Green Academy: Moving Beyond Fragments
Organized by: Institute for Political Ecology (IPE, Institut za političku ekologiju)
Module - Climate Change and Just Transition
Location: Spomen dom, Komiža, Vis, Croatia
Date: 27th August 2018
Speaker: Erik Swyngedouw (University of Manchester, UK)
Convenors: Jagoda Munić (FoE Europe), Dražen Šimleša (IPE)
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Climate change is one of the biggest threat to human civilisation and Earth’s ecosystems, as we know them. Nowadays, both science and political decision makers are convinced we need urgent action and consequently, in 2015, at Conference of the Parties under UN Framework Climate Change Convention the “Paris agreement was adopted with an aim to reduce greenhouse gases pollution and curb the climate change. The agreement was a big diplomatic success, but it is based on the “pledges” by states and all together, mitigation ambition is not enough, leading to 2,8 °C increase, instead of 1.5 °C, as written in the agreement itself. Since then, the main issue is how to speed up the transition from the fossil fuel to post-fossil fuel societies, which necessarily requires a fundamental change of the current political, social and economic system.
What this transition requires and how it should be done is a key debate among different stakeholders. Industry and some of the decision-makers, rely heavily on the technology and efficiency to solve the problem. Labour movement demandsjust transition that would provide justice for the workers in the fossil fuel industries. The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) created the Just transition Centre to lead on the debate from the perspective of labour unions. Environmental and climate justice organisations are demanding that the burden of transition is not carried by the poorest part of society, that would suffer if the transition costs are automatically transferred in the end costs of services - for example house heating. Others are viewing transition from the perspective of regions, for example, how to change economy of coal dependent regions in order to maintain jobs in the region. We will explore these perspectives and will discuss what does the transition look like in the European periphery.
The Climate justice module has many overlaps with degrowth and commons/municipalisation module, as we need urgently shift from fossil fuels, but the key question is how we will do it and who will pay the costs? To use less and more efficiently resources and energy is the first, very often, the most neglected tool to curb the climate change. The ownership of the production is also very important. For example, community energy projects are ways to enable local communities to produce their own renewable energy and even sell it to the grid. Such decentralised production would provide more resilience in the system and profits would spread more evenly, which would eliminate energy poverty.
In the climate module, we will therefore explore Climate governance and Just Transition from the environmental and social perspective and community energy models.
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Climate Change Politics as Post-Political Populism
Erik Swyngedouw is Professor of Geography at Manchester University. His research interests include urban political-ecology, hydro-social conflict, urban governance, democracy and political power, and the politics of globalisation. His was previously professor of geography at Oxford University and held the Vincent Wright Visiting Professorship at Science Po Paris, 2014. His forthcoming books are Promises of the Political (MIT 2018) and. co-edited with H. Ernstson, Urban Political Ecology in the Anthropo-obscene (Routledge 2017).