Past Emissions, Present Injustice

21. 11. 2025

In Namibia, where I currently conduct research on wildlife conservation, everyone speaks about climate change because everyone feels its effects. Droughts last longer, water holes dry up, the rains no longer come when they should. Crops fail, livestock die, and food insecurity grows. Climate change also tightens its grip on Namibia’s wildlife—elephants, rhinos, leopards, cheetahs, lions, giraffes, antelopes, zebras, kudus, and other species. As waterholes vanish, wild animals wander ever closer to villages and farms in search of water and prey. The resulting human–wildlife conflicts strike at the heart of Namibia’s unique communal conservation model in which local people tie protection of wildlife to their livelihood.

Namibia has neither caused nor contributed to the crisis now reshaping its land. Its share of global greenhouse gas emissions is vanishingly small—in 2023 its CO ₂ emissions were 4.365 million tonnes, about 0.01 percent of the world’s total. Namibia actually absorbs more greenhouse gases than it emits. Still, this beautiful and fragile country must shoulder the burden of adapting to a crisis born of others’ emissions and prosperity.

The Weight of Pollution History

Namibia, like many countries in the Global South, embodies the moral problem at the heart of climate change. It has contributed almost nothing to global warming, yet it bears its heaviest costs. This deep asymmetry lies at the core of what we call global climate justice. Since the term first appeared, it has been mainly used to expose the unequal historical responsibility that nations carry for the climate crisis—and to make a moral claim that the countries which grew wealthy by emitting vast amounts of greenhouse gases have duties to cut their own emissions and to help those most affected by climate change, especially the most vulnerable communities that have no means to adapt.

The issue of historical responsibility is not an abstract notion, nor an academic indulgence. It is a matter of fact and physical reality. CO₂ is a long-lived gas: about half of what is released is absorbed by sinks such as oceans and forests, but the rest remains in the atmosphere for centuries. The accumulated carbon dioxide released since the dawn of the industrial revolution, first through deforestation and land-use change, and later, after 1950, through the burning of fossil fuels, is what drives the 1.2°C of global warming already recorded today. In 1850, the year marking the onset of large-scale industrialization and the first reliable data on fossil-fuel use, atmospheric CO₂ stood at roughly 285 parts per million. Since then, it has risen by about 50 percent, reaching today’s 425 ppm.

Many reliable datasets (e.g., Climate Watch, Carbon Brief, World Resource Institute, or Global Carbon Project) make one fact unmistakably clear: the CO₂ accumulated in the atmosphere over the past 170 years comes from specific countries. Data from the World Resource Institute show that a small group of nations dominated global emissions between 1850 and 1950. They include the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, France, Belgium, Poland, Austria, Spain, the Netherlands, and Canada, joined by Japan and the Soviet Union in the 1920s. Curiously, the Czech lands, the industrial heart of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, ranked among the world’s top ten emitters between 1863 and 1919. Britain led global emissions until 1887 when the United States took over—and then saw the steepest rise over the following nine decades, together with the UK and Germany. China’s emissions began increasing rapidly in the 1980s and in 2005 China became the world’s top annual emitter.

The United States remains responsible for the largest share of historical emissions—roughly 25 percent of the global total. The European Union follows closely, with about 22 percent of cumulative CO₂ emissions. Together, these two entities are accountable for nearly half of all carbon dioxide currently in the atmosphere. Behind it come China (12.7 percent), Russia (6 percent), Japan (4 percent), India (3 percent), and Canada (2 percent). (See the graphic here.) Both the U.S. and the EU are each roughly twice as responsible as China for the global share of emissions. India, today’s third biggest emitter, accounts for only a small fraction of the world’s historical emissions. There is no escaping the reality that most carbon released to date came from the industrialized countries of the Global North—nations that developed and grew wealthy through fossil fuel-based development and now possess the financial and technological means to adapt to the warming they created.

International Climate Law and the Struggle for Fairness

The undeniable fact of historical responsibility for global warming and the demand that past polluters bear the costs of addressing it have shaped international climate negotiations from the very beginning. As early as the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, developing countries, led by India and its Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, insisted that global environmental protection must not come at the expense of their right to economic development and poverty eradication. When climate change entered the global agenda in the late 1980s, this position solidified. Developing nations consistently argued that industrialized countries should acknowledge their historical responsibility and shoulder the primary burden of mitigation, that is, reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

These debates gave rise to the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities” (CBDR) that became a cornerstone of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)—a treaty now ratified by 197 countries plus the European Union. (Such near-universal participation is rivaled only by the UN Charter and the Montreal Protocol on ozone-depleting substances.) Article 3 (1) of the UNFCCC declares that: “Parties should protect the climate system for the benefit of present and future generations… on the basis of equity and in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities.”

The CBDR principle, which recognizes that climate action must reflect both nations’ contributions to the problem and their capacity to address it, became the foundation of the Kyoto Protocol, adopted under the UNFCCC framework in 1997. The Protocol bound industrialized countries (OECD and the former Soviet bloc) to cut their greenhouse gas emissions during the period 2008–2012 to at least 5 percent below 1990 levels. The EU agreed to cut its emissions by 8 percent compared to 1990 levels. The Protocol also required developed nations to provide financial resources and facilitate technology transfer to help developing countries pursue climate action.

Global North’s Broken Promises

The Kyoto Protocol failed to usher in an era of reduced emissions. Many countries chose to ignore their commitments, e.g., Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and Slovenia. The United States refused to ratify the Protocol because it did not impose binding targets on developing countries. Its defection effectively killed the agreement and marked the beginning of a new era of pragmatism in global climate politics. Under the current treaty, the Paris Agreement, countries make voluntary pledges to reduce emissions. There is no binding differentiation in obligations based on historic responsibility or capacity to act.

Yet the problem of historic responsibility remains a powerful moral principle and political demand to bear the costs of addressing the climate crisis. As Henry Shue argued in his influential essay Global environment and international Inequality, polluting the atmosphere with greenhouse gases by some is fundamentally unfair. Emissions inflict costs and harms on those who do not pollute. It is contrary to their interests, without their consent, and leaves them worse off while the emitters get richer and more advantaged. This asymmetry implies a clear demand for equity and fairness: those who caused the harm must shoulder the burdens of reducing pollution and pay for the damages suffered by those who did not cause it. Simply put: those who make the mess must pay to clean it up and not dump these costs onto others.

Historic responsibility continues to animate international climate politics and remains a central moral demand of the Global South toward the Global North. At COP27 held in 2022 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, developing countries (led by the G77 + China and small island states) argued that they face escalating costs from floods, droughts, and sea-level rise caused mainly by emissions from industrialized nations. Their key demand was the establishment of a Loss and Damage Fund to support developing countries most affected by climate impacts. At COP29, held last year in Baku, Azerbaijan, the Loss and Damage Fund was integrated into a broader framework of climate finance (NCQG) designed to support mitigation, adaptation, and resilience globally. Developing countries jointly called for US$1.3 trillion per year in public, grant-equivalent climate finance from the Global North. Developed countries, to the huge disappointment of developing countries, committed to mobilizing only US$300 billion annually.

Unequal Responsibilities, Unequal Choices

Communal conservancies in Namibia are searching for ways to adapt to climate change and mitigate human–wildlife conflict so they can continue protecting the wildlife that draws visitors from around the world—and that the world expects them to safeguard. Speaking at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) in Brazil just days ago, Namibian President Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah stated that adapting key sectors vulnerable to climate change, such as agriculture and wildlife conservation, will require over N$ 100.8 billion (USD 5.8 billion). Only about ten percent of this, she noted, can come from domestic sources.

Knowing it will be left to face these challenges largely on its own, Namibia is likely to turn to the mining sector as an economic strategy to finance its development and adaptation efforts. Yet mining, in Namibia as elsewhere, risks worsening climate impacts through deforestation, water depletion, habitat loss, and greenhouse gas emissions.

The contrast with some European countries—such as the Czech Republic—could not be starker. This country continues to obstruct the European Union’s green policies, including measures to phase out coal, accelerate emissions reductions, and support electric mobility. The previous government, led by ODS’s Petr Fiala, sought to undermine EU climate targets, weaken the emissions trading system, and discontinue support for renewable energy sources. The emerging new government is set to deepen this obstructionist, anti-environmental posture. Two of its coalition partners openly reject the EU Green Deal and the goal of carbon neutrality, support the continued operation of coal power plants, and oppose any form of climate taxation or regulation.

This is climate injustice. While a long-time beneficiary of industrialization uses its power to guard its privileges and slow the collective effort, a country that did not cause the climate crisis struggles to find the means to adapt and to protect the world’s natural heritage.

The author is a political scientist currently based at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena. Her research focuses on international political theory, international law, and global justice.