Green Equity: Environmental Justice for more Inclusive Growth

Abstract

This June sees world leaders and civil society convene for the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20). It will focus on reviewing progress in achieving the goals of the original 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (the 1992 Rio Earth Summit). A main issue at the heart of the sustainable development paradigm, and the Rio+20 Summit, will be the extent to which the world has been able to find synergies between dual challenges of poverty reduction and ecological protection. As we look back over the past twenty years, an important trend has been the rise of rights-based approaches and a transnational environmental justice movement in which citizens confront both the State and the international community on the impacts of growth on social and ecological well-being. The escalating development challenges, defined by the nexus between poverty and ecological degradation, are also conditioned by the lack of accountability and rule of law surrounding natural resource use and the control of pollution. Vulnerable communities are the ones who most suffer the burden of ecological change, while being least able to mobilize against these trends. For the poor, unsustainable resource use and pollution bring risks to their ability to earn a livelihood and live a healthy life; it is the new face of long-term structural inequality. (...)