Ubuntu, Equity and the African Court’s Climate Justice Moment
Picture Credit: "Visit to Peris Owiti's climate-smart farm in Western Kenya" by CGIAR Climate is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Editor’s Note: This article draws, in part, from the chapter, “Ubuntu and Climate Justice,” published in Ubuntu in the Age of Human Rights, a Judicial Action Group (JAG) and Protimos project exploring the role of Ubuntu in contemporary rights adjudication.
Climate justice has become one of the most contested terrains of international law, and the chapter, here in condensed form, argues that Africa’s own normative traditions offer vital guidance for the moment before the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (African Court).
Across the continent, communities have lived the consequences of ecological disruption for more than a century, from colonial land dispossession to contemporary extractive economies that deepen vulnerability. Today, as floods, droughts, displacement and loss of livelihoods intensify, the Pan-African Lawyers Union (PALU) has requested an advisory opinion from the African Court to clarify what climate justice requires under the African Charter. This moment invites the Court to develop an African-centred vocabulary of equity, grounded in the continent’s legal instruments and lived philosophies.
Crucially, PALU’s paragraph 94 request asks the Court to consider international cooperation and equity as normative anchors of states’ climate obligations. This is where the continent’s own intellectual resources, particularly ubuntu, bring unique clarity.
Colonialism and the roots of environmental injustice
For many African communities, climate vulnerability is inseparable from a longer history of disruption. Colonial administrations forcibly displaced pastoralists, carved out protected areas that excluded indigenous peoples from ancestral lands, and introduced conservation regimes that treated Africans as threats to nature rather than custodians of it. Capitalist development deepened these fractures, positioning nature as a resource to be rationalised and extracted.
This “vicious sedimentation” produced a double injustice. First, it destabilised traditional ecological knowledge systems that had regulated the commons through norms of restraint and reciprocity. Second, it locked many African states into economies heavily exposed to climate shocks, while contributing least to global emissions.
Any African conception of climate justice, therefore, begins with a simple truth: the continent did not create the crisis but carries a disproportionate share of its burdens. This asymmetry is, in part, central to PALU’s invitation to the Court: to explain how equity must shape both intra-African and international climate responsibilities.
Climate justice and the centrality of equity
Global climate debates often operate within technical frames: mitigation, adaptation, Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and emissions budgets. But African states have repeatedly emphasised two deeper themes: fairness and financing.
Fairness calls attention to historical pollution and differentiated responsibility. It requires acknowledging that states with greater resources and greater historical emissions must shoulder correspondingly greater obligations. This principle has been repeatedly affirmed by African leaders, including through the Nairobi Declaration’s insistence that climate commitments must reflect both past contributions and present capacities.
Financing is the companion to fairness. Accountability for climate harm cannot be meaningful where structural inequality denies African states the resources to adapt. The uncertain operationalisation of the Loss and Damage Fund, for example, illustrates the distance between rhetoric and lived reality.
These issues place the African Court in a unique position. Unlike the International Court of Justice (ICJ) or the International Tribunal for the Law of the sea (ITLOS), the African Court adjudicates within a normative system that already embeds principles of solidarity, equitable sharing of resources, and duties of cooperation under Articles 22–24 of the African Charter as well as Articles III and IV of the Revised African Convention on the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources. PALU’s request simply asks the Court to apply those norms to the climate crisis.
Ubuntu as a continental ethic of equity and cooperation
Ubuntu is sometimes described as a philosophy of relational personhood, but at its core lies a broader ecological ethic; one that recognises that human flourishing is inseparable from the well-being of the community and the natural world. Ubuntu’s ecological philosophy (‘ecosophy’) rejects the atomised individualism that underpins homo oeconomicus and instead orients communities toward solidarity, restraint, responsibility and stewardship.
Two Ubuntu-derived concepts are especially relevant to the Court’s mandate.
Solidarity as the foundation of equitable cooperation
Ubuntu teaches that communities survive only through collective sufficiency, taking no more than is needed so that others may also live. This ethic mirrors the African Charter’s insistence that states must cooperate to ensure equitable development and the use of resources.
Applied to climate change, solidarity demands that:
states with greater capacity assist those with less;
adaptation and mitigation burdens be shared in ways that do not entrench historical injustice;
vulnerable communities: indigenous peoples, coastal populations, small-scale farmers, should be recognised as rights-holders, not policy afterthoughts.
Solidarity also contains an element of epistemic justice. It requires courts and governments to listen to, and learn from, the ecological knowledge of communities whose practices historically conserved ecosystems. African courts have begun embracing this principle. In Sustaining the Wild Coast (Shell seismic blasting), the High Court insisted that customary spiritual relationships with the sea must be taken seriously, not dismissed as irrational. This approach aligns squarely with Ubuntu’s recognition of collective wisdom.
Due diligence as an intergenerational obligation
“Ubuntu also imposes duties across generations. Professor Ramose’s “triad of the living, the living-dead and the yet-to-be-born” captures a worldview in which caring for land, water, forests, and coastlines is a duty owed not only to those alive today but to ancestors and future descendants.
This maps directly onto the African Charter’s protection of the right to a satisfactory environment and its implicit intergenerational logic. For the African Court, ubuntu-infused due diligence could justify requiring states to:
adopt ambitious mitigation measures proportionate to their capabilities;
regulate extractive industries to avoid foreseeable ecological harm;
consult and protect customary resource-dependent communities;
justify developmental decisions that risk irreversible harm.
The Court would not be creating new law—it would be interpreting existing obligations through equity, consistent with the Charter’s object and spirit.
Why the African Court is uniquely placed
The ICJ and ITLOS delivered important clarifications on climate obligations. But they are not situated within the lived normative universe of African peoples. The African Court, by contrast, operates within a framework where solidarity, equitable sharing, communal responsibility, and protection of vulnerable groups are not add-ons; they are foundational values.
This gives the Court space to deliver what Spann famously called expository justice: reasoning that does more than resolve disputes; it articulates society’s moral commitments. For Africa, an expository approach anchored in ubuntu would make visible the connections between climate harm, colonial legacies, extractive capitalism, and the fragility of indigenous life worlds.
PALU’s call for international cooperation and equity thus invites the Court to craft an opinion that centres:
Africa’s historical marginalisation in global emissions;
the continent’s ecological vulnerability;
the normative weight of solidarity in African law; and
Ubuntu as a legitimate interpretive lens for continental obligations.
Conclusion
Africa’s climate crisis is intertwined with its history, but so too is its response. Ubuntu, rooted in reciprocity, interdependence and stewardship, offers a distinctively African articulation of climate justice. The African Court now has the opportunity to translate that ethos into legal meaning.
By grounding its advisory opinion in the Charter’s equity provisions and the continent’s philosophical inheritance, the Court can chart a path that is both principled and practical: one that affirms Africa’s agency, strengthens cooperation, and ensures that the burdens and benefits of climate action are shared fairly.
This is the moment for an African jurisprudence of climate justice: one that speaks in our own voice, from our own values, to our own future.
