Rajbir Saha
(rajbirsaha1995@gmail.com)
Environmental consciousness can be broken up into procedural knowledge and informational interventions. Climate change is in large part a result of man-made enterprise and is arguably the most comprehensive and toughest challenge facing humanity today. Even if a huge human impact on the climate is a current phenomenon, the realisation that climate has an impact on human life isn't new. The issue of climate change inevitably raises questions surrounding the energy consumption of humans. In the pursuit of leading a more "clean" lifestyle, humans have adopted increasingly harrowing ways to exploit the different types of naturally occurring energy sources on earth, which has led to a more accelerated deterioration of the earth and the climate and its resources. One of the most frequently referenced founders of medical science, Hippocrates (b. 460 BCE), wrote a treatise known as On Airs, Waters, Places, the first systematic step was taken to establish a contingent relationship between human sickness and their immediate surroundings. He held that temperament becomes associated with climate and that droughts, rains, heat waves, and seasonal modifications had a routine effect on the human condition. Much later, during the enlightenment, the social theorist Montesquieu (1689-1755) noticed a near courting among climate and social lifestyles.
Notably, Montesquieu believed that cold air made people full of life, even as warmness made them torpid, with what he deemed to be critical implications for cultural improvement. Dismissed through later social theorists as simplistic environmental determinism, comparable thoughts have never quite disappeared. What is new within the modern age is the almost acquainted reputation of humanity's effect on weather and its potentially catastrophic effects on life on the earth in the future. In this discipline, all those invested in the research in the pursuit of numerous sciences are making essential contributions to knowledge and analysis. Before thinking about those contributions, however, it's far necessary to offer a quick overview of the wider context wherein contemporary issues with climate change is located. Inequality has been an ongoing problem within the entire climate change discourse it is well-known it comes below the category of the discussion on "climate justice" which in flip is an offshoot of the "environmental justice" issue. However, the point of interest of this dialogue has been principally centred on inequality which ranges across nations, we fail to acknowledge the inequalities that arise within our countries themselves. That is to say that the inequality or discrimination which results because of climate change within the countries we reside in is not given as much international or theoretical attention. Social inequality has obtained even much less interest, as we similarly discuss the effect that climate change has on the social factors of human existence we will additionally be referencing the impact climate change has on the more tangible factors. The international discussion surrounding the impact of climate change was primarily focused on the tangible side of things which is the impact climate change has on nature. It is time due consideration was given to the social impact that was sustained due to climate change, the evidence was presented regarding the relationship between climate change and poverty in livelihood and health.
Gratuitously put, there are several types of inequality still to be considered within a domestic setting of the issue at hand. On one side there are qualities based on demographic characteristics such as race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and age. On the second hand, we have the type of inequality that is based on personal assets and income, acquired by individuals comprising the population. A tertiary type of inequality is that regarding political power and access to public resources such as publicly funded services of health, education, housing, and finance. Furthermore in this, we will see that regional inequality within a country often coincides with inequality regarding race, ethnicity and religion. We use the umbrella term "social inequality" to refer to all these different types of inequalities within the country. The concept of social inequality used in this paper is multidimensional. The availability of data in regards to income inequality shows that the people living in poverty or just above the poverty line suffer disproportionately from the more harrowing effects of climate change than the rich. This is not to say that other social groups which are marginalized based on gender, age, race and ethnic city do not suffer at the hands of climate change. Unsurprisingly, this discussion of the effects of climate change on poverty quite often extends itself to the impact of climate change on inequality as previously stated that socially and economically disadvantaged and marginalised groups are disproportionately affected by climate change, we understand that the climate change impacts tend to be counter-revolutionary, that is that they tend to harm the poor more than the rich.
As the overall conclusion is drawn that climate change accelerates inequality it is worth noting that socially and geographically disadvantaged people including those facing discrimination on the basis of gender, age, race, class, caste, indigeneity, and disability are particularly impacted negatively by environmental hazards. As noted above exacerbation of inequality can occur through disproportionate erosion of tangible, human, and social assets. Climate change adaptation expenditure is often found to be selfishly driven more by wealth than by need, so in conclusion, these expenditures end up aggravating inequality rather than aiding in decreasing it. Regardless of the progress stated above the dialogue of the inter-linkages between climate change and social inequalities so far goes through several problems. The highly glaring one of these problems is the unavailability of a definitive unifying conceptual framework.