Climate scientist Joyeeta Gupta: ‘Who do we hold liable if a piece of land dries up somewhere?’

A cracking cold wind blows through a typical Dutch residential area with red pointed roofs in Wateringen, but inside Joyeeta Gupta it feels warm through the walls in pink earth tones. The house is overflowing with dozens, perhaps a hundred, small and large statues of wood and clay. She brought them from India, China, and Africa. The condition is that they are truly handmade. “Now that it is fashionable to have a Buddha statue in your home, for example, you can also buy such statues cheaply at stores such as Action. How are the image makers supposed to get their money?

Justice, even if only in her own purchasing behavior – it is the central theme in Gupta’s life and work. She is professor of ‘environment and development in the global south’ at the University of Amsterdam. She investigates how the causes and consequences of climate change and environmental problems are (unfairly) distributed. This year, Gupta received the Spinoza Prize, the highest Dutch award in science, worth 1.5 million euros.

She wants to use the money from the Spinoza Prize to work on a universal constitution in the coming years. “A global constitution that all countries must adhere to in order to protect the earth, nature and the environment,” she says. More about that later.

Gupta grew up in Delhi in an educated, middle-class family, with her parents and sister. She studied economics in Delhi and law in Gujarat. “In Gujarat I had lectures from seven to ten in the morning.” After her lecture in the morning, she went straight to work at a consumer rights organization.

That is where her fire for justice was sparked, “during the Bhopal toxic disaster,” she says. That was the worst industrial disaster in modern history. Union Carbide, an American multinational that produced pesticides in Bhopal, India, had not adhered to safety rules to save costs. This allowed toxic gas to leak from the factory one evening in December 1984. Thousands of people died in a short time. Tens of thousands later died because their immune systems were compromised. “Everyone was talking about it in the office. The NGO where I worked was already working on a strategy against Union Carbide before the disaster. The NGO wanted to know how they could hold Union Carbide liable for that enormous disaster. The question that stuck with me: how is it possible that an American company deliberately transfers the damage to the environment and public health to India?”

Consumer columns she wrote for an Indian newspaper were partly the reason, she thinks, that she got a scholarship that allowed her to go to Harvard for her master’s degree. In the columns she wrote about how consumers can be protected, for example when buying a house or against misleading products in the supermarket. When she went from India to America, she experienced firsthand how large companies push risks across the border. “The asthma medications I took in India were produced in the United States. But before leaving, my doctor in India pointed out that the drugs are banned in the US itself.” Then she started looking into it for her master’s thesis and concluded: “If a pharmaceutical company thinks that their drug will be banned in the US because it does not meet certain requirements, then they try to sell it in other countries.”

Gupta came to the Netherlands for love and has lived here for over thirty years. Her husband is Neerlandicus; the dining table we are sitting at is adjacent to his large bookcase. He taught her Dutch. A dinosaur skull stares at us on the dining table in Wateringen. “Yes, sorry,” she says, “I still have to find a place for that. My son used to love fossils, and then my husband and I started to love them too.” The new acquisition is a head of a Plesiosaur that is seventy million years old.

Gupta has now become an important voice in her field. She was one of the lead authors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. She contributed to several United Nations scientific reports.

She is also listened to in politics. “Embarrassing,” says Gupta about the moment she realized that. Three years ago, Sigrid Kaag unexpectedly called her at home after Gupta had written her a letter. “In the letter I said everything I did not like about the corona policy: the virus mainly affected the poorest in society and increased global inequality. On the phone, Kaag, then Minister of Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation, said, I agree with you, tell me what should I do? Then I thought: shit, I have no idea. People want to listen to me, but I had no solutions at all. I realized that I had to stop just talking about what is going wrong in the world: climate, environment and social inequality. I want to think about how it should be done.”

Gupta talks with spirit, continuously, with a loud voice and the occasional English word in between. She sees major connections between problems in the world. She easily switches from an analysis about plastic waste to an argument about women’s rights.

What is unfair about the climate problem?

“We all know: if we want to solve the climate problem, we must emit less greenhouse gases. The amount of CO₂ that we can still emit to stay below 1.5 degrees Celsius as specified in the Paris Agreement, is becoming smaller and smaller. That creates conflict. How are we going to divide the last leftovers? Developing countries are becoming increasingly angry. They are no longer allowed to deforest to use the land for agriculture, because their trees use our CO₂ to absorb emissions. You will increasingly see conflicts over land and water. Land dries out. Soil is no longer fertile. Some places become unliveable. Some developing countries want to extract and sell their fossil fuels because they want to grow economically. Can rich countries ban that? And there are also conflicts within countries themselves: one wants clean air, the other wants comfort and driving. Ultimately, we all harm each other by warming the world, polluting the environment and depleting the Earth’s resources.”

How can a global constitution help with this?’

„_{It is difficult to live more sustainably on an individual level, some things simply have to be arranged from above. I have arranged solar panels on my roof myself, but I also want to get rid of gas in this house. Due to a lack of advice from the municipality, we invested in a heat pump ourselves. But it is the municipality that must make that possible. Same story in India. In my mother’s municipality, most households have their own system for cleaning drinking water. That takes a lot of energy. It is really much more efficient if a water company sells clean water itself.”}

Who should write that universal constitution? In other words: who decides what is fair?

“You ask questions that I don’t have the answers to yet.” She thinks out loud: “A judge could say, based on science, that we need to do more to limit climate change. And what is fair within that may be based on existing national constitutions of different countries. They often contain the same things. Already in the time of the Romans, the idea existed that you should not harm others.

“I think someone should just start writing a draft that takes into account as many points of view as possible. You will then test this and then there will be a debate about it. It is not a problem if the text changes completely during that process. This is the case with all treaties worldwide. There will also be many lawsuits where the text will be tightened. Somewhere a piece of land is drying up, who is liable according to the global constitution? The constitution must be proactive.”

In a room with white walls, fluorescent lights and blue carpet at the University of Amsterdam, Gupta tells students in October about her participation in a protest by the climate movement Extinction Rebellion, where she gave a speech. She encourages her students to vote in the House of Representatives elections in a few weeks. She walks busily back and forth along the board and apologizes when she realizes she has forgotten the break.

She asks her students: “How would you determine how much each country has contributed to climate change? Do you look at how much the average resident of a country emits? Do you look at the size of the country? Do you look at how much the country has emitted in the past?” It is quite complicated to appoint someone responsible, she says. “My intuition says: we have to look at emissions since 1990. From that moment on, countries came together to talk about climate change, and then we were really aware of the problem.” The group of students remains silent.

In India I see many more women in high positions

What should be included in the global constitution?

“I don’t know whether the constitution should say exactly what the rules are. I think they are more like boundaries within which a country can trade. Which damage is acceptable and which is not. This then results in certain environmental and emission standards, and sanctions for those who cross the borders. This is what the law could look like.”

Do you have an example of such a boundary?

“My colleagues and I recently published a study in Nature, in which we looked at how much water you can get from a river without the entire system becoming unbalanced. We concluded that the water flow in a river per month should not deviate more than 20 percent from the natural flow regime.”

Who should enforce those boundaries?

“That could be the International Peace Palace or criminal court in The Hague. Or national judges.”

How will you build the constitution in the near future?

“First we map out all the ingredients for a good constitution for the 21st century. Next, we will try to study the different constitutions in different countries to see what they do and do not include. We will include common elements from these constitutions in our draft constitution. Then we look at what is still missing. We will test our ideas in different forums.”

Is it fair that so few professors are women in the Netherlands?

“To be honest, I’m not sure. Maybe it has something to do with the glass ceiling, it takes effort to break through it. When I had a child, other people thought it was crazy that I worked so much. In India this is much more normal. There I see many more women in high positions, although their starting position is more difficult.”

You are confronted every day with what is going wrong in the world. In your presentation at TedX you quoted Leonard Cohen: “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” What is your light?

“The Global Constitution. It is not easy to achieve that, I know that, but at some point we will enter crisis mode. I’m confident that it will work out.”

What will we talk about when we meet in three years?

“In three years we should have a zero-order draft, the first draft, of the Constitution ready.”