way to manage climate risk, while women believed that education is the most important way to adapt, since they could find out what are the better techniques and technologies to face climate risk.A key enabler to climate change adaptation is access to useful climate information, however in Sub-Saharan Africa access to information has been found to be gendered with women having poorer access to climate information. In a study published in 2020 of smallholder sugarcane farmers in Malawi, it was found that more women than men do not access forecast information to guide adaptation decisions. Gendered access and preferences of climate information may be tied to varying marital status and well as education and literacy levels among women and men.Contribution to climate change – through emissions of greenhouse gases – is correlated to gender. A study on car use in Sweden, for example, found that men are likely to use the car more, for longer distances and alone compared to women, thereby emitting more CO2 (a greenhouse gas).In a survey conducted by the European Investment Bank on climate, men were found to be more sceptical about the impact of females in climate action leadership. 50% of women surveyed thought that having more females leaders would make a difference, while only 45% of men thought so. The study indicated the biggest discrepancy in the UK, where 38% of men and 61% of women agreed that women leaders would effectively combat climate change. The European Investment Fund also discovered that businesses run by women had better ESG ratings than other businesses, spend more in renewable energy sources, and invest less in polluting businesses.Various research shows that nations with higher proportions of women in parliament are more likely to ratify environmental agreements and implement climate change policy, thus female leaders are more likely to favor climate action and sustainability. Vulnerability Disasters Disasters are unpredictable events that cause harm to people and damage to property, infrastructure, and the environment. They can be natural, such as floods, wildfires, earthquakes, hurricanes, or tsunamis, or they can be man-made, such as oil spills, industrial accidents, and terrorist attacks. Disasters can cause physical, psychological, and economic damage. They can also disrupt social networks, weaken economic systems, and cause a range of physical and mental health impacts. People affected by disasters may face displacement, loss of livelihoods, and disruption of education, among other impacts. In the wake of a disaster, governments, international organizations, and aid agencies may provide relief and assistance to those affected. Death rates A study by the London School of Economics found that, in natural disasters in 141 countries, gender differences in deaths correlated to women's economic and social rights in those countries. Due to their social standing, women in developing countries are not generally taught survival skills like swimming or climbing, meaning they are more likely to die in a natural disaster. When women have fewer rights and less power in society, more of them die due to climate change, but when there are equal rights for all groups, death rates are more equally matched.Women working in areas exposed to climate change effects, like agriculture, water or forestry, are also more likely to be affected by extreme weather, resulting in an increase of deaths. Countries have also reported rising violence against women and girls after natural disasters. Sexual abuse and disease transmission Sexual abuse is any form of unwanted sexual contact, ranging from verbal to physical. It can range from sexual harassment or inappropriate touching to rape or attempted rape. It can occur between two people of any gender, but is most commonly perpetrated by males against females. It can occur in any setting, but is most often within a relationship or family. Disease transmission is the spread of disease-causing organisms from one person to another. This can happen through direct contact with an infected person, or through indirect contact with items such as clothing, bedding or toys that have been contaminated with the infectious agents. Sexual contact is one of the most common ways for disease to be spread, and includes unprotected sex, sexual assault, and intimate contact between partners. The most common diseases that are spread through sexual contact include HIV, syphilis, chlamydia, gonorrhea, and genital herpes. HIV and syphilis can be spread through any form of sexual contact, while chlamydia, gonorrhea, and herpes are mainly spread through unprotected vaginal or anal intercourse. Other sexually transmitted infections, such as hepatitis B, can also be spread through sexual contact.Natural disasters disrupt daily routines and complicate gender and family roles, which can cause victims of natural disasters to feel powerless and frustrated. These feelings often result in aggression against less powerful groups. Women and children in developed and developing countries are at higher risk of sexual abuse during and after natural disasters than before. Cases of child marriage and sex trafficking have risen in some areas of the Indian Sundarban delta after the devastating effects of Cyclone Amphan and ongoing stress caused by COVID-19, impacting the lives of young girls. Condom use during disasters is also lower than at other times, because of decreased access to condoms. Combined with the accelerated spread of diseases and infections in developing countries, the breakdown of the social order and the malnourishment that sometimes accompanies climate change have led to higher rates of dengue fever, malaria, HIV, and STI transmission, especially for women. Elderly women are also particularly at risk during natural disasters and times of crisis because they are more susceptible to climatically induced health risks like disease and because they are often isolated from social support to which men and some younger women have access. Agriculture Agriculture is the science, art, and practice of cultivating plants and livestock. It includes the preparation of soil for growing crops, planting, harvesting, and storing food, and the breeding and raising of livestock. Agriculture also involves the production of commodities such as milk, eggs, and meat, as well as the production of fibers such as cotton and wool. Agriculture is an important part of the global economy and is essential for providing food, feed, and fiber. It is also an important part of rural life and culture, providing employment and a source of income for many people in rural areas. In addition to providing food, feed, and fiber, agriculture also plays an important role in environmental conservation, providing habitat for wildlife and helping to maintain biodiversity.The poor and impoverished are dependent on the environment and its natural resources for subsistence and income; poverty research reveals that many of the poor are women because, as a group, they have less social power. Many women in developing countries are farmers, but women as a group have trouble obtaining education, income, land, livestock, and technology, meaning climate change may negatively impact female farmers more than male farmers by further limiting their resources. In 2009, women produced between 60 and 80 percent of all food in the developing world, yet they owned ten percent of all agricultural land and approximately two percent of land rights. As the planet warms and access to water changes, the crop yields tend to decrease. These effects are not uniform, and they have the largest impact on areas of the world where the economy depends on agriculture and the climate is sensitive to change. In developing countries, women are often in charge of obtaining water, firewood, and other resources for their families, but these resources are directly impacted by climate change, meaning women must travel further and work longer to access them during crisis. Climate change increases burdens placed on women by society and further limits their access to education and employment. A changing climate has adverse impacts on agricultural production and in India's Mahanadi delta, this has forced the male farmers to migrate, leaving behind the responsibility of cultivating the small land-holdings to the women under "increasingly uncertain climatic conditions".Strong gender norms around roles and access to resources in semi-arid regions often confine women-led businesses to climate-exposed sectors, particularly agriculture, but also limit the options women have to build resilience within their businesses. Despite these limitations and the need to addressing inequalities, women entrepreneurs can harness significant adaptive capacity and take advantage of new opportunities. According to research involving the private sector, businesses that have more women on their boards are more likely to increase energy efficiency, lessen their total environmental effect, and invest in renewable energy sources.In fact, a UN Food Agriculture Organization report shows that women farmers will be more affected by food insecurity due to climate change. Even though they represent 43% of farmers in developing countries, female farmers find it hard to compete with men farmers. This is due to their responsibility to be more present at home, and their limitations to market credit access. In addition to that, women don't usually invest more money in sectors that might increase agriculture productivity. An FAO dossier on Women and Agriculture reported in 2011 confirms that "The obstacles that confront women farmers mean that they achieve lower yields than their male counterparts... Yet women are as good at farming as men. Solid empirical evidence shows that if women farmers used the same level of resources as men on the land they farm, they would achieve the same yield levels." Increased inequalities Climate change and gender-based inequality go hand in hand. Climate change is a major global problem with far-reaching implications for the world's population, particularly women and girls living in impoverished countries. Women and girls are disproportionately affected by climate change because they are often more dependent on natural resources and lack access to the same services and resources that men do. Climate change can lead to water shortages, food insecurity, and displacement, which can all increase the gender-based inequalities already present in many countries. For example, women are typically responsible for collecting water and firewood and managing the household, so an increase in extreme weather events or a decrease in resources can make these tasks more difficult and time-consuming. This can decrease the amount of time women have to pursue other activities, such as education or employment. Climate change can also increase the risk of violence and exploitation for women in vulnerable situations. Natural disasters can leave women and girls homeless and without access to safety resources, increasing their vulnerability to abuse and exploitation. Overall, climate change has the potential to significantly worsen gender-based inequalities in many parts of the world. It is essential that governments and organizations recognize the effect climate change has on gender equality and take steps to protect and empower women and girls. This may include providing access to resources, education, and support services, as well as developing gender-sensitive policies and programs to address the effects of climate change.The IPCC Fifth Assessment Report concludes that there is 'robust evidence' for an increase of gender inequalities as a result of weather events as well as for the perpetuation of differential vulnerabilities. The increase of inequalities due to climate change can have several reasons. For example, girls often face more serious risks than boys due to unequal distribution of scarce resources within the household. This effect is amplified by climate change induced resource scarcity. Furthermore, climate change often results in an increase of out-migration of men. This leaves women with an increased work-load at home, resulting in a feminization of responsibilities. Climate change is predicted to increase frequency and magnitude of natural hazards such as extreme heat. During and after these hazards especially women are burdened with increased care work for children, the sick and old, adding furthermore to already significant amount of household duties. Women also tend to donate their food in times of food scarcity, leaving them more vulnerable to health, social and psychological damages. Girls are also pulled out of school to help their families deal with natural disasters. Energy poverty Scientific field Climate change and gender are intertwined in multiple ways. First, environmental changes resulting from climate change can disproportionately impact women, depending on their socio-economic status, ethnicity, and geographic location. For example, women in developing countries are more likely to be dependent on natural resources for food security, access to clean water, and fuel for cooking and heating. As climate change causes more extreme weather events and shifts in precipitation patterns, these resources become scarcer, leading to greater food insecurity and poverty among women. Second, women are often underrepresented in the scientific field, making it difficult to take into account the gender-specific impacts of climate change. This is because women are less likely to have access to education, resources, and research opportunities in the sciences, so their perspectives and expertise are not as well represented in the field. Research that does not consider gender-specific impacts of climate change can lead to an inadequate understanding of how climate change affects different populations and can lead to unequal access to resources and services to address climate change impacts. Finally, women are often responsible for caring for household members and managing resources in communities, so they are well-positioned to lead changes to mitigate climate change. However, women are often excluded from decision-making processes that shape climate change policy, so their perspectives and knowledge are not considered in the policy-making process. This can lead to policies that are not tailored to the gender-specific needs of different populations, resulting in unequal access to resources and services to address climate change impacts. Overall, climate change and gender are interconnected in multiple ways, and it is important to recognize the importance of considering the gender-specific impacts of climate change in research and policy-making.According to a survey conducted IPCC WGI Co-Chairs and Technical Support Unit (TSU) on 25 April 2014, many of the polled authors stated that they saw the need for a better gender balance. This is reflected in the gender balance of contributors to the fifth IPCC assessment report. Only 27% of contributors to Working Group II, concerned with impacts, adaptation and vulnerability and 18,5% of contributors of Working Group I, concerned with the physical science basis, are female. This also applies to other organisation, as for example only 7% of leadership positions in the offices of National Weather Services are women. On a similar note, a study conducted by the University of Oxford in cooperation with the Nielsen Company found that 18 of the 22 'most influential spokespeople on climate change' are male. Female spokespeople were neither politicians nor scientists and their direct connection to climate change is therefore doubtful. Policies Mitigation policy attempts to moderate the intensity of global warming's effects through measures like reducing greenhouse gases and enhancing sinks. According to research, men and women use their knowledge of their environments to mitigate disasters, transferring this knowledge through informal education. Some of this knowledge includes food preservation processes, methods of construction, and understanding of natural resources in the area. Examples of mitigation efforts include carbon emissions trading. Mitigation efforts largely ignore gender.Adaptive policy involves spontaneous or planned efforts to tolerate the negative effects of climate change and take advantage of the beneficial effects. Men and women respond differently to climate change and subsequently also to adaptation measures, which can affect men and women unequally, when the gender perspective is ignored in the policy. For example, the IPCC report AR5 points out that adaptation measures in agriculture can in some cases lead to increased gender inequalities. Most effective approaches for gender-sensitive policies Some scholars recommend incorporating gender dimensions into research and using human-rights approaches like the Millennium Development Goals and CEDAW as frameworks for climate change responses. Several organizations believe that linking mitigation and adaptation approaches, equally funding both types of efforts, and integrating gender into mitigative and adaptive policies will better address the consequences of climate change. The UNDP mandates gender mainstreaming in all adaptation measures, meaning adaptive responses to climate change must consider gender and gender equality from their inception and cannot incorporate a gender component late in their development or only in certain areas. Others believe that imposing mainstreaming agendas on communities can make gender-sensitive policy less effective and may even be counter-productive, emphasizing gender differences and isolating gender issues from other areas affected by climate change. Gender-blind mitigation policy In 2009, a forest-protection mechanism called Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) was agreed upon by attendees of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. Many development organizations praise the REDD mechanism, but others criticize its function as a market-based instrument and its impact on local communities.Over the past 13 years, they have partnered with 65 countries to meet their forest goals. Some examples of this include: UN-REDD partnered countries have submitted 700 million tCO2 of forest emission reductions, and 25 UN-REDD countries have integrated REDD+ policies at the ministerial or cabinet level, meaning these countries have now seen reductions in deforestation. Their 2020 Executive Summary notes that Myanmar and Peru created strategic policies for the reduction of emissions in the forest and land-use sector.The UN-REDD program has created a plan for 2021–2025 to reduce forest emissions and enhance carbon stocks. The first priority is to have forest solutions realized, in which they focus on reducing CO2 emissions. The second priority is to reward these forest solutions, and they have allocated $5 billion from Results-based Payment schemes, carbon markets, and private-sector carbon investments. Additionally, transactions under the 6th Article of the Paris Agreement are included in this. The third priority of this plan is to have at least 15 countries alter their Nationally Determined Contributions by 2025 to include more about forests, particularly with the goal of lowering emissions. The fourth goal involves REDD+ leading a Nature-based Solutions movement to speed up changes around climate action. Gender-blind adaptation policy Some scholars believe that climate change policy that does not address gender is not effective. Much of the climate change policy created before the 21st century focused on economic rather than social effects of climatic change and global warming. Climate change research and policy began to look at gender in the 21st century. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), the Millennium Development Goals, and the Beijing Platform for Action are all gender-aware initiatives that may affect climate change policy. Some of the international responses to climate change that do not address gender or employ gender-sensitive approaches include Agenda 21, the Rio Declaration on the Environment and Development, the Kyoto Protocol and the Bali Action Plan.The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change have incorporated gender dimensions, the latter through a Gender Action Plan. Roehr notes that, while the United Nations officially committed to gender mainstreaming, in practice gender equality is not reached in the context of climate change. Little data and research results in insufficient gender awareness in enacted gender policies.Indian state of Odisha's Climate Change Action Plan for 2018–2023 has an entire chapter dedicated to gender and climate change, which outlines a gender-sensitive approach of "empowering women as agents of change and not victims". This is a refreshing change from the earlier Climate Change Action Plan 2010–2015 where gender in the context of climate change has not been fully explored and is thus not included in the government's own Progress Report on the Implementation of the Climate Change Action Plan. This indicates "an exclusion of women's voices from decision-making and financial processes" and further removing them from the policies which have direct impact on their lives.The five priority areas of the Gender Action Plan include: capacity building, knowledge management and communication, gender balance, participation in women's leadership, coherence, gender-responsive implementation and means of implementation, and monitoring and reporting. Capacity building, knowledge management and communication requires gender consideration to play a larger role when creating policy and action plans. The goal of this is to not only make sure the genders are considered equally, but to increase outreach and awareness to do so. The second part, gender balance, participation and women's leadership, explains a goal of having more women participate in UNFCCC process. The next, which is coherence, emphasizes the need for gender-related mandates. Gender-responsive implementation and means of implementation is ensuring the importance of having women mentioned in legislation such as the Paris Agreement. And finally, the monitoring and reporting would monitor these changes under the Lima work program to see whether or not the gender action plan is being implemented properly. Including women in policy-making processes Gender inequalities do not only emerge in context of climate change as a physical reality, but also within discourses of and negotiations over climate change. This is reflected in the fact that men are dominant in all levels of climate change debate – from the science to policy, from the local to the global level. This has an effect on climate change policies. Women can be important players in climate change policy because they have gendered knowledge about things like managing water resources. While women in rural areas depend on the environment heavily, they are not usually represented in climate change decision-making processes. CARE's research shows that, when women are in control of the family income, it is more likely to be spent on human development. Women are also generally more risk averse than men and make safer decisions. Yet, in 2008, the EU Commission and Council on adaptation policy did not address gender at all. Furthermore, gender roles and subsequent institutional and social pressures can pose constraints to adaptive capacities. Most scholars and organizations working to address climate change agree that policy-makers must work with both women and men and take them into consideration at all levels.Research supports the role women play in leading climate action: nations with more female parliamentary representation are more likely to ratify environmental accords and pass laws that deal with the implications of climate change. Patriarchy and climate change science and policy Some feminist scholars hold that the debate on climate change is not only dominated by men but also primarily shaped in 'masculine' principles, which limits discussions about climate change to a perspective that focuses on technical solutions, and accounts for the inability to adapt to and mitigate climate change points out the impact of spatial practices that manifest power relations and marginalise women. The often-hidden subjectivity and power relations that actually condition climate change policy and science, lead to a phenomenon which Tuana terms 'epistemic injustice'.Similarly, MacGregor criticizes the scientific discourse from a less quantitative perspective but focusses on discursive aspects. She attests that by framing climate change as an issue of 'hard' natural scientific conduct and natural security, it is kept within the traditional domains of hegemonic masculinity. Seager maintains that the 2 °C aim, which is a reoccurring topic in the climate change debate, is not, as often assumed, a safe goal for all people on the planet. Rather it will ensure the stability of a patriarchal capitalism and subsequently the continuity of power for those who are powerful today. Individual action by women Women can play a role in climate change response and can often help at the local level, which can inform specific aspects of climate change policy. Women contribute their local knowledge of leadership, sustainable resource management, and how to incorporate sustainability into both the household and community. This also demonstrates how women play a vital role in natural resource management.Additionally, evidence demonstrates communities are better prepared for natural disasters when women play a pivotal role in the early warning systems and reconstructions. A 2000 study in South Asia demonstrated that women were crucial in hazard preparation and rebuilding/managing communities after a disaster, as well as ensuring food security and safety for specific groups of people. Gender inclusivity Sexual and gender minorities Many marginalized groups are disproportionately affected by the climate crisis the world is experiencing, and this includes both gender and sexual minorities. Following a disaster, same sex couples risk not receiving relief support if they are not recognized as a legitimate couple by the government. Additionally, non-binary individuals lack access to gender-specific services that target men or women. Initiatives to reduce this risk and danger include MapBeks to map LGBTQ+ safe spaces, HIV testing facilities, and access through roads and buildings for disaster management. US policy and strategy In recent years, initiatives toward gender equality in relation to climate change have been created. One of these initiatives is the National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality, which was proposed by the Biden-Harris administration. This is a strategy that aims to have full participation of all people, which includes women, in the United States. In this Strategy, they recognize that there is gender-based discrimination and exclusion in the development of climate policy. These policies, which are exclusionary, make it difficult to make effective policy about issues such as climate change if groups of people are being left out. The goal of this strategy is to promote gender equity in relation to climate change policy and mitigation, as well as address how climate change might affect public health differently based on gender.This goal of promoting gender equity in mitigating and responding to climate change involves multiple steps. The first is to pursue this gender parity in both negotiations and science that center around climate change. To promote the education of women, the administration hopes to create a focus on climate science in education and ensure their inclusion in the environmental protection plans and climate action plans. The next priority is to create more leadership trainings for women to create better participation in clean energy economy. Another goal is to utilize the Justice40 Initiative to deliver 40% of benefits from investments for climate and clean energy to disadvantaged communities. Additionally, they plan to create a Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool.Other legislation, such as the Women and Climate Change Act of 2019. hopes to highlight initiatives led by women to not only combat climate change itself, but the gender inequality that exists within this area. They hope to establish the Federal Interagency Working Group on Women and Climate Change, and to create a more comprehensive strategy on how to involve women in climate policy in the future. Case studies Bangladesh Madagascar 80% of species of plants and animals found in Madagascar are not available anywhere else on Earth. Due to this exceptional uniqueness of the species, deforestation in Madagascar will have serious impact on the global biodiversity, and this arguably makes the country the highest priority for world's biodiversity conservation. Climate change effects in Madagascar, a country with a predominantly rural and vulnerable population, is expected to exacerbate the occurrences of powerful cyclones, flooding, droughts, and unpredictability in climate patterns, which will further threaten food security, infrastructures, and the ecosystem of the country. The Policy Research Brief published by International Policy Centre for Inclusive Growth (IPC-IG) titled "Greening the Economy and Increasing Economic Equity for Women Farmers in Madagascar" identifies that the lived realities of climate change in Madagascar are distinctly gender-differentiated. The relevant national policies and strategies such as Madagascar's National Adaptation Program of Action (NAPA) related to climate change have not been gender focused, hence, resulting to vital gender related policy gap that tends to further reinforce women marginalization in policy processes relating to climate adaptation, funding and mitigation. The report recommended organization of women's cooperatives and improved inclusion of women in leadership role to improve social inclusivity in the green economy. Mozambique The government of Mozambique adopted a Gender, Environment and Climate Change Strategy and Action Plan in early 2010, being the first government in the world to do so. In its phase II action plan, Alcinda António de Abreu, Mozambique's then Minister of Environment, comments that "climate change adaptation and mitigation [rely] upon the sustainable use and equitable control of, as well as benefits derived from, natural resources – and all citizens, regardless of their social status or their gender, in all spheres of economic and political life, have a role to play in this critical effort". Sustainable use and management of natural resources training have been provided to over 12,000 women. Similarly, thirty-six communities have learned and gained knowledge about more effective methods for prevention and control of fires, plantation of drought resistant crops, and production and usage of improved stoves. South Africa In 2010, South Africa was the region with the largest economy in Africa, yet more than half of the population lived in poverty and many were unemployed. Impoverished populations of South Africa depend heavily on agriculture and natural resources to live. Coal and metal ore mining were also significant contributing sectors of the economy, but are decreasing in the 21st century due to climate change and globalization. In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted that Africa would warm due to climate change 1.5 times more than the rest of the world and that South Africa, specifically, would be 3 – 4 °C warmer by 2100. Water, agriculture, mining, and forestry would all be affected by these changes in temperature and weather. The Human Sciences Research Council found in 2004 that 57% of South Africa's poor were at risk for negative climate change effects because they depended on rain-fed agriculture and climate change in Africa was expected to cause longer and more intense periods of drought over time. Many of the rural poor in South Africa are women who have only limited access to property, income, credit, resources, and social power.In South Africa, men traditionally look after the livestock while women look over the garden, but in extended periods of drought, many households lose their livestock. In response to this loss and to increasing unemployment, men are turning to alcohol to deal with the psychological stress. Some are also increasing their number of sexual partners, increasing their risk of contracting or spreading HIV. In response to these changes, more women are entering the workforce, either formally or informally. Some are now working in traditionally male occupations like mining and construction. Others are making and selling goods locally. Social grants from the South African government further support households affected by the changing climate. These grants include pensions, disability payments, and child support. In some cases, when men are responsible for the distribution of social grants in the household instead of women, they use the money to purchase alcohol. In response, the government tends to give grant money to women, which can cause domestic disputes within households.Understanding of climate change in South Africa is based mainly on experience and local knowledge, which is communicated orally. Women tend to hold more of this knowledge than men do because of their experience with farming and gardening. In response to drought, some women plant crops near wetlands or other water sources. They also preserve food for periods of drought or crop failure. Despite their knowledge of climate change, many responses in South Africa (like the South African Country Study on Climate Change Vulnerability & Adaptation Assessment) do not address gender. While women in South Africa are represented in the government at national and provincial level, there are not many women in government at a municipal level. India To understand gendered vulnerabilities one needs to understand it in conjunction with caste, class, and ethnicity. In India's Mahanadi Delta, women from Scheduled Castes exhibited high levels of self-confidence and self-esteem in spite of facing deprivation. While women from higher castes are bound by "stronger patriarchal control and restricted mobility", women from Scheduled Castes "often without even realizing it" are capable of doing away with patriarchal limitations and "acquire mobility with greater ease".The perception of women as being "only vulnerable and marginalized in the context of climate change" is incorrect. Women's agency to cultivate vegetables in water logged fields of Totashi village of Odisha has turned the disadvantages caused by water logging on its head by providing them with additional income to support their families and nutritional requirement. Women of Odisha's Jeypore village volunteer twice a month to clear out water hyacinth from the water bodies by forming a chain to "pull floating sections of water hyacinth prior to uprooting them". This has not only improved the water quality of the ponds and enabled villagers to engage in duck farming and fishing but also checked the reduction of soil fertility and spread of diseases, snakes, and poisonous insects.A study conducted between 2014 and 2018 in five districts of the Mahanadi delta of Odisha show that female-headed households experienced "more monetary losses due to failure of crop, livestock and equipment damages as well as loss of life" as compared to the male headed households during extreme events. The female headed households had the existing responsibilities of looking after the family, and coupled with lower incomes, lower resilience or adaptive capacity, they were worse off than male headed households during extreme events. The inequalities were further compounded by the women's age, marital status, lack of education, and income where a proportion of women had no income, many had low income, and a significant proportion were widows of mature age with no education. Not only were these women living under vulnerable physical conditions in the delta owing to a changing climate but were also socio-economically more vulnerable than the male-headed households. Controversies regarding gender and climate change "Women as vulnerable" vs "Women as virtuous" There are two concurring themes that emerge when examining climate change and gender: "Women as vulnerable or virtuous in relation to the environment." This means that women living in countries in the global South are more likely to be affected by climate change than men in those countries and that men in the global North are more likely to contribute to climate change than women. These assumptions about women's vulnerability and virtuousness reinforce global north–south biases, which is that women in the global South are poor and helpless and women in the global North are well-educated and pro-environmentalists. The "women as virtuous" narrative frames women as important drivers in building equal and sustainable responses to climate change. The UNFPA report State of World Population 2009 – Facing a Changing world: Women, Population and Climate identifies women as important actors in mobilizing against climate change. Specifically, Carolyn Sachs discusses the struggles women face on a global scale against environmental factors such as gender arrangements in agricultural development. Often women become oppressed by their corporate counterparts as a more focused point of reference in women's vulnerability. Women labor is exploited as a way to keep them from fighting back in turn, during the mid year season change they face vast struggles of extreme climate change and availability to natural resources. See also Climate change adaptation Climate change and poverty Climate justice Feminization of poverty Women in climate change References Sources MacGregor, Sherilyn. "A Stranger Silence Still: The Need for Feminist Social Research on Climate Change." The Sociological Review 57 (2010): 124–140. Web. 25 October 2014. Nussbaum, Martha C. Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Olsson, Lennart et al. "Livelihoods and Poverty." Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Part A: Global and Sectoral Aspects. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Ed. C. B. Field et al. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 793–832. Schneider, Stephen H., Armin Rosencranz, Michael D. Mastrandrea, and Kristin Kuntz-Duriseti. Climate Change Science and Policy. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2010. Tuana, Nancy. "Gendering Climate Knowledge for Justice: Catalyzing a New Research Agenda." Research, Action and Policy: Addressing the Gendered Impacts of Climate Change. Ed. Margaret Alston and Kerri Whittenbury. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2013. 17–31. External links Contributions of WGII in the IPCC Fifth Assessment Reports Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women Global Gender and Climate Alliance Millennium Development Goals Archived 1 April 2013 at the Wayback Machine

economic inequality

Economic inequality is an umbrella term for a) income inequality or distribution of income (how the total sum of money paid to people is distributed among them), b) wealth inequality or distribution of wealth (how the total sum of wealth owned by people is distributed among the owners), and c) consumption inequality (how the total sum of money spent by people is distributed among the spenders). Each of these can be measured between two or more nations, within a single nation, or between and within sub-populations (such as within a low-income group, within a high-income group and between them, within an age group and between inter-generational groups, within a gender group and between them etc, either from one or from multiple nations).Income inequality metrics are used for measuring income inequality, the Gini coefficient being a widely used one. Another type of measurement is the Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index, which is a statistic composite index that takes inequality into account. Important concepts of equality include equity, equality of outcome, and equality of opportunity. Whereas globalization has reduced the inequality between nations, it has increased the inequality within the population in most nations. Income inequality between nations peaked in the 1970s, when world income was distributed bimodally into "rich" and "poor" countries. Since then, income levels across countries have been converging, with most people now living in middle-income countries. However, inequality within the population in most has risen significantly in the last 30 years, particularly among advanced countries. In this period, approximately 90 percent of advanced nations increased their income inequality with over 70% nations recording their Gini coefficient increase, exceeding two points.Research has generally linked economic inequality to political and social instability, including revolution, democratic breakdown and civil conflict. Research suggests that greater inequality hinders economic growth and macroeconomic stability, and that land and human capital inequality reduce growth more than inequality of income. Inequality is at the center stage of economic policy debate across the globe, as government tax and spending policies have significant effects on income distribution. In advanced economies, taxes and transfers decrease income inequality by one-third, with most of this being achieved via public social spending (such as pensions and family benefits). While the "optimum" amount of economic inequality is widely debated, there is a near-universal belief that complete economic equality (Gini of zero) would be undesirable and unachieveable.: 1 Measurements In 1820, the ratio between the income of the top and bottom 20 percent of the world's population was three to one. By 1991, it was eighty-six to one. A 2011 study titled "Divided we Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising" by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) sought to explain the causes for this rising inequality by investigating economic inequality in OECD countries; it concluded that the following factors played a role: Changes in the structure of households can play an important role. Single-headed households in OECD countries have risen from an average of 15% in the late 1980s to 20% in the mid-2000s, resulting in higher inequality. Assortative mating refers to the phenomenon of people marrying people with similar background, for example doctors marrying other doctors rather than nurses. OECD found out that 40% of couples where both partners work belonged to the same or neighbouring earnings deciles compared with 33% some 20 years before. In the bottom percentiles, number of hours worked has decreased. The main reason for increasing inequality seems to be the difference between the demand for and supply of skills.The study made the following conclusions about the level of economic inequality: Income inequality in OECD countries is at its highest level for the past half century. The ratio between the bottom 10% and the top 10% has increased from 1:7 to 1:9 in 25 years. There are tentative signs of a possible convergence of inequality levels towards a common and higher average level across OECD countries. With very few exceptions (France, Japan, and Spain), the wages of the 10% best-paid workers have risen relative to those of the 10% lowest paid.A 2011 OECD study investigated economic inequality in Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Russia, and South Africa. It concluded that key sources of inequality in these countries include "a large, persistent informal sector, widespread regional divides (e.g., urban-rural), gaps in access to education, and barriers to employment and career progression for women." A study by the World Institute for Development Economics Research at United Nations University reported that the richest 1% of adults alone owned 40% of global assets in the year 2000. The three richest people in the world possess more financial assets than the lowest 48 nations combined. The combined wealth of the "10 million dollar millionaires" grew to nearly $41 trillion in 2008.Oxfam's 2021 report on global inequality said that the COVID-19 pandemic has increased economic inequality substantially; the wealthiest people across the globe were impacted the least by the pandemic and their fortunes recovered quickest, with billionaires seeing their wealth increase by $3.9 trillion, while at the same time the number of people living on less than $5.50 a day likely increased by 500 million. The 2022 Oxfam report said that growing economic inequality has been a factor in increased mortality rates during the pandemic, contributing to the deaths of 21,000 people on a daily basis, while the wealth of the world's 10 richest billionaires doubled. The 2023 report stated that roughly two thirds of all new wealth went to the top 1% at the same time that extreme poverty has been increasing globally. According to economist Joseph Stiglitz, the pandemic's "most significant outcome" will be rising economic inequality in the United States and between the developed and developing world. According to PolitiFact, the top 400 richest Americans "have more wealth than half of all Americans combined." According to The New York Times on July 22, 2014, the "richest 1 percent in the United States now own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent". Inherited wealth may help explain why many Americans who have become rich may have had a "substantial head start". A 2017 report by the IPS said that three individuals, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, own as much wealth as the bottom half of the population, or 160 million people, and that the growing disparity between the wealthy and the poor has created a "moral crisis", noting that "we have not witnessed such extreme levels of concentrated wealth and power since the first gilded age a century ago." In 2016, the world's billionaires increased their combined global wealth to a record $6 trillion. In 2017, they increased their collective wealth to 8.9 trillion. In 2018, U.S. income inequality reached the highest level ever recorded by the Census Bureau.The existing data and estimates suggest a large increase in international (and more generally inter-macroregional) components between 1820 and 1960. It might have slightly decreased since that time at the expense of increasing inequality within countries. The United Nations Development Programme in 2014 asserted that greater investments in social security, jobs, and laws that protect vulnerable populations are necessary to prevent widening income inequality.There is a significant difference in the measured wealth distribution and the public's understanding of wealth distribution. Michael Norton of the Harvard Business School and Dan Ariely of the Department of Psychology at Duke University found this to be true in their research conducted in 2011. The actual wealth going to the top quintile in 2011 was around 84%, whereas the average amount of wealth that the general public estimated to go to the top quintile was around 58%.According to a 2020 study, global earnings inequality has decreased substantially since 1970. During the 2000s and 2010s, the share of earnings by the world's poorest half doubled. Two researchers claim that global income inequality is decreasing due to strong economic growth in developing countries. According to a January 2020 report by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, economic inequality between states had declined, but intrastate inequality has increased for 70% of the world population over the period 1990–2015. In 2015, the OECD reported in 2015 that income inequality is higher than it has ever been within OECD member nations and is at increased levels in many emerging economies. According to a June 2015 report by the International Monetary Fund (IMF): Widening income inequality is the defining challenge of our time. In advanced economies, the gap between the rich and poor is at its highest level in decades. Inequality trends have been more mixed in emerging markets and developing countries (EMDCs), with some countries experiencing declining inequality, but pervasive inequities in access to education, health care, and finance remain. In October 2017, the IMF warned that inequality within nations, in spite of global inequality falling in recent decades, has risen so sharply that it threatens economic growth and could result in further political polarization. The Fund's Fiscal Monitor report said that "progressive taxation and transfers are key components of efficient fiscal redistribution." In October 2018 Oxfam published a Reducing Inequality Index which measured social spending, tax and workers' rights to show which countries were best at closing the gap between the rich and the poor.The 2022 World Inequality Report, a four-year research project organized by the economists Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, shows that "the world is marked by a very high level of income inequality and an extreme level of wealth inequality" and that these inequalities "seem to be about as great today as they were at the peak of western imperialism in the early 20th century." According to the report, the bottom half of the population owns 2% of global wealth, while the top 10% owns 76% of it. The top 1% owns 38%. Wealth distribution within individual countries The wealth is calculated by various factors, for instance: liabilities, debts, exchange rates and their expected development, real estate prices, human resources, natural resources and technical advancements, etc. Income distribution within individual countries Income inequality is measured by Gini coefficient (expressed in percent %) that is a number between 0 and 1. Here 0 expresses perfect equality, meaning that everyone has the same income, whereas 1 represents perfect inequality, meaning that one person has all the income and others have none. A Gini index value above 50% is considered high; countries including Brazil, Colombia, South Africa, Botswana, and Honduras can be found in this category. A Gini index value of 30% or above is considered medium; countries including Vietnam, Mexico, Poland, the United States, Argentina, Russia and Uruguay can be found in this category. A Gini index value lower than 30% is considered low; countries including Austria, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Slovenia, Sweden, and Ukraine can be found in this category. In the low-income inequality category (below 30%) is a wide representation of countries previously being part of Soviet Union or its satellites, like Slovakia, Czech Republic, Ukraine and Hungary. In 2012 the Gini index for income inequality for whole European Union was only 30.6%. Income distribution can differ from wealth distribution within each country. The wealth inequality is also measured in Gini index. There the higher Gini index signify greater inequality within the wealth distribution in country, 0 means total wealth equality and 1 represents situation, where everyone has no wealth, except an individual that has everything. For instance, countries like Denmark, Norway and Netherlands, all belonging to the last category (below 30%, low-income inequality) also have very high Gini index in wealth distribution, ranging from 70% up to 90%. Consumption distribution within individual countries In economics, the consumption distribution or consumption inequality is an alternative to the income distribution or wealth distribution for judging economic inequality, comparing levels of consumption rather than income or wealth. This is an important measure of inequality as the basic utility of the wealth or income is the expenditure. People experience the inequality directly in consumption, rather than income or wealth. Factors proposed to affect economic inequality There are various reasons for economic inequality within societies, including both global market functions (such as trade, development, and regulation) as well as social factors (including gender, race, and education). Recent growth in overall income inequality, at least within the OECD countries, has been driven mostly by increasing inequality in wages and salaries.Economist Thomas Piketty argues that widening economic disparity is an inevitable phenomenon of free market capitalism when the rate of return of capital (r) is greater than the rate of growth of the economy (g). According to an IMF report in 2016, after reviewing four decades of neoliberalism, it had warned that certain neoliberal policies including privatization, public spending cuts, and deregulation, have resulted in "increased inequality" and are stunting economic growth globally. Labour market In modern market economies, if competition is imperfect; information unevenly distributed; opportunities to acquire education and skills unequal; market failure results. Many such imperfect conditions exist in virtually every market. According to Joseph Stiglitz this means that there is an enormous potential role for government to correct such market failures.In the United States, real wages are flat over the past 40 years for occupations across income and education levels, e.g., auto mechanics, cashiers, doctors, and software engineers. However, stock ownership favors higher income and education levels, thereby resulting in disparate investment income. Taxes Another cause is the rate at which income is taxed coupled with the progressivity of the tax system. A progressive tax is a tax by which the tax rate increases as the taxable base amount increases. In a progressive tax system, the level of the top tax rate will often have a direct impact on the level of inequality within a society, either increasing it or decreasing it, provided that income does not change as a result of the change in tax regime. Additionally, steeper tax progressivity applied to social spending can result in a more equal distribution of income across the board. Tax credits such as the Earned Income Tax Credit in the US can also decrease income inequality. The difference between the Gini index for an income distribution before taxation and the Gini index after taxation is an indicator for the effects of such taxation. Education An important factor in the creation of inequality is variation in individuals' access to education. Education, especially in an area where there is a high demand for workers, creates high wages for those with this education. However, increases in education first increase and then decrease growth as well as income inequality. As a result, those who are unable to afford an education, or choose not to pursue optional education, generally receive much lower wages. The justification for this is that a lack of education leads directly to lower incomes, and thus lower aggregate saving and investment. Conversely, quality education raises incomes and promotes growth because it helps to unleash the productive potential of the poor.Access to education was in turn influenced by land inequalities. In the less industrialized parts of 19th century Europe, for example, landowners still held more political power than industrialists. These landowners did not benefit from educating their workers as much as industrialists did, since "educated workers have more incentives to migrate to urban, industrial areas than their less educated counterparts." Consequently, lower incentives to promote education in regions where land inequality was high led to lower levels of numeracy in these regions. Economic liberalism, deregulation and decline of unions John Schmitt and Ben Zipperer (2006) of the CEPR point to economic liberalism and the reduction of business regulation along with the decline of union membership as one of the causes of economic inequality. In an analysis of the effects of intensive Anglo-American liberal policies in comparison to continental European liberalism, where unions have remained strong, they concluded "The U.S. economic and social model is associated with substantial levels of social exclusion, including high levels of income inequality, high relative and absolute poverty rates, poor and unequal educational outcomes, poor health outcomes, and high rates of crime and incarceration. At the same time, the available evidence provides little support for the view that U.S.-style labor market flexibility dramatically improves labor-market outcomes. Despite popular prejudices to the contrary, the U.S. economy consistently affords a lower level of economic mobility than all the continental European countries for which data is available."More recently, the International Monetary Fund has published studies which found that the decline of unionization in many advanced economies and the establishment of neoliberal economics have fueled rising income inequality.Contrary to the proponents of neoliberalism, trickle-down economics have been proven to not be effective in resolving economic inequalities but have instead worsened it. Technology The growth in importance of information technology has been credited with increasing income inequality. Technology has been called "the main driver of the recent increases in inequality" by Erik Brynjolfsson, of MIT. In arguing against this explanation, Jonathan Rothwell notes that if technological advancement is measured by high rates of invention, there is a negative correlation between it and inequality. Countries with high invention rates — "as measured by patent applications filed under the Patent Cooperation Treaty" — exhibit lower inequality than those with less. In one country, the United States, "salaries of engineers and software developers rarely reach" above $390,000/year (the lower limit for the top 1% earners).Some researchers, such as Juliet B. Schor, highlight the role of for-profit online sharing economy platforms as an accelerator of income inequality and calls into question their supposed contribution in empowering outsiders of the labour market.Taking the example of TaskRabbit, a labour service platform, she shows that a large proportion of providers already have a stable full-time job and participate part-time in the platform as an opportunity to increase their income by diversifying their activities outside employment, which tends to restrict the volume of work remaining for the minority of platform workers. In addition, there is an important phenomenon of labour substitution as manual tasks traditionally performed by workers without a degree (or just a college degree) integrated into the labour market in the traditional economy sectors are now performed by workers with a high level of education (in 2013, 70% of TaskRabbit's workforce held a bachelor's degree, 20% a master's degree and 5% a PhD). The development of platforms, which are increasingly capturing demand for these manual services at the expense of non-platform companies, may therefore benefit mainly skilled workers who are offered more earning opportunities that can be used as supplemental or transitional work during periods of unemployment. It has also been proposed that information technologies contribute to "winner take most" market concentration, reducing the need for labor across competing suppliers. Market concentration drives down labor's share of the GDP, increasing the wealth of capital and thereby exacerbating inequality. Automation Economists have linked automation to increases in economic inequality, as automation raises the returns to wealth and contributes to stagnating wages at the lower end of the wage distribution. Several economists have suggested that automation has increased income inequality by causing low skill jobs to be replaced with machines operated by technologically skilled workers, thereby reducing the demand for unskilled labor while increasing the demand for skilled labor.: 1 Globalization Trade liberalization may shift economic inequality from a global to a domestic scale. When rich countries trade with poor countries, the low-skilled workers in the rich countries may see reduced wages as a result of the competition, while low-skilled workers in the poor countries may see increased wages. Trade economist Paul Krugman estimates that trade liberalisation has had a measurable effect on the rising inequality in the United States. He attributes this trend to increased trade with poor countries and the fragmentation of the means of production, resulting in low skilled jobs becoming more tradeable.Anthropologist Jason Hickel contends that globalization and "structural adjustment" set off the "race to the bottom", a significant driver of surging global inequality. Another driver Hickel mentions is the debt system which advanced the need for structural adjustment in the first place. Gender In many countries, there is a gender pay gap in favor of males in the labor market. Several factors other than discrimination contribute to this gap. On average, women are more likely than men to consider factors other than pay when looking for work and may be less willing to travel or relocate. Thomas Sowell, in his book Knowledge and Decisions, claims that this difference is due to women not taking jobs due to marriage or pregnancy. A U.S. Census's report stated that in US once other factors are accounted for there is still a difference in earnings between women and men. A study done on three post-soviet countries Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan reveals that gender is one of the driving forces of income inequality, and being female has a significant negative effect on income when other factors are held equal. The results show more than 50% gender pay gap in all three countries. These findings are because usually employers tend to avoid hiring women because of possible maternity leave. Other reason for this can be occupational segregation, which implies that women are usually accumulated in lower-paid positions and sectors, such as social services and education. Race There is also a globally recognized disparity in the wealth, income, and economic welfare of people of different races. In many nations, data exists to suggest that members of certain racial demographics experience lower wages, fewer opportunities for career and educational advancement, and intergenerational wealth gaps. Studies have uncovered the emergence of what is called "ethnic capital", by which people belonging to a race that has experienced discrimination are born into a disadvantaged family from the beginning and therefore have less resources and opportunities at their disposal. The universal lack of education, technical and cognitive skills, and inheritable wealth within a particular race is often passed down between generations, compounding in effect to make escaping these racialized cycles of poverty increasingly difficult. Additionally, ethnic groups that experience significant disparities are often also minorities, at least in representation though often in number as well, in the nations where they experience the harshest disadvantage. As a result, they are often segregated either by government policy or social stratification, leading to ethnic communities that experience widespread gaps in wealth and aid.As a general rule, races which have been historically and systematically colonized (typically indigenous ethnicities) continue to experience lower levels of financial stability in the present day. The global South is considered to be particularly victimized by this phenomenon, though the exact socioeconomic manifestations change across different regions. Westernized Nations While the progression of civil rights movements and justice reform has improved access to education and other economic opportunities in politically advanced nations, racial income and wealth disparity still exists. In the United States for example, a survey of African American populations show that they are more likely to drop out of high school and college, are typically employed for fewer hours at lower wages, have lower than average intergenerational wealth, and are more likely to use welfare as young adults than their white counterparts.Mexican-Americans, while suffering less debilitating socioeconomic factors than black Americans, experience deficiencies in the same areas when compared to whites and have not assimilated financially to the level of stability experienced by white Americans as a whole. These experiences are the effects of the measured disparity due to race in countries like the US, where studies show that in comparison to whites, blacks suffer from drastically lower levels of upward mobility, higher levels of downward mobility, and poverty that is more easily transmitted to offspring as a result of the disadvantage stemming from the era of slavery and post-slavery racism that has been passed through racial generations to the present. These are lasting financial inequalities that apply in varying magnitudes to most non-white populations in nations such as the US, the UK, France, Spain, Australia, etc. Latin America In the countries of the Caribbean, Central America, and South America, many ethnicities continue to deal with the effects of European colonization, and in general nonwhites tend to be noticeably poorer than whites in this region. In many countries with significant populations of indigenous races and those of Afro-descent (such as Mexico, Colombia, Chile, etc.) income levels can be roughly half as high as those experiences by white demographics, and this inequity is accompanied by systematically unequal access to education, career opportunities, and poverty relief. This region of the world, apart from urbanizing areas like Brazil and Costa Rica, continues to be understudied and often the racial disparity is denied by Latin Americans who consider themselves to be living in post-racial and post-colonial societies far removed from intense social and economic stratification despite the evidence to the contrary. Africa African countries, too, continue to deal with the effects of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, which set back economic development as a whole for blacks of African citizenship more than any other region. The degree to which colonizers stratified their holdings on the continent on the basis of race has had a direct correlation in the magnitude of disparity experienced by nonwhites in the nations that eventually rose from their colonial status. Former French colonies, for example, see much higher rates of income inequality between whites and nonwhites as a result of the rigid hierarchy imposed by the French who lived in Africa at the time. Another example is found in South Africa, which, still reeling from the socioeconomic impacts of Apartheid, experiences some of the highest racial income and wealth inequality in all of Africa. In these and other countries like Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and Sierra Leone, movements of civil reform have initially led to improved access to financial advancement opportunities, but data shows that for nonwhites this progress is either stalling or erasing itself in the newest generation of blacks that seek education and improved transgenerational wealth. The economic status of one's parents continues to define and predict the financial futures of African and minority ethnic groups. Asia Asian regions and countries such as China, the Middle East, and Central Asia have been vastly understudied in terms of racial disparity, but even here the effects of Western colonization provide similar results to those found in other parts of the globe. Additionally, cultural and historical practices such as the caste system in India leave their marks as well. While the disparity is greatly improving in the case of India, there still exists social stratification between peoples of lighter and darker skin tones that cumulatively result in income and wealth inequality, manifesting in many of the same poverty traps seen elsewhere. Economic development Economist Simon Kuznets argued that levels of economic inequality are in large part the result of stages of development. According to Kuznets, countries with low levels of development have relatively equal distributions of wealth. As a country develops, it acquires more capital, which leads to the owners of this capital having more wealth and income and introducing inequality. Eventually, through various possible redistribution mechanisms such as social welfare programs, more developed countries move back to lower levels of inequality. Wealth concentration Wealth concentration is the process by which, under certain conditions, newly created wealth concentrates in the possession of already-wealthy individuals or entities. Accordingly, those who already hold wealth have the means to invest in new sources of creating wealth or to otherwise leverage the accumulation of wealth, and thus they are the beneficiaries of the new wealth. Over time, wealth concentration can significantly contribute to the persistence of inequality within society. Thomas Piketty in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century argues that the fundamental force for divergence is the usually greater return of capital (r) than economic growth (g), and that larger fortunes generate higher returns. Rent seeking Economist Joseph Stiglitz argues that rather than explaining concentrations of wealth and income, market forces should serve as a brake on such concentration, which may better be explained by the non-market force known as "rent-seeking". While the market will bid up compensation for rare and desired skills to reward wealth creation, greater productivity, etc., it will also prevent successful entrepreneurs from earning excess profits by fostering competition to cut prices, profits and large compensation. A better explainer of growing inequality, according to Stiglitz, is the use of political power generated by wealth by certain groups to shape government policies financially beneficial to them. This process, known to economists as rent-seeking, brings income not from creation of wealth but from "grabbing a larger share of the wealth that would otherwise have been produced without their effort". Finance industry Jamie Galbraith argues that countries with larger financial sectors have greater inequality, and the link is not an accident. Global warming and climate change A 2019 study published in PNAS found that global warming plays a role in increasing economic inequality between countries, boosting economic growth in developed countries while hampering such growth in developing nations of the Global South. The study says that 25% of gap between the developed world and the developing world can be attributed to global warming.A 2020 report by Oxfam and the Stockholm Environment Institute says that the wealthiest 10% of the global population were responsible for more than half of global carbon dioxide emissions from 1990 to 2015, which increased by 60%. According to a 2020 report by the UNEP, overconsumption by the rich is a significant driver of the climate crisis, and the wealthiest 1% of the world's population are responsible for more than double the greenhouse gas emissions of the poorest 50% combined. Inger Andersen, in the foreword to the report, said "this elite will need to reduce their footprint by a factor of 30 to stay in line with the Paris Agreement targets." A 2022 report by Oxfam found that the business investments of the wealthiest 125 billionaires emit 393 million metric tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions annually.In July 2023, a letter sent to the United Nations secretary general António Guterres and World Bank president Ajay Banga by a group of over 200 economists from 67 countries, including Jayati Ghosh, Joseph Stiglitz and Thomas Piketty, warned that if the sharp increase in economic inequality is not reversed, it will "entrench poverty and increase the risk of climate breakdown." Politics Joseph Stiglitz argues in The Price of Inequality (2012) that the economic inequality is inevitable and permanent, because it is caused by the great amount of political power the richest have. He wrote, "While there may be underlying economic forces at play, politics have shaped the market, and shaped it in ways that advantage the top at the expense of the rest." Cognitive biases Research has shown that biased decision-making does not alone explain a significant proportion of inequality, therefore inequality cannot be explained by cognitive biases of a specific sub-population, such as temporal discounting (i.e., not preferring immediate funds over larger future gains), overestimation (i.e. thinking you are better than you are at making decisions), over-placement (i.e. thinking you are better than the average person at making decisions), and extremeness aversion (i.e. taking the 'middle option' simply because it seems safer than the highest or lowest). Mitigating factors Countries with a left-leaning legislature generally have lower levels of inequality. Many factors constrain economic inequality – they may be divided into two classes: market driven, and government sponsored. The relative merits and effectiveness of each approach is a subject of debate: Market forces outside of government intervention that can reduce economic inequality include: propensity to spend: with rising wealth & income, a person may spend more. In an extreme example, if one person owned everything, they would immediately need to hire people to maintain their properties, thus reducing the wealth concentration. On the other hand, high-income persons have higher propensity to save. Robin Maialeh then shows that increasing economic wealth decreases propensity to spend and increases propensity to invest which consequently leads to even greater growth rate of already rich agents.Typical government initiatives intended to reduce economic inequality include: Public education: increasing the supply of skilled labor and reducing income inequality due to education differentials. Progressive taxation: the rich are taxed proportionally more than the poor, reducing the amount of income inequality in society if the change in taxation does not cause changes in income.Research shows that since 1300, the only periods with significant declines in wealth inequality in Europe were the Black Death and the two World Wars. Historian Walter Scheidel posits that, since the Stone Age, only extreme violence, catastrophes and upheaval in the form of total war, Communist revolutions, the French Revolution, pestilence and state collapse have significantly reduced inequality. He has stated that "only all-out thermonuclear war might fundamentally reset the existing distribution of resources" and that "peaceful policy reform may well prove unequal to the growing challenges ahead." However, Scheidel also stated that "There is certainly room for incremental change, that's what the example of Latin America shows in the past 15 years or so." Policy responses intended to mitigate A 2011 OECD study makes a number of suggestions to its member countries, including: Well-targeted income-support policies. Facilitation and encouragement of access to employment. Better job-related training and education for the low-skilled (on-the-job training) would help to boost their productivity potential and future earnings. Better access to formal education.Progressive taxation reduces absolute income inequality when the higher rates on higher-income individuals are paid and not evaded, and transfer payments and social safety nets result in progressive government spending. Wage ratio legislation has also been proposed as a means of reducing income inequality. The OECD asserts that public spending is vital in reducing the ever-expanding wealth gap.Deferred investment programs that increase stock ownership amongst lower income levels can supplement income to compensate wage stagnation.The economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty recommend much higher top marginal tax rates on the wealthy, up to 50 percent, 70 percent or even 90 percent. Ralph Nader, Jeffrey Sachs, the United Front Against Austerity, among others, call for a financial transaction tax (also known as the Robin Hood tax) to bolster the social safety net and the public sector.The Economist wrote in December 2013: "A minimum wage, providing it is not set too high, could thus boost pay with no ill effects on jobs....America's federal minimum wage, at 38% of median income, is one of the rich world's lowest. Some studies find no harm to employment from federal or state minimum wages, others see a small one, but none finds any serious damage."General limitations on and taxation of rent-seeking are popular across the political spectrum.Public policy responses addressing causes and effects of income inequality in the US include: progressive tax incidence adjustments, strengthening social safety net provisions such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children, welfare, the food stamp program, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, organizing community interest groups, increasing and reforming higher education subsidies, increasing infrastructure spending, and placing limits on and taxing rent-seeking.A 2017 study in the Journal of Political Economy by Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson and Thierry Verdier argues that American "cutthroat" capitalism and inequality gives rise to technology and innovation that more "cuddly" forms of capitalism cannot. As a result, "the diversity of institutions we observe among relatively advanced countries, ranging from greater inequality and risk-taking in the United States to the more egalitarian societies supported by a strong safety net in Scandinavia, rather than reflecting differences in fundamentals between the citizens of these societies, may emerge as a mutually self-reinforcing world equilibrium. If so, in this equilibrium, 'we cannot all be like the Scandinavians,' because Scandinavian capitalism depends in part on the knowledge spillovers created by the more cutthroat American capitalism." A 2012 working paper by the same authors, making similar arguments, was challenged by Lane Kenworthy, who posited that, among other things, the Nordic countries are consistently ranked as some of the world's most innovative countries by the World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Index, with Sweden ranking as the most innovative nation, followed by Finland, for 2012–2013; the U.S. ranked sixth.There are however global initiative like the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 10 which aims to garner international efforts in reducing economic inequality considerably by 2030. Effects A lot of research has been done about the effects of economic inequality on different aspects in society: Health: For long time the higher material living standards lead to longer life, as those people were able to get enough food, water and access to warmth. British researchers Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have found higher rates of health and social problems (obesity, mental illness, homicides, teenage births, incarceration, child conflict, drug use) in countries and states with higher inequality. Their research included 24 developed countries, including most U.S. states, and found that in the more developed countries, such as Finland and Japan, the heath issues are much lower than in states with rather higher inequality rates, such as Utah and New Hampshire. Some studies link a surge in "deaths of despair", suicide, drug overdoses and alcohol related deaths, to widening income inequality. Conversely, other research did not find these effects or concluded that research suffered from issues of confounding variables. Social goods: British researchers Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have found lower rates of social goods (life expectancy by country, educational performance, trust among strangers, women's status, social mobility, even numbers of patents issued) in countries and states with higher inequality. Social cohesion: Research has shown an inverse link between income inequality and social cohesion. In more equal societies, people are much more likely to trust each other, measures of social capital (the benefits of goodwill, fellowship, mutual sympathy and social connectedness among groups who make up a social units) suggest greater community involvement. Happiness: According to the 2019 World Happiness Report, increasing socioeconomic inequality, along with rising healthcare costs, surging addiction rates, and an unhealthy work–life balance, are causes of unhappiness around the world. Crime: The cross national research shows that in societies with less economic inequality the homicide rates are consistently lower. A 2016 study finds that interregional inequality increases terrorism. Other research has argued inequality has little effect on crime rates. Welfare: Studies have found evidence that in societies where inequality is lower, population-wide satisfaction and happiness tend to be higher. Poverty: Study made by Jared Bernstein and Elise Gould suggest, that the poverty in the United States could have been reduced by the lowering of economic inequality for the past few decades. Debt: Income inequality has been the driving factor in the growing household debt, as high earners bid up the price of real estate and middle income earners go deeper into debt trying to maintain what once was a middle class lifestyle. Economic growth: A 2016 meta-analysis found that "the effect of inequality on growth is negative and more pronounced in less developed countries than in rich countries", though the average impact on growth was not significant. The study also found that wealth inequality is more pernicious to growth than income inequality. Civic participation: Higher income inequality led to less of all forms of social, cultural, and civic participation among the less wealthy. Political instability: Studies indicate that economic inequality leads to greater political instability, including an increased risk of democratic breakdown and civil conflict. A significant impact of inequality on civil war probability has been found through anthropometric methods. Political party responses: One study finds that economic inequality prompts attempts by left-leaning politicians to pursue redistributive policies while right-leaning politicians seek to repress the redistributive policies. Perspectives Fairness vs. equality According to Christina Starmans et al. (Nature Hum. Beh., 2017), the research literature contains no evidence on people having an aversion to inequality. In all studies analyzed, the subjects preferred fair distributions (inequity aversion) to equal distributions, in both laboratory and real-world situations. In public, researchers may loosely speak of equality instead of fairness, when referring to studies where fairness happens to coincide with equality, but in many studies fairness is carefully separated from equality and the results are univocal. Very young children seem to prefer fairness over equality.When people were asked, what would be the wealth of each quintile in their ideal society, they gave a 50-fold sum to the richest quintile than to the poorest quintile. The preference for inequality increases in adolescence, and so do the capabilities to favor fortune, effort and ability in the distribution.Preference for unequal distribution has been developed to the human race possibly because it allows for better co-operation and allows a person to work with a more productive person so that both parties benefit from the co-operation. Inequality is also said to be able to solve the problems of free-riders, cheaters and ill-behaving people, although this is heavily debated. Researches demonstrate that people usually underestimate the level of actual inequality, which is also much higher than their desired level of inequality.In many societies, such as the USSR, the distribution led to protests from wealthier landowners. In the current U.S., many feel that the distribution is unfair in being too unequal. In both cases, the cause is unfairness, not inequality, the researchers conclude. Socialist perspectives Socialists attribute the vast disparities in wealth to the private ownership of the means of production by a class of owners, creating a situation where a small portion of the population lives off unearned property income by virtue of ownership titles in capital equipment, financial assets and corporate stock. By contrast, the vast majority of the population is dependent on income in the form of a wage or salary. In order to rectify this situation, socialists argue that the means of production should be socially owned so that income differentials would be reflective of individual contributions to the social product.Marxian economics attributes rising inequality to job automation and capital deepening within capitalism. The process of job automation conflicts with the capitalist property form and its attendant system of wage labor. In this analysis, capitalist firms increasingly substitute capital equipment for labor inputs (workers) under competitive pressure to reduce costs and maximize profits. Over the long term, this trend increases the organic composition of capital, meaning that less workers are required in proportion to capital inputs, increasing unemployment (the "reserve army of labour"). This process exerts a downward pressure on wages. The substitution of capital equipment for labor (mechanization and automation) raises the productivity of each worker, resulting in a situation of relatively stagnant wages for the working class amidst rising levels of property income for the capitalist class.Marxist socialists ultimately predict the emergence of a communist society based on the common ownership of the means of production, where each individual citizen would have free access to the articles of consumption (From each according to his ability, to each according to his need). According to Marxist philosophy, equality in the sense of free access is essential for freeing individuals from dependent relationships, thereby allowing them to transcend alienation. Meritocracy Meritocracy favors an eventual society where an individual's success is a direct function of his merit, or contribution. Economic inequality would be a natural consequence of the wide range in individual skill, talent and effort in human population. David Landes stated that the progression of Western economic development that led to the Industrial Revolution was facilitated by men advancing through their own merit rather than because of family or political connections. Liberal perspectives Most modern social liberals, including centrist or left-of-center political groups, believe that the capitalist economic system should be fundamentally preserved, but the status quo regarding the income gap must be reformed. Social liberals favor a capitalist system with active Keynesian macroeconomic policies and progressive taxation (to even out differences in income inequality). Research indicates that people who hold liberal beliefs tend to see greater income inequality as morally wrong.However, contemporary classical liberals and libertarians generally do not take a stance on wealth inequality, but believe in equality under the law regardless of whether it leads to unequal wealth distribution. In 1966 Ludwig von Mises, a prominent figure in the Austrian School of economic thought, explains: The liberal champions of equality under the law were fully aware of the fact that men are born unequal and that it is precisely their inequality that generates social cooperation and civilization. Equality under the law was in their opinion not designed to correct the inexorable facts of the universe and to make natural inequality disappear. It was, on the contrary, the device to secure for the whole of mankind the maximum of benefits it can derive from it. Henceforth no man-made institutions should prevent a man from attaining that station in which he can best serve his fellow citizens. Robert Nozick argued that government redistributes wealth by force (usually in the form of taxation), and that the ideal moral society would be one where all individuals are free from force. However, Nozick recognized that some modern economic inequalities were the result of forceful taking of property, and a certain amount of redistribution would be justified to compensate for this force but not because of the inequalities themselves. John Rawls argued in A Theory of Justice that inequalities in the distribution of wealth are only justified when they improve society as a whole, including the poorest members. Rawls does not discuss the full implications of his theory of justice. Some see Rawls's argument as a justification for capitalism since even the poorest members of society theoretically benefit from increased innovations under capitalism; others believe only a strong welfare state can satisfy Rawls's theory of justice.Classical liberal Milton Friedman believed that if government action is taken in pursuit of economic equality then political freedom would suffer. In a famous quote, he said: A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both. Economist Tyler Cowen has argued that though income inequality has increased within nations, globally it has fallen over the 20 years leading up to 2014. He argues that though income inequality may make individual nations worse off, overall, the world has improved as global inequality has been reduced. Social justice arguments Patrick Diamond and Anthony Giddens (professors of Economics and Sociology, respectively) hold that 'pure meritocracy is incoherent because, without redistribution, one generation's successful individuals would become the next generation's embedded caste, hoarding the wealth they had accumulated'.They also state that social justice requires redistribution of high incomes and large concentrations of wealth in a way that spreads it more widely, in order to "recognize the contribution made by all sections of the community to building the nation's wealth." (Patrick Diamond and Anthony Giddens, June 27, 2005, New Statesman)Pope Francis stated in his Evangelii gaudium, that "as long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation and by attacking the structural causes of inequality, no solution will be found for the world's problems or, for that matter, to any problems." He later declared that "inequality is the root of social evil."When income inequality is low, aggregate demand will be relatively high, because more people who want ordinary consumer goods and services will be able to afford them, while the labor force will not be as relatively monopolized by the wealthy. Effects on social welfare In most western democracies, the desire to eliminate or reduce economic inequality is generally associated with the political left. One practical argument in favor of reduction is the idea that economic inequality reduces social cohesion and increases social unrest, thereby weakening the society. There is evidence that this is true (see inequity aversion) and it is intuitive, at least for small face-to-face groups of people. Alberto Alesina, Rafael Di Tella, and Robert MacCulloch find that inequality negatively affects happiness in Europe but not in the United States.It has also been argued that economic inequality invariably translates to political inequality, which further aggravates the problem. Even in cases where an increase in economic inequality makes nobody economically poorer, an increased inequality of resources is disadvantageous, as increased economic inequality can lead to a power shift due to an increased inequality in the ability to participate in democratic processes. Capabilities approach The capabilities approach – sometimes called the human development approach – looks at income inequality and poverty as form of "capability deprivation". Unlike neoliberalism, which "defines well-being as utility maximization", economic growth and income are considered a means to an end rather than the end itself. Its goal is to "wid[en] people's choices and the level of their achieved well-being" through increasing functioning (the things a person values doing), capabilities (the freedom to enjoy functionings) and agency (the ability to pursue valued goals).When a person's capabilities are lowered, they are in some way deprived of earning as much income as they would otherwise. An old, ill man cannot earn as much as a healthy young man; gender roles and customs may prevent a woman from receiving an education or working outside the home. There may be an epidemic that causes widespread panic, or there could be rampant violence in the area that prevents people from going to work for fear of their lives. As a result, income inequality increases, and it becomes more difficult to reduce the gap without additional aid. Societal acceptance A 2022 study published in Perspectives on Psychological Science found that in countries where neoliberal institutions have significant influence over policies, the psychology of those population are shaped to have both a higher tolerance of large levels of income inequality, and prefer it over more egalitarian outcomes. Arguments that economic inequality is not a problem The majority of researchers who analyze economic inequality argue that today's levels are problematic and deserve some mitigation. There are however, some who disagree, and feel that current levels of inequality are necessary because it encourages individuals to gain useful skills and take risks, thereby encouraging growth and innovation, which are necessary for progress. Some have also argued that economic inequality is a natural and fair outcome in market economies, in which the rewards are distributed based on different economic contributions because individuals have different attitudes and talents. Many who feel that economic inequality is not a significant issue are associated with conservative or libertarian think tanks funded by corporations and the wealthy like The Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the Cato Institute or the American Enterprise Institute, who may also feel that policies which would reduce inequality are direct attacks on their favored version of capitalism, laissez-faire capitalism.: 1  In addition, some feel that economic inequality has not actually increased significantly. See also References Further reading BooksAtkinson, Anthony B.; Bourguignon, François (2000). Handbook of income distribution. Amsterdam & New York: Elsevier. ISBN 978-0444816313. Atkinson, Anthony B. (2015). Inequality: What Can Be Done? 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Stewart, Alexander J.; McCarty, Nolan; Bryson, Joanna J. (2020). "Polarization under rising inequality and economic decline". Science Advances. 6 (50): eabd4201. arXiv:1807.11477. Bibcode:2020SciA....6.4201S. doi:10.1126/sciadv.abd4201. PMC 7732181. PMID 33310855. S2CID 216144890. Svizzero, Serge; Tisdell, Clem (2003). "Income inequality between skilled individuals" (PDF). International Journal of Social Economics. 30 (11): 1118–30. doi:10.1108/03068290310497486. S2CID 153963662. Vicencio, Eduardo Rivera (2019). "Inequality, Precariousness and Social Costs of Capitalism. In the Era of Corporate Governmentality". International Journal of Critical Accounting. 11 (1): 40–70. doi:10.1504/IJCA.2019.10025189. S2CID 211435244. Historical Alfani, Guido, and Matteo Di Tullio. The Lion's Share: Inequality and the Rise of the Fiscal State in Preindustrial Europe, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2019. The Lion's Share: Inequality and the Rise of the Fiscal State in Preindustrial Europe Crayen, Dorothee, and Joerg Baten. "New evidence and new methods to measure human capital inequality before and during the industrial revolution: France and the US in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries." Economic History Review 63.2 (2010): 452–478.online Hickel, Jason (2018). The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0393651362. Hoffman, Philip T., et al. "Real inequality in Europe since 1500." Journal of Economic History 62.2 (2002): 322–355. online Morrisson, Christian, and Wayne Snyder. "The income inequality of France in historical perspective." European Review of Economic History 4.1 (2000): 59–83. online Lindert, Peter H., and Steven Nafziger. "Russian inequality on the eve of revolution." Journal of Economic History 74.3 (2014): 767-798. online Nicolini, Esteban A.; Ramos Palencia, Fernando (2016). "Decomposing income inequality in a backward pre-industrial economy: Old Castile (Spain) in the middle of the eighteenth century". Economic History Review. 69 (3): 747–772. doi:10.1111/ehr.12122. S2CID 154988112. Piketty, Thomas, and Emmanuel Saez. "The evolution of top incomes: a historical and international perspective." American economic review 96.2 (2006): 200–205. online Archived December 26, 2011, at the Wayback Machine Piketty, Thomas, and Emmanuel Saez. "Income inequality in the United States, 1913–1998." Quarterly journal of economics 118.1 (2003): 1-41. online Saito, Osamu. "Growth and inequality in the great and little divergence debate: a Japanese perspective." Economic History Review 68.2 (2015): 399–419. Covers 1600–1868 with comparison to Stuart England and Mughal India. Scheidel, Walter (2017). The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0691165028. 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climate fiction

Climate fiction (sometimes shortened as cli-fi) is literature that deals with climate change. Generally speculative in nature but inspired by climate science, works may take place in the world as we know it, in the near future or in fictional worlds experiencing climate change. The genre frequently includes science fiction and dystopian or utopian themes, imagining the potential futures based on how humanity responds to the impacts of climate change. The genre typically focuses on anthropogenic climate change and other environmental issues as opposed to weather and disaster more generally. Technologies such as climate engineering or climate adaptation practices often feature prominently in works exploring their impacts on society. The term "cli-fi" is generally credited to freelance news reporter and climate activist Dan Bloom in 2007 or 2008. "Climate fiction" has only been attested since the early 2010s, and the term has been retroactively applied to a number of works. Pioneering 20th century authors include J. G. Ballard and Octavia E. Butler, while dystopian fiction from Margaret Atwood is often cited as an immediate precursor to the genre's emergence. Since 2010, prominent cli-fi authors include Kim Stanley Robinson, Richard Powers, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Barbara Kingsolver. The publication of Robinson's The Ministry for the Future in 2020 helped cement the genre's emergence; the work generated presidential and United Nations mentions and an invitation for Robinson to meet planners at the Pentagon.University courses on literature and environmental issues may include climate change fiction in their syllabi. This body of literature has been discussed by a variety of publications, including The New York Times, The Guardian, and Dissent magazine, among other international media outlets. Academics and critics study the potential impact of fiction on the broader field of climate change communication. Terminology Bloom had used the term to describe his novella Polar City Red, a post-apocalyptic story about climate refugees in Alaska set in 2075, which was not commercially successful. It later came into mainstream media use in April 2013, when Christian Science Monitor and NPR ran stories about a new literary movement of novels and films that dealt with human-induced climate change. Bloom had been critical of the lack of mention of his role in coining the term in these features. Scott Thill wrote in HuffPost in 2014 that he had popularised the term in 2009, inspired by the mixture of science and fiction in Franny Armstrong's film The Age of Stupid. History Jules Verne's 1889 novel The Purchase of the North Pole imagines climate change due to tilting of Earth's axis. In his posthumous Paris in the Twentieth Century, written in 1883 and set during the 1960s, the eponymous city experiences a sudden drop in temperature, which lasts for three years.Laurence Manning's 1933 serialized novel The Man Who Awoke has been described as an exemplary work of ecological science fiction from the golden age. It tells the story a man who awakes from suspended animation in various future eras and learns about the destruction to the Earth's climate, caused by overuse of fossil fuels, global warming, and deforestation. People of the future refer to 20th century humans as "the wasters". They have abandoned over-industrialization and consumerism to live in small self-sufficient villages based around genetically engineered trees that provide all their necessities. Isaac Asimov credited The Man Who Awoke for bringing the "energy crisis" to his attention 40 years before it became common knowledge in the 1970s.Several well-known dystopian works by British author J. G. Ballard deal with climate-related natural disasters. In The Wind from Nowhere (1961), civilization is devastated by persistent hurricane-force winds, and The Drowned World (1962) describes a future of melted ice-caps and rising sea-levels caused by solar radiation. In The Burning World (1964, later retitled The Drought) his climate catastrophe is human-made, a drought due to disruption of the precipitation cycle by industrial pollution.Frank Herbert's 1965 science fiction novel Dune, set on a fictional desert planet, has been proposed as a pioneer of climate fiction for its themes of ecology and environmentalism.Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower (1993) imagines a near-future for the United States where climate change, wealth inequality, and corporate greed cause apocalyptic chaos. Here, and in sequel Parable of the Talents (1998), Butler dissects how instability and political demagoguery exacerbate society's underlying cruelty (especially with regards to racism and sexism) and also explores themes of survival and resilience. Butler wrote the novel "thinking about the future, thinking about the things that we're doing now and the kind of future we're buying for ourselves, if we're not careful." As scientific knowledge of the effects of fossil fuel consumption and resulting increase in atmospheric CO2 concentrations entered the public and political arena as "global warming", human-caused climate change entered works of fiction. Susan M. Gaines's Carbon Dreams (2000) was an early example of a literary novel that "tells a story about the devastatingly serious issue of human-induced climate change", set in the 1980s and published before the term "cli-fi" was coined. Michael Crichton's State of Fear (2004), a techno-thriller, was a bestseller upon its release but was criticised by scientists for portraying climate change as "a vast pseudo-scientific hoax" and rejecting the scientific consensus on climate change. Sigbjørn Skåden's novel Fugl (2019) is a Sámi novel written in Norwegian that weaves together environmental collapse with an allegory of colonialismMargaret Atwood explored the subject in her dystopian trilogy Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009) and MaddAddam (2013). In Oryx and Crake, Atwood presents a world where "social inequality, genetic technology and catastrophic climate change, has finally culminated in some apocalyptic event". The novel's protagonist, Jimmy, lives in a "world split between corporate compounds", gated communities that have grown into city-states and pleeblands, which are "unsafe, populous and polluted" urban areas where the working classes live.In 2016, Indian writer Amitav Ghosh expressed concern that climate change had "a much smaller presence in contemporary literary fiction than it does even in public discussion". In The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Ghosh said "if certain literary forms are unable to negotiate these waters, then they will have failed – and their failures will have to be counted as an aspect of the broader imaginative and cultural failure that lies at the heart of the climate crisis."By the 2010s, climate fiction had attracted greater prominence and media attention. Cultural critic Josephine Livingston at The New Republic wrote in 2020 that "the last decade has seen such a steep rise in sophisticated 'cli-fi' that some literary publications now devote whole verticals to it. With such various and fertile imaginations at work on the same topic, whether in fiction or nonfiction, the challenge facing the environmental writer now is standing out from the crowd (not to mention the headlines)." She highlighted Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation to Nathaniel Rich's Odds Against Tomorrow as examples.In african literature, climate informed novels and short stories have been recently receiving attention as field of contemporary african literature. Books such as Eclipse our sins, by Tlotlo Tsamaase; It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way, by Alistair Mackay and Noor, by Nnedi Okorafor, have been highlighted as remarkable publications in the topic. Prominent examples The popular science-fiction novelist Kim Stanley Robinson has been writing on the theme for several decades, including his Science in the Capital trilogy, which is set in the near future and includes Forty Signs of Rain (2004), Fifty Degrees Below (2005), and Sixty Days and Counting (2007). Robert K. J. Killheffer in his review for Fantasy & Science Fiction said "Forty Signs of Rain is a fascinating depiction of the workings of science and politics, and an urgent call to readers to confront the threat of climate change." Robinson's climate-themed novel, titled New York 2140, was published in March 2017. It gives a complex portrait of a coastal city that is partly underwater and yet has successfully adapted to climate change in its culture and ecology. Robinson's novel The Ministry for the Future, is set in the near future, and follows a subsidiary body, whose mission is to advocate for the world's future generations of citizens as if their rights are as valid as the present generation's. British author J. G. Ballard used the setting of apocalyptic climate change in his early science fiction novels. In The Wind from Nowhere (1961), civilisation is reduced by persistent hurricane-force winds. The Drowned World (1962) describes a future of melted ice-caps and rising sea-levels, caused by solar radiation, creating a landscape mirroring the collective unconscious desires of the main characters. In The Burning World (1964) a surrealistic psychological landscape is formed by drought due to industrial pollution disrupting the precipitation cycle. Similarly, The Road (2006) by Cormac McCarthy is set after an unspecified apocalypse or environmental catastrophe. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2007. Although it does not explicitly mention climate change, it has been listed by The Guardian as one of the best climate change novels, and environmentalist George Monbiot has described it as "the most important environmental book ever written" for depicting a world without a biosphere.The novel State of Fear by Michael Crichton, published in December 2004, describes a conspiracy by scientists and others to create public panic about global warming. Crichton has publicly advocated "skepticism" of global warming. His novel describes a group of eco-terrorists attempting to create natural disasters to convince the public of the dangers of global warming. It is based upon the idea that there is a deliberately alarmist conspiracy behind climate change activism. The book is critical of the scientific consensus on climate change. A critique in the BBC News pointed out that "Crichton's trade is to bring pleasurable terror to millions by spinning tales of science gone amok" and "To make sure you get his point, Crichton adds a 32-page footnote documenting his own conviction that global warming is an unscientific scare."Ian McEwan's Solar (2010) follows the story of a physicist who discovers a way to fight climate change after managing to derive power from artificial photosynthesis. The Stone Gods (2007) by Jeanette Winterson is set on the fictional planet Orbus, a world very like Earth, running out of resources and suffering from the severe effects of climate change. Inhabitants of Orbus hope to take advantage of possibilities offered by a newly discovered planet, Planet Blue, which appears perfect for human life.Other authors who have used this subject matter include: Fallen Angels (1991) by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn. Set in North America in the "near future", a radical technophobic green movement dramatically cuts greenhouse gas emissions, only to find that manmade global warming was staving off a new ice age. Mother of Storms (1994) by John Barnes describes a catastrophic, rapid climate and weather change brought on by a nuclear explosion releasing clathrate compounds from the ocean floor, based on the clathrate gun hypothesis. The Swarm (2004) by Frank Schätzing. The book follows an ensemble of protagonists who are investigating what at first appear to be freak events related to the world's oceans. Seemingly unrelated events like the destabilization of the continental shelf resulting in a megatsunami, whales attacking a commercial freighter, and an outbreak of an epidemic caused by contaminated lobsters are revealed to be caused by an unknown submarine species trying to defend the oceans against human influence. Far North (2009) by Marcel Theroux, in which the world is largely uninhabitable due to climate change. However, the novel implies that scientists got it wrong and that it was our actions combating global warming that irrevocably altered the climate. Arctic Drift (2008) by Clive Cussler and Dirk Cussler. A thriller involving attempts to reverse global warming, a possible war between the United States and Canada, and "a mysterious silvery mineral traced to a long-ago expedition in search of the fabled Northwest Passage." Devolution of a Species by M.E. Ellington focuses on the Gaia hypothesis, and describes the Earth as a single living organism fighting back against humankind. The Carbon Diaries: 2015 (2009) by Saci Lloyd is set in a future where power is scarce and the UK has just begun carbon rationing. The story is told in diary form by Laura Brown, a teenager living in London in the aftermath of the Great Storm. Barbara Kingsolver's novel, Flight Behavior (2012), employs environmental themes and highlights the potential effects of global warming on the monarch butterfly. Norwegian author Maja Lunde has released a "Climate Quartet" of novels, beginning with Bienes histore (The History of Bees) in 2015, which examines pollinator decline through a number of human storylines throughout history, followed by The End of the Ocean (2017), Przewalski's Horse (2019) and an upcoming fourth instalment. The Overstory (2018) by Richard Powers, which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The novel revolves around nine disparate characters with close associations to individual trees, that come together to address deforestation. The New Wilderness (2020) by Diane Cook is set in North America where climate change has affected the natural environment. It was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize. Bewilderment (2021) by Richard Powers was shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize. It was also longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction. It was selected by Oprah Winfrey as part of Oprah's Book Club on 28 September 2021. Description of apocalyptic scenarios "Climate apocalypse scenarios" are explored in multiple science fiction works. For example, in The Wind from Nowhere (1961), civilization is devastated by persistent hurricane-force winds, and The Drowned World (1962) describes a future of melted ice-caps and rising sea-levels caused by solar radiation. In The Burning World (1964, later retitled The Drought) his climate catastrophe is human-made, a drought due to disruption of the precipitation cycle by industrial pollution.Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower (1993) imagines a near-future for the United States where climate change, wealth inequality, and corporate greed cause apocalyptic chaos. Here, and in sequel Parable of the Talents (1998), Butler dissects how instability and political demagoguery exacerbate society's underlying cruelty (especially with regards to racism and sexism) and also explores themes of survival and resilience. Butler wrote the novel "thinking about the future, thinking about the things that we're doing now and the kind of future we're buying for ourselves, if we're not careful."Margaret Atwood explored the subject in her dystopian trilogy Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009) and MaddAddam (2013). In Oryx and Crake, Atwood presents a world where "social inequality, genetic technology and catastrophic climate change, has finally culminated in some apocalyptic event". Other examples Heat (1977), by Arthur Herzog, US The Sea and Summer [Drowning Towers] (1987), by George Turner, Australia The Crystal World (1988), by J. G. Ballard, UK The Ice People (1998) and The Flood (2004), Magee Gee, US Earth (1990), David Brin, US A Friend of the Earth (2000), T.C. Boyle, US Floodland (2001) and Aurora (2011), Marcus Sedgwick, US Exodus (2002) and sequels, Julie Bertagna, US Flood (2008) and Ark (2009), Stephen Baxter, US The Windup Girl (2009), Ship Breaker (2010), The Drowned Cities (2012), The Water Knife (2015) and Tool of War (2017), Paolo Bacigalupi, US Empire Builders (2011), Ben Bova, US 2312 (2012), Kim Stanley Robinson, US Odds Against Tomorrow (2013), Nathaniel Rich, US The Bone Clocks (2014), David Mitchell, UK The Collapse of Western Civilization (2014), by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Columbia University Press, US Memory of Water (2015), Emmi Itäranta, Finland Gold Fame Citrus (2015), Claire Vaye Watkins, US American War (2017), Omar El Akkad, US The Water Cure (2018), Sophie Mackintosh, UK The Last Children of Tokyo (The Emissary) (2018), Yoko Tawada, Germany/Japan The City in the Middle of the Night (2019), by Charlie Jane Anders Gun Island (2019) by Amitav Ghosh The Wall (2019), by John Lanchester The Ministry for the Future (2020), by Kim Stanley Robinson A Children's Bible (2020) by Lydia Millet Migrations (2020) by Charlotte McConaghy Diatomea (2022), by Núria Perpinyà Depart, Depart (2020) by Sim Kern 470 (2020) by Linda Woodrow Anthologies and collections Welcome to the Greenhouse (2011) US edited by Gordon Van Gelder Loosed Upon the World: The Saga Anthology of Climate Fiction (2015) US edited by John Joseph Adams Drowned Worlds (2016) UK edited by Jonathan Strahan Possible Solutions (2017) US by Helen Phillips – Many of the short stories concern climate change. Author and editor Bruce Meyer and creative writing professor at Georgian College edited a 2017 anthology of stories about "changing ocean conditions, the widening disappearance of species, genetically modified organisms, increasing food shortages, mass migrations of refugees, and the hubris behind our provoking Mother Earth herself", which he labels as "cli-fi". The anthology includes works by George McWhirter, Richard Van Camp, Holly Schofield, Linda Rogers, Sean Virgo, Rati Mehrotra, Geoffrey W. Cole, Phil Dwyer, Kate Story, Leslie Goodreid, Nina Munteanu, Halli Villegas, John Oughton, Frank Westcott, Wendy Bone, Peter Timmerman, and Lynn Hutchinson-Lee. Meteotopia - Futures of Climate (In)Justice (2022) Collection of short stories on climate and environment by authors of the Global South. Influence Many journalists, literary critics, and scholars have speculated about the potential influence of climate fiction on the beliefs of its readers. To date, three empirical studies have examined this question. A controlled experiment found that reading climate fiction short stories "had small but significant positive effects on several important beliefs and attitudes about global warming – observed immediately after participants read the stories", though "these effects diminished to statistical nonsignificance after a one-month interval". However, the authors note that "the effects of a single exposure in an artificial setting may represent a lower bound of the real-world effects. Reading climate fiction in the real world often involves multiple exposures and longer narratives", such as novels, "which may result in larger and longer-lasting impacts".A survey of readers found that readers of climate fiction "are younger, more liberal, and more concerned about climate change than nonreaders", and that climate fiction "reminds concerned readers of the severity of climate change while impelling them to imagine environmental futures and consider the impact of climate change on human and nonhuman life. However, the actions that resulted from readers' heightened consciousness reveal that awareness is only as valuable as the cultural messages about possible actions to take that are in circulation. Moreover, the responses of some readers suggest that works of climate fiction might lead some people to associate climate change with intensely negative emotions, which could prove counterproductive to efforts at environmental engagement or persuasion."Finally, an empirical study focused on the popular novel The Water Knife found that cautionary climate fiction set in a dystopic future can be effective at educating readers about climate injustice and leading readers to empathize with the victims of climate change, including environmental migrants. However, its results suggest that dystopic climate narratives might lead to support for reactionary responses to climate change. Based on this result, it cautioned that "not all climate fiction is progressive", despite the hopes of many authors, critics, and readers. See also Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction Climate apocalypse Ecofiction Climate change in popular culture Media coverage of climate change Mundane science fiction Petrofiction Public opinion on climate change Solarpunk Utopian and dystopian fiction References Further reading Canavan, Gerry; Robinson, Kim Stanley (2014). Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction. Wesleyan University Press. ISBN 978-0-8195-7428-2. Milner, Andrew; Burgmann, J.R. (2020). Science Fiction and Climate Change: A Sociological Approach. Liverpool University Press. ISBN 978-1-78962-752-7. Mehnert, Antonia (2016). Climate Change Fictions: Representations of Global Warming in American Literature. Springer. ISBN 978-3-319-40337-3. Schneider-Mayerson, Matthew (2017). "Climate Change Fiction". In Greenwald Smith, Rachel (ed.). American Literature in Transition, 2000–2010. Cambridge University Press. pp. 309–321. ISBN 978-1-108-54865-6. Trexler, Adam (2015). Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change. University of Virginia Press. ISBN 978-0-8139-3693-2. Ghosh, Amitav (2016). The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-32317-6. Streeby, Shelley (2018). Imagining the Future of Climate Change: World-Making Through Science Fiction and Activism. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-29444-8. California, CLI-FI, and Climate Crisis: Special Issue of Western American Literature Vol. 56, nos. 3-4, Fall-Winter 2021. University of Nebraska Press. External links Cli-Fi in American Studies: A Research Bibliography Climate Fiction in English: Oxford Research Encyclopedia Burning Worlds Column in the Chicago Review of Books Stories to save the world: the new wave of climate fiction, essay by Claire Armitstead for The Guardian Climate Change Dystopia, discusses current popularity of climate change dystopia.

climate justice

Climate justice is a term that recognises "although global warming is a global crisis, its effects are not felt evenly around the world". Climate justice is a faction of Environmental justice and focuses on the equitable distribution of the burdens of climate change and the efforts to mitigate them. It has been described as encompassing "a set of rights and obligations, which corporations, individuals and governments have towards those vulnerable people who will be in a way significantly disproportionately affected by climate change."Climate justice examines concepts such as equality, human rights, collective rights, and the historical responsibilities for climate change. This is done by relating the causes and effects of climate change to concepts of justice, particularly environmental justice and social justice. Climate justice actions can include the growing global body of legal action on climate change issues. In 2017, a report of the United Nations Environment Programme identified 894 ongoing legal actions worldwide. Climate justice is an aspect of SDG 13 under UN Agenda 2030. Conceptions of climate justice can be grouped along the lines of procedural justice, which emphasises fair, transparent and inclusive decision making, and distributive justice, which places the emphasis on who bears the costs of both climate change and the actions taken to address it.A main factor in the increased popularity and consideration of climate justice was the rise of grassroots movements – such as Fridays for Future, Ende Gelände, and Extinction Rebellion. A special focus is placed on the role of Most Affected People and Areas (MAPA), i.e., groups overall disproportionately vulnerable to or affected by climate change, such as women, racial minorities, young, older and poorer people.Historically marginalised communities, such as low-income, indigenous communities and communities of colour often face the worst consequences of climate change: the least responsible for climate change broadly suffer its gravest consequences. They might also be further disadvantaged by responses to climate change which might reproduce or exacerbate existing inequalities, which has been labeled the 'triple injustices' of climate change.Some climate justice approaches promote transformative justice where advocates focus on how vulnerability to climate change reflects various structural injustices in society, such as the exclusion of marginalised groups from climate resilient livelihoods, and that climate action must explicitly address these structural power imbalances. For these advocates, priority is placed on ensuring that responses to climate change do not repeat or reinforce existing injustices, which has both distributive justice and procedural justice dimensions. Other conceptions frame climate justice in terms of the need to curb climate change within certain limits, like the Paris Agreement targets of 1.5 °C, as otherwise the impacts of climate change on natural ecosystems will be so severe as to preclude the possibility of justice for many generations and populations. Other activists argue that failure to address social implications of climate change mitigation transitions could result in profound economic and social tensions and delay necessary changes while ways that reduce greenhouse gas emissions in a socially just way – called a 'just transition' – are possible, preferable, in better agreement with contemporary human rights, fairer, more ethical as well as possibly more effective. Definition and objectives Use and popularity of climate justice language has increased dramatically in recent years, yet climate justice is understood in many ways, and the different meanings are sometimes contested. At its simplest, conceptions of climate justice can be grouped along the following two lines: procedural justice, which emphasizes fair, transparent and inclusive decision making, and distributive justice, which places the emphasis on who bears the costs of both climate change and the actions taken to address it.The objectives of climate justice can be described as follows: "to encompasses a set of rights and obligations, which corporations, individuals and governments have towards those vulnerable people who will be in a way significantly disproportionately affected by climate change."Climate justice examines concepts such as equality, human rights, collective rights, and the historical responsibilities for climate change. Climate justice is mainly concerned with the procedural and distributive ethical dimensions of and for climate change mitigation. The IPCC Sixth Assessment Report underlines another principle of climate justice which is the “recognition which entails basic respect and robust engagement with and fair consideration of diverse cultures and perspectives”. Alternatively, recognition and respect can be understood as the underlying basis for distributive and procedural justice. Related fields are environmental justice and social justice. Causes of injustice Existing economic systems as a root cause One contentious issue in debates about climate justice is whether fundamental differences in economic systems, such as capitalism versus socialism, are the, or a, root cause of climate injustice. In this context, fundamental disagreements arise between, on the one hand, liberal and conservative environmental groups and, on the other, leftist and radical organizations. While the former often tend to blame the excesses of neoliberalism for climate change and argue in favor of market-based reform within capitalism, the latter view capitalism with its exploitative traits as the underlying central issue. Other possible causal explanations include hierarchies based on the group differences and the nature of the fossil fuel regime itself. Systemic causes It has been argued that the unwarranted rate of climate change, along with its inequality of burdens, is a structural injustice. There is political responsibility for the maintenance and support of historically constituted structural processes. This is despite assumed viable potential alternative models based on novel technologies and means. As a criterion for determining responsibility for climate change, individual causal contribution or capacity does not matter as much as the responsibility for the perpetuation of effectively carbon-intensive structures, practices, and institutions. These structures constitute the global politico-economic system, rather than enabling structural changes towards a system that does not naturally facilitate unsustainable exploitation of people and nature.For others, climate justice could be pursued through existing economic frameworks, global organizations and policy mechanisms. Therefore, for them the root-causes could be found in the causes that so far inhibited global implementation of measures like emissions trading schemes, specifically of forms that deliver the assumed mitigation results. Disproportionality between causality and burden The responsibility for anthropogenic climate change differs substantially among individuals and groups. Studies find that the most affluent citizens of the world are responsible for most environmental impacts, and robust action by them is necessary for prospects of moving towards safer environmental conditions.According to a 2020 report by Oxfam and the Stockholm Environment Institute, the richest 1% of the global population have caused twice as much carbon emissions as the poorest 50% over the 25 years from 1990 to 2015. This was, respectively, during that period, 15% of cumulative emissions compared to 7%. The bottom half of the population is directly-responsible for less than 20% of energy footprints and consume less than the top 5% in terms of trade-corrected energy. High-income individuals usually have higher energy footprints as they disproportionally use their larger financial resources – which they can usually spend freely in their entirety for any purpose as long as the end user purchase is legal – for energy-intensive goods. In particular, the largest disproportionality was identified to be in the domain of transport, where e.g. the top 10% consume 56% of vehicle fuel and conduct 70% of vehicle purchases.Many of the people and nations most affected by climate change are among the least responsible for it.A 2023 review article found that if there were a 2oC temperature rise by 2100, roughly 1 billion primarily poor people would die as a result of primarily wealthy people's greenhouse gas emissions. Intergenerational equity The current nation states and world population need to make changes, including sacrifices (like uncomfortable lifestyle-changes, alterations to public spending and changes to choice of work), today to enable climate justice for future generations.Preventable severe effects are projected to likely occur during the lifetime of the present adult population. Under current climate policy pledges, children born in 2020 (e.g. "Generation Alpha") will experience over their lifetimes, 2–7 times as many heat waves, as well as more of other extreme weather events compared to people born in 1960. This, along with other projections, raises issues of intergenerational equity as it was these generations (specific groups and individuals and their collective governance and perpetuated economics) who have been mainly responsible for the burden of climate change.This illustrates the general fact that emissions produced by any given generation can lock-in damage for one or more future generations, making climate change progressively more threatening for the generations affected than for the generation responsible for the threats. Crucially, the climate system contains tipping points, such as the amount of deforestation of the Amazon that will launch the forest’s irreversible decline. A generation whose continued emissions drive the climate system past such significant tipping points inflicts severe injustice on multiple future generations. Disproportionate impacts on disadvantaged groups Disadvantaged groups will continue to be disproportionately impacted as climate change persists. These groups will be affected due to inequalities that are based on demographic characteristics such as differences in gender, race, ethnicity, age, and income. Inequality increases the exposure of disadvantaged groups to the harmful effects of climate change while also increasing their susceptibility to destruction caused by climate change. The damage is worsened because disadvantaged groups are the last to receive emergency relief and are rarely included in the planning process at local, national and international levels for coping with the impacts of climate change.Communities of color, women, indigenous groups, and people of low-income all face a larger vulnerability to climate change. These groups will be disproportionately impacted due to heat waves, air quality, and extreme weather events. Women are also disadvantaged and will be affected by climate change differently than men. This may impact the ability of minority groups to adapt unless steps are taken to provide these groups with more access to universal resources. Indigenous groups are affected by the consequences of climate change even though they historically have contributed the least. In addition, indigenous peoples are unjustifiably impacted due to their low income, and they continue to have fewer resources to cope with climate change. Responses to improve climate justice Common principles of justice in burden-sharing There are three common principles of justice in burden-sharing that can be used in decision-making related to who bears the larger burdens of climate change globally and domestically: a) those who most caused the problem, b) those who have the most burden-carrying ability and c) those who have benefited most from the activities that cause climate change. Observing calls for climate reparations in scientific literature, among climate movements, and in policy debates, a 2023 study published in One Earth estimated that the top 21 fossil fuel companies would owe cumulative climate reparations of $5.4 trillion over the period 2025–2050.Another method of deciding starts from the objective of preventing climate change e.g. beyond 1.5 °C and from there reason back to who should do what. This makes use of the principles of justice in burden-sharing to maintain fairness. Court cases and litigation By December 2022, the number of climate change-related lawsuits had grown to 2,180, including 1,522 in the U.S. Already in the present and based on existing laws, some relevant parties can be forced into action (to the degree of accountability, monitoring and law enforcement capacities and assessments of feasibility) by means of courts. Human rights Challenges Disruption of social stability, jobs and uncomfortable changes Climate justice may often conflict with social stability whereby e.g. interventions that establish a more just pricing of products could facilitate social unrest and interventions of socioeconomic decarbonization could lead to, not only decreased e.g. material possessions, number of freely choosable options, comfort, maintained habits and salaries, but also at least temporary increased unemployment rates which may be problematic with contemporary psychology (possibly including norms, expectations, conscience, pressures, feedbacks, bias, plasticity and awareness) and socioeconomic structures (possibly including structural facilitation mechanisms for economic activities, enforceable policies, media systems and education apparatuses) even though multiple studies estimate that if a rapid transitions were to be implemented in certain ways the number of full-time jobs formally recognized in the economy could increase overall – albeit not addressing topics such as retraining – at least temporarily due to the increased demand for labor to e.g. build public infrastructure and other "green jobs" to build the renewable energy system. Even though accumulating evidence suggests that people who are living more environmentally friendly lifestyles are happier, according to a study "current strategies for encouraging lifestyle change aren't working". Many of the measures that could decrease social stability could also decrease public political support and political stability or make such more difficult to maintain. Public political support Due to mechanisms of politics and possibly partly due to an earlier neglection of enacting required policies and relevant education of citizens via education systems and media, the urgency for and extent of policies, especially when seeking to facilitate lifestyle-changes and shifts on the scale of entire industries, could not only lead to social tension but also decrease levels of public support for political parties in power. For instance, in contemporary socioeconomic structures keeping gas prices low is often "really good for the poor and the middle class". This may make it more difficult or less rational for political parties to enact such decisions across the world in cases where the national, rather than international, level is adequate. Citizens often form their opinions based on peer opinions and media as well as according to their personal near-term interests. Endorsements of policies – which historically have often been highly suboptimal – that come from an untrusted source may lower citizens' policy support and competing political campaigns and outreach, a key mechanism of politics, as well as online misinformation may further exploit early public discontent with policies, especially when combined ubiquitously with other grave imperfections and ignorance of relevant political parties. The dilemma that links this problem to the concept of climate justice is that interests – in particular extrapolated interests based on scientific data and projections – of hypothetical yet-unborn generations are not suitably represented and considered in today's climate policy-making, which is further complicated in that the already living young generations that will suffer most from climate change receive a politically equal voice and that large shares of voters generally do not have a good quality understanding of the projected likely effects of climate change and other relevant conditions. Public support could also be decreased by decisions for large financial transfers for the purpose of achieving climate justice, making this a challenging task including in cases where this money largely comes from taxing the general population rather than more select subgroups. Reduced efficiency Some may see climate justice arguments for compensation by rich countries for disasters and similar problems in developing countries (as well as for domestic disasters) as a way for "limitless liability" by which at least high levels of compensations could drain a society's resources, efforts, focus and financial funds away from efficient preventive climate change mitigation towards e.g. immediate climate change relief compensations or climate-unrelated expenses of the receiving country or people. Conflicting interest-driven interpretations as barriers to agreements Substantially different interpretations and perspectives, arising from different interests, needs, circumstances, expectations, considerations and histories, can lead to substantially varying conceptions of what is "fair". Such may lead to countries effectively making it more difficult to reach an agreement, similar to the prisoner's dilemma. Developing effective, legitimate, enforceable agreements could thereby be substantially complicated, especially if traditional ways or tools of policy-making are used, in-sum trusted third party expert authorities are absent and the scientific research base relevant for the decision-making – such as studies and data about the problem, potential mitigation measures and capacities – is not robust. Fundamental fairness principles include or could be: Responsibility Capability and Rights (needs)for which country characteristics can predict relative support. The shared problem-characteristics of climate change could incentivize developing countries to act in concert to deter developed countries from "passing their climate costs onto them" and thereby improve the global mitigation effectiveness to 1.5 °C. Fossil-fuels dependent states Fossil fuel phase out are projected to affect states – and their citizens – with large or central industries of fossil-fuels extraction – including OPEC states – differently than other nations. It was found that they have obstructed climate negotiations and it was argued that many of them have large amounts of wealth due to which they should not need to receive financial support from other countries but could implement adequate transitions on their own in terms of financial resources. A study found that governments of nations which have historically benefited from extraction should take the lead, with countries that have a high dependency on fossil fuels but low capacity for transition needing some support to follow. In particular, transitional impacts of a rapid phase out of extraction is thought to be better absorbed in diversified, wealthier economies which should bear discrepancies in costs needed for a "just transition" as they are most able to bear it and may have better capacities for enacting absorptive socioeconomic policies. Less ambitious mitigation There are concerns that climate justice could be used as an excuse or moral justification by developing, undeveloped or later-developed nations for less ambitious climate change mitigation goals as they have emitted less greenhouse gases in the past. History The concept of climate justice was deeply influential on climate negotiations years before the term "climate justice" was regularly applied to the concept. In December 1990 the United Nations appointed an Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) to draft what became the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC), adopted at the UN Conference on the Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992. As the name “Environment and Development” indicated, the fundamental goal was to coordinate action on climate change with action on sustainable development. It was impossible to draft the text of the FCCC without confronting central questions of climate justice concerning how to share the responsibilities of slowing climate change fairly between developed nations and developing nations. The issue of the fair terms for sharing responsibility was raised forcefully for the INC by statements about climate justice from developing countries. In response, the FCCC adopted the now-famous (and still-contentious) principles of climate justice embodied in Article 3.1: "The Parties should protect the climate system for the benefit of present and future generations of humankind, on the basis of equity and in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities. Accordingly, the developed country Parties should take the lead in combating climate change and the adverse effects thereof." The first principle of climate justice embedded in Article 3.1 is that calculations of benefits (and burdens) must include not only those for the present generation but also those for future generations. The second is that responsibilities are "common but differentiated", that is, every country has some responsibilities, but equitable responsibilities are different for different types of countries. The third is that a crucial instance of different responsibilities is that in fairness developed countries' responsibilities must be greater. How much greater continues to be debated politically.In 2000, at the same time as the Sixth Conference of the Parties (COP 6), the first Climate Justice Summit took place in The Hague. This summit aimed to "affirm that climate change is a rights issue" and to "build alliances across states and borders" against climate change and in favor of sustainable development.Subsequently, in August–September 2002, international environmental groups met in Johannesburg for the Earth Summit. At this summit, also known as Rio+10, as it took place ten years after the 1992 Earth Summit, the Bali Principles of Climate Justice were adopted. In 2004, the Durban Group for Climate Justice was formed at an international meeting in Durban, South Africa. Here representatives from NGOs and peoples' movements discussed realistic policies for addressing climate change.In 2007 at the 13th Conference of the Parties (COP 13) in Bali, the global coalition Climate Justice Now! was founded, and, in 2008, the Global Humanitarian Forum focused on climate justice at its inaugural meeting in Geneva.In 2009, the Climate Justice Action Network was formed during the run-up to the Copenhagen Summit. It proposed civil disobedience and direct action during the summit, and many climate activists used the slogan 'system change not climate change'.In April 2010, the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth took place in Tiquipaya, Bolivia. It was hosted by the government of Bolivia as a global gathering of civil society and governments. The conference published a "People's Agreement" calling, among other things, for greater climate justice.In September 2013 the Climate Justice Dialogue convened by the Mary Robinson Foundation and the World Resources Institute released their Declaration on Climate Justice in an appeal to those drafting the proposed agreement to be negotiated at COP-21 in Paris in 2015.In December 2018, the People's Demands for Climate Justice, signed by 292,000 individuals and 366 organizations, called upon government delegates at COP24 to comply with a list of six climate justice demands. One of the demands was to "Ensure developed countries honor their “Fair Shares” for largely fueling this crisis." Some advance was achieved at the Paris climate finance summit at June 2023. The World Bank allowed to low income countries temporarily stop paying debts if they are hit by climate disaster. Most of financial help to climate vulnerable countries is coming in the form of debts, what often worsens the situation as those countries are overburdened with debts. Around 300 billion dollars was pledged as financial help in the next years, but trillions are needed to really solve the problem. More than 100 leading economists signed a letter calling for an extreme wealth tax as a solution (2% tax can generate around 2.5 trillion). It can serve as a Loss and damage mechanism as the 1% of richest people is responsible for twice as many emissions as the poorest 50%. Examples Subsistence farmers in Latin America Several studies that investigated the impacts of climate change on agriculture in Latin America suggest that in the poorer countries of Latin America, agriculture composes the most important economic sector and the primary form of sustenance for small farmers. Maize is the only grain still produced as a sustenance crop on small farms in Latin American nations. The projected decrease of this grain and other crops can threaten the welfare and the economic development of subsistence communities in Latin America. Food security is of particular concern to rural areas that have weak or non-existent food markets to rely on in the case food shortages. In August 2019, Honduras declared a state of emergency when a drought caused the southern part of the country to lose 72% of its corn and 75% of its beans. Food security issues are expected to worsen across Central America due to climate change. It is predicted that by 2070, corn yields in Central America may fall by 10%, beans by 29%, and rice by 14%. With Central American crop consumption dominated by corn (70%), beans (25%), and rice (6%), the expected drop in staple crop yields could have devastating consequences.The expected impacts of climate change on subsistence farmers in Latin America and other developing regions are unjust for two reasons. First, subsistence farmers in developing countries, including those in Latin America are disproportionately vulnerable to climate change Second, these nations were the least responsible for causing the problem of anthropogenic induced climate.Disproportionate vulnerability to climate disasters is socially determined. For example, socioeconomic and policy trends affecting smallholder and subsistence farmers limit their capacity to adapt to change. A history of policies and economic dynamics has negatively impacted rural farmers. During the 1950s and through the 1980s, high inflation and appreciated real exchange rates reduced the value of agricultural exports. As a result, farmers in Latin America received lower prices for their products compared to world market prices. Following these outcomes, Latin American policies and national crop programs aimed to stimulate agricultural intensification. These national crop programs benefitted larger commercial farmers more. In the 1980s and 1990s low world market prices for cereals and livestock resulted in decreased agricultural growth and increased rural poverty.Perceived vulnerability to climate change differs even within communities, as in the example of subsistence farmers in Calakmul, Mexico.Adaptive planning is challenged by the difficulty of predicting local scale climate change impacts. A crucial component to adaptation should include government efforts to lessen the effects of food shortages and famines. Planning for equitable adaptation and agricultural sustainability will require the engagement of farmers in decision making processes. Hurricane Katrina Because of climate change, tropical cyclones are expected to increase in intensity and have increased rainfall, and have larger storm surges, but there might be fewer of them globally. These changes are driven by rising sea temperatures and increased maximum water vapour content of the atmosphere as the air heats up. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 provided insights into how climate change disasters affect different people individually, as it had a disproportionate effect on low-income and minority groups. A study on the race and class dimensions of Hurricane Katrina suggests that those most vulnerable include poor, black, brown, elderly, sick, and homeless people. Low-income and black communities had little resources and limited mobility to evacuate before the storm. Also, after the hurricane, low-income communities were most affected by contamination, and this was made worse by the fact that government relief measures failed to adequately assist those most at risk. See also References Further reading Dolšak, Nives; Prakash, Aseem (2022). "Three Faces of Climate Justice". Annual Review of Political Science. 25 (1): 283–301. Homeberg, Marc van den; McQuistan, Colin (2018). "Technology for Climate Justice: A Reporting Framework for Loss and Damage as Part of Key Global Agreements". Loss and Damage from Climate Change. 513-545. Department of Economics and Social Affairs, UN (2017). "[1]". Climate Change and Social Inequality. External links In-depth Q&A: What is 'climate justice'? Carbon Brief, 2021.

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