The Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF) and the V20 group of finance ministers address climate change impacts on vulnerable countries. This chapter introduces the interconnectedness of climate justice, economic resilience, and sustainable development. It highlights personal stories, such as Victor Yalanda from Colombia and Jevanic Henry from Saint Lucia, who share their experiences of climate change’s impacts on their communities — covering both the economic loss and the emotional devastation caused to communities. We introduce the CVF’s Climate Vulnerability Monitor — a unique study of the impacts of climate change, including fresh modelling, covering biophysical, economics and health projections up to 2100. The global community via COP27 and COP28 have agreed on the urgency of both adaptation and mitigation strategies. Yet the speed of change is not sufficient. The fate of today’s most vulnerable will soon be the fate of the world.

Financial flows and financial structures are fueling climate instability and worsening inequities around the world. A stable future now requires urgent change including transformative financial innovations. Yet the pandemic and recent financial disruptions reveal how financial architecture designed to promote stability in times of crises exacerbates economic inequities and vulnerabilities. Recognizing the division in climate politics among those advocating for stable policies and a smooth transition and those calling for more radical, disruptive politics, this chapter reviews the critical role of financial innovations, including central banks’ monetary policies, in redirecting society toward a more just and stable future. We propose a paradigm shift to reconceptualize stability and politicization in finance and central banking for climate justice. We argue that current depoliticized perspectives on financial stability are worsening climate instability, and that finance, central banks, and their monetary policies are an underappreciated part of climate politics. Transformative climate policy to promote stability requires repoliticizing finance and financial innovations.

Chapter 20 reflects on the evolving landscape of climate litigation, circling back to some of the insights emerging from the Handbook’s various chapters, and speculates on its future trajectory. The editors begin by underscoring the remarkable progress that has been made in climate litigation, highlighting the significant role it has played in shaping legal responses to the climate crisis. They emphasise that the journey of climate litigation is far from over and that the field is poised for continued advancements and innovations. In particular, the editors shine a light on new frontiers for strategic litigation, including loss and damage cases that promote climate justice and considerations of ethics, fairness, and equity; claims against private polluters, particularly major corporate greenhouse gas emitters; more diverse litigation against governments that target the insufficient ambition, inadequate implementation, and lack of transparency in climate policies; litigation defending biodiversity through a climate lens; and inter-State climate lawsuits.

Summarising how economists have historically studied families from the nineteenth century to the present, we recall that economists developed methodologies in response to how they imagined and constituted the problem of family poverty in different periods. In contemporary times, concerns for poverty-alleviation have increasingly featured concerns for justice across gender, race, and ethnicity. We also recall how family economists prioritised some social and political problems over others, leaving significant injustices uncontested. These findings encourage reflection on how we define the social problems of families today. Describing the small body of economics on the relation between family behaviour and a sustainable biosphere, the book closes with a provocation. If each period of family economics has relied on an act of imagination to formulate the family-relevant social problems worthy of consideration, how might we constitute the problem of family poverty today, consistent with justice across gender, race, and ethnicity, while also tackling the very urgent need for a biosphere capable of supporting human life? How might we imagine living well and dying well today, on a damaged planet undergoing ecosystem collapse? And how might economists assist families to tackle this problem, today?

Climate change, it is often said, is the greatest challenge of our time. As a global phenomenon with a long temporal reach, the impacts of climate change amplify challenges already faced across social, political, economic and ecological spheres. Similarly, constitutional theory is not immune from the impacts of climate change. Yet scholarly engagements between constitutional theory and climate change have thus far been targeted and disparate. This chapter represents an attempt to face up to the challenge of climate change from the perspective of constitutional theory. It takes seriously the discourse of “climate emergency” to argue that emergency is a theoretically defensible framing of the problem. Using the rule of law, rights and federalism as three examples of the challenges that climate change poses for constitutional theory, it highlights some strengths and limitations of existing literatures on these three concepts. Ultimately, it shows that the climate emergency points us to a theory of constitutionalism that builds on these strengths, responds to these limits and provides a path forward for thinking through the role of constitutional theory in a climate-disrupted world.

This chapter analyzes one of the most visible consequences of ecocide: eco-migration. The international criminal justice system does not include detrimental effects of ecocide or of social harm resulting in forced migration flows as a genuine crime capable of being prosecuted. However, a recent landmark United Nations Human Rights Committee decision claims that people should not be returned to their place of origin if climate change appears to constitute a threat. The United Nations Refugee Agency also welcomes such a pioneering ruling since it lays the ground for potentially effective international protection. This work examines the contemporary loophole regarding eco-displacements and ecocide and clamors for both legal and criminological international conceptualisation at ensuring the rights of eco-migrants, considering the future number of eco-migrants is unforeseeable.

Readers are presented with achievable reforms of laws and policies discussed in earlier chapters.

This chapter analyzes the regional and sectoral differences in how cities and municipalities engage in climate change networks. Over the past 20 years, an increasing number of cities, regions, companies, investors, and other non-state and subnational actors have voluntarily committed to reducing their GHG emissions. Such actions could help reduce the implementation gap. Along with the increase in commitments and the growing number of venues through which non-state actors can cooperate in order to govern climate change, it is necessary to track and evaluate such efforts. This chapter assesses the voluntary commitments made by Swedish municipalities, regions and multistakeholder partnerships to decarbonize by reducing GHG emissions. It finds large differences in which cities and municipalities that engage in networks. Large and urban municipalities in the south and along the eastern coast are well represented, whereas more rural municipalities along the Norwegian border are less represented in the data. The findings are discussed in terms of climate justice, highlighting the importance of having everyone onboard to create acceptance and reduce inequality in the transformation toward decarbonization.

A new way of thinking about environmental problems has emerged since the 1980s. Environmental problems are increasingly seen as systematically entwined, with human action as their primary cause. We are in a new epoch in Earth’s history, the Anthropocene, and climate change is its most immediate and dramatic manifestation. The drivers of the Anthropocene can be seen through the lens of a simple equation: Environmental impact is the product of population, affluence, and technology. Nations and individuals vary greatly in their impacts, so questions of justice are unavoidable. Questions of justice extend across generations as well as among nations and individuals. Ultimately, we must ask what kind of world we want for ourselves and our children.

This chapter employs narrative analysis to examine how people who live in the shadow of carbon-intensive industries imagine a just transition to net-zero emissions. The analysis rests upon an interview study with local politicians, civil servants, union representatives, and citizen groups in the Swedish west-coast city of Lysekil, home to Scandinavia’s largest oil refinery. By mapping stories of climate (in)justice told in view of Sweden’s efforts to decarbonize, this chapter illustrates the cultural dimensions of carbon lock-ins and why some people resist transformative change. In the city of Lysekil, the refinery is not only an important source of local employment but also deeply entangled with community identity and sense of place. However, the chapter also points to the multiple interpretations of just transitions to climate neutrality and the power of narrative to open-up possibilities for decarbonized futures.