Skip to 0 minutes and 4 seconds [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] [SINGING]
Skip to 0 minutes and 15 seconds The world today faces challenging environmental problems due to the planetary scale and because they’re experienced by people differently. For example, think about climate change. Climate change will involve unprecedented environmental changes of a planetary scale, yet we also know that there will be significant regional variation in climatic changes. We know that the different regions of the world, Global North and Global South, have contributed differently to climate change. And we know the effects of climate change will be felt differently by different people and places. This course helps you to understand how injustice is a common feature of many environmental problems because the problems are experienced differently by people. For example, water.
Skip to 0 minutes and 56 seconds Putting a price on water may help some to maximise shareholder values and financial returns, where others are threatened in their daily livelihoods. Or consider forests. The management of tropical forests for the maximisation of timber revenues or carbon stocks puts at risk attempts by people living in and around forests to meet their own subsistence needs or manage forests according to their own visions of a healthy forest ecosystem. The course shows that sustainable environmental management requires attention to justice. We need to strike the right balance between the interests of the contemporary generation, the needs of future generations, and the rights of nature.
Skip to 1 minute and 40 seconds Environmental solutions have to be just for moral reasons, but environmental solutions also have to be just because justice provides such a powerful motivation for sustainable environmental management. And as part of this course, we will show you a series of films with environmental activists that provides vivid testimony to the power of justice as a motivation for environmental action. This course builds on the work that I, Thomas Sikor, and my colleagues in the Global Environment Justice group of the University of East Anglia have conducted over the past few years, including biodiversity conservation, forestry, water management, climate change, health, and disaster management.
Skip to 2 minutes and 21 seconds In collaboration with partners from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, we try to understand the causes of environmental problems and actively contribute to solving them in cooperation with practitioners, professionals, and activists.
Skip to 2 minutes and 37 seconds This course is for you if you work on environmental problems or care about environmental issues. It is for all environmentalists, whether you live in the UK or other parts of the world. You will become familiar with key concepts of environmental justice. We will illustrate these key concepts through films from Asia and Africa. We expect you to contribute actively to this course in the form of quizzes, commentaries, and assignments. It’s the power of this course that it combines the transfer of new theoretical knowledge by us with its application to particular problems by you. And it’s up to you to make the best of the course.
Skip to 3 minutes and 16 seconds Thus by the end of this course, we hope that you’ve developed an interest in environmental justice and know how to pursue further learning on the injustices driving environmental problems and on practical approaches to enhancing justice for a sustainable future.
