Ilmasto-oikeudenmukaisuus UNFCCC:ssä – Laadullinen analyysi COP29:stä

As the climate crisis escalates and multilateral arenas such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change remain central sites to intergovernmental climate negotiations, it is important to understand how decisions are made in these spaces. What is emphasized or left unsaid, whose voices are heard or left in the void, and ultimately, what type of justice is being achieved? This master’s thesis examines how climate justice was understood, framed, and contested by different negotiating blocs during the 29th Conference of the Parties (COP29), the so called “finance COP”, held in Baku, Azerbaijan, on 11–22 November 2024. Climate justice recognizes that those least responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, such as low income communities, marginalized populations, and the Global South, suffer the most severe impacts of climate change and it calls for equitable, rights based responses. Climate justice and its different dimensions: procedural, recognitional, distributional and restorative, seek to address the unfair impacts of climate change in different contexts. Critical and transformative climate justice combines different theories of climate justice with actionable solidarity to address the root causes of uneven and disproportionate impacts. Central to critical climate justice is questioning dominant historical and contemporary systems that enable injustice, including capitalism, colonialism, racism, and patriarchy. While climate justice has become a highly contested concept in international climate negotiations, there is limited research on the extent to which climate justice perspectives are reflected in negotiation discourse. Using critical discourse analysis and through qualitative coding, this thesis analyses the Earth Negotiations Bulletin’s (ENB) daily summaries of COP29. Drawing on climate justice scholarship, it examines how different dimensions of climate justice were understood, framed, and contested by negotiating blocs during the COP29 climate finance negotiations. The results show that while all four dimensions of climate justice were present in the negotiations, some occupied more space than others. Distributional and procedural issues were more common sites of dispute than restorative and recognitional dimensions. Furthermore, the conference did not reflect a critical or transformative understanding of climate justice, as negotiating blocs rarely questioned the structural causes of climate injustice.