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7 J. Hum. Rts. & Env't. 1 (2016)

handle is hein.journals/jhre7 and id is 1 raw text is: Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, Vol. 7 No. 1, March 2016, pp. 1-6 Editorial In the shadow of Paris: theories of justice and principles of harm With the Paris Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change due to get underway as this edition goes to press, we cannot yet know how the surging call for 'climate justice' will have been advanced by the time you read this - if at all. What is clear, and likely to remain so, however, is that the work of meeting the inexorable demands of those dispossessed by climate change, and those in the anteroom of dispossession, has barely begun. This edition of the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment features a rich range of analysis, theoretical inquiry and practical suggestion that will prove of immense help, perhaps most especially once the clamour of climate justice demands reaches a pitch that can no longer be ignored. The edition places climate justice in the context of the broader terrain of 'environmental justice' and human rights, and publishes the views of a select group of scholars addressing both the big picture and the policy detail. Setting the scene, Upendra Baxi canvasses a family of ideas characteristic of con- temporary justice concerns. He identifies these as three 'theories' - of global justice, environmental justice and climate justice respectively. Locating 'global justice' largely within the recent surging cosmopolitan literature (though he distinguishes utilitarian and deontological strains in passing), Baxi notes that the principal concern in these theories is neither with inter-state settlement of conflict, nor with intra-state distributive justice, but with cross-border distributive dilemmas. Human rights feature in contemporary global justice accounts, but not primarily - Baxi perceptively observes - by reference to international human rights law; instead it is the 'moral idea of human rights' that animates these theorists. And yet, while divided on which particular justice questions ought to be foregrounded, theorists of global justice are apparently united, he notes, in their 'determination to keep the num- ber and nature of moral rights as human rights to as few as possible'. For Baxi, the rise of the Anthropocene 'aggravates the tasks of global distributive justice', making it increasingly difficult to ignore not only the striking injustice of the incoming climatic ordering, but also raising the stakes for older calls for redress - for the wrongs of 'colonization and imperialism of the Westphalian, and contemporary, Cold War and war on terror eras'. Climate justice - in its first oblique appearance here - is suffused with the claim of the past on the present. For Baxi, 'environmental justice' involves the recognition of environmental 'pro- blems' - waste, pollution, ecosystem degradation - as affecting socially vulnerable and marginalized persons and peoples in particular, and of the role of racism in allo- cating the burdens of environmental damage. This still recent tradition has added 'to the notion of justice also that of fair and equal participation of the impoverished and the indigenous peoples and concepts of fair procedural justice'. Baxi mentions in passing the cognate notion of sustainable development, suggesting that it is 'more a matter of policies of governance ... than an agendum of justice'. Crucially, however, he insists that environmental justice must always co-exist with the axiom 0 2016 The Author Journal compilation 0 2016 Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd The Lypiatts, 15 Lansdown Road, Cheltenham, Glos GL50 2JA, UK and The William Pratt House, 9 Dewey Court, Northampton MA 01060-3815, USA

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