David Schlosberg is the Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Visiting Professor in the Environment and Humanities at Princeton University for Spring 2009. He is Professor of Politics and International Affairs, and Director of the Environmental Studies Program, at Northern Arizona University. Professor Schlosberg is known nationally and internationally for his work in environmental political theory, environmental justice, and environmental movements. He has taught at the London School of Economics, has been Fulbright Senior Scholar in the Social and Political Theory Program at Australian National University, and is a Fellow of the Centre for Research in Environmental Action and Thought at Keele University in the UK. Schlosberg's books include Environmental Justice and the New Pluralism (Oxford 1999), Green States and Social Movements (Oxford 2003, co-authored with John Dryzek, Christian Hunold, and David Downes), Debating the Earth: The Environmental Politics Reader (Oxford 1998, 2nd edition 2005, co-edited with John Dryzek), Defining Environmental Justice (Oxford 2007), and, most recently, Environmentalism in the United States (Routledge 2009, co-edited with Elizabeth Bomberg). He is currently co-editing The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society.

Climate justice is a growing field of inquiry, and yet one that is unnecessarily limited in scope. Most authors who have addressed climate justice focus on conceptions of equity, and in particular inequity between existing human populations or between existing and future generations of human beings. I argue that there are key limitations in much of this literature, and that the issue of climate change necessitates a much more broad understanding of climate justice. The thesis here is that the capabilities approach, developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum and expanded in key ways, can be applied to a conception of climate justice. This approach enables a notion of climate justice that is applicable to the impacts of climate change on both human and non-human individuals and communities. This capabilities-based conception of climate justice will be compared to the demands of the climate justice movement. These groups often articulate justice in terms of demands for community capabilities, functioning, and social reproduction. Climate justice groups already illustrate the way that a capabilities approach can be applied to human communities and ecological systems.