A Systematic Review of the Literature on Climate Justice: A Comparison Between the Global North and South

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank you for allowing me to review this manuscript.

The study analyzes the characteristics of publications on climate justice on a global scale and between the Global North and South.

In the introduction the authors must comprehensively discuss the relevance of this study and its main objective. Currently, this section is mainly dealing with the concept of climate justice and the distribution of climate risks between North and South.

In the second paragraph of section two the authors state the research question: “from what perspective is climate justice addressed…” However, explaining the method, the authors state that the assessment is purely quantitative and the mapping is based on “authors, affiliations, countries, and journals” of publication. Please clarify this discrepancy. Is the review completely quantitative or aims to respond to a qualitative question?

The authors use only two keywords for their data collection (“climate justice” and “climate injustice”). However, there are studies discussing matters related to climate justice, which do not include these two keywords in the title or abstract. Is this a limitation of the study? Please provide more details on the two keywords selection and the limits of this decision.

It is unclear how the grouping for Figure 2 was made. The authors state that 86.6% of the studies “belonged to countries in the Global North.” What is the criteria? Authors affiliation or another one? How were considered the papers including in the empirical assessment countries from Global South? Please provide more details.

Please comprehensively explain the meaning of the asymmetries of climate justice topic representation in papers between North and South. Hint at the potential reasons for this asymmetry.

One of the main limitations identified by the authors was the English language in scientific publications. This limitation means that the main stream of scientific literature is dominated by the English language. However, this does not exclude the possibility of having numerous studies in other languages addressing the climate justice topics. Under these circumstances, the conclusion saying that “there is a concentration of studies and publications in countries in the Global North” seems risky.

Please explain more comprehensively the future directions for study starting from the accomplished objectives of this research.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

 

Thank you for your review and suggestions for improving our work. We accept and have made all the adjustments. 

 

The introduction was modified to give more emphasis to the objective of the study and its relevance, in addition to reinforcing them in the text.

 

The research question was revised and removed from section 2 to fit the quantitative context of the research.  

 

A paragraph has been inserted in section 2.3 to highlight the limitations of searching using only the descriptors “climate justice” and “climate injustice”. The words were inserted into the keywords. Other descriptors were tested, but by methodological decision we opted to keep just these two, in order to cover the theme analysed and get closer to the universe sampled, ensuring greater accuracy of the sample. The whole process can be checked in the Prisma Checklist in the supplementary materials.

 

In section 3.1, the reinforcement of the classification of works using the countries of affiliation of the first authors was inserted, as mentioned previously in section 2.1, paragraph 6. A paragraph was also inserted after Figure 2 to explain and discuss the asymmetry in the representation of climate justice between countries in the Global North and South.  

 

Two paragraphs were inserted at the end of section 5 to comprehensively address the future directions of the study and indicate recommendations for future studies in the same area, based on the results obtained in this research.

 

Once again we thank you for your attention and suggestions for our paper.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Very enjoy to read this article. I have few points required further attention.

1. When you talk about Global South and Global North, you could not avoid issue of the colonization of the global south. Climate change and biodiversity in particular point of view, can be considered a new sort of continuation of colonization to stablize current unfair and unjustice global system. I think you may need to touch this issue in your article.

2. You need to refine the terminology of injustice.  I felt that meaning of injustice may be much different, in particular in the lens of capacity difference between global south and global north.

3. I hope please read some references on Potilical Ecology, which may provide you a new lens for reference analysis.

4. Please think about Coding approaches for references analysis, and coding appraoches should be guided by a sort of theory, including political ecology.

 

 

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

 

We are grateful that you enjoy reading this article. We greatly appreciate the few points that require further attention. Thank you for your review and suggestions for improving our work. We accept and have made all the adjustments.

 

But the reviewer indicated that the article has deficiencies in "Are the research design, questions, hypotheses, and methods clearly stated?" and in "For empirical research, are the results clearly presented?" But he didn't elaborate. Research design follows a step-by-step international standard for systematic review. Even with the inclusion of the PRISMA protocol, what is not clearly stated in the method? The same for the empirical part. The empirical part - the search results based on the descriptors of the systematic review is the heart of the work.  Of the 4 comments made, none address these issues.

 

1. On the issue of coloniality. It is indeed crucial. It is present in several parts of the text. We reinforced it, according to the reviewer's suggestion. 
2. Thank you for your suggestion. Concerning (climate) injustice we use the definition from Flavio Comim https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=ypqPay8AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao .  Flavio Comim argues that climate injustice is a pervasive feature of current climate change problems. Injustice is manifested in terms of cost–benefit asymmetries and in the erosion of individuals' capabilities. To understand the overall impact of climate change on poverty and human development, it is relevant to contextualize this discussion within the general issue about the impact of ecosystem services on human well-being. Moreover, it is important to qualify what we understand by ‘climate justice’ and use this characterization to think about policy directions for better responses.

Comim, F. Climate Injustice and Development: A capability perspective. Development 51, 344–349 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1057/dev.2008.36

3. The suggestion to include the political ecology approach, although tempting, would divert the present work in another direction. One of the challenges of good academic work is to theoretically and methodologically follow its initial proposal. A suggestion for future work is to use the political ecology approach, especially in dialogue with Erik Swyngedouw and political ecology networks in the South, such as Waterlat.

4. Once again, we disagree with the reviewer. We do not consider political ecology as a theory, but rather an approach, a lens of analysis. Redoing the coding process based on political ecology would generate other work. Here is a suggestion for future work. A challenge and limitation of this suggested path is that the dialogue between authors in the field of political ecology and climate justice is emerging and still scarce.

Once again we thank you for your attention and suggestions for our paper.

 

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The authors did their best to address the comments and improve the manuscript.