Contents
Environmental
justice
Introduction
Environmental justice is the fair
treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color,
national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and
enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies. EPA has this goal
for all communities and persons across this Nation. It will be achieved when
everyone enjoys the same degree of protection from environmental and health
hazards and equal access to the decision-making process to have a healthy
environment in which to live, learn, and work.
Environmental justice has more in
common than a brief look at either reveals. This is the intra- and
inter-generation distribution of costs and benefits of development. Their
primary concern is the improvement of the quality of life of people and
enhanced access to resources.
The environmental justice movement
in the United States challenges a process of development that does not ensure
the sharing of environmental costs and benefits equitably among all citizens.
It singles out the sitting of waste treatment facilities in certain communities
as inordinately burdening them. Like sustainable development proponents,
advocates of environmental justice are concerned about the changes that
development occasions in access to environmental goods. Both seek to have
integrated into the development process mechanisms for ensuring access for all.
However, sustain-able development is not limited to quality of life concerns
but also includes concerns about unequal access to natural resources,
especially for rural people.
One major strength of the
environmental justice is that it focuses on communities. It thus goes beyond
the field of most international instruments pertaining to sustainable
development which emphasise mainly the role of states and individuals. It would
however benefit from tackling the root causes of injustices that it has
identified.
While the imbalances discerned in
environmentalism may seem to combine into racial concerns in the developed
coutries, the same imbalances occur at the international level in relationships
between states and at the national level in communities that would appear to be
monolithic on the surface. In this latter case, the imbalances are noticeable
between people in different socio-economic categories.
The political power of a national
group, a country or an individual determines to a great extent the flow of
burdens vis-à-vis benefits.
Environmental
Justice in Developed countries
A. Background
The term environmental justice has
featured prominently in the environmental debate for the last two decades but
only surfaced in legal parlance in the 1990s.
It focuses on the disproportionate
sharing of environmental benefits and burdens between different categories of
persons. In the United States, environmental justice focuses broadly on the
equity and fairness dimension of environmental policies. It is based upon the
recognition that environmental costs and benefits are not distributed in a fair
and equitable manner and that traditional environmentalism has not been
sufficiently concerned with very divergent local situations and the plight of
minorities.
Indeed, the term environmental
justice is almost synonymous with environmental racism and has been used to
describe the distribution of environmental benefits and burdens across society
along the lines of race or colour.
Thus the concerns of environmental justice centre mainly on
“side” effects of industrial activity, such as the siting of waste disposal
facilities, the proximity of industrial pollution and workplace exposure to
industrial toxins and in-house lead exposure, in particular for children. The
environmental justice movement seeks to redefine the traditional environmental
movement by incorporating the concerns of minorities within environmental
policy making and thereby engendering environmental equality.
Some commentators have based their analysis of environmental
justice problems on intent arguing that the main problem that has to be dealt
with is the issue of intentional discrimination, in particular in the siting of
hazardous waste facilities.
Others have highlighted the results of current environmental
policies in terms of the unequal
distribution of benefits and burdens among the population at large.
B. Basic Principles
The major force of the environmental justice movement is to
shift the focus of attention from the environment to people, specifically
communities. It seeks to show that environmental protection should not be
planned in a vacuum and that environmental goals should take into account
social, political and economic realities. In a broad sense, environmental
justice is about positive discrimination: it seeks to achieve a redistribution of
the costs of environmental justice so as to lower the disproportionately high
burden borne by some segments of society.
Environmental justice brings a new dimension to American
mainstream environmentalism by shifting the central focus of environmentalism from
the predominantly middle-class concerns with aesthetic values and environmental
improvements to social concerns and relations between different communities.
Environmental protection thus becomes part of a larger social justice movement
that does not aim at protecting nature as such but strives to achieve a more
reasonable balancing of the costs and benefits of environmental protection
across
human societies. In other words, it is shifting the goals of
environmental protection towards taking into account the needs of the poorer
sections of the community that have suffered the environmental consequences of
industrialisation more than others.
However, it must be noted that environmental justice relies
on the same broad issues which have constituted the main plank of the
mainstream environmental movement over the past decades. It is fundamentally
concerned with the negative side-effects of industrialisation and is seeking
solutions to mitigate problems caused by the current development process. It
does not question the current path of development and its associated
environmental woes. For the movement to achieve long-term and meaningful gains,
the root causes of environmental problems such as mass consumerism must be
tackled.
(Richard, environmental juistice, 1980)
C. Emphasis on Waste
A lot of the work done in the area of environmental justice
in the United States has focused on hazardous waste disposal. Public attention
was first drawn to issues of environmental justice in 1982 with the Warren
County residents in North Carolina opposing the location of a hazardous waste
dump in their neighborhood (predominantly poor and black).
The community challenged the identification of their
neighborhood as a potential hazardous waste dump site on the ground that it was
not necessarily the most environmentally sound choice.
They argued that they had been chosen because their community
seemed incapable of resisting. Despite the failure of the protests to ward off
this particular siting, this event led to increased interest in the question of
environmental justice prompting the commissioning of several studies looking at
the question of environmental justice.
D. Emphasis on People
Environmental problems have traditionally been addressed
through command and control legislation. The disillusionment with this approach
has led to the search for alternatives. The quest for efficiency in dealing
with environmental problems has resulted in the use of market instruments which
tend to emphasize individual behavior. Neither of the two approaches has
focused on communities.
Mainstream environmentalism has thus failed to consider the
operation of environmental legislation vis-à-vis people by assuming that
uniform laws will affect everybody uniformly. However, the assumption that
everybody benefits from environmental regulation has been severely tested by
the proliferation of grass-roots movements challenging the effects of those
programmes on the poor and minority communities.
(Richard R. D.,
1980)
Causes of the
Problem
Race Relations
Race has been identified as a major factor in environmental
justice concerns at the domestic level in the developed countries and the
primary focus of the movement has been on the issue of racial inequalities. The
United Church of Christ report found that these sites tended to be in
communities showing a much higher proportion of “racial and ethnic” residents.
Race was found to be the most significant explanatory
variable, with socio-economic factors ranking second. The report went as far as
arguing that an increased concentration of minority residents tends to augment
the probability of the existence of some form of hazardous waste activity.
Economic Disparities
Environmental discrimination has also been linked to the
economic status of minority communities. Host communities of landfills have,
for instance been found to be disproportionately poor in many cases.
Communities with higher than average unemployment rates are more likely to
accept the siting of a waste facility if it offers employment opportunities and
may underplay the possible environmental consequences.
The provision of employment opportunities to local residents
may thus procure their silent approval and seems to act as an informal
compensatory mechanism. Other benefits include increased tax revenues and
improved infrastructure.
Political power
It has been argued that as a result of discriminatory laws
and attitudes over a long period of time, racial minorities find themselves
with less power in political forums. This seems to increase the likelihood of
minority communities bearing a disproportionate share of the burden of
environmental protection. The capacity to refuse the siting of any given
facility is directly linked to the political power of the community at stake
and its traditional involvement in environmental affairs.
The failure of traditional environmental law to address
issues relevant to the impoverished communities and communities of colour has
alienated these groups from the development of environmental law.
Environmental
justice in Pakistan
Bhurban Declaration 2012
The
move comes in light of recommendations of the Bhurban Declaration 2012 titled
‘A Common Vision on Environment for the South Asian Judiciaries’ during South
Asian Conference on Environmental Justice held on March 24-25 under the aegis
of the Supreme Court of Pakistan.
Various
courts all over Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan and Islamabad have been dubbed as
green courts while green benches have also been constituted to hear cases
pertaining to the environment and the factors affecting it.
The
chief justice of Lahore High Court has established a green single bench and
green division bench. Similarly, all courts of senior civil judges-cum-judicial
magistrates and of civil judges-cum-judicial magistrates at sub divisions have
been declared as green courts. All courts of district and session judges in
Punjab have also been declared the same.
The
chief justice of the Sindh High Court has also established a green single bench
and a green division bench for the purpose and has even nominated judges to
grace the benches.
The
provincial chief justice has established green courts in all districts of Sindh
and has directed all senior civil judges, civil judges and judicial magistrates
of the respective districts to handle cases related to the Sindh Building
Control Authority and the Sindh Local Government Ordinance in these green
courts.
Developments due
to Human Rights
International human rights constitute claims by individuals
against states and include civil, political, economic and social rights whose
purview is wide enough to encompass tenets of sustainable development. Thus,
the realization of the rights to life and health depends to a large extent upon
the quality of the environment in which individuals live. More specifically,
the proposed human right to environment is premised on the link between the realization
of human rights and environmental protection.
It focuses on the people-environment relationship which is
not always taken into account in environmental conservation. Further, economic
and social rights have been linked
to development concerns. The existence and content of a human
right to development however remain very controversial despite its codification
in a UN General Assembly Resolution.
The basic substance of both the rights to environment and
development is covered in existing human rights treaties. In this sense, human
rights already include the basic tenets of a right to sustainable development.
However, it is significant that the enforcement of human rights is only at the
level of individuals. Communities do not ordinarily have standing in
international human rights judicial bodies.
Conclusion
The discussion of environmental justice concerns at both the
international and domestic levels elicits a multiplicity of dimensions from
which the issues it raises can be tackled. Over-emphasising race and waste at
the domestic level masks other potent elements that must be incorporated into
any comprehensive analysis. Only after considering such elements can one
conclusively assign responsibilities for environmental inequities.
The overview of a few of the possible dimensions of an
environmental justice debate on the international level have demonstrated that
there are varied and multifaceted aspects of relevance to the problems
environmental justice. The racial aspect is by no means a predominant factor of
all the links that can be found. In environmental law, the international
community has in some ways gone beyond the US in experimenting with ways to
accommodate legal regimes with the realisation that countries do not all have
the same capacity to implement treaties and do not all have the necessary resources
to include implementation of environmental treaties among their own priorities.
Besides, environmental justice concerns relate very closely
to issues that have been widely studied at the international level of the
relationship between human rights and the environment. Here again, the
discrimination side is only one of a host of human rights issues that may be
relevant to the environmental debate.
Bibliography
khan, a. (13,2002). Green b enches.
Richard. 1980.
Richard. (1980). environmental
juistice.
Richard, R. D.
(1980). environmental justice.
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