Abstract
This chapter addresses a gap in the literature on climate justice by examining inequity at the urban scale. Such a perspective builds on the concept of a climate-just city, which prioritizes the needs of those most vulnerable to climate change. This study focuses on Bangkok, a city not only highly vulnerable to climate change, but a city with one of the highest carbon emissions per capita. The chapter highlights instances of urban climate injustice by presenting three case studies: Bangkok's public transportation sector, the state's response to the 2011 floods, and coastal erosion in southern Bangkok. The cases show that the city's governance of climate change has unjustly benefited the upper echelon of society, while low-income communities have been adversely affected.
Keywords: urban climate justice, Bangkok climate change policy, 2011 Thailand floods, Bangkok urban governance, urban political ecology
Introduction
In June 2015, a group of civil society organizations (CSOs) from a number of Asian countries issued the People's Declaration for Climate Justice. The declaration asserted:
The burning of fossil fuels by big polluters has been found to be primarily responsible for emitting large amounts of greenhouse gases. We refuse to accept the “new normal’ and demand for climate justice by holding the big polluters and their respective governments to account for their contribution to the climate crisis. (Greenpeace 2015)
The polluters highlighted here are from the Global North. Climate Justice Now, an international network of CSOs, further asserting the links with the North, demanded “huge financial transfers from North to South based on historical responsibility and ecological debt” (Bond 2008). The focus of these quotations characterize much of the discourse on climate justice (see also Brown 2008; Posner and Sunstein 2008; Asian-Pacific Resource & Research Centre for Women 2009), which is primarily focused on justice on an international scale. During recent years, there has been an increased, if still limited, focus by both civil society and academics on climate justice at the national scale. However, despite a number of scholars, activists, and policy makers being in agreement that urban governance significantly shapes responses to climate change, only a few academics have written about urban climate justice (MacCallum et al. 2011; Steele et al. 2012; Hillier et al. 2013; Bulkeley, Edwards, and Fuller 2014).