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Importance of Environmental Justice in Ensuring Sustainability.

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Environmental Justice Movements

Environmental justice has emerged as a key theme in the environmental discussion.

Major environmental initiatives, such as the UNFCCC and the Kyoto Protocol, now include

appeals for environmental equality and justice. The fact that appeals for justice are heard

everywhere indicates that there are unsolved problems in all dimensions of human interaction as

well as sociality. As a result, justice is a historically existing phenomenon that emphasizes the

societal existence of harm, exploitation, and repression on the one hand, and a desire to correct

these faults on the other. Environmental justice is a concept that emerged from civil rights efforts

in the 1960s and gave birth to the more modern Environmental Justice Movement. This article

will examine the importance and significance of environmental justice movements in shaping the

discourse in environmental policies, assuring fairness, equity, and justice in the many

environmental processes that resolve environmental problems, using Schlosberg and Collins

(2014) and other examples.

Environmental justice discourse has heightened awareness of the concerns by presenting

empirical data to back up the movement's assertions and emphasize how environmental

processes and regulations, as well as corporate actions, result in disproportionately harmful

environmental consequences on communities (Schlosberg, & Collins, 2014). According to

Taylor (2000), the environmental justice debates have changed how conventional

environmentalists think, conceive, and react to environmental matters. Therefore, they

have made it unacceptable for environmentalists to describe and assess environmental concerns

without considering the social consequences. Poor people and minorities, who are

disproportionately impacted by environmental prejudice, are included in the campaign because

activists emphasize their perspectives and voice their grievances in ways that they understand
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(Taylor, 2000). As a result, the environmental justice framework identifies not only

environmental injustice as it pertains to people destroying nature, but also as it relates to racial,

gender, and class prejudice.

The focus of environmental justice discourse is increasingly on the equalization of

environmental quality, with a focus on the harms created and exacerbated by anthropogenic

activities. Justice is sought for or in favor of environmental victims in this case. Environmental

victims are defined as those affected by either anthropogenic or natural processes and constraints

in necessary access to the environment (Penz 1998, p.42). Environmental issues are

fundamentally global because the earth's natural systems and communities are interrelated.

Climate change, desertification, increasing sea levels, pollution, and animal extinction are all

challenges that affect people all over the world. However, certain groups and countries are hit

harder than others (Schlosberg, & Collins, 2014). At the local level, the effects of global

environmental change are felt in varied ways, and the expenses of environmental destruction are

not evenly spread all across the world or within regions.

Environmental goods; accessibility to clean water and air and productive soil, space, and

land. Whereas environmental degradants; pollution, urban degradation, lack of green areas, and

land appropriation are all part of the distributive component of environmental justice. Crucial

human geography and environmental fairness are close mates in Global Environmental Politics

and they typically boil down to space and location (Gillard et al., 2017). Early environmental

justice groups aimed to combat the unequal distribution of environmental harms by highlighting

links between marginalized populations and the negative impacts of industrialization (Schrader-

Frechette, 2005). The struggle between marginalized communities and exploitative companies in

the context of uneven governance dominated these discourses and politics. The distributional
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dimension of justice, which is based on utilitarian principles, adopts an integrated approach to

analyzing environmental costs and benefits throughout society, making it easily transferable to

the examination by international parties and global policies.

In a broader sense, justice emphasizes the distribution or accessibility to environmental

quality - much like any other resource - among various groups that challenge and oppose these

distributions because they have significant implications on their lives and environments. In a

larger sense, environmental justice may be linked to broader social justice concerns that raise

questions about society's sociopolitical and economic institutional structures, or even the globe

as a whole (Schlosberg, & Collins, 2014). The fact that these maldistributions frequently have

both geographical and temporal characteristics is a key aspect that requires an amalgamated

voice to speak about the disastrous disparities.

Environmental justice promotes the need for natural resource protection and equitable

use. According to Schlosberg, & Collins (2014), when people pursue environmental justice, they

can protect natural resources. It guarantees that resources are used properly because communities

dispute justice when it comes to allocating available natural resources like minerals and water

fairly. Unjustified allocation and use of natural resources, for example, can be harmful,

particularly in locations where they are limited. As a result, environmental justice stresses

equitable distribution and opposes waste. When environmental justice principles are followed,

injustices related to natural resources are forgotten, as are problems like wars and battles over

natural resource utilization.

Furthermore, conventional global environmental control provides an instrumentalist

premise of sustaining environmental system conditions that are valuable to humans through elite

discourses of 'Earth Systems Governance' and 'Planetary Boundaries.' This not only emphasizes
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professional ecological and socioeconomic research but also encourages a technocratic strategy

for dealing with human-environment relations. These discourses are shining instances of how

mainstream international relations have attempted to respond to the demands of complicated

environmental challenges by aggregating discourses, depoliticizing them, and intervening from

the top down (Gillard et al., 2017). Procedural and interactional justice problems have been

addressed only lightly in this context, and the basic questions behind how a socially and

environmentally fair society may be envisaged, let alone achieved, have gone unresolved and

remains a new frontier for environmental justice warriors.

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) played an important role in obtaining

information and shaping the debate during and after the Basel Convention discussions (Bulkeley

& Mol, 2003). NGOs are frequently sidelined in governance as non-governmental players.

However, boosting the engagement of NGOs and social organizations in environmental

governance has several environmental justice advantages. NGOs, according to Gemmill and

Bemidele-Izu, serve essential roles in exposing environmental injustices. These groups

frequently conduct research and gather data on environmental consequences, offer consultation

to communities and policymakers, and aid with policy implementation, evaluation, and

monitoring. According to Bulkeley & Mol, (2003), distributive inequities can be brought to the

notice of policymakers through local study and campaigning. Local activism and social

movements also foster agency, voice, and acknowledgment for communities previously impacted

by classism. Increased NGO and civil society engagement also promote procedural fairness by

allowing for greater decision-making, engagement, and participation by a wider range of

stakeholders, including those who are now excluded from the legislation.
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Conclusion

Environmental justice is a human right as well as a set of societal circumstances that promote its

protection and implementation. To create the circumstances for environmental justice, it is

necessary to examine environmental disparities and question why they exist: what institutions

and processes support these disparities, and what approaches might be put in place to address

them? Environmental justice discourse and governance necessitate confronting entrenched

interests. It necessitates a multi-faceted understanding of justice that encompasses distribution,

acknowledgment, and involvement. Current governance institutions fail to foster environmental

justice, as seen by the continuous worldwide trade in hazardous wastes which reveals that

existing mechanisms fall far short of supporting environmental justice. Civil society action and

environmental justice movements, on the other hand, are a promising route for influencing

government institutions to better establish safe and healthy environments for all people, so that

the consequences and hazards of environmental degradation are not borne by those who had the

least involvement in their creation. 

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References

Bulkeley, H., & Mol, A. P. (2003). Participation and environmental governance: consensus,

ambivalence, and debate. Environmental values, 12(2), 143-154.

Gillard, R., Ford, L., & Kütting, G. (2017). Justice Discourses and the Global Environment:

Diverse perspectives on an uneven landscape. In Traditions and Trends in Global

Environmental Politics: International Relations and the Earth (pp. 120-135). Taylor and

Francis.

Penz, P. (1998), Environmental Victims and State Sovereignty: A Normative Analysis, in

Schlosberg, D., & Collins, L. B. (2014). From environmental to climate justice: climate change

and the discourse of environmental justice. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate

Change, 5(3), 359-374.

Shrader-Frechette, K. (2005) Environmental justice: creating equality, reclaiming democracy

Oxford University Press, Oxford

Taylor, D. E. (2000). The rise of the environmental justice paradigm: Injustice framing and the

social construction of environmental discourses. American behavioral scientist, 43(4),

508-580.

Williams, C. (ed.) Environmental Victims. Earthscan: London.