Climate justice has become a central concept in climate governance and policy planning, yet significant questions remain about how justice can be defined, measured, and translated into policy. This 90 minute webinar organised by UNU-CRIS’ Nature, Climate, and Health cluster, UNU-EHS, and Universidad Politécnica de Madrid brings together three complementary perspectives that bridge political theory, policy analysis, and climate governance to explore how climate justice can move from an abstract normative ideal to a practical method of inquiry across disciplines.
The webinar will begin by examining key concepts of climate justice and different methods for operationalising ideal-typical principles of justice in policy practice. Building on this conceptual foundation, the webinar turns to the empirical assessment of climate justice in Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), examining how countries integrate justice commitments across different dimensions and identifying both progress and risks of superficial or symbolic engagement with justice. The penultimate contribution to the webinar will focus on greenhouse gas accounting frameworks and how different approaches, including production, consumption, historical, and per capita-based accounting, reshape understandings of responsibility and fairness in international climate governance. Finally, the importance of procedural justice will be foregrounded through an analysis of cross-border hydrogen initiatives between the EU and Tunisia. Together, these perspectives contribute to climate justice scholarship as a cross-cutting and interdisciplinary research field.
Published Research Presented
Employing Methods of Reflective Equilibrium to Operationalise Ideal–Typical Principles of Justice in the Context of Climate and Environmental Crises
Kevin Le Merle, UNU-CRIS.
The climate and environmental crises are expected to have heterogeneous impacts within and between human societies. While this has led philosophers and political scientists alike to explore the principles of justice that can structure and guide policymakers’ responses to such crises, less research has been advanced on how to pragmatically implement such normative principles in policymaking praxis. This chapter paper begins by underlining the similarities between climate, energy, and environmental justice, in order to stress the need for integrated approaches to interwoven crises. After outlining wide reflective equilibrium as a tried and tested method for fine-tuning ideal–typical justice principles, it goes a step further by proposing “applied wide reflective equilibrium” for the cogent implementation of justice principles in non-ideal circumstances. In doing so, the chapter paper seeks to reconcile an originally Rawlsian method with Sen’s perspective on situations of injustice.
National GHG accounting frameworks and their implications for climate justice.
Rodrigo Gil Llorente, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid.
Work analyzing how country rankings of the biggest emitters change when using Production Based Accounting, vs Consumption Based Accounting, Historical Based Accounting and Per Capita based Accounting. Each accounting principle responds to different criteria for responsibility attribution, leading to an interesting reframing of principles such as Polluter Pays, Beneficiary Pays, etc. Through a SWOT analysis, these concepts are situated within the broader problem of access to the atmosphere as a distributive justice and development problem.
Evaluating Transformative Climate Justice in NDC 3.0 Submissions.
S. M. Jaffar Abbas, UNU-EHS.
While Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement are expected to reflect ambition and equity, national commitments to climate justice often remain superficial. Building on a baseline policy brief analyzing early NDC 3.0 submissions, this research utilizes a structured climate justice analysis framework spanning four key dimensions—recognitional, procedural, distributive, and restorative justice—evaluated across four levels of commitment (No Mention, Tokenistic, Partial, and Embedded) across nine thematic policy clusters. The ongoing phase scales this methodology to analyze the larger corpus of NDC 3.0 submissions received up through August 1st, 2026. By extracting cross-cutting themes, mapping national commitments along composite justice axes, and evaluating sectoral integration, the study aims to identify key structural gaps, such as the risk of "justice-washing" through process-oriented commitments, and provides actionable pathways for drafters to embed legally anchored, enforceable justice provisions into national climate plans ahead of COP31.
A Procedural Justice Analysis of Cross-border Green Hydrogen Initiatives Between the EU and Tunisia.
Paola Jimenez-Casanova, Shakya A. Wickramanayake, Sonia Chabane, Strahinja Obrenović & Syed Sajad Ali Shah.
The EU’s hydrogen strategy, which aims to develop a European hydrogen market to decarbonise energy-intensive industries that are hard to electrify, relies partly on imports of green hydrogen from third countries such as Tunisia. Tunisia alone could potentially supply up to 40% of the green hydrogen target established in the REPowerEU Plan. The SoutH2 Corridor – a cross-border infrastructure project included in the Union’s list of Projects of Common Interest and Projects of Mutual Interest (PCIs and PMIs) – seeks to connect Tunisia with the European Union (EU) through a pipeline extending from Italy to Austria and Germany, with the goal of supplying the latter two with green hydrogen by 2030. This chapter examines the risks that such projects may pose for ensuring an inclusive and equitable energy transition in Tunisia. Given Europe’s historical relationship with Tunisia, including through colonisation, there are concerns that these energy projects will potentially perpetuate historical patterns of dominance, dependency, and extractivism. By analysing the challenges facing the EU, EU Member States and the Tunisian energy sectors in pursuing a just energy transition, alongside Tunisia’s democratic backsliding, the chapter highlights the absence of adequate procedural justice safeguards in some of the public and private legal arrangements underpinning the SoutH2 Corridor project. As such, it appears that said gaps strongly risk undermining the just energy transition, especially in Tunisia. The chapter concludes that the EU bears a responsibility to ensure that a set of minimum safeguards are established to prevent the reproduction of colonial practices in its external energy relations, using Tunisia as an illustrative example of broader risks faced by other partner countries in similar contexts.
