A Conceptual Integration of Climate Justice: Taxonomy of Climate Justice Integrating Theory and Policy Practice

ABSTRACT

Climate justice has become a defining frame in climate governance and scholarship. The field remains fragmented across multiple intellectual traditions, including environmental justice, energy justice, political theory, climate ethics, and decolonial critique. Existing reviews illuminate parts of this terrain. None integrates the full conceptual field into an analytically bounded structure that is also policy‐assessable. Fragmentation of this kind impedes systematic comparison, policy evaluation, and cross‐disciplinary dialogue. This article addresses that gap by developing a comprehensive taxonomy of climate justice that clarifies diverse normative claims, maps their interrelationships, and supports both scholarly analysis and policy assessment. We conducted a semi‐structured integrative review combined with narrative synthesis, following established guidance for integrative reviews. The review drew on peer‐reviewed scholarship, authoritative assessment reports, and conceptually substantive gray literature across five scholarly traditions, with thematic saturation as the stopping criterion. The taxonomy synthesizes these traditions into nine analytically distinct but interdependent justice domains: distributive, procedural, recognitional, corrective and restorative, representational, epistemic, capability and well‐being–based, intergenerational and interspecies, and transformative and structural. Within these domains, the analysis identifies 48 sub‐themes, each specified by indicative metrics and illustrative policy applications. The domains are mutually constitutive, so single‐domain appraisals of governance instruments miss most of what is at stake. A worked application to the Loss and Damage Fund illustrates how the taxonomy generates a nine‐domain appraisal of any climate governance instrument. The taxonomy also names persistent blind spots, including disability justice, data justice, and everyday justice in informal settlements. By aligning with the IPCC AR6 framing of equity as a determinant of climate‐resilient development, the taxonomy helps operationalize justice as both a normative standard and a practical diagnostic tool for governance.