Climate change is one of the most significant challenges our global community has ever faced. As scientific evidence continues to accumulate, it is becoming obvious that climate change requires an urgent global response. Without such a response, rising sea levels, severe weather patterns and the spread of deadly diseases threaten the lives of both present and future generations. Although states continue to work together to act on climate change, most recently by ratifying the Paris Agreement, the global response has so far been woefully inadequate. Some world leaders, most notably United States president Donald Trump, seem outright determined to halt the climate change response altogether. With temperatures rising and climatic changes taking hold across the world, it is increasingly apparent that not enough is being done.

This book aims to make sense of the lack of proper response to climate change – focusing on what has gone wrong, what has gone right, and what might change now that the Paris Agreement has been ratified. Of course, one cannot assess what is going right and wrong without knowing what a right, or just, response to the climate change problem would look like in the first place. The book contends that cosmopolitan thinking on global justice is ideally placed for developing an understanding of what such a response requires. Cosmopolitans put individuals at the centre of moral concern and emphasise the importance of fair treatment of humans across the globe. Engaging in cosmopolitan global justice debates means exploring ethical aspects of the climate change problem: identifying victims of injustice, defining a fair distribution of climate responsibilities and assigning duties of justice to those who are responsible. In exploring these ethical aspects of the climate change problem, the book is able to determine what a just response to the climate change problem entails. Once this has been established, the book can then assess whether the current response to the climate change problem is, in fact, just.

Although this is not the first book on the subject of cosmopolitan global justice and climate change (or climate justice for short), it is the first to normatively evaluate multilateral (state) and transnational (non-state) climate change responses, and in doing so make sense of the ‘big picture’ of climate change (mis)management and the injustices that come along with it.