Survival Equity and Climate Change Triage: How to Decide Who Lives and Who Dies

Abstract

In one of many foreshadowings of what climate change means for the future, heatwaves in June and July 2022 raged in most of the Northern Hemisphere—i.e., within most of the world’s the “rich” countries, as well as in many that are not so well off. The heatwaves of 2022 illustrate a profound reality of climate change: even if humanity manages to keep global average warming to no more than 2°C, people are going to die. Those deaths will increase exponentially if global average warming reaches 4°C or more—an event that could occur by the end of this century or shortly thereafter. Law and politics have to internalize these new deadly realities.

However, whether a person dies in a heatwave is often a complex combination of individual health factors, where the person lies on several non-climate spectrums of inequality (including income, environmental conditions, and health care availability), where the person chose to live, that location’s capacity to prepare and respond, and sheer dumb luck (good or bad). How should the law respond?

This chapter explores the concept of survival equity in a changing world. Specifically, it explores how the concept of emergency triage might be used to improve survival equity. The chapter concludes that macroallocation of increasing scarce resources based on triage could work relatively well, right up until the point when governments begin to decide to triage people instead of resources and places. Given this ultimate failure, moreover, the chapter argues that population control through equity-enhancing measures, such as increasing women's and girls' access to education and employment, should become a more robust climate change adaptation strategy along with reduced resource consumption among wealthy countries.

Keywords: climate change adaptation, triage, climate disaster, equity