Nathan MAROM, Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya, Israel
“Climate justice” (CJ) has become a key term to address the unequal impacts, responsibilities, and vulnerabilities related with climate change, the major societal and political challenge of our times. Indeed, the climate crisis has highly unequal repercussions on countries, cities, and communities – exacerbating existing spatial justice disparities relating to race, ethnicity, gender, class, etc. Moreover, CJ touches nearly every aspect of local urban life, including housing, livelihoods, food, water, energy, waste, pollution, and more. However, I argue that in most existing literature and policy debates, CJ remains primarily concerned with the planetary and global scales of climate change (i.e. Global North/South), and is less attuned to local scales of justice. As such, it can benefit greatly from a stronger dialogue with the concept of spatial justice, in particular as it is applied to local community, urban, and metropolitan spaces. I further argue that CJ is mostly used to describe future temporalities (i.e. scenarios of unequal climatic harm), whereas by localizing the concept we may also connect it to an expanded notion of time, including the histories, memories, needs, and aspirations of communities. I develop these arguments through case studies from my ongoing research in the Tel Aviv metropolitan region, across scales and times. These include marginalized neighborhoods in South Tel Aviv struggling against air pollution while preparing to bear the brunt of extreme heat; struggles over unequal exposure to flood risks at the scale of the metropolitan river basin, extending beyond the green line into Palestinian territory; and the “One Climate” activism of Israeli and Palestinian groups engaging with temporalities ranging from activist time (specific struggles and campaigns), political time (pre/post 1948, 1967, 1994, and other key dates in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict), historical time, and climate time – all of which impact claims for spatial justice.
Mots clés : climate justice|spatial justice|urban political ecology|metropolitan regions|urban geography
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