Paul G. Harris (ed.), A Research Agenda for Climate Justice (Edward Elgar, 2019), 185 pages, DOI: 10.4337/9781788118170. Climate justice is now an established area of scholarship that crosses disciplinary boundaries. However, despite the work of governments, activists and scholars to study and implement climate justice, the injustices of climate change – greenhouse gas pollution and the felt impacts of environmental changes resulting from that pollution – continue to increase. Realizing climate justice under these circumstances will require doing much more in the very near future; it will require new vision about the way forward. A Research Agenda for Climate Justice aims to foster and present a visionary and provocative research agenda that can help to illuminate alternative pathways for scholars, policymakers and activists. In addition to furthering climate justice as a scholarly field, the book seeks real-world impact: producing and sharing an agenda for research that can inform and guide the way forward for those doing the actual work of climate justice. A key aim is to stimulate innovative, alternative perspectives on climate justice – to explicitly avoid more of the same scholarship and more of the same policies.
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“There is no better analysis of the prospects of failure and success in climate justice.”
Holmes Rolston III, University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Colorado State University
“Theoretically rich as well as empirically based, … this is an important and timely contribution to the climate justice literature.”
Environmental Politics (vol. 29, no. 5, 2020)
“The writing throughout is animated by a sense of urgency and ethical purpose. This volume will interest scholars focusing on climate change, environmental policy, global environmental issues, and sustainability.”
J.L. Rhoades, Associate Director of the Environmental Studies PhD program and co-director of the Institute for International Conservation, Antioch University New England
“Paul Harris has assembled a collection that examines important lingering questions in climate justice but also plots a new course for research in the field. Harris and his contributors explore how climate justice might be more broadly conceptualized and effectively advanced, extending the field’s focus well beyond the questions about burden-sharing among nation-states that dominated its first decade.“
Steven Vanderheiden, University of Colorado, Boulder
“Paul Harris has been tracking the academic climate justice debate for a very long time. In this book, the depth and texture of his knowledge shows, as does the importance of his subject. The climate emergency is a justice emergency, all the way down. To stabilize the Earth System, we’ll have to face that reality, in all its facets. The real agenda is action, but the research agenda here could help to open doors. It’s all we can really ask.”
Tom Athanasiou, EcoEquity
“Paul Harris says that it is not far-fetched to suggest that climate change is becoming the greatest injustice ever perpetrated in all human history. He may well be right. Yet how do we get others – and in democracies, a majority of voters – to see it this way? The contributors to this book not only show, from their different perspectives, why climate change is an injustice, but also take steps towards answering that question.”
Peter Singer, Princeton University
Paul G. Harris 