Equity. What a thoroughly cavernous issue.
For a word that comports itself as a standard-bearer of fairhandedness and accessibility, it’s truly amazing how nuanced it really is. Equity is suffering from an almost total lack of definition.
And a good thing, too, because once you define what kind of equity you’re talking about, it becomes incredibly clear that your calls for equity are disenfranchising a lot of people.
I am an American student working to identify the synergies and incompatibilities that arise when we work to protect multiple types of environmental systems, primarily how our energy choices impact land, air, and water. We want to protect all these systems, and we make choices that affect them simultaneously, but sometimes an action that is good for one is terrible for another. Take carbon capture and storage from coal-fired power plants: as currently conceived, it’s great for keeping carbon out of the atmosphere, but it would likely require quite a bit of extra coal to fuel the carbon capture, which means more mining. Which in turn means more negative land and water impacts.
Just as it’s much more comfortable to talk about needing to protect “the environment” than to have difficult conversations about which systems to sacrifice in favor of the others, talk of equity at Copenhagen’s United Nations climate conference skirts issues of definition. Because what is equity? Equal treatment of something based on some parameter. And as it turns out, those somethings and some parameters are dizzyingly diverse.
There’s resource equity on a personal basis, meaning every person gets an equal amount of every resource. There’s resource equity on a national basis, with respect to the past or to the present or to the future—or some combination of the three. Then that resource equity can be on an absolute basis—everyone gets 6 pounds of wheat, or on a needs basis—everyone gets exactly enough calories to maintain him or herself at the same BMI as everyone else, or whatever the community decides is appropriate. Administrative nightmare, ethical nightmare, might I add. Because who decides what a resource is, or what the appropriate level of personal maintenance might be?
Then there’s equity in effort. Is it equitable to ask some people to reduce their standard of living while others increase theirs? Or to expect that it’s just as easy to reduce pollution as to grow it? (And please don’t read too deeply into this wording with respect to COP-15. I think we can reach a low carbon society without decreasing standards of living in the developed world, and there are obviously questions of magnitude surrounding standard of living.) Given two countries in identical situations, except that one happens to have higher historic emissions, is it fair—or realistic—to expect one to shrink while the other grows? What if it is clear that the growing country’s cumulative emissions will be just as high as the shrinking country’s after another 10 years of growth? There is inequity in valuing past actions as more important than future ones, and there would be inequity in valuing them equally—as we don’t know the future ones will happen yet—or in valuing future actions above past ones.
There is cultural inequity in allowing small societies to perish. There is population inequity in allocating resources for their survival instead of improving health conditions in large cities. Policymakers are constantly faced with incredibly subjective questions, such as how many people should be willing to accept a chronic illness to save one life. Is a life only as valuable as the number of years it spans, and taking a year of life from 50 people should be deemed equivalent to killing a young adult?
Equity is not a simple issue, and demanding it is one of the more nuanced aspects of the climate negotiations. There are many goals here, and unfortunately, they don’t always align nicely: physically keeping carbon out of the atmosphere is not sustainable development, which in turn is not a massive redistribution of wealth or a social revolution. As with energy, we can make choices that will promote more than one of these goals at once. First, though, we need to agree on what we’re talking about.
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