Science For Just Solutions

If science-policy interfaces are to deliver just and effective solutions to climate change, they must involve indigenous peoples and local communities

- Pia M Kohler

When presenting my research on global institutions established to guide policy-making on environmental challenges, my (mostly North American and European) audiences will often wonder at the need to scrutinise these science-policy interfaces. Isn’t the only thing that matters, someone will inevitably ask, is that we have asked the best scientists on the planet to guide us?

This is typically when I draw from Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain’s seminal 1991 piece, “Global warming in an unequal world”. Agarwal and Narain called out the environmental colonialism evident in a 1990 report by the US-based World Resources Institute purporting to measure a country’s greenhouse gas emissions. I invite my interlocutors to consider the distinction Agarwal and Narain draw between “luxury” and “survival” emissions. We then consider what gets erased when we take up the now commonplace unit: the metric tonne of CO2 (or of CO2 equivalent). From there, it is easier to understand how the assumptions stemming from Eurocentric knowledge have gone on to constrain not only the output of science-policy interfaces but also the climate negotiations and policies that followed.