The ‘How’ of Transformation: Principles for a Justice-Centered Response to the Climate and Biodiversity Crises

Year: 2025
Published in: Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development. Taylor & Francis
Cited as: Tebboth, M. G., Carmenta, R., Minas, A., Adelekan, A., Cao, X., Fullonton, A., … & Shelton, C. (2025). The ‘how’of transformation: Principles for a justice-centered response to the climate and biodiversity crises. Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development, 67(3), 7-23.

The ‘How’ of Transformation: Principles for a Justice-Centered Response to the Climate and Biodiversity Crises

The need for societal transformations to address the myriad climate and biodiversity challenges is widely recognized. However, interventions designed to promote and enable these transformations are realized within hugely inequitable global patterns of environmental integrity and human well-being. In this article, we draw on insights informed by research undertaken across low-and middleincome countries. Using the global environmental justice framework to systematize our analysis, we explore how interventions intended to support transformations in the climate, energy, transport, waste, and biodiversity spaces can result in the reproduction of multiple dimensions of harms. Through our analysis, we identify four principles to support more just transformations:(1) recognize plural perspectives,(2) address inequitable structures to support fairer distributions of costs and benefits,(3) plan for perverse outcomes, and (4) empower local people and institutions. We hope that these principles and the analysis from which they are drawn will be useful for practitioners, policymakers, and researchers interested in transformation, and will support more just responses and outcomes to the climate and biodiversity crises. Practitioners, policymakers, and researchers largely agree that solutions to global environmental problems such as climate change and biodiversity loss must align with efforts to secure human well-being. 1, 2, 3, 4 These solutions often require “broad, deep and rapid” 5 transformations to fundamentally shift societal actions away from high-carbon patterns of development. 6 However, these calls for transformation are often pursued through preexisting systems of global injustice. 7, 8 Interventions thereby risk reproducing, albeit in new and sometimes unexpected forms, inequality and injustice that typically land hardest on already politically, socially, and economically marginalized gro ups. 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14
The global environmental justice (GEJ) framework, with its three related dimensions of recognition, procedure, and distribution, is useful to understand and address risks associated with interconnected global crises. 15 The framework provides a systematic approach through which one can identify and analyze the connections between social and environmental issues that are at the heart of many injustices. The strength of the GEJ framework lies in the multidimensional