기후변화와 환경정의 - 지속가능한 지구의 미래를 위한 선순환구조의 모색 -

Environmental justice theory began from the civil movement for environmental justice in the US in 1970s. It is different from environmental racism or environmental equity, but is regarded to include these two concepts. Although it is an non-official definition, a report of US EPA defines that “environmental justice is fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, ethnicity, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies.”Generally, one of the clear themes in environmental justice is the procedural justice that focuses on the fairness in the decision-making process, and the distributive justice that focuses on the norm of resource distribution. In that context, it is very persuasive that environmental justice is a concept combined with utilitarianism, contractarianism and egalitarianism. Accordingly, international environmental justice includes procedural justice for fairness of the decision-making process and the distributive justice for the norm of equal resource distribution. The reaction case against depletion of the Ozone layer was regarded as a successful case where industrialized countries of the North and developing countries of the South acknowledged they were victims of depletion of Ozone layer regardless of its severity and responded the discussion led by the US. Industrialized countries provided fund and technology, while developing countries cooperated for substitute material development. Such a case that overcame environmental crisis by international cooperation can be a good example in terms of distributive justice against the climate change. Mutualcooperation may be realized by distributive justice between developed and developing countries which fits for environmental justice. Environmental justice can be added to the operation of GHG(especially Carbon) Emission Trading Scheme, which was devised to overcome the climate change under the Kyoto mechanism. As a means, relatively different price can be introduced in the trading of the GHGs. In other words, the advanced countries pay for more expensive to compensate the past responsibilities, and the semi-developed countries or developing countries pay relatively lower price for GHGs. It is not easy to resolve the relation between adaption of climate change and environmental justice in terms of proper function and virtuous cycle. Rather, these two concepts seem to be contradictory to each other. However, such conflicting or inconvenient relation must not be maintained and is meaningless against solidarity of human being for overcoming climate change. Now these two concepts should be transferred to virtuous cycle and complementary relation from mutually exclusive relationship.