Social- Environmental

With a few exceptions, none of which should be hard to remedy, delivering social justice and protecting the environment are not only compatible: they are each indispensable to the other. Only through social justice, which must include the redistribution of the world's ridiculously concentrated wealth, can the environment and the lives of the world's poorest be defended.

The social justice line is set by the eleven priorities listed by the governments preparing for this year's Rio summit. These are:

• food security

• adequate income

• clean water and good sanitation

• effective healthcare

• access to education

• decent work

• modern energy services

• resilience to shocks

• gender equality

• social equity

• a voice in democratic politics.

The destruction line is set by the nine planetary boundaries identified in Stockholm in 2009 by a group of earth system scientists. They identified the levels beyond which we endanger the earth's living systems of:

• climate change

• biodiversity loss

• nitrogen and phosphate use

• ozone depletion

• ocean acidification

• freshwater use

• changes in land use

• particles in the atmosphere

• chemical pollution.

We are already living above the line on the first three indicators, and close to it on several others.

The space between these two lines is the "safe and just space for humanity to thrive in". So what happens if everyone below the social justice line rises above it? Does that push us irrevocably over the destruction line? The answer, she shows, is no.

For example, providing enough food for the 13% of the world's people who suffer from hunger means raising world supplies by just 1%.

Providing electricity to the 19% of people who currently have none would raise global carbon emissions by just 1%.

Bringing everyone above the global absolute poverty line ($1.25 a day) would need just 0.2% of global income.

In other words, it is not the needs of the poor that threaten the biosphere, but the demands of the rich. Raworth points out that half the world's carbon emissions are produced by just 11% of its people, while, with grim symmetry, 50% of the world's people produce just 11% of its emissions. Animal feed used in the EU alone, which accounts for just 7% of the world's people, uses up 33% of the planet's sustainable nitrogen budget. "Excessive resource use by the world's richest 10% of consumers," she notes, "crowds out much-needed resource use by billions of other people."

The politically easy way to tackle poverty is to try to raise the living standards of the poor while doing nothing to curb the consumption of the rich. This is the strategy almost all governments follow. It is a formula for environmental disaster, which, in turn, spreads poverty and deprivation. As Oxfam's paper says, social justice is impossible without "far greater global equity in the use of natural resources, with the greatest reductions coming from the world's richest consumers".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2012/feb/13/protecting-environment-social-justice