Abstract
While a relativist view of environmental ethics could be quite difficult to justify, it is also
difficult to be so strict about the quest for global environmental justice1. At the same time, even
though the reality of environmental degradation is plain to see, most African traditional
communities and even their respective states at large still wallow in poverty such that they are
still in need of developing themselves if they are to reach the level of development in the
developed countries in the global North. Moreso, the majority of indigenous and mostly poor
and underrepresented African people in the global South are faced with disproportionate
amount of environmental benefits and burdens compared to their counterparts in the global
North. In this article, I therefore seek to examine a normative framework for conceptualising
global environmental justice within different environmental, social, political and economic
contexts. I consider how best environmental benefits and burdens could be fairly distributed
across communities with different environmental, social, political and economic advantages.
In the end, I appeal to John Rawls’s conception of distributive justice as a framework for
arriving at an acceptable view of global environmental justice that takes into account the
circumstances of the global South.