Equity and justice in climate change law and policy: a role for benefit-sharing

Abstract

A wealth of climate justice literature tackles complex questions of need, capability and historical responsibility, which admit of no easy resolution. While the debate on burden sharing in multilateral climate governance continues in negotiations on the rulebook of the Paris Agreement, fertile ground already exists to consider whether climate change response measures are consistent with justice considerations, or reinforce existing inequalities. This chapter explores the use of benefit sharing to support the achievement of equity and justice in climate change governance. The concept of benefit-sharing is commonly deployed across areas of environmental law and policy to allocate advantages derived from the sustainable use and conservation of natural resources and related traditional knowledge. This concept is increasingly used in climate change law and policy, at the national, international and transnational level. This chapter considers how benefit-sharing has been used thus far, as well as how it may be more systematically used to carve out a space to better embed equity and justice considerations into climate change law and policy.