Environmental Justice in Europe

Abstract

This chapter examines the broadening concepts and meaning of environmental justice in terms of Europe in the era of ecological and climate emergency. It reveals how the broadening environmental justice discourse has absorbed several issues and has been applied at a global level. It is argued here that the reality of the global ecological and climate emergency has made climate justice a central theme of environmental justice. Environmental justice has been expanded to climate justice, because the environmental justice movements increasingly addressed the environmental and social conditions. In the European context, the analyzed wide range of environmental justice evolved in the framework of Aarhus Convention which institutionalized the framework of environmental democracy. The regime of environmental democracy of the Convention has so defined thinking about environmental justice that it has essentially narrowed down to procedural and corrective dimensions of environmental justice. There is a core imbalance of procedural and environmental rights in the Aarhus Convention, and this causes normative mismatch. All of this was burdened by the strong division in terms of the European center and periphery discussed in this Chapter. The socio-spatial aspects of environmental (in)justice are remarkable in Western and Central and European (CEE) scales. The centrum-periphery division is embedded into the implication and expectation of the CEE regime changes; it has been assumed that ecological modernization will be the effect of the double transition to capitalism and democracy; and at the same time, several social inequalities and burdens were raised by the integration into the global capitalism. It is analyzed here that the Roma minority has been suffering from the following environmental problems and injustices. The chapter concludes that there is a need to (re)enhance the social nature of environmental problems in the era of climate emergency, and this will strengthen the environmental consciousness in CEE and Western Europe as well.

The European landscape revels the North-South gap in terms of environmental justice.