Seventeenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

Flooding in the UK is predicted to significantly increase due to climate change, but it has become increasingly evident that the distribution of who is at risk of flooding in England is significantly weighted towards areas of deprivation. This proposal seeks to rebalance this distribution of risk by drawing on principles of climate justice to develop a framework to identify and manage ‘flood justice’. The origins of climate justice stem from grassroots action by marginalised groups, and the term broadly seeks to contextualise climate change in the understanding that the people most affected by climate change are both the least responsible and have the least capacity to manage. Drawing on personal experience from climate campaigns, and key debates within theoretical academic justice, I have developed a ‘flood justice’ framework for analysing flood risk management (FRM) in England. The framework is made of three stages: justice as recognition, procedural justice, and the capabilities theory. Justice as recognition is concerned with who is considered and who is left out of decisions, procedural justice is concerned with decision-making methodologies (e.g. hierarchical, consensus, iterative) and the capability theory is a set of ‘capabilities’ that Nussbaum considers required in order to achieve full human flourishing. The flood justice framework will be further operationalised and tested through fieldwork, by investigating the experiences of flooding by those who have lived through it, because climate justice principles indicate that experiential knowledge provides most meaningful suggestions for implementing just policies.