Climate Justice in Sub‐Saharan Africa: Unequal Burdens and Pathways to Socially Just Adaptation

ABSTRACT

Climate change in Sub‐Saharan Africa is often framed through vulnerability, resilience, and adaptation, yet these concepts alone do not fully explain the unequal social, economic, and political conditions shaping climate harm. This review examines climate change through a climate justice lens, focusing on unequal burdens, household welfare losses, fiscal constraints, adaptation finance, gendered inequalities, and pathways to socially just adaptation. Using a structured integrative review, the study synthesizes 52 sources, including 46 peer‐reviewed journal articles and selected institutional and policy reports used mainly for regional statistics and climate‐finance architecture. The findings show that climate injustice operates across interconnected structural, community, and household levels. Historical responsibility, uneven development, debt, limited fiscal space, infrastructure deficits, and unequal access to finance constrain adaptation, while climate shocks reduce incomes, assets, consumption, food and water security, health, and livelihoods. These effects vary across subregions and are differentiated by gender, class, age, location, livelihood systems, and institutional access. The review argues that socially just adaptation requires context‐sensitive financing instruments, meaningful local participation, gender‐responsive institutions, adaptive social protection, recognition of local and Indigenous knowledge, and measurable accountability to ensure adaptation reduces rather than reproduces existing inequalities. It therefore explicitly links climate justice directly to Sustainable Development outcomes.