Climate Change, Resource Geography, and Environmental Justice

Human geography's engagement with climate change centers on a basic spatial paradox: the regions and populations that have contributed least to cumulative greenhouse-gas emissions are frequently those most exposed to its physical consequences. Small island states in the Pacific and Indian Ocean, the low-lying deltas of Bangladesh and the Nile, and semi-arid regions across the African Sahel face existential risks from sea-level rise, cyclones, and desertification despite negligible historical emissions, while the industrialized economies of North America, Europe, and increasingly China and India that generated the bulk of atmospheric carbon face comparatively manageable, if still serious, impacts.

This asymmetry is compounded by the geography of resource extraction: cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo, lithium extraction in Chile's and Bolivia's salt flats, and rare-earth mineral processing in China all illustrate how the 'green transition' to renewable energy and electric vehicles depends on extractive supply chains that reproduce familiar patterns of environmental degradation, labour exploitation, and political instability in resource-rich but capital-poor regions — a dynamic environmental geographers term the 'resource curse' or, more critically, a new form of 'green extractivism.'

The environmental justice movement, which originated in African American communities' resistance to toxic-waste siting in the US South during the 1980s (notably the 1982 Warren County, North Carolina protests), has since become a global analytical and political framework connecting pollution exposure, resource extraction, and climate vulnerability to race, caste, class, and colonial history. Geographers now trace environmental justice struggles worldwide: Niger Delta communities' decades-long resistance to Shell's oil extraction and gas flaring, Adivasi and Dalit communities' disproportionate exposure to industrial pollution and mining displacement in India, and Indigenous resistance to pipeline construction across North America, such as the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Global climate governance has struggled to reconcile these asymmetries. The UNFCCC's principle of 'common but differentiated responsibilities,' first codified at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, remains contested terrain between industrialized nations seeking universal emissions commitments and developing nations insisting on historical accountability and adequate climate finance before accepting binding constraints on their own development. The 2022 establishment of a Loss and Damage Fund at COP27 marked a hard-won, if still underfunded, acknowledgment that vulnerable nations deserve compensation for climate harms already occurring, distinct from mitigation or adaptation funding.

Geographers increasingly argue that addressing climate change adequately requires attention not just to carbon accounting but to the deeper political-economic geography of who controls energy infrastructure, land, and resource wealth — meaning that climate justice, resource justice, and post-colonial economic justice are, in this analysis, inseparable dimensions of the same global spatial problem.