Preview
IB DP ESS — Topic 1: Foundations | SL & HL | Paper 1 & Paper 2
🎯 Learning Intentions By the end of this note, you will be able to:
- Define environmental justice and environmental inequality using IB-aligned ESS terminology.
- Explain how the unequal distribution of environmental burdens and benefits operates at local, national, and global scales.
- Describe the relationship between socioeconomic status, race, gender, and exposure to environmental hazards.
- Analyse case studies of environmental injustice using ESS analysis parameters: scale, multiple perspectives, sustainability, and trade-offs.
- Evaluate the effectiveness of environmental justice movements and policy responses in addressing inequalities.
- Discuss contrasting worldviews — ecocentric, technocentric, and anthropocentric — in relation to who bears the costs of environmental degradation.
- Distinguish between procedural justice and distributive justice in the context of environmental decision-making.
Real-World Context & Relevance
In 1982, residents of Warren County, North Carolina — a predominantly Black, low-income community — lay down in front of trucks carrying polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB)-contaminated soil destined for a landfill in their neighbourhood. The state of North Carolina had selected Warren County for the site after a deliberate assessment of land costs and community resistance capacity. Studies later confirmed that hazardous waste facilities in the United States were disproportionately sited in communities of colour: a landmark 1987 report by the United Church of Christ, Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States , found that race was the single most significant variable in determining the location of hazardous waste facilities — more predictive than income, property values, or political affiliation.
This pattern is not confined to the United States. Across the globe, the communities least responsible for environmental degradation are frequently the most exposed to its consequences. The small island developing states of the Pacific — nations such as Tuvalu and Kiribati — contribute less than 0.03% of global greenhouse gas emissions yet face existential threats from sea-level rise driven by the industrialised world's carbon output. In Bangladesh, approximately 17% of the land area could be submerged by a one-metre rise in sea level, displacing an estimated 18 million people — a population that has contributed negligibly to the atmospheric carbon concentration now threatening their homes (IPCC, Sixth Assessment Report , 2021). These patterns reveal a structural feature of the global environmental system: the costs and benefits of environmental exploitation are not distributed according to responsibility, need, or consent.
🌍 Why This Matters Environmental justice sits at the intersection of ecology, economics, and human rights. Understanding how environmental burdens fall disproportionately on marginalised communities is essential for designing equitable sustainability policy, evaluating international agreements, and applying the systems-thinking lens that ESS demands. Without justice, sustainability is incomplete — a society cannot be truly sustainable if its environmental costs are simply exported to those with the least power to resist them.
Core Concepts & Definitions
Before we can analyse who bears the costs of environmental degradation, we need a conceptual framework for thinking about fairness in the distribution of environmental goods and harms. The term that captures this framework emerged from the civil rights and environmental activism of the 1980s and has since become a central organising concept in both environmental policy and ESS.
📖 Key Definition — Environmental Justice Environmental justice is the