Environmental Justice Organisations, Liabilities and Trade

As global consumption of resources and human populations increase, the search for energy and materials cause the “commodity frontiers” to expand. Along the entire global chain of production, from extraction, to processing, to disposal, the impacts of pollution are distributed unequally among populations. Those most heavily impacted are marginalized sectors of the population including poor people, women, minorities and particularly indigenous peoples, who depend most directly on natural resources for their livelihood. Environmental Justice Organisations (EJOs) are civil society organisations involved in conflicts over resource extraction or waste disposal, focusing on the link between the need for environmental security and the defence of basic human rights with the aim to redress inequitable environmental burdens.

Which are the underlying causes of increasing ecological distribution conflicts at different scales, and how to turn such conflicts into forces for environmental sustainability?

This entails:

• To compile a large database, ‘The Map of Environmental Justice’, that will comprise an atlas of thematic and regional maps covering ecological distribution conflicts around the world, drawing on activist knowledge and linking them with material trade flows among other variables, and providing a platform for communication among EJOs and scientists working on related issues.
• To make available the latest knowledge on indicators of social metabolism for the analysis of the environmental impacts of nuclear energy, oil and gas extraction, biomass extraction, mining and ship breaking and e-waste, focusing on the whole ‘commodity chains’ (from extraction to waste disposal or recovery).
• To unveil some of the socio-environmental and public health impacts which are invisible to the consumers in the main resource importing and waste exporting countries, and to empower stakeholders to monitor and understand risks to environmental health.
• To apply methodologies that allow the study of the valuation languages deployed in ecological distribution conflicts, particularly related to environmental liabilities.
• To improve the basis for EJOs to undertake legal actions regarding environmental liabilities or campaign for institutional changes in corporate accountability.
• To develop the basis for EJOs to use notions and methods of calculation of ecologically unequal exchange and ecological debt.
• To hold workshops and develop an online resource library for EJOs on political ecology and public policies, environmental health (including popular epidemiology), ecologically unequal trade and the ecological debt, and legal redress.
• To translate project findings into concrete policy proposals to be communicated to decision makers in European, international institutions and corporate bodies. The emphasis of the recommendations will be on increasing corporate accountability and on legal institutional mechanisms to seek alternatives to and minimize harmful resource extraction and waste disposal.