Adapting Environmental Justice: In the Age of Climate Change, Environmental Justice Demands a Combined Adaptation-Mitigation Response

Abstract

The Environmental Justice Movement of the late twentieth century had a lofty goal: to protect poor and minority communities from being adversely affected by environmental harms such as toxic waste dumps and polluted waters. Many agree that today's greatest environmental danger is climate change, a worldwide problem with intensely local impacts; and poor and minority communites ma be adversely impacted by that environmental harm as well. In the climate change case, experts foresee that the people in developing countries and island nations stand to face climate-change-related dangers ranging from increased hurricanes to desertification of cultivating lands to total inundation as sea levels rise. One goal of the Kyoto Protocol's carbon-exchange market is to mitigate the impacts on developing countries. Yet not all the consequences of climate change will be felt on the in/ernational scene, and within the United States, Environmental Jusice concerns dictate that mitigation should not be the only regional and national response to the planet's rising temperatures. Environmental Justice demands an adaptive response.