Brian Petersen - Justice in Climate Action Planning

The series focuses on implementation strategies and responses to sustainability problems at the organizational, local, national, and global levels.

Our objective is to encourage policy proposals and prescriptive thinking on topics such as: sustainability management, sustainability strategies, lifestyle changes, regional approaches, organisational changes for sustainability, educational approaches, pollution prevention, clean technologies, multilateral treaty-making, sustainability guidelines and standards, sustainability assessment and reporting, the role of scientific analysis in decision-making, implementation of public-private partnerships for resource management, regulatory enforcement, and approaches to meeting inter-generational obligations regarding the management of common resources.

We favour trans-disciplinary perspectives and analyses grounded in careful, comparative studies of practice, demonstrations, or policy reforms. This largely excludes further documentation of problems, and prescriptive pieces that are not grounded in practice, or sustainability studies. Philosophically, we prefer an open-minded pragmatism show us what works and why rather than a bias toward a theory of the liberal state (i.e. command-and-control) or a theory of markets. We invite contributions that are innovative, creative, and go beyond the business as usual approaches.

Themes covered in the series are:

Sustainability management

Sustainability strategies

Lifestyle changes

Regional approaches

Organisational changes for sustainability

Educational approaches

Pollution prevention

Clean technologies

Multilateral treaty-making

Sustainability guidelines and standards

Sustainability assessment and reporting

The role of scientific analysis in decision-making

Implementation of public-private partnerships for resource management

Governance and regulatory enforcement

Approaches to meeting inter-generational obligations regarding the management of common resources

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/8584

This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG

The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

As warnings become more dire (IPCC, 2018), climate change discussions increasingly invoke the concept of transformation (Krause, 2019), especially around implementing policies and actions that address climate change by transitioning to low carbon technologies (Bulkeley et al., 2011). Such transitions require political decisions and tradeoffs that have the potential to advantage some at the expense of others. In an urban context, scholars have examined city sustainability goals (Broto & Westman, 2019), urban politics (Luque-Ayala et al., 2018), and addressing poverty (Roy et al., 2016). As Hordijk et al. (2016: 1) make clear, urban poverty requires a conscious consideration of climate change as a global process with local impacts. More and more cities have initiated climate action plansplanning efforts aimed at reducing carbon emissions and preparing for climate change consequences through coordinated actionsbut early analyses suggest that equity and justice remain peripheral in these efforts (Schrock et al., 2015). At the same time, cities in the United States that have climate action plans are falling behind on their emission reduction goals (Markolf et al., 2020). Recent events in the United States, including the emergence of the Black Lives Matter Movement, George Floyds murder, and the prominence and visibility of racial injustices in the public sphere, have heightened awareness around justice. Several cities have taken prominent roles in linking justice and climate action planning. Oakland, California, Minneapolis, Minnesota and Providence, Rhode Island, which have created a Climate Justice Plan, are key examples. Still, as climate change consequences become more acute, and as justice issues take on greater importance in cities, more clarity and insight is needed to understand how cities are responding, and can respond, to climate change in a just way.