Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change (Handbooks in Philosophy) 3031070011, 9783031070013

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Handbooks in Philosophy

Gianfranco Pellegrino · Marcello Di Paola Editors

Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change

Handbooks in Philosophy

The Handbooks in Philosophy series is a comprehensive, wide-ranging multi-volume research collection with contributions from experts in all areas of philosophy. It offers up-to-date scholarly summaries and sources of information on the major subject areas and issues of philosophy. Each handbook examines its particular subject area in depth, providing timely, accessible coverage of its full scale and scope, discusses substantive contributions for deeper understanding, and provides reliable guidance on the direction of future developments.The series covers topics within a wide spectrum of areas in philosophy and it will focus particularly in newly emerging research fields. Each volume provides a state-of-the-art treatment of its respective area. The series will quickly prove useful to a broad audience including graduate students, senior undergraduates and scholars across a range of disciplines. This handbook: • Offers collections of emerging topics that discuss cutting-edge research and ensure comprehensive and timely coverage of ever-expanding disciplines • Written by distinguished specialists from multiple disciplines, these handbooks can be easily updated creating a dynamic overview on the topic • Useful reading for researchers and students in all branches of philosophy

Gianfranco Pellegrino • Marcello Di Paola Editors

Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change With 9 Figures and 12 Tables

Editors Gianfranco Pellegrino Department of Political Science Luiss University Roma, Italy

Marcello Di Paola Department of Humanities University of Palermo Palermo, Italy

ISSN 2524-4361 ISSN 2524-437X (electronic) Handbooks in Philosophy ISBN 978-3-031-07001-3 ISBN 978-3-031-07002-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Preface

This Handbook for the Philosophy of Climate Change has been long in the making. The project was proposed to Neil Olivier (then still working at Springer) by one of the editors (GP) during the Conference of Association for Social and Political Philosophy held at Luiss University in Rome in June 2018. The editors sent a proposal during the summer, which was accepted in October. Since then, the world has changed significantly, with an intervening pandemic, the ignition of large-scale military conflicts, some unsuccessful COPs, and increasing harm from climate change. This has led to the viewing of climate change as a new philosophical issue. Climate change is applied philosophy par excellence. Preventing dangerous anthropogenic climate change needs a very good philosophy applied to concrete and specific issues. The main purpose of the handbook is to give readers a broad view of what philosophy can contribute to climate change studies, as well as of the impact of climate change as an issue in philosophical research. As said in the Introduction, there are many ways that philosophers can deal with climate change. They can bring their traditional tools to climate change studies. Philosophy can help to cope with climate change by borrowing from its traditional wisdom. But philosophers should also deal with the new puzzles that climate change creates. As a consequence, climate change has an impact on philosophy, changing its agenda, its central notions, and tools. The handbook provides an updated and comprehensive survey of the main philosophical issues concerning climate change, with the aim of fostering greater communication and exchange between scholars of different areas in and outside philosophy, as well as between scholars and policy makers, professionals, and citizens. To this purpose, the chapters of this handbook have been written in a language readable by a wide audience, significant room has been given to applications and policy-making issues. In most of the chapters, an attempt has also been made to indicate solutions to the main philosophical puzzles, and paths of interaction between philosophy and other disciplines have been indicated. The handbook focuses on philosophical questions raised by climate change in the fields of ethics, political philosophy, the natural and social sciences, and the humanities. The handbook develops into five parts, listing 63 chapters: Climate Change, v

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Preface

Science, and Philosophy (edited by Marcello Di Paola); Climate Change, Social Sciences, and Philosophy (edited by Gianfranco Pellegrino); Climate Change, Humanities, and Philosophy (edited by Marcello Di Paola); Climate Change and Ethics (edited by Gianfranco Pellegrino); and Climate Change and Political Philosophy (edited by Marcello Di Paola). By offering a broad and yet unified treatment of all the philosophical issues connected with climate change, ranging from foundational puzzles to detailed applications, the handbook provides a much-needed starting point for any researcher in the field, as well as an updated and unbiased treatment of the hot topics in the area. Thanks to the wide number of scholars and perspectives involved, the handbook will be both a reference point for absolute beginners and a standard reference for engaged scholars. Some entries on emerging topics and approaches will hopefully also constitute a stimulus for new waves of reflection and scholarly and political discussions on climate change, as well as practical engagement with its alleviation and management. Editors are thankful to all the contributors for their invaluable work in writing and editing the chapters. Special thanks also go to the project managers and the production team at Springer for much-needed help and great patience in managing and completing this work. Roma, Italy Palermo, Italy October 2023

Gianfranco Pellegrino Marcello Di Paola

Contents

Volume 1 Part I

.......................................

1

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gianfranco Pellegrino

3

Part II

Introduction

Climate Change, Science, and Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

21

Understanding Model-Based Uncertainty in Climate Science . . . . . . . . Monica Ainhorn Morrison and Peter Lawrence

23

Implications of Model-Based Uncertainty: Scientific Responses and Philosophical Interpretations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Monica Ainhorn Morrison and Peter Lawrence

45

Climate Models and Robustness Analysis – Part I: Core Concepts and Premises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Margherita Harris and Roman Frigg

67

Climate Models and Robustness Analysis – Part II: The Justificatory Challenge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Margherita Harris and Roman Frigg

89

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105

Climate Research and Big Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Benedikt Knüsel, Christoph Baumberger, and Reto Knutti

125

Environmental Robots and Climate Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Justin Donhauser

151

Abrupt Climate Changes and Tipping Points Vincent Lam

vii

viii

Part III

Contents

Climate Change, Social Sciences, and Philosophy . . . . . . .

163

Climate Change Sociology: Perspectives and Dilemmas . . . . . . . . . . . . Dario Padovan and Alessandra Sannella

165

Climate Change and Cultural Anthropology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Viola Di Tullio

187

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205

Climate Change and Urban Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Elena De Nictolis

227

Normative Challenges in Climate Change Economics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kiran Chawla

249

Climate Change and Decision Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Andrea S. Asker and H. Orri Stefánsson

267

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287

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307

Climate Change and Geography Antonella Pietta

Climate Change and Psychology James Andow and Aimie Hope Climate Change and Legal Theory Michele Carducci Part IV

Climate Change, Humanities, and Philosophy . . . . . . . . . .

335

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337

Climate Change, Environmental Philosophy, and Anthropocentrism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ela Tokay

361

The Earth Means the World to Me: Earth- and World-Interest in Times of Climate Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Vincent Blok

377

Climate Change and the Environmental Humanities Thomas Heyd

Environmental Aesthetics and Global Climate Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . Emily Brady Climate Change, Natural Aesthetics, and the Danger of Adapted Preferences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gillian K. J. Moore and Heidi M. Hurd

395

415

Climate Change and Religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Robin Attfield

431

Climate Change, Relational Philosophy, and Ecological Care . . . . . . . . Bruce Jennings

449

Contents

ix

Philosophical Perspectives on Climate Anxiety . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Petr Vaškovic

467

Climate Change and Myth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jan A. Kozák

489

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503

Climate Change and Fashion: At the Intersection of Ethics and Aesthetics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Laura T. Di Summa

525

Climate Change, Philosophy, and Fiction Marta Benenti and Lisa Giombini

Volume 2 Part V

Climate Change and Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

539

Consequentialism and Climate Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mattia Cecchinato

541

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561

Climate Change and Virtue Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Enrico Galvagni

587

Climate Change and Environmental Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Clement Loo

601

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623

Climate Change and Population Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Trevor Hedberg

647

Responsibility for Climate Harms Arthur Obst

Climate Change and Intergenerational Justice Tim Meijers

Climate Change, the Non-identity Problem, and the Metaphysics of Transgenerational Actions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tiziana Andina and Fausto Corvino

663

Climate Change and Overpopulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Raffaele Bifulco

685

Climate Change and the Motivational Gap . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Alberto Pirni

699

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721

Adaptation Duties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Marco Grasso

759

Mitigation Duties Michel Bourban

x

Contents

Compensation Duties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kian Mintz-Woo

779

Climate Change, Global Health, and Planetary Health . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stephen M. Gardiner and Paul Tubig

799

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821

Food and Climate Change in a Philosophical Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . Andrea Borghini, Nicola Piras, and Beatrice Serini

845

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871

Climate Change and Animal Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Simone Pollo

885

Plant Ethics and Climate Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Luca Stroppa

899

The Ethics of Geoengineering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Daniel Edward Callies

919

Climate Change and Human Engineering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pei-hua Huang

939

Climate Change and the Ethics of Technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Vera Tripodi

957

Part VI

975

Climate Change and Nature Conservation Elena Casetta

Climate Change and the Ethics of Agriculture Cristian Timmermann

Climate Change and Political Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Climate Change, Uncertainty, and Policy Jeroen Hopster

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977

Climate Change and Democracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1001 Matthias Fritsch Climate Change and Gender Susan Buckingham

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1027

Climate Change and Human Rights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1047 Francesca Pongiglione Climate Change and the Circumstances of Justice Fausto Corvino

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1065

Climate Change and Distributive Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1083 Dominic Roser Climate Change and Global Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1103 Sarah Kenehan

Contents

xi

Climate Change and Human Mobilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1119 Simona Capisani Climate Change and Social Movements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1145 Kostas Koukouzelis Climate Change Conspiracy Theories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1161 Juha Räikkä Climate Change Action as Collective Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1179 Angela Kallhoff Climate Change and Republicanism Ashley Dodsworth

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1193

Climate Change and Communitarianism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1213 Volker Kaul Climate Change and Institutions for Future Generations: The Litigation Option . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1229 Jasmina Nedevska Central Banks and Climate Justice: The Case for Green Quantitative Easing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1247 Josep Ferret Mas Climate Change and Security in the Anthropocene: Existential Threats, Ethics, and Futures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1269 Judith Nora Hardt Part VII

Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1289

Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1291 Marcello Di Paola Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1297

About the Editors

Gianfranco Pellegrino is an Associate Professor at LUISS Guido Carli Rome, where he teaches Political Philosophy. His interests are in the history of political thought (mainly Jeremy Bentham and Henry Sidgwick), distributive justice theories, migration, and environmental ethics. He wrote on global justice, the ethics of climate change, and the Anthropocene. Among his publications: “Sidgwick and the Many Guises of the Good,” Philosophical Explorations, 2021; “Robust Responsibility for Climate Harms,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 2018; “Climate Refugees: A Case for Protection,” in G. Pellegrino e M. Di Paola, eds, Canned Heat. Theoretical and Practical Challenges of Global Climate Change, London/Delhi: Routledge, 2014. Marcello Di Paola is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Department of Humanities at the University of Palermo. He works in environmental philosophy, particularly climate change, the Anthropocene, and the philosophy of plants. He writes on ethics, aesthetics, political theory, and the history of philosophy. Among his publications are Ethics and Politics of the Built Environment. Gardens of the Anthropocene (Springer, 2017) and the co-edited volume Plant Ethics: Concepts and Applications (Routledge, 2018); The Vegetal Turn. History, Concepts, Applications (ed.) (Springer, 2024); Climate Change and Human Rights, (eds.) M. Di Paola, D. Kamal (Global Policy, 2015); Canned Heat: Ethics and Politics of Global Climate Change – (eds.) M. Di Paola, G. Pellegrino (Routledge, 2014).

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Contributors

Tiziana Andina Department of Philosophy and Educational Sciences, University of Turin, Turin, Italy James Andow University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK Andrea S. Asker Department of Philosophy, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden Institute for Futures Studies, Stockholm, Sweden Robin Attfield Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK Christoph Baumberger Institute for Environmental Decisions, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland Marta Benenti Department of Humanities (DISUM), University of Eastern Piedmont (UPO), Vercelli, Italy Raffaele Bifulco Law Department, Luiss Guido Carli, Rome, Italy Vincent Blok Wageningen University & Research, Wageningen, The Netherlands Andrea Borghini University of Milan, Milan, Italy Michel Bourban Department of Philosophy, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands Emily Brady Department of Philosophy, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA Susan Buckingham Cambridge, UK Daniel Edward Callies Institute for Practical Ethics, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA Simona Capisani Department of Philosophy, Durham University, Durham, UK Michele Carducci Centro di Ricerca Euro Costituzionali, University of Salento, Lecce, Italy

Americano

sulle

Politiche

Elena Casetta University of Turin, Turin, Italy xv

xvi

Contributors

Mattia Cecchinato University of Oxford, Oxford, UK Kiran Chawla Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources, Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, Stanford, CA, USA Stanford Law School, Stanford, CA, USA Fausto Corvino Department of Philosophy, Linguistics and Theory of Science, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden Elena De Nictolis New York University School of Law, New York, NY, USA Marcello Di Paola Department of Humanities, University of Palermo, Palermo, Italy Laura T. Di Summa Philosophy Department, William Paterson University, Wayne, NJ, USA Viola Di Tullio Department of Political Science, Luiss University, Rome, Italy University School for Advanced Studies IUSS Pavia, Pavia, Italy Ashley Dodsworth University of Bristol, Bristol, UK Justin Donhauser Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH, USA Josep Ferret Mas Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Reading, Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain Roman Frigg Department of Philosophy, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK Matthias Fritsch Concordia University, Montréal, Canada Enrico Galvagni Department of Philosophy, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK Stephen M. Gardiner Department of Philosophy, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA Lisa Giombini Department of Philosophy, Communication and Performing Arts, Roma Tre University, Rome, Italy Marco Grasso University of Milan-Bicocca, Milan, Italy Judith Nora Hardt Franco-German Research Centre for Social Sciences, Centre Marc Bloch, Berlin, Germany Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the Hamburg University, Hamburg, Germany Margherita Harris London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK Trevor Hedberg University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA Thomas Heyd Department of Philosophy and School of Environmental Studies, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada

Contributors

xvii

Aimie Hope University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK Jeroen Hopster Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands Pei-hua Huang Department of Medical Ethics, Philosophy and History of Medicine, Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam, The Netherlands Heidi M. Hurd University of Illinois, Champaign, IL, USA Bruce Jennings Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA Angela Kallhoff Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria Volker Kaul Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic Sarah Kenehan The University of Scranton, Scranton, PA, USA Benedikt Knüsel Institute for Environmental Decisions, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland Reto Knutti Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland Kostas Koukouzelis Philosophy & Social Studies Department, University of Crete, Rethymno, Greece Jan A. Kozák Charles University, Prague, Czechia Vincent Lam Institute of Philosophy & Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, Australia Peter Lawrence National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO, USA Clement Loo University of Minnesota Morris, Morris, MN, USA Tim Meijers Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands Kian Mintz-Woo Department of Philosophy and Environmental Research Institute, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland Equity and Justice Group, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria Gillian K. J. Moore University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD, USA Monica Ainhorn Morrison National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO, USA

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Contributors

Jasmina Nedevska Department of Philosophy, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden Arthur Obst University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA Dario Padovan Università di Torino, Torino, Italy Gianfranco Pellegrino Department of Political Science, Luiss University, Roma, Italy Antonella Pietta Department of Economics and Management, University of Brescia, Brescia, Italy Nicola Piras University of Milan, Milan, Italy Alberto Pirni Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy Simone Pollo Sapienza University of Rome and National Biodiversity Future Center, Rome, Italy Francesca Pongiglione Faculty of Philosophy, University Vita-Salute San Raffaele, Milano, Italy Juha Räikkä Philosophy, University of Turku, Turku, Finland Dominic Roser University of Fribourg, Fribourg, Switzerland Alessandra Sannella Department of Human, Social and Health Sciences (DSUSS), University of Cassino and Southern Lazio, Cassino, Italy Department of Human, Social and Health Sciences (DSUSS), University of Cassino, Cassino, Italy Beatrice Serini University of Milan, Milan, Italy H. Orri Stefánsson Department of Philosophy, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Uppsala, Sweden Institute for Futures Studies, Stockholm, Sweden Luca Stroppa University of Turin (FINO), University of St. Andrews, Turin, Italy Cristian Timmermann Ethics of Medicine, Medical Faculty, University of Augsburg, Augsburg, Germany Ela Tokay Department of Philosophy, Fordham University, New York, NY, USA Vera Tripodi Politecnico di Torino, Turin, Italy Paul Tubig Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, GA, USA Petr Vaškovic Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic

Part I Introduction

Introduction Gianfranco Pellegrino

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Overview of the Handbook Sections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

Abstract

Climate change generates new topics for philosophy. Philosophy, for its part, can contribute important conceptual tools to climate change discussions, as well as shed light on various dimensions of climate change studies – especially the underlying assumptions of the natural and social sciences of climate change. This Handbook provides a wide-ranging overview of the outcomes of this encounter between climate change and philosophical reflection. It consists of five parts, for a total of 63 chapters covering topics in and for the natural and social sciences, the humanities, and the ethics and political philosophy of climate change. Keywords

Aesthetics · Sociology · Anthropology · Urban Studies · Geography · Psychology · Ethics · Political Philosophy · Uncertainty · Justice · Consequentialism · Virtue ethics

G. Pellegrino (*) Department of Political Science, Luiss University, Roma, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_1

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G. Pellegrino

Introduction The Springer Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change registers the establishment of a new field of study concerning the main socio-political and existential phenomenon of our time, i.e., climate change and its threatening effects. Climate change has turned from a largely ignored threat in the late 1960s to a shared existential horizon for humanity at large (few surviving, recalcitrant denialists excepted). The emergence of a philosophy of climate change was slow and, for a long time, quite inchoate (Budolfson et al., 2021; Irwin, 2010; Jamieson, 2014). The first relation between climate change and philosophy occurred in ethics broadly understood, with Garvey (2008) providing a monograph-length overall treatment of the main ethical issues deriving from climate change, and Gardiner et al. (2010) collecting seminal papers in a landmark contribution to the field. That climate change needed an ethical lens has been clear since one of the very first issues of the IPCC reports in 2001, where the authors intimate that “natural, technical, and social sciences can provide essential information and evidence needed for decisions on what constitutes ‘dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.’ At the same time, such decisions are value judgments determined through sociopolitical processes, taking into account considerations such as development, equity, and sustainability, as well as uncertainties and risk” (quoted in Garvey, 2008, pp. 1–2). Soon, climate change became a topic in political theory, mainly in discussions about the just distribution of the costs and gains of mitigation and adaptation (Athanasiou & Baer, 2002; Jamieson, 2010, 2014; Shue, 2014). Progressively, an increasing exchange occurred between philosophers, social scientists, natural scientists, and other scholars dealing with climate change. Though short, the history of the relationship between philosophy and climate change already displays some distinct patterns. In particular, two patterns can be spelt out (already noted in Budolfson et al., 2021; Irwin, 2010). In what we can call a topical pattern, climate change provides philosophy with new topics and a new horizon not previously examined but of independent philosophical interest. Climate change shows that some consolidated assumptions in Western thought are now false or problematic. Because climate is no longer an unvarying background to the human condition but rather an active element in it, indeed an actor in its own right, philosophy has become aware of its central importance for issues such as the shape and the meaning of human life, the enduring existence of humankind and future humans, the shape and nature of politics, and the contents of ethics. Indeed, the emergence of climate as a new actor and a new subject-matter brings with it the emergence of Earth as an object of philosophical inquiry. This motif is evident in discussions about the Anthropocene, the age of unprecedented human impact on Earth, with climate change being the main impact to be considered (Chakrabarty, 2021; Latour, 2017; McKibben, 2003). The philosophy of climate change is global or planetary, aligning with the emerging discipline of global history (Biermann, 2014; Conrad, 2016; Chakrabarty, 2021; Connolly, 2017; Hamilton, 2017; Latour, 2018; Lovelock, 2006, 2009; Singer, 2002; Wainwright & Mann, 2020).

Introduction

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Moreover, climate change is further evidence that the criticism of the domination of nature, voiced in environmental ethics, is true and sound and of general philosophical interest (Leiss, 1994; Merchant, 1980, 2020; Plumwood, 1994). In general, climate change makes certain old, historically settled dichotomies (subject/object, nature/culture-artifice-society, human-social sciences/natural sciences) collapse (Bonneuil & Fressoz, 2015; Chakrabarty, 2009, 2015; Hamilton et al., 2015). Climate change also sheds light on the fate of modernity. For some, it marks the end of modernity, in two ways: with climate change, humanity permanently enters post-modernity; and/or climate change shows that we have never been modern (Latour, 1993). The planetary philosophy of climate change will cover new topics. First of all, it will deal with new ethical issues, such as existential risks (Avin et al., 2018; Bostrom, 2013; Bostrom & Ćirković, 2008; Huggel et al., 2022; Kareiva & Carranza, 2018; Ord, 2020; Torres, 2023), population ethics and intergenerational justice (Arrhenius et al., 2022; Cafaro, 2012; Greaves, 2017; Page, 2006), the ethics of technology and geoengineering (Gardiner, 2010; Hoły-Łuczaj & Blok, 2019; Keith, 2000; Pamplany et al., 2020), food (Barnhill et al., 2018), agriculture (Thompson, 2017), biodiversity (Sarkar, 2005), energy (Sovacool, 2013), animals and plants (D’Silva, 2013; Gjerris et al., 2011; Kallhoff et al., 2018; Nolt, 2011a; Palmer, 2016, 2021; Sebo, 2021), the ethics of rationing (Wood et al., 2023), the ethics of broken futures (Mulgan, 2011), and the deficits of the Holocene politics in the new Anthropocene setting we’re living in (Di Paola & Jamieson, 2018; Di Paola & Pellegrino, 2014; Dryzek, 2019; Jamieson, 2007, 2012; Pellegrino, 2023). Almost all these new topics of the philosophy of climate change are covered in this Handbook. A second pattern, which we can call expansionistic or practical-use, has philosophers contributing to the discussion of climate change by drawing insights from traditional topics and approaches of pre-climate change philosophical inquiries. Philosophy takes on the following challenges posed by climate change. There is an ethical challenge. Climate change adaptation and mitigation raise issues of distributive justice, loss and gains, harms and the currency of value most fitting to assess them, poverty, and global justice. Certain characteristics of climate change exacerbate already difficult structures of pre-climate change ethical and political theory. Climate change is an intergenerational tragedy of the commons, with some features making it intractable (Blomfield, 2019; Broome, 2010, 2012; Gardiner, 2011; Caney, 2016; McKinnon, 2011; Meyer & Sanklecha, 2017; Miller, 2009; Moellendorf, 2014; Moss, 2015; Nolt, 2011b; Posner & Weisbach, 2010; Roser & Seidel, 2016; Tremmel & Robinson, 2014; Vanderheiden, 2008; Vanderheiden & Barry, 2008; Wallimann-Helmer et al., 2019). There is a conceptual challenge. Climate change derives from nonlinear, sometimes redundant or overdetermining causal chains. This makes ascribing responsibilities for climate-related harms to agents specifically tricky. Consequently, allocating duties and rights in connection with climate-related harms is particularly difficult. Many principles compete, with no one emerging as more than pro-tanto plausible (Baatz, 2014; Banks, 2013; Barry & Overland, 2015; Caney, 2005, 2009;

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Cripps, 2013; Hiller, 2011; Jamieson, 2014; Mulgan, 2016; Pellegrino, 2018; Sinnott-Armstrong, 2005). Climate change also impacts our conception of nonhuman nature, as it is the main display of humanity as a force of nature, and of the Anthropocene as the age of the end of nature. This needs new conceptualizations of what nature is (Castree, 2013; Purdy, 2015; Soper, 1995; Vogel, 2015). There is a political challenge. Climate change needs a different politics and a different political theory, able to cope with long-term effects and with a planetary focus, as already said (Dobson, 2016; Gabrielson et al., 2016; Harris, 2021; Latour, 2018). There is an epistemological challenge. Coping with climate change requires sophisticated and widespread epistemic virtues. Climate change is a matter of probabilistic predictions and complex scenarios, whose grasp needs a minimal understanding of the data deriving from many branches of natural science. A conscientious citizen wanting to decide about climate issues should make extra efforts. Moreover, climate change attracted many styles of denial, driven by manifold open and hidden motivations (Kovaka, 2021; Norgaard, 2011; Sinanian, 2017; Washington & Cook, 2011). Concerning all these challenges, philosophers can contribute by drawing from pre-climate change debates. These contributions are largely represented and discussed in the chapters of this Handbook.

Overview of the Handbook Sections This Handbook consists of 63 chapters distributed across five parts: Climate Change, Science, and Philosophy (edited by Marcello Di Paola); Climate Change, Social Sciences, and Philosophy (edited by Gianfranco Pellegrino); Climate Change, Humanities, and Philosophy (edited by Marcello Di Paola); Climate Change and Ethics (edited by Gianfranco Pellegrino); and Climate Change and Political Philosophy (edited by Marcello Di Paola). The Handbook’s objective was to give a reasonably comprehensive survey of current debates within the philosophy of climate change as described above. It attempts to strike a balance between philosophical reconstruction of the main debates and original philosophical proposals, as well as between more consolidated topics (such as climate justice) and emerging topics (such as the philosophy of climate science). The part entitled Climate Change, Science and Philosophy offers discussions of scientific uncertainty (the two chapters by Monica Ainhorn Morrison and Peter Lawrence), the evidential justification of Earth system models (the two chapters by Margherita Harris and Roman Frigg), abrupt climate changes and tipping points (by Vincent Lam), the use of big data in climate science (the chapter by Benedikt Knüsel, Christoph Baumberger, and Reto Knutti), and the use of environmental robots to face climate harms (by Justin Donhauser). The chapters on uncertainty list the sources of uncertainty in the models used in climate science and explore how uncertainty can affect model-based predictions of

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climate change impacts, the assessment of extreme climatic changes, and sensitivity and attribution science. The chapters consider the scientific responses to and the philosophical interpretations of uncertainty. Uncertainty can be eliminated or mitigated through an increase in the amount of data and power in data processing. Machine learning and increasingly more powerful AI can be used in research about both climate changes and its impacts. Uncertainty can also be limited through stronger justification procedures. The chapters on the justification through climate models illustrate and assess how the robustness of models can confirm certain hypotheses in climate science. In this view of justification, a hypothesis is vindicated when all the available and diverse evidence agrees with it. In particular, a hypothesis is justified when all the available and diverse models agree with it. The robustness of models (i.e., their convergence) can give justificatory force to the inevitably simplified, abstract, and partly distorted representations that models provide. Among many, a relevant source of uncertainty for climate science lies in the fact that large-scale and discontinuous transitions in the climate and the Earth system are possible – so-called abrupt changes in climate. Accounting for these changes, and making predictions about their consequences, is particularly hard, raising conceptual, epistemological, and methodological issues, which spill over into the social sciences as well. The part entitled Climate Change, Social Sciences and Philosophy hosts chapters dealing with the many social sciences which touch upon climate change-related issues. A chapter (by Alessandra Sannella and Dario Padovan) considers the main dimensions of the sociology of climate change (ranging from the various views of the relation between climate and societies to alternative ontological views of the climate in diverse societies, and to the view that climate can be regarded as a common, i.e., a public, non-rival good). The manifold ontologies of the climate developed in different cultures and societies, as well as the so-called ‘ontological turn’ in anthropology, are also considered in the chapter about anthropology and climate change (by Viola Di Tullio), where the relevance of an ethnographic approach to the climate and multispecies relations is emphasized. The chapter also deals with the debate on the Anthropocene and the cultural assumptions of the adaptation and mitigation policies. Related topics appear in the chapters on geography (by Antonella Pietta) and legal theory (by Michele Carducci). Pietta emphasizes the spatial and geographical assumptions of adaptation and mitigation policies and their socio-economic grounds and impacts. Moreover, the chapter highlights the function of the geographical focus on spatial scales for global climate governance, the notion of ‘global climate’, and the insights deriving from a geography-based approach to vulnerability and resilience to climate change. A related topic, focusing on geographically diverse scales and different legal instruments, is considered in the chapter on climate change and urban studies by Elena De Nictolis. Cities are causes of climate change but also privileged venues of mitigation and adaptation policies, sometimes in stark contrast with national

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policies. The chapter considers different scholarly views of this topic, some more optimistic, others more cautious or skeptical. The chapter by Kiran Chawla, entitled Normative Issues in Climate Change Economics, sheds light on another field where scientific data, social science methodologies, and socio-political issues interplay. In particular, Chawla discusses the often-implicit value assumptions underlying different social welfare functions adopted in various views of the so-called social costs of carbon and the cost-benefit analysis of mitigation and adaptation policies. Relatedly, the chapter on climate change and decision theory (by Andrea S. Asker and H. Orri Stefánsson) asks whether the expected utility theory (commonly used in economics) can accurately describe the choice of engaging or abstaining from emission-producing behavior. The chapter also considers the view that when facing the consequences of their conduct on climate, individuals are in the grip of various prisoner dilemma-style schemes, also touching upon issues of individual responsibility for climate harms. The chapter on climate change and psychology by James Andow and Aimie Hope closes the part. Here, the authors consider what empirical environmental psychology can contribute to climate policies, specifically focusing on the attitudes toward environment-human relationships, the resistance to ethical action, the reaction to climate impacts, and the ways to develop effective practical responses to the climate crisis. In his chapter on legal theory, Michele Carducci touches upon four topics. First, the historical relations between climate and law. Second, the challenges brought about by current climate emergencies, i.e., the relations between the global space of climate and national legal systems, national sovereignty on natural resources, and global climate stability. Third, the emergence of a right to a safe climate and the legal repercussions of it. Fourth, the dysfunctionality of existing democratic regimes in coping with climate change mitigation and adaptation, especially concerning the policies’ time frame and scope. The part entitled Climate change, Humanities and Philosophy deals with climate change as a topic in and for the humanities. The part hosts a chapter on the emerging new branch of the environmental humanities (by Thomas Heyd), in their relationship with climate change. Environmental humanities, Heyd remarks, engage in a critical and reflective stance toward environmental matters. When applied to climate change, they can shed light on four topics: values and justice, narratives (especially the alternative between a catastrophist construal of the climate crisis and more optimistic views), temporalities, and the diverse views of nature in different cultures. The chapter by Petr Vaskovic focuses on climate anxiety and considers culturalhistorical philosophical views, Christian existentialist analyses, and phenomenological approaches to its exploration. On the basis of the reconstruction of the above views, the chapter puts forward a definition of climate anxiety, resting also on two comprehensive taxonomies of climate emotions. An alternative ontological narrative, centered on Earth and World (as ontological spheres and notions) and their interest, in contrast with humanism and post-humanism, is provided in the chapter written by Vincent Blok. In this chapter,

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the ontological concept of World is used to distinguish between the Holocene World and the Anthropocene World. Moreover, a gestalt-based understanding of the givenness of Earth is developed. Related themes also appear in the chapter by Lisa Giombini and Marta Benenti, on climate fiction, where the characteristics and the use of the so-called cli-fi novels are considered. The chapter identifies the main features of most cli-fi novels, as well as their capacities to prompt engagement in readers, and changes in their beliefs and attitudes. In the chapter by Jan A. Kozák the social myths about climate change are looked at as offshoots of cultural traditions such as Romanticism, Transcendentalism, animism/neo-paganism, as well as Calvinism, with its focus on sin and asceticism. The connection of these mythical images (or “mythemes”) with specific ritual practices that are relevant to climate change adaptation and mitigation – such as certain dietary regimes and consumer behaviors – is also considered. Of related interest is also the chapter on climate change and religion by Robin Attfield. After a reconstruction of the attitudes of religions to climate change, Attfield examines the discussion about the supposedly religious roots of the environmental crisis and provides a qualified defense of the paradigm of the stewardship of nature. This chapter can usefully be read with the one on anthropocentrism by Ela Tokay, where the relations between anthropocentric views and climate change are accounted for, and the one on relational philosophy and care by Bruce Jennings. Tokay’s chapter insists on some less noted aspects of anthropocentrism in relation with climate change, namely the fact that the focus on anthropocentrism as the cause of climate change unfairly implicates all humans and ways of life and obscures potentially more relevant causes such as capitalism. Jennings’ chapter puts forward a conception of care as paying attention to the moral dignity, standing, and needs of others. This conception of care is used to deal with the philosophical, ethical, and political challenges posed by climate governance and climate action. These three chapters allow the reader to assess how the main environmental ethics approaches – full anthropocentrism, stewardship, care ethics, and non-anthropocentrism – deal with climate change. This part lists three chapters on aesthetics. In her chapter, Emily Brady draws the contours of an aesthetics of climate change, focusing on the aesthetic qualities, meanings, and values of what is impacted by climate change, such as lost or adapted species, places, and landscapes, or of what is produced by climate change, such as wildfires, floods, hurricanes, and droughts. In their chapter, entitled “Climate Change, Natural Aesthetics, and the Danger of Adapted Preferences,” Gillian J.K. Moore and Heidi M. Hurd explore some paradoxical consequences of our aesthetic attitudes to nature, i.e., the possibility that we adapt, as it were, to the impacts of climate change, by finding aesthetically pleasurable the deteriorated nature, even when the latter fail to satisfy our objective aesthetic needs. The authors use their discovery to mount a reductio of weak sustainability. Finally, in her chapter, Laura T. Di Summa considers sustainable fashion as a way to put together ethical and aesthetic values. The chapter investigates the viability of

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using fashion, and its aesthetic values, as a potentially effective way of responding to contemporary environmental concerns. The part on Climate Change and Ethics hosts three kinds of chapters. There are chapters on the relationship between different normative ethics approaches and climate change. Such are the chapters on consequentialism (by Mattia Cecchinato) and on virtue ethics (by Enrico Galvagni). The former examines the limits and virtues of consequentialist approaches to climate ethics. The chapter considers various ways to make consequentialism able to suggest actions against climate change, notwithstanding the fact that no one is individually responsible for climate changes. The chapter written by Arthur Obst gives a general survey of the discussion about responsibility for climate change. Obst considers two views – individualism (individuals are responsible), collectivism (collectives are responsible) – and the arguments for and against them, finally defending individualism. The chapter on virtue ethics lists the main advantages of using the notion of “virtue” in environmental ethics and the main environmental virtues proposed in scholarship. In particular, Galvagni explores two benefits of applying virtue ethics to climate change, namely, the capacity of better capturing the phenomenology of our moral experience, and the option of avoiding the problem afflicting consequentialism, i.e., the fact that no one is individually responsible for climate changes. Another group of chapters in the part on the ethics of climate change deals with specific issues in ethics. Such are the two chapters on justice – environmental justice (by Clement Loo) and intergenerational justice (by Tim Meijers). While the former focuses on distributive and participative justice issues between contemporaries and their consequences on treatises and governance, the latter considers distributive justice among non-contemporaries. In particular, Loo’s chapter provides a review of the very concept of “environmental justice,” and considers its application to climate change and climate change governance. Meijers’ chapter deals with distributive justice principles, such as equality, sufficiency, or just basic human rights, as applied to future people. The chapter also discusses the kind of goods owed to future people. A wider view on the ethics of future people is given by Trevor Hedberg. In his chapter, Hedberg examines the non-identity problem, various views on population ethics, some recent policy proposals about fertility reduction, and the relationship between population reduction and the impacts of climate change. Tiziana Andina and Fausto Corvino come back to the non-identity problem. The two authors put forward a social ontology shedding light on how joint actions go across generations, thereby grounding solidarity duties toward future people. Alberto Pirni’s chapter on the motivational gap considers solidarity across generations, too. The chapter elaborates on the difficulties of motivating present people to sacrifice for the sake of posterity and puts forward a view of diachronic solidarity as a Kantian duty. Of related interest is the chapter on overpopulation, where Raffaele Bifulco claims that overpopulation is a cause of climate change and defends the idea of a global agreement on the limits of demographic growth. Three chapters are related to the specific duties of climate justice. Michel Bourban considers mitigation duties. His chapter deals with the identity of the duty-bearers (individuals, states, subnational jurisdictions, supranational entities, corporations,

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cities, the WTO, carbon majors), the content of their mitigation duties, and how demanding these duties are. Marco Grasso considers adaptation duties. His chapter lists the duty bearers, the forms of adaptation duties, their scope, and the dutyrecipients. Kian Mintz-Woo’s chapter examines principles to establish compensation duties to the victims of climate change, and in particular, the polluter pays principle, the beneficiary pays principle, the ability to pay principle, and a new principle, the polluter pays, then receives principle. The chapter also considers the Loss & Damage pillar of climate policy. The part also hosts a chapter on global health, written by Stephen M. Gardiner and Paul Tubig. In it, the impact of climate change on issues of public health and a notion of “planetary health” are considered. The main aim of the chapter is to shed light on the relations between climate change, issues of public health, and issues of justice. In a chapter on nature conservation, Elena Casetta discusses conservationism after climate change and the end of nature claim, i.e., the view that climate change, and the Anthropocene, make pristine nature disappear. Moreover, the chapter considers also two cases of nature conservation motivated by climate change, naturebased nature and the Global Deal for Nature. A third group of chapters in the part on ethics focuses on specific dimensions of applied ethics. Andrea Borghini, Nicola Piras, and Beatrice Serini survey both how climate change impacts food and how the production, distribution, and consumption of food affect climate patterns. The discussion also goes through three case studies: geographical indications, global hunger, and food biodiversity. Cristian Timmerman’s chapter focuses on the impacts of climate change on agriculture, especially in the Global South, and the ensuing inequalities. The chapter argues that wastage in agriculture and food consumption should be reduced, also by building resilient farming systems. Climate change impacts both animals and plants. In his chapter, Simone Pollo lists the impacts of climate changes on animals, considering issues concerning animal food production and consumption, as well as habitat conservation and change in the Anthropocene. Luca Stroppa uses the effects of climate change on plants as a key to introducing the new field of plant ethics. The chapter deals with people’s responsibility to preserve plants, to plant trees, and to help plant migration. According to some, we can cope with the effects of climate change by engineering the Earth and humans. In his chapter, Daniel Callies explores the ethics of geoengineering, considering ethical issues that arise during research, after the deployment or the use of these technologies, and in the kind of world where these technologies have become the new normal. In her chapter, Pei-hua Huang considers the usage of technologies on humans in order to produce cognitive and moral enhancement, preference and physiological modification, and the ethical concerns they raise. Vera Tripodi gives a general survey of the ethical issues concerning the usage of artificial intelligence in information and communication technologies, by focusing in particular on issues of moral responsibility. The Handbook closes with a part on Climate Change and Political Philosophy. The part lists four chapters on the fundamentals of climate change politics. Angela

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Kallhoff explores the collective action problems preventing efficient climate policies, defending a theory of joint climate action and showing its normative implications. In his chapter, Fausto Corvino deals with similar issues. He reconstructs climate change as a multiplayer prisoner’s dilemma, and considers empirical arguments to deal with the puzzling features of climate change. Corvino’s conclusion is that the standard circumstances of justice also hold in climate scenarios. Justice is also considered in two chapters. Dominic Roser considers issues of distributive justice, both intergenerational and intragenerational, also listing various principles of justice and reflecting on their implementation in current political conditions. Similar principles are applied to the global context in Sarah Kenehan’s chapter on global justice. The chapter also considers the main challenges to achieving international justice in the context of global climate change (such as feasibility issues, noncompliance, and free-riding). Of related interests is Josep Ferret Mas’ chapter, dealing with how central banks can serve intergenerational climate justice. The chapter presents the case for Green Quantitative Easing and various ways of borrowing from the future, i.e., of making our grandchildren pay some prices for present emission cuts. Jasmina Nedevska’s chapter concerns another tool for intergenerational justice, i.e., climate litigation. Nedevska views climate litigation as an institution for future generations and surveys its legitimacy. Francesca Pongiglione reflects on the link between climate change and human rights. Her chapter deals with the shape and nature of a human right to a safe environment and discusses its viability and enforcement. The part continues with chapters on how certain political approaches can deal with climate change policies. Volker Kaul claims that contrary to appearances, communitarian partiality can ground global climate justice. If so, populist and nationalist denials of climate justice are internally inconsistent and ungrounded. According to Ashley Dodsworth, climate change policies are better approached from a republican standpoint, especially focusing on domination and vulnerability. Even republicans’ focus on citizenship can help in promoting climate policies, Dodsworth insists. In her chapter, Susan Buckingham considers an eco-feminist approach to climate change. The traditional eco-feminist focus on the patriarchal bias of the standard view of nature is put at the service of a deeper understanding of climate change and climate policies. Matthias Frisch writes a chapter on climate change and democracy. Democratic regimes have many climate-related weaknesses. The chapter lists some remedies to them and suggests that climate change might force democracies to evolve. Of related interest is Kostas Koukouzelis’ chapter on social movements, dealing with the philosophical grounds of global civil society, the climate justice social movement and its current manifestations. The chapter also discusses some of the means used by climate movements and explores the connection between democratic loyalty and social movements. The survey of the political philosophy of climate change given in this section also covers specific and practical issues. Judith Nora Hardt focuses on security issues. In particular, the chapter traces how the field of climate security has developed in theory and practice, also in connection with traditional security politics and

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institutions, such as the United Nations Security Council. Simona Capisani’s chapter concerns climate-induced migration, the many kinds of it and its impacts. Capisani also considers the political issues related to displacement and mobility and their repercussions on the international state system. Juha Räikkä’s chapter considers philosophical issues concerning climate change conspiracy theories, spanning definitional, ethical, and practical questions and defends a social-trust based policy against them. Finally, Jeroen Hopster gives a classification of climate uncertainty, to illustrate how decision-makers can cope with them. The chapter gives recommendations to cope with unavoidable and deep uncertainty.

Conclusions This Handbook went across many topics. However, there are some common themes which constitute the bare bones of the philosophy of climate change. First, we need to establish and define climate change, by understanding its nature and when it occurs. There are some epistemological issues. Climate science heavily rests on models. This creates several puzzles about the justification and the reliability of such models and of the predictions based on them. Moreover, climate science is more afflicted by many kinds and degrees of uncertainty than other sciences. This is connected to the predictive efforts that are the main mission of climate science. Finally, any public and practical usage of climate science as a ground for climate policies needs specific epistemic virtues. Some of them are lacking, both in policy-makers and in ordinary citizens. This creates specific issues for a philosophical analysis of how public discussion and opinion work in climate change-related scenarios. There are also metaphysical issues. Global climate as an object has specific features, distinctive and rather unknown. This also holds for the global or collective agency that gives rise to climatic changes. Climate change comes through weird causal chains whose understanding is far from clear. Moreover, reflecting on the changing climate and its impacts on the relations between humans and nonhuman nature attracts our attention to different ontologies of climate spread in non-Western cultures. The plausibility of these alternative ontologies is still to be established. Finally, in order to cope with the effects of climate change on future people, we may need a new social ontology, making room for intergenerational joint actions or for the political representation of future individuals, groups, and nonhuman nature. The philosophy of climate change will face political and ethical issues. The value of nature and the requirements of distributive, inter- and intragenerational climate justice are still to be established. The discussion on these topics is emerging but already animated. Still it seems we are far from widespread consensus. Which narrative is fittest to describe the climate crisis as a social event is still not clear. The alternative between ideals of care, stewardship, or full-fledged non-anthropocentric views of environmental ethics is still an open one. There is an urgent need to develop new views and tools concerning the moral and empirical psychology of agents in climate change scenarios. How to cope with uncertainties and denialism is still far from clear.

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These topics will have growing space in the philosophy of climate change. Indeed, they will be the main puzzles that a successful philosophy of climate change should contribute to solving. The chapters in the Handbook are indications of what we achieved until now and of what is left to do. The present state and the future prospects of the philosophy of climate change, as represented in this introduction and the Handbook, provides evidence that climate change is simultaneously a theoretical and practical problem. It is an issue in natural sciences whose consequences and impacts span social sciences, humanities, ethics, and politics. It is an issue of enormous urgency, demanding theoretically informed solutions. Climate change threatens the survival of humanity and challenges many settled convictions in human culture. One is the idea that theory and practice can diverge and that practical solutions need no theory or theories can go without concrete applications. The philosophy of climate change is always applied philosophy. Like the best philosophy ever, it is in continuous and permanent dialogue with other fields of human culture and thought. More than any philosophy of the past, the philosophy of climate change is needed to give a contribution to fixing the most urgent problems of humanity. Hence, a book on the philosophy of climate change is a helpful contribution to the ongoing discussion and struggle to keep the planet in conditions fitting to the continuation of life.

Cross-References ▶ Abrupt Climate Changes and Tipping Points ▶ Adaptation Duties ▶ Central Banks and Climate Justice: The Case for Green Quantitative Easing ▶ Climate Change Action as Collective Action ▶ Climate Change and Animal Ethics ▶ Climate Change and Communitarianism ▶ Climate Change and Cultural Anthropology ▶ Climate Change and Decision Theory ▶ Climate Change and Democracy ▶ Climate Change and Distributive Justice ▶ Climate Change and Environmental Justice ▶ Climate Change and Fashion: At the Intersection of Ethics and Aesthetics ▶ Climate Change and Gender ▶ Climate Change and Geography ▶ Climate Change and Global Justice ▶ Climate Change and Human Engineering ▶ Climate Change and Human Mobilities ▶ Climate Change and Human Rights ▶ Climate Change and Institutions for Future Generations: The Litigation Option ▶ Climate Change and Intergenerational Justice

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▶ Climate Change and Legal Theory ▶ Climate Change and Myth ▶ Climate Change and Nature Conservation ▶ Climate Change and Overpopulation ▶ Climate Change and Population Ethics ▶ Climate Change and Psychology ▶ Climate Change and Religion ▶ Climate Change and Republicanism ▶ Climate Change and Security in the Anthropocene: Existential Threats, Ethics, and Futures ▶ Climate Change and Social Movements ▶ Climate Change and the Circumstances of Justice ▶ Climate Change and the Environmental Humanities ▶ Climate Change and the Ethics of Agriculture ▶ Climate Change and the Ethics of Technology ▶ Climate Change and the Motivational Gap ▶ Climate Change and Urban Studies ▶ Climate Change and Virtue Ethics ▶ Climate Change Conspiracy Theories ▶ Climate Change, Global Health, and Planetary Health ▶ Climate Change, Natural Aesthetics, and the Danger of Adapted Preferences ▶ Climate Change, Philosophy, and Fiction ▶ Climate Change, Relational Philosophy, and Ecological Care ▶ Climate Change, the Non-identity Problem, and the Metaphysics of Transgenerational Actions ▶ Climate Change, Uncertainty, and Policy ▶ Climate Models and Robustness Analysis – Part I: Core Concepts and Premises ▶ Climate Models and Robustness Analysis – Part II: The Justificatory Challenge ▶ Climate Research and Big Data ▶ Compensation Duties ▶ Consequentialism and Climate Change ▶ Environmental Aesthetics and Global Climate Change ▶ Environmental Robots and Climate Action ▶ Food and Climate Change in a Philosophical Perspective ▶ Implications of Model-Based Uncertainty: Scientific Responses and Philosophical Interpretations ▶ Mitigation Duties ▶ Philosophical Perspectives on Climate Anxiety ▶ Plant Ethics and Climate Change ▶ Responsibility for Climate Harms ▶ The Earth Means the World to Me: Earth- and World-Interest in Times of Climate Change ▶ The Ethics of Geoengineering ▶ Understanding Model-Based Uncertainty in Climate Science

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Di Paola, M., & Jamieson, D. (2018). Climate change and the challenges of democracy. University of Miamy Law Review, 72, 369–424. Di Paola, M., & Pellegrino, G. (Eds.). (2014). Canned heat: Ethics and politics of global climate change (pp. 193–209). Routledge. Dobson, A. (2016). Environmental politics: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press. Dryzek, J. (2019). The politics of the anthropocene. Oxford University Press. Gabrielson, T., Hall, C., Meyer, J. M., & Schlosberg, D. (Eds.). (2016). The Oxford handbook of environmental political theory. Oxford University Press. Gardiner, S. M. (2010). Is “arming the future” with geoengineering really the lesser evil? Some doubts about the ethics of intentionally manipulating the climate system. In Climate ethics: Essential readings (pp. 284–309). Oxford University Press. Gardiner, S. M. (2011). A perfect moral storm: The ethical tragedy of climate change. Oxford University Press. Gardiner, S. M., Caney, S., Jamieson, D., & Shue, H. (2010). Climate ethics: Essential readings. Oxford University Press. Garvey, J. (2008). The ethics of climate change. In Right and wrong in a warming world. Continuum. Gjerris, M., Gamborg, C., Röcklinsberg, H., & Anthony, R. (2011). The Price of responsibility: Ethics of animal husbandry in a time of climate change. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 24(4), 331–350. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-010-9270-6 Greaves, H. (2017). Population axiology. Philosophy Compass, 12(11), e12442. https://doi.org/10. 1111/phc3.12442 Hamilton, C. (2017). Defiant earth. In The fate of humans in the anthropocene. Polity Press. Hamilton, C., Bonneuil, C., & Gemenne, F. (Eds.). (2015). The anthropocene and the global environmental crisis. Rethinking modernity in a new epoch. Routledge. Harris, P. G. (2021). Pathologies of climate governance: International relations, national politics and human nature. Cambridge University Press. Hiller, A. (2011). Climate change and individual responsibility. The Monist, 94(3), 349–368. Hoły-Łuczaj, M., & Blok, V. (2019). How to deal with hybrids in the anthropocene? Towards a philosophy of technology and environmental philosophy 2.0. Environmental Values, 28(3), 325–345. https://doi.org/10.3197/096327119X15519764179818 Huggel, C., Bouwer, L. M., Juhola, S., Mechler, R., Muccione, V., Orlove, B., & WallimannHelmer, I. (2022). The existential risk space of climate change. Climatic Change, 174(1), 8. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-022-03430-y Irwin, R. (2010). Climate change and philosophy: Transformational possibilities. New edizione. Continuum International Publishing Group. Jamieson, D. (2007). The moral and poltical challenges of climate change. In Creating a climate for change: Communicating climate change and facilitating social change (pp. 475–482). Cambridge University Press. Jamieson, D. (2010). Climate change, responsibility, and justice. Science and Engineering Ethics, 16, 431–445. Jamieson, D. (2012). Ethics, public policy, and global warming. In Ethical adaptation to climate change: Human virtues of the future (pp. 187–202). The MIT Press. Jamieson, D. (2014). Reason in a dark time: Why the struggle against climate change failed – And what it means for our future (1st ed.). Oxford University Press. Kallhoff, A., Di Paola, M., & Schörgenhumer, M. (2018). Plant ethics: Concepts and applications. Routledge. Kareiva, P., & Carranza, V. (2018). Existential risk due to ecosystem collapse: Nature strikes Back. Futures, 102, 39–50. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2018.01.001 Keith, D. (2000). Geoengineering: History and prospect. Annual Review of Energy and the Environment, 25, 245–284. Kovaka, K. (2021). Climate change denial and beliefs about science. Synthese, 198(3), 2355–2374. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02210-z

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Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern (C. Porter, Trans.). Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (2017). Facing Gaia: Eight lectures on the new climatic regime. Polity. Latour, B. (2018). Down to earth: Politics in the new climatic regime (C. Porter, Trans.). Polity Press. Leiss, W. (1994). The domination of nature: New edition (2nd ed.). McGill-Queen’s University Press. Lovelock, J. (2006). The revenge of Gaia: Earth’s climate crisis and the fate of humanity. Basic Books. Lovelock, J. (2009). The vanishing face of Gaia. A final warning. Basic Books. McKibben, B. (2003). The end of nature. Bloomsbury. McKinnon, C. (2011). Climate change and future justice: Precaution, compensation and triage (1st ed.). Routledge. Merchant, C. (1980). The death of nature: Women, ecology, and the scientific revolution. Harper and Row. Merchant, C. (2020). The anthropocene and the humanities: From climate change to a new age of sustainability. Yale University Press. Meyer, L. H., & Sanklecha, P. (2017). Climate justice and historical emissions. Cambridge University Press. Miller, D. (2009). Global justice and climate change: How responsibilities should be distributed. In The tanner lectures on human values. University of Utah Press. Moellendorf, D. (2014). The moral challenge of dangerous climate change. Values, poverty, and policy. Cambridge University Press. Moss, J. (Ed.). (2015). Climate change and justice. Cambridge University Press. Mulgan, T. (2011). Ethics for a broken world. Imagining philosophy after catastrophe. McGillQueen’s University Press. Mulgan, T. (2016). Answering to future people: Responsibility for climate change in a breaking world. Journal of Applied Philosophy, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1111/japp.12222 Nolt, J. (2011a). Nonanthropocentric climate ethics. WIREs Climate Change, 2(5), 701–711. https:// doi.org/10.1002/wcc.131 Nolt, J. (2011b). How harmful are the average American’s greenhouse gas emissions? Ethics Policy & Environment, 14(1), 3–10. https://doi.org/10.1080/21550085.2011.561584 Norgaard, K. M. (2011). Living in denial: Climate change, emotions, and everyday life. MIT Press. Ord, T. (2020). The precipice: Existential risk and the future of humanity. Hachette Books. Page, E. A. (2006). Climate change, justice and future generations (New edition). Edward Elgar. Palmer, C. (2016). Climate change, ethics, and the wildness of wild animals. In B. Bovenkerk & J. Keulartz (Eds.), Animal ethics in the age of humans: Blurring boundaries in human-animal relationships (The International Library of Environmental, Agricultural and Food Ethics, pp. 131–150). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44206-8_9 Palmer, C. (2021). Assisting wild animals vulnerable to climate change: Why ethical strategies diverge. Journal of Applied Philosophy, 38(2), 179–195. https://doi.org/10.1111/japp.12358 Pamplany, A., Gordijn, B., & Brereton, P. (2020). The ethics of geoengineering: A literature review. Science and Engineering Ethics, 26(6), 3069–3119. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-02000258-6 Pellegrino, G. (2018). Robust individual responsibility for climate harms. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 21(4), 811–823. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-018-9915-5 Pellegrino, G. (2023). Politics in the anthropocene: Non-human citizenship and the grand domestication. Rivista italiana di filosofia politica, 1(3), 131–160. Plumwood, V. (1994). Feminism and the mastery of nature. Routledge. Posner, E. A., & Weisbach, D. (2010). Climate change justice. Princeton University Press. Purdy, J. (2015). After nature: A politics for the anthropocene. Harvard University Press. Roser, D., & Seidel, C. (2016). Climate justice: An introduction. Routledge. Sarkar, S. (2005). Biodiversity and environmental philosophy: An introduction. Cambridge University Press.

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Sebo, J. (2021). Animals and climate change. In M. Budolfson, T. McPherson, & D. Plunkett (Eds.), Philosophy and climate change. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/ 9780198796282.003.0003 Shue, H. (2014). Climate justice: Vulnerability and protection. Oxford University Press. Sinanian, A. (2017). A climate for denial: Why some people still reject climate change science. Enproc Pty Ltd. Singer, P. (2002). One world. The ethics of globalization. Yale University Press. Sinnott-Armstrong, W. (2005). It’s not my fault: Global warming and individual moral obligations. In R. Howarth & W. Sinnott-Armstrong (Eds.), Perspectives on climate change (pp. 221–253). Elsevier. Soper, K. (1995). What is nature? Culture, politics and the non human. Blackwell. Sovacool, B. K. (2013). Energy & ethics: Justice and the global energy challenge. Palgrave Macmillan. Thompson, P. B. (2017). The spirit of the soil: Agriculture and environmental ethics. Routledge. Torres, P. (2023). Existential risks: A philosophical analysis. Inquiry, 66(4), 614–639. https://doi. org/10.1080/0020174X.2019.1658626 Tremmel, J., & Robinson, K. (2014). Climate ethics: Environmental justice and climate change. I.B.Tauris. Vanderheiden, S. (2008). Atmospheric justice: A political theory of climate change. Oxford University Press. Vanderheiden, S., & Barry, J. (Eds.). (2008). Political theory and global climate change. The MIT Press. Vogel, S. (2015). Thinking like a mall: Environmental philosophy after the end of nature (1st ed.). The MIT Press. Wainwright, J., & Mann, G. (2020). Climate leviathan: A political theory of our planetary future (Reprint edizione). Verso Books. Wallimann-Helmer, I., Meyer, L., Mintz-Woo, K., Schinko, T., & Serdeczny, O. (2019). The ethical challenges in the context of climate loss and damage. In R. Mechler, L. M. Bouwer, T. Schinko, S. Surminski, & J. Linnerooth-Bayer (Eds.), Loss and damage from climate change: Concepts, methods and policy options (Climate Risk Management, Policy and Governance, pp. 39–62). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72026-5_2 Washington, H., & Cook, J. (2011). Climate change denial: Heads in the sand. Routledge. Wood, N., Lawlor, R., & Freear, J. (2023). Rationing and climate change mitigation*. Ethics, Policy & Environment, 1–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/21550085.2023.2166342

Part II Climate Change, Science, and Philosophy

Understanding Model-Based Uncertainty in Climate Science Monica Ainhorn Morrison and Peter Lawrence

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What Makes a Climate Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Overall Model Structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Individual Model Components . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Running Model Simulations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Model Evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sources of Uncertainty in Climate Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Structural Uncertainty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Parameter Uncertainty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Scenario Uncertainty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Initial Conditions and Internal Variability Uncertainty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Uncertainty in Observations and Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Concluding Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

Understanding of the anthropogenic influences on the Earth and climate system is built on a foundation where models are the integrating framework for the science. Contemporary climate models, also termed Earth system models, allow us to have insight into how an external forcing on the climate – such as an increase in greenhouse gas emissions from human activity – affects the climate system and the properties of the system that emerge from the complex interactions of the system’s multitude of constituent sub-system and small-scale components. The epistemic challenges present in the science when attempting to understand and predict climate change are largely a consequence of the complicated issues of

M. A. Morrison (*) · P. Lawrence National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_154

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uncertainty involved in the development and implementation of climate models and their use to create simulations representing possible future climates. This chapter tackles the issue of model-based uncertainty in climate science, focusing on the nature of climate models and the multitude of sources from which uncertainty arises, including structural and parameter uncertainty, scenario uncertainty, and initial condition uncertainty. Keywords

Climate change · Global climate models · Earth system models · Scientific models · Scientific uncertainty · Evaluation · Parameterization · Values in science · Simulation · Internal variability · Projections

Introduction “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” – George Box

Climate models are the primary instruments used in climate science for understanding and predicting future changes given anthropogenic interference in the complex climate system. Contemporary climate models, also termed Earth system models, allow us to have insight into how an external forcing on the climate – such as an increase in greenhouse gas emissions from human activity – influences the climate system and the properties of the system that emerge from the complex interactions of sub-systems and small-scale processes. The epistemic challenges present when attempting to understand and predict climate change are largely a consequence of the complicated issues of uncertainty in climate models, their simulations, and the resulting projections describing possible future climates. This chapter provides a comprehensive description of the nature of model-based uncertainty and the multiplicity of sources from which it arises. The first portion of this chapter offers a detailed description of climate models (section “What Makes a Climate Model”), looking at the model’s structure and its component parts – which are termed the model physics – and explaining how a model is configured and applied to generate a simulation of the climate or Earth system. In the course of this description, there is also discussion of how non-epistemic considerations influence choices involved in a model’s development and applications. The second portion of this chapter (section “Sources of Uncertainty in Climate Models”) contains a discussion of the many sources of model-based uncertainty – structural and parameter uncertainty (model uncertainty), scenario and initial condition uncertainty, internal variability and feedbacks, and uncertainties borne out of limitations in observations and data. For a discussion of the implications of the model-based uncertainties described in this chapter on the understanding or ability to project future climates, please see Morrison and Lawrence (this volume), which also contains an account of scientific responses and philosophical interpretations.

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What Makes a Climate Model Climate is the probability of a temperature or precipitation event (weather) on a given day in a given location (i.e., the likelihood of snow on the Eastern slope of the Colorado Rockies in late April). The primary representational priority of a climate model is to capture the distribution of probabilities of certain weather events across the globe. To achieve this representational aim, contemporary climate models describe the complex Earth system constituted by the atmosphere, land, ocean, cryosphere (sea and land ice), biosphere, and simplified description of human systems. These models, sometimes termed Earth system models (given an inclusion of the carbon cycle), aim at simulating features of the Earth’s global climate, properties which emerge based on the interactions between processes in the atmosphere, land, ocean, cryosphere, biosphere, and human systems. Climate, or Earth system, models need to adequately describe the overall dynamics of the global system and it constituent parts, as well as those small-scale properties and emergent features of their interactions that influence the nature of the Earth system across a range of temporal and spatial scales.

Overall Model Structure State-of-the-art climate models are comprised of a dynamical core, model dynamics, and the model components, model physics, the latter of which represent the constituent parts of the Earth system identified above. The dynamical core of a model is made up of sets of mathematical equations describing the fundamental laws of physics, fluid motion, and chemistry. These equations describe those processes that govern the movement of air, energy (heat), moisture, and chemical constituents around the globe. The equations are solved within a three-dimensional gridded space covering the Earth’s vertical and horizontal areas. The horizontal gridding of the model tracks the latitude-longitude space of the globe. The vertical captures the height or pressure. The grid spaces are the area within which the mathematical equations that constitute the model dynamics are solved, with the model time-step determining the frequency for which solutions to the equations are given for a space. The solutions to the equations within a given grid space can be thought of as glimpses into the state of the Earth system at a particular location for a particular time. The density of the grid spacing for a model determines its resolution, with higher density resulting in a higher-resolution, more computationally expensive model. When a model runs a simulation, the solutions generated in one grid cell are passed to the adjacent cells, and the equations are solved again using this new input. These iterative solutions processed within and across the grid cells during a model run determine the emergent dynamics of the system. The dynamical core of the model, which simulates the general circulation patterns based on the above-described structure and process, is combined with the model physics, generally referred to as the parameterizations. The model physics is responsible for capturing the sub-grid

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scale processes and describing their interaction with the emergent dynamics of the overall system.

Individual Model Components A contemporary coupled model’s physics, described above, are constituted by individual models each representing a different sub-system of the Earth system – land, ocean, sea and land ice, biogeochemistry, atmospheric chemistry, and simplified human systems. As stated above, these individual models represent the processes and interactions in the system that occur at spatial scales smaller than those represented by the model grid cells. These processes and interactions are parameterized in the model’s component pieces – the sub-system models – because they cannot be explicitly resolved in the model grid space. The equations within the dynamical core are used to determine the mean quantities of momentum and heat within a grid scale, and this information is communicated by way of the parameterizations to determine how the sub-grid scale processes will interact with and respond to the mean quantities. The combining of the dynamical core to the individual models that constitute the sub-system components is known as coupling. Models can be run as fully coupled systems, which requires utilizing all the components and respective physics. Many state-of-the-art models that are highly complex in terms of their physics can be run offline, meaning the dynamics and the physics of a single component are being actively run by way of forcing the representation of the sub-system through offline input. This can solve limitations on computational resources or be used to investigate problems where the many degrees of freedom and uncertainties present in the fully coupled system compromise the usefulness of the model for answering specific research question. The parameterizations in the components represent processes that are essential for describing the climate whether it be local, regional, or global. The parameterizations that constitute the model physics are built based on either theory, observations, or a combination of both for the relevant process. In the atmospheric component, important sub-grid sale processes include shallow and deep convection, cloud formation, precipitation, cloud mixing, entrainment, moisture and temperature profiles, cloud microphysics, radiation, and aerosol interaction and concentrations. All of these sub-grid scale processes determine the emergent properties of the space and how momentum and heat are treated and transferred through the grid cell. In the ocean component of the model, considering the fluid nature of matter, dynamics are an importation representational feature of this sub-system. Dynamical equations are thus used to describe the large-scale properties of the system. Parameterizations are used to treat the smaller processes, such as heat transfer, eddy formation, mixing along isopycnal surfaces, deep ocean mixing, and surface wind stress. Sea ice is an important feature of the Earth’s ocean that can influence climate; however, representations of sea ice processes are not parameterized in the ocean model, but make up their own self-standing model. The accumulation of sea ice from precipitation and the mixing of sea ice and ocean water are important inclusions in

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the model physics because these processes determine the extent and thickness of ice sheets, which effect the albedo at the poles, a determinant of the overall climate. Land ice representations and processes also constitute their own component, although they have previously been included in the land models. Land ice parameterizations describe glacial systems and ice sheets in locals such as Antarctica and Greenland. Land models represent vegetation dynamics, soil processes, hydrology, and, in some cases, human land use processes such as cropping, fertilization, and wood harvest/deforestation. One of the most important representations in the land model is of the terrestrial carbon cycle, which, in addition to the ocean carbon cycle, is increasing in terms of the sophistication of the representations. This increasing complexity, however, in representing features of the land surface such as vegetation heterogeneity, introduces considerable sources of uncertainty, discussed below.

Running Model Simulations Contemporary models are used for a variety of purposes, ranging from long-term projections of the future climate out to 2100 and beyond, to decadal to sub-seasonal predictions of precipitation changes. In each case, a model runs a simulation to provide a projection of a single or multiple possible future states of the system, whether this be for one of the sub-systems or the coupled system as a whole. These simulated evolutions of the climate system over a particular period of time require the use of initial conditions, which is a description of the state of the system at the very beginning of the simulated period. In the investigations of anthropogenic climate change, there is also the need to include details about external forcings, in this case anthropogenically caused emissions, which are often termed boundary conditions. Climate models can be run to simulate historical climate, for the sake of evaluation or understanding of the deep time Earth system, or can be run to make projections of future climate change. When running a model for evaluation purposes, some elements of the model can be constrained by specifying inputs, such as sea surface temperature or atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. Once the constrained model – for example, the atmosphere – produces output, it is compared against observational records. Since there are no observations of the future, model evaluation runs are always performed over past or present climate. A model can be run for the purposes of investigation over shorter time periods, for example, decades, or longer time periods, such as for the entire twentieth century. In some cases, models are run for extremely short periods of time, such as days, to determine whether they are able to represent the behavior of the climate for a specific weather event, such as a hurricane. When running a model projection of the future climate, scenarios of inputs are needed. Scenarios are essentially descriptions and estimations of elements of the human system that contribute to the external forcing on the climate – mainly greenhouse gas emissions, land use and land cover changes, etc. Scenarios can also include other details to describing a future climate forcing, such as solar output

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or aerosol emissions from natural events, like volcanic eruptions. In general, scenarios will specify these inputs to force the model to project what a future might look like given these direct influences. Modeling runs can also make use of integrated assessment models (IAMs), which, rather than specifying the input for the humandriven forcings, will employ certain assumptions about population and economic growth in a scenario and run these scenarios internally to produce estimates of future emissions and land use given principles of the human system. The results are then input into a climate model, with the main difference being the simulations are given online information from IAM, as opposed to being prescribed statically from a fixed scenario. Note that a climate model is essentially a computer program, with contemporary models employing around a million or more lines of code (Gettelman & Rood, 2016). The code is comprised of all the equations that describe the components of the system that are detailed above in connection with the physical laws that make up the model dynamics. To run a contemporary climate model, one must utilize a supercomputer with a large number of processors, as the “cost” of running a model can be quite large. The more complex a model is, and the higher its resolution (the smaller the grid cell sizing), the more expensive the model is to run. Additionally, the length of a simulation adds to the required computing resources. Even though many institutions have supercomputers to utilize for running climate models, there are still bounds when it comes to applying climate models to answer research questions due to limitations and competition for computing resources. This is problematic for the science when it comes to investigating model uncertainty, as one commonplace approach is to use ensembles – running a model a multitude of times with different initial conditions or parameter values – a practice that requires considerable computing resources. Hence, certain approaches to investigating uncertainty, while fruitful in theory, are not practically feasible because of pragmatic constraints.

Model Evaluation Confidence in climate models and the projections they produce results from “the foundation of the models in accepted physical principles and from their ability to reproduce observed features of current climate and past climate changes” (AR4, WGI; Solomon et al., 2007). Validation and evaluation are distinct concepts in the realm of climate modeling. Validation specifically refers to “the process of ascertaining or testing the ‘truth’ of a model” (Gettelman & Rood, 2016, p. 161). Given climate models are incomplete representations of their target system, assessing the exact fit of a model with reality is beyond the possibilities within the practice of modeling a complex system. Instead, modelers are interested in figuring out the value of the model with respect to certain applications, such as relative to different sets of observations. The assessment of this value is known as evaluation, and this is the practice that seeks to determine whether a model can give us knowledge about a particular set of features within the target system. Parker (2020) has detailed a similar approach to climate evaluation known as the adequacy-

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for-purpose approach. On Parker’s adequacy-for-purpose view, a model is evaluated not based on its accuracy with respect to a target system, but has value relative to how well it performs for a certain purpose. A model’s quality, more specifically, is highly context dependent, being a function of more than the relation the model stands in to the representational target. Additional considerations are the user’s requirements, the methodology, circumstances of the model application, and overall modeling goal, all of which will differ on a case-by-case basis. Evaluation of a model requires the comparison of a model’s behavior with a set of observations and theoretical expectations. These evaluations can be in terms of a model’s individual components, whether that be the individual parameterizations that are combined to make up the model physics or the individual model components that fully describe the sub-system (land, ocean, biogeochemistry, land ice, etc.). This form of component evaluation is known as offline testing. Results of these offline tests are used to inform decisions about areas of improvement for the model components (Flato et al., 2014). For example, with a land model, offline tests can be performed to see how well the model can represent soil moisture averages given temperature and precipitation inputs. Disagreement between the models and the observations of soil moisture can point to deficiencies in the model’s physics for the processes responsible for determining this variable. Certain processes represented in climate models can be tested using very short model runs. For example, errors in the representations of clouds show up in just a couple days of a simulation (Gettelman & Rood, 2016). The models are also evaluated against observations when fully coupled. These evaluations can make use of a simulation and observations of an individual weather event, such as a hurricane, or can involve representations of the climate over various periods of time, in which case there is comparison to observations of averages and variability for important variable. To evaluate models for use in the Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion (World Meteorological Organization, 2011), researchers looked at the ability of models to reproduce the distribution of ozone and the related atmospheric chemistry. In particular, the models were evaluated against observations of the distribution of chlorine, distribution and character of clouds over the Antarctic during springtime, and temperature and water vapor measurements (Gettelman & Rood, 2016). The report used these evaluations to identify models that had deficient representations of key processes and recommend which models, based on these evaluations, can inform the studies with future projections. In a recent experiment, Hausfather et al. (2020) engaged in experiments to evaluate past early climate model produced projections against current day observations. They evaluated climate models introduced between 1970 and 2007 against observations of the global mean surface temperature for the years after they were introduced. The models evaluated in the study were deemed skillful in their predictions of changes to the global mean surface temperature and simulated warming that is consistent with the observations for those years after their introduction. Model evaluation can have an added advantage of helping to pinpoint where measurement and observational campaigns are needed, highlighting deficiencies in measurement products (Gettelman & Rood, 2016). Models allow us to investigate

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where there are sensitivities within the system – whether this be due to small-scale processes or initial conditions exerting a major change in model behavior. These sensitivities within the model point to where observations are needed to further evaluate the model and its performance. In the context of modeling, it is often the case that models can help to identify phenomena that are not well understood and represented and parameters that are not well constrained. Gettelman and Rood (2016) point out that models have been used to inform field projects observing clouds in critical regions, as clouds are one of the key uncertainties in models and are poorly sampled in the available observations. Debates over model evaluation, in the context of philosophy of science, have discussed the issues of model confirmation and robustness. With respect to confirmation, Lloyd (2009) argues that many of the contemporary climate models have been confirmed by their fit with observational data from the past. She expands on this idea, however, to argue that when there are a variety of instances of fit for an individual model, there is an increase in the confidence of the confirmatory virtue of that model. This happens in particular when a model performs well in terms of fitting with one variable of interest and then has demonstrated fitness with several others. It can also happen when there is independent empirical support for additional features and assumptions of the model. This might mean fit between parameterizations and observations or process representation consistent with well-established theory. This argument is rejected by Parker (2009) who claims that models cannot be confirmed in the traditional sense given they are not accurate reflections of the system they target. In particular, they contain too many simplifications and approximations, are empirically inadequate, or are even “false.” Parker suggests that what is confirmed by instances of fit are hypotheses about the adequacy of the model for some particular purpose. She recommends a shift from talking about model confirmation to confirmation of adequacy-for-purpose of models, the theory introduced above.

Sources of Uncertainty in Climate Models Uncertainty is most broadly understood as the departure from exacting knowledge of an object or system. The National Research Council (1994) employs this definition, specifically characterizing uncertainty as “a lack of precise knowledge as to what the truth is” (p. 161). There are many attempts to provide more detail to the definition of uncertainty. Funtowicz and Ravetz (1990) distinguish between the sources of uncertainty and the types of uncertainty, identifying three categories that populate the latter branch of the distinction: inexactness, or imprecision; unreliability, or inaccuracy; and lack of statistical expression. Smith and Stern (2011) delineate uncertainty along the lines of ambiguity, imprecision, indeterminacy, and intractability. Petersen (2012) asserts that Funtowicz and Ravetz’s (1990) account is not detailed enough and proposes his own six-dimensional typology, which includes the location, nature, range of uncertainty, and “recognized ignorance, methodological unreliability, and value diversity” (p. 50).

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The IPCC describes the uncertainty associated with key findings in terms of confidence intervals, based on the validity of a finding in terms of the type, amount, quality, and consistency of evidence for the finding. For example, high confidence is assigned when a finding has an 80 percent probability or an 8 out of 10 chance. Uncertainties can also be communicated directly in terms of a probability that is based on the statistical analysis of a set of observations or model simulations results or even expert judgment (see Mastrandrea et al., 2010). The formal treatment of uncertainties within the scientific findings allows for the consistent treatment of uncertainties across Working Group Reports and is interpreted in terms of two primary types of uncertainties arising in scientific practice: value uncertainties and structural uncertainties. In the former case, the uncertainties are a consequence of there being incompleteness in the value or results, inaccuracies in the data, or an incomplete representation of data for a phenomenon of interest. Structural uncertainties are a consequence of an incomplete understanding of the processes that control the values or results. This is the type of uncertainty in the IPCC framework that describes model uncertainty, as the simulations used for analysis are run on models that don’t include all the relevant processes or relationships (see Solomon et al., 2007, 1.6, for more details). When thinking about uncertainty in the context of future climate change, it is best characterized in terms of the possibility of wrongness or error in projections of what is known onto what is unknown (Gettelman & Rood, 2016). Uncertainty, which can result from the model, the scenario, or the initial conditions, is contained in the forecast or prediction that is the product of running a model to make the projection of the future. Fully characterizing uncertainty in a forecast or prediction of future climate change requires identifying the sources of uncertainty and understanding their relative contributions to total uncertainty. Since the different types of uncertainty operate on different time and space scales, the relative contribution of each source of uncertainty will be different for different types of research questions. The following sections discuss the different sources of uncertainty, provide examples of these sources within contemporary climate modeling, and identify the categories of research questions they have the most significant consequences for.

Structural Uncertainty Structural uncertainty and parameter uncertainty (section “Parameter Uncertainty”) constitute model uncertainty in that they are fundamental features of the model as an object. Structural uncertainty specifically concerns the mathematical structure of the model and the adequacy of this mathematical structure to represent the structures of the target system. Due to limitations on theoretical and empirical knowledge, mathematical representations of the physical processes that constitute the complex system contain errors, assumptions, idealizations, and simplifications. Winsberg (2018) notes that model structural uncertainty and uncertainty resulting from numerical approximations in the computer’s solutions to the equations describing the system are conceptually different. However, in practice, it is difficult to separate

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numerical approximations as a source of error from the more general uncertainties within the model structure. Hence, when talking about structural uncertainty, this refers to both the uncertainty stemming from choices of how to mathematically describe the system and the errors that result from computing approximate solutions to those equations. Parker (2010) maintains that structural uncertainty is an inevitable aspect of climate models, as models require the use of simplifications and idealizations to describe their target system. For Parker, structural uncertainty is a function of how physical processes that are key in the models are not described well because of lack of theoretical knowledge. Additionally, because of the inability to perfectly represent the system, the lack of theoretical knowledge, and the existence of pragmatic constraints, science employs simplified and idealized representations. The lack of knowledge also makes it such that there is no one best way to describe a process when including it as a part of the model physics. So, for these reasons, there are uncertainties in the model structure with respect to how it mathematically described the target system. A slightly different characterization of structural uncertainty is provided by Frigg et al. (2014). This account focuses on the nature of non-linear models and how any slight deviation from an accurate representation in the model dynamics compromises the model. This account of structural uncertainty focuses less on the causes of the uncertainty and more on the widespread implication for the knowledge of the target system. The idea is that models cannot in practice adequately describe the dynamics that determine the behavior of the non-linear system and any slight variation from what is actually the case in these systems can produce exponential errors in their simulations. This effect on knowledge from structural uncertainty in models is known as the hawkmoth effect. Winsberg (2018) has taken up discussion of this phenomenon, noting that it is not as big a problem as it has been made out to be. He likens the hawkmoth effect to the butterfly effect, where a slight error in what are thought to be the initial conditions for a system can lead to widespread difference in the system’s state and behavior and make predictions impossible. Winsberg (2018) argues that climate models, which are forms of models of non-linear systems, are thankfully not in the business of making predictions, but rather projections using forcing experiments to investigate future possibilities of the state of the system in terms of its statistical and quantitative properties. Building from these discussions by Parker (2010), Pacchetti (2020) provides a deeper epistemological account of structural uncertainty in climate models. Pacchetti argues that a comprehensive account of structural uncertainty should identify the sources of uncertainty and explain how these limit the applicability of a model for different purposes, where the severity of uncertainty will be relative to the questions the model is responding to. The author claims that by paying attention to the details of model building, it is possible to answer these questions about structural uncertainty for individual models. She goes on to show how certain representations of processes in models thought to be highly uncertain because of the assumptions they

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contain are actually theoretically justified when attention is paid to scale separation assumptions. Engaging in these rigorous analyses of assumptions, and investigating the explicit or implicit justification for their use, can help us get a better handle on how sub-grid process representations in the model physics contribute to the model’s overall structural uncertainty. Structural uncertainty and parameter uncertainty (discussed below) introduce uncertainty into all types of climate simulations. One particular way this can impact simulations and invite increased degrees of uncertainty is with respect to the feedbacks in the system and the inadequacies in the understanding that prevent us from constraining them well in the models. Hawkins and Suttons (2009) demonstrate that for projections for a decade or longer, the dominant sources of uncertainty are model uncertainty and scenario uncertainty, with the latter contributing the most. Uncertainty in projections with smaller lead times (sub-decade) are dominated by model uncertainty and internal variability as the main source. In their study, they show that model uncertainty contributes a little less than half of the total uncertainty for short-term projects and a little over a third when looking at projections out to the end of the century. However, these relative contributions change significantly based on the region of study. Additionally, the type of research question being asked of a model can change the contribution of different sources of uncertainty to the overall total. Lovenduski and Bonan (2017) show how for projections of terrestrial carbon, model uncertainty is the dominant source across all timescales. This is compared to the projections of carbon uptake in the oceans, where model uncertainty is initially dominant, but is taken over in a few decades by scenario uncertainty. This is likely due to the simplification required to generalize representations of the processes key to the terrestrial carbon cycle in land models. One might expect that the increase in model complexity has helped to address uncertainty, because the addition of more processes better captures the real-world system. But Stevens and Bony (2013) argue that this is not the case. The increase in complexity has greatly expanded the questions that can be investigated with state-ofthe-art climate and Earth system models. The result of this expansion has been a multiplication of the biases that introduce uncertainties in the model due to representational inadequacies of basic processes. The authors note that there remains massive uncertainty in the understanding of the carbon cycle because of inadequacies in the understanding of tropical precipitation over land and the related vegetation dynamics. Similarly, models have not increased understanding of how warming will amplify processes in the Arctic, making it difficult to predict permafrost melt, an important feedback in the system for measuring climate sensitivity (which is another key uncertainty in contemporary climate science). The authors call on the community to go “back to basics” and focus on developing a deep understanding of key elements of the system, for example, the coupling between water and circulation, instead of investing resources into the continued expansion of complexity in the model physics.

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Parameter Uncertainty The second branch of model uncertainty is known as parameter value uncertainty. Parameters are those prescribed numerical features of the model that are expressed within the mathematical representations of the model’s physics. Uncertainty related to parameter values can be with respect to the values assigned when characterizing sub-scale processes represented in the individual model components (model physics) or values assigned when constructing a scenario to input into a model. This section describes the former and characterizes it as parameter uncertainty and discusses uncertainty in model input in the context of scenario and initial condition uncertainty. Parameter uncertainty, which is not clearly delineated from structural uncertainty in all cases, results from their being available choices and a lack of knowledge to inform the assignment of values for parameters in the model. In many cases, parameter values are drawn from observations of relevant phenomena. However, as will be discussed in section “Uncertainty in Observations and Data”, there are considerable amount of uncertainty in many observations, allowing us to constrain parameter values to a range, but not explicitly assign a value. Additionally, some observations are entirely absent, meaning science isn’t even in a position to constrain parameter values, as is the case with certain values associated with marine ice-cliff instability (DeConto & Pollard, 2016). This specific source of parameter uncertainty contributes to uncertainty in estimates of sea level rise given Antarctic ice sheet loss. One way uncertainty in parameter values can be addressed is through the act of model tuning, which is not well defined (Mauritsen et al., 2012). Tuning a model happens in the last stages of development and evaluation and generally refers to the act of adjusting parameter values from some processes to bring the model as a whole into better agreement with observations. What observations are used in the tuning process, what parameters are subjected to tuning, and what the overall goals of the exercise are differ across institutions (Hourdin et al., 2017; Schmidt et al., 2017). A common example of shared tuning goals is to tweak certain parameters in the atmospheric component of the model to get the top-of-atmosphere energy balance correct, a metric of evaluation that is essential for using a model for climate change purposes (Winsberg, 2018). Unfortunately, tuning certain parameters like those for clouds can mask the deficiencies that result from uncertainties in the representation of these poorly understood processes (Mauritsen et al., 2012). To put it simply, tuning is not a way to fix or improve the uncertainties with a parameterization, but rather a means to compensate for the error introduced by the deficient parameterization on emergent model behavior. Tuning also brings with it additional challenges, mainly that it can complicate attempts to evaluate a model’s consistency with data and ascribe the skill to the model contents as opposed to the act of tuning. Randall et al. (2007), to address this issue, argue that data used to tune the model cannot be used to also evaluate the model’s skill. Frisch (2015) further claims that when data for a particular variable is used for tuning, this should reduce confidence in the ability of the model to provide suitable output for that variable in the future. Winsberg (2018) notes that choices in parameterization are a consequence of model structure and grid sizing, such that the value is responsive to these other

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elements of the model. Thus, there is no “correct” value to assign to a parameter, but rather a value that might be “better” with respect to these other model features. Winsberg’s claim is supported by observations made by Shackley et al. (1998) and analyzed by Petersen (2012): that many of the key parameterizations included in models are scale dependent, such as in the case of those that describe cloud processes. While these parameterizations are critical components of those models and its behavior, they are not fully based on theory. This issue, coupled with the scale dependence of the representations, introduces a degree of arbitrariness, which leads Petersen to conclude that “ad hoc assumptions are systematically involved in deriving parameterizations” (2012, p. 107), with the arbitrariness contributing to model uncertainty. Related to the charge that parameter choice can include an ad hoc character is the philosophical debate over the inclusion of non-epistemic values in modeling choices. Winsberg (2012) claims there are two notable ways that values make their way into climate modeling during development: (1) in choices about model purpose and metrics for evaluation and (2) during assessments of inductive risk when scientists are faced with methodological uncertainty (see also Biddle & Winsberg, 2009). The latter is most significant for considerations of model uncertainty: in cases where there might be more than one choice as to how to represent a certain feature in the model – say with respect to cloud microphysical properties – scientists will make a value-informed decision about which option to implement. The consequence of these value-informed decisions about model structure and parameter values is that non-epistemic values are embedded in the “nooks and crannies” of the models. This is especially problematic when modelers engage in uncertainty quantification and assign probabilities to hypotheses based using models as evidence, as there is no way to account for the contribution from the values to the uncertainty in the models. Parker (2014) rejects Winsberg’s interpretation of parameter choices, arguing that he overexaggerates the role of values in practice. While it might be in a few cases scientists have appealed to inductive risk assessment to make parameter choices, more often, when presented with an unforced methodological decision, they appeal to pragmatic considerations to make a choice. Parker reasons that scientists are more likely to make a choice because one option comes with readily available computer code or because implementing the parameterization is easier or the modeling institution or group employs an expert on that process. Morrison (2021), who also rejects Winsberg’s account of inductive risk in modeling, claims choices of parameterizations are justified based on appeal to their consistency with the certain representational perspective the model is built to occupy. Specifically, when decisions are made about what research questions a model will be constructed to answer, a commitment to a certain representational perspective on the target system is involved. There is the need to represent certain features of the target system in a certain way to adequately answer specific research questions, which means committing to certain perspectivally dependent “values” or what Lloyd et al. (2020) conceptualize as representational values. These “values” are used as reasons when making a choice of how to describe certain features of the target system to ensure that the representational content of the model is consistent with the required perspective. As such,

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Morrison argues, it is misleading to characterize these as “values” if values are understood as non-epistemic in nature, because the reasons given are epistemic and they stand in relation to the aims to achieve knowledge within a particular perspective.

Scenario Uncertainty Scenario uncertainty is most broadly the uncertainty within model inputs when a simulation is set up and run, specifically with respect to climate projections. In the case of future model projections, the emissions inputs that inform the model for these simulations are uncertain because of the lack of knowledge of what future socioeconomic and technological developments will look like. Assumptions are made about future activities such as the growth of green technology in developed and developing nations, population growth, deforestation, and land use, but these assumptions are just best guesses for what the world and society will look like in the future. Scenario uncertainty is particularly troublesome for long-term projections. When the timescale of the model projects farther into the future, certain elements of the scenario become increasingly uncertain. There is little to inform the choices about how to characterize these components, so they are often riddled with assumptions that are not well justified. The uncertainty associated with scenarios grows exponentially the farther into the future the models project, and once lead times come to about four decades, scenario uncertainty is most significant (Hawkins & Sutton, 2009). The farther the descriptions of these futures go, the more uncertainty there is, as there is more confidence in what will happen over the next decade than what will manifest toward the end of the century. In an effort to reduce this uncertainty and cover a collection of possibilities, models used to project future climate change employ a multitude of emissions scenarios – Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) – which can then be compared or averaged to give a better representation of the possibilities given the socioeconomic and technological assumptions about future emissions trajectories. Newer frameworks have been introduced that relate the RCPs adopted in earlier multi-model ensemble comparisons to Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) (see Van Vuuren et al., 2013). The newer narratives and description of pathways of socioeconomic drivers of change (population, technology, and GDP) that informed development of the RCP-SSP scenarios were developed by taking into account the degree of challenge (low, medium, high degree) to adaptation and mitigation of climate change (O’Neill et al., 2014). The result was five different pathways, known as SSP1 through SSP5, which were fed into integrated assessment models to produce scenarios for use by climate models of emissions and land use. These are known as the baseline scenarios. In addition to the baselines that were constructed, there are also sets of scenarios developed to represent possible mitigation policies that can be put in place to achieve end-of-century temperature targets – known as the shared policy assumptions (Tebaldi et al., 2021).

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Initial Conditions and Internal Variability Uncertainty There is also uncertainty with respect to the initial state of the system the model represents, known as initial condition uncertainty. When a simulation is conducted using a climate model, the model starts with a representation of the state of the climate at a specific period in time. For example, if a model simulation is being run from 1850 to 2000, the model will be run for an extended period of time and allowed to come into balance, based on some set of assumptions about what the climate state was like for the initiating period, i.e., 1850. This setting of the stage for the model to being its simulation is known as the model “spin-up.” The state the model occupies at the beginning of the simulation, which results from the model’s spin-up period, undoubtedly differs from the actual state of the climate for that time. There is an absence of those observations needed to perfectly inform these initial state inputs, and the models spinning up will not reflect the way the natural system comes into equilibrium from a set of initial conditions. The limited knowledge of the internal variability combined with the numerical instability of the coupled system the model is representing stand in relation to these initial conditions from which a model simulation is generated. Deser et al. (2020) demonstrate that applying small perturbations to the initial conditions of each member of a large ensemble creates diverging weather and climate trajectories resulting in unpredictable internal variability within the system. Winsberg (2018) notes that internal variability contributes to uncertainty about the climate in an indirect manner, when it is seen through this lens of uncertainty about initial conditions – there might be changes in the weather events that characterize a climate due to the natural variability in the system and the way this responds to slight uncertainties in the initial conditions from which the model is run. Internal variability is the change in climate variables, such as temperature and precipitation, due to the internal dynamics of the complex climate system. For example, there might be natural variations in areas of low and high pressure and air circulation for a certain region, which impact day-to-day precipitation patterns. These changes are not due to an external forcing on the system, but rather naturally occurring fluxes in the system such as monsoon intensity and duration, ocean current, and seasonal sea ice extent. The lack of knowledge of the processes, interactions, and feedback within the complex non-linear system makes it very difficult to gauge and examine the effects of internal variability and divorce those effects from those caused by external forcing on the system. In short, there is uncertainty about whether a change for some variable seen in a climate model simulation is due to a forcing or the choice of initial conditions, where different initial conditions might produce different short-term climate states. In this way, the natural internal variability in the system causes significant difficulties for climate change attribution and when making shorterterm (sub-decadal) predictions of future climate states globally and regionally. In longer future projections, like with initial condition uncertainty, because of the increased contribution from other uncertainties, notably scenario uncertainty, internal variability contributes less uncertainty overall.

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Additionally, the initial conditions that the model simulation is launched from introduce uncertainty into the projections because of the distances between the assumptions about the climate state for that time, which the model uses, and the actual state of the climate for that historical date. Hence, the quality of the initial condition inputs are dependent on the quality of the observations used (Alizadeh, 2022). Initial condition uncertainty is sometimes discussed in the context of uncertainty due to the internal variability within the climate system, described in section “Uncertainty in Observations and Data”. Initial condition uncertainty is more significant for shorter projections, as the farther into the future a model projects, the less the possible errors in the initial conditions begin to matter. Krishnamurthy (2019) demonstrates that errors associated with the initial conditions for the atmosphere input into a model grow rapidly over the first few days of the simulation. Hence, for sub-seasonal climate predictions, the uncertainty from the atmospheric initial conditions has the most impact. But climate predictions for seasonal to interannual timescales are more impacted by the initial condition input for the slow modes of the climate system, such as soil moisture content, surface vegetation, sea ice, snow cover, and sea surface temperature (Alizadeh, 2022). The errors associated with uncertainty initial condition input for these variables take longer to appear because of the longer timescales at which these processes act, in comparison to the extremely short timescales on which atmospheric processes act. Hawkins and Sutton (2009) have noted that the problem of internal variability in the system can be dampened if observations informing initial conditions are corrected or multiple observations are considered. If there were the ability to more accurately inform the model about initial conditions, then the indirect contribution to uncertainty from ignorance of the systems internal variability can be diminished. Data assimilation techniques are also used to combat the issue of initial conditions which feeds into uncertainties of internal variability in the system. Data assimilation is the combining of short-term predictions with comprehensive observations to produce the most skillful assessment of initial conditions for inclusion in the model (Alizadeh, 2022). Cheng et al. (2017) have demonstrated that the application of data assimilation techniques can lead to an improvement in short-term climate predictions that are subject to error from uncertainty in initial conditions.

Uncertainty in Observations and Data Models and the representations they contain are informed by observations of the real-world system. Climate models are also evaluated through comparisons to past observations, which are measurements of climate metrics such as temperature and precipitation or their proxies. One major issue with historical data sets for the evaluation of climate models is the uncertainties in the statistics for variables such as precipitation, temperature, and humidity due to limitations in the observations. The further back in time one goes, the larger the amount of uncertainty in the averages for these variables because of the fewer measurements that informed the construction of the average. Advances have been made, however, with measurement systems such as satellites. However, data from these instruments is not without its

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own deficiencies, as has been shown in the work of Santer et al. (2017) looking at evaluations of model performance for tropospheric warming (see also Lloyd, 2012). The incompleteness of the historical record and the types of uncertainties from newer instruments described cause issues for effectively and holistically evaluating climate models for wide application. Limited or nonexistent observations and measurements for informing an understanding of certain processes, for example, ice sheet physics, cause issues in the model with respect to parameter and structural uncertainty. Proxy data is used to evaluate models in the context of paleoclimate and to extend and compliment the historical record. Tree rings, sediment data, and ice cores are common examples of sources of proxy data because of the sensitivity of processes connected to these sources to changes in climate variables. These proxy sources are viewed as indicators of climatic variables; thus, the observations are indirect measurements of metrics such as temperature and precipitation. Growth estimations of older trees are gained through analysis of their rings and can be used as indicators of seasonal and annual temperatures. In some cases, corals have even been used as indicators of past ocean conditions (see, e.g., Lauchstedt et al., 2017). Using proxy data requires assuming that the processes responsible for the records have responded in the past to changes in climate in the same way they do now. Therefore, there is a need to create a model that translates the proxy to a climate variable that is based on the statistical relationship describing the current relation (Gettelman & Rood, 2016). Researchers will collect and use a variety of data from different proxies, such as ice cores and tree rings, to address uncertainties associated with only using one type of data from a particular source. In particular, pluralism of proxy data can be used to rule out the possibility of an alternative cause to the trends extracted from the proxy source. Inhomogeneities are another cause for uncertainty in long-term observations and data and can result from changes in station or instrument location or changes in measurement practices over time. For example, Vincent et al. (2002) note inhomogeneities in temperature measurements in Canada due to station location change and the consequential change in instrument exposure. Parker and Cox (1995) note how various changes in instruments and methods used for radiosondes, such as changes to the sensor type and data correction methods for radiation, have led to the presence of inhomogeneities in temperature, pressure, humidity, and wind. To address these types of uncertainties, and correct for inhomogeneity in data, researchers can take parallel measurements or calculate statistical corrections for the data set by comparing a number of stations. In response to these issues in observations fundamental to the practice of climate modeling, many climate scientists have called for improvements in the global observational network and practices of data sharing in response to the uncertainties associated with these features of the science. Weatherhead et al. (2018) point to the deficiencies in climate observations to provide vital information about societally relevant climate impacts, such as sea level rise, drought, flood, food and freshwater security, and extreme heat events. They recommend targeted investments in the development of a climate observing system be made to address the deficiency of observations needed to inform us about these impacts. The system proposed would need to include the development of long-term monitoring systems and protocols,

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process studies, and the use of comprehensive evaluative tools for satellite, groundbased, and in situ observations to determine the quality of observations to inform studies of these impact priorities. Trenberth et al. (2016) called upon the community to develop a much more comprehensive system that is termed as “end to end.” This climate information system would address the management of information on climate coming out of many different disciplines and communities and structure the observing, modeling, evaluation, data management and integration, production of assessments, and dissemination of information in such a way that it establishes foundational links between the basic science and applied science and bring the different aspects of climate science closer together.

Concluding Remarks Uncertainty in modeling does not entail model skepticism. Despite the considerable challenge of uncertainty in climate modeling, the science is not found to be in an epistemically insecure position. Furthermore, the sources of uncertainty discussed in this chapter should not prevent us from acting or be used as an excuse to further put off mitigation and adaptation. Knutti and Sedláček (2013) rightly maintain that the desire to narrow uncertainties should not be the primary criteria used to evaluate the epistemic status of the science. Considerable progress has been made, in that models are more complex, yet they are still able to adequately capture the historical warming trends, precipitation, and other features of the system. Additionally, the CMIP5 and many of the constrained CMIP6 models, despite increasing in complexity in different ways, show little change in their spread for future climate. While there are uncertainties that create spread, some cannot be reduced and are due to internal variability in the system. Models have gotten better, and despite the remaining uncertainties, the inability to further narrow those uncertainties is not a reason to not engage in adaptive decision-making and widespread mitigation. Please see Morrison and Lawrence (this volume) for further discussion of the implications for model-based uncertainty on the understanding and ability to project climate change.

Cross-References ▶ Climate Change, Uncertainty, and Policy ▶ Implications of Model-Based Uncertainty: Scientific Responses and Philosophical Interpretations

References Alizadeh, O. (2022). Advances and challenges in climate modeling. Climatic Change, 170(1–2), 18. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-021-03298-4

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Implications of Model-Based Uncertainty: Scientific Responses and Philosophical Interpretations Monica Ainhorn Morrison and Peter Lawrence

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Implications of Model Uncertainty for the Science of Climate Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity and Transient Climate Response . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Detection and Attribution of Anthropogenic Climate Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Future Climate Extremes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Future Climate Impacts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Scientific Responses to the Challenges of Model Uncertainty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Model Ensembles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Alternative Model Pluralisms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Benchmarking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Paleo-Reconstructions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Machine Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Concluding Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

There are a multitude of sources of uncertainty in the science of climate change, many of which are related to the extensive use of climate models to answer research questions. This chapter, which complements Morrison and Lawrence (chapter “Understanding Model-Based Uncertainty in Climate Science,” this volume), examines how various sources of uncertainty in climate models – structural, parameter, scenario, and initial condition – contribute to uncertainty in the ability to project climate impacts and changes to extremes, understand equilibrium climate sensitivity and transient climate response, and identify the causal contributions of a changing climate to disastrous weather events (attribution). The second component of this chapter moves beyond descriptions of the M. A. Morrison (*) · P. Lawrence National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_155

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consequences of uncertainty to discuss how scientists have sought to decrease and understand model-based uncertainties. Practices examined include the use of model ensembles in various forms (multi-model, large single model, and perturbed parameter), benchmarking, out-of-sample testing, and machine learning. Also explored are the philosophical discussions related to these practices, commenting on interpretations of model pluralisms, the epistemic opacity of machine learning, and the epistemic role of models in informing decisions related to adaptation and resilience. Keywords

Climate change · Global climate models: Earth system models · Scientific uncertainty · Climate impacts · Attribution · Equilibrium climate sensitivity · Extremes · Model ensembles · Pluralism · Machine learning

Introduction Model-based uncertainties in climate science translate to uncertainties in the evidence for answering certain research questions, including those related to climate sensitivity, extremes, impacts, and climate change attribution. This chapter explains how different sources of uncertainty in climate models lead to uncertainties in the models’ various applications and products. As the contemporary science has evolved rapidly, one area of particular focus that has dominated during this evolution has been the exploration of approaches for identifying, measuring, and understanding uncertainty. The second portion of this chapter details many of the approaches currently at use in modeling practice to address uncertainty, including large ensemble analyses, model intercomparison projects (MIPs), out-of-sample testing, crossscale assessment, and applications of machine learning. These discussions also treat the philosophical commentaries on the epistemic values and limitations of these practices.

Implications of Model Uncertainty for the Science of Climate Change Climate models are afflicted with uncertainty, but also the primary instruments for understanding and predicting the future climate given anthropogenic influences. The presence of these model-based uncertainties is a challenge for the status of the knowledge about what the future climate will look like, especially in terms of being able to derive specific information about local impacts. This section looks at the way the model uncertainties described in the related chapter (Morrison and Lawrence, “Understanding Model-Based Uncertainty in Climate Science”, this volume) impact knowledge of climate change in terms of climate sensitivity, attribution of climate change, climate extremes and events, and assessing regional and

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local impacts. Climate sensitivity (section “Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity and Transient Climate Response”) is most impacted by model structural and parameter uncertainty and the lack of understanding of feedbacks in the system. The uncertainties within the sensitivity measurements themselves have consequences for the understanding of climate extremes and impacts (sections “Future Climate Extremes” and “Future Climate Impacts”). If studies of climate extremes and impacts are in the far future, scenario uncertainty becomes an important contributing issue. For studies of extreme events and attribution (section “Detection and Attribution of Anthropogenic Climate Change”), the primary source of uncertainty comes from initial conditions and internal variability in the system. These issues are described in detail for the relevant categories of studies below, with comments on how scientists have understood and responded to the uncertainties to secure the epistemic status of their investigations.

Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity and Transient Climate Response Equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) and transient climate response (TCR) are measurements of the sensitivity of the climate system to external forcings. Specifically, ECS is the measurement of the change in climate via temperature once an equilibrium has been reached given the external forcing, in this case higher values of carbon dioxide. This measurement is on a longer timescale, as reaching a new equilibrium requires the counterbalance not only in the atmosphere but also of the deep oceans and carbon cycle. Experiments to investigate ECS look specifically at the state of the climate given a doubling of atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide from per-industrial levels and qualify it as an emergent property of climate feedbacks and aerosol forcing (Gettelman et al., 2019). In contrast, TCR is the measurement of climate response to a given forcing before equilibrium has been reached. In sensitivity studies, TCR characterizes the mean temperature increase at the time a doubling of carbon dioxide has been reached. In this set of experiments, climate models are run with prescribed increases of carbon dioxide at 1 percent per year till a doubled concentration from pre-industrial levels is reached. Having an understanding of the climate’s response to an external forcing is important because of connections to climate change impacts, which either directly or indirectly result from global increase in temperatures. ECS can inform the understanding of long-term changes to the climate and indices given a new point of stability. TCR is more important for understanding warming over the coming decades and provides a better comparison and understanding of the observed historical climate record (Knutti et al., 2017a). But pinning down an exact number or even a suitable range for ECS and TCR remains one of the areas of uncertainty in contemporary climate modeling. As Nijsse et al. (2020) note, climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide is one of the key uncertainties with respect to projections of climate change, and with TCR, this is especially problematic given the role the measurement plays in estimates of the carbon budget relevant for mitigation purposes. The uncertainties associated with measurements of ECS and TCR result from model

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structural uncertainty, for example, through processes’ representations and responses to forcing, as well as system feedbacks. Additionally, scenario uncertainty contributes from various forcing elements such as greenhouse gas concentrations, aerosols, and land use assumptions to achieve a radiative target. With the most recent Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) installation, there was a sharp increase in ECS among many of the participating models. Of the 34 models participating in the experiments, 12 produced ECS measurements higher than 4.5C, with the average above 2.5C (Nijsse et al., 2020). This is to be contrasted with the best estimate interval, according to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, of 1.5 to 4.5C. There have been attempts not only to identify sources within models of the increase in ECS but to further evaluate the measurements using emergent constraints. Analyses of the Community Earth System Model 2 (CESM2), which exhibited an ECS measurement of 5.3C, identified the cause of the increase from the previous model version as representations of cloud feedbacks in the model (Gettelman et al., 2019). The authors of the study specifically note how changes to the model to reduce its sensitivity to aerosols impacted the behavior of cloud feedbacks. CESM2, when evaluated against observations of present climate, demonstrated considerable skill; therefore, an important research question for the modeling endeavor going forward is whether the exhibited high ECS is plausible, given it falls far outside best estimate ranges, with the high end at 4.5C (Stocker et al., 2013). The use of paleo simulations and emergent constraints on ECS can help to determine the degree of confidence in the measurement. Some recent studies, such as those conducted by Sherwood et al. (2020), examined the plausibility of the demonstrated range by producing a probability density function for the sensitivity which pointed to an increase in the lower end of the range to around 2.3C and the inability to rule out the possibility of a sensitivity above 4.5C. The somewhat stronger constraint on the range (low bound of 2.3 as opposed to 1.5) results from the use of multiple lines of evidence that are found to be in agreement but also independent of one another (feedback process understanding, historical climate record, paleoclimate records). Recent work also employs emergent constraints to assess whether the estimated ranges of ECS need to shift in response to the high ECS measurements exhibited in the CMIP6 experiments. Some of these studies follow methods applied to the CMIP5 models, particularly the use of the record of historical warming or paleoclimate data to constrain (Knutti et al., 2017a) or developing constraints related to observed climate trends, such as global temperature variability, for use in ensemble studies (Cox et al., 2018). Another approach has been offered to constrain ECS in CMIP6 models involving the use of assumptions about the emergent relationship between observed warming and climate sensitivity justified by a two-box energy balance model (Nijsse et al., 2020). The researchers found that the likely range for ECS from the CMIP6 models was between 1.9 and 3.4C. The approach using emergent constraints to identify a likely range of measurements is also used to evaluate TCR, which is more easily constrained because it stands in a closer relationship to the rate of warming and can be explicitly determined from the historical record (Tokarska et al., 2020).

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Detection and Attribution of Anthropogenic Climate Change Detection and attribution of climate change is one of the primary uses of climate models. The IPCC (Stocker et al., 2013) characterizes detection studies as being focused on demonstrating that an external forcing, in this case anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, has changed the climate system or a system influenced by climate, in some statistically significant sense, with a change being reported if the chance of the change being due to internal variability is exceedingly small (less than 10%). In short, the statistical tests are aimed at showing the likelihood that a particular event or collection of events would happen in the absence of climate change. A null hypothesis is generally articulated and then tested against observations. But this can be problematic in practice as the differences in defining a null hypothesis can create different conclusions against the same data set (Cohn & Lins, 2005). Uncertainties related to the knowledge of the complexity system and its key processes contribute to the difficulty in articulating null hypotheses or narrowing the range of possible alternatives. Attribution is more specifically focused on identifying the cause of the change once climate change has been detected in relation to an event or series of events. The causes attributed to the change can range from identification of direct cause, such as an increase in average temperatures for a particular region where the event happened, or an indirect cause, such as the increase in severity of wildfires due to changes in the local climate, for example, if climate change has been detected in Arctic regions and is thought to be contributing to species loss and cascading impacts. The question is then what causal mechanisms associated with climate change led to this species loss through changes in habitat, or food sources, or the passing of a climatic threshold they can survive. The first stage of the study would work to attribute the cause of the event to one of these causal mechanisms, say reduction in food source. Then the study would turn to attributing the reduction in food source to an increase in drought in the region because of shifts in precipitation patterns and increased temperatures. Attribution studies, such as the hypothetical one just described, rely heavily on the understanding of the physical processes, their interactions and interdependencies, and their sensitivities to climate change. These studies are thus complicated by the limited knowledge of the inner workings of the complex system’s physical processes and the deficiencies in the models for exploring these features of the system, expressed as structural and parameter uncertainty. Studies of past extreme events, such as the heatwave experiences in spring of 2012 over the Eastern United States, have also been looked at from the perspective of attribution studies (Knutson et al., 2013). Attribution studies of extreme events can provide the opportunity to investigate contributions to findings from another source of uncertainty: methodological uncertainty. Given the variety of different approaches for investigation attribution of extreme events, it is a worthy pursuit to look at the relative merits of different methods. Most recently, Swain et al. (2020) have noted that there is a shared epistemology between researchers involved in extreme-event attribution. The common framework involves the use of a combination of observations, climate model simulations, and statistical techniques to

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delineate the effects of human forcing on the climate system and a counterfactual climate system without human interference. Despite this shared general epistemology, there still remain more specific methodological variations, and the authors call on more work to being done to understand how the results of these studies are dependent on the details of the chosen analytical approach and assumptions employed. Trenberth et al. (2015) also note that results from the studies of the role of anthropogenic climate change on an event can also depend on how the research questions are framed. In a series of case studies on the 2012 extreme events, including heavy rain in Europe and Australia and the record low levels of Arctic Sea ice, researchers were able to provide “insights into the structural uncertainty of event attribution, that is, the uncertainty that arises directly from the differences in analysis methodology” (Peterson et al., 2013, p. S64). One example within this set of case studies is of the analysis of heavy rainfall during the 2012 season over Eastern Australia. One study found that there wasn’t a detectable change from human forcing on the extreme events given natural variability in the El-Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) (King et al., 2013), while another concluded there was an increase in the probability of above-average rainfall from human-caused climate forcing of 5–15% (Christidis et al., 2013). The difference in the results of the studies is a consequence of different choices of methodology and metrics for evaluation. Note that the disagreement between the findings of these studies is limited and the ultimate conclusions across the many forms of analysis were that the events were predominately due to natural variability. The point here is that engaging in multiple different types of attribution analyses of a single extreme event can provide insight into other, often overlooked sources of uncertainty in these types of studies. The plurality of methodological approaches also allows for the identification of model deficiencies and observations, allowing for practitioners to narrow in on sources of uncertainty that need to be addressed to increase the reliability of this category of studies.

Future Climate Extremes There are two particularly important sets of questions about climate change that models are applied to, which have high degrees of societal relevance. These are sets of questions about (1) how extreme events, such as hurricanes, floods, droughts, heatwaves, and tornadoes, will change in the future under anthropogenic climate change and (2) how these extreme events and changes to overall trends and distributions of the climate state will impact different sub-systems and their constituent parts. Questions related to climate extremes and changes in extreme events under a future climate are closely related to questions about future impacts on regional and local systems and communities. How the latter sets of questions are impacted by uncertainty is discussed in section “Future Climate Impacts”. Studies of future climate extremes contain uncertainties resulting from scenario uncertainty and internal variability and feedbacks. Prediction of extreme events is particularly difficult because of this latter set of uncertainties. Climate models might be able to

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indicate an increase in the probability of a certain extreme event; there is still the need to factor in the influence of internal variability independent of the influence of the external forcing. Many studies have attempted to tease apart the relative contributions to extremes through the employment of initial-condition large ensembles, which are able to capture natural variability in the system well (Swain et al., 2020). Studies of past extreme events, such as the heatwave experiences in spring of 2012 over the Eastern United States, have also been looked at from the perspective of attribution studies, as discussed in the preceding section “Detection and Attribution of Anthropogenic Climate Change” (see Knutson et al., 2013; Knutson & Ploshay, 2016). Advances in extreme-event attribution have been made, with some researchers claiming that a previously intractable question about climate change influences on the frequency, probability, and severity of extreme events being “beyond a reasonable doubt” answered at this point (Swain et al., 2020). There are, however, considerable difficulties that still need work, particularly those related to model uncertainty in terms of the process-based physics of models and limitations to historical observations for many geographic locations. The study of extremes within a regional or local framework is complicated by the biases in global climate models resulting from inadequacies in process representation and the uncertainties associated with the climate sensitivity to the external forcing of greenhouse gases. A possible way to address the uncertainties here is by using regional, fine-scale simulations that can represent underlying physical processes that are at play in more specified geographical locations to compliment, or in place of, global studies.

Future Climate Impacts Questions of future impacts range from focus on how changes to precipitation will impact agriculture in the Midwestern United States to how increases in drought and temperature will impact wildfire risk in Australia, to how melting of polar ice sheets will shift habitat ranges of penguins and polar bears. Global climate models, and Earth system models, are often used to provide information to support responses to these questions and act accordingly. However, models do not operate on the spatial scales required to inform how climate will change at local levels. The models present information at a coarser resolution than desirable because of the lack of fine-scale details needed to inform societally relevant assessments. Further complicating the direct use of climate model output is the provision of raw model data to stakeholders. This information can fail to be useful because the models are purposed to investigate global trends and large-scale processes and thus contain biases in the regionally specific output compared to observations. In addition to these inadequacies of climate model output for regionally applied purposes, it is only more recently that climate models have exhibited considerable skill in simulating change on the shorter timescales most relevant for adaptation and impact planning (seasonal to decadal). Yet, there remain substantial issues with these latter simulations due to the uncertainties associated with internal annual and inter-decadal variability.

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To address the resolution mismatch and biases in raw output for regional purposes, scientists engage in the downscaling of global climate model output to construct this form of usable climate information. There are two main types of downscaling: dynamical and statistical. The former relies on the use of higherresolution regional model simulations to output regional and local climate information. These techniques can utilize grid nesting of a higher resolution over certain regions in a global model, with the boundaries of the nested grid being informed by the global simulations run at coarser resolution. Knutson and Ploshay (2016) used dynamical downscaling for CMIP5 projections, in comparison to downscaled products from CMIP3 projections, to investigate potential changes in hurricane activity in the Atlantic. The comparison of downscaled products from two different sets of multi-model projections allowed for the researchers to investigate how sensitivity projections of hurricane activity are to various uncertainties, for example, the largescale changes resulting from global climate sensitivity to external forcings. More recent studies have detailed the global sources of biases for different regions, which provides us with a better understanding of how regional projections might be compromised by uncertainties in the climate’s sensitivity to human external forcing (section “Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity and Transient Climate Response”). Proistosescu et al. (2020) demonstrated that the structure of uncertainty in regional temperature projections in the mid and low latitudes is somewhat simple, being dominated by a single identifiable pattern. The pattern identified is attributed to the large-scale mixing processes in the atmosphere and radiative feedbacks in proximity to the equator. The “analysis suggests that there are limits to how much we can improve regional climate projections by improving representations of regional processes” (Proistosescu et al., 2020, p. 6). Hence, the authors argue that in order to reduce uncertainties in regional projections the focus should be on improving the representation of global patterns and processes, as opposed to increasing model complexity or representational fidelity regionally. The alternative and less computationally expensive form of downscaling relies on the use of statistical methods to determine the relationships between large-scale patterns simulated in climate models and observed local trends for the region of interest. Once a statistical relationship between global trends and local climate metrics has been identified, projections from the climate model are transformed via this statistical relationship to produce local information about impacts. This form of downscaling is said to mitigate the influence of climate model biases on regional information; however, studies have questioned the added value of statistical downscaling. In a study by Lanzante et al. (2018), there is demonstration that although statistical downscaling can add value, there are certain circumstances in which the results of this method contain high degrees of error. This is due to the reliance on an assumption that the relationship extracted based on historical data will hold in the future, i.e., that the underlying physical relationship captured in the statistical relationship will remain unchanged (Dixon et al., 2016). Assessing the adequacy of the assumption is difficult because the future observations that would be needed to validate the application of the relationship to future projections are not available. Lanzante et al. (2018) employ a “perfect model” method to further their investigation

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of these sorts of errors in statistical downscaling products, where high-resolution climate model output is the surrogate for historical and future observations. Despite questions about this method, and the above-identified shortcomings, statistical downscaling methods are less computationally expensive and less operationally complex compared to dynamical downscaling and are therefore preferred by many practitioners in climate science. Analyses of the usability of models for regional purposes given their representational features have also been undertaken. These assess whether the representations of the system within the model are suitable for providing reliable information to answer applied questions. In one such study, Briley et al. (2021) found that the CMIP5 models do not represent the large lakes in the Great Lakes region in the way necessary to capture the impact they have on regional climate. This causes issues in the credibility of the projections for providing usable information for impact studies in this region or other regions where large lakes have influence on regional climate. The authors found there is low fidelity, simplification, or even absence, in the representation of lake-atmosphere-land interactions in the CMIP5 models, which strongly contributes to the deficiencies in projections for these regions. Morrison (2021) characterizes the issue of model usability in terms of a mismatch of representational perspectives, whether it be those occupied by regional models or global models. The mismatch exists between the representational abilities of the model to provide an answer to a research question and the logical form of the research question in terms of the representational values it implies. She recommends greater amounts of transparency with respect to development decisions so that analyses of fit between applied research questions and model representational perspectives can be utilized. Given absent representations in individual models of key processes, another approach seeks to guide users in the selection of a subset of the members of the multi-model ensembles that maintain the key properties that are relevant to the research question (Herger et al., 2018). There are also discussions of how regional models can add value to long-term climate projections when the research questions at issue rely on fidelity in process representations that are absent in global models (Lloyd et al., 2020). Regional models are run at higher resolutions and can therefore represent important climate and weather processes at a much finer scale. As an example, when there are questions about impacts of future climate change in locations with highly variable terrain, such as mountainous regions or coastlines, regional climate models are better for these purposes as they are able to better resolve the topography of a region than a global model operating on a resolution of 100–200 km (Lloyd et al., 2020). To combat uncertainty in regional and local impact assessments informing adaptation responses, there are also frameworks for evaluating the quality of scientific statements and estimates of climate change, where one source of information is climate model output. Pacchetti et al. (2021) focus on assessing the quality of regional climate information in terms of the type of evidence and the relation between evidence and scientific statement. Quality is understood in this context in terms of reliability and more specifically is related to how reasonable it might be to believe a credible statement or estimate is being made with societal consequences. It

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is to be assessed across multiple dimensions, i.e., diversity, completeness, theory, adequacy for purpose, and transparency. One important feature of their argument about quality assessments of regionally specific information obtained from scientific studies is that “this knowledge cannot only be derived from the output of ESMs” (2021, p. 477). Additional lines of evidence should be taken into account, along with expert judgment, theory, and observation. Hence, to reduce the impact of modelborne uncertainty in knowledge about regional and local climate impacts, Pacchetti et al. (2021) recommend heavily supplementing, or even replacing, model output with information from other sources.

Scientific Responses to the Challenges of Model Uncertainty Climate scientists have developed a number of approaches for investigating and responding to the different sources of model uncertainty. This section describes some of the commonplace practices for addressing model-based uncertainties both in the model itself and in simulations and related outputs. Also discussed are some of the emerging practices in climate modeling, in particular the use of model hierarchies to both develop model components and reduce structural and parameter uncertainty and evaluate model performance. The chapter concludes with a description of the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence to alleviate some of the challenges in modeling related to sources and investigation of uncertainties, as well as the high computational expense of running a high number of simulations.

Model Ensembles Ensembles are one of the primary ways scientists investigate and respond to uncertainty in climate models. Interestingly, the use of multi-model ensembles can be justified by appeal to philosophers’ arguments that it is fruitful to use a plurality of representations to investigate a complex system since any single representation, or model, will fail to describe all important elements of the system (see discussions in Morrison, 2021). There are a variety of different ensembles that can be performed: multi-model ensembles, single-model large ensembles, and perturbed parameter ensembles. Each type of ensemble study responds to a different source of uncertainty in climate models. Multi-model ensembles are meant to be responsive to the difficulties of employing comprehensive uncertainty quantification strategies to long-term climate projections and structural uncertainty. Perturbed parameter ensembles address parameter value uncertainty, and large ensembles respond to initialcondition uncertainty and the challenges of internal variability and uncertainty stemming from initial conditions. One of the largest multi-model ensembles is the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP). Tebaldi and Knutti (2007) define a multi-model ensemble as “a set of model simulations from structurally different models, where one or more initialcondition ensembles are available for from each model” (p. 2055). In the early

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justifications for engaging in multi-model ensemble studies, the main motivation is to explore the uncertainties contained in each model’s approximation of the system that are intrinsic to the choices made during its construction. The impacts of these choices for model formulation can be explored in perturbed parameter ensembles, but only in a limited manner (discussed more below). These studies also allow the science community to get a handle on whether the results of simulation are a consequence of some individual element of the particular model. CMIP aims at providing coordination in the design of experiments to simulate the past, current, and future climate. The most recent iteration of the project makes use of several common experiments, known as the DECK (Diagnostic, Evaluation, and Characterization of Klima) and a historical simulation from pre-industrial periods to the present that are standardized and run on all participating models. The standardization of experiments and framework for the evaluation and dissemination of output and characterizations of ensembles allows for researchers to engage in multi-model and ensemble output analyses to understand the origins and consequences of systematic biases in the models. The ensembles sample initial condition, structural, and parameter uncertainty across the models and allow for studies of the Earth system sensitivity to external forcings that can respond to the uncertainties that contribute to a single model’s projections (Eyring et al., 2016). These multi-model ensembles produce incredibly large data sets that that can be used to investigate future climate under a number of different scenarios. There are a variety of issues that have been identified with multi-model ensembles that impact the understanding gained from them, such as model dependence, bias, and tuning (Tebaldi & Knutti, 2007). A particular issue with multi-model ensembles, which has informed some of the positions in the philosophical debate on robustness, discussed below, is the assumption that models participating in the ensemble studies are independent. Independence, however, is questionable, as Masson and Knutti (2011) demonstrated by constructing a “family tree” of models contributing to the CMIP. The family tree documents the similarities between the models participating in the ensemble analyses, where similarity is characterized in terms of modelsimulated fields. The study found that there are greater degrees if similarity between models that share code than those do not and that models from the same institutions, or different institutions that use the same atmospheric component, also have greater degrees of similarity (Masson & Knutti, 2011; see also Knutti, 2010 and Knutti et al., 2013). The authors maintain that these observed similarities are a consequence of how models, through their historical evolution, have common ancestors, from which they are modified by exchange of information and code within the greater community. Parker (2011), touching on this issue, argues that this lack of independence entails that the models participating in multi-model ensembles cannot be understood as constituting a random sample of the space of possibilities. There have been attempts to develop frameworks for weighing models (e.g., Knutti et al., 2017b). Sanderson et al. (2017) develop a weighting strategy that looks at the skill in climatological performance of models over North America and the interdependency among models as a consequence of there being common parameterizations and tuning practices. The weights applied to models are used to compute

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a weighted mean and significance information from an ensemble where the members are considered co-dependent but vary in skill. The results of the application of the weighting scheme show that for variables such as temperature and precipitation, the change in projections is moderate. More comprehensive weighting schemes, like those used by Knutti et al. (2017b) which employ more targeted metrics, have more impact on confidence assigned to ensembles for projecting future patterns of change than the simplified scheme adopted in the Sanderson et al. study. But, returning to Parker’s (2011) argument, this strategy might fall short, as there is no way to determine what the space of possibilities might be, and model weighting schemes cannot respond to this conceptual problem. Wimsatt and Wimsatt (2007) characterizes robustness analyses as “the use of multiple independent means to detect, derive, measure, manipulate, or otherwise access the entities, phenomena, theorems, properties, and other things we wish to study” (p. 37). Robustness analyses take up a variety of different approaches for the study of an object or system of interest. In the context of climate modeling, this can be interpreted as the use of multiple representations (models) of the complex target system or the use of different types of instruments and evidence (models, theory, observations, etc.). Weisberg (2006) has also characterized a view of robustness from Levins, who discusses it in the context of biology. On this view, when a researcher is faced with multiple models of a phenomenon of interest, there is a need to divorce the reliable predictions from the errors that result from the assumptions employed by different models. To achieve this, a researcher will engage in a comparison across the plurality of models to identify the overlap or common prediction they all share. With respect to robustness in the context of climate modeling, Lloyd (2009, 2015) has argued for a conceptualization that combines model fit, independent support for model assumptions, variety of evidence, and multi-model agreement. When these various criteria are met, it warrants an increase in the confidence for robustness of the causal structure for a collection of models of the same model type. In simpler terms, agreement among models can be combined with independent support for the models participating in the ensemble, and when both criteria are satisfied, confidence can be assigned to the climate hypotheses the models seek to provide evidence for. Parker (2009, 2011) disagrees, arguing that robustness should not give us confidence in a climate hypothesis, but it can possibly provide evidence for hypotheses about the models. More recently, Winsberg (2021) has argued that the best way to understand a variety of evidence in climate science is to employ an explanatory conception of robustness. O’Loughlin (2021) argues that the explanatory robustness discussed by Winsberg (2021), Schupbach (2018), and Lloyd’s conception of robustness are complementary and that elements of Lloyd’s account can be used to supplement the idea of explanatory robustness to make it better fit with observations of climate modeling practice. Initial-condition large ensembles are used to investigate the internal variability of the climate system. As discussed in the complementary chapter by Morrison and Lawrence (Understanding Model-Based Uncertainty in Climate Science, this volume), uncertainty connected to internal variability is challenging for detection and

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attribution and understanding and prediction of climate extremes (see sections “Detection and Attribution of Anthropogenic Climate Change” and “Future Climate Extremes”). Some large ensembles aim to explore and isolate the uncertainty from internal variability by creating “an ensemble of simulations with a single model under a particular radiative forcing scenario, applying perturbations to the initial conditions of each member to create diverging weather and climate trajectories” (Deser et al., 2020). The forced response can then be inferred by averaging across the members of the single-model ensemble. This strategy assumes that the unpredictable internal variability in the system will be “randomly phased” between the individual members of the ensemble, such that the average will isolate the impact of the forcing from the range of internal variability (Deser et al., 2020). Studies aimed at partitioning uncertainty in projections into contributions for the various sources of uncertainty have also made use of the individual model large ensembles. These studies use results of the large ensembles from multiple models to evaluate assumptions in earlier studies (see Hawkins & Sutton, 2009) concerning the forced changes in climate mean and variability (Lehner et al., 2020). The final sort of ensemble, which is less common in climate modeling practice, is the perturbed parameter ensemble. These ensembles are aimed at exploring and quantifying the uncertainties from parameter values. In these studies, a single model is run a number of different times with different choices in parameter values to gauge the sensitivity of the model to changes in these values and investigate ranges for loosely constrained variables based on how different values impact model behavior. These studies are not only computationally expensive but also limited in that a single model cannot adequately explore all of the possible ways a parameterization can be designed, let alone all the values that can be attributed to its terms. Machine learning has recently been adopted as a means to better explore and quantify parameter uncertainty without the computational expense (see section “Machine Learning”).

Alternative Model Pluralisms Parker (2006), Lenhard and Winsberg (2010), and Walmsley (2020) have all offered analyses of model pluralism in climate science, pointing to the perceived benefits, but also real deficiencies in the practice of modeling. Parker (2006) maintains that the existing plurality of models results, to some extent, from the scientific uncertainty concerning how to best represent processes and interactions in the climate system. The different models, to navigate this uncertainty, employ different, incompatible assumptions, resulting in what she terms ontic competitive pluralism, whereby “two models incorporate conflicting assumptions about the part of the world that they are intended to represent” (p. 362). Despite this competition, models are engaged also in pragmatic integrative pluralism, where different accounts of the system are brought together in practice to provide estimations of how uncertainty in representations of the system relates to uncertainty in knowledge about future climate change. The use of model pluralities allows practitioners to better evaluate

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their epistemic situation, as seen in the case of the MIPs and other multi-model ensemble analyses described above in section “Model Ensembles”. Lenhard and Winsberg (2010) doubt the ability of model pluralism to provide insight into sources of model success or model error, which feeds into additional doubt about the effectiveness of efforts to provide quantitative measures of uncertainty. For Lenhard and Winsberg, models suffer from confirmation holism and analytic intractability or the inability to develop an analytic understanding of models and attribute their success or failure to their constituent parts. This prevents us from determining whether reductions in the uncertainty associated with model structure or parameters are responsible for improvements in model performance. This analytic impenetrability is due to enormous size and complexity of models, the distributed epistemic agency, and the fact that past methodological choices are generatively entrenched in the model. This latter feature of models refers to how models have a historical character and are path dependent, meaning that past decisions made during development influence and determine future decisions. An additional consequence is skepticism about the possibility of model unification or convergence, as the inability to attribute the successes and failures of models to their particular parts will prevent us from ever constructing a “perfect” model. Walmsley (2020) is equally skeptical about the value of pluralism of the same types of models – coupled climate models – and instead argues more attention should be paid to developing model pluralism across models with differing complexity. Revisiting the criticism of multi-model ensembles offered by Parker (2011), he claims that using these ensembles to address structural uncertainty is not the best path forward, as the plurality of models contributing to the analyses is not systematic or independent, but better understood as “ensembles of opportunity.” Following the lines of argument described in the previous section “Model Ensembles,” agreement between models thus might not provide evidence of genuine robustness. Walmsley asserts more fruitful analyses that are not plagued by the problems infecting traditional ensembles could result from using a plurality of models that exist along a model hierarchy. In this type of plurality, models have varying degrees of complexity, from those simple models at the bottom of the hierarchy to the much more complex models at the top. Additionally, models of different types, such as data-driven models and dynamical models, can be used. These types of model pluralities can better contribute to independent determination and causal isolation robustness analyses. The use of different model types in an ensemble study would strengthen independent determination and causal isolation robustness analyses by supplying a framework for the “systematic variation of assumptions in model families” (Walmsley, 2020). Recently, Morrison (2021) has offered an interpretation of models in terms of representational perspectives, wherein the pluralism in climate modeling is best understood as a plurality of representational perspectives of a complex target system. This reconceptualization of the plurality of models can provide us with resources to further analyze model differences by utilizing approaches to cross-perspectival assessment and by investigating model disagreement in terms of negative complementarity within the model physics. The utility of cross-perspectival assessment has already been demonstrated in instances where different model types are used to reduce the uncertainty in process understanding and inform development of convection schemes

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that capture the structure and patterns of mesoscale systems in nature (see Moncrieff, 2019; Moncrieff et al., 2017). Negative complementarity consists of individual models in a plurality compensating for representational deficiencies of other models with their higher-fidelity representations for particular processes. Interestingly, the phenomenon of negative complementarity can provide insight into why the average in multi-model ensembles is in better agreement with observations than any individual model, as deficiencies or uncertainties in one model are responded to by another with better representation of key processes (see, e.g., Knutti et al., 2010 and Weigel et al., 2010). While this might be the case for certain process in models, such as with respect to land processes, the idea is not applicable to features in models such as cloud processes, as these representations are poor across all models. Jebeile and Crucifix (2021) also argue for a reconceptualization of pluralism in their thinking about how the science can design ensembles using the multiple models available to help manage the values introduced by individual models (see chapter by Morrison and Lawrence, “Understanding Model-Based Uncertainty in Climate Science”, this volume). These development decisions have led to inequality across the models, in that they more accurately represent features of one regional climate as opposed to another and thus are not well equipped to answer impacts and other questions for certain regions. The authors reconceptualize the pluralism of models in the multi-model ensembles as a “diverse set of representative viewpoints informed by expert judgments” (2021, p. 125). This reconceptualization of model pluralism puts us in a position to intentionally design a system that will allow us to sample a collection of models that represent the relevant diversity of viewpoints to answer climate questions in a more epistemically equitable manner. Model pluralism provides us with the resources to engage in this value management, given the right choices of which individual to sample for a specific question.

Benchmarking An extension of the multi-model intercomparison projects is the development of benchmarking frameworks and programs across modeling communities. These efforts are to establish a community agreed upon set of defined standards for measuring the performance of models at simulating a number of processes, responses, and variables. Luo et al. (2012) define benchmarking as “a standardized evaluation of one system’s performance against defined references (i.e., benchmarks) that can be used to diagnose the system’s strengths and deficiencies for future improvements” (p. 3858). Interestingly, the practice of benchmarking has been used in other disciplines, such as economics, computer science, business, and engineering. The authors of the previously mentioned study provide an example of how benchmarking has been used in business to provide a systematic approach for improving products by way of examining, understanding, and ultimately employing the practices and processes at use in other companies. In the context of climate modeling, the practice is needed for the sake of evaluating models against observations to identify uncertainties and provide direction for model improvement (Luo et al., 2012).

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The International Land Model Benchmarking (ILAMB) effort was initiated for just this reason, such as to address systematic model errors (uncertainties) in model structures and parameters, which arise when key dependencies within the system being represented are absent or not described correctly (Hoffman et al., 2017; see also Collier et al., 2018). Comprehensive benchmarking studies can help reveal where these structural errors are in the model physics that cannot be addressed through parameter optimization (Abramowitz et al., 2007). These studies are useful for these purposes because of how they can carefully examine the behavior of a model from a multitude of perspectives using a collection of metrics that quantify model performance across spatial and temporal scales relevant for the processes being evaluated (Luo et al., 2012). Developing an objective, effective, and reliable set of benchmarks for use across the community is thus one of the most important aspects of this practice. Benchmarks for evaluation meet this criterion by reflecting the fundamental properties of the system, the model targets, and are derived from data products that are synthesized to reflect real-world processes represented in the models. Hence, one of the additional aims of these benchmarking efforts is to develop a robust network of multi-instrument observations. Hoffman et al. (2017) note that the appropriate use of observations remains one of the key challenges when engaging in these activities, as there is a mismatch between models and measurements available, poor characterization of observational uncertainty, and biases in reanalysis data that might be used to supplement raw observations. A recent activity akin to benchmarking for the models participating in CMIP has demonstrated immense value for understanding the merits and deficiencies of individual models to answer different categories of climate questions. Fasullo (2020) presents an objective approach for assessing the skill of coupled climate simulations across different models using the CMIP archives and comparing the model output for different metrics against satellite and reanalysis data sets for the same time period. The study scores model simulations for skill in simulating mean state (temperature and precipitation), seasonal and interannual timescales, energy budget, water cycle, and system dynamics. These types of analysis provide information to users on which models, based on skill across different variables, will provide the best choice to answer their specific questions. This is especially valuable given one model cannot do well at simulating all features of interest of the target system. For example, certain models might be better purposed to evaluate changes to El Niño under future climates, and this analysis can provide insight into which models those might be based on the scores assigned. These efforts can contribute to the evaluation of the model in terms of adequacy for purpose. Additionally, these evaluations of skill across the models for different simulations can inform efforts to design optimized model ensembles for targeted applications (Fasullo, 2020).

Paleo-Reconstructions Out-of-sample testing of models is another practice within the climate modeling community that is used to explore sources and the effects of structural uncertainty in the models. These types of studies are described as analyses of a model where data is

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used to evaluate the model in conditions that are different than the conditions that were used to develop the model, such as the observations from the twentieth century. Running paleoclimate simulations using state-of-the-art models whose development has been informed by present-day observations is a traditional example of this practice. It is incredibly useful to employ models to simulate past climates, as this can contribute to confidence in their ability to simulate a future climate, which cannot be entirely evaluated based on a model’s performance when simulating the current climate. The Community Earth System Model (CESM2) recently engaged in a paleoclimate simulation of the Last Glacial Maximum. One of the main purposes of the study was to investigate whether the high ECS exhibited by the model (section “Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity and Transient Climate Response”) was realistic (Zhu et al., 2022). Another goal of the study was to investigate the cause of the increase in ECS. The study demonstrated that the high ECS is likely unrealistic, as the model simulation was inconsistent with observations for the Last Glacial Maximum, where the model exhibited excessive cooling for the period which is inconsistent with data extrapolated from proxy sources. Exploration of the reasons for the excessive cooling exhibited in simulations identified particular sensitivity of the climate to the way in which cloud microphysics processes are treated in the model physics. Zhu et al. (2022) found that changes to this feature of the model’s physics both reduced ECS and brought the model simulation into better agreement with proxy data. This study in particular articulates the utility of using simulations of past climate to evaluate the model behavior and in particular scrutinize structural uncertainty.

Machine Learning The employment of machine learning and artificial intelligence to address model uncertainty is the most recent in practice response. Rasp et al. (2018) explain how machine learning can be used to improve on deficient representations in climate models, such as those related to clouds. Cloud-resolving models are able to represent, with much higher fidelity, the processes that in global models contribute considerable uncertainty. These cloud-resolving models, however, cannot be run at the timescales necessary for answering climate questions because of the computational expense. By training a neural network on a model that explicitly represents convection and using this network to replace the sub-grid parameterizations, modelers can address the uncertainties associated with inadequate representations of key processes. Similarly, O’Gorman and Dwyer (2018) have used machine learning to parameterize moist convection in climate models. The representation of moist convection contributes significant uncertainty to models, but by training a statistical model to represent these processes based on high-resolution output that better represent the processes, some of the uncertainty associated with the simplified descriptions can be addressed. Kawamleh (2021) is skeptical of the use of neural networks to replace parameterizations in models, as these do not represent the physical processes of the climate

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system either directly or indirectly. This lack of representation of the physical processes that are key for simulating the climate undermines the reliability of a model’s projections, as there are cases in which the models that contain machine learning parameterizations fail to exhibit skill outside of the data used to train the model parameterization. This failure is attributed to the lack of processes’ representation and the limitations of using a neural network which simply maps the relationship between input and output variables given a data set and does not capitalize on information about why the relationship exists between the variables. Another application of machine learning is to use emulators to dramatically reduce the computation expense of large and perturbed parameter ensembles. Dagon et al. (2020) designed and implemented a machine learning approach for the sake of calibrating a subset of parameters that control biophysical features of the terrestrial system such as hydrology and carbon uptake in a land model. The use of machine learning allowed the researchers to better explore and better understand how different parameters and the values assigned to them play a role in land model uncertainty. After identifying important biophysical parameters to which the model is sensitive, the group used model results from a perturbed parameter ensemble to train a neural network to emulate a subset of output in the model. The neural network predicts metrics for carbon and water fluxes given the parameter values as inputs. The benefit of using this approach is that there is less computation expense, as neural network is trained to emulate the dynamics of the system and allows the exploration of a great set of possibilities for the parameterizations than could be achieved through model simulations. To cut down on the computation expense associated with initial-condition large ensembles, Castruccio et al. (2019) trained a stochastic generator to create a statistical model from which a more extensive sample of variability in regional trends could be taken.

Concluding Remarks Despite the considerable challenge of uncertainty in climate modeling, the science is not in an epistemically insecure position. Not only is questioning the reality of climate change not justified, but there are no good reasons to maintain skepticism about certain impacts and the need to adapt to a warming world in addition to mitigating. While models contain many sources of uncertainty, they still have an important role to play in helping us to understand and further explore the various climate trajectories the world is committed to given current activities. The models also have an important role to play in informing decisions at the regional and local scales; however, their place is as one source of information among many (see Pacchetti et al., 2021). Models continue to improve in their ability to represent a variety of important phenomena for investigating climate change, and this is likely to continue to be the case since as computational power improves, more complex models can be run at higher resolutions. As the collection of models evolves individually, close attention should be paid to what purposes they are being developed for and maintain transparency about their adequacies and uncertainties,

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especially for applied purposes such as informed decision-making. As they evolve as a plurality, following Jebeile and Barberousse (2021), there ought to be consideration for balancing the desire for a reduction in model spread with the value of increasing model independence, where independence is of value for answering a more extensive collection of research questions serving a diversity of purposes.

Cross-References ▶ Abrupt Climate Changes and Tipping Points ▶ Climate Change, Uncertainty, and Policy ▶ Climate Models and Robustness Analysis – Part I: Core Concepts and Premises ▶ Climate Models and Robustness Analysis – Part II: The Justificatory Challenge ▶ Climate Research and Big Data ▶ Understanding Model-Based Uncertainty in Climate Science

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Climate Models and Robustness Analysis – Part I: Core Concepts and Premises Margherita Harris and Roman Frigg

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Model-Based RA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Articulating Core Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Independence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Agreement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Establishing the Premises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Premise of Step 1: Finding the Robust Property . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Premise of Step 2: Finding the Common Structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Premise of Step 3: Understanding Robust Theorems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Robustness analysis (RA) is the prescription to consider a diverse range of evidence and only regard a hypothesis as well-supported if all the evidence agrees on it. In contexts like climate science, the evidence in support of a hypothesis often comes in the form of model results. This leads to model-based RA (MBRA), whose core notion is that a hypothesis ought to be regarded as well-supported on grounds that a sufficiently diverse set of models agrees on the hypothesis. This chapter, which is the first part of a two-part review of MBRA, begins by providing a detailed statement of the general structure of MBRA. This statement will make visible the various parts of MBRA and will structure the discussion in the remainder of the chapter. The chapter explicates the core concepts of M. Harris (*) London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] R. Frigg Department of Philosophy, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_146

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independence and agreement, and it discusses what they mean in the context of climate modeling. The statement shows that MBRA is based on three premises, which concern robust properties, common structures, and so-called robust theorems. The chapter analyzes what these involve and what problems they raise in the context of climate science. In the next chapter, which is the second part of the review, an analysis of how the conclusions of MBRA can be justified is provided. Keywords

Robustness analysis · Model ensemble · Climate models · Model agreement · Independence · Truth plus error hypothesis · A priori approaches · A posteriori approaches · Common structure · Decompositional strategy · Scrutability · Robust theorems

Introduction In his discussion of justification, Wittgenstein (1953, §265) tells the story of an imaginary fool who buys several copies of the morning paper to assure himself that what it said was true. The fool’s instinct to check his information against further sources is laudable, and yet the fool is obviously mistaken because, as Wittgenstein insists, “justification consists in appealing to something independent.” To assure himself that a particular story in the morning paper was true, the fool should have diversified his evidence. In the first instance, he should have checked other newspapers, making sure they were from different publishers and positioned on different parts of the political spectrum. In a next step, he should have checked news outlets other than newspapers, and he should have consulted the direct communications of news agencies. If the reports from these diverse sources all essentially said the same thing, then he would have been justified in regarding it as true. In nuce, robustness analysis (RA) is the prescription to avoid the fool’s mistake by considering a diverse range of evidence and only regard a hypothesis as well-supported if all the evidence agrees on it. The maxim to diversify evidence wherever possible is a fixture of the scientific method (Staley, 2004), and RA is therefore often motivated by appeal to experimental practice. Schupbach, for instance, introduces RA with the example of Brownian motion (2018, pp. 275–77). Brownian motion is the random motion of particles suspended in a medium. It is named after botanist Robert Brown, who first described the phenomenon in 1827 when observing pollen particles suspended in water. Brownian motion is nowadays regarded as a general feature of all matter, which is due to the particles being pushed around when colliding with the molecules of the medium. To establish this conclusion, it wasn’t enough to look at Brown’s pollen particles. Brown himself repeated the experiment first with several different kinds of pollens and then also with various inorganic materials. Physicists then continued to vary circumstances by using different containers, different media, different light to observe the particles, and so on. The phenomenon was regarded as real only once it was detected in all these cases – that is, once it was shown to be robust across a wide

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range of physical circumstances and means of observation. Robustness is intended to rule out that the phenomenon only occurs under specific circumstances, or that it is an artifact of the means of observation available. (For discussions of this case that differ from Schupbach’s, see, e.g., Mayo (1986), Psillos (2011), Chalmers (2011), and Hudson (2020)). In the case of Brownian motion, the evidence for the phenomenon is experimental. Such cases are important, but they are no longer the only game in town. In numerous contemporary scientific contexts, the evidence in support of a hypothesis comes from scientific models, and, following the imperatives of RA, a hypothesis is regarded as well-supported on grounds that a sufficiently diverse set of models (in this context referred to as a model ensemble) agrees on it. This line of reasoning is called model-based RA (MBRA). Examples of MBRAs are readily to hand. It has been applied to justify results in cosmology (Gueguen, 2020), economics (Kuorikoski et al., 2010), ecology (Weisberg, 2006), population genetics (Plutynski, 2006), environmental risk analysis (Sprenger, 2012), and, indeed, climate science. Leduc et al. note that “[a]greements between climate change projections from several models are often interpreted as predictors of confidence” (2016, p. 8302) and Pirtle, Meyer, and Hamilton review the literature on climate modeling and report that “a rough survey of the contents of six leading climate journals since 1990” yields “118 articles in which the authors relied on the concept of agreement between models to inspire confidence in their results” (Pirtle et al., 2010, p. 353). In general terms, models are representations of a target system, in the case at hand the world’s climate (see Frigg and Hartmann (2020) for a general discussion of scientific models, and Frigg, Thompson, and Werndl (2015b) for a discussion of climate models). But systems like the world’s climate are far too complex to be represented fully and truthfully in a model, which is why models always offer representations that are simplified, abstracted, idealized, and distorted in one way or another. Yet, proponents of MBRA submit that model-agreement is epistemically significant and that results that are robust across a sufficiently diverse set of models should be regarded as well-supported. Tebaldi et al. (2011, p. 1) are explicit about this when, in the context of a discussion of future climate projections, they note that “[t]he idea is that if multiple models, based on different but plausible assumptions, simplifications and parameterizations, agree on a result, we have higher confidence than if the result is based on a single model, or if models disagree on the result.” So even though each model in an ensemble has its shortcomings, the fact that they all agree on a conclusion is taken to be boost confidence in it. In Levins’ by now proverbial formulation, the idea is that “our truth is the intersection of independent lies” (Levins, 1966). But why is this? That is, why should the fact that a number of models, each deficient in its own ways, agree, provide a warrant for regarding the agreed-upon proposition to be well-supported? This is the core question that a philosophical reflection on MBRA has to answer. The aim of this two-part review is to address this question, with a particular focus on climate models. This chapter is Part I of the review. Section “Model-Based RA” provides a detailed statement of the general structure of MBRA. This statement will make visible the various parts of MBRA and

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will structure the discussion in the remainder of the chapter. Section “Articulating Core Concepts” explicates the core concepts of independence and agreement, and discusses what they mean in the context of climate modeling. The statement in Section “Model-Based RA” shows that MBRA is based on three premises, which concern robust properties, common structures, and so-called robust theorems. Section “Establishing the Premises” analyzes what these involve and what problems they raise in the context of climate science. Section “Conclusion” provides a brief conclusion. In the next chapter, which is Part II of the review, an analysis of how the conclusion of MBRA can be justified is provided.

Model-Based RA MBRA is a form of inference, and to understand how MBRA works, one has to understand what its inference pattern is. The most influential recent analysis of MBRA is Weisberg’s (2006), who introduces it with the example of the Lotka–Volterra model of predator prey interaction. It is therefore helpful to briefly review Weisberg’s discussion to get to a general formulation of MBRA, and then note that this formulation equally applies to climate models. Consider the fish in the Adriatic Sea. They can be sorted into a population of prey and a population of predators, which have sizes Vand P, respectively. Since predators eat prey, the time evolutions of the population sizes are related. Their relation can be represented in a model that is based on two coupled first-order differential equations, the so-called Lotka–Volterra equations: V_ ¼ rV  ðaV ÞP and P_ ¼ bðaV ÞP  mP, where r is the birth rate of the prey population, m is the death rate of the predator population, and a and b are linear response parameters. This is the Lotka–Volterra model. An analysis of the model shows that the populations in it have the so-called Volterra, namely that a general biocide (the uniform reduction of all species) favors prey in the sense that after introducing the biocide the number of preys grows and the number of predators shrinks (Weisberg, 2006, p. 735). Further analysis shows that the model has a feature known as negative coupling, namely that increasing the number of predators decreases the number of preys and increasing the number of preys increases the abundance of predators. Finally, one can show that in this model the following holds: if the system is negatively coupled, then it has the Volterra property. The question now is whether these features of the Lotka–Volterra model are also present in real populations of fish in the Adriatic Sea. That is, can one assert that the predator and prey populations in the Adriatic Sea have the Volterra property and negative coupling, and that in that population the former is brought about by the latter? This is where MBRA enters the scene. Weisberg (2006), and later Weisberg and Reisman (2008), consider alternative models: a family of models whose equations are the same as in the original Lotka–Volterra model but where the parameters have different values; then a model whose equations are the Lotka–Volterra equations with a density term added, and finally an individual-based model which represents individual organisms and their behaviors rather than describing the

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populations at an aggregate level. The result of this modeling exercise is a model ensemble consisting of four models (setting aside the protracted but ultimately inconsequential question of how one counts models that differ only in their parameter values). One can then show that all these alternative models still have the Volterra property and negative coupling, and hence that in the class of models that make up the ensemble the following holds: if the system is negatively coupled, it has the Volterra Property. Hence, these features are robust in the ensemble in the sense that all models in the ensemble have them. This is Weisberg’s motivation for calling the Volterra property the robust property R; for saying that negative coupling is the common structure S of the models in the ensemble, and for dubbing the proposition that (ceteris paribus) S brings about R a robust theorem. The punch line of MBRA is that the fact that these features hold in all models in the ensemble is taken to warrant the belief that all (or at the very least some) of those features also hold in the target population, the fish in the Adriatic Sea, because the models in the ensemble are sufficiently independent. In this instance, according to Weisberg, MBRA is taken to establish the truth of the proposition “under conditions C, negative coupling brings about the Volterra property.” The proviso “under conditions C” is added to make explicit the fact that this regularity is supposed to hold only ceteris paribus. If, for instance, the prey population catches a disease that greatly reduces the number of preys, then the robust theorem may cease to hold. The general inference pattern of MBRA can be summarized as follows (Frigg, 2023, Sec 15.3): Assume as given a model ensemble Ω consisting of sufficiently independent models that all represent target system T. Step 1: Robust property Premise 1 – Ensemble-Robust-Property: all models in Ω have property R. This property is called the “robust property.” Conclusion 1 – Target-Robust-Property: T has R. Step 2: Common structure Premise 2 – Ensemble-Common-Structure: all models in Ω have structure S. This structure is called the “common structure.” Conclusion 2 – Target-Common-Structure: T has structure S. Step 3: Robust Theorem Premise 3 – Model-Robustness-Theorem: in all models in Ω it is the case that, under conditions C, S brings about R. This proposition is called the “robust theorem.” Conclusion 3 – Target-Robustness-Theorem: under conditions C, S brings about R in T. Lloyd (2010, Sec. 5) discusses MBRA and points out that it is a suitable way of looking at climate models. She considers an ensemble of 14 climate models and then notes that the property of having increasing global mean surface temperature is robust in the ensemble because it is exhibited by all models. This is the robust property R. The models also all have a common core which consists of physical

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principles which describe the interaction of increasing greenhouse gas emissions with the earth’s energy balance. This is the common structure S. Furthermore, an investigation of the models shows that an increasing concentration of greenhouse gases brings about increasing global mean surface temperatures. This is the robust theorem. Lloyd does not comment on the conditions C, but presumably these are conditions that rule out major interference from other factors (such as a large-scale volcanic eruption). This is the place to add some qualifications to the above general scheme. First, at this point, nothing is assumed about the ensemble Ω beyond the fact that its models are sufficiently independent. Specifically, it’s not assumed that Ω is large or complete (in some relevant sense), or that the models in it are well-confirmed. Note, however, that there is an interesting connection between the choice of Ω and the formulation of the conditions C in the robust theorem, because the conditions under which the theorem holds will depend on what is covered by the models in Ω. In essence, the larger the spectrum of scenarios that are covered by the models in Ω, the less restrictive C will be. This is a point that is often not sufficiently stressed in discussions surrounding the epistemic import of robustness analysis, especially when it comes to the conclusion in Step 3. Indeed, it is often assumed that one can talk about the conclusion of Step 3 without any reference to the conditions C under which the theorem is supposed to hold – see, e.g., Kuorikoski et al. (2010) and Schupbach (2018). But without such clarification the empirical content of the robust theorem remains unspecified. Second, rather than construing the argument as one that establishes conclusions in a categorical way, one can see it as increasing the confidence in the propositions in the conclusions. Indeed, this is how the core idea of MBRA has been summarized in the quotes by Leduc et al. and Tebaldi et al. in the previous section, and it is also how Baumberger et al. (2017) and Parker (2011) formulate the approach. On this reading, the conclusions in the three steps don’t make the categorical statement that T has R, but instead establish that a statement is well supported (or at least that it is better supported than it was prior to having carried out the MBRA). The conclusion of Step 1, for instance, could then be the statement that one has increased confidence that T has R. The issues that are discussed in what follows are independent of whether conclusions are formulated categorically or in terms of increased confidence. The categorical formulation is used for simplicity; readers can always substitute the confidence formulation if this is their preference. Third, Step 3 ensures that there is a genuine connection between S and R, and that it is not just a coincidence that systems that have S also have R. However, the notion “bringing about” is vague, and deliberately so. What notion exactly is appealed to will depend both on the context (negative coupling will bring about the Volterra property in a way that is different from how the exposure of a human body to high levels of radiation brings about cancer) and on one’s philosophical commitments (such as one’s views on causation and laws of nature). At a general level, MBRA need not commit to a particular notion of bringing about, and a relevant notion can be introduced in specific cases.

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Fourth, the above scheme, which involves three steps, is what one might call a complete template of MBRA. Depending on the problem at hand and one’s research question, only parts of the scheme may be of interest. For instance, one may only want to establish that a system has property R while not being interested in identifying a structure S and connecting that structure to R in a robust theorem. If so, then one only carries out Step 1. An example of such case is a study by Seager et al. (2007) in which they aim to establish through model agreement that the Southwestern United States will experience increased aridity and drought over the next one hundred years. In another scenario, it may be the case that it is known empirically that T has R, which makes Step 1 obsolete and a robustness analysis will focus on Steps 2 and 3. An example of such case is Vicedo-Cabrera et al.’s (2021) attribution study which used pairs of factual–counterfactual ensemble runs of daily mean temperature between 1991 and 2018 from ten general circulation models, to conclude that 37% of the heat wave deaths across 43 countries from 1991 to 2018 were attributable to human induced climate change. Here the heat wave deaths are taken as given and one tries to show that they are (partly) attributable to the common structure of climate physics plus increases in greenhouse gases. In yet other cases, one may just be interested in Step 3 and aim to establish the connection between S and R, while leaving it open whether a particular system has either of the properties. An example of such case is Kuorikoski et al.’s (2010) application of MBRA to a family models in geographical economics in which they aim to establish the following robust theorem: “Ceteris paribus, if firms benefit from economies of scale, goods are costly to transport, and there are both immobile and mobile activities, spatial agglomeration occurs when economies of scale are high, market power is strong, and transportation costs are low” (2010, p. 557). MBRA raises three issues, and these will be the subject matter of this two-part review. The first issue concerns the proper articulation of the basic notions in MBRA. In particular, what does it mean for models in an ensemble to be sufficiently independent and what does it mean for models to agree? This will be discussed in Section “Articulating Core Concepts.” The second issue concerns how the premises are established. How can one show that all models in the ensemble have the property R, and all models have a common structure S, and that S brings about R? For MBRA to get off the ground, one has to know that the premises are true, or at the very least have evidence to support them. The problem of how to establish the premises is discussed in Section “Establishing the Premises.” The third issue is the validity of the inferences drawn. The transition from the premises to the conclusion amounts to a transition from what Smith calls model-land (2007, p. 135) to the real world: the premises make assertions about the model ensemble and the conclusion concerns the target system. It is obvious that none of the inferences are deductively valid: in each step it is possible for the premise to be true while the conclusion is false. What, then, justifies the inference from the premises to the conclusions? This is a thorny issue, which is discussed in the second part of this two-part review.

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Articulating Core Concepts MBRA is based on two core notions: independence and agreement. This section looks at different articulations of these notions in the context of climate modeling.

Independence As has become clear in Section “Model-Based RA,” a crucial ingredient in MBRA is independence. So the first question that arises is: what does it mean for models to be independent? There are at least three different interpretations of independence that have been discussed in the climate literature, and the distinction between them is significant in many respects. Broadly they can be characterized as follows: 1. Under the first interpretation, “the assumption of independence is equivalent to the interpretation that each model approximates the real world with some random error” (Knutti et al., 2010, p. 2745). This is often referred to as the truth plus error hypothesis (or the truth plus error paradigm). 2. Under the second interpretation, the degree of independence is determined by the amount of divergence between models’ outputs independent of observations (Abramowitz & Gupta, 2008), or by the degree of correlation of observed model errors (Bishop & Abramowitz, 2013; Sanderson et al., 2015). Approaches of this kind are referred to as a posteriori approaches. 3. Under the third interpretation, the degree of independence is determined by the degree of shared formulation in the models. Hence, under this conception of independence models are classified “based on the independence of their structure” (Abramowitz, 2010). Approaches of this kind are referred to as a priori approaches. Notice that under the first interpretation, independence is not a matter of degrees. In other words, under the first interpretation models are either independent or they are not. By contrast, under the second and third interpretations, models can be more or less independent, and what one is interested in is the extent to which they are. These interpretations are discussed in the remainder of this section. Under the first interpretation, what it means for models to be independent is that their errors are independent and identically distributed (typically assumed to be normally distributed with zero mean). As Knutti et al. (2010, p. 2745) note, many Bayesian methods that are used to interpret the results from multimodel ensembles rely on the assumption that the truth plus error hypothesis is true, and according to Leduc et al. (2016, p. 8302), “the truth-plus-error paradigm remains the most widely used technique for processing multimodel ensemble.” However, as Annan and Hargreaves (2017) point out, if the truth plus error hypothesis were true, it would have remarkable consequences:

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Although it has not generally been explicitly stated, even a small ensemble of samples drawn from such a distribution would be an incredibly powerful tool. If we could sample models from such a distribution, then we could generate arbitrarily precise statements about the climate, including future climate changes, merely by proceeding with the model-building process indefinitely and taking the ensemble mean. This would obviate the need both for computational advances and also for any additional understanding of how to best simulate the climate system. (2017, pp. 212–13)

As an example of the impact of the error plus truth hypothesis, consider the figure below taken from Knutti et al. (2010), showing various probability density functions obtained using a Bayesian method developed by Furrer et al. (2007), which relies on the truth plus error assumption. The graph shows that the uncertainty in the true value of the temperature change (i.e., the width of the probability density function) decreases substantially as the number of models included in the ensemble increase from 4 to 21 models (Fig. 1). Despite the fact that many Bayesian methods that are used to interpret the results derived from multimodel ensembles rely on the truth plus error hypothesis, there are reasons to doubt that it is applicable to actual model ensembles. The problem is that models’ errors are often correlated, and that the mean of an ensemble does not converge to the truth when the number of models in an ensemble increases, as one would expect if the error plus truth hypothesis were true. Knutti et al. (2010), for instance, show that the errors of the models’ results in the CMIP3 are strongly correlated and that the mean of the CMIP3 does not asymptotically converge to observations. But crucially, the knowledge that climate models often share many simplifications, limitations and assumptions should already provide enough of a reason to suspect that this assumption is not appropriate in the first place, as many have noted (see, e.g., Knutti et al. (2010) and Bishop and Abramowitz (2013, p. 886)). Under the second interpretation, independence is measured in terms of the amount of divergence between models’ outputs. Specifically, “the proximity of GCMs results or of their errors is used to quantify a posteriori their interdependencies” (Boé, 2018, p. 2772). A posteriori approaches can be further divided into ones that assume that the level of dependence reflects only the amount of divergence of model outputs independent of observations, and ones that also take agreement of model outputs with observations into account. An instance of the former is Abramowitz and Gupta’s (2008) measure of independence, which assesses independence solely on the divergence of outputs independent of observations: the closer the models’ outputs under similar input and initial conditions, the more dependent they are. Annan and Hargreaves (2017, p. 213) object that “this approach has the potential weakness that models that agree because they are all accurate will be discounted, relative to much worse models, without any allowance being made for their good performance relative to reality.” However, Abramowitz and Gupta (2008, pp. 3–4) note that “to choose the best model ensemble, we must consider both the independence and performance of

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Fig. 1 Probability density functions for annual global temperature change (for a particular period and under a specific scenario) obtained by Knutti et al. (2010) with Bayesian method developed by Furrer et al. (2007), for 4, 10, and 21 models

potential ensemble members” (emphasis added) and that “choosing model weights for an ensemble is then a process of deciding on a performance measure (or aggregation of performance measures) and then using a weight description that values performance and independence in an appropriate ratio.” So this does seem to be a possible reply to Annan and Hargreaves’s concern. However, there nonetheless remains a question about how performance relative to reality is integrated into Abramowitz and Gupta’s approach, which, as stated, only takes divergence of outputs into account. Abramowitz et al. present a stronger objection when they argue that “inter-model distances alone in the absence of observational data are an incomplete proxy for model independence” (2019, p. 95). According to them, when models perform well (i.e., model-observation distances are relatively small) they should not be considered dependent even if their outputs are similar (since their outputs are all close to observations). Essentially, this is because “an ideal definition of model dependence

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would only include variability in process representations that are not tightly observationally constrained” (ibid., p. 94). However, if models’ outputs are similar merely because the models perform well, then it seems unlikely that the similarities across models’ outputs reflect similarities in the sections of models’ representation that are not tightly constrained by observations. If this is right, then measures of independence that rely on intermodel distances alone in the absence of observational data are clearly inadequate. To address this concern, other a posteriori approaches assume that the level of dependence is a function of the level of model error covariance or error correlation (Collins et al., 2011; Bishop & Abramowitz, 2013). As Abramowitz et al. (2019, p. 95) note, these approaches have “the advantage that ‘error’ only reflects deviations from an observational product (rather than similarity in model outputs per se)” and hence it is perhaps more reasonable to assume that “differences in the structure of error between models are likely to reflect differences in the sections of model representation that are not tightly constrained by observations.” However, despite this advantage, these more sophisticated a posteriori approaches are not immune to general concerns that apply to all a posteriori measures of independence. Indeed, as Pirtle et al. (2010, p. 354) remark, all a posteriori measures of independence “essentially treat models as black boxes, ignoring the causal reasons for disagreement between models. It is possible that two models could agree with respect to outputs despite their having different causal assumptions, but such a result, using this approach, would falsely indicate model ‘dependence,’ because these models would yield the same output despite the fact that they make different and possibly conflicting claims about the underlying mechanisms.” Similarly, Annan and Hargreaves (2017, p. 218) worry that “[p]airwise similarity between model outputs may arise through convergence of different approaches to understanding the climate system, and not merely through copying of ideas, and this would not indicate any dependence as defined here. [. . .] We do not believe that coincidentally similar behaviour should be penalised by downweighing of these models, as it may represent a true ‘emergent constraint’ on system behaviour.” And Abramowitz et al. (2019, p. 98) worry about the sensitivity of a posteriori dependence measures “to the choice of variable, constraining observational data set, metric, time period and the region chosen.” A posteriori approaches are seen as pragmatic approaches to quantifying intermodel dependencies, and the underlying hope is that the proximity of models’ results or model error correlations are good proxy measures for model interdependencies (i.e., the similarities in the way the models represent the world and its causal structure). However, the objections discussed cast doubt on whether a posteriori approaches to quantifying intermodel dependencies are really fit for purpose. In light of this, some scientists argue that intermodel dependencies should be assessed using a priori approaches instead, where “the independence of models is judged a priori, based only on the knowledge of their codes, and not of their results” (Boé, 2018, p. 2772). However, a priori approaches are still very much in their infancy. A very basic a priori approach is the “institutional democracy” proposed by Leduc et al. (2016). In contrast to the popular but highly criticized “one model, one vote” approach (Knutti,

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2010), under institutional democracy models that come from the same institution (i.e., the same modeling center) are assumed to be fully dependent if they lead to equivalent projections and hence are considered as a single model when their signals are statistically indistinguishable (but not otherwise). The motivation behind this approach is that “[c]limate models developed within a given research group or institution are prone to share structural similarities” (Leduc et al., 2016, p. 8301) and hence institutional democracy could be used as a proxy for quantifying intermodel dependences. However, many have found the institutional democracy approach unsatisfactory, since models can have significant similarities despite not being from the same modeling center and hence “deciding whether or not two GCMs are independent based on their institutions is just a first step. A better knowledge of how code similarity impacts GCMs[’] results is needed to go forward” (Boé, 2018, p. 2772). Annan and Hargreaves (2017) propose a general account of independence that is determined a priori in terms of the anticipated outputs of the models. According to them, two models should be considered independent if a researcher’s subjective belief about a possible outcome of one of the models in the ensemble is not affected by learning an output of the other model. However, this assessment of independence is extremely subjective, and they only show how it is supposed to work in cases where all the researcher knows is the model’s institution. Boé (2018) has recently proposed using the number of shared components by GCMs as a proxy for model independence, where each GCM is characterized by its four key components: atmosphere, ocean, land surface, and sea ice models. However, Boé acknowledges that this approach “is still crude and has some limits” (ibid., p. 2777). For a start, determining whether two components are different is not a trivial exercise and is bound to be rather subjective. Indeed, Boé relies on the version numbers of the GCMs’ components to determine whether two components are different, but as Abramowitz et al. note “it is unlikely that the approach to version numbering is consistent across modeling centers, meaning that two components might be very different even if they share a major version number, or vice versa” (2019, p. 94). Furthermore, as Boé (2018, p. 2777) notes, different versions of a component “often share identical parameterization schemes and are therefore themselves not independent.” Another issue that Boé points out is that “the impact of tuning is not considered. Some components may be considered ‘identical’ in this work but use different parameters, which may be a source of important differences. A better documentation of tuning in GCMs would be necessary to go further” (Boé, 2018, p. 2777). Finally, as Abramowitz et al. (2019, p. 100) remark, “Boé’s approach quickly becomes difficult and time consuming for large ensembles such as CMIP, given the lack of transparency regarding precisely what constitutes different models and the role of tuning.” And furthermore “shared history as it pertains to dependence should only include process representations that are not tightly observationally constrained (so that Navier–Stokes equations might not represent dependent process treatment, for example)” (ibid., 100), which might further complicate things. Overall, although a priori approaches to measure intermodel dependencies may intuitively seem more promising, they clearly face considerable challenges.

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Indeed, there is currently no scientific consensus on how to measure intermodel dependencies.

Agreement Agreement seems to be a simple concept, but on closer examination it turns out that different and often incongruent notions of agreement are at work in climate modeling. It is common to regard “agreement” and “robustness” as interchangeable (Parker, 2011, p. 580). It pays to note, however, that some climate scientists (e.g., Pirtle et al. (2010)) assume that for a model result to be robust the models not only have to agree on it, but they also have to be sufficiently independent from one another. This usage is set aside in the remainder of this chapter. Even if one were willing to set aside the challenges (discussed in the previous subsection) that arise when one tries to identify an adequate account of model independence, a discussion of the epistemic import of robustness analysis becomes significantly more difficult if one muddies the waters by including some notion of epistemic significance in the definition of robustness. A key consideration when formulating a definition of robustness in climate science is how many models must agree on a result for it to be deemed robust. While the most straightforward notion of robustness would require all models to agree, this notion is not universally accepted. Almazroui et al. (2016, p. 164), for instance, define an increase (or decrease) in the projected signal “to be robust if at least 66% of the models agree in the direction of change.” By contrast, Screen and Blackport (2019, p. 11410) define “a robust response as being when nine or greater (of the eleven) models depict individual responses of the same sign as the ensemblemean response.” In yet other cases, robustness is assumed to be a noncategorical notion, where “the greater the number of models in agreement, the greater the robustness” (Field et al., 2012, p. 131). This draws attention to an important question that arises when defining robustness in climate science: is robustness best thought of as a categorical notion? If so, how many models have to agree on a result for it to be considered robust? If not, how can the notion of robustness be understood in a noncategorical way, and is robustness comparable across different model ensembles and different results? Another important aspect of a definition of robustness in climate science has to do with what it takes for models to agree in the first place. One approach might be to consider a particular range of possible results and ask: do all (or most) of the models agree on this range of possible results (where the range in question can be determined even after looking at the models’ individual results)? If the question is answered affirmatively, then that range is considered robust. This is how Baumberger et al. (2017, p. 9) seem to understand robustness when they write that “[a] model projection is robust if all or most models in the ensemble agree regarding the projection. If all models in an ensemble show more than a 4 C increase in global mean surface temperature by 2100 when run under a certain forcing scenario, this projection is robust.”

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Alternatively, one might define model robustness without reference to a range of possible results. Ukkola et al., for instance, regard “projections as ‘robust’ when the magnitude of the multimodel mean future change exceeded the intermodel standard deviation of the change” (2020, p. 4). This is a very different understanding of robustness, and its application is limited to answering the question of whether a particular change (e.g., an increase in mean precipitation or an increase in the frequency and duration of seasonal meteorological drought) is robust. Under this approach, the question is no longer whether a range is robust, but rather whether the mean of the models’ results is sufficiently large (i.e., larger than the intermodel standard deviation). This implies that even if most of the models show more than a 4  C increase in global mean surface temperature by 2100 when run under a certain forcing scenario, if the mean of the models’ results is not greater than the intermodel standard deviation, then the models’ results would not be considered robust. Notice further than under this approach, the greater the magnitude of the multimodel mean future change, the more spread out the models’ projections are allowed to be before the change is deemed not to be robust. The rationale behind this definition of robustness is not entirely clear and gives rise to several questions. To begin with, why should the focus be on the multimodel mean to determine whether model projections are robust? In other words, why is the multimodel mean the relevant variable here, rather than, say, an unequally weighted mean or another variable altogether? Indeed, if models are dependent, then it is unclear why the multimodel mean is a meaningful variable to consider in the first place. At the beginning of this section, a decision was made against including a notion of epistemic significance in the definition of robustness, and it is important to note that the focus on the multimodel mean is a choice that disagrees with this maxim by at least implicitly relying on a model democracy approach, and that this is certainly not the only choice available. Furthermore, why should this mean be greater than one intermodel standard deviation rather than, say, two standard deviations? These questions must be asked to highlight the fact that this approach to defining model robustness relies on several not obviously natural choices. Tebaldi et al. (2011, p. 1) make a distinction between a lack of signal and a lack of information due to model disagreement and “categorize three levels of multimodel agreement: 1) the majority of models agree that future changes will be statistically significant and of the same sign 2) the majority of models show significant change but in opposite directions and 3) most of the models show no significant change. The basic idea is that testing for model agreement is only meaningful if the models are producing significant changes, i.e., changes outside of internal variability” (ibid., p. 4). This categorization clearly has profound consequences for how one determines whether a result is robust. For instance, as Tebaldi et al. remark, “in contrast to popular belief, model agreement of future precipitation change is greater than currently thought. Only few places in the world show significant changes of opposite sign in different models” (ibid., p. 4). It is also worth noting that, under this approach, the extent of the assessed agreement may be affected by the choice of method used to assesses the natural variability of the system (since this might affect whether one deems a change in the model to be statistically significant).

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Each of these three approaches defines robustness in a different way, and hence could lead to a different assessment of robustness in any given case. The fact that scientists have not agreed on a definition of robustness adds a layer of complexity to investigations into the epistemic import of model robustness in climate science.

Establishing the Premises This section discusses the question of how to establish the three premises of the general inference pattern of MBRA presented in Section “Model-Based RA.”

Premise of Step 1: Finding the Robust Property To justify the premise of Step 1, one must establish that all models in an ensemble of models Ω have property R. But what kind of ensemble of models should one consider? There are three kinds of ensembles in climate science that are worth discussing: perturbed parameter ensembles, multimodel ensembles, and initial condition ensembles. These three kinds of model ensembles are explored through different techniques. Studying a perturbed parameter ensemble requires scientists to vary the parameters in the model and check whether, and if so how, the desired results change. This is simple in theory, but it is often difficult to do in practice. The number of parameters may be large, and equations may not be solvable analytically. In such cases, scientists have to resort to computer simulations and run multiple versions of the same model, where each version incorporates a different set of parameter values. But no amount of simulation results can explore the full range of parameter values, and there will always be gaps. These gaps are particularly significant if models are large and computationally costly to explore. Contemporary climate models, for instance, have hundreds of parameters and yet the available computational infrastructure only allows scientists to make a comparatively small number of runs, which results in large parts of the parameter space remaining unexplored. For instance, HadCM3, a global climate model on which the UK’s official climate policies were based until a few years ago, has hundreds of parameters (leading to billions of combinations of values), and yet the results communicated to policy makers were based on less than 300 model runs, only 17 of which were runs of the full model (for a discussion of this case, see Frigg, Smith and Stainforth’s (2013, 2015a)). Understanding how changes in model parameters affect the model result of interest in the face of difficulties like these has turned into a scientific discipline in its own right, namely sensitivity analysis. Philosophical discussions of sensitivity analysis can be found in Bokulich and Oreskes’ (2017, Sec. 41.6) and Raerinne’s (2013, Sec. 2); its place in the broader edifice of RA is discussed in Justus’ (2012, p. 801) and Weisberg and Reisman’s (2008, p. 115). For a technical discussion, see Saltelli, Tarantola, Campolongo, and Ratto’s (2004).

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Things get even more complex when one turns to multimodel ensembles. The purpose of such ensembles is to evaluate whether a result is robust under structural changes to the model. This involves changing the substantial modeling assumptions and the mathematical structure of the model. Such stability is required because if a model is idealized and it turns out that a result vanishes when idealizations are removed or changed, then the result is not epistemically significant. Fletcher (2020) traces the demand for stability back to Duhem and Maxwell, and then discusses topological notions of stability in dynamical systems; for further discussions of that kind of stability, see Frigg, Bradley, Du, and Smith’s (2014) and Frigg and Smith’s (2022). Making good on this intuition is a challenging task. Unlike in the case of perturbed parameter ensembles, where the problem is to establish results about a well-defined ensemble, the problem now is how to define the ensemble to begin with. In the example discussed in Section “Model-Based RA.” Weisberg and Reiman considered a small multimodel ensemble consisting of three models and then studied each model individually. But what justifies this choice? Why these three models? Why not an ensemble of four, or five models, or an ensemble with a larger, or even infinite, number of models? In climate science, multimodel ensembles often include considerably more than three models. Phase 6 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Projection (CMIP6), for instance, includes over 100 models (PCMDI, 2022). However, no matter how large ensembles may be, they are nonetheless “ensembles of opportunity” (Tebaldi & Knutti, 2007; Parker, 2013) because the selection of models to be included in these ensembles is neither systematic nor standardized, and models are not constructed to sample the existing uncertainty. Rather, what models are included in any given multimodel ensemble will ultimately depend on contingent factors such as what state-of-the-art models are currently available and whether a modeling group is willing and able to do the requested simulations. The third type of model ensembles, initial condition ensembles, is one in which the initial conditions of a model are perturbed, and what is studied is how the result responds to this perturbation. In this context, there is an important distinction between predictions and projections that is worth mentioning, for it affects the interpretation of an initial ensemble. Predictions are claims about the actual evolution of the climate system based on current initial conditions. Whereas projections are claims about the response of the climate system to external forcing scenarios based on possible initial conditions where the system has at least partially adjusted to the external forcings a t0 (where t0 is some point of time during the preindustrial period). Hence, whereas for prediction an initial ensemble is interpreted as estimates of the actual initial conditions, for projections an initial ensemble is interpreted differently, namely as potential initial conditions at preindustrial times. In the climate literature, it is often assumed that when it comes to projections, initialcondition uncertainty is not very important. For instance, Tebaldi et al. (2007) state that “[i]nitial condition uncertainty is most relevant for the shortest time scales. Weather is chaotic, and predictions are sensitive to the value of observations used to initialize numerical models [. . .] Long-term projections of climate change are typically averaged over decades and often across several ensemble members, and are

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thus largely insensitive to small variations in initial conditions.” Indeed, it is common practice to only consider very few initial states per model (often only one to five, and rarely more than ten). However, initial uncertainty might be more important. Werndl (2020) has recently argued that there is little if any justification for the claim that projections are independent of the details of the initial ensemble, and research does suggest a much larger number of initial conditions are needed to reliably estimate projections (see for instance, Daron and Stainforth (2013) and Deser et al. (2012)).

Premise of Step 2: Finding the Common Structure The task of establishing that the models in the ensemble have a common structure (as required by the premise of Step 2) can be broken down into two subtasks: (a) say what it means for there to be such a structure and (b) state how it can be found. Regarding (a). One way in which models in an ensemble can have a common structure S is it being the case that every model Mi in the ensemble can be decomposed into a core and a set of idealizations: Mi ¼ S & Ii, where i is an index that ranges over all the models in the ensemble. The crucial aspect here is that while idealizations are particular to each model (hence the index for the idealizations Ii), the structure S must be common to all models. Rice calls this the “decompositional strategy” and argues that it is a dead end: “many of our best scientific models cannot be decomposed in the ways required by the decompositional strategy” (Rice 2019, p. 180). The contributions of S to a model’s output cannot be isolated from the contributions of the contributions of Ii because the two are inextricably intertwined and they collaborate to produce the model’s output. The idealizations are introduced to render the basic mathematical frameworks applicable, and they often distort difference-making features. Hence, there is no such thing as the contribution of the idealization that can be isolated from the result of the core (ibid., pp. 189–95). This is a serious worry and those who wish to perform an RA on a given ensemble will have to argue that the models at stake do not face the issue Rice describes. But even if this were possible and decomposition would not be an in-principle limitation, there still remain practical obstacles, which relates to (b): saying how to find the common structure. Few ensembles will consist of models whose structure naturally decomposes into a core and idealizations, and different models may even be formulated in different mathematical frameworks. It is then a challenge to find a core structure that they all have in common. Weisberg and Reisman’s (2008) ensemble is one case in point. The models use different formalisms and isolating negative coupling as the common structure involved much more than just watching out for shared elements in the mathematical formulation of the models. Weisberg (2006, p. 738) recognizes this difficulty and notes that “[s]uch cases are much harder to describe in general, relying as they do on the theorist’s ability to judge relevantly similar structures.” Even if one has faith in theorists’ ability to do so, certain cases may present insurmountable obstacles. Justus (2012, pp. 802–03) discusses the case of climate models and points out that these large computational structures are

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opaque, and that the sheer number and complexity of equations involved undercuts any attempt to duplicate the kind of analysis that Weisberg and Reisman were able to carry out on the relatively simple models of the predator–prey system. This brings raises the issue of scrutability. According to Justus (2012, p. 802), determining that the models in an ensemble have a common structure requires that the models’ structure and dynamics be “scrutable.” One could interpret this as the claim that the models have to be totally scrutable: one has to know and understand every detail of their structure. But is this necessary? Can “partial scrutability” be enough? For instance, one can certainly scrutinize climate models to the point that one knows that all of them have increasing concentration of greenhouse gases. Could this suffice to identify a common structure? Lloyd (2015, p. 62), for instance, seems to think so when she writes that “despite this model variation, all the models in this model family share a core representation of greenhouse gases (GHG) as a radiative cause. We can consider this the common causal core shared by this entire GHG model-type under consideration” (emphasis added). However, as will become clear shortly, this may be requiring too little by way of scrutability. But then a question naturally arises: if one does not think one has to go all the way to full scrutability, how much scrutability does one need to be able to identify a common structure in a model ensemble? According to Katzav (2014, p. 230), “some false assumptions that are shared by all the GCMs in question play a crucial role – the models would not run without them – in generating model successes.” But then it seems clear that partial scrutability of the kind required by Lloyd in her identification of a common structure is not enough. For if Katzav is right, one would, at the very least, need enough scrutability to identify as part of the common structure the false assumptions that are responsible for the models’ successes. This, in turn, gives rise to two concerns. First, as Katzav remarks, this may not always be possible for “[w]e will often have good reason to conclude that some shared climate model assumptions are wrong without being able to identify which are wrong” (ibid., p. 230). Second, even if one had enough scrutability to determine all the false assumptions that should be identified as part of the common structure, the very fact that the common structure would include some false assumptions is problematic. For in such cases, one would know that the conclusion of Step 2 of the general inference pattern of MBRA presented in Section “Model-Based RA” is false, and hence it would no longer be clear what the epistemic role of Step 2 is. In sum, when it comes to the premise of Step 2, there remain question marks about the identification of a common structure both in principle and in practice.

Premise of Step 3: Understanding Robust Theorems As noted when discussing the Volterra Principle, the formulation of the relevant conditions of the robust theorem, which is an important part of Step 3, is a formidable problem. The problem is linked to the issues concerning the construction

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of multimodel ensembles. If the structure of the models in the ensemble is fully understood, and if it could be shown that in all these models S brings about R, then one would probably have at least some idea about what goes into C. But since a full characterization of models in the ensemble often remains elusive, it is unsurprising that formulating the relevant criteria remains a hard nut to crack. But even if the content of C was known, there would be the further worry that C might include unrealistic assumptions about the target system. Suppose, for instance, that it was unknown that the Volterra principle is insensitive to density dependence. In this case, one could not assume that the Volterra principle concerns any system with density dependence, no matter how small. But a Volterra principle which concerns only predator–prey systems with no density dependence at all is not a theorem about the actual world, because any real system is bound to have some density dependence. To give another example, if it is unknown whether or not the Volterra principle is sensitive to predators’ and preys’ responses to seasonal fluctuations, one cannot assume that the Volterra principle concerns predator–prey systems in a seasonal environment. And yet virtually all real-world biological populations live in a seasonal environment. Arguably, this might be the very worry that underlies Weisberg’s recommendation to collect “a sufficiently diverse set of models so that the discovery of a robust property does not depend in an arbitrary way on the set of models analyzed” (2006, p. 737). But this is insufficient to put the worry to rest. For no matter how diverse the set may be, if all the models in the ensemble involve a particular unrealistic assumption about the target system despite differing in many other respects, there is no justification for not including that unrealistic assumption in C. But if C ends up including even just one unrealistic assumption about the target system, the robust theorems end up being inapplicable to the actual world, and this renders them useless for explaining or predicting real-world phenomena.

Conclusion This chapter has introduced the structure of MBRA and analyzed its core concepts and premises. The discussion showed that the articulation of these concepts raises important questions, and that establishing the premises is a formidable task. But the most serious challenge still lies ahead: justifying the inferential step from the premises to the conclusions. None of the three inferential steps that occur in MBRA are deductively valid. But the use of a deductively invalid inference pattern needs a justification, assuring its users that at least in the instances in which it is used, the conclusions drawn are nevertheless correct. This is the topic of Part II of this review.

Cross-References ▶ Climate Models and Robustness Analysis – Part II: The Justificatory Challenge

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Climate Models and Robustness Analysis – Part II: The Justificatory Challenge Margherita Harris and Roman Frigg

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 The Justificatory Challenge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 Top-Down Justifications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 Bottom-Up Justifications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 The Likelihood Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 Independence Approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 The Explanatory Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101

Abstract

Robustness analysis (RA) is the prescription to consider a diverse range of evidence and only regard a hypothesis as well-supported if all the evidence agrees on it. In contexts like climate science, the evidence in support of a hypothesis often comes from scientific models. This leads to model-based RA (MBRA), whose core notion is that a hypothesis ought to be regarded as well-supported on grounds that a sufficiently diverse set of models agrees on the hypothesis. This chapter, which is the second part of a two-part review of MBRA, addresses the thorny issue of justifying the inferential steps taking us from the premises to the conclusions. The chapter begins by making explicit what exactly the problem is. It then turns to a discussion of two broad families of justificatory strategies,

M. Harris (*) London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] R. Frigg Department of Philosophy, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_147

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namely top-down and bottom-up justifications. In the latter group, one can distinguish between the likelihood approach, independence approaches, and the explanatory approach. This discussion leads to the sober conclusion that multimodel situations raise issues that are not yet fully understood and that MBRA has not yet reached a stage of maturity. Important questions remain open, and these will have to be addressed in future research. Keywords

Robustness analysis · model ensemble · model agreement · independence · common structure · climate model · top-down justification · bottom-up justification · likelihood approach · independence approach · reliability independence · confirmational independence · explanatory approach

Introduction The core idea of robustness analysis (RA) is the prescription to consider a diverse range of evidence and only regard a hypothesis as well-supported if all the evidence agrees on it. In many contemporary scientific contexts, the evidence in support of a hypothesis comes from scientific models. This leads to model-based RA (MBRA), whose core notion is that a hypothesis ought to be regarded as well-supported on grounds that a sufficiently diverse set of models agrees on the hypothesis. A general statement of MBRA is as follows (Frigg 2023, Sec 15.3): Assume as given a model ensemble Ω consisting of sufficiently independent models that all represent target system T. Step 1: Robust property Premise 1—Ensemble-Robust-Property: all models in Ω have property R. This property is called the “robust property.” Conclusion 1—Target-Robust-Property: T has R. Step 2: Common structure Premise 2—Ensemble-Common-Structure: all models in Ω have structure S. This structure is called the “common structure.” Conclusion 2—Target-Common-Structure: T has structure S. Step 3: Robust Theorem Premise 3—Model-Robustness-Theorem: in all models in Ω it is the case that, under conditions C, S brings about R. This proposition is called the “robust theorem.” Conclusion 3—Target-Robustness-Theorem: under conditions C, S brings about R in T. Part I of this review analyzed the core notions of independence and agreement, and it discussed what it would take to establish the premises. The current chapter, Part II of the review, addresses the thorny issue of justifying the inferential steps leading from the premises to the conclusions. Section “The Justificatory Challenge”

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makes explicit what exactly the problem is. One can distinguish between two broad families of justificatory strategies, namely top-down justifications, discussed in section “Top-Down Justifications,” and bottom-up justifications, discussed in section “Bottom-Up Justifications.” Section “Conclusion” assesses the success of MBRA and highlights alternative ways of dealing with multimodel situations.

The Justificatory Challenge There is a justificatory problem because the inferences linking the premises and the conclusions in each step of the general inference pattern of MBRA are not deductively valid: at each step it is possible for the premise to be true while the conclusion is false. But the use of a deductively invalid inference pattern needs a justification, assuring the user that at least in the instances in which it is utilized, the conclusions drawn are nevertheless correct. One might be inclined to dismiss this as a philosophical nicety. Inductive inferences are not deductively valid either, but one might say that worries about whether one can infer from the fact that the sun has risen every morning in the past that it will also rise tomorrow (Hume, 1748/2007) are for exhilarated philosophical minds and can be safely set aside by practicing scientists. Whatever one’s views on Hume’s problem of induction, the justificatory problem for MBRA is not like that, and it is one that should worry practitioners. Talking about econometric models, Cartwright formulates the worry thus: Now here is the reasoning I do not understand: “Econometrician X used a linear form, Y a log linear, Z something else; and the results are the same anyway. Since the results are so robust, there must be some truth in them.” But [. . .] we know that at the very best one and only one of these assumptions can be right. We may look at thirty functional forms, but if God’s function is number thirty-one, the first thirty do not teach us anything. [. . .] I agree that it is a coincidence that they all find the same results. But I do not see what reason we have to assume that the correct explanation for the coincidence is that each of the instruments, despite its flaws, is nevertheless reading the outcome correctly. (1991, 154)

And worries about MBRA are not confined to the philosophical literature. Climate physicist J. Räisänen also draws attention to it: The risk that the uncertainty in the real world exceeds the variation between model results is obvious: even if all models agreed perfectly with each other, this would not prove that they are right. From a more physical perspective, some authors have argued that the differences between the parametrization schemes used in existing models do not cover the actual uncertainty in the representation of subgrid scale processes. (2007, 9)

So the challenge is: how can one justify the inference from facts about models to facts about the world? The following sections will discuss and assess two distinct approaches that have been taken to address this justificatory challenge: top-down justifications and bottom-up justifications.

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Top-Down Justifications Top-down justifications aim to justify the inferential step by appeal to properties of an entire model ensemble. These approaches contrast with bottom-up justifications, which are approaches that do not rely on ensemble properties and see confirmation as coming from individual models, one at a time. Top-down approaches are discussed in this section; bottom-up approaches are the focus of section “BottomUp Justifications.” Orzack and Sober address the justificatory challenge and give a negative answer: MBRA cannot be justified. To reach this conclusion, they distinguish three cases (1993, 538). The first case is one in which “we know that one of a set of models [Ω] is true, but we do not know which” (ibid.) where, by a model being “true,” they mean that the model represents T accurately in the relevant respects. This option is also discussed in the climate modeling literature, although in a probabilistic version (cf. the second qualification in section “The Justificatory Challenge”). Baumberger et al. (2017), for instance, state that “[a]n inference from robustness of projections to their likely truth is legitimate if we have reasons to assume that it is likely that at least one model in the multimodel ensemble correctly projects the quantity of interest within the specified error margin” (2017, 10; see also Parker, 2011, 584). Orzack and Sober’s second case is that Ω is known not to contain the true model: each model in Ω is false. Their third case is that it is unknown whether Ωcontains the true model. Orzack and Sober argue that it is obvious that the second and the third options fail to support the relevant inferences. In the second case, this is because “[i]f we know that each of the models is false (each is a “lie”), then it is unclear why the fact that R is implied by all of them is evidence that R is true” (ibid.). In the third case, this is because “[i]f we do not know that one of the models is true, then it is again unclear why a joint prediction should be regarded as true” (ibid. 538–39). Let us turn to the first option. The problem with the first case is different from that with the second and third cases. Orzack and Sober admit that under the assumption of the first case the inference is valid because a result is robust if all models in Ω agree on the result, and if Ω contains the true model, then all models agree on the truth, and therefore, the robust result is true. Their worry is that this scenario is unrealistic. First, it is far from obvious why a true model should be part of Ω to begin with, given that models typically involve simplifications and omissions. Second, even if one were lucky enough to have an ensemble that contained the true model, one would rarely, if ever, be in the situation to know this to be the case. Whether this point holds depends on other characteristics of the ensemble. Orzack and Sober discuss the case where Ω is the ensemble that scientists have de facto constructed. Under this assumption, their argument is hard to refute. But let us now change the scenario and assume that the ensemble is a complete ensemble Ωc, an ensemble that contains every possible model of T. This is of course an entirely hypothetical scenario, but it’s worth asking the question whether MBRA would be justified under this strong assumption. There are several worries about justifying MBRA by appeal to Ωc. The first is that it is unclear what this ensemble would be and how it should be circumscribed. What

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would the complete class of all models of the earth’s climate be? Answering this question would amount to spelling out the mathematical form of every possible climate model and explicating how the relevant equations represent the climate. One need not have an overly pessimistic outlook on climate modeling to come to the conclusion that this is an entirely unrealistic endeavor. But even if Ωc could somehow circumscribed, it is unlikely that this would be of any use. An ensemble of all possible models will also contain models that are misrepresentations of the climate (see Frigg & Nguyen, 2020, Ch.1, for discussion of misrepresentations). But misrepresentations will disagree with accurate representations on certain features, and these may well include R and S. So it is to be expected that R and S are not actually robust properties in Ωc. In response to this worry, one could change the hypothetical scenario and say that the relevant ensemble is the one that contains all models of T that have certain empirical credentials. Call this ensemble Ωce. Indeed, in his reply to Orzack and Sober, Levins stressed the fact that a relevant ensemble must be an ensemble of models with empirical credentials (1993, p. 554). Likewise, Weisberg emphasized that the models in the ensemble must have what he calls “low-level confirmation” (Weisberg, 2006, p. 740). It is precisely the fact that models in the ensemble enjoy a degree of confirmation that makes them relevant. This raises three sets of questions: (a) how should low-level confirmation be understood?, (b) does Ωce warrant the relevant inferences?, and (c) is there any chance of working with Ωce in practice? As regards (a), Weisberg (2006) argues that what justifies the inferential step in MBRA is what he calls “low-level confirmation.” Low-level confirmation essentially means that the models in the ensemble get certain basic features or properties about the system right. Writing about the ecological models that were introduced in Part I, Weisberg puts the point thus: In the predation case, for example, we are confident that ecological relationships can be represented with the models described by coupled differential equations. Thus when we discover the consequences of these models, we are confident that most of these consequences are true of any system described by the model[s]. This confidence comes from low-level confirmation, not from robustness analysis itself. Thus robustness analysis is not a nonempirical form of confirmation as Orzack and Sober suggest. It does not confirm robust theorems; it identifies hypotheses whose confirmation derives from the low-level confirmation of the mathematical framework in which they are embedded. (ibid., p. 741)

However, Weisberg’s notion of low-level confirmation raises several questions. For a start, as Houkes & Vaesen (2012, p. 353) observe, Weisberg is ambiguous about the scope of his notion of low-level confirmation. Is it supposed to apply to a broad mathematical framework, say that of coupled differential equations? Or to a specific model family? Or to individual models? Secondly and relatedly, if low-level confirmation is the sort of confirmation that licenses the use of a framework to construct models of phenomena in the first place, then what are the features or properties of the framework that are compared to reality to determine when one is indeed licensed to do so? Without a clear understanding of the scope in the notion of low-level

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confirmation, it seems particularly hard to give an adequate answer to this question, and it is not clear what it would come down to in the case of climate models. As regards (b), without a better understanding of the nature of low-level confirmation, it is hard to see why a set Ωce of models that enjoy a degree of low-level confirmation should in fact warrant the relevant inferences. Weisberg is aware of this problem and tries to address the worry by noting that “when we discover the consequences of these models, we are confident that most of these consequences are true of any system described by the model[s]” (Weisberg, 2006, p. 741, emphasis added). This shifts the target, as the systems that the models now are said to represent are fictional systems, that is systems that are unrealistic with respect to the actual target system in various respects. Low-level confirmation then comes down to the claim that that if those fictional systems happened to exist in the real world, then one would be entitled to believe that the consequences of the models are true in those systems. But this does not solve the initial problem: if one is interested in learning about properties of the actual target system and not of fictional systems, low-level confirmation of that kind offers no help. Is there then another way to define Ωce? An option might be to rely on Parker’s notion of adequacy for purpose. According to Parker (2009, 2020), it is wrong to try to confirm models wholesale. Instead, one should (and often can) confirm that a model is adequate for purpose. Let us then call a model A-adequate if all claims that the model makes concerning A are true in the target T. Ωce can then be understood as the set of all A-adequate models. Although this may be a definable set, it leads to a catch-22. On the one hand, if one is interested in A, then the ensemble is superfluous because one can just take one of the models to study A. On the other hand, if one is interested in a different aspect B, then it is useless to know that models are A-adequate because from the fact that they are A-adequate it does not follow that they are also B-adequate. So, either MBRA is superfluous, or A-adequacy fails to justify MBRA. One way out might be to define Ωce as the ensemble of all possibly A-adequate models (i.e., this set would span all current scientific uncertainty about how to adequately represent the climate system for the predictive tasks at hand). Under the assumption that this ensemble includes at least one model that is A-adequate, learning that all models make the same claims concerning A would allow one to infer that those claims are true. However, what this set actually consists in, and whether it is a well-defined set to begin with, is not at all clear (due to concerns similar to those expressed earlier about Ωc). As regards (c), even if the problems with (a) and (b) could somehow be circumvented, this would still leave us with the question of how to work with Ωce in practice. There seem to be two options here: either one works with Ωce itself, or one works with a representative sample of it. On the latter view, the representative sample plays an evidential function: it is understood as informing us about properties of all models in Ωce in much the same way in which an opinion poll with a few hundred participants is taken to inform as about the views of the entire population. However, neither of these options is realistic in the context of climate science. The first option is clearly a nonstarter because there is no way to actually construct Ωce.

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The second option isn’t viable either because, as mentioned in Part I (section “The Likelihood Approach”), climate model ensembles are ensembles of opportunity, and they are not constructed to representatively sample existing uncertainty. Rather, what models are included in any given multimodel ensemble will ultimately depend on contingent factors such as what state-of-the-art models are currently available, and whether a modeling group is willing and able to do the requested simulations. But even if models were intended to provide a representative random sample of Ωce, there are reasons to think that they could not actually constitute such a sample because, as Winsberg remarks, “[o]ne obvious reason to doubt [this assumption] is that all of the climate models on the market have a shared history. Some of them share code; scientists move from one lab to another and bring ideas with them; some parts of climate models (though not physically principled) are from a common toolbox of techniques, etc.” (2018, p. 99). But then, if climate models are not constructed independently and are likely to share systematic sources of error, it really does seem unreasonable to assume that current climate model ensembles can be thought of representing anything like a random sample from Ωce. In sum, how to construct, and explore, a representative multimodel ensemble is by and large an open question.

Bottom-Up Justifications As noted previously, bottom-up justifications are approaches that don’t attempt to mount a justification based on properties of Ω as a whole, but rather see support being built up one model at a time. In other words, bottom-up approaches make no “detour” via a complete ensemble and see members of the ensemble supporting the conclusion directly. This section discusses three different approaches of this kind.

The Likelihood Approach Parker (2011, p. 590) considers the following Bayesian argument for why agreement across models should increase confidence in the common result H: Premise 1: Proposition e warrants significantly increased confidence in predictive hypothesis H if p(e|H ) >> p(e|  H ). Premise 2: Take e to be saying that all the models in this ensemble indicate H to be true. Premise 3: The observed agreement among models is substantially more probable if H is true than if H is false; that is, p(e|H ) >> p(e|  H ). Conclusion: e warrants significantly increased confidence in H. The first premise follows directly from Bayes’ theorem and the second one is simply a statement of robustness and hence is assumed for the sake of argument. This approach is called the likelihood approach because the soundness of this argument

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crucially depends on whether the third premise (that the likelihood of H given data e is substantially greater than the likelihood of H give the same data) can be plausibly justified in reference to today’s climate model ensembles. Parker, herself, doesn’t think so, for she worries that there are many reasons why climate models might all indicate the truth of a predictive hypothesis, despite it being false: First, there are climate system features and processes—some recognized and perhaps some not—that are not represented in any of today’s models but that may significantly shape the extent of future climate change on space and time scales of interest. In addition, when it comes to features and processes that are represented, different models sometimes make use of similar idealizations and simplifications. Finally, errors in simulations of past climate produced by today’s models have already been found to display some significant correlation (see, e.g., Knutti et al. (2010); Pennell & Reichler (2011)). Thus, in general, the possibility should be taken seriously that a given instance of robustness in ensemble climate prediction is, as Nancy Cartwright once put it, “an artifact of the kind of assumptions we are in the habit of employing” (1991, 154). Perhaps with additional reflection and analysis, persuasive arguments for p(e|H ) >> p(e|H ) can be developed in some cases, but at present such arguments are not readily available (Parker, 2011, p. 591).

Parker’s worry is that models might tend to indicate the truth of a hypothesis H because they share similar idealizations and simplifications, despite H not being true, and hence, it is hard to justify the assumption that p(e|H ) >> p(e|  H ). One might suggest that a satisfactory measure of model independence could help address Parker’s concern. The idea here might be the following: if it can be show that models in an ensemble do not involve similar idealizations and simplifications, then it might be possible to alleviate the worry that models agree merely because they are similar—and hence one might be in a better position to justify Premise 3. But a little reflection shows that things are not as straightforward as they may seem. As Parker (2006, p. 363) notes, climate models in a multimodel ensemble “often incorporate conflicting assumptions about what the climate system is like.” And, arguably, the more dissimilar models are, the more conflicting assumptions one might expect them to incorporate. But if this is right then one might plausibly worry that having highly dissimilar models in an ensemble merely replaces one worry with another, as far as the above argument is concerned. For although one no longer has to worry that models might agree because they share similar simplifications and idealizations, one now has to ask why models agree despite making conflicting assumptions about what the climate system is like. In other words, given that the models make conflicting assumptions about the climate system and hence “the models are [. . .] incompatible with respect to ontology” (ibid., p. 364), why should one expect that the models are more likely to agree regarding the truth of a hypothesis on the assumption that the hypothesis is true, rather than on the assumption that the hypothesis is false? If anything, the knowledge that models agree despite making incompatible assumptions about the target system might suggest that the models are agreeing for reasons that are independent of what the climate system is like.

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Independence Approaches The idea that, in order for a robust result to be reliable, the various different means of access should be reliably independent goes all the way back to Levins’ “independent lies” (see section “Introduction” of Part I) and has been elaborated by Wimsatt (1981) who argued that “we feel more confident of objects, properties, relationships and so forth that we can detect, derive, measure or observe in a variety of independent ways because the chance that we could simultaneously be wrong in each of these ways declines with the number of independent checks” (ibid., p. 196). According to Kuorikoski et al. (2010), Wimsatt’s view of what it takes for a robust result to be reliable is relevant for assessing the epistemic import of model robustness. This is because, according to them, when models in an ensemble include the same (realistic) core assumptions C about the target system, but different simplifying or “tractability” assumptions (assumptions that are known to be strictly false about the target system), it is reasonable to assume that the probability that each model has to reach the correct result is independent of whether or not the other models reach the correct result, since “the modeler should have no positive reason to believe that if one tractability assumption induces a certain kind of error (due to its falsity) in the result, so does another” (Kuorikoski et al., 2010, p. 562). In light of this, they argue that if the same result R can be derived from several models involving the same substantial assumption C, but different tractability assumptions, this should rationally increase our confidence in the robust theorem. Their argument can be reconstructed as follows: Premise 1: Models that share a common core S (and satisfy conditions C) but involve completely different tractability assumptions can be assumed to be reliably independent. That is, conditional on the hypothesis that result R holds (or does not hold) in any target that satisfies conditions C, one’s confidence that a model will reach R is not affected by whether the other models reach R or not. Premise 2: If models that share a common core S (and satisfy conditions C) are reliably independent, one’s confidence in the robust theorem “in any target that satisfies conditions C, S brings about R” should rationally increase as the number of models that agree on result R increases. Conclusion: When models in an ensemble that share a common core S (and satisfy conditions C) but involve completely different tractability assumptions agree on a result R, this should rationally increase one’s confidence in the robust theorem “in any target that satisfies conditions C, S brings about R.” Several commentators have questioned the soundness of this argument. For an extensive assessment of those arguments, see Harris’ (2021b); see also Odenbaugh & Alexandrova’s (2011) for some earlier objections to Kuorikoski et al.’s (2010) argument and Kuorikoski et al. (2012) for some replies. Setting these concerns aside, another crucial question arises: what is the relevance of this argument to realistic cases of model-based robustness analysis? Notice that if models in the ensemble do not differ in all or most of their tractability assumptions,

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then there is, according to the current approach, no reason to assume that the models are reliably independent; for if models share several tractability assumptions (which are potential sources of unreliability), then “discovering that one of the models is unreliable should often greatly increase our confidence that the other is too” (Schupbach, 2018, p. 283). As discussed earlier, current climate models do share many similar idealizations, simplifications, and uncertain factual assumptions. Hence, the models in an ensemble of climate models simply will not be independent in the sense of Premise 1. There are notions other than being reliably independent (in the sense of Premise 1) to which one could appeal to motivate the epistemic import of model robustness. Confirmational independence (Fitelson, 2001) is one of them. Indeed, Lloyd (2009) seems to appeal to this notion of independence in her attempt to justify the epistemic import of model robustness (see Justus (2012), Vezér (2016), and Harris (2021b) for some attempts to reconstruct and evaluate Lloyd’s argument). However, similar concerns arise with this notion of independence. If models share similar idealizations and simplifications, it is at best unclear why their results should be expected to be confirmationally independent regarding a hypothesis. One might suggest that a satisfactory measure of intermodel dependencies—one which, as discussed in Part I of this review (section “Top-Down Justifications”), climate scientists are currently invested in finding—could help us address these concerns with independence approaches. The idea here could be something like the following: the more dissimilar models are from other models in an ensemble, the more reasons for believing that those models’ results are reliably independent or confirmationally independent regarding a hypothesis. A problem with this idea, however, is that models’ results are either reliably/confirmationally independent regarding a hypothesis, or they are not. That is, reliability independence or confirmational independence (as discussed in Kuorikoski et al. (2010) and Fitelson (2001)) are not matters of degree. Hence, greater dissimilarity across models, despite knowing that the models still share some idealizations, simplifications, and uncertain assumptions, does not seem to be enough to dismiss our worries about the independence approaches discussed in this section. It is worth noting, however, that there have been Bayesian attempts to introduce continuous notions of independence (see, e.g., Claveau (2013) and Landes (2021)) to which one might try to appeal to motivate the epistemic import of model robustness and that might in turn make independence approaches more defensible. Hence, the identification of an adequate measure of intermodel independencies that would successfully address the concerns with independence approaches discussed in this section remains an open question.

The Explanatory Approach Schupbach (2018) has offered an explanatory Bayesian account of RA to defend the epistemic import of model robustness. He agrees with the critical points made previously and submits that models in an ensemble can rarely (if ever) be assumed to be reliably independent or confirmationally independent regarding a hypothesis.

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However, he argues that this is not a problem, because models do not have to be independent in any relevant sense for their consensus to be epistemically significant. According to Schupbach’s explanatory account of RA, using an additional means to detect the same result can incrementally confirm an explanatory hypothesis concerning the target as long as its detection is able to rule out a competing explanation for that result left standing by the previous detections. These means of detections (which Schupbach calls RA diverse) do not have to be independent from one another in any relevant sense for this to happen. To illustrate why this is, Schupbach considers the example of Brownian motion mentioned in Part I of this review (section “Introduction”). When Brown first observed the curious motion of sample of pollen granules suspended in water, Einstein’s molecular explanation for this motion was not the only viable one. The motion might have been due to currents or evaporation of the water, or a sexual drive inherent in pollen, etc. But according to Schupbach, each new detection of this motion (using different materials or different media or different means of suspending the particles, etc.) was able to rule out a competing explanation for this motion not yet ruled out by previous means of detection, and in so doing could incrementally confirm Einstein’s molecular explanation. Schupbach argues that distinct means of detection do not have to be independent in any sense discussed in the previous section for them to be able to rule out competing explanations for the robust result. Consider, for instance, the competing explanation that the motion is exclusively due to a sexual drive inherent in pollen. By additionally detecting this motion using an inorganic material (instead of granules of pollen), one can rule out this competing explanation. However, these two means of detections are not reliably independent since “both could be misleading us due to the way particles are being suspended, due to the use of the same medium, due to the use of the same environmental conditions surrounding the apparatus, and so on” (Schupbach, 2018, 283)—and for similar reasons, they are also not confirmationally independent regarding Einstein’s molecular explanation. Schupbach suggests that his explanatory account of RA can also shed light on the epistemic import of model robustness, in particular. By considering multiple models that “may be quite similar apart from some modest differences in their simplifying assumptions” (Schupbach, 2018, p. 289) and observing that they all reach the same result, one is able to rule out competing explanations for that result, thereby incrementally confirming the target explanation for that result. In his recent book, Winsberg (2018) argues that Shupbach’s explanatory account of RA can shed light on the epistemic import of model robustness in climate science (albeit with some qualifications): Whether or not an ensemble of models is a good candidate for lending strong support for a hypothesis via RA depends almost entirely on the extent to which the set of models suffices for ruling out competing hypotheses. This means that just because the set of procedures we have that detect H are RA-diverse does not imply that we should have confidence in H. RA-diversity only implies CEP [cumulative epistemic power], i.e., it only implies that you are headed down the road to acceptance as you increase the size of the set of procedures. Once we know that a set is RA-diverse the question of whether it is large enough to warrant acceptance of H, whether it is sufficiently RA-diverse, is a further question. And the answer

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to that further question will always be a matter of judgment, context, considerations of inductive risk, etc. (Winsberg, 2018, 194)

Winsberg’s argument for the epistemic import of model robustness in climate science has been well received in the literature. According to O’Loughlin (2021, 36), “Winsberg (2018) convincingly argues that [Schupbach’s account] can be applied to climate models.” In reviews of Winsberg’s book, Lusk (2019) writes that “Winsberg’s argument is a convincing reconceptualization of robustness analysis in climate science” and Knüsel (2020, p. 116) that “Winsberg [. . .] makes a novel, convincing suggestion for when multiple sources of evidence in favor of a hypothesis are meaningful in climate science.” However, despite this positive reception, there are some reasons to be wary of Schupbach’s explanatory account’s ability to shed light on the epistemic import of model robustness in climate science. The first is a fundamental concern. As Harris (2021a) argues, there is an important difference between empirically driven RAs and model-based RAs, which may affect the applicability of Schupbach’s account to the latter. In empirically driven RAs, the various detections of a result (e.g., Brownian motion) are physical measurement processes taking place in the actual world, and the hypothesis that one tries to confirm (i.e., Einstein’s molecular explanation), which also concerns the actual world, is a possible explanation of these detections. By contrast, in model-based RAs the various distinct detections of a result are all operations in “model land” and since the hypothesis that one wants to confirm (e.g., a particular climate hypothesis) concerns the actual world the hypothesis is not a possible explanation for these detections. This does not necessarily imply that Schupbach’s account is not applicable to model-based RAs in general, but it does nonetheless show that any attempt to successfully apply it will have to acknowledge this difference and show that it can be applied in spite of it. This point is not addressed in Winsberg’s use of Schupbach’s account of RA diversity in the context of climate model ensembles, and so questions about the applicability of this account in the context of climate remain. The second concern is of a practical nature. As O’Loughlin (2021, p. 37) remarks “because climate scientists may engage in robustness inferences that are not focused solely on pinning down the value of a climate variable and that do not include the elimination of competitor hypotheses, we should be critical of the notion that [RA diversity] applies generally across all cases of RA in climate science.” Indeed, this is an understatement. Most current multimodel ensembles in climate science are not intended to rule out specific explanations for a result, nor is it clear how current ensembles could be used in this way. It is also an open question how climate model ensembles that would serve this purpose would have to be designed in practice. Furthermore, it is hard to reconcile climate scientists’ current efforts to find a measure of intermodel dependencies (which stem from the view that independence is what matters for choosing the best model ensembles) with an approach that sees the role of multimodel ensembles to be that of eliminating specific competing explanations for a result. The third is an epistemic concern. Under Schupbach’s account, the extent to which the target hypothesis is confirmed is partly determined by how plausible the rival hypothesis is prior to elimination (2018, p. 293–96). Hence, in the case of

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model robustness, the extent to which the target hypothesis will be confirmed would have to partly depend on the agent’s knowledge and beliefs about the derivational relationships in a family of models. This gives rise to two worries. First, knowledge and beliefs about the derivational relationships in a family of models can vary substantially from agent to agent. Hence, although nonomniscient agents might agree that some models’ results are RA diverse, they might nonetheless strongly disagree about the extent to which this should confirm a hypothesis. Hence, the extent to which a target hypothesis is confirmed is bound to be highly contextual. Second, the extent to which a target hypothesis is confirmed seems also very difficult to assess within a given context, since it requires agents to assess their own knowledge and beliefs about the various derivational relationships in a family of models: evidently not an easy task. Although Winsberg acknowledges that “[o]nce we know that a set is RA-diverse the question of whether it is large enough to warrant acceptance of H, whether it is sufficiently RA-diverse, is a further question” there is here an implicit and questionable assumption that scientists are in fact able to assess the extent to which the target hypothesis is confirmed by an RA-diverse set of models in the first place.

Conclusion This chapter reviewed different ways in which the inferences drawn in MBRA can be justified. The sober conclusion can only be that multimodel situations raise issues that are not yet fully understood and that MBRA has not yet reached a stage of maturity. Important questions remain open, and these will have to be addressed in future research. This marks a juncture where two options are available. The first option is to tackle the issues head on with the aim of formulating a version of MBRA that does not suffer from the difficulties discussed. The other option is to abandon MBRA and explore alternatives. Alternatives that one might explore at this point are perspectivism (Giere, 2006; Massimi, 2022), modal modeling (Katzav, 2014; Sjölin Wirling & Grüne-Yanoff, 2021; Massimi, 2022), and a program focused on managing severe uncertainty (Bradley & Steele, 2015; Roussos et al., 2021), but there may well be others.

Cross-References ▶ Climate Models and Robustness Analysis – Part I: Core Concepts and Premises

References Baumberger, C., Knutti, R., & Hirsch Hadorn, G. (2017). Building confidence in climate model projections: An analysis of inferences from fit. WIREs Climate Change, 8(3), e454. Bradley, R., & Steele, K. (2015). Making climate decisions. Philosophy Compass, 10, 799–810. Cartwright, N. (1991). Replicability, reproducibility, and robustness: Comments on Harry Collins. History of Political Economy, 23, 143–155.

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Claveau, F. (2013). The independence condition in the variety-of-evidence thesis. Philosophy of Science, 80(1), 94–118. Fitelson, B. (2001). A Bayesian account of independent evidence with applications. Philosophy of Science, 68(3), S123–S140. Frigg, R. (2023). Models and theories. A philosophical inquiry. Routledge. Frigg, R., & Nguyen, J. (2020). Modelling nature: An opinionated introduction to scientific representation. Springer. Giere, R. N. (2006). Scientific perspectivism. University of Chicago Press. Harris, M. (2021a). Conceptualizing uncertainty: The IPCC, model robustness and the weight of evidence. PhD thesis. London School of Economics and Political Science. Harris, M. (2021b). The epistemic value of independent lies: False analogies and equivocations. Synthese, 199(5–6), 14577–14597. Houkes, W., & Vaesen, K. (2012). Robust! Handle with care. Philosophy of Science, 79(3), 345–364. Hume, D. (1748/2007). An enquiry concerning human understanding. Oxford University Press. Justus, J. (2012). The elusive basis of inferential robustness. Philosophy of Science, 79(5), 795–807. Katzav, J. (2014). The epistemology of climate models and some of its implications for climate science and the philosophy of science. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, 46, 228–238. Knüsel, B. (2020). Philosophy and climate science. Ethics, Policy & Environment, 23(1), 114–117. Knutti, R., Furrer, R., Tebaldi, C., Cermak, J., & Meehl, G. A. (2010). Challenges in combining projections from multiple climate models. Journal of Climate, 23(10), 2739–2758. Kuorikoski, J., Lehtinen, A., & Marchionni, C. (2010). Economic modelling as robustness analysis. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 61(3), 541–567. Kuorikoski, J., Lehtinen, A., & Marchionni, C. (2012). Robustness analysis disclaimer: Please read the manual before use! Biology and Philosophy, 27, 891–902. Landes, J. (2021). The variety of evidence thesis and its independence of degrees of independence. Synthese, 198(11), 10611–10641. Levins, R. (1993). A response to Orzack and Sober: Formal analysis and the fluidity of science. The Quarterly Review of Biology, 68(4), 547–555. Lloyd, E. A. (2009). Varieties of support and confirmation of climate models. Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, 83(1), 213–232. Lusk, G. (2019). Eric Winsberg’s philosophy and climate science. BJPS Review of Books. http:// www.thebsps.org/reviewofbooks/lusk-on-winsburg Massimi, M. (2022). Perspectival realism. Oxford University Press. O’Loughlin, R. (2021). Robustness reasoning in climate model comparisons. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 85, 34–43. Odenbaugh, J., & Alexandrova, A. (2011). Buyer beware: Robustness analyses in economics and biology. Biology and Philosophy, 26, 757–771. Orzack, S. H., & Sober, E. (1993). A critical assessment of Levins’s the strategy of model building in population biology (1966). The Quarterly Review of Biology, 68(2), 533–546. Parker, W. S. (2006). Understanding pluralism in climate modeling. Foundations of Science, 11(4), 349–368. Parker, W. S. (2009). Confirmation and adequacy-for-purpose in climate modelling. Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, 83(1), 233–249. Parker, W. S. (2011). When climate models agree: The significance of robust model predictions. Philosophy of Science, 78(4), 579–600. Parker, W. S. (2020). Model evaluation: An adequacy-for-purpose view. Philosophy of Science, 87(3), 457–477. Pennell, C., & Reichler, T. (2011). On the effective number of climate models. Journal of Climate, 24(9), 2358–2367. Räisänen, J. (2007). How reliable are climate models? Tellus A: Dynamic Meteorology and Oceanography, 59(1), 2–29.

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Roussos, J., Bradley, R., & Frigg, R. (2021). Making confident decisions with model ensembles. Philosophy of Science, 88(3), 439–460. Schupbach, J. N. (2018). Robustness analysis as explanatory reasoning. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 69(1), 275–300. Sjölin Wirling, Y., & Grüne-Yanoff, T. (2021). The epistemology of modal modeling. Philosophy Compass, e12775, 1–11. Vezér, M. A. (2016). Computer models and the evidence of anthropogenic climate change: An epistemology of variety-of-evidence inferences and robustness analysis. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 56, 95–102. Weisberg, M. (2006). Robustness analysis. Philosophy of Science, 73(5), 730–742. Wimsatt, W. C. (1981). Robustness, reliability, and overdetermination. In M. B. Brewer & B. E. Collins (Eds.), Scientific inquiry and the social sciences: A volume in honor of Donald T. Campbell (pp. 123–162). Lexington Books. Winsberg, E. (2018). Philosophy and climate science. Cambridge University Press.

Abrupt Climate Changes and Tipping Points Epistemic and Methodological Issues Vincent Lam

Contents Introduction: This contribution has been written in Spring 2021 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Defining Abrupt Climate Changes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Dynamical Systems Theory Perspective: Bifurcations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Defining Tipping Points in the Climate and Earth Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tipping Points: Scientific Relevance and Uncertainties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Communicating About Tipping Points . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tipping Points in the Anthropocene: The Social Science Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Large-scale and discontinuous rapid transitions in the climate and Earth systems constitute one of the most concerning, yet in many ways one of the least understood aspects of climate change. On the one hand, because of their potential huge impacts on human and ecological systems, it is argued that climate tipping points and their interactions (potentially leading to cascading effects) help “to define that we are in a climate emergency.” On the other hand, it is largely acknowledged that making quantitative (e.g., probabilistic) statements about abrupt climate changes and tipping points is extremely challenging. Some form of tension thus emerges from these two sides of abrupt climate changes and underlies the development of the very notion of climate tipping point. This tension finds its roots in the many epistemic and methodological issues that arise in the context of abrupt climate changes and tipping points. This contribution aims to provide an overview of these issues in a philosophy of science perspective; the expectation is that such a V. Lam (*) Institute of Philosophy & Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, Australia e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_118

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conceptual perspective can help to improve our understanding of the specific challenges related to abrupt climate changes and tipping points. Keywords

Climate tipping points · Abrupt climate changes · Dynamical systems theory · Earth system science · Deep uncertainties · Climate policy · Climate communication · Storylines · Social tipping points · Anthropocene

Introduction: This contribution has been written in Spring 2021 Large-scale and discontinuous rapid transitions in the climate and Earth systems constitute one of the most concerning, yet in many ways one of the least understood aspects of climate change. On the one hand, because of their potential huge impacts on human and ecological systems, it is argued that climate tipping points and their interactions (potentially leading to cascading effects) help “to define that we are in a climate emergency” (Lenton et al., 2019, 592). On the other hand, it is largely acknowledged that making quantitative (e.g., probabilistic) statements about abrupt climate changes and tipping points is extremely challenging (McNeall et al., 2011). Some form of tension thus emerges from these two sides of abrupt climate changes and underlies the development of the very notion of climate tipping point (for a review of this development, see Russill, 2015). This tension finds its roots in the many epistemic and methodological issues that arise in the context of abrupt climate changes and tipping points. This contribution aims to provide an overview of these issues in a philosophy of science perspective; the expectation is that such a conceptual perspective can help to improve our understanding of the specific challenges related to abrupt climate changes and tipping points. The topic is actually getting increasing prominence in climate science (as well as in other disciplines), as manifested, for instance, by the increasing number of publications related to abrupt climate changes and tipping points (on this latter notion, see some bibliometric evidence in Milkoreit et al., 2018) as well as recently by the dedicated chapter in the Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (IPCC, 2019, ch. 6) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). There is also a proposal prepared by some countries and parts of the climate science community for an IPCC Special Report devoted to the issue of tipping points and impacts to be prepared during the Seventh Assessment cycle (AR7) of the IPCC (T. Stocker, private communication, June 2021). Depending on the context, the very concepts of abrupt change and tipping point actually point to a variety of different physical and mathematical notions, such as feedback and nonlinearity, threshold and phase or critical transition, multistability, hysteresis, and bifurcation (see, for instance, the discussion based on a large bibliographic review across domains in Milkoreit et al., 2018). However, there is up to now very little discussion in philosophy of climate science of the conceptual, epistemic, and methodological issues raised by the many different aspects of abrupt

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changes and tipping points in the climate and Earth systems, despite their relevance not only from a philosophy of science standpoint but also in view of the climate challenge more generally. Unsurprisingly, abrupt climate change has been a bit more discussed in the climate ethics literature (see Gardiner, 2011, ch. 6 for a prominent example); one of the goals of this contribution is to show that it also raises fundamental philosophy of science issues – some of which actually being not completely unrelated to practical philosophy and social science questions, as we will see. In this sense, this contribution is less an exhaustive overview of these issues than an invitation to philosophers of science (as well as to climate and Earth system scientists) to turn their attention to them. We discuss the standard definitions of abrupt climate change and of tipping point for the climate and Earth systems in sections “Defining Abrupt Climate Changes” and “Defining Tipping Points in the Climate and Earth Systems”. In section “The Dynamical Systems Theory Perspective: Bifurcations”, we very briefly present a few basic elements of dynamical systems theory, which mathematically encode the idea of a qualitative change that is at the heart of the notions of abrupt climate change and tipping point. We then review three families of epistemic and methodological issues related to the scientific relevance of the concept of tipping point (section “Tipping Points: Scientific Relevance and Uncertainties”), to tipping points as a tool in climate change communication (section “Communicating About Tipping Points”), and to the social science perspective on tipping points (section “Tipping Points in the Anthropocene: The Social Science Perspective”).

Defining Abrupt Climate Changes From a conceptual point of view, and in order to avoid any confusions, it is crucial to define precisely the notions we are interested in; conceptual clarity is indeed especially important in a scientific context with such societal relevance as climate science (in the philosophy of climate science literature, the need of conceptual clarity has been recently stressed in particular with respect to the central notions of climate state, climate change, and climate sensitivity, among others, see Werndl, 2016; Katzav & Parker, 2018). In this section, we highlight the relevance of such conceptual clarity when defining abrupt climate changes. Let us consider the IPCC definition of abrupt climate change. In the Working Group I (which is concerned with “the physical science of climate change”) contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report of the IPCC (AR5), we find the following definition (IPCC, 2013, 1114)–see also the recent IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (SROCC) IPCC (2019, 594) (note: this contribution has been written before the publication of the Sixth Assessment Report AR6): (ACC-1)

We define abrupt climate change as a large-scale change in the climate system that takes place over a few decades or less, persists (or is anticipated to persist) for at least a few decades, and causes substantial disruptions in human and natural systems.

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This definition explicitly takes impact considerations – in particular, on human systems – and related relevant timescales (“a few decades”) into account. Another standard definition – to be found for instance in the report of the Committee on Abrupt Climate Change formed by the US National Research Council – rather puts the focus on the response to an external forcing as well as to some threshold behavior ((NRC, 2002, 14)): (ACC-2)

Technically, an abrupt climate change occurs when the climate system is forced to cross some threshold, triggering a transition to a new state at a rate determined by the climate system itself and faster than the cause.

Since the two definitions (ACC-1) and (ACC-2) emphasize different aspects related to abrupt climate changes, they may well lead to different conclusions as to whether a given climate dynamics involves an abrupt change or not. For instance, certain shifts induced by “natural low-frequency climate variability” may be considered as abrupt following (ACC-1), but not necessarily so according to (ACC-2), since the considered change may not be due to any external forcing (Bathiany et al., 2016, 2–3); in other words, (ACC-2) may not allow for abrupt changes that are due to what is sometimes called “internal variability,” that is, without external forcings. In this sense, the definition (ACC-2) seems to require an internal/external distinction, which relies on how the climate system and its boundaries are defined – and such definition itself asks for careful attention (Katzav & Parker, 2018, §2 & §4). Relatedly, and to complicate the matter a bit, one should take into account the fact that external forcings can influence internal variability – so that “the contributions of forcing and variability cannot be clearly separated” (Bathiany et al., 2016, 3); this may lead to the ambiguity that what seems at first sight to be the consequence of internal variability can sometimes also be understood as the result of the influence of external forcings on internal variability. In any case, it is important to note that both standard definitions (ACC-1) and (ACC-2) involve certain subjective components, for example, about relevant timescales and what is considered as “substantial disruptions” (ACC-1) or about what is considered as internal (external) to the climate system. In order to avoid any confusion, these subjective aspects and the ambiguities in defining abrupt climate change call for transparency about the definitions used. In particular, these subjective components may convey nonepistemic (e.g., social, ethical) values; transparency then involves these latter to be clearly identified (to the extent that is it is possible) and communicated along with the definitions used – and allowing for public debate (in many ways, the issue here echoes the recent discussion about nonepistemic values in climate modeling, see, e.g., Winsberg, 2012; Parker, 2014; Intemann, 2015). More generally, the notion of abrupt climate change as encoded in both definitions (ACC-1) and (ACC-2) seems to fundamentally involve the idea of a qualitative change in (the evolution of) the climate system – possibly triggered by some small perturbations, such as a small change in external forcing (ACC-2). This motivates a

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more mathematical perspective on abrupt climate changes, which we consider in the next section.

The Dynamical Systems Theory Perspective: Bifurcations The mathematical framework for studying the qualitative behavior of physical systems such as the climate system is dynamical systems theory. In particular, this latter allows the study of the geometrical and topological properties of the set of all trajectories (orbits) of a dynamical system over time in state space (this set is called the phase portrait of the dynamical system). This is an extraordinarily rich and complex mathematical field and the purpose here is only to provide an intuition of the notion of bifurcation, which is the central tool for characterizing qualitative changes in dynamical systems, without entering into too many technical details. To this aim, we now introduce a few basic notions (we closely follow Kuznetsov, 1998, ch. 1 & 2; see Scheffer, 2009, Part I for a nontechnical introduction to key concepts of dynamical systems theory). In general terms, a dynamical system is characterized by the set of its possible states (called state space) and by a law of time evolution for these states. (DS)

A dynamical system is a triple{T,X, φ t}where T is a time set, X is a state space, and φ t: X ! X is a family of evolution operators parametrized by t ∈ T, such that φ 0 is the identity map and satisfying φ t þ s ¼ φ t o φs.

Depending on the context, either continuous-time dynamical systems (T ¼ ℝ) or discrete time dynamical systems (T ¼ ℤ) can be considered. In the continuous-time case, the time evolution is often characterized by a set of autonomous (time-invariant) ordinary differential equations, ẋ ¼ ƒ (x), with X ¼ ℝn and (smooth) ƒ: ℝn ! ℝn. Since our aim is to study qualitative changes in the behavior of dynamical systems – and of the climate system in particular – we need a way to compare dynamical systems, that is, to specify when they are or fail to be qualitatively equivalent: The relevant equivalence relation is topological here. (EQU)

A dynamical system {T, ℝn, φ t} is called topologically equivalent to a dynamical system {T, ℝn, ψ t} if there is a homeomorphism h: ℝn ! ℝn mapping orbits of the first system onto orbits of the second system, while preserving the time orientation.

A homeomorphism is a continuous invertible map such that its inverse is also continuous. If two dynamical systems are topologically equivalent, then their phase portrait can be continuously transformed into each other (since they are homeomorphic), which means that they have the same topological properties, such as the same number of invariant sets (equilibria/fixed points/attractors), with the same (e.g., stability) features – hence qualitatively similar dynamical properties. Conversely, topological inequivalent dynamical systems may have a different number of invariant sets with different features,

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characterizing different dynamical properties. The notion of bifurcation precisely aims to capture these qualitative changes appearing as the parameters vary in parametrized dynamical systems (e.g., of the form ẋ ¼ f (x, α), with x ∈ ℝn and α ∈ ℝm). (BIF)

The appearance of a topologically inequivalent phase portrait under variation of parameters is called a bifurcation.

The value of a parameter at which the dynamical system undergoes a qualitative change in the here precisely defined topological sense is called bifurcation value or critical value. The qualitative behavior of a dynamical system can be studied with the help of a bifurcation diagram, which, in rough terms, is the partition of the parameter space into regions with topologically equivalent phase portraits; the transitions between such regions then encode bifurcations. One of the main aims of bifurcation theory is the study and the classification of the various types of bifurcation in dynamical systems (there actually is an important variety of different types of bifurcations, such as the saddle-node bifurcation, the Andronov-Hopf bifurcation,...). In the climate context, one often considers a broad classification of (co-dimension 1) bifurcations – co-dimension 1 bifurcations are bifurcations that can be associated with a single control parameter – into three types: safe, explosive, and dangerous (Thompson & Sieber, 2011). Bifurcation theory encodes in precise mathematical terms central features associated with abrupt climate changes and climate tipping points, such as the existence of and the transition between multiple stable states or attractors, possibly involving some lack of reversibility (or some limited reversibility or hysteresis). In particular, bifurcation theory provides a precise topological meaning to the notion of qualitative change, possibly triggered by some small change in parameter value. We do not intend to do justice to the fruitfulness of the interactions between this mathematical perspective and climate (and Earth system) science – that would go much beyond the scope of this contribution. But it is important to highlight that most results in bifurcation theory concern low-dimensional cases with very few parameters and so strictly speaking do not directly apply to the very high-dimensional climate (modeling) context with its huge number of parameters. However, even in the high-dimensional cases, the behavior of the system under consideration can be dominated by only a few positive feedbacks, so that bifurcations can be studied using low-dimensional techniques to some extent (this low-dimensional perspective has limitations though, see Bathiany et al., 2016). Furthermore, abrupt climate changes can be studied in climate models with the help of specific numerical methods exploiting bifurcation theory, called numerical bifurcation analysis; for instance, bifurcation diagrams can thus be produced for climate and Earth systems expected to undergo abrupt changes, such as in the case of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) and marine ice sheets (see Dijkstra, 2019 as well as references therein). The notion of critical value or bifurcation value encodes in particular a threshold behavior in abrupt climate changes, which is explicitly highlighted in definition (ACC-2). This threshold behavior is at the heart of the concept of tipping point, which has gained increasing prominence in climate science (and beyond, see Milkoreit et al., 2018).

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Defining Tipping Points in the Climate and Earth Systems The concept of tipping point in the climate context is closely related to the notion of abrupt climate change, but it is however clearly distinct. In this section, we discuss distinctive features of the standard approach to climate (and Earth system) tipping points. An important definition of tipping point in the climate context can be found in Lenton et al. (2008), to which most of the papers involving tipping points in the climate context refer (for a historical perspective on the concept of tipping point in the climate context, see Russill, 2015). A distinction is made between tipping element and tipping point, which are defined as follows (Lenton et al., 2008, 1786): (TE)

A tipping element Σ is a large scale (at least subcontinental) subsystem of the Earth system that is associated with a region or a collection of regions of the globe and such that the parameters controlling Σ can be combined into a single control ρ with a critical value ρc at which a small parameter variation δρ > 0 leads to a qualitative change F in a crucial system feature F, after some observation time T > 0, measured with respect to a reference feature at the critical value, that is, j Fðρ  ρc þ δρjT Þ  Fðρc jT Þ j F > 0:

The critical point in the control parameter (ρc) or the system feature (F(ρc)) is then called a tipping point for Σ. In the context of climate change, the subset of policy-relevant tipping elements is of particular interest (Lenton et al., 2008, 1787): (PRTE)

A policy relevant tipping element is a tipping element Σ satisfying the following conditions:

– Human activities are interfering with the system Σ such that decisions taken within a “political time horizon” (TP > 0) can determine whether the critical value for the control ρc is reached. – The time to observe a qualitative change plus the time to trigger it lie within an “ethical time horizon” (TE). – A significant number of people care about the fate of the component Σ, because it contributes to the overall mode of operation of the Earth system (such that tipping it modifies the qualitative state of the whole system), it contributes significantly to human welfare (such that tipping it impacts on many people), or it has great value in itself as a unique feature of the biosphere. Prominent examples of possible future policy relevant tipping elements considered in Lenton et al. (2008) include the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), the Arctic sea ice, the El NiñoSouthern Oscillation (ENSO), the Asian and West African monsoons, as well as the

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Amazon rainforest – see also, for instance, the list of tipping elements (and tipping points) discussed in the IPCC Special Report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5  C (SR15) IPCC (2018, ch. 3). Although closely related, there are several ways in which this characterization of tipping element (and tipping point) is distinct from (and not equivalent to) both the physical notion of abrupt climate change and the mathematical notion of bifurcation (discussed in sections “Defining Abrupt Climate Changes” and “The Dynamical Systems Theory Perspective: Bifurcations”, respectively). In particular, the definition (TE) emphasizes the occurrence of a qualitative change rather than the abruptness of the change: Indeed, (TE) includes cases “where the transition is slower than the anthropogenic forcing causing it” (Lenton et al., 2008, 1786). In other words, a tipping element may not involve an abrupt change in the sense of (ACC-2) (see section “Defining Abrupt Climate Changes”), whereas the latter always involves a tipping point (“threshold”); in this sense, the notion of tipping point is more general than the notion (ACC-2) of abrupt climate change (it is also more general in the sense that it is not restricted to the climate system, but concerns the Earth system more largely). Furthermore, the definition (PRTE) of a policy relevant tipping point also encodes the impact considerations of the definition (ACC-1), but makes explicit (some of) the subjective aspects involved in these notions (e.g., through the choice of the political time horizon TP and the ethical time horizon TE), to some extent easing transparent communication and public debate. It is also important to note that, in principle, the notion of tipping element need not be restricted to equilibrium properties (see the Appendix 1 of the supporting information to Lenton et al., 2008) and so may not be characterizable in terms of bifurcation theory for autonomous dynamical systems. For instance, a tipping element may depend on the rate of change of some parameter, such that the (nonautonomous) dynamical system remains far from equilibrium (permafrost thawing is sometimes considered as possibly involving positive feedbacks due to decomposition that may lead to such a rate-dependent tipping, called “compostbomb,” see Luke & Cox, 2011). Ashwin et al. (2012) actually distinguish three kinds of tipping mechanisms in open (i.e., nonautonomous) systems, namely, bifurcation-induced tipping (“B-tipping”), noise-induced tipping (“N-tipping”), and rate-induced (or rate-dependent) tipping (“R-tipping”). Here is a recent fairly intuitive characterization of these different tipping mechanisms (Ghil & Lucarini, 2020, 56): • B-tipping: Slow change in a parameter leads to the system’s passage through a classical bifurcation. • N-tipping: Random fluctuations lead to the system crossing an attractor basin boundary. • R-tipping: Because of rapid changes in the forcing, the system loses track of a slow change in its attractors. In several models, the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) is associated with a bifurcation-induced tipping point (Dijkstra & Weijer, 2005). In

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contrast, on the basis of ice-core record, the Dansgaard-Oeschger events, which involved abrupt warming during the last ice age, are generally considered as being noise-induced (Ditlevsen & Johnsen, 2010). The “compost-bomb” mentioned above is an example involving a rate-induced tipping mechanism. The mathematical details behind these various tipping mechanisms are not relevant here. What is important in our conceptual perspective is that the noiseinduced and rate-induced tipping points may not involve any bifurcations in the sense of classical bifurcation theory. For instance, in the case of a rate-induced tipping (R-tipping), there is no critical parameter value at which the system undergoes a bifurcation; rather, there may be a critical rate of change for a relevant (time-dependent) parameter. It therefore seems that the notion of tipping point cannot be fully captured by the standard notion of bifurcation, and it is argued in the climate or Earth system context that the former is more general than the latter (Lenton et al., 2008; Bathiany et al., 2016; Ghil & Lucarini, 2020). More precisely, Ghil and Lucarini (2020, 56) claim that the notion of tipping point “generalize[s] the bifurcation concept in the context of open systems that are modeled mathematically by NDS [non-autonomous dynamical systems] or RDSs [random dynamical systems],” although Ashwin et al. (2017, 2186) note that “[t]here seems to be no universally agreed rigorous mathematical definition of what a tipping point is” and that a “a tipping point in a real non-autonomous system will typically be a mixture of these effects [B-, N-, R-tipping], but even in idealized cases it is a challenge to come up with a mathematically rigorous and testable definition of ‘tipping point’” – beyond the rather phenomenological characterization (TE) above. To some extent, these technical aspects of tipping points find an echo in the wider debate about the notion itself, as we will see in the next sections.

Tipping Points: Scientific Relevance and Uncertainties For a bit less than two decades now, the notion of tipping point is getting increasing prominence and visibility in climate and Earth system science as well as in climate change communication (Russill & Nyssa, 2009; Russill, 2015). At the same time, various types of criticisms and worries related to the notion have emerged. The main issues can be divided into three broad categories. First, there are worries about the scientific relevance of the notion, in particular in the face of the deep uncertainties involved. Second, some critics have argued that the notion of tipping point may be unhelpful and even confusing for the purpose of climate change communication. Third, general concerns have been raised from the social science perspective. These issues touch important epistemic and methodological aspects of tipping points (and abrupt changes) in the climate and Earth systems, so we will consider these three categories in turn (which are clearly related to one another), starting in this section with the worries related to scientific relevance and uncertainties. Regarding scientific relevance, a central issue concerns the (scientific) novelty of the concept of tipping point (in the climate context), that is, the extent to which it

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really captures novel features of the climate system (or of the Earth system) that are not already adequately described by other well-established physical and mathematical concepts, such as abrupt climate change or those of bifurcation theory. The point is that if tipping points are “old wine in new bottles,” as the editors of Nature put it (2006), then it needs to be clearly acknowledged that the main purposes of introducing this new concept in climate (and Earth system) science are extra-scientific (e.g., related to climate communication and policy-making; see the discussion in Russill & Nyssa, 2009). Now, the fact that the notion of tipping point in the climate context is intended to have some communication and policy relevance is actually explicit in the very definition of policy relevant tipping elements (PRTE) in section “Defining Tipping Points in the Climate and Earth Systems” above. Relatedly, possible cascading or domino effects linking the main tipping elements of the climate and Earth systems are clearly put forward in a risk management perspective, that is, in view of adequate policy-making (Steffen et al., 2018; Lenton et al., 2019). However, having some policy and communication relevance does not prevent a concept to have its own scientific legitimacy, and indeed the notion of tipping point is often presented as such in the climate and Earth system science literature. In this context, as we have highlighted in the last section, in both the phenomenological (Lenton et al., 2008) and the more mathematical (Ashwin et al., 2012) perspective, the concept of tipping point is aimed to generalize standard notions such as abrupt change and bifurcation. In contrast, it is interesting to note that the climate scientist Michel Crucifix explicitly considers that the relevance of the notion of tipping point is best understood in view of adequate climate risk management and policymaking (“far-thinking climate governance”), that is, that it is best considered as a conceptual (and communication) tool for drawing attention to certain mechanisms in the climate and Earth system with far-reaching environmental and socio-economic consequences (the physical mechanisms being themselves described by other technical concepts such as bifurcation) – see Crucifix (2020). The concrete scientific relevance of the notion of global tipping point – that is, a tipping point for the climate system or for the Earth system as a whole, possibly induced by cascading effects (Steffen et al., 2018) – has also been more specifically put into question. For instance, in a reply to Crucifix (2020) on the general relevance of the tipping point concept, Annan (2020) writes: “there is no scientific reason to believe there is a particular tipping point or threshold demarcating a safe space with low harm, from a catastrophic collapse of civilisation” (in their paper aiming to raise awareness to the possibility of cascading tipping points in the climate system, Lenton et al., 2019, 595 similarly note: “[s]ome scientists counter that the possibility of global tipping remains highly speculative”). It is not the aim of this contribution to discuss the current scientific support to the possibility of a global tipping point in the climate or Earth system; suffice it to say that this issue is clearly distinct and has no direct bearing on the scientific relevance of the concept of tipping point itself (moreover, local tipping points in the Earth system do not necessarily involve any global, planetary tipping point). However, the concerns about the notion of global

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tipping point are linked to the issue of the deep uncertainties that are involved when it comes to tipping points in the climate or Earth system – both at the local and global levels. Indeed, while some key positive feedbacks for certain tipping elements are rather well identified (e.g., salt-advection feedback in the case of the AMOC), there are still many deep uncertainties about tipping mechanisms and their interactions. Moreover modeling tipping elements is extremely challenging; to some extent, some of the standard challenges faced by climate modeling in general (see Frigg et al., 2015 for a philosophical overview) are exacerbated in the context of tipping points. For instance, contemporary observational data may have limited relevance for evaluating the adequacy of climate models to encode (future) abrupt changes and tipping points, since contemporary observational data may not contain any relevant abrupt changes and tipping points (this is a specific aspect of a general issue about climate model evaluation, see, e.g., Parker, 2009 and Baumberger et al., 2017). This latter point further highlights the crucial importance of the paleoclimate data when it comes to abrupt changes and tipping points, even if paleoclimate data involve their own challenges – paleoclimate data, such as those about the Dansgaard-Oeschger events, are often put forward as a strong motivation for taking seriously abrupt changes and tipping points in the climate and Earth systems. A further difficulty for modeling tipping points is that climate models tend to be calibrated to be too stable: for example, those containing large abrupt changes tend to be discarded from multimodel ensemble studies such as the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, currently in Phase 6 (CMIP6) – it is interesting to note that Drijfhout et al. (2015)’s systematic investigation of the CMIP5 climate models for abrupt changes reveals that the detected abrupt events are “model-specific”, thereby illustrating the large uncertainties that are involved. One can distinguish two different methodological stances with respect to the deep uncertainties surrounding abrupt climate changes and tipping points (Bathiany et al., 2016, §6): The first, “bottom-up”, approach aims at modeling abrupt changes and tipping points with “as much realism as possible”, whereas the second, “top-down”, approach explores the “possibilities of tipping points and devise methods to analyse and categorize them”. In many cases, the skeptical and critical attitude with respect to tipping points actually tends to focus on the first approach only, which is often considered as the standard (or default) strategy in climate science more broadly. The second approach relies on a more qualitative perspective, for example, in the sense of dynamical systems theory. Indeed, as we have seen above, such a qualitative perspective allows one to meaningfully investigate abrupt changes and tipping points in the climate and Earth systems, even given the deep uncertainties that are involved about the relevant underlying (physical, biogeochemical, etc.) processes. For example, the tipping behavior can be studied in low-dimensional conceptual models (e.g., using bifurcation theory) if it is dominated by only a few positive feedbacks (for instance, Wunderling et al. 2021) is a very recent example of such a qualitative perspective applied to the study of the interactions among various Earth system tipping elements).

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Of course, as Bathiany et al. (2016) stress, these two methodological perspectives need not stand in opposition and are actually best conceived as complementary. Indeed, they may well be fruitfully combined: For instance, stability properties of complex climate models can be studied using tools from bifurcation theory. These latter (together with statistical methods) also play a central role when it comes to the crucial issue of finding generic “early warning indicators” of abrupt changes and tipping points, such as “critical slowing down”, which involves, very roughly, some slower rate of recovery from perturbations as a bifurcation is approached (for an overview in the climate context, see Lenton, 2011; this is an important topic of on-going research, and there is a debate about whether and to what extent all types of tippings, in particular N- and R-tippings, allow for generic early warning indicators, see, e.g., Ditlevsen & Johnsen, 2010 and Ritchie & Sieber, 2016). These indicators can typically be applied to complex model outputs, but also directly to observational data, such as paleorecords. This nicely illustrates the complementarity of the two methodological stances discussed above, as highlighted by Thompson and Sieber (2011, 5): “[a]n alternative to the model and simulate appoach [. . . ] is to realize that mathematically some of the climate-tipping events correspond to bifurcations [. . . ], and then to use time-series analysis techniques to extract precursors of these bifurcations directly from observational data [. . . ]”, “bifurcation predictions directly from real time series will be a useful complement to modelling from first principles because they do not suffer from all the many difficulties of building and initializing reliable computer models.”

Communicating About Tipping Points As we have mentioned in the previous section, and as detailed in Russill and Nyssa (2009) and Russill (2015), the notion of climate tipping point has central communication and policy dimensions. In this context, a recurrent criticism is that the concept of climate (and Earth system) tipping points – in particular global ones – is too alarmist, possibly leading to a loss of credibility of the scientific community and to inadequate reactions such as fatalism or cynicism (see, e.g., Nature, 2006, and more recently Annan, 2020). Besides the specific communication issues (see Russill & Nyssa, 2009 for a discussion), which are not the main focus here, we would like to highlight an interesting analogy with the debate about the appropriate methodology and the role of nonepistemic (e.g., social, ethical) values in the context of extreme event attribution. It has been convincingly argued that the methodological differences between, on the one hand, the standard probabilistic approach to extreme event attribution (in terms of the fraction of attributable risk) and, on the other hand, the recent storyline approach to extreme event attribution (which aims at identifying “physically self-consistent unfolding of past events, or of plausible future events,” Shepherd, 2019, 2) reflect different attitudes towards risk, and that choosing between these different attitudes is not a purely scientific matter, but involves nonepistemic values (Lloyd & Oreskes, 2018; Winsberg et al., 2020). By its very focus on causal

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stories, the storyline methodology is prone to type I errors (or “false positives”), whereas the probabilistic risked-based methodology is prone to type II errors (or “false negatives”), by averaging out the effect; preferring to avoid one type of error rather than the other involves nonepistemic values and preferences. Lloyd and Oreskes (2018) convincingly argue that “there is a strong bias in the scientific community” (317) and in the climate science community more specifically against type I errors. In particular, the critique of “alarmism” that has been raised against the storyline approach largely relies on such a bias. One of the factors for this bias that Lloyd and Oreskes (2018) identify is the community norms of rationality, according to which “more conservative claims tend to be viewed as more rational – and therefore more scientific – than less conservative ones” (317); however, such norms are not necessarily epistemically justified (to say the least) and actually need to be openly debated and communicated. Now, the interesting point for us is that, in many ways, the above concerns about tipping points also seem to largely rely on a similar bias. Indeed, the critique that considerations about tipping points lead to undue alarmism mainly focuses on the danger of making type I errors and often completely neglects the twin danger of type II errors. As Lloyd and Oreskes (2018, 318) note, the “point here is not that one set of risks is necessarily worse than another, but rather than climate scientists have been asymmetrical in their concerns”. In this perspective, what is required is an open communication about tipping points and the epistemic limitations that are involved, as well as an open debate about the different attitudes towards risk that can be adopted in this context. This clearly concerns both types of errors: For instance, the worries concerning wrongly setting “climate deadlines” should be seriously taken into account (Asayama et al., 2019), as should be the consequences of missing cascading tipping effects (Lenton et al., 2019). In order to facilitate such a debate and to balance the above mentioned asymmetry, it might be fruitful to apply the storyline methodology to climate (and Earth system) tipping points. This methodology is indeed in no way restricted to the attribution context and can also be applied to the characterization of future climate change, in particular in cases involving strong uncertainties that may weaken the relevance of probabilistic projections (such as for certain regional climate change projections, extreme events and, of course, tipping points). Indeed, instead of providing (probabilistic) predictions (or projections), storylines aim to investigate plausible climate change futures, that is, to “explore the boundaries of plausibility” as Shepherd et al. (2018, 566) put it (see also Shepherd, 2019, who advocates a “reframing of the climate risk question from the prediction space into the decision space”). For instance, tipping point storylines would investigate plausible climate change futures involving climate (or Earth system) tipping points, for example, articulating “physically self-consistent unfolding of [. . . ] plausible future events” exploring the consequences of crossing tipping points, without necessarily assigning any probabilities. We suggest this is a much-needed line of research that may help to navigate the tension between the possible huge impacts and the deep uncertainties linked to climate (and Earth system) tipping points and abrupt changes – for recent steps in this direction, see, for example, Ritchie et al. (2020), who study plausible

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impacts of the collapse of the AMOC on land use and agricultural production in Great Britain; similarly, see also Wunderling et al. (2021, 602), who view their study of the interactions among Earth system tipping elements as “a hypotheses generator that produces qualitative scenarios (rather than exact quantifications or projections) that can then be further examined by more process-detailed Earth system models”.

Tipping Points in the Anthropocene: The Social Science Perspective The notion of climate and Earth system tipping point has central policy dimensions in the sense that it aims to influence the societal and political response to the climate (and environmental) issues (which it helps to frame as an “emergency”, see Lenton et al., 2019). In this line of thought, there are also considerations for identifying and inducing “positive” (in the broad sense of “desirable” in view of addressing the climate challenge) tipping mechanisms in various socioecological systems (e.g., see recently Lenton, 2020 and Otto et al., 2020). This is a rather natural move, considering the fact that the very concept of tipping point has emerged from studies on social systems (about racial segregation) in the first place (on the origins of the notion, see Russill, 2015; for a review of the literature on social and socio-ecological tipping points, see Milkoreit et al., 2018). These social and policy-related aspects of tipping points have given rise to a broad but constructive social science critique; this latter is interrelated with epistemological and methodological considerations and can greatly enrich the philosophy of science perspective adopted in this contribution – to this effect, we briefly review some elements of this critique in this section (in many ways, this section can be understood as a call for more interactions between philosophy of science and social sciences, which are here broadly construed, on climate and environmental issues). In a first approach, the very fact that the same concept of tipping point is applied to a large variety of very different natural (physical) and social contexts leads to the worry that crucial differences between physical and social processes may be blurred (Milkoreit et al., 2018, §7; Russill & Nyssa, 2009, §11); in particular, as a result, the specificities of the various social contexts and processes may simply be left out of the picture. This may in turn lead to an impoverished and potentially biased understanding of the relevant social features and dynamics underlying social tipping points. More generally, in the Earth system science perspective, the concept of tipping point in the climate and Earth systems (together with the related notion of planetary threshold) is closely linked to the concept of Anthropocene. This latter is typically defined as a “new geological epoch in which humans are the primary determinants of biospheric and climatic change” (see Steffen et al., 2020, 59, where the concept of Anthropocene is explicitly described as arising from Earth system science), and there is a growing consensus on its scientific relevance. However, the concept of Anthropocene, as currently articulated in the scientific literature, is also critically considered by some parts of the social sciences and the humanities (it is clearly beyond the scope of this brief section to do full justice to the

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richness of the social sciences critique here; for more detailed discussions, see, e.g., Palsson et al., 2013; Lövbrand et al., 2015; Bonneuil & Fressoz, 2016). Indeed, despite the fact that the concept of Anthropocene centrally involves human and social dimensions, these latter tend to be neglected, and the Anthropocene narrative is often dominated exclusively by the natural sciences – in particular, Earth system science – perspective. As a consequence, “[t]he anthropocenologists’ dominant narrative of the Anthropocene presents an abstract humanity uniformily involved—and, it implies, uniformily to blame” Bonneuil and Fressoz (2016, ch.4). It is precisely such an abstraction (the “humans”) that underlies the above typical characterization of the Anthropocene – at least without further qualifications. Similarly, Lövbrand et al. (2015, 214) warn that “[w]hen the complex environmental challenges of our times are accounted for in aggregated terms, we lose sight of the situated conflicts, warped distribution of wealth and unequal power relations that engine ‘the great acceleration”, which denotes a post-World War II strong accelerating trend in a series of socio-economic and Earth system indicators. This analysis also points to the fundamentally global nature of the Earth system science perspective and in particular of the related Anthropocene narrative, which runs the risk to render “the human beings invisible, both as agents and victims of environmental destruction” (Lövbrand et al., 2015, 216). Both the human impacts (including responsibilities) and their consequences (including vulnerabilities) are heterogenous and need to be differentiated in several ways (e.g., taking into account their geographical and social distributions). The worry is that this heterogeneity and these differences may not be accounted for in the global Anthropocene narrative. At the heart of the difficulties here lies a tension between this global perspective and the local scale at which people get impacted (this tension has been nicely highlighted in Shepherd & Sobel (2020) in the context of climate science). In a completely analogous way, this tension also directly affects the notions of Earth system tipping point and planetary threshold, which can be useful notions in a global perspective (e.g., for discussing the consequences of some cascading effects, see Lenton et al., 2019), but, at the same time, which can hide the vast heterogeneity of what these notions may involve at the local scale (e.g., in social, political, economical terms). These homogenizing effects also need to be seriously considered in the context of the recent proposals for deliberately triggering positive social tipping points (e.g., see recently Lenton, 2020, Otto et al., 2020). Recent formalizations in the literature of the notions of social tipping point (e.g., see Milkoreit et al., 2018) and social tipping element (e.g., relevant for decarbonization transformation, see Otto et al., 2020) are very similar to (and, in the latter case, even explicitly reply on) the standard definitions in the climate and Earth system context, see (TE) and (PRTE) in section “Defining Tipping Points in the Climate and Earth Systems” (see also Winkelmann et al., 2020). As we have already mentioned above, the fact that the same concept of tipping point is used for both natural (physical) and social systems should not mask the differences between the relevant underlying physical and social processes in both contexts (the very notion of “positive” social tipping point can be ambiguous in the sense that there may be disagreement about what exactly is considered as “positive” or “desirable”). These differences may not prevent the

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useful application of the same mathematical and conceptual tools (e.g., for early warning signals), but their potential limitations in the social context should be more systematically explored and explicitly highlighted (similar considerations are also put forward in the conclusion of Milkoreit et al., 2018; of course, this also concerns the possible application of modeling and machine learning techniques in this context, see, e.g., Donges et al., 2020). Indeed, recently, there have been first steps in this direction within the Earth system science community. For instance, Winkelmann et al. (2020) identify several key differences between social and climate tipping processes, such as the presence of (human) agency, the structure and complexity of social networks, and the relevant temporal and spatial scales. More generally, from the social science (and political ecology) point of view, a central worry with the strategy of social tipping interventions – and more globally, with the larger conceptual framework of planetary stewardship (Steffen et al., 2018) – is that it may completely overlook the plural and political nature of the underlying social mechanisms, rather favoring a normative narrative of an apolitical and purely scientific course of action. Such a narrative may then lead to “techno-managerial planning and expert administration at the expense of democratic debate and contestation” (Lövbrand et al., 2015, 217; see also Russill, 2018, 256). This a serious concern that needs to be taken into account; the dialogue with the social sciences and the humanities promoted by parts of the Earth system science community constitute important first steps in this direction, see, e.g., Otto et al. (2020, 2362).

Conclusion This contribution provides a brief (nonexhaustive) overview of some important epistemic and methodological issues in relation to abrupt climate changes and, more broadly, tipping points in the climate and Earth systems (including social tipping points with climate policy relevance). In particular, the concept of tipping point is connected to a number of different physical and mathematical notions, and as such it raises many technical, but also climate communication and social science issues. Within this framework, it seems therefore particularly important to be as explicit and precise as possible about the exact definition that is at work in a given context, about its purpose and its limitations. Furthermore, the tension between the potential huge impacts and the deep uncertainties at the heart of (most of) the climate and Earth system tipping points (including local, regional tipping points and their interactions) highlights the relevance of a qualitative (“top-down”) perspective in complement to the standard (and sometimes exclusive) modeling (“bottom-up”) strategy. Such a qualitative perspective can be articulated in different ways, for example, in the sense of dynamical systems and bifurcation theory or by devising physical storylines involving tipping points (in contrast and in complement to the usual probabilistic projection strategy). Within the framework of the climate and environmental challenge, a better understanding of abrupt changes and tipping points in the climate and Earth systems (including local, regional ones) is crucial – in particular in view of avoiding negative

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(i.e., undesirable) tipping points, but possibly also in view of inducing positive (i.e., desirable) ones. Given the plural nature of the challenge and the deep intertwining between natural and social systems (at many different, including epistemological, levels), which is at the heart of the notion of Anthropocene, this understanding needs to be truly interdisciplinary, e.g. involving climate and Earth system science as well as philosophy and social sciences. Acknowledgments I acknowledge support from the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant PP00P1 170460/1).

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Climate Research and Big Data Benedikt Knu¨sel, Christoph Baumberger, and Reto Knutti

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Big Data Elements in Climate Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Data and Its Uncertainty in Climate Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Traditional Climate Data and New Developments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Modeling, Adequacy, and Uncertainty of Climate Datasets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Data-Driven Modeling in Climate Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Machine Learning and Data-Driven Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Representational Accuracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Predictions and Uncertainty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Understanding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

In recent years, the ability to gather and store information has increased dramatically, and the ability to make use of these increasing volumes of data has improved. This advent of big data has opened up new opportunities for scientific research, including for research on climate change. These changes are associated with a number of interesting philosophical questions. This chapter provides an introduction to these questions. It starts by first clarifying terminological issues

B. Knüsel (*) Institute for Environmental Decisions, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] C. Baumberger Institute for Environmental Decisions, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland R. Knutti Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_9

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concerning “big data” and related terms and by giving an overview of big data elements that can be found in climate research. Second, it discusses data in climate research with a focus on new developments regarding the increase in the volume and complexity of climate data and on how the uncertainty of climate datasets may be assessed. Finally, the chapter addresses the topic of machine learning in climate research and specifically the use of machine learning for the data-driven modeling of climate phenomena. The focus of this discussion is on the representational accuracy of data-driven models and how it might be assessed and what this implies for their use for predictions and for understanding. Keywords

Big data · Machine learning · Climate data · Climate models · Data-driven models · Uncertainty · Predictions · Scientific understanding

Introduction The volumes of data produced and stored are increasing rapidly. Because of technological innovation, society is now able to make use of “big data,” as these massive volumes of data are often referred to, for a range of applications (National Research Council, 2013). Textbook examples of big data concern developments in the private sector, e.g., recommender systems in online shops or content prioritization on social media platforms (Mayer-Schönberger & Cukier, 2013; National Research Council, 2013). Yet, the ability to store and analyze more and more data also leads to new methodological opportunities for scientific research (Lyon, 2015). This is not only true of scientific research in general but also specifically of the scientific disciplines that study climate change – i.e., both physical climate science and climate impact research more broadly (Knüsel et al., 2019; Reichstein et al., 2019). The developments associated with big data raise interesting philosophical questions, which relate, for example, to the transparency of data collection and data analysis, the extent to which modeling with big data is theory-laden, and to the assessment of the reliability and the uncertainty of predictions made with big data. It is particularly important to study these issues with respect to climate research for several reasons. First, the volumes and complexity of climate data are increasing rapidly (see Overpeck et al., 2011), and big data approaches are already somewhat common in different strands of climate research (Knüsel et al., 2019). Thus, climate research offers interesting case studies to analyze such issues. Second, climate research is inherently interdisciplinary, and coupling heterogeneous datasets is often necessary in these studies. This coupling of different datasets is one of the key characteristics of big data (Sun & Scanlon, 2019). Third, it has been argued that for big data to be helpful for tackling scientific problems, a dataset should cover all relevant configurations of a target system (Pietsch, 2015, 2016). When studying climate change, it may be difficult to fulfill this condition as future local climatic conditions may be different than any observed today (Dahinden et al., 2017),

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meaning that data covering all relevant states of the target system may not be available. Hence, it seems prima facie unclear how confidence in big data approaches should be established when researching climate change. Finally, modeling with big data relies on domain theory differently, and arguably less explicitly, than more established modeling approaches (Pietsch, 2015, 2016). As coherence with background knowledge is one of the key reasons for confidence in established climate models (Baumberger et al., 2017), the question of confidence in predictions based on big data are particularly interesting in climate applications. This chapter provides an overview of the philosophical questions arising when researching climate change with big data. It starts by providing an overview of big data approaches in climate research and why they are used in section “Big Data Elements in Climate Research”. This section also clarifies some terminological questions. Section “Data and Its Uncertainty in Climate Research” discusses data in climate science, with a special focus on new developments and dataset uncertainty. Section “Data-Driven Modeling in Climate Research” addresses data-driven modeling in climate research and some philosophical issues raised by this modeling approach. The chapter is concluded in section “Conclusions”.

Big Data Elements in Climate Research The goal of this section is to provide an overview and some examples of how and why big data is used in research on the climate and on climate change more broadly. The term “big data” lacks a clear-cut definition. The most common definition of “big data” focuses on certain characteristics of datasets, such as their size (“volume”), the rate of data generation (“velocity”), and the different types and structures of data they contain (“variety”) (Kitchin & McArdle, 2016). However, attempting to define “big data” in terms of such characteristics may be inadequate because all of these characteristics are relative ones. Thus, what counts as “big data” today, based on these characteristics, may no longer be considered “big data” in the future (Floridi, 2012). More importantly, focusing on such characteristics of datasets ignores important aspects of what is typically considered “big data,” namely, aspects that relate to data analysis and modeling (Veltri, 2017). Thus, here, the term “big data” is used more broadly to describe large datasets with fine-grained information as well as new tools to analyze these datasets. While a universally accepted definition of “big data” may be out of reach, there are still some common characteristics to the developments that are typically subsumed under the term. Namely, such approaches are usually characterized by the size and complexity of the involved datasets (see De Mauro et al., 2016; Floridi, 2012; Kitchin, 2014; Mayer-Schönberger & Cukier, 2013; Northcott, 2019; Pietsch, 2016) and by the methodological approaches used to analyze these datasets, namely, the use of machine learning and data mining (see Boyd & Crawford, 2012; Kitchin, 2014; Northcott, 2019; Pietsch, 2015, 2016; Veltri, 2017). Because big data is about more than just large volumes of data, it has been suggested to use the term “dataintensive science” (see, for example, Pietsch, 2015, 2016) or “data-driven science”

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(Leonelli, 2012), instead. According to Leonelli (2012, p. 1), the two characteristic features of data-intensive or data-driven science are the central role of inductive inference from data and the importance of automation, as machines are used to automatically extract useful information from data. Big data elements are quite common in climate research, as different overviews published in recent years have shown (see, for example, Huntingford et al., 2019; Knüsel et al., 2019; Reichstein et al., 2019). In the following, an overview of such approaches is presented that follows Knüsel et al. (2019), who have classified studies from climate research that use big data elements according to a conceptual framework. According to this framework, classical domain science and pure big data approaches can be contrasted and understood using three dimensions, namely, the measurements, the datasets, and the model relations. While in classical domain science the measurements are based on theory-based concepts, the datasets are fixed sets of structured data, and the model relations are derived from theory, in pure big data approaches, the measurements are based on everyday language concepts, the datasets are streams of partly unstructured data, and the model relations are automatically extracted from a dataset. As Knüsel et al. (2019) show, the use of big data approaches in climate research typically falls somewhere between these two extremes. There are many studies in which the model relations are automatically identified using a machine learning algorithm. For example, Jones et al. (2017) used three different machine learning algorithms to build models of how different climatic and environmental factors determine the soil selenium concentration worldwide. Based on these models, they aimed to better understand the drivers and distribution of soil selenium concentrations and to project how soil selenium concentrations might change in the future due to climate change. This example has some of the characteristics of big data regarding the modeling component but lacks others. Many examples that take similar modeling approaches can be found in the literature, for example, for the downscaling of climate model outputs (see, for example, Chadwick et al., 2011; Nasseri et al., 2013; Tavakol-Davani et al., 2013) or for the prediction of specific climatic variables like rain (Kashiwao et al., 2017) or drought (Deo & Şahin, 2015). Furthermore, there are studies in which only some but not all model relations are automatically identified by a machine learning algorithm. In such studies, a stateof-the-art climate model is complemented with certain components that are built using machine learning, constituting a hybrid model (Gentine et al., 2018; Krasnopolsky & Fox-Rabinovitz, 2006). There are also studies in which some or all of the analyzed data contains measurements that are based on everyday language concepts and in which the datasets contain at least partly unstructured data (like text or video data). For example, Tapia et al. (2017) created an indicator of the vulnerability of European cities to different climate risks. In order to obtain data on the awareness of the population of a city to such risks, the authors used the frequency with which a city name was searched for on Google in combination with different terms related to climate risks. In such an example, the indicator is built largely in a classical way (i.e., using theory-derived model relations), but some of the measurements are based

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on everyday language concepts. In contrasts, other approaches that rely on new forms of data also employ models that are at least partly based on automatically detected correlations and hence use more big data elements. Most notably, there are studies relying on social media data for estimating the damage from extreme weather events like hurricanes. Such studies have been carried out with the modeling being structured by theory-based frameworks (Shelton et al., 2014) and in more theory-free approaches (Kryvasheyeu et al., 2016). This overview reveals that big data elements are already quite common in climate research. This is especially true of modeling based on machine learning. However, only comparatively few examples correspond to pure big data approaches. Hence, this overview reveals that big data does not enter research in an all-or-nothing fashion (see also Northcott, 2019). Rather, individual big data elements are often embedded in more “classical” research approaches. Embedding big data elements in more classical research approaches helps, for example, to establish confidence in the assumption that the identified relationships extrapolate well to new cases, especially when these relationships cannot constantly be tested against new data (Knüsel et al., 2019). Based on the overview of big data elements in climate research, Knüsel et al. (2019) have identified two rationales for why researchers employ big data elements in climate research. First, big data elements can help to collect data or to model a target system more efficiently when limited financial or computational resources prevent a more theory-based approach. Knüsel et al. refer to this as the efficiency rationale. An example for this rationale is provided by the study by Tapia et al. (2017) discussed above in which the awareness of citizens to climate risks was estimated by relying on Google search frequencies. A more traditional approach like conducting surveys would have been possible but more expensive. A different example for the efficiency rationale is provided by the hybrid climate model discussed by Krasnopolsky and Fox-Rabinovitz (2006), who show that the computational costs of running a hybrid model are substantially smaller than those of running a state-of-the-art climate model. Second, Knüsel et al. (2019) argue that big data elements can help to model a target system when a more theory-based approach is prevented by limited system understanding, which they refer to as the epistemic rationale. An example for the epistemic rationale is provided by the study on soil selenium concentrations by Jones et al. (2017).

Data and Its Uncertainty in Climate Research This section provides an overview of philosophical issues concerning data in climate research. While the aim of the section is to target issues specifically relevant in the context of big data, many issues are also of a more general interest in climate research. It starts by providing an overview of classical observational climate data and then discusses some new developments, specifically relating to crowdsensing and crowdsourcing of data. As this discussion will show, it is important to understand the limitations and uncertainties of climate datasets. Thus, the second half of

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this section discusses modeling practices necessary to obtain data products in climate research, as well as the evaluation of datasets and dataset uncertainty.

Traditional Climate Data and New Developments “Traditional” climate data is obtained from a range of different measurement activities. While, historically, this data has been used mostly by scientists who study the climate system and climate change, it is more and more also used by researchers in other disciplines and decision-makers outside of scientific research (Overpeck et al., 2011). Such climate data can roughly be classified into data obtained from stationbased measurements, data obtained from remote sensing, proxy data from paleoclimate reconstructions, and data obtained from models (Frigg et al., 2015; Parker, 2018; Winsberg, 2018, Chap. 2). Data from station-based measurements has been collected for a long time, with many systematic records going back to the mid-nineteenth century and earlier (Overpeck et al., 2011). While satellite records only date back a few decades (Lloyd, 2012), they have already surpassed stationbased records in terms of total volume of data (Overpeck et al., 2011). A special case of climate data is provided by the so-called reanalysis datasets. Such datasets are produced by data assimilation, a method that, in its most general form, employs a numerical (often process-based) model to obtain a complete dataset from limited observations. Reanalysis data is specifically created by running a full weather forecast model in a data assimilation mode to produce a global three-dimensional high-resolution dataset of many different variables, constrained by surface data, satellites, and radiosondes (Parker, 2018). Besides these more traditional sources of climate data, new developments have led to novel ways for researchers to collect data to conduct research on climate change. Interdisciplinary climate research, e.g., on the impacts of extreme weather events and of climate change, can use new sources of data as outlined in the previous section. Such data can be obtained from, for example, Internet search queries (Tapia et al., 2017) or from social media platforms (Kryvasheyeu et al., 2016; Preis et al., 2013; Shelton et al., 2014; Tkachenko et al., 2017). But new developments also concern data on more traditional climate variables like temperature and precipitation records. Namely, researchers have been exploring approaches in which data is obtained through the services of a potentially large number of individuals or from sensors that are connected to the Internet (Muller et al., 2015). This data collection approach is usually labeled “crowdsourcing,” but terms like “citizen science” (Elliott & Rosenberg, 2019) and “crowdsensing” (Zumwald et al., 2021) are also used. While there are some differences between what these terms typically refer to, the approaches raise similar philosophical questions. Thus, these approaches are discussed collectively here. Crowdsourced data has been used, for example, to collect information on urban temperatures from smartphone battery temperature (Overeem et al., 2013) or to collect data from citizens on weather events like precipitation types generally (Elmore et al., 2014) or hail more specifically (Barras et al., 2019) through

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questionnaires conducted via smartphone apps. Such approaches are employed for reasons similar to the ones outlined in the previous section. For example, Elmore et al. (2014, pp. 1335–1336) note that high-quality observations of winter precipitation types are needed for the evaluation of radar data. Crowdsourcing provides such data efficiently. Records of urban temperature records are difficult to obtain because the measurement standards set by the World Meteorological Organization are difficult to meet in urban environments (Zumwald et al., 2021). Hence, crowdsourcing approaches help to obtain data that would otherwise not be available for fundamental or practical reasons. While crowdsourcing approaches thus provide the opportunity to obtain data that might not otherwise be obtainable, there are certain concerns regarding those datasets, specifically regarding data quality. These quality concerns might be based on the fact that the individuals involved in collecting the data are not properly trained, which could lead to a lower overall accuracy of the data as an account of the phenomenon that is to be measured (Elliott & Rosenberg, 2019). This concern also holds for private weather stations that people can place on their private properties and whose data is accessible through the Internet. Due to a lack of information, it is unclear if such private weather stations are adequately located or whether they are, for example, directly exposed to sunlight (Zumwald et al., 2021). However, as Elliott and Rosenberg (2019) have argued, rather than considering whether or not data obtained from crowdsourcing provides accurate representations of reality, one should consider whether the data is of sufficient quality for the intended purpose (i.e., whether the data is fit-for-purpose). Whether or not this is the case is not primarily a philosophical but an empirical concern. As Elliott and Rosenberg (2019) discuss, evaluations of data quality in citizen science projects have often found that data quality was sufficient for the intended purposes.

Modeling, Adequacy, and Uncertainty of Climate Datasets The focus away from overall accuracy of a dataset toward its fitness-for-purpose is relevant not just for data obtained from crowdsourcing but also for more traditional scientific data. And while the question of whether a particular dataset is fit-forpurpose is an empirical one, philosophical work is of course relevant for spelling out what it actually means for a dataset to be fit-for-purpose. Scientific data has received increasing philosophical attention in recent years, with particular attention being paid to various modeling steps necessary to obtain a scientific dataset (Bokulich, 2018; Bokulich & Parker, 2021; Leonelli, 2019b). As Bokulich (2018) has argued, whether or not these modeling steps are appropriate should be assessed specifically in the context of the scientific purpose of the dataset. The concerns for the modeling practices necessary to obtain scientific datasets are particularly relevant in the context of climate science. In fact, all of the sources of climate data mentioned earlier in this section rely heavily on modeling until a finished data product is obtained (Frigg et al., 2015). This is particularly obvious for data obtained from the simulation of climate models and for reanalysis data, but it

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is true of other types of data as well. Data from in-situ measurements relies on modeling, for example, because researchers need to perform so-called homogenization to remove artifacts in the data (e.g., from urbanization) and to make records from different stations comparable (Parker, 2018). Furthermore, such stations are unevenly distributed across the globe and the resulting data contains errors and gaps. Thus, modeling is necessary to obtain a complete, gridded dataset (Frigg et al., 2015). Satellite data also requires modeling because satellites do not record temperature values and other variables of interest directly. Hence, a model is employed to derive the variables of interest from the recorded signals (Parker, 2018). Furthermore, the orbits of satellites change over time, which requires recalibration of these modeling steps (Overpeck et al., 2011). Finally, paleoclimate data is based on modeling because variables of interest are derived from other data points (the so-called proxies). For example, the composition of the air bubbles found in ice cores can be analyzed to obtain information on the surface air temperatures during the time period when the air bubble formed (Frigg et al., 2015; Parker, 2018; Winsberg, 2018, Chap. 2). The modeling steps to obtain data products in climate science have received some attention by philosophers. For example, Parker (2016, 2017) has argued that the distinction between genuine observational data (e.g., from in-situ measurement stations) and reanalysis data is not as clear as one might think. The reason for this is that any dataset is the result of modeling steps. Thus, Parker argues that reanalysis datasets should be seen as the result of a complex measurement activity that is still under development. A different example of such a discussion is a case study described by Lloyd (2012), who has analyzed a controversy regarding a discrepancy between climate model results and temperature data obtained from satellites. Careful analysis revealed that the discrepancy was in fact due not to an inadequacy of climate models but to processing errors in obtaining satellite data. This episode highlights that no scientific hypothesis (e.g., regarding the quality of a climate model) can be assessed in isolation but only in combination with auxiliary hypotheses. As discussed by Winsberg (2018, Chap. 2), a good understanding of the uncertainties of observational climate records is thus necessary. Controversies like the so-called global warming hiatus (an apparent slowdown of global mean surface warming between approximately 1998 and 2012, which was in part the result of a coverage bias in global temperature records that was not corrected for by some researchers; see Cowtan and Way (2014); for an overview of this controversy, see Medhaug et al. (2017)) further illustrate the need to recognize and appropriately discuss the uncertainties of climate datasets and whether these datasets are fit for specific purposes. A recent proposal to tackle the issue of dataset uncertainty was made by Zumwald et al. (2020), who have proposed a framework to understand and characterize uncertainty arising when a dataset is used for a specific purpose. This framework discusses the issue specifically for the purpose of climate model evaluation but is applicable to other purposes, too. It aims to characterize the uncertainty that emerges when using a climate dataset for a specific purpose and proposes how this uncertainty can be assessed quantitatively. At the heart of the proposal by Zumwald et al. is the view outlined earlier that datasets should not be thought of as being inherently

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accurate or not but as being adequate or inadequate for a specific purpose. Thus, any analysis of the uncertainty of a dataset needs to be performed specifically for that particular purpose, although, of course, some elements of the analysis will be apparent in any application of a given dataset. Zumwald et al. propose to focus on three distinct locations in the construction of a dataset that may give rise to uncertainty when this dataset is used for a particular purpose. The first of these locations is the modeling performed in the measurement process (e.g., in deriving temperature values from the signal recorded by a satellite) and in the subsequent processing of the individual measurements to a gridded dataset (e.g., when creating a gridded dataset from many individual in-situ measurements). The second location is the sampling when individual measurements are aggregated to a gridded dataset. The third location concerns choices of abstract properties of a dataset that are made, for example, concerning the grid size of the dataset or concerning a baseline period (for calculating temperature anomalies). According to the framework by Zumwald et al. (2020), the first two of the three locations are directly relevant for evaluating the accuracy of the dataset as a representation of a specific phenomenon. For example, when the phenomenon of global mean surface warming is analyzed with an observational dataset based on in-situ measurements (e.g., the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature dataset), both modeling choices and sampling choices influence how accurately global mean surface warming is represented in the dataset. Representational uncertainty may arise at these two locations, e.g., due to underdetermined choices in the modeling steps and/or due to samples that may not be representative but from which a global dataset is created. Biases that are not recognized or that cannot be corrected for can be an additional source of uncertainty. Further uncertainty may arise at the third location, namely, because of abstract properties of the dataset like the grid size or the baseline period for calculating temperature anomalies. These choices need not directly impact the representational accuracy of a dataset – e.g., the global warming signal in a dataset is not influenced by the chosen baseline period. Yet, such choices can be relevant, for example, when comparing different datasets (see Hawkins & Sutton, 2016), and hence need to be made such that the abstract properties are adequate for the purpose at hand. Thus, according to Zumwald et al. (2020), dataset uncertainty emerges from possible deviations from a perfectly accurate dataset and from properties of the dataset that may be inadequate. Often, researchers are interested not only in characterizing the uncertainty and its sources but also in assessing it quantitatively. In climate modeling, this goal is often achieved by using climate model ensembles, that is, by conducting an analysis not only with one climate model but with a range of models whose model structure, parameters, or initial conditions are varied (Knutti et al., 2019; Parker, 2010). Zumwald et al. (2020) propose to use an analogous approach for assessing the uncertainty of observational climate datasets. Namely, they propose to vary modeling choices, sampling choices, or choices of abstract properties systematically to create dataset ensembles. Such ensembles should then be used when putting observational datasets to specific purposes, e.g., to study global warming or to evaluate climate models.

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More work is certainly needed to discuss the uncertainty of datasets in climate research and how it is related to the adequacy of datasets for specific purposes. For example, in practical applications, the adequacy of datasets is likely not just influenced by the relationship between the data and the target phenomenon but also by purely practical considerations such as data accessibility and documentation (Overpeck et al., 2011). The problem of data accessibility could be exacerbated if more and more data is produced and owned by private institutions (see Leonelli, 2019a), e.g., the providers of private weather stations. Furthermore, storage size can be a relevant consideration as volumes of climate data keep increasing, which can limit the portability of datasets. As Leonelli (2015) has argued, the portability of datasets is an important feature of the datasets such that they can serve as evidence for or against scientific hypotheses.

Data-Driven Modeling in Climate Research As discussed in section “Big Data Elements in Climate Research”, big data is not only about the data but also about how the data is analyzed and how the models are constructed. This section provides an in-depth discussion of machine learning and more specifically of data-driven models in climate research. It then discusses why it is important to think about the representational accuracy of data-driven models and how this issue might best be approached. Finally, two specific purposes are discussed for which data-driven models are used, namely, predictions and understanding.

Machine Learning and Data-Driven Models The term “machine learning” refers to both an academic subdiscipline of computer science and a set of methods with which useful information can be extracted from large datasets. Most if not all applications that are thought of in the context of big data involve some sort of machine learning (Northcott, 2019). In this chapter, the focus of the discussion will specifically lie on so-called supervised machine learning methods. Machine learning algorithms are referred to as “supervised” if they are explicitly provided at least one dependent variable. The algorithm then uses a set of independent variables to learn to predict the values of the dependent variables. These dependent variables can be either categorical in classification tasks (e.g., what type of precipitation has fallen in a specific region given a set of predictors?) or continuous in regression tasks (e.g., how much precipitation is expected at a given location given a set of predictors?). Supervised learning differs from unsupervised machine learning methods such as clustering algorithms. These algorithms are not provided a “true answer” in the form of a dependent variable but aim to extract useful information in a dataset. For example, unsupervised methods can be used to identify homogeneous clusters in a dataset or to reduce the dimensionality of a dataset (Hastie et al., 2008, Chap. 1; James et al., 2013, Chap. 2). While unsupervised methods can be important tools in

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scientific practice, supervised methods raise more immediate philosophical concerns, which is why these tools are the focus of this section. There are a range of different supervised machine learning algorithms. On the one end of this range, there are comparatively simple tools like classical linear regression and regressions that perform a regularization (like LASSO and RIDGE regression), i.e., they perform a kind of selection of independent variables. On the other end of the spectrum, there are more complex nonlinear methods including neural networks and ensemble approaches like random forest (James et al., 2013, Chap. 2). Deep learning, i.e., neural networks with multiple hidden layers of neurons (see Buckner (2019) for a philosophical introduction to deep learning), has become particularly important in many scientific fields, including climate science (Reichstein et al., 2019). While the more complex, nonlinear tools are generally more flexible and can thus extract more complex relationships between variables in a dataset, these tools are generally also less transparent. The reason for this is that simpler tools like linear regression provide explicit rules or equations, such that a model user can easily understand why certain predictions are made. This is not the case for more complex methods. The construction of a supervised machine learning model follows two basic steps, model training and model validation. While the actual procedure in scientific practice can be more interactive and recursive, it is analytically helpful to separate these two steps. In model training, the machine learning algorithm considers part of the available dataset (the so-called training data) and learns to predict the dependent variable based on the available independent variables. In the validation step, a different portion of the dataset (the test or validation data) is used to select the best-fitting model and sometimes also to estimate the error rate (James et al., 2013, Chaps. 2 and 5). Because the algorithm extracts the relationships between the variables directly from the data, knowledge of these relationships is not required for constructing the model, establishing an epistemic rationale for using machine learning for modeling. Machine learning is used for different kinds of applications in climate research. For example, Sippel et al. (2020) used machine learning to detect patterns in observational data of global weather patterns, without further interpreting the models as representing any processes in the climate system. This is in contrast to, for example, Jones et al. (2017) who, as discussed in section “Big Data Elements in Climate Research”, used different machine learning algorithms to model the global distribution of soil selenium concentrations. Jones et al. (2017, p. 2849) explicitly argue that “this modeling approach likely captures the broad-scale mechanisms” that are relevant for producing soil selenium concentrations. Thus, in such cases, the models built with machine learning are explicitly taken to represent a target system. It is such applications that are the focus of the remainder of this section. Following Knüsel and Baumberger (2020), they are referred to with the term “data-driven model,” i.e., a model that is built with a supervised machine learning algorithm and is interpreted as representing a target system. In contrast to process-based models, which represent processes taking place in the target system explicitly in the form of equations (see Knüsel & Baumberger, 2020), data-driven models do not contain such

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explicit representations. The next subsection discusses how the representational accuracy of data-driven models should be assessed in more details.

Representational Accuracy Representational accuracy – the degree of similarity between the model and its target system in relevant respects (Giere, 2004; Wilkenfeld, 2017) – is usually used as one important dimension of model evaluation in science (Parker, 2020). Most models are intended to represent the target system with the goal of capturing a certain phenomenon rather than representing the entire target system. Thus, the relevant respects in which the model needs to be similar to the target system are usually related to this specific phenomenon (Knüsel & Baumberger, 2020). For process-based models, these relevant respects may, for example, refer to causal processes that are represented in the model in the form of equations and are known to be relevant for producing the phenomenon of interest. If a data-driven model is used for the same purpose as a process-based model, these relevant respects are the same ones. However, it is somewhat unclear how one should proceed to evaluate the similarity of a data-driven model to the target system in relevant respects. An obvious point of departure is to analyze data-driven models along the same lines as process-based models, i.e., to think about whether important causal processes that produce a phenomenon are represented in the model. However, this is not so simple because no processes are explicitly represented in the model (Knüsel & Baumberger, 2020; Knüsel et al., 2020). Matters are even more complicated because neither the structure nor the parameters of a data-driven model can be readily interpreted in terms of the target system, especially if the model was built with a machine learning algorithm that lies on the more flexible and less transparent end of the spectrum outlined in the previous section. The reason for this is that many datadriven models constructed with such algorithms do not have a clearly defined model structure. This is the case, for example, for ensemble approaches like random forest. Other algorithms like neural networks do have a model structure, but it is unclear how this structure can be interpreted in terms of the target system. The same reasoning applies to model parameters (Knüsel et al., 2020). Rather than such aspects of the model, Knüsel et al. (2020) argue that it is the behavior of datadriven models that should be considered for evaluations of the representational accuracy. More specifically, they suggest that representational accuracy for datadriven models often means that the model behaves in a way that is similar to the target system, specifically with respect to important causal processes, which should be analyzed in terms of input-output relationships. Now that it has been clarified what it means for a data-driven model to be an accurate representation of a target system for an account of a specific phenomenon, it is worth thinking about how this representational accuracy can be assessed. Knüsel and Baumberger (2020) have argued that it is not directly accessible whether a model is similar to its target in relevant respects, regardless of whether it is process-based or data-driven. Thus, indirect indicators for representational accuracy need to be

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considered. Knüsel and Baumberger have suggested three such criteria, namely, the coherence of a model with background knowledge, empirical accuracy, and robustness, which are largely based on Baumberger et al. (2017). These criteria are intended as indicators, giving us reason for believing that a model is representationally accurate. However, they can neither individually nor jointly guarantee that a model is indeed representationally accurate. Each of these three criteria is briefly discussed in the following paragraphs: The first criterion concerns the extent to which a model, as an account of the phenomenon of interest, is coherent with well-established background knowledge about that phenomenon. This background knowledge, according to Knüsel and Baumberger (2020), can include anything ranging from fundamental physical laws to well-established empirical relationships. Whereas for process-based models this criterion can be applied directly to the model equations and the model structure more generally, other factors need to be considered for data-driven models. Knüsel and Baumberger suggest five such factors. Namely, they suggest that the coherence of a model with background knowledge should be assessed by considering whether, based on background knowledge, (i) all relevant variables have been included and (ii) whether sufficiently many configurations of the target system have been considered in the training dataset (these considerations are based on Pietsch, 2015, 2016). Further considerations are (iii) whether sufficiently flexible algorithms have been used such that they can extract the actual relationships between the variables; (iv) whether model behavior, to the extent that it is accessible, is consistent with background knowledge; and (v) whether model outputs are consistent with background knowledge. Empirical accuracy is a more straightforward criterion. It is defined as the degree of agreement between the model outputs and relevant observational and observationbased data (Knüsel & Baumberger, 2020). Such agreement can give some confidence that important causal processes are accurately represented in the model, specifically if the data has not been previously considered in model calibration or model training (Frisch, 2015). Such use-novel data is particularly important for datadriven models because their behavior depends crucially on the training data used. This is also why, as mentioned in the previous section, it is common practice in machine learning to use separate training and test datasets or forms of cross validation that make sure that different data is employed for model calibration and model evaluation (see Steele & Werndl, 2018). Finally, robustness, in the context of such model evaluations, is the degree to which the outputs from different models agree. This agreement indicates whether the outputs depend crucially on the specific implementation of the model whose representational accuracy is in question. For this agreement to give us confidence in the representational accuracy of the models, the different models need to share certain core causal assumptions but differ in auxiliary assumptions. If, under these conditions, their outputs agree and there is independent evidential support for the common core causal assumptions, then this indicates that causal processes in the target system are similar to the ones represented in the analyzed models (Frigg and Harris, this volume; Lloyd, 2015; Weisberg, 2006).

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Two issues can impair the confident assessment of the representational accuracy of data-driven models based on these three criteria. First, as mentioned in the previous section, data-driven models often suffer from a lack of transparency, meaning that it can be difficult for a human agent to understand why the model behaves the way it does. This lack of insight into model behavior can concern a specific input-output relationship, but it can also concern how the model extracts relationships from the data more generally (see Creel, 2020). This lack of transparency is a problem for assessing the coherence of the model with background knowledge, specifically regarding whether sufficiently flexible algorithms have been used (as it may be unclear if a certain algorithm is sufficiently flexible for the problem at hand) and whether model behavior is consistent with background knowledge (because that behavior might not be accessible). Furthermore, this lack of transparency is also relevant for the argument from robustness, which depends on the presence of common causal assumptions at the core of the models. In the case of data-driven models, it can be unclear whether this causal core is actually present in all models (see Knüsel & Baumberger, 2020; Knüsel et al., 2020). A second problem relates to the fact that data-driven models are specifically attractive for modeling phenomena that are ill-understood, as has been discussed in section “Big Data Elements in Climate Research”. This means that often there will be a lack of background knowledge, which makes the argument from coherence with background knowledge to representational accuracy considerably weaker. For example, when considering whether model behavior is consistent with background knowledge, researchers may perform a sensitivity analysis in which they vary the values of some of the independent variables and observe how model outputs respond to this. If the phenomenon of interest is comparatively ill-understood, model behavior may be consistent with background knowledge, but this only provides very weak reasons for believing that the model is indeed representationally accurate (Knüsel & Baumberger, 2020). Despite these problems in evaluating the representational accuracy of a datadriven model, case studies show that data-driven models are used successfully in scientific practice and that these applications are often based on evaluations of the models in terms of representational accuracy. For example, researchers employ tools like variable importance plots (Gagne II et al., 2019) and sensitivity analyses (Andersen et al., 2017; Jones et al., 2017) to gain insights into model behavior and to judge whether model behavior is consistent with what researchers know about the phenomenon of interest. While considerable uncertainty may remain about how representationally accurate the model is, it is important to acknowledge, here, that in many scientific applications, models are evaluated in terms of their adequacy-forpurpose rather than their overall representational accuracy (Parker, 2020). While representational accuracy is often an important dimension of adequacy-for-purpose, which degree of representational accuracy is needed for a model to be outright adequate depends on the context and on the specific purpose (Knüsel & Baumberger, 2020). Thus, despite the problems that researchers may face when evaluating the representational accuracy of data-driven models, data-driven models can still be

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adequate for many different purposes. This is similar to the arguments made above about new developments for data collection. Due to these difficulties in evaluating the representational accuracy of data-driven models, one may wonder when background knowledge is sufficient for justifying the representational accuracy of a data-driven model while being insufficient to construct a process-based model of the phenomenon of interest. As argued by Knüsel (2020), this question seems not to admit of a general answer. The reason for this is that whether a certain degree of confidence in the representational accuracy of a model is sufficient for a particular application depends on the practical consequences of wrong inferences. Since these consequences need to be assessed in terms of contextual factors and non-epistemic (e.g., social, moral, economic) values, such factors and values play an important role in determining whether the available background knowledge is sufficient to obtain a model that can confidently be used for a particular purpose (see Hirsch Hadorn & Baumberger, 2019). Typically, if the practical consequences of wrong inferences are small, quite limited background knowledge may suffice. With increasing consequences of wrong inferences, the required background knowledge for model construction and evaluation typically increases.

Predictions and Uncertainty It is widely acknowledged that machine learning is a valuable set of tools for making predictions. Pietsch (2016) has specifically argued that the predictive success of machine learning algorithms is rooted in the fact that the algorithms are able to extract the causal structure of a phenomenon under certain conditions, which in turn enables them to make reliable predictions about that phenomenon. These conditions are that first, the variables in the model are based on well-defined terms; second, that all relevant variables are included in the model; third, that the training dataset covers all relevant configurations of the target system; and fourth, that the background conditions do not change for those instances of the phenomenon that are to be predicted. Northcott (2019) has argued that these conditions are likely necessary but not sufficient for the predictive success of machine learning. Additional conditions may need to be fulfilled according to Northcott, for example, that appropriate methods are available for handling the data. According to Pietsch (2015), when these conditions hold, no further theoretical background assumptions regarding the inner workings of a model are necessary. As no further assumptions are made regarding the relationships depicted by the model, in these cases, the models built with machine learning seem to be theory-free in an internal sense. However, the models are still theory-laden in an external sense, as the assessment of whether the conditions necessary for reliable predictions are fulfilled has to be based on background knowledge (see Pietsch, 2015). These conditions can help to better understand the predictive success of many machine learning applications like machine translation or speech recognition. As Pietsch (2016) outlines, they are intended to be relevant specifically for those scientific disciplines that are

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characterized by a lack of hierarchies of laws. Examples of such disciplines are biology and the social sciences (Pietsch, 2016, p. 161). While they allow interesting insights into many applications of big data, not all of these conditions are fulfilled in many applications in climate research. Specifically, as argued in the introduction of this chapter, climate change will take the climate system outside the range of observed values for many variables. Thus, the condition that data covering all relevant configurations be available may only rarely be fulfilled, or researchers may lack confidence that this condition holds. Furthermore, it may also be argued that climate change is a factor that changes the background conditions; hence, the requirement of stable background conditions may no longer hold. Thus, if machine learning is useful for making predictions in climate science at all, the conditions outlined above may seem to limit the applicability of machine learning to short-term predictions not influenced by climate change. However, examples discussed in section “Big Data Elements in Climate Research” show that data-driven models are also applied for questions for which climate change clearly plays a role (or even precisely to estimate the impact of climate change). Thus, in many applications of data-driven models in climate research, other justifications for the applicability of machine learning than the conditions mentioned above may have to be considered. While at least one condition proposed by Pietsch (2016) may often not be fulfilled in climate research, due to its rooting in physics, climate research is also characterized by a rich body of background knowledge. Thus, the predictive success of datadriven models in climate research may be best understood by relaxing the conditions in question and complementing them with others that make use of the available background knowledge. Knüsel et al. (2019) have proposed that reliable predictions with big data can be made either if there is a constant stream of new data to evaluate the predictions made and to adapt the model if necessary or if the identified relationships remain sufficiently constant over the time horizon of interest. In most applications of data-driven modeling in climate research, the reliability of the predictions will depend on the latter condition because constant model evaluation is not possible. The question then becomes how this constancy assumption can be justified. Obviously, such a constancy assumption cannot be justified purely based on the data. Rather, it has to be justified at least in part by referring to the relevant background knowledge about the phenomenon of interest and the methods employed (Knüsel et al., 2019). An extensive case study of how this constancy assumption can be justified in practice is provided by Knüsel et al. (2020), who discuss the long-term selenium projections made by Jones et al. (2017). The most plausible justification of the constancy assumption, Knüsel et al. argue, is that the data-driven models in question represent the most important causal mechanisms accurately and that these mechanisms are not influenced by changing environmental conditions. Thus, the justification of the representational accuracy of data-driven models discussed in section “Representational Accuracy” can be important for justifying the constancy assumption. As discussed, one of the factors to be considered for justifying the coherence of data-driven models with background knowledge is whether sufficiently many configurations of the target system are considered in the

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training data. This is a relaxed version of the condition by Pietsch (2016). Instead of requiring that the dataset cover all configurations of interest, Knüsel et al. (2020) argue that the dataset should cover sufficiently many configurations such that the machine learning algorithm extracts the processes of interest from the dataset. This condition is complemented by others, such as that model behavior is consistent with background knowledge. These complementary conditions help to assess whether sufficiently many configurations were actually considered. Often, climate researchers are interested not only in making predictions but also in estimating the confidence they have in those predictions. This requires that the uncertainty of the predictions be understood. There are machine learning methods that directly estimate the uncertainty of the predictions, e.g., by providing empirical quantiles estimated from the data (Meinshausen, 2006) or by relying on Bayesian approaches (Gal & Ghahramani, 2016; Kendall & Gal, 2017). However, in applications of data-driven models such as the ones discussed above, uncertainties that go beyond those that can be empirically estimated directly from the data should be considered. New conceptual approaches are needed to assess the predictive uncertainty in such cases. The reason for this is that established tools to perform uncertainty assessments (e.g., Refsgaard et al., 2007; Walker et al., 2003) have been developed specifically for process-based models. These approaches focus on specific locations in the models at which the uncertainty emerges, e.g., the model parameters or the model structure. As noted in the previous subsection, such locations are not informative of the representational character of data-driven models. Thus, these approaches to uncertainty characterization cannot be applied to data-driven models. Knüsel et al. (2020) have proposed a novel framework for assessing the predictive uncertainty of data-driven environmental models that is based on argument analysis. This approach focuses on the fitness of a data-driven model for making predictions (“fitness-for-purpose” is used here to denote the same property as “adequacy-forpurpose,” except that fitness-for-purpose admits of degrees; see Parker (2020)), which is defined in terms of model performance. A model is considered maximally fit-for-purpose in this sense if it can reliably predict a variable with errors always lying within a small range that solely depends on the natural variability of the system under study. The framework by Knüsel et al. focuses on how this fitness-for-purpose can be justified and suggests to analyze the justification with tools of argument analysis. Uncertainty emerges, according to this framework, to the extent that it cannot be conclusively justified that the model is maximally fit-for-purpose in the sense defined above. In applications for which extensive testing of the model is possible and for which no large extrapolation beyond the observed range of values of the dependent variable is performed, model performance on past instances can directly justify the fitness-for-purpose. In other cases, for example, the selenium projections by Jones et al. (2017), the fitness-for-purpose has to be justified by referring explicitly to the representational accuracy of the models. As argued in section “Representational Accuracy”, different indicators can provide reasons for the representational accuracy of a model, but they can neither individually nor jointly guarantee that a model is representationally accurate. Thus, arguments based on these factors will not be able to conclusively justify the

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fitness-for-purpose of data-driven models, thereby giving rise to epistemic uncertainty (Knüsel et al., 2020). Knüsel et al. emphasize that often researchers may not only fail to conclusively justify that a data-driven model is maximally fit-for-purpose but also be faced with arguments whose strength is difficult to assess. This is particularly so for arguments for the representational accuracy of data-driven models. For example, Jones et al. (2017) perform sensitivity analyses to assess whether the data-driven models employed behave in a way that is consistent with background knowledge. However, since data-driven models are often employed precisely in situations where researchers do not fully understand the processes involved quantitatively, it can be unclear how strong the argument from the consistency of model behavior to the representational accuracy of the models in fact is. Similar points can be made about the lack of transparency of many machine learning algorithms. For example, it can be difficult to assess model behavior or to know whether the algorithms employed are sufficiently flexible while also avoiding overfitting (i.e., capturing noise in the training data). Hence, in many applications of data-driven models in which confidence in model predictions stems from the representational accuracy of the models, there may be not only predictive uncertainty but also substantial uncertainty in the assessment of the predictive uncertainty, so-called second-order uncertainty (Knüsel et al., 2020).

Understanding While it seems widely accepted that data-driven models are useful for making predictions, whether data-driven models can also be useful for understanding phenomena is less clear. However, understanding is recognized to be an important aim of scientific inquiry (de Regt, 2017). Different authors have expressed skepticism regarding the role that models built with machine learning can play for understanding. For the example of research in biology, López-Rubio and Ratti (2019) have argued that models built with machine learning become predictively better for studying complex phenomena if the models themselves become more complex. However, this complexity of the models makes them less transparent (or intelligible), and model intelligibility is, according to López-Rubio and Ratti, a prerequisite for understanding phenomena through the models, at least when understanding is related to mechanistic explanations. In contrast, Sullivan (2019) has argued that the usefulness of models built with machine learning for understanding is impaired not by their lack of intelligibility but by the lack of evidence tying the model to the phenomenon of interest. Thus, according to Sullivan, the problem is not the relationship between the model user and the model, but the justification of the relationship between the model and its target. In the philosophical literature on scientific understanding, it has been suggested that understanding should be understood as a multidimensional concept (Baumberger, 2019; Wilkenfeld, 2017). Following this idea, Knüsel and Baumberger (2020) have proposed a framework for assessing the fitness of a model for providing understanding. The framework assumes that a model can

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provide its user with understanding if it provides her with explanatory information, i.e., information that helps her to construct an explanation of a phenomenon. According to the framework, the fitness of models for providing understanding should be evaluated along three dimensions, namely, the representational accuracy, the representational depth, and the graspability of a model. As outlined above, the representational accuracy of a model (for an account of a specific phenomenon) depends on the similarity between the model and the target in relevant respects. The representational depth depends on the level at which the phenomenon of interest is described and determines how mechanistic the understanding is that can be obtained with a model. The graspability of a model depends on the degree of insight a user has into how the model works. A model can be grasped to the extent that its outputs can be anticipated by the user, e.g., because she has familiarized herself with the model, and to the extent that the model behavior can be explained. As this framework allows for different degrees of fitness-for-purpose, it also explicitly allows for different degrees of understanding (Knüsel & Baumberger, 2020). By discussing a simple toy example as well as an in-depth case study, Knüsel and Baumberger (2020) show that the problems discussed by López-Rubio and Ratti (2019) regarding model intelligibility reduce the graspability of data-driven models. Furthermore, the problems with justifying the representational accuracy of data-driven models discussed above are examples of exactly the kind of problems with linking models built with machine learning to the target phenomenon discussed by Sullivan (2019). However, despite these issues, Knüsel and Baumberger (2020) show that data-driven models can have a reasonable degree of fitness for serving as vehicles for understanding and that they are actually successfully used for this purpose in scientific practice. Examples are provided by Jones et al. (2017), who determine the most important predictors of soil selenium concentrations, or Andersen et al. (2017), who use artificial neural networks to determine the most important drivers for the fraction and properties of certain kinds of clouds. These examples show that data-driven models can provide a user with information that helps to construct explanations of phenomena like soil selenium concentrations and the fractions and properties of the clouds. Pietsch (2016) has argued that despite the causal nature of data-driven models, they are unlikely to be helpful for explanations because they are typically applied in scientific domains characterized by a lack of hierarchies of scientific laws (see section “Predictions and Uncertainty”). This leaves open the possibility that in disciplines like climate research, where such background knowledge is available, data-driven models can actually contribute to explaining phenomena, as argued by Knüsel and Baumberger (2020). Two things are worth emphasizing when comparing the use of data-driven models for predictions and for understanding. First, it has been outlined above how the uncertainty in justifying the representational accuracy of data-driven models can impair the assessment of the predictive uncertainty of the models and thus be a source of second-order uncertainty. A similar point can be made regarding the use of data-driven models for understanding. Namely, the issues

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in determining the representational accuracy of a data-driven model can lead to problems in determining the degree of fitness of the model to serve as a vehicle for understanding. This can make it uncertain whether an explanation constructed based on the explanatory information obtained from the model is actually correct. Second, the lack of transparency of many data-driven models is relevant for both predicting and understanding. However, for predictions, it is only relevant to the extent that it makes the assessment of the representational accuracy more difficult. This contrasts with the purpose of understanding, where the lack of transparency directly impairs the graspability of a data-driven model. The lack of transparency of data-driven models is thus a larger concern for understanding than for predictions.

Conclusions This chapter has provided an overview of philosophical issues that emerge when researching climate change with big data. It first provided an overview of big data elements in climate research and indicated two rationales for using them. It then addressed data in climate research with a specific focus on new developments that are directly relevant in the context of big data and provided a discussion of uncertainty and adequacy-for-purpose of climate datasets. Finally, it addressed the topic of data-driven modeling in climate research and discussed how the representational accuracy of data-driven models can be assessed and what this implies for the use of data-driven models for predictions and understanding. As the volumes of data and the computational resources to use this data keep increasing, it is likely that big data and data-driven modeling will only become more important for climate research in the future. Since, as has been shown, background knowledge is essential in any application of data-driven modeling in climate research, attempts to create interdisciplinary collaborations between data scientists and climate scientists should be welcomed (Karpatne et al., 2017; Reichstein et al., 2019). Many philosophically interesting questions remain, e.g., regarding datadriven parts in otherwise process-based models (Gentine et al., 2018; Krasnopolsky & Fox-Rabinovitz, 2006). For such models, the representational accuracy and reliability of the data-driven components deserve in-depth discussions. Furthermore, the difficulty in justifying the representational accuracy of data-driven models has important implications for other more general discussions in the philosophy of science. For example, the issues in justifying the representational accuracy of datadriven models and the associated second-order uncertainty may have consequences for how inductive risks, i.e., the risks of erroneously accepting or rejecting a hypothesis, are handled in scientific research. Thus, this discussion may also be important for the role of non-epistemic values in science, as these values are important when handling such inductive risks (Douglas, 2000). Hence, the difficulty in justifying the representational accuracy of data-driven models may have implications for the role of non-epistemic values in science and for discussions of scientific objectivity (see Knüsel, 2020).

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Environmental Robots and Climate Action Justin Donhauser

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What Are “Environmental Robots”? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Environmental Robots for Climate Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ecobots for Climate Action? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Robots-for-Ecology for Climate Action? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Robots-in-Ecology for Climate Action? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Works Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

Van Wynsberghe and Donhauser (2018), Donhauser (2019), and Donhauser, van Wynsberghe, and Bearden (2021) discuss the Ethics of Environmental Robots. Scientists explore using various types of robots to address unprecedented environmental challenges caused by climate change. This chapter expands on previous research, exploring new roles, human dependence, environmental mitigation strategies, and contributions to life and environmental health. Few works exist on Environmental Robots. This lack of critical assessments is unfortunate given the increasing affordability and value of robotics for environmental protection. This work presents a functional taxonomy of Environmental Robots (§2) and examines their roles in Climate Action initiatives (§3). Keywords

Robot ethics · Environmental robotics · Ecological robots · Climate action · Sustainability

J. Donhauser (*) Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_117

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Introduction van Wynsberghe and Donhauser (2018), Donhauser (2019), and Donhauser et al. (2021) each discuss aspects of the Ethics of Environmental Robots. Scientists continue exploring ways of using a variety of different types of such robots in applications to respond to the massive unprecedented environmental challenges we must confront in the climate changed world. Building on those previous works, this chapter discusses new roles that robots may play in our environments, new forms of human dependence on such robots, new environmental mitigation strategies they can enable, and new ways such robots can help sustain and enhance life and environmental health. To date, there are only a handful of works that focus on exploring issues surrounding Environmental Robots (these include the aforementioned articles as well as Grémillet et al., 2012 and Sullins, 2011). This lack of work on Environmental Robotics is acutely unfortunate because advances in production methods and increasing affordability continue to make applications of robotics technologies for environmental protection “crucially valuable options for responding to mounting environmental challenges” (Donhauser et al., 2021). This work progresses in two main steps. It explains the functional taxonomy of kinds of Environmental Robots originally proposed by van Wynsberghe and Donhauser (2018) (section “What Are “environmental Robots”?”) and then looks at roles each identified type of Environmental Robots can play in Climate Action initiatives (section “Environmental robots for climate action”). The issues we confront in the domains of both Environmental Robot Ethics and Climate Action have both scientific and political aspects. The aforementioned papers on Environmental Robots tend to focus on the ethical and political aspects of issues surrounding such technologies. However, this chapter focuses more on explicating the technical and practical ways such technologies can aid in Climate Action. The discussion below thus holds many insights and implications for related questions about ethics, policy, and sociopolitical concerns, while at once leaving many ethical and political insights, implications, and questions as open avenues for followup work.

What Are “Environmental Robots”? Following van Wynsberghe and Donhauser (2018), I will take Environmental Robot Ethics to be the study of any robots that aid in environmental remediation, engineering, research, and protection. Below, I will primarily discuss robotics technologies used in environmental research, engineering, and protection (cf. ISO, 8373). Yet, notably, Environmental Robot Ethics also includes the study of the environmental impacts of robots whose primary functions may be other than service for environmental research or engineering. For example, Environmental Robot Ethics also encompasses concerns about robots being made from materials that are more or less environmentally friendly and sustainable. There are also robots whose intended

Environmental Robots and Climate Action Fig. 1 Nested diagram of the proposed taxonomy of environmental robotics. (Adapted from van Wynsberghe & Donhauser, 2018)

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Ecobots

Robots-for-ecology

uses impact the environment though that is not their primary function, like certain agricultural robots (see Aravind et al., 2017; Yaghoubi et al., 2013).1 In line with the taxonomy proposed by van Wynsberghe and Donhauser (2018), I see substantive distinctions between general robotics technologies used in environmental research, those designed for specialized environmental research applications, and those used to play functional ecological roles. Let’s distinguish these as “robotsin-ecology,” “robots-for-ecology,” and “ecobots” (ecologically functional robots). Ecologically functional robots, or “ecobots,” are those whose primary function is playing some functional ecological role (e.g., being used to cull an invasive species) or by augmenting ecological functioning (e.g., enhancing water quality) by autonomously impacting select environmental variables. The name “robots-for-ecology” denotes autonomous technologies specifically designed to carry out functions for environmental research tasks. Finally, “robots-in-ecology” are more general, robotics technologies, like “of the shelf” drones, that are used for environmental research applications. Thus, I follow van Wynsberghe and Donhauser (2018) in observing these functional classes of environmental robots, of which Fig. 1 illustrates their nesting and overlap. These classifications are based on functionality, and these proposed categories can overlap. For instance, certain “robots-in-ecology” and “robots-for-ecology” can also function as “ecobots.” Still, these classifications are significant and useful because they can help guide, organize, and map the practical and ethical issues environmental robots present. So these functional classifications can aide in formulating guidelines and policies and can shape how we think about different responsibilities that environmental robot designers, makers, and users of different sorts may have (cf. Donhauser et al., 2021). These classifications are, accordingly, useful for

1 In my names for the different types of Environmental Robots, I use the term “ecology” primarily as shorthand for “environmental research and engineering.” van Wynsberghe and Donhauser (2018) explain several motivations for using the term ecological and for spotlighting uses of robots for ecological research and engineering (p. 1780). Also, Donhauser (2019) provides an extended discussion of various ecological values, and value for addressing ecological justice issues, had by the sorts of robots we focus on in the discussion that follows.

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organizing thinking about potential use of such technologies for “climate action.” And, in the next section (section “Environmental Robots for Climate Action”), I’ll systematically examine examples of how different ecobots, robot-for-ecology, and robot-in-ecology can be useful for aiding in Climate Action initiatives.

Environmental Robots for Climate Action I will assume that “climate actions” include such actions as defined by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which says they include: stepped-up efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and strengthen resilience and adaptive capacity to climate-induced impacts, including: climate-related hazards in all countries; integrating climate change measures into national policies, strategies and planning; and improving education, awareness-raising and human and institutional capacity with respect to climate change mitigation, adaptation, [and] impact reduction. (Sustainable Development Goals)

Ecobots for Climate Action? An exemplary ecobot developed with the not-for-profit Robots in Service of the Environment is the COTSbot. Developed by Matt Dunbabin, the COTSbot is an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) that also autonomously hunts predatory crown-of-thorn starfish (COTS) using visual recognition technology. It kills the predators by injecting them with a toxin (Today’s Eco-robots; see also Lionfish Project). This is also an exemplary Climate Action, as COTS grow more rapidly and, therefore, eat and prey on coral more frequently in waters acidified and warmed by climate change (see, e.g., Caballes et al., 2021). Other examples of ecobots that can be used in Climate Action include bio-mimicking robots developed to help respond to environmental damages and impacts on environmental resources. These include Harvard’s Wyss Institute’s various “programmable robot swarms.” The Institute’s website explains some potential applications, saying: [A] hive “operating system” could let a user program colonies of robots to perform complex tasks in natural environments such as land, air, and sea. Flying microrobots could be instructed to pollinate a field, or — inspired by termites — an autonomous robot construction team could be programmed to build 3D structures and traversable surfaces, to stack sandbags along vulnerable coastlines before a hurricane or to lay our barriers around toxic chemical spills. (Programmable Robot Swarms)

Robot swarms of different sorts can also be used to repair environmental damages or to mitigate environmental threats. They can do so by repairing reefs, culling species like the COTS-bot, or by cleaning up water or soil contamination, for example.

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Another sort of ecobot has already been used in environmental remediation efforts for quite a while. What I have in mind are ecobots that make use of engineered plants and “designer biofilms” and associated microorganisms to remove, chemically stabilize, or contain soil, water, or atmospheric contamination (see Elliot et al., 2017; Hegde et al., 2011; Kardel et al., 2015; Succuro et al., 2009; Tripathi et al., 2008; Vangronsveld et al., 2009; Todd, 1991; Todd & Todd, 1994). For instance, so-called living machines use sequences of tanks that water can pass through, where each tank remediates water in different ways. And each tank contains a micro-ecosystem that can autonomously adapt to changes and remediation needs by evolving their composition in response to water chemistry changes (see Kangas, 2004, Chaps. 2 and 8). These ecobots can also aid in Climate Action in other indirect ways – perhaps by incorporating solar power for locomotion or by using mechanisms to move relative to concentrations of certain chemicals (“chemotaxically directed navigation”) or by including sensors that to log data for monitoring and efficiency (see Past Ecological Engineering Projects). More complex ecobots, what Donhauser et al. (2021) call “hybrid ecobots,” basically integrate living machine-type systems and computer-control systems. Such hybrids can autonomously and adaptively respond to environmental changes. Calling them “technoecosystems,” Odum (1993) first envisioned these as hybrid ecobot systems as those where “formerly wild components of ecosystems are incorporated into technological systems as hybrids.” And, calling them “ecocyborgs” Clark et al. (1999) envisioned them as “systems containing both biological and technological components interacting as an ecosystem” (cf. Parrott, 1996). What Odum and Parrott envisioned as future possibilities have been developed more and more, and hybrid ecobot systems of each kind they describe actually exist. One example is Petersen’s (2001) use of dissolved oxygen sensors, UV-lights, and a data-logging computer to create controlled feedbacks within a contained aquatic ecosystem – not unlike that found within the aforementioned “living machines” (see also Myers & Clark, 1944). Petersen’s system uses UV lighting to “stimulate photosynthesis when dissolved oxygen levels dropped below the threshold for optimal algal growth and turned off the lights when it dissolved oxygen measured too high for optimal growth” (Donhauser et al., 2021). Cai et al. (2006) and Blersch (2010) developed similar hybrid ecobots for water quality maintenance and remediation, which are applications that could assist in many kinds of Climate Actions. In the least, such ecobots can find very many applications for “strengthen [ing] resilience and adaptive capacity to climate-induced impacts.” Hybrid ecobots like those described can also be integrated to form larger, interlinked, hybrid systems, and/or integrated into existing natural ecosystems. Indeed, “natural and urban terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems could be functionally linked with such hybrid systems, and even data synced, to serve as parts of complex hybrid environments with numerous ecobot subsystems” (cf. Donhauser, 2019; Donhauser et al., 2021). Even simpler biomimicking ecobots could be used as a sort of robot linkages to build larger hybrid ecobot networks like this. For instance, consider tiny bacteria-mimicking robots that mimic bacterial chemotaxic locomotion can be implemented to track chemical concentrations for research or influence

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ecological functionality by also “eating” and chemically transforming chemical substances just like natural bacteria (see Dhariwal et al., 2004; see also Hart & Martinez, 2006 and Rundel et al., 2009). In short, both complicated and comparatively simply ecobots can be used in applications to form rather complex hybrid systems and have potential for helping confront many of the facets of complex Climate Action problems.2

Robots-for-Ecology for Climate Action? Robots that are designed and used for environmental research but may or may not be ecologically functional, I call robots-for ecology. Following van Wynsberghe and Donhauser (2018), they are a subclass of robots used in environmental research, robots-in-ecology, that are invented and designed to carry out specific and specialized research tasks with efficiently. A good example of robots of this sort that can be used to aid in Climate Action in many ways, even “improving education” and “awareness-raising,” are some of those designed to do difficult environmental research tasks. Though Donhauser (2019) and Donhauser et al. (2021) discuss others, one such robot that could be used in ecologically functional ways or in ecologically negligible research applications are those akin to “Treebot” (Lam & Xu, 2012; cf. Menon et al., 2004). Treebot is described as the “world’s lightest, smallest and most flexible tree-climbing robot” designed for maximally efficient “tree inspection, maintenance, pest control and monitor[ing] arboreal environment[s] for ecological research” (ibid., p. 140). Robots-for-ecology also include the array of bio-mimicking robots and robot groups (including the “robot swarms” discussed above) designed to carry out specialized research tasks. They also can include robots like the abovementioned COTSbot, and another, similar robot, the Lionfish Project AUV that aides in research on the impacts of species management and can also directly aid in such management is. How do these robots aid in Climate Action specifically? Treebots and Treebot teams can serve research purposes and ecological functions simultaneously or independently. For instance, they could just be used for enhanced monitoring, but could also be used to do things like systematically remove tree diseases or scare away or cull nuisance species. Bacteria-mimicking robot swarms could also be used in both ways, for example, by being used just to track chemical contaminant concentrations or by also being used in systems that can influence ecological functionality by “eating” and chemically transforming those substances. So too, a variation of the Lionfish Project AUV can be used in both ways. The Lionfish Project robots use visual recognition technology to find and autonomously 2

Donhauser (2019) is careful to add the caveat that, because such ecobots can introduce novel forms of ecological competition and changes that could propagate through ecological networks, they could have many wide-reaching irreversible impacts on ecosystems and human health that need to be considered to get a reasonable idea about how they may positively or negatively impact particular natural systems.

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hunt predatory lionfish – killing them by injecting them with a toxin. Donhauser (2019) notes that this is quite safe, since the lionfish is “an apex predator without competition in nature, due to its armor of eighteen venomous spines, a single lionfish can reduce the biomass of a coral reef by 80% in one month; and currently there are seventeen times more lionfish than is sustainable.” Thus, with the Lionfish Project, we have a robot that can cull a dangerous species efficiently, relatively cheaply, and more safely than humans can alone. And, like treebots and robot swarms, such robots can aid in Climate Action by being used to aid in research, enhance awareness, or by being used to directly functionally address emerging issues due to climate change.

Robots-in-Ecology for Climate Action? There are many other existing and possible robots-for-ecology that I will not discuss here, as the examples just glossed are representative. The more general class, robotsin-ecology, designates more general, non-specialized robotics that are used in environmental research and monitoring. In environmental sciences and engineering, UAVs are very commonly used for monitoring (see Ivošević et al., 2015). That is, for: risk monitoring and assessment (e.g. monitoring volcanoes or extreme weather events); monitoring illegal activity (e.g. poaching); “change mapping” (e.g. urban sprawl); monitoring natural and man-made elements impacts on many different species (e.g. on migrations and population density); and monitoring existential threats and risks of losses and damages to human and nonhuman populations (e.g., via droughts, floods, extreme storms and volcanoes (ChoiFitzpatrick, 2014, p. 24).

Like AUVs have allowed researchers to observe and monitor sensitive and difficult to monitor species more efficiently and ethically than has been possible so far without them, other “off the shelf” drones and rovers, UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) and AGVs (Autonomous Ground Vehicles), have also enabled safer, more efficient, more ethical, and new research of all sorts (see Dunbabin & Marques, 2012, 20; cf. Siegwart et al., 2004). Their increased availability and usage has even led to the birth of a new subdiscipline called “drone ecology” (Koh & Wich, 2012). Vas et al. (2015) document hundreds of trials using UAVs to approach mallards (Anas platyrhynchos), wild flamingos (Phoenicopterus roseus), and common greenshanks (Tringa nebularia) within four meters without having any noticeable effects on the birds 80% of the time (cf. Hodgson et al., 2016). Similarly, Le Maho et al. (2014) recount monitoring populations of endangered king penguins (Aptenodytes patagonicus) with AGVs, which enabled researchers to significantly reduce “longlasting increases in stress hormones,” associated with human approaches (1242). UAVs have also been useful for enabling better and safer monitoring of dangerous

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species, including black bears (Ursus americanus) and rhinoceros (Diceros bicornis and Ceratotherium simum) (see Ditmer et al., 2015). Drones and rovers of different sorts have also enabled explorations of environments and species in extreme conditions (e.g., extreme aquatic conditions and depths inhospitable to humans) (see Yoerger et al., 2000). For instance, they have allowed researchers to explore under arctic ice sheets and have enabled safer predator monitoring (see, e.g., Wadhams et al., 2006 and Clark et al., 2013). In these, and exceedingly many other, ways, drones and rovers alone have shown that general robotics technologies can substantially augment environmental research capabilities in ethically preferable ways. At the same time, the various potential uses of robots as robots-in-ecology and ecobots raise many novel ethical and sociopolitical concerns. In each of these ways, robots-in-ecology can aid, and arguable have aided, in Climate Action by assisting in research and data acquisitions that can inform decision-making about “climate-related hazards[. . .] integrating climate change measures into national policies, strategies and planning; and improving education, awareness-raising and human and institutional capacity.”

Conclusion Elsewhere (e.g., in Donhauser, 2019) I’ve argued that we ought to pursue the development and use of any sorts of Environmental Robots that can protect and enhance forms of well-being for both humans and non-human species. I have further argued that we have normatively forceful reasons to pursue the development and uses of technologies that can protect and enhance environmental goods that will be available for future humans and non-human species with well-being interests. Above, my discussion has also been almost entirely positive in discussing the potential beneficial uses of different environmental robots without also discussing potential risks and dangers they may present. Thus, I leave open avenues for followup critical work, in the vein of Donhauser et al. (2021), which will be crucially important in the development of Environmental Robot Ethics and Policy. As we have said, “[w]e need an ethics of environmental robotics to inform decision-making about the ethics, policy, and regulation of such technologies before the development of them outpaces our capacities to make informed and ethical decisions about them.” At once, it is clear that various sorts of environmental robots can indeed help protect, promote, and enhance valuable environmental goods, and that they can indeed help us confront many challenges that call us to Climate Action. I hope that my readers have found my discussion informative and useful, and sincerely hope it that will inspire further critical discussion of environmental robots and their potential applications for aiding in Climate Action. Acknowledgments I would like to thank Gillian Barker, Eric Desjardins, Aimee van Wynsberghe, and students in my Robot Ethics courses for discussions that have helped improve my thinking about numerous issues discussed above.

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Capurro, R. (2009). Ethics and robotics. In R. Capurro & M. Nagenborg (Eds.), Ethics and robotics (pp. 117–123). IOS Press. Chechetka, S. A., Yu, Y., Tange, M., & Miyako, E. (2017). Materially engineered artificial pollinators. Chem, 2(2), 224–239. Chen, Y., Wang, H., Helbling, E. F., Jafferis, N. T., Zufferey, R., Ong, A., et al. (2017). A biologically inspired, flapping-wing, hybrid aerial-aquatic microrobot. Science Robotics, 2(11), eaao5619. Griggs, M. B. (2017). Sorry, but these pollinating robots can't replace bees. Popular Science. Retrieved from https://www.popsci.com/forgotten-gel-could-help-future-robot-pollination-beedrone Klein, B. A., Stein, J., & Taylor, R. C. (2012). Robots in the service of animal behavior. Communicative & Integrative Biology, 5(5), 466–472. Lampton, C. (1993). Nanotechnology playhouse: Building machines from atoms. Waite Group Press. Leibovici, D. G., Rosser, J. F., Hodges, C., Evans, B., Jackson, M. J., & Higgins, C. I. (2017). On data quality assurance and conflation entanglement in crowdsourcing for environmental studies. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, 6(3), 78. Lin, P., Abney, K., & Bekey, G. A. (2011). Robot ethics: The ethical and social implications of robotics. MIT Press. Mineraud, J., Lancerin, F., Balasubramaniam, S., Conti, M., & Tarkoma, S. (2015). You are AIRing too much: Assessing the privacy of users in crowdsourcing environmental data. Paper presented at the Trustcom/BigDataSE/ISPA, 2015 IEEE. Mission Vision.. Robots in the Service of the Environment. Retrieved 5/25/17, from https:// robotsise.com/mission-vision/ Olivito, J. (2013). Beyond the Fourth Amendment: Limiting drone surveillance through the constitutional right to informational privacy. Ohio State Law Journal, 74(4), 669–701. Past Ecological Engineering Projects.. University of Maryland: Department of Environmental Science & Technology. Retrieved 5/25/2017, from https://enst.umd.edu/people/faculty/patrickkangas/past-projects Peckham, S. H., Maldonado Diaz, D., Walli, A., Ruiz, G., Crowder, L. B., & Nichols, W. J. (2007). Small-scale fisheries bycatch jeopardizes endangered Pacific loggerhead turtles. PLoS ONE, 2(10), e1041. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0001041 Programable Robot Swarms.. Wyss Institute. Retrieved 5/25/2017, 2017, from https://wyss.harvard. edu/technology/programmable-robot-swarms/ Rutz, C., & Hays, G. C. (2009). New frontiers in biologging science. The Royal Society, 289–292. Sustainable Development Goals Help Desk.. Background. Retrieved 02/08/2023 from: https:// sdghelpdesk.unescap.org/learn-more-about-climate-action#:~:text¼According%20to% 20UNDP%20%2C%20climate%20action,policies%2C%20strategies%20and%20planning% 3B%20and The Lionfish Project: This Invasive Predator From The Pacific Is Rapidly Destroying Our Reefs.. Robots in the Service of the Environment. Retrieved 5/24/2017, from https://robotsise.com/ lionfish-project/ Today’s Eco-Robots.. Robots in the Service of the Environment. Retrieved 5/24/2017, 2017, from https://robotsise.com/todays-eco-robots/ Volovelsky, U. (2016). Civilian use of drones as a test case for the right to privacy: An Israeli perspective. In The future of drone use (pp. 261–288). Springer. West, G. (2015). Drone on: The sky’s the limit-if the faa will get out of the way. Foreign Affairs, 94(3), 90–97. Whitcomb, L. L. (2000). Underwater robotics: Out of the research laboratory and into the field. Paper presented at the Robotics and Automation, 2000. Proceedings. ICRA'00. IEEE international conference on. Willcox, B. K., Aizen, M. A., Cunningham, S. A., Mayfield, M. M., & Rader, R. (2017). Deconstructing pollinator community effectiveness. Current Opinion in Insect Science, 21, 98–104.

Part III Climate Change, Social Sciences, and Philosophy

Climate Change Sociology: Perspectives and Dilemmas Dario Padovan and Alessandra Sannella

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Sociology of Climate Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Climate Change Ontology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . On the Different Meanings of Climate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Climate as Commons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Causes of Climate Change: Fossil Energy, Fossil Capitalism, and the Sociology of Energy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Consequences of Climate Change: Injustice and Inequality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Sociology of climate change focuses on how different societies perceive, experience, and respond to the acceleration of climate change and its impact on society. The authors of this chapter review the theory of the discipline’s classics to examine the connections between the social world and the physical environment and analyze how climate change shapes and is shaped by political, social, and economic relationships. Sociological reflection contributes to seeing climate change as a complex of common, local, and global goods. The debate also hinges on how climate change is experienced differently by those in a state of D. Padovan Università di Torino, Torino, Italy e-mail: [email protected] A. Sannella (*) Department of Human, Social and Health Sciences (DSUSS), University of Cassino and Southern Lazio, Cassino, Italy Department of Human, Social and Health Sciences (DSUSS), University of Cassino, Cassino, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_23

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vulnerability. Through important transdisciplinary research, social sciences will be able to analyze the social transitions in progress, trace solutions for “adaptation” proposals, and change behaviors and perceptions of different social actions. Keywords

Climate change · Social science · Social transition · Health · Inequality

Introduction Sociology of climate change is a new sociological research and reflection field. For decades, natural scientists, economists, and, more recently, human geographers have influenced the discourses on climate change. However, sociology is uniquely situated to speak to the causes and consequences of the acceleration of climate change, opening not only specific fields of research but also new perspectives and horizons for social sciences. Sociology can transform climate change research, but at the same time, climate change research can transform sociology, presenting new challenges and opportunities for sociological research (Falzon et al., 2021). Sociologists can use several theoretical and analytical tools to research the sociomaterial traits of environmental and ecological issues. These resources can provide a solid framework for investigating the causes and effects of climate change. These include critical notions of technological solutions to climate chaos, the role of organizations and institutions in avoiding potentially catastrophic climate changes, and structural critiques that identify capitalism as the key mechanism for ecological destruction. The climate is one of the essential general prerequisites for human existence. Not surprisingly, the climate has been a recurring social, cultural, and scientific theme over the centuries. Numerous accounts have identified climate as an explanatory factor in human civilization and its particular forms, successes, and failures. For example, it is common to think that the more developed a society is, the less dependent on climate, or conversely, the more underdeveloped a society is, the greater its dependence on climate. Societies have struggled to emancipate themselves from the uncertainties of climate by replacing rainwater with irrigation systems, frostiness with greenhouses, manipulating seeds and diversifying their production. Those most successful in this struggle have been Western societies that used fossil fuels to interfere with climate dynamics (Stehr & Machin, 2019). After centuries of emancipation and detaching from it, human societies are returning to struggle with the climate. They are increasing their dependence on it to liberate themselves from its caprices. Climate change provoked by the constant effort of Western societies to move beyond the natural limits of Earth’s reproduction to feed its valorization processes is threatening the survival or the well-being of all societies. It now operates at different levels and scales in human societies, both directly and indirectly, spanning national boundaries and social, ecological, economic, and political spheres. It is likely the

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major problem our societies must face for the rest of the century. Scientists and politicians are starting to understand that environmental problems cannot be understood through biophysical and STEM sciences alone. Environmental and climate issues are fundamentally human issues and must be placed in the context of social, political, cultural, and economic knowledge. Climate change is a problem of how we live, produce, and consume, and social sciences should be at the forefront of efforts to understand and address such a problem. This chapter does not list the social causes and impacts of climate change that the social sciences can explore. The chapter does not illustrate the technological measures claimed to be taken and the ways to render these measures socially acceptable. Instead, it wants to examine the debates becoming more complex and epistemologically confused, if not conflicting. The days in which it was claimed that environmental crisis could be easily seen and quickly contained are now at our backs. The global environmental problems of the twenty-first century are becoming increasingly manifold as they move beyond the conventional epistemological gaze addressing a multiplicity that does not necessarily mean fragmentation (Carolan, 2004). Multiplicity implies not only a variety of epistemological gazes to look at climate change but also a “pluriverse” of practices that start from different ontologies – sometimes converging, sometimes contrasting – designing a plural universe of alternatives to fossil capitalism (Kothari et al., 2019; Escobar, 2020). The chapter wants to introduce some preliminary reflections on how to know and enact climate change as a matter of social ontology. How climate chaos enters our individual and collective lives is shaking the theoretical solidity of social sciences and their research practice, established long ago. When we realize that we are living in a deep transition, intended or not, we become aware that the changing climate regime raises relevant challenges and questions: 1. What kind of contribution should a sociology of climate change provide? What kind of relationships there are between social and biophysical sciences and knowledge? What is the reality of climate change? What is its meaning for people? How much is it a biophysical phenomenon or a social one? To what extent can it be regarded as a common good? 2. What specific human activities and social characteristics – the “driving forces” in the climate literature – are mainly responsible for the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations and land surface change? 3. What are the social consequences of climate change regarding losses, damages, justice, and inequality, and what are the global implications of the so-called zerocarbon transition? 4. What can be done to curb the driving forces, reduce human impact on climate and the impact of climate on humans, protect the vulnerable, and avoid victims? These questions are answered as follows. The first section elucidates the mission of the sociology of climate change, the challenges it must answer, and the posture it must take in responding to the material solicitations coming from climate chaos. The

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second section investigates the notion of climate change ontology, showing that it has different ontological realities and can be conceived as a multiple object. The third section explains how climate has been historically experienced and described. People understand that “weather” differs from “climate”; this latter being a scientific abstraction derived from global measures. The fourth section introduces the idea that climate is a global commons that must be treated as a collective, not appropriable good by states or business enterprises. The fifth section contends that the production/ consumption system fed by fossil fuels, the fossil capitalism based on the commodity form, is the cause of climate change. The final section examines the consequences of climate change in terms of exacerbated inequalities, both from the point of view of impacts and adaptation measures, and suggests a more systematic analysis of the concept of justice.

A Sociology of Climate Change What kind of society do we need to cope with climate change? If we agree that climate change – not climate alone – is a social phenomenon, we must ask ourselves what kind of society triggered it and what kind of society we need to cope with it. Sociology has spent much time examining the nature of modern societies but has not addressed fossil-based resources in such societies. It did not discuss how movement within society was possible only based on oil. If fossil energy – oil, gas, and coal – is no longer so cheap and plentiful, or if it has to be priced or rationed to minimize use due to its climate impacts (Urry, 2010), then the human world has not only to regulate its nature’s consumption better, but it must be radically changed. This would be true for people, objects, food, water, technics, and science. Preparing or planning for a no-carbon future is the challenge of post-carbon sociology. The sociological “posture” that refuses to acknowledge the material basis of social practices is still at work, even though it no longer dictates the sociological agenda. Sociologists are, in part, still reluctant to embrace an agenda where the causes and consequences of the changing climate and earth system are first and principal issues. Undoubtedly, sociology needs to develop new perspectives to identify the social circumstances of planetary biophysical constraints and changes and the sociocultural limits to our political-economic transformation capacity. It also needs to examine the nature of global economic growth and its role as a fundamental driver of climate change, address how growth can be slowed without immiseration and de-democratization, enrich the sociological understanding of how climate change engages and overlaps with other ecological and social problems, and understand the nature of technical apparatuses or dispositive that enhance climate change. It depends on the capacity to introduce the “material” into sociological epistemology and ontology. Since the biophysical sciences have raised the problem of the climate crisis identifying the Earth system as the reference of the human species, the social and human sciences have found themselves in a conceptual dare that pushed them to think about Nature in wider dialectical terms than usual. Currently, also an increasing

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number of people are experiencing climate chaos consequences. The growing number of catastrophes, extreme natural events, calamities, and disasters are affecting people’s lives and forcing social sciences to consider these events at both concrete and abstract levels. The fact that humans have become a telluric force, capable of changing the functioning of the Earth as much as the volcanic eruptions, the tectonic movements of the continents, the cyclical fluctuations of solar activity, or changes in the orbital movements of the Earth around to the Sun, poses not only technical or physical problems of preservation of the usual parameters of operation of the Earth system but above all those of the place of historical human societies about nature. Social scientists must question themselves radically about the potentialities that the incorporation of the material in the social – in its various forms of technical objects or natural agents – poses to explain the different social orders. They must explore how, in its making or emerging, the “social” incorporates, manipulates, and transforms the nonhuman and how, reciprocally, the nonhuman in its making and emerging incorporates the social. For example, focusing on how “materiality” – in the form of the earth, climate, resources, food, goods, building materials, life forms, technology, and objects of scientific investigation – contributes to constituting or de-constituting society is becoming a very crucial topic. In essence, argues Schatzki (2010), the “social” – understood as coexistence forms of human sociality or “hanging together” – is constitutionally interconnected with nonhuman living organisms as well as with other nonliving entities. Therefore, these material matrices in which the practices of human activities unfold are fundamental for the emergence of social life. In the light cast by climate changes, we should consider the social as the result of causal dynamics deriving from the close dialectic between the material and the immaterial, the natural and the social, the concrete and the abstract, the actual and the potential. The relationship between different scientific disciplines and fields of knowledge stirred a long-standing debate that started at the beginning of the twentieth century to demonstrate the incommensurability of natural and social sciences. The current epistemological debate arises to address a transdisciplinary dialogue (Thompson Klein, 2008), leaving aside the old binary logic of the natural and social sciences opposition (Naturwissensschaften und Kulturwissenschaften), to challenge the unpredictable future linked to the acceleration of climate change and the impact on social structures (Buizza et al., 2022). Human history is also natural history; nature is inextricably intertwined with human history because humans can never wholly dissociate from the natural world. This “inextricability” takes the form of an “asymmetric dialectic” between ontologies: as suggested by Michael Carolan (2005), “the biophysical can exist without the social, the opposite is categorically impossible.” The “natural” can survive without the “social,” but the latter cannot last without a material basis for arising and maintaining a social life. While trapped in this social/natural nexus, what is at stake here is the social definition of the world. What is a not-only social world? Set of relationships, ways of life, ways of existence, exchange system, metabolic system, cultural system, and hierarchical system? We are experiencing a clash between rival images of the world, which brings with it fierce conflicts, bloody conquests, dirty

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wars, terror, and counterterror. Ulrich Beck (2016) claims that climate change is an agent of radical transformation. It has already changed our way of being in the world – of living in the world, of thinking about the world, of trying to act on the world through social action and politics. Climate change creates new landscapes of inequality, drawing new maps whose key lines are not the traditional borders between nation-states but those of climate change impacts. It creates a different way of conceptualizing the world and our survival chances. Climate change pushes us beyond the risk society opening the time of the “sacrifice society,” where some people and places are sacrificed for the survival of others, usually the richer. However, a future with socio-natural disasters and breakdowns might have advantageous effects. According to Beck (2016), climate change highlights the nice side effects of evils rather than the adverse side effects of goods. It can be advantageous to avoid the “worst” instead of seeking out the “best,” as has been suggested for decades in the win-win logic where everyone wins and no one loses. These anticipated risks that quickly materialize into actual damages have the potential to generate normative horizons of common goods, as it will be explained below, push us beyond the national framework to steer politics in the direction of a global perspective, and reevaluate a cooperative and communitarian perspective, favoring new ways to interact with our planet collectively.

Climate Change Ontology When approaching climate change issues, many ask themselves what kind of phenomenon it is. Climate scientists are oriented to define it as a biophysical phenomenon despite its social causes and consequences. Social and human scientists are oriented to define it as a social phenomenon despite its biophysical dimensions constituting the mediation by which climate shapes social modes of living. These ways of seeing climate change are indicators of the difficult ontological status that climate in its changing features and dynamics can take. Climate change might be defined as a multiple object that cannot be contained in a single methodological context or epistemological framework; it is an object, nonetheless, a real and not only a socially constructed object (Esbjörn-Hargens, 2010). It is an objective phenomenon that shows multiple characteristics and several dimensions, combining material features, scientific observations, and cultural meanings, finally revealing itself as an ontologically separate entity. Instead of being “one thing,” climate change is a complex issue made up of numerous interconnected sub-issues at many scales, ranging from lawn care and building codes to eating habits, subsistence practices like clearing old-growth forests, gas flaring practices in the oil industry, overt conflicts, and countless others, all of which reflect a wide range of values, needs, and resulting behaviors. The fact that we face a multiple object means that we do not face the standard simple case – many perspectives looking differently at a single object – but rather, we face multiple perspectives using a variety of techniques, practices, and methods to enact multiple objects that overlap

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with and diverge from each other in numerous ways to generate an object that goes under the signifier of climate change (Esbjörn-Hargens, 2010). To approach sociologically such a process enacting a multifaceted but real or concrete object such as climate change, it will be useful to refer to Max Weber’s concept of “refraction” (Weber, 1958), in which methods of knowledge (of material events such as climate change) refract or bend within different sociocultural formations. The notion of “refraction” (or refractive effect) is interesting because it indicates a process of switching and contingency of ideas concerning certain concrete phenomena when they enter a particular cultural or scientific field. According to this view, ideas “change” their path, altering the original direction derived from elementary material forces to become forces in themselves eventually. Weber’s concept of refraction is close to Marx’s concept of concrete abstraction, or determinate abstraction, whereby a reality subjected to abstraction or produced by thought has very real consequences. It is a practically accurate abstraction because it is now an abstract object that occupies and makes reality. Put another way, when faced with social facts that manifest situations with deep material roots, such as climate change, we must identify the concept that defines it to capture its innermost abstract essence – its ontology – and then unfold it in its many determinations and multiplicities. If we use this perspective, we can understand that climate change meanings and discourses are radically changing the path, from a technical perspective to multiple social and cultural ones. As used here, the concepts of refraction and concrete abstraction indicate how socio-material issues are refracted through the specific cultural and disciplinary lens, whose connection generates a new object – a “boundary” or “multiple” or “dialectical” object. What was originally material – climate change – takes on an altered form (refracted or bent as in light), acquiring new content as it passes through and is captured by various epistemological and cultural domains, such as scientific knowledge, social interaction, politics, and religion. The social sphere in which we live “secretes” meanings – and illusions – from which we cannot escape, nexuses in which each thing helps the other to appear normal. Analyzing these nexuses allows us to criticize the collectively generated meanings and the socio-material foundation of the “social” itself. In this perspective, when we face the issue of a socio-material foundation of climate change, it is possible to assert that multiple ontologies (for example, those of indigenous people) aim to explain “what there is” (Descola, 2013). What is missing is the fundamental discussion about “what there is” and the mechanism by which a “refracted” reality imposes itself on other realities. In the debate, epistemological issues tend to be discussed as disembedded from their ontological contexts. However, as “knowledge” cannot be separated from “reality,” epistemological queries cannot be separated from ontological ones. Knowledge is not produced in an ontological void. Thus, the acknowledgment of a plurality of meanings coming from different ontologies is the presupposition for addressing problems of global climate justice (Burman, 2017). Ontologies of climate change are firmly linked to the ways in which climate change is experienced, understood, and addressed. In the case of “indigeneity,” different notions of “the climate” tend more to collide than coalesce

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(IPCC 2022). Even though IPCC recognized that “an inclusive, equitable approach to integrating adaptation, mitigation and development” can be strengthened by involving local and indigenous knowledge, dichotomized notions of nature and society and a romanticized notion of indigenous peoples as the “guardians of nature” are still at work. Here an ontological conflict can be seen that manifests itself in two different ways, a conflict over the nature of reality and a conflict between different realities. Rather than focusing on multiple perspectives about a unique reality, we refer here to the existence of different worlds, a multiplicity of realities, or a “pluriverse.” These two perspectives suggest, as Burman (2017) claimed, that ontology is not a hermetically sealed property of a circumscribed social group but a dynamic configuration of premises regarding the nature of being and reality. The pluriverse implies different gazes and refractions, different practices of investigation that tend to produce different realities. In this way of thinking, the move to ontology means that the world –the objects, the institutions and the people that make it up – is no longer a single thing. Instead of a “universe,” we are instead caught up in and help to produce a “pluriverse” (Law & Urry, 2004). Thus, “reality” is reconceptualized and transformed from being a monolithic and reified entity to becoming transforming and transformative lifeworlds that are multiple in themselves –biophysical and sociopolitical, sociophysical and biopolitical – and the notion of partially connected and partially overlapping realities in the plural becomes less essentialist and static.

On the Different Meanings of Climate Different ontologies are consequences of different explanations and meanings of phenomena such as climate change. Weather and its extremes have often been interpreted magically, religiously, metaphorically, or morally as Indigenous people still do. Several objects, rituals, and symbolic actions (including fire and foreskins) have been designed to influence rain initiation or ward off storms. Some historians describe how, starting from the end of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the existence of “unnatural” climatic phenomena, particularly the beginning of the Little Ice Age, was explained as the evil intent of “a great conspiracy of witches” (Behringer, 1999). The women denounced because they were considered the “witches of the weather” were burned at the stake (Federici 2004). Nowadays, many believe that the scientific concept of climate is the only relevant notion. The ability to determine temperature and humidity constitutes perhaps humanity’s oldest dream: the reverie of “a life without weather conditions, without weather contingencies and surprises, without extreme weather events, seasonal changes, or locally difficult” (Stehr & Machin, 2019). Technologies such as air conditioning have allowed the emergence of a universal standard of “ideal climate,” part of a framework of modernity in which man is distinct from nature and society is torn away from the climate. However, various representations of weather phenomena, climate conditions, and climatic influences that have arisen over the centuries remain. Commonsense ideas of climate continue to have an essential function in

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everyday life. In this view, climate and weather are obviously different: the weather is the transient, real, local, and unruly atmospheric condition of a particular moment. It should be distinguished from the abstract entity of climate. In the scientific view of it, the climate could only be accessed through statistics, usually calculated over long periods and large geographical areas. Climate, in other words, is the “statistics of the weather.” As Stehr and Machin (2019) said, the climate is a matter of average conditions that do not exist in themselves. It is a scientific construction created by collating a series of measurements and observations of atmospheric values – primarily temperature, precipitation, and wind speed. Alongside technological change, the climate is no longer understood as average weather but as a global system that delineates possible weather. In these scientific depictions of climate as a system working at a worldwide level, the diversity of material, social, and psychological impacts of climate that occurs at a local level collapse. The climate is considered a neutral object that can be quantitatively described in terms of measuring climatological variables and their interaction. However, global climate averages and models need to convey the full impact of the climate on the intricacies of human cultures. Climate, in short, cannot simply be understood as a neutral scientific object but must be understood to be a matter of social and political concern. With this recognition, the weather is no longer recognized as entirely natural but is also partly social. Sociology’s founders were not unaware of material conditions’ role in molding cultures and organizations. Max Weber explored various environmental-cultural relationships, including the effect of climate on religion in Palestine and the role of hydraulic bureaucracies in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China. Ancient Palestine was precariously situated between the two great civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt. The proximity to Egypt raised the question of why Egyptian culture had not penetrated deeper into Jewish beliefs. Weber explains this by noting the “profound differences in natural environmental conditions” underlying different social orders. The separation of the two kingdoms was “based on natural and social differences.” Just as ancient Egyptian culture reflected the environmental conditions of the Nile, cultural life in ancient Palestine reflected the agricultural structure dependent on rain and cattle breeding. Life was, in Weber’s words, “meteorologically precarious” because agriculture was based on irrigation and was limited and depended on rainfall. The entire region was subject to numerous natural depredations, including violent storms, which eroded the sandy soil and drought. Hence the two alternative divinities: Yahweh and Baal. Baal was the god of fertility, the earth, and its fruits. By contrast, Yahweh was the god of rain, storm, and war (Weber, 1952; Foster & Holleman, 2012).

Climate as Commons Different meanings and ontologies of the same object – climate change – pose crucial questions. Recognizing alternative ontologies risks denying the reality of a common world – even though this common world is subsumed and realized by

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global capital and global capitalism. However, accepting the prospect of an ontological multiplicity does not mean embracing an apolitical perspective, even though this move offers meagre prospects for critically addressing social and climate injustice. A way to keep a unified social vision not prone to global capitalism ontology is to understand our planet and its surrounding atmosphere as a “common.” In a broad and conventional sense, a common can be understood as one or a collection of natural or cultural resources accessible to all members of society. Such resources also include air, water, or habitable land. These resources are managed in common, not privately appropriated, and not subjected to rivalry and competition. A typical common can be seen as a natural resource that a group of people (communities, cooperatives, and user groups) manages for individual and collective benefit. This implies a variety of informal norms and values that constitute the governing mechanism of the commons. Finally, a common can also be a social practice governing a resource – often called commoning, outside the state and market spheres, implemented by a community of users who self-govern through institutions created by itself. In the case of global warming, the common good is a certain composition of the atmosphere. This composition maintains the climate and, consequently, the biosphere on Earth within the parameters to which we have adapted and to which we have adapted our way of life, culture, activities, economics, and so on. This “special composition of the atmosphere which can maintain a certain climate” is made by a balanced dynamics between temperature, humidity, and other physical parameters that shelter the crucial “critical zone.” All species living on Earth are involved, although only humans can contribute to preserving the atmosphere. The composition of atmospheric gases and their effect on the biosphere and humanity is a “commonpool resource.” No one can be excluded from enjoying their positive impact. Sustainable management of global commons, such as the atmosphere, is a new challenge for the future of socioeconomic systems. However, rivalry exists, and the atmosphere is used as a reservoir to discharge emissions from human activities (production, transport, consumption, etc.). Activities of some classes, countries, and enterprises are unduly occupying – or have already occupied – the atmosphere’s space with greenhouse gases emitted from them. Suppose everyone could benefit from the sustainable use of these commons. In that case, however, there are situations in which harmful “free riding” behaviors (i.e., indiscriminate use or individual purposes) can potentially change the climate. The atmosphere is currently a “no man’s land,” available for free. This is an attack on these global commons – the atmosphere and the climate – even though there is the acknowledgment that they are crucial commons for humanity. In some way, as said by Caffentzis and Federici, “it is almost a law of contemporary social life that the more commons are attacked, the more they are celebrated.” When we look at climate as a common, we must introduce two other dimensions: the “commoning” and the “commoners.” There are no commons without the former. The concept of commoning articulates the dynamic and transformative quality of the commons, as well as the inherent relationality and performativity. The dynamic and transformative

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aspect implies that a commons is not a static resource but a constitution of social networks that seek to cocreate and sustain the life world based on confrontations, debates, and solutions that are often not definitive. This is truer for a global common such as climate. From the commoning perspective (Caffentzis & Federici, 2014), climate and microclimates are not static objects or physical containers where things are located or practices occur. The climate is not dead or inert; it is a process; it is fluid and alive; it is always becoming due to human activities. It must be maintained, when possible, into safe ranges of change or boundaries. Climate dynamics are due to social relations; capitalistic rules and actions now shape these relations. Thus, the climate results from a changing composition of social forces that, ranging from states, governments, armies, and enterprises to people, social organizations, and unions, confront and compose each other. All contribute to the production of the climate as a common source, including its everyday life weather and the related perception and culture. This space is also potentially conducive to common practices enacting “another climate,” meaning “another world” within the neoliberal landscape. In doing so, they are altering subjectivities, relations, and practices. Managing the atmosphere as a global common requires related policies at the international, national, regional, and local levels – that is, multilevel or polycentric climate governance (Ostrom, 2010) or, as said before, a “pluriverse” of possible alternatives to fossil capitalism. An intergovernmental agreement is indispensable even though it is insufficient to combat climate change. Despite intergovernmental agreements such as those stipulated during the various COPs, emission reductions in one region led to increased emissions in other regions, and this is already happening: in the face of ever-increasing greenhouse gas emissions, some countries have already decarbonized to some extent. Such dilemmas, typical of the management of resources deemed to be appropriable, can be resolved by treating them as common resources for humanity and then managing them as common goods. Global commons such as forests, oceans, and the atmosphere should be entrusted to reliable commoners and expanded commoning processes (Edenhofer et al., 2013). Looking at climate as a common implies a radical ontology of the world. Hoping that the annual COP will be able to overcome the global heating is rather naïf. People created what today we call the commons as a strategy to enact their worlds, including the climate. To defend and promote the commons means creating with every act and every practice worlds in which the commons – indeed, commoning – still find breathing space and sometimes even the chance to flourish. Commoners are the makers of their own world. They refuse to abide by the rules of the One-World World that wish to organize everything in terms of individuals, private property, markets, profits, and a single notion of the real. One-World World seeks to banish nature and the sacred from the domain of an exclusively human-driven life (Law, 2015). Those who insist on commoning defy this civilization of the One-World (capitalist, secular, liberal, patriarchal, and white) that arrogates for itself the right to be “the world” and that reduces all other worlds to nonexistence or noncredible alternatives to what exists (Helfrich & Bollier, 2019).

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The Causes of Climate Change: Fossil Energy, Fossil Capitalism, and the Sociology of Energy If we want to cope with climate change and change society – not the Planet – we need to understand why societies produce and consume the current energy levels and manage the Earth as they do. The sociology of climate change can strongly help in this huge project. We need to understand how and why societies use resources and manage their environments to formulate ways to reduce fossil fuel use and deforestation and change the variety of other human activities that drive climate change. It is now acknowledged that every impact of climate change carries the imprint of several human acts. These acts have often been grasped and termed as consumption, indicating final consumers as responsible for climate change and the potential agents to solve it. However, if we investigate the world of consumption, we discover that consumption is much more than the actions and practices of final users. Suppose we approach climate change through the lens of the socio-ecological metabolism of human societies. In that case, we discover that this metabolism entails production and consumption, challenging the common idea that an unbridgeable gap exists between producers and consumers. Even though we think to know where consumption starts and ends, from the point of view of “natural resources,” each activity implied in society reproduction (namely production, distribution, exchange, and consumption) consumes energy, matter, ecosystem services, and labor. It means that any agent of bio-socioeconomic activity consumes, and producers are also consumers. The routine enactment of many different activities entails consuming energy and matter, including the body’s energy. Consumption is, by definition, a process of adaptation of the human species to changing environmental and social conditions: without consumption, there is no reproduction, evolution, or change, but neither is there conservation, repetition, or stability. As Marx said, “a society can no more cease to produce than it can cease to consume. When viewed, therefore, as a connected whole and in the constant flux of its continuous renewal, every social process of production is simultaneously a process of consumption (reproduction). The conditions of production are simultaneously the conditions of reproduction” (Marx, 1867, p. 711). Consumption is the cause of climate change. Every activity involves the “consumption of nature,” that is, of matter and energy. That energy, whether endosomatic or exosomatic, comes from nature (or rather from the Sun) by transforming into different carriers (vectors) materials: oil, coal, gas, biomass, wind, and tides. The critical factor is that in the current economic system, the consumption of energy and matter, while being a universal and transhistorical process, tends to grow continuously to produce consumer goods and generate economic profits. The fact that “consumption of nature” unravels based on the principles of capitalist economics transforms it into something very different from the simple reproductive and metabolic activity, which remains its primary goal. The historical-biological continuity of the human species and its members, guaranteed over time by a complex system of activities and practices, is transformed into activities of capital valorization that systematically remove all physical and human limits to increased consumption

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and, thus, production. When the process of biosocial reproduction no longer recognizes social and natural limits, when the materiality of our lives depends on how many goods we have at our disposal when we think that economic prosperity and social welfare increase with increasing consumption, we have already defined the set of underlying causes of climate change. In this interdependence of production and consumption lies the main modern explanation of the changing climate: without consumption, there is no production; without consumption, depletion, destruction of matter, energy, and final goods, there are no opportunities for the production (growing) of commodities. Consumption and production should, therefore, not be treated as separate, irreconcilable, and even antagonistic worlds but as two sets of processes and activities that are closely interdependent and often, as in the case of “consumption of nature,” indistinguishable. Despite the artificial separation of the two sides of social reproduction made by social sciences, consumption is closely articulated with production. Production must be considered to achieve an adequate understanding of consumption analysis. As suggested by Marx, “the very process of production itself involves consumption, is immediately consumption” (Marx, 1973, p. 90), in the sense that materials and resources are used, and energy and other capacities are expended while making things and/or providing services. Considering consumption as a driver of climate chaos is not only a matter of consumption patterns primarily driven by the desire for social status, conspicuous consumption, and leisure that secure one’s position in society. Consumption is instead a matter of the mode of production, a notion that designates the combination of material modes and social forms that characterize the appropriation of nature. The relationship between consumption and production is complex and varied and has changed over time. With the globalization and delocalization of consumer goods manufacturing, consumer services have been increasingly outsourced, moving from wealthier, more developed “consumer” societies to emerging “producer” societies, creating distance between producers and consumers. A metabolic approach gives consumption its original materialistic meaning, combining production-based and consumption-based processes. Prosumption involves production and consumption rather than focusing on either one (production) or the other (consumption). In prosumer capitalism, there is a trend toward the recruitment of the consumer in the production process. This involvement is branded by unpaid rather than paid labor applied to goods innovation processes, thus allowing products to be offered at no cost (Ritzer & Jurgenson, 2010). In Grundrisse, Karl Marx was clear: “production is also immediately consumption. Twofold consumption, subjective and objective: the individual not only develops his abilities in production but also expends them and uses them up in production, just as natural procreation is a consumption of life forces. Secondly: consumption of the means of production, which become worn out through use, and are partly (e.g., in combustion) dissolved into their elements again. Likewise, raw material consumption loses its natural form and composition by being used up. The act of production is, therefore, in all its moments, also an act of consumption... Consumption is also immediate production, just as in nature; the consumption of the

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elements and chemical substances is the plant’s production. In taking in food, for example, a form of consumption, the human produces his own body. However, this is also true of every kind of consumption which in one way or another produces human beings in some aspect.” (Marx, 1973, p. 89). The consumption/production complex leads us to the crucial question of fossil energy. Production, distribution, consumption, and disposition of commodities need raw materials and energy used to build up artifacts, move stuff, extract their use value, and dispose of end-of-life commodities. Fossil capitalism refers to the economic system of capital which has chosen to use fossil fuels to expand, becoming, in Engels’ eloquent expression, a “waste of past solar heat.” Using solar energy preserved underground for millions of years allowed the production to exceed the limits of wind, water, and muscle. As we now know, there has been a huge hidden cost in environmental destruction, particularly the carbon cycle disruption, but these costs are not considered in capital accounting. The steam engine, railroad, steamships, automobiles, and aeroplanes consumed coal, oil, and gas at an ever-increasing rate. Ian Angus (2016) calls it “fossil capitalism.” Looking at transformed ecosystems forces us to turn back towards human society to understand what has happened in history. Global warming is projecting a new light onto history. The fossil economy was established, entrenched, and expanded in this process. The building of the railway networks, the construction of the Suez Canal, the introduction of electricity, the discovery of oil in the Middle East, the rise of suburbia, the CIA coup against Mohammad Mossadeq, the opening of the Chinese economy by Deng Xiaoping, the American invasion of Iraq, and now the Russian-Ukraine war. As a series of moments in the historical totality of the fossil economy – deepening its channels, adding increasing volumes of fossil fuels to the fire – these events are retroactively suffused with a new significance, calling for a return to history (Malm, 2016). As such, the fossil economy has a historical substance. It has undertaken its birth once upon a time. The British transition to steam power and the resulting CO2 emissions could not have had any ontology or ecology prior to property relations; climate change is fundamentally sociogenic. The turn to the steam engine in the mid-nineteenth century occurred even though waterpower was an abundant and cheaper energy source, chiefly because it required no animate labor to extract its energy. In stark contrast to waterpower, steam-powered, rotative engines patented by men such as James Watt were quite expensive to maintain due to their dependence on coal, which required human labor power to extract it from the earth. The transition to steam power represented the reaction of a part of factory owners against the collective ownership model of the reservoir system. The fossil economy was driven by the need for new property relations and an independent source of fuel that could enable the relative independence of individual producers – and this was embodied in coal, which could be broken up and transported to different areas (Malm, 2016). Forests and lands became sites of accelerated extraction of the resources needed to feed industry. Weber wrote that capitalism “extracts products from the earth, mines, foundries and mechanical industries” (Gerth & Wright-Mills, 1946, p. 367). The mercantilist period between the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth

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centuries saw rapid deforestation in Europe, particularly in Great Britain, where the smelting of iron and coal had intensified the demand for wood. Carbon coke was introduced in the smelting process at the beginning of the eighteenth century, replacing traditional charcoal, but it only became popular in England at the end of the century: “the forest - or what was left of it - was saved only by hard coal, a fuel more suitable for the industry than charcoal” (Foster & Holleman, 2012, p. 1646). For Weber, the transition from coal smelting to coke smelting represented a critical historical turning point, without which the emergence of industrial capitalism and the rational-inorganic phase of development would have been blocked. To Weber (1992, p. 123), “the Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. When asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. His order is now bound to machine production’s technical and economic conditions, which today determine the lives of all the individuals born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition but with irresistible force. Perhaps it will determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. Since asceticism undertook to remodel the world and to work out its ideals in the world, material goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history.” Animated by fossil fuels, capital could concentrate production in the most profitable sites and at the most convenient hours, as it continues today. However, today the unavoidable switch to renewable energy can transform the energy heart of the capital, meaning a radical overthrow of the current economic order. A sociology of climate chaos must consider the role of fossil energy and its social roots and offshoots. The energy issues are placed in two critical contexts: the environmental catastrophe and the crisis of capitalism. During the continued industrialization of the planet, fossil fuels have been the primary energy source to power capital’s economic and political expansion. The fabric of today’s climate crisis is the intense and extensive dynamics of capital accumulation. Typically framed because of bad consumption habits, the environmental problem of energy is and has always been deeply linked to the material origins of the commodity form: what it takes to create a thing and what it takes to move it. Today, most emissions come from the transport and manufacturing sectors of the industrial economy. In almost all projections, the mere reproduction of existing production and distribution systems, not to mention their growth, will condemn the planet to a series of ecocide developments. Against the weaving of such catastrophic scenarios, energy transition experts have spread the comforting techno-future vision of a world that could be different from the one currently drenched in hydrocarbons. Nevertheless, these technologically smoothed energy transition advocates need to see that the issue is not simply one of engineering but of discovering how to overcome the deep roots of fossil capitalism’s ever-increasing energy dependency. As claimed by The Guardian, “ending climate change requires the end of capitalism. Have we got the stomach for it? Policy twists will not do it; we must throw the kitchen sink at this with a total rethink of our relationship to ownership, work and capital” (McDuff, 2019).

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Consequences of Climate Change: Injustice and Inequality Usually, the natural environment is thought to be almost immutable, changing so slowly that it appears static, at the point to call “naturalisation” each social process that is believed constant and stable. Climate change and the broader ecological crisis indicate that the bio-geo-physical environment can change abruptly, exerting important influences on the life of societies and their members. At the same time, society is doing very little to cope with it, showing that society is more inertial than nature. Some consequences of climate change, although physical (increased temperatures, floods, extreme climatic variations, soil erosion, desertification, loss of biodiversity, and so on), are harshly experienced and perceived in our social and economic life contexts. Their form can be the most diverse: migrations, habitat loss, loss of resources, famine, conflict, cultural dislocation, anxieties, fears, collective stress, disease, and so on. However, natural change is rarely linked to social change, except for some technical and economic aspects. The list of consequences social sciences should investigate is very long, and each deserves deep investigation. To fight increasing inequalities due to climate change, scholars are developed a “climate justice” perspective. This is one of the most debated issues at the global level by international agencies. What is the impact of climate change on existing social inequalities, namely intergenerational, international, inter-ethnics, inter-classes, and interreligious inequalities? Societies are already unequally stratified. We do not need climate change to discover these inequalities and injustices. But we are discovering that climate change causes and consequences are deeply intertwined with them, acting as a multiplier of existing vulnerabilities. In a world where responsibility for the causes of climate change is inversely proportional to the degree of vulnerability to its consequences, equity and social justice must be placed at the center of the political agenda on climate action. One of the things that once again needs an explanation, or a new explanation, is the old question of the origin of multiple inequalities. Our daily experience already teaches us that people are undoubtedly different. They differ in all kinds of aspects – and so markedly so that we can distinguish everyone as a distinct individual. However, they also differ in natural collective characteristics such as gender, age, race, habitat, or place. Natural inequalities then turn into social and economic injustice due to the power of capital over labor; the poor redistributive activity of the welfare state (care, education, housing, and environment); and the social structure or the structure of inequalities, normally referred to as “social stratification.” This latter results from long-lasting processes that become fixed in a given social morphology, in a given socioeconomic configuration. The objective structure of inequalities reproduces itself through the “silent operation of the various social orders,” crystallizing in rules and modes of functioning of society itself. Racism and racialization processes exemplify this functioning (Padovan & Alietti, 2019). A starting point for this dual agenda is to deepen the understanding of who is vulnerable to the consequences of climate change, where, how, and why (Mearns & Norton 2010). This understanding includes how climate change contributes to vulnerability and how adapting measures can amplify the effects of many existing

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vulnerability factors. The greatest impact on vulnerable people may come not so much from climate change but from the policies adopted to mitigate climate change. Taking into consideration of these aspects and the phenomenology of social inequalities, it is conceivable to assert that climate change influences the following dimensions: • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Multiplication of risks, threats, conflicts, and inequalities. Loss of resources and famines. Health, diseases, epidemics, and global endemics. Pathoclima, anxieties, fears, and collective stresses. Environmental and climatic racism along the center-periphery logic (geo-racism or spatial sedimentation of racial inequalities). The naturalization of inequalities. Habitat loss and forced migrations. Catastrophes and normality of emergency. Financing and commodifying nature, thus developing cost models for insurance. Military management of the effects of climate change on collective security. Transition wars (i.e., the wars for water, energy, raw materials, food, etc.) Dynamics of scapegoating and fear communities. Changes in consumption: food, energy, water, mobility, tourism. Increasing inequalities and extreme poverty (education, energy, etc.).

As anthropogenic and catastrophic, climate change manifests as a new synthesis between nature and society. Inequalities of life chances arise from the – very social – ability to have income, educational qualifications, and capabilities. The radical inequality of climate change consequences takes material form in the increasing frequency or exacerbation of natural events such as floods or hurricanes that are, in principle, familiar natural events and not the product of social decisions. The expression “force of nature” takes on a new meaning: the obvious natural law of “natural” catastrophes produces a naturalization of social relations of inequality and power (Beck, 2016). The political consequence is that the conception of the natural equality of human beings is reversed into the conception of a natural inequality of human beings produced by natural catastrophes. Global warming, melting of the polar ice caps, rising seas, desertification, and an increasing number of tornadoes are usually treated as natural catastrophes. For Beck (2014), nature itself is not catastrophic. It is catastrophic only in so far as it concerns the affected society and the anthropogenic changes exacerbating such phenomena. Catastrophic potentials cannot be inferred from nature or scientific analysis but reflect the social vulnerability of specific countries and population groups to the consequences of climate chaos and the persistent production and consumption activities that generate it. The anthropogenic transformations of ecosystems are forcing scientists to recognize not only the inextricable merging of nature and human society (Malm & Hornborg, 2014) but also the fact that such profound changes are becoming, as mentioned before, a perfect marker and multiplier of differences and inequalities. The appropriation of nature under the conditions of today’s capitalism, which are at the heart of today’s ecological problems, entails some related processes such as intensification of labor

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exploitation processes, expropriation of peasants’ land, indiscriminate extraction of raw materials and racialization of all these processes. All this implies a radical fragmentation of the relationship between humans and between humans and nature. These dynamics reveal a dual process: on the one hand, there is a generalized racialization of populations and social groups as a form of capitalist adaptation to changes in the ecological regime of global production systems such as food, energy, biomass, water, and raw materials, generated by climate and ecological change. On the other, there is an imperious use of racist discourse, claims, public measures, and violent practices aimed at galvanizing the racial and racist spirit of white European and North American populations against migrants and refugees driven by the underlying forces previously referred to. These two dynamics are closely intertwined. For a long time, researchers have been concerned with local dynamics and phenomena of racism, often forgetting how global, broad, and planetary processes of exploitation, appropriation, and dispossession locally sculpt these dynamics (Padovan & Alietti, 2019). The link between local racism and global processes of dispossession and deprivation now seems more plausible than ever, even in the case of the new racism arising in many Western countries. To combat these new forms of inequalities that feed and drive new forms of racism, a different idea of justice and properly of climate justice has to be embraced. As David Schlosberg (2013) and Ian Gough (2015) suggested, climate justice should combine diverse principles. The debate on climate justice goes around different issues. A critical approach focuses on some countries’ historical responsibility for the current situation. The central argument is that some countries have generated industrial development practices leading to the climate change crisis. Those countries should now be paying the current costs of their past transgressions. Proponents of historical responsibility note that already vulnerable people in developing countries will increasingly and more rapidly be affected by climate change in their daily lives than those in developed countries. This perspective is likely the most discussed and contested because it implies an ethical vision in which past emitters are blamed for their bad past actions and not awarded for their current virtuous behavior. This is not only a matter of ethics. It is also a matter of sociological distribution of losses and gains not only among countries but also among classes, races, genders, and generations on which ethics mainly focus. An alternative approach to climate justice is “per capita equity” or “carbon egalitarianism.” Rather than focusing on past responsibility for emissions, this approach seeks to give everyone an equal “share” of atmospheric CO2 absorption capacity. Proposals based on the principle of equity would require scientific agreement on the total allowable amount of greenhouse gas emissions; that total amount would then be divided by the total world population, and the result would be an equal amount of emissions for every person on the planet. Each country would be allowed to emit the sum of its population multiplied by the per capita emissions allowance. An important approach to climate justice focuses on rights – fundamental human rights, development rights, and more specific environmental rights – and the different obligations and responsibilities that flow from them. Some argue that all people have the right not to suffer climate impacts that undermine their fundamental welfare

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and that climate change violates human rights to life, health, and livelihood. Others combine a historical approach with a rights-based perspective on development. They focus on preserving the right of all to attain a dignified level of sustainable human development free from deprivation and poverty. Climate change is seen as a new threat to these already established rights in both cases. Combining these approaches can yield an idea of climate justice based on environmental and development rights. Here, the right to development is rearticulated as the right to an environment where human prosperity, including a stable climate system, is possible. In this perspective, it is emphasized that fundamental environmental and development rights prevail over less fundamental rights and that developed countries must not only not prevent others from pursuing development but must pay the full cost of their current wealth. One of the most promising aspects of rights-based approaches is moving beyond climate justice based on equity alone to a notion focused on the environmental and developmental conditions individuals, communities, and societies need to survive, develop, and function. Finally, to enhance ontological justice, and to limit the consequences caused by the acceleration of climate change but also to better understand the approach to climate as a common, it is helpful to introduce the vision of the One Health approach approved by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2017, that is, a methodological approach which considers the global health of the planet as having the same value of and on a par with that of individuals. Based on the recognition that human health, animal health, and ecosystem health are inextricably linked, this fundamental triad requires a transdisciplinary collaboration for its implementation. Considering the One Health approach as a “public good for health and social justice,” it can become a strategic element for tackling the complex challenges caused by the acceleration of climate change. Think, for example, of the megatrend caused by the “Sars-Cov2” virus to which are added the other planetary emergencies based on zoonotic food safety; the challenges relating to antimicrobial resistance (AMR): the damage caused to the ecosystem by diseases highlight the need of a global approach to the “health system” and its promotion. One Health is the primary approach to address our society’s pressing and complex challenges. On an international scale, we must also add to our analysis the real risk to which populations are exposed, and above all, those already in a state of vulnerability, which could suffer the dizzying increase of the existing profound inequalities and generate new ones (Kleinman, 2010). Added to this is the large displacement of populations due to the effects of climate change and the high number of displaced persons. According to a new analysis of global ecological threats (Reuters, 2020; ISS, 2019), more than 1 billion people will face displacement by 2050. This vision is relevant precisely because of the contribution that the social sciences can make to the One Health vision, as Michalon (2020) argues, in analyzing a holistic vision of social behavior given the needs and objectives of the One Health Agenda, to be able to change individual and collective practices. Social sciences could be the best interlocutors to produce adaptive policy strategies in the light of the “common good” also through economic predictive models and innovative legal tools (e.g., climate laws to protect populations) to pursue justice in society and promote global health of the planet and people.

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Conclusions In this chapter, we tried to show how sociology can cope with the challenges of climate change. We suggested that sociologists already have several theoretical tools to cope with it, but also that some crucial aspects are to change if we want to contribute to the definition and solution of the problem that climate change poses. Sociology helps us understand that climate change has been provoked by Western societies’ constant efforts to move beyond Earth’s natural limits to feed their economic and material growth processes, thus threatening all societies’ survival or well-being. When confronting climate change, it is crucial to define what kind of phenomenon it is. This is an ontological problem which has several consequences. In our view, global warming is a multiple or boundary object, made of many aspects – social, physical, symbolic, and political – that combine in an entity marked by its specificity and reality. However, this entity is bent towards different meanings generated by different ontologies. Here the signifier “climate change” acquires new and contrasting meanings, subjected to a process of “refraction” or of “abstraction” that reflects one or another vision of the social-ecological complex. Sociology can produce an ontology of climate change, defining it as a socio-material puzzle deserving to be explained by a pluriverse of meanings and practices. The pluriverse implies different gazes and refractions, different practices of investigation that tend to produce different realities. In this way of thinking, the move to ontology means that climate change and the objects, institutions, and people composing it are no longer a single thing. Instead of a “universe,” we are caught up in producing a “pluriverse.” In this effort to dig into the deep reality of climate change, social scientists can see the climate as a complex of commons, local and global. A common is a real thing managed collectively for collective use, subtracted from private appropriation. The key physical aspect of climate commons is the atmosphere filled with a cumulative amount of greenhouse gases released by private and public companies. These releases are a matter of lasting global political negotiations. But climate is also a matter of commoning made up of collective initiatives, whereas commoners are trying to influence both the mitigation strategies (protecting nature from society) and adaptation measures (protecting society from nature) in terms of justice and equity. Social sciences look at the common’s strategy as a real alternative to the principal cause of climate change, namely fossil capitalism. We all know that the sources of these changes are the burning of fossil fuels and that this serves to feed the production/ consumption complex firmly dominated by global geo-capitalism. Social sciences investigation can show that, animated by fossil fuels, capital could concentrate production in the most profitable sites and at the most convenient hours, as it continues today. However, today the unavoidable switch to renewable energy can transform the energy heart of the capital, meaning a radical overthrow of the current economic order. We do not know if green capitalism will affirm, but we know that climate change is threatening fossil capital’s existence, which might have strong consequences. The acceleration of climate change, understood as a “total social fact,” will tend to be one of the most determining direct and indirect variables, widening the inequalities between people and territories. This fact becomes a challenge that leads sociology to

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explore, in a transdisciplinary key, the complexity of the impacts that future societies have to cope with. As we have tried to highlight in this chapter, the comprehension of accelerating climate change cannot be satisfied within the biophysical approach but requires multiple dialogues with social sciences. These latter can help to create models of “adaptation” for present and future societies and contrast the acceleration itself by avoiding the fragmentary nature of the solutions. Considering that climate change is a global threat to the environment and individuals living in societies, the perspective of the “climate commons” could contribute to changing harmful social actions into actions that can favor the One Health approach, the idea that the Earth is the horizon on which our health has to be pursued.

Cross-References ▶ Climate Change and Cultural Anthropology

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Climate Change and Cultural Anthropology Viola Di Tullio

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Climate Ethnography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Anthropocene Debate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . More-than-Human Relations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

This chapter provides a partial overview of contemporary anthropological engagement with climate change. The aim is twofold: first, to provide a stateof-the-art review of scholarly contributions in this field from 2008 to date; second, to provide researchers with a tool to compare recent contributions. Recently, the discipline reached new levels of reflection regarding multiscale analysis, critics of mainstream concepts of adaptation and mitigation practices, the concept of the Anthropocene, and multidisciplinary and interspecies approaches. Works have expanded from “glocal” analysis and the discussion on the Anthropocene to the development of new relationships with the environment. These perspectives investigate and critique contemporary Western capitalism and exploitative system, promoting a collaborative approach with nonhuman entities. These approaches aim at new sustainable practices and a renovated consciousness of the human role in climate change, by rethinking the concepts, ideas, histories, and cultural influences behind the capitalist system.

V. Di Tullio (*) Department of Political Science, Luiss University, Rome, Italy University School for Advanced Studies IUSS Pavia, Pavia, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_21

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Keywords

Anthropocene · Adaptive strategies · Nonhuman relations · Climate ethnography · Multispecies ethnography

Introduction Fifteen years ago, Simon Batterbury complained about the “lack of professional engagement” in anthropology regarding climate change (Batterbury, 2008). Today, on the contrary, a proliferation of studies, research, and projects have entered the public debate, illustrating to what extent climate variability and weather patterns are a central force in social life. In the last decade, much progress had been made towards a more complex understanding of climate change events, not merely as a technical, scientific, and economic issue but as an ethical and moral question that relies on sociocultural models. According to Dale Jamieson, the future possibilities of human survival have to do with “how we ought to live, what kind of societies we want, and how we should relate to nature and other forms of life” (2010, p. 83). It is around these dimensions that anthropologists developed their research, bringing new insights and alternative worldviews in the imagination of a different future for humankind. However, contemporary anthropological works focus also on the presence of the environmental crisis, thereby considering how people experience, respond, and give meaning to the world in which they live, appealing to shared values and relations (Ray, 2001; Roncoli et al., 2009). In particular, “climate ethnography” (Crate, 2011) draws attention to the uneven expansion of topographies of climate change and tries to “bridge what we know and those who know it with the rest to facilitate global understanding and reach” (Crate, 2011, p. 184). According to the anthropological understanding of the concept of “environment” (Descola, 2005; Kohn, 2013), climate change is not merely a geophysical disaster, but rather a “total social fact” (Mauss, 1924), meaning a multidimensional crisis that cannot be reduced to its natural components. Anthropologists have underlined how climate change has developed from the unintended consequences of global production (Beck, 2018), and, thus, from human action, affecting society on a large scale. Borrowing from Susan Crate’s work, climate change is “ultimately about culture” (2008, p. 570), meaning that the issue exists because of a society that experiences it, measures it, and constructs a notion of “normal” climate that is challenged by it (Bougleaux, 2017). Elena Bougleaux (2017) brilliantly summarizes the hybrid status of climate variations – a mixture of measured climatic datum and attributed social meaning – highlighting the central role of human communities and their experiences in its understanding. The ethnographic method enables researchers to “being there” (Batterbury, 2008) and “develop cultural models of the local effects of global climate change” (Crate, 2008, p. 569). This methodology promotes the elaboration of a holistic approach based on the multiplicity of perspectives and interpretative frameworks, using not only quantitative data but also narratives, perceptions, local epistemologies, and meanings as “data” and “proofs,” broadening the scope of possibilities and actions.

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Climate change is to be understood as a continuation of capitalistic globalization’s history emerging from already existing human and nonhuman inequalities and, at the same time, amplifying them (Chakrabarty, 2009). Anthropologists have addressed multiple dimensions of climate change – that is, the ways knowledge about climate change is produced (Latour, 1993; de la Cadena & Lien, 2015), how it circulates (Hulme, 2009; Puntenney, 2009; Lahsen, 2010), how local interpretations and adaptation measures can be integrated into global negotiations (O’Bryan, 2004; Crate, 2008), local resiliency and adaptability (Crate, 2008; Strauss, 2009; Nuttal, 2017). These works try to answer the following questions: Which views of climate change exist, and how do they problematize the Western hegemonic form of understanding the weather? How can alternative understandings of normalcy, weather, agriculture, and sustainability enable us to address climate change in new and fertile ways? What new social and political realities are formed by recognizing the interactions between humans and nonhumans? What is it that needs to be sustained (Moore, 2017a)? Although not exhaustive of contemporary anthropological works, this chapter draws on a few central aspects related to climate change studies. The first part shows how community-centered ethnographies are critical to the development of anthropological engagement and contribution to adaptation policies and global negotiations. Anthropologists highlight how political institutions and governance systems are embedded in society and often characterized by opaque dynamics and offer tools for a more holistic approach to climate change policies. The second part of this chapter considers the current debates on the Anthropocene and the anthropological critiques that identify in this concept the same mechanisms that contributed to the climate crisis itself. The last section draws on the anthropological literature and theories about the nature/culture dichotomy, perceived as partially responsible for the capitalistic approach to the environment and nonhuman entities. Both discussions give us useful insights into the powers of the ontology from which the monolithic, narrow view of Western capitalism and sustainability (Sullivan, 2017) originates. These critiques then open the floor to alternative perspectives on reality based on the recognition of the multiple connections in which humans are embedded (Tsing, 2015; Haraway, 2016; Ingold, 2020).

Climate Ethnography Ethnography is the main anthropological methodology that allows researchers to “being there” (Batterbury, 2008), to live in the research context and create relations of intimacy and trust with the ethnographic subjects, that is, the community members. Through participatory engagement, ethnography enables the researcher to design a space for the coproduction of narratives giving a significant epistemological value to long-term involvement (Roncoli et al., 2009). Narratives, stories, perceptions, memories (Krauß & Bremer, 2020), and beliefs constitute evidence and “data” allowing the ethnographer to exercise the “art of noticing” (Tsing, 2015) as a methodology, that is, the capacity to pay attention to the most minute and seemingly

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insignificant details attempting to take a stance that seeks to look at the margins because, as Anna Tsing points out: “big histories are always best told through insistent, if humble, details” (2015, p. 111). According to environmental anthropology, nature and society shape and influence each other, such that environmental dimensions are socially expressed through impacts, vulnerability, and resilience (Oliver-Smith, 2013); in other words, “natural” events such as drought, floods, or fires are “culturally mediated through practices, institutions and knowledge” (Batterbury, 2008, p. 64). Drawing from this framework, vulnerability represents a key aspect in climate ethnographic analysis: since climate change affects already existing global structures – which include unequal distribution of wealth and access to resources, social injustices (Singer, 2019), and significant gaps in global security (Cons, 2018) – vulnerability becomes a crucial factor in reducing or amplifying the degree of the impact of natural events (Henshaw, 2009; Oliver-Smith, 2017). Moreover, as Beck (2018) highlights, the first law of climate change is that pollution follows the poor, namely, those communities that lack infrastructure, strong economies, and welfare. Marginalized groups are often at the center of ethnographic works that stress the uneven topographies of acceleration, overheating, and climate-changing processes. That is why anthropologists have been among the first to directly document the disastrous local impacts of climate change, exposing the multilevel and cross-scale contexts involved and simultaneously interrogating different communities, actors, and stakeholders (Crate, 2011; Roncoli et al., 2009). In this sense, anthropologists “act as translators, mediators, and facilitators when communities design, plan, and implement climate solutions” (Fiske et al., 2014, p. 54), capturing the multiple dimensions of climate change. Climate anthropology, then, has focused mainly on the impacts of climate change in marginalized communities (Crate & Nuttal, 2009; Orlove et al., 2019); the consequences of mitigation and adaptation policies (Ford et al., 2011; Singer, 2019); the role of indigenous and traditional knowledge in adaptation (De Sousa Santos, 2017); migration and displacement studies (Oliver-Smith, 2009), environmental justice, social inequalities, and human rights (Crate, 2008; Singer, 2019). Bringing local contexts into global connections presents several obstacles, for instance, “the problem of scale” (Eriksen, 2016). Community-centered ethnographies are based on a local context immersed in global connections and national nets. This scalability creates a crucial knot where “[. . .] the current conjuncture of globalisation and global warming leaves us with the challenge of having to think of human agency over multiple and incommensurable scales at once” (Chakrabarty, 2012, p. 1). The discussion in anthropology focused on the methodological consequences of the multiplicity of levels but also the speed of these global changes “out of control” (Eriksen, 2016) and on the uncertainty (Giddens, 2015) derived by an unthinkable geographical scale (Gosh, 2016). After the Fukushima accident, when it became clear that all societies were linked and connected as never before, Ulrich Beck elaborated on the concept of a “risk society” (Beck, 2018). This idea today is applied to climate change understood as the global risk of modernity that industrialization and progress have self-inflicted, and that cannot be solved at the level of a single State; Beck stresses the necessity of new international institutions that can fit a

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transnational level, in a space that he defines “glocal” as the dialectical relation of global and local instances that do not fit the national policy (ibid.). Likewise, Susan Crate dedicates part of her work to showing how anthropology through ethnographic methodology is suited to tackle this “schizophrenic context,” namely, the multiple levels of analysis (2011). In the Final report of the AAA Global Climate Change Task Force, the authors define adaptation and resilience as the way “humans proactively and retroactively respond to forces of change” (Fiske et al., 2014, p. 29), underlying that human adaptation is not just a technical or biological reaction, but rather a cultural response, embedded in a complex system of interests, meanings, perceptions, and experiences (Oliver-Smith, 2017). Therefore, using global models to drive climate responses simplifies complex questions and contexts, reducing and standardizing the multiplicity of social and environmental realities (Fiske et al., 2014). The concepts of adaptive capacity, resilience and vulnerability are often used as apolitical, ahistorical, and neutral tools that risk ignoring multiple agencies (Béné et al., 2012) and meaningmaking (Lazrus, 2009). This reductionist approach can undermine the local effort to adapt to climate change (Oliver-Smith, 2017), conceal the complexity of human responses (Orlove, 2009), and fail to address systemic vulnerabilities (Pelling, 2011). Disaster and climate change anthropology have challenged the neutral use of these categories adopted in national and international policy, challenging the top-down approach through localized experiences provided by ethnography (Crate, 2008; Henshaw, 2009; Oliver-Smith, 2017) and highlighting the risks and powers of depoliticization in environmental bureaucracies (Mathews, 2011) and institutions. For instance, Lazrus’ ethnographic work in Tuvalu shows how the impacts of climate change are socially constructed, and how vulnerability management is tied to the local agency and multiple scales of governance that hinder vulnerable people’s access to power, resources, and decision-making (2009). Likewise, Jennings shows the contradiction of adaptation and resilience top-down strategies that get trapped in the neoliberal apparatus demonstrating “how adaptation at times serves larger institutions and interests rather than local people” (2011, p. 139). Adaptation, today, is understood as a “policy-driven set of formal strategies and projects” (Fiske et al., 2014, p. 44), and thus is closely intertwined with national and international organizations and agencies in a complex net of interests, scales, stakeholders, and funding. However, as Fiske et al. emphasize, adaptation is further complicated by spatial variations, meaning that one solution can be both effective for one context and detrimental to another, turning short-term risks into long-term ones (2014). Therefore, anthropologists’ contribution to an interdisciplinary environment focused on designing policies avoids the risk of developing technical interventions that lack attention to social issues (Singer, 2019) and enhances autonomous adaptation (Thornton & Manasfi, 2010). The focus on adaptability and vulnerability demands an engagement with localism and “ethnographic reflexivity” (Roncoli et al., 2009), as it contributes to modifying and improving policy decisions otherwise imposed on indigenous, marginalized, and situated communities. According to Pisor et al. (2022), autonomy in decision-making regarding which adaptive strategy to choose should be a crucial element for equity but also

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effectiveness. Although development actors tend to fund top-down initiatives, community involvement and participation determine a project’s success or failure (Crate, 2008; Oliver-Smith, 2017; Pisor et al., 2022). As Crate and Nuttal argue “societies do not interact directly with their environment but with their perceptions of that environment” (Crate & Nuttal, 2009, p. 20) and thus local adaptation – attentive to cultural concerns – must be situated in relation to global dynamics when planning climate policies (Thornton & Manasfi, 2010). Yet, it is also a matter of representation regarding “who is doing the representing, under what conditions, and for what purposes” (Lazrus, 2009, p. 248). In this sense, a broad body of literature addresses the involvement of traditional knowledge in climate adaptation, criticizing its marginalization and delegitimization (Lazrus, 2009; Grosfoguel, 2016; Reyes-García et al., 2016; De Sousa Santos, 2017; Singer, 2019). Furthermore, Lazrus, in line with postcolonial studies, situates climate change events within a broader history of domination. As a result, the author demonstrates how enabling traditional knowledge to define the problem, rather than simply tolerating it as an alternative discourse, has contributed to reducing the dominant paradigms and thus the socioenvironmental inequalities (Lazrus, 2009). There are increasing attempts to incorporate indigenous and traditional climate knowledge into dominant epistemic institutions (O’Reilly et al., 2020) such as the IPCC (Ford et al., 2016), the UNFCCC (Shawoo & Thornton, 2019), the REDD+ (Orecho et al., 2016), or the National Adaptation Programs of Actions (NAPA), a project aimed at enhancing local understanding and decision-making (Lazrus, 2009). However, all these cases point to problems and contradictions that have not yet been resolved. For instance, Shawoo and Thornton highlight that the role of colonialism and unequal power relations in creating marginalization is not recognized, nor are the institutional barriers within the UNFCCC (2019). Similarly, Ford et al. point to the IPCC’s poor critical engagement with the indigenous knowledge system (2016). To develop a more critical collaborative method and to address the disjuncture between the “abstracted climate science and ‘lived’ socio-cultural contexts” (Goodman, 2018, p. 345), Susan Crate suggests the category of “climate ethnography” as an “ethnography with a mission” (Crate, 2011, p. 185): An action-oriented approach to anthropological climate change research that begins by developing cultural models of the local effects of global climate change, goes on to fill in the gaps with Western scientific knowledge, and ends with the dissemination of that information and its use for the development of adaptive strategies, policy recommendations, and advocacy (Crate, 2008, p. 569).

The author proposes using the multiple interpretative frameworks acquired through ethnography to co-construct and inform policy processes, developing a collaborative model that spans small contexts and large research projects (Crate, 2008), employing the tools of public anthropology and advocacy. Nevertheless, more concise contributions should explore how to transform knowledge into action, and vulnerability into responsible practices, while finding ways to communicate these insights to influence policymakers (Crate & Nuttal, 2009).

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The Anthropocene Debate Anthropologists have produced a broad literature discussing human relations with the environment and with nonhuman entities. Starting from several ethnographic fieldworks around the world, they have extensively criticized the nature/culture (Descola, 2005), and object/subject (Latour, 1993) dichotomies based on the Cartesian dualism, proving the degree of abstraction of these categories. Numerous works have presented alternative ways of relating to the environment (Haraway, 1991; Latour, 1993; Descola, 2005; De Castro, 2014) revealing that the nature/culture dichotomy, which is characteristic of the capitalist system is only one possibility for understanding reality. Therefore, their contributions criticize the sociocultural, political, moral, and economic foundations that led to the climate crisis in the first place. Anthropologists attempting to discuss the Anthropocene have concentrated their attention on the place of humans amidst “the ruins of capitalism” (Tsing, 2015). Authors elaborated new theories and analytical concepts such as overheating (Eriksen, 2016), frictions (Tsing, 2017), geontologies (Povinelli, 2016), and Gaia (Latour, 2017a), all trying to grasp the contemporary reality of humanenvironmental relations. In the 1980s, biologist Eugene F. Stoermer coined the term “Anthropocene” to define the contemporary epoch characterized by the emergence of humans as a geophysical force, capable of influencing the climatic balance of planet Earth. The concept of Anthropocene has contributed to broadening a discussion started in environmental anthropology regarding the correlation between humans and the environment, multiplying the research on this topic. As Bruno Latour highlights in a lecture for the American Association of Anthropology in 2014, this label was a “poisonous gift” for anthropologists since [. . .] pushed from behind by the vast extent of ecological mutations and dragged ahead by philosophers, historians, artists, and activists, a sizeable group of natural scientists are describing the quandary of our time in terms that exactly match the standards, vices and virtues of that very discipline (Latour, 2017b, p. 36).

The concept of the Anthropocene matches anthropology’s standards, vices, and virtues by recognizing the central role of the relationship between humans and the planet. Chakrabarty emphasizes how “humans are now part of the natural history of the planet” (2012, p. 10), while Latour (2017b) points out how the Anthropocene “gives another definition of time, it re-describes what it is to stand in space, and it reshuffles what it means to be entangled within animated agencies” (2017b, p. 48). According to both authors, the implications of such a shift are profoundly cultural and require a rethinking of moral, political, and social approaches to the environment and interspecies relations. This revelation entails several theoretical and practical consequences analyzed in the recent debate regarding the Anthropocene that largely developed within anthropology (Haraway, 2016; Haraway et al., 2016; Moore, 2016; Latour, 2017b; Tsing et al., 2017; Mathews, 2020). The Anthropocene refers to humanity as a whole – from Greek anthropos (-ἄνθρωπos), meaning “man,” “human being” – but what are the implications of defining humanity as responsible for the

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climate crisis? What humanity is here being referred to? The focus on the “anthropogenic force” driving climate variations opens ontological and epistemological debates on the human species: “Who is the ‘we’ of this process? How do we think of this collective human agency in the era of the Anthropocene?” (Chakrabarty, 2012, p. 10). Dipesh Chakrabarty calls for a “species thinking,” namely, the understanding of humans as a species, a collective agent that acts on the planet, and, at the same time, is part of that same geological nature. The author argues that “the geologic now of the Anthropocene has become entangled with the now of human history” (2009, p. 212) highlighting a double level of analysis between two histories and two kinds of agents. The first scholar to point out the problematic nature of the label “Anthropocene” and to propose an alternative is the economist Jason Moore (2016, 2017b), who argues against the idea of a homogeneous human responsibility for the climate crisis. Moore, taking up the notion from Andreas Malm, proposes “Capitalocene,” highlighting the leading role of capitalistic thinking in the acceleration of climate variations. This author shows how the Capitalocene focuses more on the problem of who’s responsible for climate variation and greenhouse emissions, noticing that different social groups have different responsibilities. He emphasizes the hegemony of political, economic, social, and cultural dimensions specific to the West, leading to the concealment of all those other alternative sociocultural models, which have different approaches to life on Earth. Following Moore’s footsteps, Bauer and Ellis (2018) highlight how the consequences of the domination of humans on nature are the result of heterogeneous activities and not the “synchronous product of a global humanity” (2018, p. 209). This point raises a question on responsibility (Eriksen, 2016; Moore, 2016, 2017b; Mathews, 2020) – or response-ability (Haraway, 2012) – bringing to light the difficulty of identifying those directly responsible for the environmental crisis and the opacity of the sociopolitical mechanisms at play. Therefore, discussing climate responsibilities implies considering the broader context of the history of oppression that is also “fundamental to capitalism’s political economy, which in its turn rests upon an audacious accumulation strategy: Cheap Nature” (Moore, 2017b, p. 2). In this context, capitalism is understood as a mode of organizing nature based on the Nature/Culture dichotomy, an abstraction with very material consequences, such as violence, oppression, and inequality (Moore, 2016). According to Jason Moore, the concept of Capitalocene questions how capitalism values nature and conveys the idea that humanity is part of nature, embedded in the “web of life” (Moore, 2017b, p. 5). The cause of climate change is not the Man as such, but the capitalist “world-ecology of power, capital, and nature” (Ivi, p. 4), as the hegemonic world system. Moore’s critique of the Anthropocene and the humans understood as a homogeneous species resonates with several indigenous claims. For instance, the indigenous leader and anthropologist Ailton Krenak (2020) questions whether all human beings are included under the same concept of humanity, conducting a strong critique of homogeneity. Krenak points out the irreducible diversity of the human ways of living, highlighting a distinction between the humans-humans and the almost-humans, namely, those who refuse the capitalistic way of the Westerns and, as such, are marginalized: is it possible to remove this veil of ethnocentrism on which the capitalist system rests?

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Two alternative terms have contributed to broadening the discussion on the Anthropocene in the anthropological field. The first, coined by Donna Haraway, Chthulucene, is a conceptual frame for revealing the illusion of an auto-poetic, selfproducing, and closed system such as the capitalistic one. Instead, the concept promotes a sympoietic system, that is, a non-anthropocentric approach to the world based on “tentacular thinking” (Haraway, 2016), using dense, subterranean networks, which, like numerous tentacles, create interconnections. This image is also reminiscent of the Matsutake mushroom described by Anna Tsing, as a way of seeing history as a series of encounters and entanglements in continuous assemblages (Tsing, 2015). The two authors intend to describe a complex of forces and powers that require commitment and collaborative work, giving space for the flourishing of multispecies encounters (Haraway, 2015; Tsing, 2015). Donna Haraway et al. highlight the risk of anthropocentrism intrinsic to this idea of thinking of the Anthropocene as a species act while ignoring other species: the idea is that the Anthropocene is rather “a situated highly complex systematicity of situated peoples and their apparatuses, including their agricultural critters and other critters” (2016, p. 539). Likewise, de la Cadena emphasizes the need to pay attention to the “anthropo-not-seen” (2015), all the more-than-human entities ignored by the nature/culture dichotomy, opening the floor for a discussion on multiple non-anthropocentric relations that will be addressed in the next chapter. The second term proposed is that of Plantationocene (Haraway, 2015, 2016; Tsing, 2015; Davis et al., 2019) which foregrounds the damage caused by monocultures and intensive agriculture regarding the uses of land, the radicalization of the elite, forced labor, and social justice. This concept is more in line with postcolonial studies, bringing to light the connections between colonialism, capitalism, racial hierarchies, and plantation models, rooted in the “plantation economy” (Mintz, 1986). However, some scholars point out how all these discussions are not an “analytically rigorous grasp of our dilemma” (Hornborg, 2017, p. 75). Hornborg, for instance, questions whether “dithering while the planet burns” (2017) can be a solution. The author’s critique grows stronger as his work goes on, concluding that “the promotion of post-humanist discourse is ultimately tantamount to looking away while neoliberal capitalism continues to destroy the planet. In other words, it can only serve as a convenient accomplice of neoliberalism” (Ibid., p. 67). Hornborg recognizes the general denial of the interconnections between society and nature. Nevertheless, he argues that the ambition to “dissolve” the nature/culture, subject/ object distinction somehow conceals, denies, and avoids the dimension of human responsibility and accountability for climate variations (Ibid.). Regardless, the focus of the discussion, rather than terminology, is on trying to grasp the complexity of contemporary phenomena, encompassing multiple scales (Chakrabarty, 2012; Giddens, 2015; Beck, 2018), responsibilities (Haraway, 2012; Moore, 2016, 2017b), speed (Eriksen, 2016), interspecies thinking (Ingold, 2013; Tsing, 2015), and ecological justice (Davis et al., 2019). The “intrusion” of humans in geological history has two crucial consequences. First, it poses another problem of scale, where the geological time and space shift the attention to the collective dimension beyond humanity (Moore, 2017b). Second, as Jason Moore argues, the figure of the human

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doubles: on the one hand, it represents the human having agency on the planet and, on the other hand, the human as part of the nonliving geophysical force (Moore, 2017b). The common thread that emerges from this complex framework is the urgency of rethinking many of the relationships that humans have with other humans, nonhumans, and the environment. Thereby, the Anthropocene, a concept developed in the society of dichotomies, simultaneously dissolves the human-nature division and poses new questions on the position of humans in the world. How to develop, then, a “species thinking” projected towards collective survival, which decenters the human presence (Chakrabarty, 2014) in the perception of the world?

More-than-Human Relations In traditional environmental anthropology, scholars have advocated for the decentralization of humanity from the discourses, practices, and policies regarding climate change (Kopnina & Shoreman-Ouimet, 2017). According to this anthropological view, rethinking the dichotomic and metabolic relation with the environment could lead to a new theory of sustainability, where all beings collaborate, intertwine, and contribute to collective survival (Tsing, 2015). In his most famous work, Par-delà nature et culture (2005), Philippe Descola theorizes how other sociocultural groups construct different ontologies – he lists four categories: animism, totemism, analogies, and naturalism. Naturalism is the ontology developed by Western societies, which assumes an ontological dichotomy between nature and culture, objects and subjects. Descola shows to what extent this classification is socially constructed and, thus, arbitrary but has concrete and important implications in society and politics. Other groups in different socio-environmental conditions put forward a radically different view on the topic, attributing agency and subjectivity to the environmental elements, animals, plants, rivers, and other entities, in an interconnected world understood as an “ecology of selves” (Kohn, 2013). In this way, they recognize that “human lives are lived collectively within fields of power” (Ingold, 2005, p. 501), embedded in a world inhabited by human and nonhuman entities. For instance, Viveiros De Castro (2014) stretches the idea of perspectivism, an Amerindian ontology that understands each being as a subject per se. While humans perceive themselves as such and see the animals as nonhumans, the animals perceive themselves as humans and understand the humans as nonhumans, creating a continuous play of changing perspectives. Likewise, Eduardo Kohn (2013) and Tim Ingold (2013) emphasize the problems and advantages of “interspecies” communication and the semantic analysis of the ecology of selves. Latour focuses on deconstructing the subject/object division and extending agency (2017b) to all actors, not just humans. Donna Haraway reflects on the idea of sympoiesi, that “[. . .] it means «making-with». Nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing” (Haraway, 2016, p. 58), stretching the idea of collectiveness of the beings living on Earth. According to her view, “we are all compost” (Ibid., p. 101). The same idea is explored by Anna Tsing with the concept of entanglements, “polyphonic assemblages, gathering of ways of being”

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(2015, p. 157) that co-construct reality, history, and relations. Tim Ingold’s early works suggest the idea of dwelling as a way of being and existing (2005, 2013). While his latest work explores the concept of correspondence as a modality of relation that recognizes the existence of one society, one reality where everything acts, suffers, responds, and corresponds (2020). These ideas of natural elements and nonhuman entities as animate, agent, and political subjects attempt to renegotiate values, perceptions, and concepts rooted in the exploitation of the global environmental system that led to the contemporary climate change crisis. These theories want to recognize the ecological interdependency and interresponsibility (Boyer, 2014) between humans and nonhuman entities and promote the reflection on the multiplicity of perspectives. With the definition of the concept of the Anthropocene, these ideas broadened and gained centrality in the debate recognizing that “collaborative survival requires cross-species coordination” (Tsing, 2015, p. 156), which is a new social and moral order that decentralizes humanity. Affirming that humans have become a driving force in global climate variations implies that humans (as a category) are part of the natural being and history of the planet (Chakrabarty, 2012). Thereby, the dichotomy on which the capitalistic system is built (Moore, 2017b) “cracks” (Chakrabarty, 2012, p. 10) on itself, showing the sociality of the nature versus culture construction, and posing the crucial question that anthropology has been asking for the previous decades: “Is this human/nature binary the most effective way to distinguish humans in the web of life?” (Moore, 2017b, p. 4). Nevertheless, these reflections unfold other obstacles, such as the problem of methodology: how can anthropologists co-construct an ethnography with nonhuman actors? How to resist the tendency to attribute human equivalence characters to nonhuman actors? After all, humans are incapable of totally grasping other ways of life that differ from each individual point of view and experience. To what extent do these new relations challenge the contemporary understanding of climate change? How can the concept and the space of nature be renegotiated? If nonhuman entities are recognized as subjects, how to rethink a political, ethical, and legal approach to them? What can nonhumans’ responses to uncertainty teach us about alternative future possibilities of “dwelling” (Ingold, 2005)? These questions raise other problems regarding the interpretation and representation of nonhuman subjects (Krenak, 2020): the difference between “speaking to” and “speaking for” (Appadurai, 1988), the interspecies communication (Kohn, 2013; Ingold, 2013) – in particular, plants (Vieira et al., 2017) and microbes (Raffaetà, 2020) – and their encounters (Tsing, 2015; Ingold, 2020). Anthropologists have studied not only human-animal relations but also elements such as wind (Zanotelli, 2017), atmosphere (Van Aken, 2020), water (Strang, 2014), glaciers (Orlove et al., 2019), and fog (Ojani, 2020) as agents in the making of local and global socioenvironmental, political, and economic relations. Similar investigations have also considered nonhuman creatures as subjects, giving rise to the so-called multispecies ethnography (Kirksey & Helmreich, 2010). However, several problems remain outstanding. Who or what should speak for these entities, and pursue their interests, not just in terms of management and use (Strang, 2019), but as part of the society? For instance, in 2017, in New Zealand, the Whanganui River was granted legal

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standing and personality rights. Although not entirely unproblematic, this approach provides an interesting example of a biocentric integration of the human with its environment, in opposition to the dominant understanding of human sovereignty over nature. Moreover, indigenous knowledge is legitimized by giving it space to produce effective alternative tools to environmental degradation (De Sousa Santos, 2017; Strang, 2019). As Veronica Strang underlines, in the case of the Whanganui River: “For them [the Maori people located around the river] the river is a living ancestor (Te Awa Tupua): an entity indivisible from themselves, and whose wellbeing is interdependent with their own” (2019, p. 105). The concept of a river as an ancestor collides with Western beliefs and understanding. Nevertheless, the idea that the well-being of the environment corresponds to that of humans as a species, and as individuals, could have crucial effects on more sustainable environmental practices. Moreover, being open to multiple entities entails “thinking outside the totalizing categories of Western metaphysics and, therefore, paves the way for a more openended, less instrumental, approach not only to social relations but also to the environment” (Vieira et al., 2017, p. 8), thereby producing a moral, epistemological, and political reconceptualization of human-nonhuman relations. Anthropology recognizes other analytical and representative possibilities regarding climate change, being open to alternative narratives, discourses, ontologies, and cosmovisions (de la Cadena, 2015; Kohn, 2013). De la Cadena (2015) and Anna Tsing (2015) step away from the assumption of multiple cultures that perceive one single world approaching the idea of multiple words. Blaser and de la Cadena propose the term pluriverse to describe a world of many worlds – instead of the “one-world world” (2018, p. 3) – and as a tool for “producing ethnographic compositions capable of conceiving ecologies of practices across heterogeneous (ly) entangled worlds” (ivi, p. 4). According to Blaser and de la Cadena, the pluriverse becomes an ethnographic tool to explore the multiple worlds that make a place and reject the extractivist logic of the capitalist system (2018). These theoretical approaches question the centrality of humans and the knowledge evaluation system (De Sousa Santos, 2017), as well as the capacity of communicating with other species (Kirksey & Helmreich, 2010; Kohn, 2013). Understanding other entities as actant and thus locating the spaces of interactions such as entanglements (Tsing, 2015), correspondences (Ingold, 2020), hyperobjects (Morton, 2013), or language (Kohn, 2013), recognizes the ecological interdependency and interresponsibility (Boyer, 2014) between humans and nonhumans. This perspective opens ontological, phenomenological, and epistemological questions that challenge alternative views of reality. Recognizing the agency of nonhuman entities and including them in the social realm entails an expansion of perspectives that offer new approaches to “generative politics” (O’Reilly et al., 2020), bringing attention to the reciprocal acknowledging of beings and the “cosmopolitical recognition of mutual concerns” (ibid., p. 16). These reflections are central in rethinking new possibilities of a more democratic coexistence (Morton, 2013) between humans, nonhumans, and the environment, in the “ruin of capitalism” (Tsing, 2015). The attempt to accept a more-than-human world emerges from the awareness that Western current values and worldviews contributed to the climate crisis and thereby

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need to be renegotiated. Yet, it remains to understand whether and how an engaged “climate ethnography” (Crate, 2011) can be applied in more-than-human ethnographic contexts.

Conclusion In a lecture on the Global Environment, Steve Rayner defined climate change as a “wicked problem” that calls for “clumsy solutions [. . .] as a challenge to the imagination” (Rayner, 2006, p. 12). This definition summarizes all the complexity, multidimensionality, and interdisciplinary approaches to possible future on Earth. Climate change requires quantitative data and investigations but cannot be grasped without considering values, responsibilities, ethics, and nonhuman agencies. Ethnographic work on climate anthropology shows how environmental change emerges as symbolic and emotional, bringing complex systems of interactions between climate and culture into the discussion. Far from being only a technical and geophysical hazard, it threatens already marginalized communities’ well-being, cosmologies, meaning, and experiences (Crate, 2008). Therefore, on a policy level, it becomes relevant to seek both environmental justice and social equality, adopting a holistic approach attentive to the role of local perceptions, meanings, and understandings of climate change (Roncoli et al., 2009). By proposing a multi-sited, critical, and collaborative ethnographic approach that focuses on community-centered research, anthropology addresses “glocal” connections and problematizes collaboration (Crate, 2011). Scholars reflecting on the Anthropocene and human/nonhuman relations also offer a cooperative approach to the “ecology of selves” (Kohn, 2013) where multispecies ethnography allows for the exploration of meaningful collective experiences. Emerging from these debates is the urgency to deconstruct structural dichotomies in favor of a multidimensional and multi-subjects view of reality. In this way, the Anthropocene is revealed as a concept strongly shaped by politics and powers originated by structures of capitalist exploitation, inequalities, and human “supremacy.” Chakrabarty (2014) suggests defining an identity relation between global justice (interhuman, intergenerational, and interspecies dimensions) and climate change, as they are two manifestations of the same problem. The central idea is to design a planetary approach to global justice without privileging human beings. Cortés Vázquez et al. (2020) underline how anthropology’s historical task involves converting into plural what is presented as singular, unique, and hegemonic. Multiplying the perspectives can effectively address climate change policies. It contributes to designing new frameworks, models, and methods to deal with complexity and multilayered connections between human perspectives, different forms of knowledge, economy, politics, nonhumans, and the environment fostering a possible way for collaborative problem-solving (Roncoli et al., 2009; Crate & Nuttal, 2009; Fiske et al., 2014). However, multidisciplinary, cross-scale research, new innovative methodologies, and connections between social and natural sciences are needed. Anthropology’s contribution to the discussion on climate change is

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based on its capacity for systemic thinking, theoretical and practical approach, reflexivity, critical deconstruction, and openness toward diversity and otherness. The approaches discussed in this chapter are directed toward new sustainable practices and a renovated consciousness of the human role in climate change processes, rethinking the concepts, ideas, histories, and cultural influences behind the capitalist system. Yet, several questions remain unanswered, especially regarding methodology and the contrast between a slow ethnographic exercise and the fastchanging contemporary world. Moreover, further research is needed to understand the extent to which ethnographies of the more-than-human entanglements filtrate, shape, and guide climate change policies, and what practical and applied contributions they bring to the design of new norms and legal frameworks in humannonhuman relations. Acknowledgments This publication (communication/thesis/article, etc.) was produced while attending the PhD programme in PhD in Sustainable Development And Climate Change at the University School for Advanced Studies IUSS Pavia, Cycle XXXVIII, with the support of a scholarship financed by the Ministerial Decree no. 351 of 9 April 2022, based on the NRRP – funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU – Mission 4 “Education and Research,” Component 1 “Enhancement of the offer of educational services: from nurseries to universities” – Investment 3.4 “Advanced teaching and university skills” OR Investment 4.1 “Extension of the number of research doctorates and innovative doctorates for public administration and cultural heritage.” This chapter and related research have been conducted during and with the support of the Italian national inter-university PhD course in Sustainable Development and Climate Change (link: www. phd-sdc.it).

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Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mitigation Policies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Carbon Offsets: Capitalist Vision and Neocolonial Approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . GHG Inventories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Unburnable Fossil Fuels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Adaptation Policies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . How to Go Beyond Adaptation: Transformation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Scales and Rescaling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rescaling and Individuals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Geographical Literature and the IPCC: Relationships and Perspectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

The geographical literature is contributing with critical insights to the debate on issues connected with climate change asking for a cultural shift on responses. In particular, geographers focus on the implications of mitigation and adaptation policies considering ethical, social, political, and legal aspects. Looking at global mitigation responses, they focus on the complex spatial relations deriving from making carbon into a commodity. They highlight the underlying capitalist vision consisting in continual capital accumulation and growth. As a result, it emerges that approaches and processes determined by solutions like carbon offsets, CO2 lonialism, and GHG inventories do not foundationally address the real causes of the crisis. Looking at adaptation, the geographical literature highlights the need to link adaptation policies to broader processes of socioenvironmental change considering sociocultural, economic, political, financial, and governance processes and involving relations and negotiations at different geographical scales. A. Pietta (*) Department of Economics and Management, University of Brescia, Brescia, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_40

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There is also a debate on the limits to adaptation that indicates transformation as a way to go beyond adaptation: transformation challenges the status quo, threatening those who benefit from current systems and structures. Geographers are giving an important contribution in asking for a cultural shift on developing and managing climate change responses also thanks to the debate on scales, giving insights on the kind of processes that determine the production of scales of action, the kind of knowledge and expertise that dominate, and the priorities favored at different scales. In particular, the geographical literature is focusing on the role of the rescaling of environmental governance in creating its own governance objects, like “the global climate.” The chapter also considers the contribution of the geographical literature to change the perspective of the IPCC on topics like vulnerability, resilience, mitigation, and adaptation policies and to introduce transformation, between the fourth and fifth assessment reports. In particular, the geographical research allowed the IPCC to situate these topics within sociopolitical and socioenvironmental processes. Keywords

Mitigation policies · Adaptation policies · Transformation · Rescaling processes · IPCC perspectives

Introduction The geographical literature is contributing with critical insights to the debate on implications and issues connected with climate change highlighting that the cure for the problem of climate change is found where it originated from: the prevalent political economy of capitalism, its neoliberal rationalities, and concomitant marketization techniques (Bailey et al., 2011; Lovell & MacKenzie, 2011; Weisser & Müller-Mahn, 2017). As a result, the assumption that the governance of global environmental issues requires global solutions through approaches expressed by carbon offsets, CO2 lonialism, and GHG inventories does not address the real causes of the crisis. Moreover, the creation of global carbon markets potentially disrupts and changes local social and ecological relations through impacts on property rights, access to resources, notions of value and justice, as well as consumption and production models, with negative consequences in terms of vulnerability and resilience. To understand global change in its complexity, the local and the global scales must be linked. This also helps propose innovative rescaling processes expressed in terms of strategic lines of reorganization and rearticulation between scales related to the different political and decision-making levels (Brenner, 1999; Amin, 2002). This chapter focuses on the geographical debate on the implications of approaches and processes to face climate change. Looking at rescaling processes, particular attention is dedicated to responses with regard to the ways to reduce the causes of climate change through mitigation policies and the ways to reduce the

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effects through adaptation policies. There is also a focus on the recent debate on the limits of adaptation that indicates transformation as a response able to go beyond adaptation critically questioning and challenging the status quo of current systems. As a result, it allows deep rooted causes of risk and vulnerability to be addressed. The chapter concludes by describing the contribution of the geographical literature to change the perspective of the IPCC on topics like vulnerability, resilience, mitigation, adaptation, and transformation situating it within sociopolitical and socioenvironmental processes.

Mitigation Policies Mitigation policies consist in coordinated actions aimed at reducing and possibly eliminating the underlying causes of climate change. Looking at these policies, the geographical literature has highlighted the need of a cultural shift by arguing that the core of the global effort to cut emissions cannot come from a single global treaty. Rather, it should have to be built from the bottom up, through ambitious national policies and creative international cooperation focused on specific opportunities to cut emissions (Kythreotis, 2012). In particular, many commentators have critically questioned the ethical, social, political, and legal aspects of global mitigation responses considering carbon offsets, CO2 lonialism, and GHG inventories, and highlighting that these solutions do not foundationally address the real causes of the crisis. They are also analyzing mitigation solutions which have a different perspective, like unburnable fossil fuels, introducing new relevant elements in climate change mitigation/compensation strategies. These critical insights have led to the request of new approaches arising from the bottom by which each country communicates its climate commitments through selfdetermined climate action plans. Geographers are also examining these recent approaches from a critical point of view.

Carbon Offsets: Capitalist Vision and Neocolonial Approaches The topic of carbon offsets emerged in the Kyoto Protocol’s flexible mechanisms (UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, UNFCCC 1997), which allow industrialized countries to meet their emission reduction targets by purchasing emission reductions that are associated with projects in the developing world (the Clean Development Mechanism, CDM) or Eastern European economies in transition (Joint Implementation). In the Kyoto Protocol offsets are considered the center of efforts to cut emissions by establishing an appropriate price for carbon. As a result, carbon offsets emerged from a market logic that has created a demand for and supply of carbon reductions that can be priced and exchanged within the international climate policy considering alternative or supplementary ways to reduce emissions as efficiently as possible. These market instruments are based on the recognition that emission reductions in industrialized countries would probably be

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more expensive than reductions in developing ones. In fact, in developing countries industrial processes are generally less efficient, forest offsets are more effective, opportunities for implementing “cleaner” energy systems may be less costly, and labor and resources are less expensive (Bumpus & Liverman, 2008). According to this vision, offsets would provide greater benefits in terms of mitigation involving projects in developing countries. Since a key point is that excess emissions generated in the Global North are usually compensated for by reductions in the Global South (Bumpus & Liverman, 2008), the geographical literature focuses on the complex spatial relations deriving from making carbon into a commodity (Anderson, 2010). This literature highlights in particular the underlying capitalist vision consisting in continual capital accumulation and growth (Swyngedouw, 2007). For example, among the various aspects it emerges that most of offsets within Kyoto’s CDM were directed to countries like India, Brazil, and China rather than the poorer countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Among the critical aspects underlined by Newell and Bumpus (2012), the consequences of rendering carbon manageable, containable, and quantifiable to be tradable as a commodity emerge. In particular, what may appear as mere technical exercises in measuring, accounting, and verifying emissions are deeply political because of the financial value they can generate, the politics of what to measure and what does not, and the decisions on where to invest. As Cohen and McCarthy (2015) state, through these strategies the focus on the single global metric of carbon dioxide ppm has allowed wealthier countries to avoid reducing emissions. Moreover, Sullivan (2017) shows a critical analysis on a consolidated thinking in the international environmental policy arena which assumes the perfect compensation between emissions and carbon credits. Following this approach in carbon management means that fossil fuels can continue to be burned since their emissions can be offset through the acquisition of carbon credits representing carbon gains stored elsewhere. Such exchanges assume an ontological equivalence between these entities on the basis only of their carbon composition. In particular, they are based on assumptions of equivalence between industrial emissions and organically stored carbon biomass, so as to achieve a “balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases” (UNFCCC Paris Agreement 2015, Article 4.1). “It may also infer carbon equivalence between plantation forests and old-growth forests, leading to conversion of the latter into the former, for example, through the expansion of biofuel plantations” (Sullivan, 2017, p. 229). These processes, arising from neoliberal ideas, are conducted at the expense of forest-inhabiting peoples who have different views and ontologies regarding how their lands should best be managed (Cavanagh & Benjaminsen, 2014; Dunlap & Fairhead, 2014; Sullivan, 2015). Moreover, these processes do not take into account the ecosystem services provided by ecosystems. For example, in the case of old-growth forests ecosystem services are represented by a number of benefits like protecting soil drainage, encouraging the formation of healthy soil, conserving water quality, providing a great variety of habitats, maintaining biodiversity, favoring nutrient cycling, improving air quality, improving CO2 uptake, favoring recreating and tourism activities, etc.

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Furthermore, Bumpus and Liverman (2008) highlight the implications deriving from considering carbon offsets as a dynamic commodity that links the Global North and South, business enterprises and consumers, as well as markets, focusing on the unequal distribution of costs and benefits of these mechanisms. Even if they could be economically rational, they may be seen as examples of what D. Harvey (2005) called the redistribution of wealth through accumulation by new forms of dispossession. Given the considerable profits deriving from trading in carbon reductions, offsetting can be seen as a form of “accumulation by decarbonization.” The rights to emit carbon (pollution permits) and carbon reductions (through CDM carbon projects) are commodified and privatized under conditions of unequal exchange between developed and developing countries, and this represents a controversial neocolonial approach to property rights (Bumpus & Liverman, 2008). As Newell and Bumpus (2012) state, carbon economy represents a paradigmatic case for exploring empirically and theoretically the connections between global and local political ecologies, markets, and structures of governance. These authors focus on how the creation of global carbon markets potentially disrupts and changes local social and ecological relations through impacts on property rights, access to resources, notions of value and justice, as well as consumption and production models. This kind of analysis contributes to understand winners and losers from the different global environmental governance arrangements. Among the different ways to commodify offsets into saleable units through the development, Bumpus and Liverman (2008) point out the growth of new forests to sequester carbon, the implementation of microhydroelectricity to displace diesel generators, and the reduction of industrial gases in hydrofluorocarbon plants. They also focus on actors of the commodity “chain” that form partnerships and networks across space, e.g., owners of lands or facilities, project developers, financial institutions, and brokers who may hold the carbon credits, and consumers, companies, and countries who purchase the credits. Similar conclusions are shown in the in-depth analysis conducted by Newell and Mulvaney (2013) on the implications of this kind of policies looking at who pays for the transition considering intra- and intergenerational equity principles. On one hand, proposals based on “grandfathering” take the status quo as the most legitimate starting point. On the other hand, developing countries do not accept to cut back global carbon emissions that do not reconcile the need to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions with the right to development. In particular, these authors focus on the production of injustice through existing market-based efforts to tackle climate change highlighting that patterns of energy use raise issues of energy justice in the form of responsibility (current generation has to respond for the emissions generated by prior generations) and entitlement (whose needs are most pressing and who decides who can emit how much). They underline that revenues that support action on climate change can entrench procedural inequalities in decisions that affect access to land and livelihoods. In many cases, wind, biomass, and solar power projects have intensified land pressures, usurping peoples’ land rights and affecting groups that have not adequately been consulted (Böhm & Dabhi, 2009). Hazlewood (2012) focuses on the CO2 lonialism, term coined by the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN, 2007) to emphasize the colonial nature of a number of

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invasive so-called green business initiatives like biofuel production and oil palm plantation expansion. These plantations that unfold in marginalized lands previously outside the market’s reach are rapidly replacing rainforests across the tropical South under global climate change policies. These practices are also often formulated with little or no input from indigenous communities. As a result, these communities and their lands are severely affected both by climate change and its mitigation strategies. These practices give a representation of persistent colonial relationships between North and South, and in some cases also within a national border to meet the rising international demand and to realize the development plans of the country. Instead of recognizing that global climate change can also be considered as a result of a defect of capitalism they consist in new forms of extraction and exploitation treating the Global South as a carbon sink for the North. Geographers insist on the need of in-depth researches on this topic asking for stopping these activities or regulating and monitoring them in more strictly ways. To solve climate change issues while reducing colonial-based inequalities between the North and South, Hazlewood (2012) state that there is a need that industrialized countries substantially cut their carbon emissions. Moreover, false climate change solutions like biofuels development which are threatening rainforests and local residents’ lives have to be stopped. The critical insights into the motivations behind economic instruments that control carbon emissions and the unfairly distribution of emissions and burdens created by emission trading systems led to the request of new approaches. One of the main objectives of these new proposals should be to break the so-called firewall between developing countries pursuing differentiated emissions reductions and developed countries seeking greater commitments from the developing world (Blaxekjaer & Nielsen, 2014). In particular, a new approach arises from the bottom by which each country communicates its climate commitments through selfdetermined climate action plans. It consists in the nationally determined contributions (NDCs) that are the key instruments of post-Paris climate commitments. The analysis of the NDCs is allowing geographers to understand the dynamics of new climate negotiations (Stephenson et al., 2019) because also these mitigation targets and plans (as the previous ones) address numerous other issues of importance in terms of equity of distribution of mitigation efforts, such as financing, technology transfer, and adaptation requirements (Rogelj et al., 2016). In many cases, the diversity of priorities also reflects asymmetries in historical responsibility, wealth, and risk exposure. Stephenson et al. (2019) showed that unfortunately, despite their goal of mobilizing bottom-up commitments toward global climate action, in many cases the NDCs continue to reflect top-down institutional divisions and the same divergent priorities that have characterized the UNFCCC for decades.

GHG Inventories The GHG inventory is the basis for the binding commitments in the Kyoto Protocol. Also, the post-Kyoto policy options require GHG inventories either as the basis for commitments or to evaluate performance. The geographical literature focuses on

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limits and advantages of the different system boundaries used in constructing GHG inventories. This is a key issue, because according to the system boundary used, the emissions allocated to each country may differ (Eder & Narodoslawsky, 1999) and, as a result, countries may have different mitigation options. In particular, a common debate in environmental policy is whether responsibility should be placed on the actor or nation that sets up a polluting process (the consumer) or the actor or nation producing the pollution (the producer) (Eder & Narodoslawsky, 1999). The system used by the UNFCCC assigns the responsibility to the producer of the pollution. On the other hand, according to many authors, consumption-based GHG inventories are “fairer” than production-based inventories (Peters & Hertwich, 2006; Grasso & Timmons Roberts, 2014; Grasso, 2017) for a number of reasons. The first one is referred to the distribution of responsibilities between producer and consumer countries. A GHG inventory based on a country’s consumption excludes the emissions embodied in exports and includes the emissions embodied in imports according to the formula: Consumption ¼ Production  Exports + Imports. As a result, each country is responsible for the emissions caused by domestic production and imports. The second reason is that consumption-based GHG inventories may reduce carbon leakage associated with international trade. In the Kyoto Protocol carbon leakage is a process where a participating country can reduce its reported GHG emissions increasing its imports from nonparticipating countries. As a result, part of the literature defines carbon leakage as the total emissions embodied in imports from non-Annex I countries to Annex I countries. It is possible to reduce carbon leakage shifting from production-based to consumption-based GHG inventories because consumption-based approaches accounting for the pollution embodied in trade can capture the carbon leakage associated with imports. Unfortunately, consumption-based GHG inventories have largely been absent in post-Kyoto debates despite their possible advantages mostly because of political resistance of developed countries. In fact, under the Kyoto protocol a country is disadvantaged if it has a large share of domestic emissions and GDP resulting from export industries. As a result, this may encourage production to occur in nonparticipating countries (carbon leakage) (Peters & Hertwich, 2008; Bagliani et al., 2019).

Unburnable Fossil Fuels Considering mitigation solutions which have a different perspective, the concept of “unburnable carbon” (or “unburnable reserves” or “unburnable fuels”) was coined in 2011 by the Carbon Tracker Initiative introducing an important element in climate change mitigation/compensation strategies: to keep the temperature from increasing by 2  C in the period 2011–2050, more than 80% of coal, 50% of gas, and 30% of oil reserves must remain “unburnable” underground (McGlade & Ekins, 2015). An interesting case study was described by Pellegrini et al. (2014) analyzing the Yasunì Ishpingo Tambococha Tiputini (Yasunì ITT). This initiative focused on the

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trade-off between extraction and conservation of commons and the rights of indigenous people. It proposed to solve this dilemma by enacting a permanent ban on oil exploration and extraction activities within an Ecuadorian National Park and obtaining financial resources from the international community to compensate forgone oil revenues. The plan received great attention and endorsements at the national and international level for its potential to become a concrete win-win policy for the protection of indigenous rights and new ways of sharing equitably costs and benefits of conservation, and the contribution to objectives of the national and global community. On the other hand, the process of implementation was difficult and in 2013 the plan was abandoned. The failure of the initiative was determined by a number of issues. Specific tensions were related to its specific history and features of the Ecuadorian state, the management of actors promoting the proposal, issues in building trust among parties and legitimacy, morality, and sovereignty issues, as well as delays, low provision of funds, and peculiarities of the global institutional framework. For example, the Yasunì Guarantee Certificates had only symbolic value, reducing the incentive to participate. Moreover, asymmetric risks and behavioral uncertainties related to decisions taken by different stakeholders highlighted the need to build trust among the parties and to design mechanisms to reduce the potential for opportunistic behaviors. Another interesting analysis was conducted by Codato et al. (2019) in the Amazon Biome. As these authors state, the available information about oil and gas sector is fragmentary, not well organized by countries or owned by private companies. Moreover, most climate change researches indicate general targets for regional or national levels without any spatially explicit localization for untapped fossil fuel reserves. In fact, parameters used for the selection of reservoirs continue to be mainly based on economic perspectives of resource availability, in particular on extraction costs and reserves depletion. As a result, there is a need of defining geographical criteria for unburnable carbon areas, also with the aim to support the decisionmaking process to develop unburnable carbon policies. Codato et al. (2019) filled a gap in the literature providing a spatial tool useful for geographical criteria to define potential unburnable carbon areas in highly sensitive cultural and biological areas. By using open-source geographical information systems (GIS) and remote sensing technologies they spatially validated the dimension of oil development and production and prepared a geodatabase of oil and gas activities, ecological, conservation, and sociocultural features of the study area also looking at the spatial relationships between oil production and culturally and ecologically sensitive areas. They chose the Amazon Biome because of its crucial role both as a carbon sink and as a fossil fuel reserve. Moreover, its importance expressed in terms of provisioning ecosystem services worldwide, particularly with regard to carbon sequestration, water resources, and biological and cultural diversity is seriously at risk due to oil and gas activities. As a result, it emerged an in-depth integrated spatial analysis on interactions between oil operations, protected areas, and indigenous territories used as a baseline to define geographical criteria for unburnable carbon areas in important priority areas for biodiversity conservation and human right protection. A geographical approach considering territorial suitability is able to

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incorporate interactions among territorial diversities and fossil fuels reserves indicating cultural and ecological diversity as priorities.

Adaptation Policies Adaptation policies consist in a set of actions that aim to act on the effects of climate change. For a number of years, adaptation as a response to climate change was considered politically wrong because it could draw attention and resources away from mitigation (Schipper, 2006). Attention to climate change adaptation has expanded rapidly since the 1990s within the areas of research, policy, and practice, as a result of the acknowledgment that some climate change is inevitable due to past and present emissions, regardless of mitigation efforts (O’Brien, 2012). The first definitions of climate change adaptation were focused on technologies, regulations, policies, and practices that enable society to live with change seeking to reduce vulnerability by minimizing the direct and indirect impacts. In those views adaptation was interpreted more as a technical and managerial challenge, to respond to scenarios and projections of future climate change (Nelson et al., 2007). As a consequence, as Eriksen et al. (2015) argued, until a few years ago adaptation policies were conceived as formal interventions or planned single actions, primarily based on technology, to reduce harms (Klein et al., 2007). So, adaptation was a linear and politically neutral response to actual or expected biophysical changes (Smit & Pilifosova, 2001). According to more recent definitions, adaptation “refers to the act of making something fit for a new situation or use [. . .] not only adapting to future temperature and precipitation scenarios” (O’Brien, 2012, 669), but also adapting to multiple global changes. Moreover, the recent literature also considers the complex social and individual processes that mediate responses to biophysical change, looking at power and politics (Eakin & Lemos, 2006; Eriksen et al., 2011; Manuel-Navarrete, 2010), focusing on the need to avoid that adaptation decision-making processes are only based on technical or managerial aspects and on the short-term view. A key point is that if in some cases it is easy to identify adaptation actions looking at problems triggered by climate change, in other cases it may be difficult because they can be generated by climate change in indirect ways. For these reasons, the geographical literature, on one hand, states that adaptation decisions are not isolated from other decisions, but occur in the context of transformations in sociocultural, economic, financial, and governance aspects at different geographical scales (Adger et al., 2005). On the other hand, it highlights a need to situate “adaptation as part of socio-political processes involving relations, contestations, negotiations and cooperation at multiple scales, from the individual to that of international negotiations” (Eriksen et al., 2015, p. 526). Considering both perspectives, Eriksen et al. (2015) offer a conceptual framework to link adaptation policies to broader processes of socioenvironmental change, including how individuals, communities, organizations, and governments interact, the response options considered, as well as who has to plan and guide those processes. They argue that

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adaptation policies are always political (the authors use this term in its broadest sense looking at the processes through which individuals and collectives cooperate and collude in the everyday life) influencing social relations, governance, and distribution of resources. As a result, what is seen as positive adaptation to one group of people may be seen as maladaptation to another. The success of adaptation strategies depends not only on how they meet the objectives of adaptation, but also on how they affect the ability of others to meet their adaptation goals, and, as a consequence, on a scale of implementation (Adger et al., 2005). In fact, changes due to adaptation could increase social injustice and inequities in resource distribution. So, Eriksen et al. (2015, p. 524) propose to focus on authority (the ability of actors’ to assert one understanding over another), knowledges (how understandings of climate change and adaptation are based in more than just scientific knowledge), and subjectivities (the way that individuals and groups are positioned in relation to adaptation) to capture multiscalar politicized relationships that extend between households to the global scale. In particular, considering adaptation as a part of broader patterns of social change means that adaptation needs to be tied to the everyday livelihood activities and ambitions of individuals and groups in society (O’Brien, 2012) and that individuals and groups are considered active agents in shaping their destinies (Eriksen et al., 2015). In fact, “any adaptation decision, whether made by an individual adjusting his or her livelihood strategy, or a policy maker designing formal adaptation strategies, is the product of prioritizing some interests over others, privileging and experiencing some biophysical changes over others, hearing some voices and ignoring others” (Eriksen et al., 2015, p. 526) with positive and negative effects distributed socially, spatially, and through time. O’Brien (2018) also insists on the importance of worldviews of reality with particular reference to beliefs and values because of their influence on how problems and solutions are perceived, approached, and addressed. In particular, beliefs are critical in perceiving a situation, identifying actions and predicting their consequences. Values, that are things considered desirable, help define what is important. Closely connected to debates over adaptation policies, the debate on climate vulnerability is also changing to take more account of how social and political processes drive vulnerability focusing in particular on unequal vulnerability to multiple sociopolitical and environmental stressors (Eakin, 2005; Leichenko & O’Brien, 2008). Geographers also consider how the political mechanisms serve to reproduce vulnerability over time and space (Eriksen et al., 2015, p. 525). For example, Taylor (2013, p. 318) emphasizes “the need to conceptualize the relational dynamics of vulnerability, where the relative security of some social groups is achieved through the production of insecurity among others.”

How to Go Beyond Adaptation: Transformation As O’Brien (2012) states, alongside the increase in geographical reflections on climate change adaptation that analyze and assess how and when household communities, economic sectors, and society in general can respond to changing

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conditions and new risks, there is also a debate on the limits to adaptation (Adger et al., 2007; Pelling, 2011). This literature focuses on “whether humans actually have the capacity to adapt to complex, non-linear and in many cases irreversible environmental changes” (O’Brien, 2012, p. 668) looking at choices expressed in terms of ability to shape future social and environmental conditions. It means to go beyond the projections of climate models avoiding falling into the trap of a sort of new environmental determinism according to which the future has already been decided and the challenge is only to adapt. Looking at this perspective, adaptation is only one of the plausible choices. Following John Holdren (2008): “We basically have three choices: mitigation, adaptation and suffering. We’re going to do some of each.” According to Pelling (2011) and O’Brien (2012), a fourth option is transformation. It challenges the status quo, threatening those who benefit from current systems and structures. It is very different than adaptation because adaptation aims at accommodating change, rather than contesting it. This means that current systems are accepted and in some cases modified, but rarely critically questioned or challenged (Pelling, 2011). The geographical literature talks about “deliberate” (or directional) transformation focusing on the intention of achieving a particular goal by recognizing the need of some fundamental shifts to enable desirable futures to emerge (Miller, 2007). These shifts may include a combination of technological innovations, institutional reforms, behavioral shifts, and cultural changes. Deliberate transformations are often initiated by small groups or communities and are particularly difficult to achieve because they typically require changes to systems, institutions, rules, policies, and practices maintained and protected by powerful interests and groups. As a result, these difficulties have their root in cultural, social, and political aspects (Kegan & Lahey, 2009; Moser & Ekstrom, 2010; Pelling, 2011). Transformations may occur across multiple dimensions and scales, including, for example, energy, economic sectors, transportation, financial systems, governance regimes, development paradigms, power relations, production and consumption patterns, lifestyles, values, and worldviews (O’Brien, 2012). Transformations imply a deviation from business as usual trying to respond to the challenges represented by the IPCC emissions scenarios with the need to shift from the current trajectory leading to a global warming of 2.6–4.8  C to one that is compatible with warming of 1.5  C by 2100 (IPCC, 2018). This deviation also helps face current and anticipated impacts as well as reduce the factors contributing to risk, vulnerability, and human insecurity (O’Brien, 2016), considering, for example, land ownership, governance and poverty, as well as community-level capacity building. As a result, the geographical literature focuses on the ability of transformation to address the roots of vulnerability through action “that changes the fundamental attributes of a system in response to climate and its effects” (Agard et al., 2014, p. 1758). It is a key point because vulnerability cannot be addressed through adjustments to maintain the current system (Pelling, 2011) alone, but there is a need for measures to address how vulnerability is produced. In fact, geographers also suggest to examine the structural and relational dimensions of inequality that shape vulnerability in order to allow better understanding and assessing the transformation

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of constraining institutions and structures and the role played by actors (Pelling et al., 2015). On the other hand, O’Brien (2012) also states that even transformations along pathways toward greater justice, equity, and long-term resilience are likely to raise contentious debates about the meaning of progress, prosperity, and human development (St. Clair, 2006). So, geographers underline that all the types of response to climate change, mitigation, adaptation, suffering, and transformation are likely to be challenged, contested, and resisted. This is one of the main reasons that show a need for deeper inquiry into structures of meaning making not only within society, but within science itself (O’Brien, 2012). For example, the proposal presented by Eriksen et al. (2015) described above, paying attention to power and politics in relationships among authority, knowledges, and subjectivity also allows to identify how adaptation processes “can challenge, rather than reaffirm, existing power relations, and hence contribute to deliberate transformational adaptation” (Eriksen et al., 2015, p. 525). To consider the characteristics of changes needed to take into account human and social dimensions, O’Brien (2018) describes three spheres of transformation: the practical, political, and personal ones. The practical sphere consists in specific strategies, actions, and behavior that directly contribute to reach certain goals, ranging from mitigation to adaptation, e.g., increase in photovoltaic installations, sustainable mobility, new educational tools, reduction in meat consumption, and so on. In most cases, progress in this sphere is easy to measure and monitor and transformations in the practical sphere can support transformations in the political sphere. The political sphere represents the systems and structures that facilitate or constrain practical responses to climate change. “Systems consist in relationships between parts that form a larger whole, and structures describe the norms, rules, regulations, institutions, regimes and incentives that influence how systems are designed, organized and governed” (O’Brien, 2018, p. 156). So, in most cases, systems and structures are created and developed through political processes, which include collective actions as well as conflicts that shape responses in the practical sphere. The personal sphere represents the subjective beliefs, values, worldviews, and paradigms that influence individual and community behavior, as well as perceptions and constructions of systems, structures, and strategies. So, it influences the political and the practical spheres defining perceptions and interpretations of reality and of what is imaginable and achievable. Beliefs, values, and worldviews can change within individual lifetimes and over generations transforming dominant paradigms and models of reality. Therefore, to turn insights of social transformation into strategies able to face climate change, O’Brien (2018) underlines a need to create the conditions that promote the development and expression of social consciousness in all the three spheres starting from recognizing that everyone is part of a system and can be considered an agent of change. According to this vision, focusing on individual worldviews allows to shift norms and institutions to support the roadmaps and pathways consistent with the Paris Agreement and the 1.5  C IPCC Report. The view proposed by geographers reflects transformation in an understanding where fundamental change is directed at the surrounding social-ecological system.

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“This interpretation ascribes transformation to adaptive actions that have the reach to shift existing systems (and their component structures, institutions and actor positions) onto alternative development pathways” (Pelling et al., 2015, p. 114). Moreover, it opens new kinds of responses by going beyond existing systemic forms and allowing deep-rooted causes of risk and vulnerability to be addressed as part of a reorientation of development pathway toward social justice and sustainable development (Pelling et al., 2015).

Scales and Rescaling As mentioned above, geographers are giving an important contribution in asking for a cultural shift on developing and managing climate change responses also thanks to the debate on scales, focusing on what processes determine the production of scales of action and analysis, whose knowledge and expertise dominate, and whose priorities are favored at different scales (Miller & McGregor, 2020). Adger et al. (2005, p. 80) state that the “dynamic nature of linkages between levels of governance is not well-understood, and the politics of the construction of scale are often ignored.” Global changes in climate, environment, economies, populations, governments, institutions, and cultures converge in localities. Changes at a local scale, in turn, contribute to global changes as well as being affected by them. But the “local” where the emissions take place is not always the same where the emissions are controlled. For example, the places of production and consumption of energy do not coincide, or the creation of plants and infrastructures of various types is the result of decisions taken elsewhere. As a result, linking the local and the global scales helps understand global change in its complexity (Wilbanks & Kates, 1999). It also helps propose strategic lines referred to the reorganization and rearticulation between scales related to the different political and decision-making levels (Brenner, 1999; Amin, 2002), known as rescaling processes. Geographers focus on the fact that adopting adaptation, transformation, and mitigation principles to climate change involves cascading decisions “made up of agents from individuals, firms and civil society, to public bodies and governments at local, regional and national scales, and international agencies” (Adger et al., 2005, p. 79). So, it is not possible to define success simply in terms of the effectiveness of meeting objectives because, for example, a certain adaptation action may produce negative externalities at other spatial and temporal scales. This is the case of air-conditioning that can be good for its adopters, but it is energy-intensive and a source of emissions, determining negative effects at the same and at other scales (Adger et al., 2005). Cohen and McCarthy (2015) summarize the contribution of geography on rescaled environmental governance looking at the decentralization of decision-making. First, it consists in a scaling down, that is, a shift toward decision-making at more localized governance scales (municipal administrations, provincial or state governments, and regional governments), according to the principle of subsidiarity and to a number of arguments aiming at introducing participatory governance principles as well as

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reflecting neoliberal arguments that central government is inefficient. Examples of these arguments are: many problems and solutions referred to environmental governance have their roots in local activities; local governments are the levels of governance closest to the people, so know needs of communities and stakeholders and play a vital role in educating, mobilizing, and responding to the public through participatory processes and consensus building. The second dimension of decentralization of decision-making is the so-called scaling up, from communities to transnational scales and networks. It is a transfer of regulatory capacity from the subnational and national level to the global scale also through the development of international organizations (Cohen & McCarthy, 2015). The third dimension of decentralization refers to scaling out, that is, increased participation of nongovernmental actors in environmental decision-making. Scaling out gives importance to arguments that including nongovernmental actors, like NGOs, cooperatives, and corporations, in decision-making processes contributes to increasing local participation and local empowerment creating more democratic spaces. It is important to note that scaling out is not always led by the state: “non-state actors can – and do – drive ‘scaling out’ initiatives” (Cohen & McCarthy, 2015, p. 6). In particular, the geographical literature is giving an important contribution focusing on the role of the rescaling of environmental governance in creating its own objects and spaces of governance. “The global climate” is one of the most relevant examples of new governance objects significantly created through rescaling processes (Cohen & McCarthy, 2015). These authors underline the strong shift in how atmospheric emissions are imagined as objects of governance. Until a few decades ago, problematic atmospheric emissions were considered as “pollution” (smog and acid rain) and their effects on human health and ecosystems were issues of the regional and national governance. Even when they crossed national borders it was relatively easy to trace specific flows from a region or country to another. Today the environmental governance of atmospheric emissions focuses on greenhouse gases and in particular on CO2 parts per million with the goal to stabilize/reduce them at a global scale through new institutions of global environmental governance, rescaling the governance to the global scale. As described above, the critical point is that “climate change as an object of governance could be measured, mitigated, and adapted to in a host of different ways, theorized and addressed at a variety of scales, and that those scaled framings of potential objects of environmental governance are materially and politically consequential” (Cohen & McCarthy, 2015, p. 12). So, there is a need to consider that the most logical objects of governance are the primary causes of climate change, determined by the different economic, political, and sociotechnical systems. Then, also the impacts that people directly experience in terms of extreme weather events, food and water shortages, consequences on health, and so on have to be taken into account. There is also a need to focus on actors and processes looking at who is responsible, who is to govern, and through what sorts of scaled frameworks. Looking at this aspect, geographers have criticized the dominant approach to climate governance, which works through specific international institutions seeking a “global” solution to the “global” problem of rising total greenhouse gas levels. Among others, Kythreotis

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(2012) emphasizes that even if the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and other “global governance” initiatives are presented as forms of collective and consensus-based “global” governance, the reality is that behind these institutions there are political relationships among highly unequal territorial nation-states. Moreover, many of these positions are dominated by the territorially based accumulation strategies of private actors within them. The fact that national states enact and protect their own specific identities and territorial interests at global climate negotiations rather than creating more equitable policies represents a relevant issue in the climate governance. This helps reconnect the discourses on rescaling to the critical analysis referred to mitigation policies. In particular, focusing only on CO2 emissions allowed wealthier countries to avoid reducing emissions through carbon offsets (Cohen & McCarthy, 2015, p. 13). On the other hand, the relative failures of climate governance at national and international scales have favored a proliferation of climate governance initiatives at the urban scale, consisting in commitments to urban sustainability as well as commitments and investments in initiatives focusing on climate change such as greenhouse gas inventories, energy action plans, tree planting programs, ecosystem services monitoring projects, regeneration of degraded areas and brownfields, development of green and blue infrastructures, modifications to transportation, and so on. So, also these initiatives are referred to new scales, objects, and actors of governance created through rescaling.

Rescaling and Individuals The last focus on rescaling of governance looks at individuals considered representative of the emergence of a climate-centered “environmentality” (Birkenholtz, 2008) and, at the same time, as one of the manifestations of the responsibilization of individuals as a key component of neoliberal governance. In fact, in many cases placing responsibility upon individuals for their own emissions also means to reduce the responsibility of other actors such as the state and private corporations. As a result, this kind of rescaling includes the responsibilization of individuals on topics like the need to change lifestyles and consumption models for addressing climate change and to monitor progress estimating changes in impact. Among the most frequently used methodologies, carbon footprints allow to assess greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions at different geographical scales, from global through to national, until urban and personal scales, and to associate emissions with human production or consumption activities and behaviors (Fuller, 2017). Placing responsibility upon individuals is also referred to the active participation in the creation and maintenance of the objects of governance by, for example, creating spaces of alternative consumption which go beyond predominant energy-hungry and hyperproductive consumer models and market systems participating in certified or local commodity chains (Cohen & McCarthy, 2015; Tononi et al., 2017). Focusing on how consumption is mediated socially and technically, these methodologies help people understand practices that are deemed to be problematic and unsustainable in the long term and the ways they might modify their behaviors (Fuller, 2017).

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In the rescaling of governance looking at individuals there is also a further step which can contribute to more equitable and globally inclusive climate justice interjecting the climate change political status quo. Networks of actors, such as civil society groups, community-based organizations operating at a local scale, in addition to finding an interface in their governments, now also cross national borders by directly accessing the higher scales (Routledge, 1996; Puttilli, 2010), in a transcalar process, in which to act simultaneously on different scales and multiple areas. In fact, in recent decades there has been a trend toward an increase in scaling out and up initiatives that include a wide range of noninstitutional actors comprising also individual citizens and groups of citizens gathered in various forms (Warner, 2007). They alter existing power relationships and conditions of access exerting pressures through economic choices and social behavior aware of the environmental repercussions generated by individual choices (Puttilli, 2010) in the daily life. They also create knowledge by adopting innovative practices from a technical and social point of view, even with niche experiments and learning by doing/using (Bulkeley et al., 2011). In order to foster these paths, ensuring that they create significant changes, institutional support is essential to link objectives of the stakeholders at the “top” at the local level with bottom-up initiatives. Moreover, the institutional structures have to be linked to the social and individual ones, consolidating the way toward structural transformations from the bottom (Manuel-Navarrete & Pelling, 2015).

The Geographical Literature and the IPCC: Relationships and Perspectives The geographical literature contributed to change the perspective of the IPCC on vulnerability, and mitigation and adaptation policies between the fourth and fifth assessment reports (IPCC, 2007, 2014b). In particular, the geographical research allowed the IPCC to situate these topics within sociopolitical and socioenvironmental processes (Nightingale, 2015). Many of these changes are not driven directly by climate change (Pelling, 2011) but climate change is exacerbating existing vulnerability (IPCC, 2014b) introducing new risks. Moreover, the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) recognized inequality and social justice issues within adaptation and transformation debates and in doing so it also acknowledged that adaptation and transformation are effected through social and political processes (Adger et al., 2014; Denton et al., 2014; Mimura et al., 2014; Olsson et al., 2014). In particular, the IPCC discussed transformation in its Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (SREX) (IPCC, 2012). This report presented transformation as one of six interacting elements to manage risks and adaptation in the context of sustainable development. The other elements are referred to the need to reduce vulnerability; prepare, respond, and recover; transfer and share risks; reduce exposure; and increase resilience to changing risks (IPCC, 2012; Pelling et al., 2015). The subsequent AR5 (2014) focused on differences between adaptation and transformation underlying the

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potential to open the political possibilities of adaptation. The AR5 also presented climate-resilient pathways as sustainable development pathways that combine the goals of adaptation and mitigation (Denton et al., 2014), (IPCC, 2014a) and introduced the notion of climate-resilient development pathways, with a more explicit focus on dynamic livelihoods, multidimensional poverty, structural inequalities, and equity among poor and nonpoor people emphasizing the importance to “transform [. . .] the development pathways themselves towards greater social and environmental sustainability, equity, resilience, and justice” (Olsson et al., 2014). The 1.5 Report (IPCC, 2018) gives a more in-depth representation of the relationships between transformation and sustainable development pathways looking at the need to reduce poverty, inequity, and environmental degradation promoting fair and cross-scalar resilience in a changing climate and recognizing that all of these are negotiated (political) concepts and processes (Manuel-Navarrete, 2010). This report highlights that there is no single pathway to achieve climate goals and that pathways depend on the underlying development processes, on societal choices, technologies, and on the scales they are referred to. It suggests to adopt transformation pathways which enable to put at the center people’s needs and aspirations, e.g., through participatory processes, and to change lifestyle choices lowering energy demand and the land and GHG intensity of food consumption. Integrated options and changes like these can enable rapid, systemic transformations, both in urban and rural areas, that are consistent with limiting warming to 1.5  C. These changes are most effective when aligned with economic and sustainable development, and when local and regional governments are supported by national governments. This is the reason why the 1.5 Report also indicates to coordinate and monitor multiscale and multisectoral policy actions and trade-offs. In fact, vertical and horizontal policy integration and coordination is essential to take into account the interplay and trade-offs between sectors and spatial scales, enable the dialogue between local communities and institutional bodies, and involve nonstate actors such as business, local governments, and civil society operating across different scales. All these connections are also embedded in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). As suggested by geographers to the IPCC (see Pelling et al., 2015), the 1.5 Report also examines synergies and trade-offs of adaptation, mitigation, and transformation options with sustainable development and the SDGs offering insights into possible climate-resilient development pathways toward a 1.5  C warmer world. It highlights that limiting global warming to 1.5  C rather than 2  C above preindustrial levels would make it easier to achieve many aspects of sustainable development, and as a consequence the SDGs, with greater potential to eradicate poverty and reduce inequalities. According to O’Brien (2018), the 1.5  C target is a powerful metaphor for radical change and even if societal challenges and global transformations of development pathways can take many forms and directions following different visions and theoretical approaches, understanding the role of culture in social transformations is vital and can be a powerful catalyst for achieving the 1.5  C target. In particular, it helps not to perpetuate old paradigms and ideas consisting in deterministic pathways that risk excluding other ways of framing and approaching problems and solutions.

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Cross-References ▶ Adaptation Duties ▶ Climate Change and Population Ethics ▶ Climate Change and Urban Studies ▶ Mitigation Duties

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Climate Change and Urban Studies Elena De Nictolis

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Why Should Cities Act About Climate Change? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What Can Cities Do for Climate Change? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . How Are Cities Acting for Climate Change? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Multi-Level, Collaborative Approaches for a Polycentric Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Urban Climate Experimentalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . City-led Climate Change Litigation. Cities Use Litigation as a Public Platform . . . . . . . . . . Cities, Climate Change and Urban Equity and Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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There has been a growing amount of writing on the role of cities and climate change for quite some time now. Starting from a shared acknowledgment that cities are championing climate action in different domestic contexts around the world, often in contrast with their country’s policy, the scholarly views oscillate between optimistic, cautious, and skeptical views of cities’ role in climate change. Some scholars advocate for the empowerment of cities in the international or global climate change law and policy framework, while others admonish against the risks of romanticizing them, and localism more broadly. One issue at the core of scholarly and policy discussion of cities and climate law and policy is whether and how cities can substantially contribute to climate mitigation efforts, whose nature is inherently global. Another set of concerns relates to whether and how cities pursue adaptation strategies. Leveraging on this body of knowledge, a diffused scholarly preoccupation concerns how cities are addressing the equity and justice concerns connected to climate policy at the local level. E. De Nictolis (*) New York University School of Law, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_19

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Keywords

Cities · Local governments · Climate change · Climate policy · Climate change law · Climate governance

Introduction There has been a growing amount of writing on the role of cities and climate change recently. This chapter provides an overview of scholarly debates on cities and climate change, with a focus on political theory, urban policy, and law (environmental, international, comparative constitutional, and public law). First, the chapter will address how climate science assesses cities’ role in climate change mitigation and adaptation at a global level. One issue at the core of scholarly and policy discussion of cities and climate law and policy is whether and how cities can substantially contribute to climate mitigation efforts, whose nature is inherently global. It will introduce the main takeaways from IPCC reports on existing efforts to quantify the role of cities from a double standpoint: computing the emissions produced by cities on the one hand and the impact of urban strategies on global emissions on the other. How much do cities contribute to climate change versus how much do they contribute to its mitigation and adaptation? Then, the chapter proceeds with a review of the scholarly debate on cities and climate change law and policy. Starting from a shared acknowledgment that cities are championing climate action in different domestic contexts around the world, in some cases in contrast with their country’s policy, the scholarly views oscillate between skeptical, cautiously optimistic, and enthusiastic views of cities’ role in climate change. Some scholars advocate for the empowerment of cities in the international or global climate change law and policy framework, while others admonish the risks of romanticizing them and localism more broadly. A considerable amount of the debate on urban law and policy for climate change is driven by scholarship from Europe or the U.S. However, it is broadly recognized that cities are an important actor for climate change, that the implications of their proactive role in promoting laws and policies on mitigation and adaptation are rich of tensions and deserve further research efforts. The reader should also be aware that for space constraints there is a certain amount of writing that this contribution doesn’t cover. It would be important to complement this reading with sources addressing specific geographical areas, or contextualized legal and policy framework analysis. The chapter moves to another set of concerns related to whether and how cities pursue mitigation and adaptation strategies through laws and policies. The legal and policy innovations that cities are promoting on climate change are critical from a variety of perspectives that are at the heart of so many concerns for a political philosophy of climate change: local corruption; private interest capture; human rights; social and economic rights; social justice. Leveraging this body of knowledge, the chapter moves to tackle the diffused scholarly preoccupation on how cities are addressing the equity and justice concerns connected to climate mitigation and

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adaptation at the local level. From a broader political philosophy and political theory perspective, scholars are arguing whether the increased relevance of cities in light of the energy transition and climate change calls for rethinking urban theories from an equity and justice lens.

Why Should Cities Act About Climate Change? Anyone approaching a piece of work on cities and climate change will likely find a statement that cities contribute substantially to GHG emissions in the first paragraph. More than half of the world’s population currently resides in urban areas, and this number will grow to nearly three quarters by 2050 with 90% of this increase in Africa and Asia (Lwasa, 2022, at 828). Urban areas account for a growing proportion (67–72%) of global emissions (Lwasa, 2022, 885), but population density and agglomeration make them more efficient in energy use or lower GHG emissions per capita than rural areas or low-density suburbs. Yet, this depends on city size, urban planning, and consumption patterns (Lwasa, 2022, 887). What is more complicated is the understanding and measurement of cities’ contribution to the reduction of global GHG emissions. Considering the scholarly narrative on the necessity to empower cities in climate change law and policy, whether, at the global or domestic level, this is of special importance. In other words: are cities’ efforts to reduce their carbon footprint worth it? And is supporting these efforts a legitimate policy priority, with an eye on resource allocation? Kuramochi and others provide a useful review of the existing efforts to quantify the contribution of non-state actors, cities included, in GHG emissions reduction (Kuramochi et al., 2020). To date, no evidence is known to the authors of a published assessment of cities’ contribution to climate change mitigation. They do propose a method for quantifying the potential aggregate impact of quantifiable climate change mitigation commitments by a range of non-state actors that include cities (individual regions, cities, companies) on global GHG emissions in 2030, applied to ten Countries and a supranational government: Brazil, Canada, China, the European Union (EU28), India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, South Africa, and the U.S. (Kuramochi et al., 2020, at 227). Their assessment included “approximately 6,000 cities accountable for at least 4.4 GtCO2e/year” (Kuramochi et al., 2020, at 282). Data are from 2016. The area where cities account for non-state actors’ emissions most is China, followed by Indonesia and the European Union (Kuramochi et al., 2020, at 282). The validity of the assessment is limited by data availability, especially considering that a large portion of voluntary climate mitigation actions pursued by cities goes undetected (Kuramochi et al., 2020, at 286). The IPCC Mitigation Report chapter on cities acknowledges the lack of appropriate measurement of how many emissions cities generate and how many they cut when implementing local mitigation measures. Another challenge is coverage. Many cities that pursue mitigation strategies do not have the tools to quantity emissions reduced, or the global coverage lacks information on these projects. So, accurate knowledge of the contribution of cities to climate mitigation is not yet available.

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Standardization and scaling are needed to achieve a global quantification, but there is a strong research interest in this direction, which should be possible soon (Lwasa, 2022, at 926) The most effective mitigation options for cities are four: (1) Avoiding carbon lock-in. This term refers to the fact that cities’ energy use is locked in a multiscale and multi-layered system of policy choices that expand beyond the administrative boundaries and geopolitical scale of cities and produce effects for decades. Streets are designed for a certain amount of cars and a certain shape, and car ownership often has a long lifespan; the electricity grid modernization influences the energy use of cities, and energy retrofitting or the shift in energy use in buildings requires a very long amount of time. Urban energy use depends on factors like the pricing of low-emissions technology or materials. To be sure, cities do have the power to influence some of these factors, depending on their economic and sociological relevance, institutional capacity, and legal power. They can set building codes that regulate materials and construction standards for buildings or that require a reduction of energy use; promote urban planning/zoning laws that determine the location of buildings, land uses, standards for densities to shape energy use, etc. (Lwasa, 2022, at 896). (2) Spatial planning. By regulating infrastructure, cities can influence key factors for energy use that pertain to the urban morphology: density, land-use mix, connectivity, and accessibility. Intervening on infrastructure will also have the benefit of promoting sustainable growth and have positive impacts in terms of employment and agglomeration economies (increase productivity through proximity and efficiency) (Lwasa, 2022, at 898). (3) Electrification. Increasing the use of electricity as the energy supply and using net zero materials and sources would turn cities into carbon-neutral and/or carbon-negative entities (Lwasa, 2022, at 902). (4) Urban green and blue infrastructure. This includes various options, from urban forestation to street trees, parks, green roofs, or green facades. Green and blue infrastructures also have implications as adaptation measures. They contribute to cooling down public areas (Lwasa, 2022, at 903). While measurement is complex, it is an empirical trend that cities are experimenting with policies and projects on climate change. Experimentation is heterogeneous, but energy experiments predominate. These assumptions on the role of cities in climate mitigation shown so far in this paragraph are largely agreed upon in climate science. We can find a nuanced range of scholarly approaches when we delve into the literature on cities and climate change in law and policy. Katrina Wyman and Danielle Spiegel Feld have summarized them into three views that are grossly corresponding to schools of thought about cities in general: skeptical, cautiously optimistic, and enthusiasts (Spiegel-Feld et al., 2022, at 2). Let’s see them in more detail. We will see how they overlap sometimes, so it is possible to see them working together in constructing a robust understanding of the room for action of cities concerning climate change. Some scholars see cities positively because they are more responsive to the needs of residents. The most renowned of these scholars celebrate cities’ capacity to counteract climate change from a democratic point of view. Benjamin Barber points out that cities have a more pragmatic approach toward issues that matter to people who live in cities, due to proximity pressure. Barber’s preoccupation is mostly with

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making a democratic case for local democracy. Cities are less captured by big economic interest issues that matter at the national level. This makes local politicians more responsive than Parliaments to the everyday needs of people (Barber, 2014). Climate change is an example of a policy field where cities are more proactive and effective than the global level. This assumption is backed up by the myriad of climate mitigation and adaptation projects that cities carry out, in some cases where the State or Federal level is not taking climate action or is openly against it (Barber, 2017). The problem is that global diplomacy does not foresee cities but only States. States are those who sign treaties and negotiate action plans. So, he argued, cities should leverage their sovereignty and create their own global governance body: a Global Parliament of Mayors (GPM). This scholarly proposal translated into real experimentation. The first GPM session took place in September 2018, convened by the Mayor of the Hague (the Netherlands). The GPM’s current members are 54 Mayors, from European and UK cities, African cities, MENA Region Cities, and U.S. cities (Global Parliament of Mayors Website, n.d.). This literature sees progressive, liberal cities as ideal fortresses against state inaction on climate change (Miller, 2020). Others argue that the urgency of climate change action and the fact that cities are among the first physical sites to subdue their effect requires recognizing them as more autonomous powers and to provide them with a framework of legal arrangements that enables them to respond effectively (du Plessis & Kotzé, 2014, at 174). Some scholars are more skeptical. A source of skepticism is the fact that, even when acting jointly, cities cannot be responsible for a meaningful reduction of emissions that are counted at the global level toward those who only look at the virtues of proximity and responsiveness of urban public institutions to their constituencies. Responsiveness to local constituencies means that the cities favor only the constituency that got them elected or that they favor one interest group over the other. Sherill Cashin reconstructed the localism debate and argued that the interests of the majority of metropolis inhabitants might be better suited within a combination of regional – in some policy areas – and federal interventions (Cashin, 2000). This is more closely related to the broader issue of motivations of city leaders (administrators, elected Mayors) to pursue climate action, an issue that is still under investigation by the literature. Additionally, there is a whole set of concerns related to the desirability of local climate action from a systemic perspective. Because they respond to their constituency, cities may be tempted to implement mitigation and adaptation actions by shifting externalities elsewhere (Spiegel-Feld et al., 2022). Several authors offer examples of this: the City of New York dumps sewage and rainwater in the surrounding water bodies during heavy rains (Wyman, 2022); Beijing and Delhi improved their air quality by closing down their coal power plants and importing electricity from outside the city (Ganguly, 2022; Lin, 2022; Kuldeep & Biswas, 2022). Between these two approaches, we have cautious optimists. Clayton Gillette (2017) has challenged the orthodox theory of urban finance by arguing that, in the presence of a well functioning political process, cities do engage in redistributive policies, towards wealthy and less wealthy constituencies. Nelson unveils the

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complexity of cities and climate action since they can be at the same time “villains and victims” when it comes to climate policies’ implications (Nelson, 2022). Katrina Wyman and Danielle Spiegel themselves do believe that cities have a strong potential, however only in some areas. In their hypothesis, we can expect cities to voluntarily address climate change mitigation and adaptation if the local benefits of doing so will outweigh the local costs (Spiegel-Feld et al., 2022). To some extent within the group of cautious optimists, we can find a large variety of scholars concerned with questions of scale, institutional capacity, and governance. Mostly situated within social science, their work offers empirical evidence from the concrete actions that cities are pursuing on climate change. This work will be addressed in the paragraph below.

What Can Cities Do for Climate Change? Urban policy and law have been historically concerned with environmental issues. Katrina Wyman and Danielle Spiegel Feld show that cities pioneered environmental protection since the late 1800s before the Federal Government started passing legislation in the 1970s, thus centralizing it. Urban law and policies implement legal mandates and autonomous experimentations that often go above and beyond the implementation of State or Federal requirements (Wyman & Spiegel-Feld, 2019). Nestor Davidson reminds us (Davidson, 2016) that the first article of the first issue of the Fordham Urban Law Journal was on the climate-related concerns for Jamaica Bay, New York, a coastal wetland that served as an ecological reserve within a highly urbanized area (Lefkowitz, 1972). One key preoccupation of scholars looking at cities as institutions pursuing climate action within a domestic legal framework are problems of legal authority. The appropriate level of authority in environmental or climate change law is usually shaped by constitutional or statutory allocation of competencies and scale. In most cases, the regulatory landscape of cities’ role in climate change law and policy looks more like a patchwork than a careful design. Analyzing the role of cities in climate action in South Africa, for example, Anel Du Plessis argues that despite the lack of clear guidelines and explicit climate governance provisions and legal mandates, cities have carved a role for themselves (du Plessis & Kotzé, 2014). And, they challenged their lack of authority, when faced with it. The interest of cities in climate change policies emerged in the late 1980s, consisting of the adoption of greenhouse gas emissions reduction plans (Bulkeley & Castán Broto, 2013, at 362). However, U.S. cities championed environmental protection since 1800, before the federal government started passing legislation, thereby centralizing environmental action, in 1970 (Wyman & Spiegel-Feld, 2021, 318). Some, more innovative, cities in recent years are increasingly passing local laws on climate change mitigation and adaptation. In federal environmental law, the decades-old scholarly debate on the appropriate allocation of authority in environmental regulation is traditionally a conversation between advocates for and against decentralization from the Federal government to States (Revesz, 1997).

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Urban climate local legislations have in some cases been subject to preemption by State law. The authors suggest ways for cities to have more space to experiment with environmental policy, within the existing system of authority established by federal and state law. For example, cities typically don’t have the legal authority to raise revenue through a new tax, unless provided by State law. There is a debate on whether cities could have the authority to impose a tax to address environmental externalities but is in practice complicated. The city of New York’s long journey toward a congestion pricing system started in the 1980s. Her efforts were constantly frustrated by the need to request authorization from New York State, eventually granted in 2019 (Wyman & Spiegel-Feld, 2021, 359). In case cities are unable to persuade State legislature, they might be able to enact a user fee, which they usually have more authority to do. For example, some cities have been enacting stormwater fees (Wyman & SpiegelFeld, 2021, 361). The understanding of the role of cities in counteracting or adapting to climate change is part of a broader debate on the role of cities in constitutional theory. This is very thick literature, the analysis of which is very far from the scope of this handbook. Some basic notions can be retraced here on the way this debate feeds into the role of cities in climate change. For federal systems, Erika Arban offers a conceptual framework by positioning cities within the intellectual history of federalism. She explains how the genesis of the federal model of the state in European thinking, based on Nation-State building, influenced the (lack of) cities’ strong status in the majority of cases. She also suggests that there is an under-theorization of cities in federal constitutional theory from the perspective of the “unit” question. Addressing the unit question for the author would mean discussing the most appropriate size, population, socioeconomic, and political features of an ideal urban entity in a federal system (Arban, 2022a, b). Katrina Wyman and Danielle Spiegel-Feld mention that some environmental climate laws passed by Cities in the U.S. have been preempted by State law. Recently, Richard Briffault noted that States have been making increasingly frequent and harsh use of preemption, in a punitive fashion (Briffault, 2022). Some scholars of U.S. local government law and urban law advocate for the recognition of a stronger status for cities, which are predominantly conceived as creatures of States in the U.S. Federal system (Davidson & Schragger, 2022). In such a system, cities are however carving a space for themselves. This means that cities can ground their claim to be full members of the national community by asserting their right to be a part of the decision-making process, for example, directly interpreting the Federal Constitution (Gerken, 2010, 43). The debate about the power of cities in Unitary states or quasi-federal, Regional states is less visibly vibrantly concerned with unleashing the power of cities. However, we can find analogies. There is an increasing debate about the power cities have in systems where they are Constitutionally invisible. In some Federal or Regional systems cities are explicitly recognized in the Constitution as constituent units of the State. However, Nico Steytler admonishes against excessive attention on the Constitutional explicit recognition, which does not inherently grant cities equal Status

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(Steytler, 2023, at 125). When it does, like for example in the case of Italy (a peculiar case of a Regional State with a Unitary thrust) their powers or resources can still be limited. Even within centralized systems, cities’ relevance as sites for the delivery of services that are of the utmost importance for welfare (housing, mobility, security, essential social services) thus configuring a body of urban law is clear (Auby, 2016). Ran Hirschl has more recently argued in a major comparative constitutional law work on cities’ explicit recognition that cities are asserting their power through avenues (some of them explored in this chapter) that go beyond States, sometimes Federal or Supranational borders: transnational city networks; human rights cities (or sanctuary cities) and the Rights to the City agenda; urban citizenship ID cards experiments (Hirschl, 2020, at 151–170). Rebecca Nelson notes that the scholarly debate on the constitutional status of cities often underestimates environmental issues. They either reflect on the constitutional implications of cities’ proactivity on climate, or they discuss the fiscal autonomy implications (Nelson 22, at 162). The author proposes to understand one of the pillars of the concept of Nation-State, territory, as an environmental dimension. The ecological context of cities would be the ground for formally recognizing their role in constitutional systems. But what would this recognition look like, in practice? The author defends that constitutions, as a general norm, should support cities’ fiscal autonomy, necessary to address climate change; provide minimum environmental safeguards by protecting high environmental standards from the state and federal pre-emption, and adopt constitutional environmental rights. The recognition of these rights, combined with mechanisms of intergovernmental coordination, is key to addressing the cumulative effect of environmental hazards (Nelson, 2022, 165–166). Fragmented legal responses might not address them adequately (Nelson, 2022, 179). In the EU supranational system, climate change and environmental protection laws are shared competence between the EU and Member States (Van Zeben, 2022, 57). There is no formal role of cities. Josephine Van Zeben therefore reminds us that the legal authority of a city to regulate issues like air pollution or climate change adaptation will depend on Member States’ regulatory approach and the authority they enjoy within the constitutional order of their Member State (Van Zebenm, 2022, 58). However, the European Commission engages in forms of supranational-local direct collaboration through soft law, funding programs, and research and development policies. Examples are the Urban Innovative Action Program (UIA), part of the Cohesion Policy, and the Climate Neutral and Smart Cities Mission, part of the Horizon Europe program. The international community has historically been a persistent advocate for climate action, yet cities don’t have a formal role in global climate change legal frameworks. This is literature that feeds into the recognition that cities can shape international/global law (Blank, 2006; Durmus & Oomen, 2022). Cities’ power within international environmental law and global climate change law is not yet established. However, there is a soft recognition. Local and sub-national governments were recognized as “governmental stakeholders” in the 2010 Cancun Agreements at paragraph 1,7, and the Paris Agreement acknowledges the significance of

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local and subnational levels for climate change adaptation and capacity-building (Rajavuori, 2021).

How Are Cities Acting for Climate Change? Multi-Level, Collaborative Approaches for a Polycentric Problem The complexity of climate change requires collective action mechanisms to be tackled successfully. However, the action of every single actor at every single scale counts. Elinor Ostrom was optimistic about the possibility to cope with climate change, even in the face of the struggles faced by States to act collectively. Research on collective action problems and cooperative governance solutions at the global level shows that we can be less pessimistic about the possibility of mechanisms based on cooperation (rather than competition) and on compliance with legal rules, given some conditions (Ostrom, 2015). On the other hand, research on public services in metropolitan areas carried out in the U.S. in the 1970s challenged the assumption that only one scale is relevant for policies that concern public goods. The large scale is important, but small and medium-sized units are also crucial components of an effective system of public service delivery. Thus, the theory of polycentric governance initially developed for urban areas, can be applied to climate change (Ostrom, 2009, at 35). Without denying the relevance of a global agreement on climate change, she argued that waiting for a truly worldwide solution is not advisable. Even in the case agreement on such a solution is eventually found, efforts at several scales (from individual to city level to regional et cetera) would be necessary (Ostrom, 2009, 3–4). An important feature of cities’ capacity to advance climate mitigation and adaptation is that there are a variety of subjects (social and institutional, private, and public) acting at the same time. These actors may act individually and autonomously, but also jointly. In the field of climate change, like in other fields, cities are the site of multi-actor actions. There is empirically rich literature analyzing climate projects, laws, and public policies that rely on these partnerships. Sometimes, these partnerships are public-private. In other cases, they might involve social actors like NGOs, or knowledge institutions like universities. Harriet Bulkeley and Vanessa Castán Broto conducted empirical analysis on the climate mitigation and adaptation experiments that cities conduct (Castán Broto & Bulkeley, 2013). Their goal is at the same time analytical and descriptive. Descriptive, because they offer a broad overview of cities’ climate actions overall, in terms of what solutions they experiment with, what actors participate, and other features that relate to research questions concerning issues of politics and governance (Castán Broto & Bulkeley, 2013, at 96). Analytical, because they research the systemic factors that can predict the likelihood of a city conducting climate action. A characteristic trend of experimentation led by private actors emerges in Asia. A major contribution comes from the literature on collective action for urban environmental stewardship. Elinor Ostrom and Harini Nagendra studied the

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strategies for the ecological restoration of seven lakes in the urbanizing, Southeast area of the City of Bangalore (Karnataka, India). The lakes are part of a network in the Koramangala-Challaghatta Valley. The study describes how groups of residents self-organized to jointly act for the ecological restoration of the lakes, whose conditions ranged from heavily polluted to extremely dry. Several public and city departments are responsible for the lakes. The government sponsored extensive public programs for restoration, that were not always or completely successful. Attempts of public-private partnerships resulted in further damage to the lakes, related to their commercial exploitation, and were successfully legally challenged by local actors and NGOs (Nagendra & Ostrom, 2014). Informal, collaborative networks of local communities with researchers and government organizations to carry out activities of maintenance and restoration of the lakes, and in some cases, this was associated with ecological restoration. The successful arrangements also had conditions such as the inclusion of different socio-economic groups, a moderate number of actors, operational community rules, the presence of local leadership, trust, and social capital. But the cooperation between the local communities and government actors is an important variable. There are limitations on the action of government agencies on one hand, and of the local communities on the other. Local communities don’t have the resources to manage complex infrastructures required for ecological restoration, for example, diverting sewage so that it bypasses the lake. Government agencies on the other hand have the legal authority and access to resources to do those things. However, they may lack the monitoring capacity and local knowledge necessary to know whether, when, and how damage is being done. Furthermore, there may be a lack of accountability toward local communities captured by private interest or institutional power dynamics. It’s the cooperation between the two, coupled with the action of local media and litigation, that secure the best outcome. The account of collaborative governance for urban environmental resources offered by Ostrom and Nagendra is situated within a situation of financial constraints for local government. Against a dominant narrative that suggested opting for privatization, the authors offer an alternative that is more responsive to the polycentric nature of the problem (Nagendra & Ostrom, 2014). Within the same literature, a view oriented toward a more proactive, enabling role of local governments in enabling collective action for sharing urban resources is offered by Sheila Foster (Foster, 2013). Christian laione published earlier work about the potential to leverage the proactive initiative of city residents’ action in mitigating climate change instead of quantity VS price-based emission reduction strategies (Iaione, 2010). Together, the authors later looked at the way cities overcome the tragedy of their commons by stimulating solidarity, sharing, and collaboration, rather than competition, between public, social, knowledge, and private actors. The authors offer an analysis of the legal tools that can facilitate collaborative governance. They can be of civic initiatives (i.e., Community Land Trust) or public initiatives (City Regulations for Governing the Urban Commons). In some cases, for example, in the City of Bologna (Italy) or the City of Seoul (South Korea), is also possible to theorize that the whole city is being governed as commons, meaning that the design

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principles that allow sharing and collaboration as modes of governance of urban assets, services, and infrastructure, especially for the benefit of vulnerable populations, become a diffused working method at the city bureaucracy level (Foster & Iaione, 2022). Another feature of cities’ assertive policymaking on climate is engaging in climate collective action and the diffusion, or mobility, of urban climate policies at the global level. This can happen horizontally (between cities) and vertically (city – state/federal/supranational level, more often referred to as scaling up). The question is whether and how the urban laws and policies promoted by cities can move between cities or scale up at the state, federal, or supranational level. The first point to be addressed is the dynamic of leaders, followers, and laggards described by Kristine Kern about European cities and climate action (Kern, 2019). She notes how climate action is initiated by cities that are leaders, often because they benefit from a rich network of climate change advocates and experts both within and outside the Municipality. The pioneering climate action that these cities voluntarily promote travel in other contexts. And that’s how we have follower cities and laggards that require external incentives (hard, like mandates, or soft, like economic incentives) to follow the leaders’ example. The problem with this dynamic is that most of the leading cities are large, sociologically, and economically relevant cities, such as New York in the U.S. But in many countries or regional areas, only a handful of cities have these features. In contrast, most cities are medium or small, and they don’t have access to the same resources. Surveying 100 cities (globally) Castán Broto and Bulkeley find that geographical areas do not influence the probability of city-led climate experimentation but belonging to a city network does (Castán Broto & Bulkeley, 2013, at 99). City networks and city diplomacy are the objects of specific literature. City networks are groups of cities, usually represented by Mayors, that create organizations to cooperate on specific policy issues or promote collective action on common problems, often as a reaction to the inaction of global or national institutions. City networks or city diplomacy bodies can focus on cooperation as the main value, and then address several themes; or they can have a geographic, regional focus; or they can have a thematic focus. One example of city diplomacy of the first kind is the Global Parliament of Mayors, mentioned above. Another is Urban 20 (U20), which coalesces cities of the G20 Countries. U20 cities aim at influencing the G20 gathering decisions when they touch upon issues that are relevant to them. An example of a geographically focused, regional network is. A notable example of thematic focused city network on climate change is the City Climate Leadership Group, C40. A network with now nearly 100 mayors members, C40 was created in 2005, by the initiative of the Mayor of London (then Ken Livingstone). The network’s main activity is the promotion of advocacy actions at the global level. For example, C40 partnered with other cities’ networks, including the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy and ICLEI Local Government for Sustainability, and launched the campaign “Cities Race to Zero”. Cities joining Race to Zero commit to publicly recognize the climate emergency and endorse policies toward counteracting it; plan and implement one or more of the climate mitigation

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actions that the network suggests; report annually on their progress (Cities Race to Zero, n.d.). Analyzing the global body of city networks, Acuto and Leffel show that it reflects some features of existing world economy hierarchies. The city membership of networks founded during 1885–1967 is chiefly in Europe, with peripheral membership in North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia; During 1979–1989 membership in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Latin America expands; during 1990–2001 and 2003–2016 the Euro-centric bias returns, although membership from cities in other areas also grows. This might be an effect, the authors argue, of the impact European Union-funded programs (such as the URBACT programs) have had in prompting more formalized city networking in Europe (Acuto & Leffel, 2021, at 1764). Another feature is that there are a few leading cities that have more visibility and influence than others inside the geography of city networks. This higher influence is shaped by their pre-existing position in the global capital markets (Acuto & Leffel, 2021, at 1767). Another factor is that cities with fiscal autonomy and a larger, wealthier tax base (among other things) have more resources to invest in joining city networks and promoting their innovative policies there (Acuto & Leffel, 2021, at 1767). Raffaele Marchetti notes that an increasing number of city governments and municipal bureaucracies are promoting international relations activities. They do it even though they don’t have any authority to speak or act on behalf of their Country’s diplomacy. He suggests that States should encourage this phenomenon and create offices and bureaus that can accommodate cities’ needs and integrate them into the national diplomatic strategy (Marchetti, 2021). The U.S. Department of State recently appointed Ambassador Nina Hachigian as Special Representative for City and State Diplomacy, within the Office for Global Partnership. The Special Representative and her team are in charge of bringing “the benefits of U.S. foreign policy, such as jobs, investments, innovative solutions, and international experiences, to the local and state level. It supports U.S. national security priorities by integrating local ideas into foreign policy and fostering connections among cities, municipalities, and communities in the United States and abroad” (The Special Representative for City and State Diplomacy, n.d.).

Urban Climate Experimentalism The literature on cities’ position in the legal framework on climate change almost overwhelmingly equals cities with local governments. However, cities are complex and thick environments and local governments are not the only institutional actor that composes them, nor are they the only actor that takes initiatives on climate change. In their analysis of 100 cities’ climate experimentations. Castán Broto and Bulkeley show that urban, multi-actor experimentations on climate are a recent and global (not necessarily confined to specific world regions or cities such as Europe or North America) trend (Castán Broto & Bulkeley, 2013, at 97). And they argue that, while the growth of urban climate public policies is undeniably a relevant phenomenon, the literature is overlooking a rich body of climate interventions that take the

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form of experimental projects. Climate experimentalism is flowering across cities, with projects carried out by a plethora of urban actors from NGOs to private economic actors. They argue that urban climate experimentalism is part of a broader phenomenon of climate governance experimentalism but is also linked to specific ways of restructuring urban authority and climate change responses as shaped by urban political economy (Bulkeley & Castán Broto, 2013, at 367). Based on the analysis of 100 climate change experiments (most of them focused on energy), they conclude that climate change experiments should be considered as a critical site through which cities govern. The lines between public and private authority are blurred when it comes to experiments, and most of them are multi-actor, but there is little doubt that they are a site of urban politics (Bulkeley & Castán Broto, 2013, at 373). On a more general level, the theory of experimentalism applied to climate change policies would suggest a system of iterative processes based on constant coordination, cooperation, and feedback between levels of government and firms. For Sabel and Viktor, an experimental regime of this kind (an example being the Montreal Protocol of 1987) promotes innovation and is more effective in problemsolving (Sabel & Victor, 2022, at 19). The relationship between cities, climate change, and experimentalism is still an understudied topic, and a lot of issues are still open to discussion. One of the issues connected with experimentalism is that it may take for granted that cities have a standard level of institutional capacity. Some authors noted a problem of institutional inertia at the local administration level, in the implementation of urban climate change plans. This is true even when the local government promoted a restructuring and when the city participates in a transnational network and engages in mutual learning (Simon et al., 2022, at 1012). For example, the problem of institutional inertia in the strategy of the city of Cape Town to prevent harm for residents derived from floodings (especially in informal settlements) was hampered by a lack of coordination between city offices. Several offices are working on the same problem at the same time, but they have different understandings of the problem, and they are averse to changing their tools. Funding cuts and staff constraints linked to the Covid19 pandemic worsened the problem (Simon et al., 2022, at 1009). Several of the research shown in this paragraph suggests that cities are engaging in two different forms of scaling: horizontal scaling (mobility and diffusion of climate policies between cities at the national, supranational, and global levels); and vertical scaling (when city policies are being adopted, or scaled-up, at the central level or supranational level of policy-making). And research shows that forms of scaling do empower cities in climate action. However, a major factor in the capacity of cities to promote climate action is the legal power that they have within an international, supranational, or domestic legal system on climate change. For example, Kern identified “embedded upscaling” as a new form of upscaling of urban policies in the EU multilevel system (Kern, 2019). She argues that it is the combination between networking and interaction with a multi-level system of government (that provides support to cities or in other ways regulates their action) the key factor or success of some urban climate policies (Kern, 2019). Sheila Foster and Chrystie Swiney (2021) argued that the commitments that cities sign when engaging in global

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networking, and the legal or quasi-legal tools they use to implement them is an emerging body of transnational law on climate by city networks. Not international nor domestic law: quasi-legally binding yet lacking enforcement mechanism. Experimental as it may be, this emerging cooperative localism entails that more powerful, cities may set standard practices for other, less powerful, ones to comply with, or emulate (Pappalardo & Foster, 2023, 386). A definition by Lin is urban climate law (Lin, 2018, at 20). Others have highlighted critically that the phenomena of scaling up best practices from higher levels of government bring into the conversation also issues related to the politics of city climate action when about other, broader contexts. What is (and what is not) being exported or scaled up are not purely technical choices but are the significance of deeper political issues (Pfotenhauer et al., 2022). In some cases, legal and policy frameworks may recognize a role for cities or experimentally engage with them. This seems to be the case for European Union policies promoting solutions for climate neutrality in cities through competitive grant funding, or capacity-building programs. This poses questions related to the balance (or compromise) between polycentric, multi-scale, and experimental processes without compromising intra-city equity and avoiding regulatory fragmentation.

City-led Climate Change Litigation. Cities Use Litigation as a Public Platform An emerging literature is devoted to understanding whether and why cities are using, or could potentially use, litigation to advance climate-related claims. Some scholars are more concerned with doctrinal analysis and others with theoretical analysis. The doctrinal analysis discusses the legal strategies that cities are choosing to pursue to promote climate litigation. Theoretical analysis is trying to understand what this wave of cases means, from two different perspectives: theories of cities’ autonomy as public powers, and theory of climate change-related legal mobilization. In the doctrinal analysis domain, the question to answer is mostly whether the legal strategy chosen by cities has a chance to be successful in Court. In the U.S., a group of coastal cities like New York (NY) or Baltimore (VA), and other cities that are enduring severe conditions due to climate change like Boulder (CO) are promoting somewhat aggressive climate litigation. They are standing alone or joining the action of others. When acting alone, they are promoting corporate accountability litigation, seeking monetary damages from fossil fuel companies for contributing to climate change. They are leveraging consumer protection law violations or state public nuisance (Lin & Burger, 2018). The other strategy is public litigation (Short, 2021). Cities are promoting legal action against their own States. They challenge the Cities’ failure to act or insufficient action, seeking symbolic damages (e.g., 1 euro) but requesting changes in the law for more decisive action. From a theoretical analysis perspective, legal and political science scholars alike are looking at city-led climate litigation with some interest. However, they look at it from different perspectives. Urban law scholars, and to some extent local

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government law scholars, argue that cities are using climate litigation to engage in a signaling function. Sarah Swan explains how they do it as a form of State building in the U.S. (Swan, 2019, at 1286), Elisabetta Tati how they do it to show independence within a complex multi-level system of governance of the European Union (Tati, 2020). Environmental law or climate change law scholars are instead interested in the climate activism perspective. The significance of promoting climate litigation for cities as actors within the legal system or the global policy-making arena is not a major point of concern. Whether they pursue the road of public litigation or corporate accountability, it is still a form of action against the actors that are damaging the environment. Their view seems neutral as to the motivations and implications of climate litigation for cities’ governments and public administrations’ position within the domestic or global climate change legal and policy landscape. Torre-Schaub, for example, includes city-led public litigation in Europe with a focus on the potential impact this might have in the overall effort to counteract the climate crises through legal change (Torre-Schaub, 2022).

Cities, Climate Change and Urban Equity and Justice The city as a site of climate justice is a crucial theme for a political philosophy of climate change. Debates on urban climate justice have normative implications. Social movements are advocating for mitigation and adaptation responses. Some governments are tackling the climate crises with aggressive climate and energy policies. However, both advocates and policymakers are concerned with the implications of the climate crises and the response policies from an equity and justice perspective. Grassroots organizations and public authorities are increasingly concerned with embedding environmental (Foster, 1998), climate (Kashwan, 2021; Wagle & Philip, 2022; Westman & Castán Broto, 2021; Williams et al., 2022), energy equity and justice (Kaswan, 2009) dimensions in urban laws and policies. This resonates with a broader discourse on urban justice (Oomen et al., 2016). Olufemi Taiwo advocates for a stronger focus on the local nature of some of the contemporary fights of the climate justice movement. Climate activism organizations counteracting gas pipelines or reclaiming support for the creation of community solar projects creating revenues and jobs are increasingly targeting neighborhoods. Climate justice fights are national, but also inherently local (Santoro & Taiwo, 2021). Climate and energy justice concerns emerged thanks to the struggle and mobilization of social movements and now permeate the policy debate and legal framework in more than one context. Environmental, climate, and energy equity and justice concerns are a cross-cutting conceptual lens and have diverse conceptual implications for cities. The environmental justice movement unveiled the disproportionate impact of environmental decisions based on Race and income. The localization of hazardous waste facilities that would harm Black and low-income populations was the main site of emergence. The scholarly literature highlights the experience of grassroots activism in communities such as El Pueblo in Kettleman

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City, Buttonwillow (California); Chester, Pennsylvania; the Indigenous Environmental Network (Cole & Foster, 2001). Air pollution is at the moment a very strong concern for both movements and the federal government, also in light of its association with the disproportionate impact of Covid-19 (Revesz, 2022). Climate justice advocates promote resistance against fossil fuel projects and engage in the hotly debated issue of how to prevent climate policies’ disproportionate impact on historically marginalized communities (Kaswan, 2022). On a normative level, political theory and philosophy scholars have opened up a dialogue on how to elaborate categories for a theory of urban climate, energy equity, and justice. At its core, urban climate justice entails that urban laws and policies, and urban governance arrangements must prioritize vulnerable individuals, low-income communities, communities of color, and vulnerable communities from the disproportionate impact of climate change, and from impacts of climate mitigation and adaptation policies. Legal scholars are concerned with how climate laws and policies recognize these claims and address them or have implications for them. One of the strongest concerns is procedural components. Public participation in policy decision-making is an important element of climate justice. Public participation promises that, if carefully designed, it has the potential to promote more responsive policies. Maria Lee and Chiara Armeni make an argument for a justification of a strong public participation rights framework, to prevent rejection associated with technocraticoriented climate decisions. While they underline that a procedural architecture is not able, by itself, to secure meaningful inclusive participation, it is an important starting point (Armeni & Lee, 2021). Framing of issues of uneven distribution of climate hazards and embedded protection of the most vulnerable among city residents (Totry-Jubran, 2018; Goh, 2020a, b; Wojciechowska, 2022) is a more substantive question and is still an open challenge. Climate justice advocates defend a distributive justice principle in the allocation of emission reduction where the benefits are maximized from a social justice perspective. For example, climate justice advocates might be supportive of targeting emission reduction in industries and sectors causing the most harmful pollution (Kaswan, 2023). This is different from a result-oriented approach where the only thing that matter is reaching the target. At the city level, this would look like targeting heavy polluters in certain areas of the city, instead of targeting all polluters in the city, for example, with obligations to promote energy efficiency in their buildings. Another core concern from a climate justice perspective is energy justice. While part of the broader climate justice discourse, energy justice (and energy democracy) are distinct concerns. Related, among other things, to energy poverty and security, energy justice is local in nature. Advocates of energy justice admonish the risk posed by climate policies, chiefly energy transition policies, to exacerbate existing inequities in the energy system and existing justice issues (McHarg, 2016). Alongside these concerns, they recognize that energy transition policies offer the chance to empower ordinary energy users through the opportunity of decentralized production of renewable energy (Savaresi, 2020). These forms of energy self-production are referred to in the literature as solar communities, energy communities, and off-grid energy systems. They are promoted via

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regulation in EU law (with the Clean Energy Package) and heavy subsidies and fiscal incentives in the U.S. (with the Inflation Reduction Act). The equity and justice concerns raised by scholars concerning these initiatives are related to equal access to technologies for vulnerable and low-income residents and communities, and the distribution of costs and benefits. On an empirical level, a set of concerns that is common for all three schools of thought (perhaps more accentuated for the skeptical) is whether equity and justice concerns are being addressed in urban climate policies, strategies, and laws. A common approach is a qualitative content methodology or discourse analysis. Researchers have been devoting serious efforts to understanding whether (and when) cities address equity and justice issues; how they frame and articulate them; what specific tools they foresee to tackle them. They do so by collecting a body of urban public policies such as climate mitigation and adaptation plans or regulations. Then, they analyze the policy documents, using a coding grid or codebook, that operationalizes through indicators the themes and categories that they identified. Hita Unnikrishnan and Harini Nagendra assessed urban climate plans for 13 cities in India. They found that critical concepts like gender, inclusivity, equity, justice, international relations, acknowledgment of indigenous people and local knowledge systems, and community-engaged strategies are largely missing from the policies (Unnikrishnan & Nagendra, 2021, at 581). On a more general level, the authors note that the plans embrace a centralized, command-and-control approach and prioritize a narrative based on technological solutions, economic efficiency, and development (Unnikrishnan & Nagendra, 2021, at 583). A comparative analysis of climate policy in Cape Town and Great Manchester reveals that, notwithstanding the commitment toward urban justice goals, poverty, and inequality appear to have been widened in both cases by climate crises such as the water crisis in Cape Town exposed by climate change in 2016–17 and by the Covid-19 pandemic (Simon et al., 2022, at 1012). In a survey of the 100 largest cities in the U.S., Diezmartínez and Short Gianotti (2022) notice that: mentions of equity and justice are growing in city policies (more than half the sample has approved one), especially in the last 5 years; rather than the language of climate justice, cities tend to prefer equity. This generally aligns with analyses of climate adaptation plans that found that discourses around the distribution of benefits and costs of climate action dominate over accounts of structural injustice. However, the authors also found in 26% of city policies there is a recognition of racial segregation, disinvestment, and environmental injustice (Diezmartínez & Short Gianotti, 2022, at 2). Moreover, those city policies that recognize historical and current injustices are focused on racial and income inequalities, and less concerned with vulnerabilities and injustices associated with gender, age, or disability. This is common in other areas, not unique to cities (Diezmartínez & Short Gianotti, 2022, at 4). In terms of the tools adopted by the plans to address equity and justice issues, the authors identify four types: justice partnerships, equity advisory boards, equity tools, and justice indicators (Diezmartínez & Short Gianotti, 2022, at 5). However, equity and justice issues are more often articulated in the form of aspirational goals and can be hampered by a lack of resources or allocation dilemmas (Castán Broto & Bulkeley, 2013).

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Research in Lagos (Nigeria) by Taibat Lawanson on vulnerability to urban floods for low-income and severely poor informal settlements indicates a form of urban climate justice deriving from the legacy of colonial and post-colonial administration. Among the Nigerian cities most negatively impacted by climate change, Lagos is a densely inhabited, low-lying coastal urban area (Olajide & Lawanson, 2014, at 45). Lagos is experiencing increased frequency and severity of floods. This results from increased sea level rise and increased intensity and volume of rainfalls. This overall climate vulnerability applies to the whole city. However, the disproportionate (human, physical, financial) vulnerability of low-income and poor inhabitants to the increased floods is rooted in the colonial and post-colonial administration of the City. Failure to tackle the overcrowding and inadequate access to infrastructures (with investments being disproportionately concentrated in the Government Reserved Areas of the city, against other areas including informal settlements that are all over the City). Currently, government responses to flooding are still isolated to wealthier parts of the city (i.e., Victoria Island) (Olajide & Lawanson, 2014, at 45–46). The City of New York (U.S.) convened under Mayor Bloomberg 2009 a “New York City Panel on Climate Change (NPCC)”. Composed by an interdisciplinary team of scholars, the NPCC produces reports advising the Mayor on climate adaptation plans against the cities’ climate hazards (extreme heat; Coastal Surge Flooding; Extreme Rainfall; Chronic Tidal Flooding; hurricanes; winter weather), based on scientific evidence, with a strong focus on equity. The panel creates vulnerability indexes, and hazard maps and suggests adaptation strategies and tools. For the latest report, the scholars worked also on city-led adaptation strategies. They found that social vulnerability to climate change is unequally distributed across the City; high levels are found in areas with lower incomes and higher shares of African-American and Hispanic residents. High levels of social vulnerability to climate change overlap with disproportionate exposure to environmental pollution, health stressors, and gentrification pressures. Local communities are involved in many forms of adaptation planning led by the City, but Community-based organizations express a desire for deeper engagement with the city via the use of fully collaborative, co-production planning approaches (Foster et al., 2019). Urban climate equity and justice are linked with different types of vulnerabilities and there is likely to be no one-size-fits-all solution for cities. In conclusion, the issue of urban climate justice questions whether cities should tackle climate-justice issues by themselves and what counterarguments are there, and what room of maneuver they have (or are carving out) within existing frameworks.

Conclusions This chapter summarized scholarly writing on the role of cities in climate change mitigation and adaptation policies. Albeit interdiscilinary in scope, it focused on perspectives from political theory, urban politics and policy, law (environmental, international, public law). This is admittedly a simplified and – for space reasons –

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incomplete account of a very complex state of affairs and a rich scholarly debate. The literature referenced to in this chapter is by no means exhaustive. A certain amount of the work presented in the chapter is driven by scholarship from the U.S. and Europe. The implications of cities’ proactive role in promoting laws and policies on mitigation and adaptation are rich in tensions and nuances, that must be tackled seriously and deserve further space than the one provided in this venue. Some scholars are more descriptive, and others suggest desirable improvements to the current situation, but this largely depends on contextual considerations.

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Normative Challenges in Climate Change Economics Kiran Chawla

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Choice of Welfare Function for Climate Policy Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Challenge of Distinguishing Positive and Normative Assumptions in Economic Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Measurement, Boundaries, and Scope of Analyses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

This chapter provides a brief overview of some of the key normative challenges in climate change economics with a focus on the social cost of carbon. Welfare functions and its parameter values have a profound effect on the estimates for net costs of climate change on the economy (the social cost of carbon, or SCC), and therefore the net benefits of climate policy. But a large number of assumptions underpinning both the choice of the welfare function to use and the parameter values to calibrate these functions are based on value judgments that are not always clarified or made transparent. Relatedly, the subjective choice of what is included within the boundaries of benefit-cost analysis and whether co-benefits such as improved health are adequately captured can also have a substantial impact on policy recommendations. Moreover, nonmarket damages represent some of the largest expected damages from climate change, but these are often inadequately captured in climate policy models, skewing conclusions about the net costs of climate change to society. Despite these challenges, benefit-cost K. Chawla (*) Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources, Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, Stanford, CA, USA Stanford Law School, Stanford, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_17

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analysis of different climate policy options, in particular through the use of the SCC, may provide valuable guidance for economic decision-making. But the normative content driving some of the guidance should be made more explicit and, where applicable, should incorporate input from other disciplines and the general public. Keywords

Social cost of carbon · Discounting · Equity weighting · Catastrophic risk · Integrated assessment models · Nonmarket damages · Sustainability

Introduction Climate change is a thorny economic as well as philosophical problem. Bill Nordhaus, a climate economist, calls climate change “the ultimate challenge for economics,” while Stephen Gardiner, a moral philosopher, has termed it “the perfect moral storm” (Gardiner, 2006; Nordhaus, 2019). Although there is widespread conceptual agreement in the economics literature on climate change being a global public goods challenge (Public goods in economics are defined as goods that are non-rival, i.e., an individual’s consumption of it does not diminish others’ ability to consume it, and non-excludable, i.e., it is not possible to prevent other individuals from consuming it. Clean air, defense, and education are examples of public goods.) there is considerable disagreement between economists and philosophers, and even among economists, about what exactly should be done about it (W. D. Nordhaus, 2007; Stern, 2008, 2016; Weitzman, 2007). This chapter provides an overview of the key normative challenges associated with using economic tools and reasoning for tackling climate change. Climate change economics focuses on quantifying the benefits and costs associated with climate policy. To estimate climate policy benefits, economists use the social cost of carbon (“SCC”). The SCC is the monetized value of damages imposed by a marginal ton of carbon on society. In precise economic terms, it is the change caused by an additional ton of carbon emission in the discounted value of the utility of consumption evaluated for the present period. The SCC is estimated using a class of models called benefit-cost integrated assessment models (IAMs) (Weyant, 2017). These models combine simplified climate system representations with the global economy to calculate the economic effects of an incremental ton of carbon emissions by projecting the effect of temperature changes on physical systems and calculating the resulting economic damages. Because these damages occur over multiple centuries, they have to be converted to present dollar terms through a welfare module that formalizes discounting assumptions. Most of the normative challenges in the estimation of the SCC pertain to the welfare module. These include the choice of the welfare function used in IAMs, as well as the parameter values and estimation techniques for relevant parameter values. However, other parts of IAMs, and the use of benefit-cost analysis for climate

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policy more generally, can raise philosophical questions as well. Chief among these are the scope of damages included for consideration in benefit-cost analyses and their definition and measurement. Despite the numerous positive and normative challenges associated with the use of IAMs in benefit-cost analysis of climate policy, the SCC is widely used to inform climate change decision-making. Therefore, a deeper understanding of the issues raised by the SCC can help understand when the SCC is an appropriate tool for policy analysis and when alternative approaches are better suited. The rest of the chapter is organized as follows: section “Choice of Welfare Function for Climate Policy Analysis” focuses on the importance of the welfare functions used in IAMs. It discusses the treatment of economic inequalities and catastrophic risks from climate change in IAMs, as well as theoretical attempts to develop welfare functions that include both risk and inequality preferences. Section “The Challenge of Distinguishing Positive and Normative Assumptions in Economic Models” touches on the debates about the choice of parameter values for welfare functions and whether this is best framed as a positive or normative issue. Section “Measurement, Boundaries, and Scope of Analyses” discusses the influence that the boundaries of analyses chosen for the estimation of SCC, and benefit-cost analysis of climate policy more generally, have on policy recommendations. It covers the issues of co-benefits and their role in policy analysis, the treatment of nonmarket goods and services, and inclusive versus narrow measures of sustainability. Section “Summary” considers alternative policy analysis approaches suggested in the literature and contrasts them with the estimation of the SCC, summarizes and concludes.

Choice of Welfare Function for Climate Policy Analysis If climate change is viewed as a global public goods problem with a negative GHG emissions externality, a practical solution to the problem is to impose a Pigouvian tax to internalize the harms from carbon emissions. Public goods in economics are defined as goods that are non-rival, i.e., an individual’s consumption of it does not diminish others’ ability to consume it, and non-excludable, i.e., it is not possible to prevent other individuals from consuming it. Clean air, defense, and education are examples of public goods. Pigouvian taxes are levied to correct the effects of negative externalities, such as GHG emissions, because producers and consumers do not account for these externalities in their market decisions in the absence of such taxes. The level of the Pigouvian tax, in part, depends on the scope of welfarerelevant criteria included in policy models. The choice of welfare functions delimiting the scope of welfare-relevant criteria arguably has the largest impact on the estimate of the SCC through the discount rate. When including welfare criteria other than efficiency, economists typically try to establish that climate policy is a better tool for implementing non-efficiency goals than other instruments. For example, to include equity considerations in the welfare function, the implied belief is that redistribution through other means is either costlier or impossible due to political and/or institutional concerns.

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The standard welfare model used in the literature for welfare analysis of climate policy is a utilitarian social welfare model of the discounted utility form with constant relative risk aversion (CRRA), or constant relative aversion to inequality (CRAI) preferences (Nordhaus, 2011). The standard welfare function in IAMs optimizes for welfare W and can be expressed as: W¼

T t¼0

U ðct Þð1 þ ρÞt

where ct is the consumption at time t, the total number of periods is T, and ρ is the pure rate of time preference, which determines how much future utility should be discounted. Note that in multi-region numerical integrated assessment models (IAMs) that are used to estimate the optimal carbon prices, the regional utility calculation is population weighted, and the per-capita utility is assumed to be the same within each region. The CRRA utility function U(c) can be expressed as: U ðc Þ ¼

c1η  1 1η

As can be seen from this formulation, η is the only parameter that translates consumption to utility and therefore represents the full scope of welfare- relevant preferences. For IAMs that focus on risk analyses, η is called the risk aversion parameter, whereas for IAMs that focus more on distributional analyses and account for equity preferences, η is called the inequality aversion parameter (which can be intergenerational inequality aversion, inter-regional inequality aversion, or intraregional inequality aversion). Equity preferences are operationalized using the “inequality aversion” parameter. The higher the value of inequality aversion, the greater the willingness to sacrifice efficiency to achieve more equitable outcomes. Note that η also represents the intertemporal elasticity of substitution (also referred to as “aversion to intertemporal fluctuation” in the literature) regardless of whether risk and equity preferences are explicitly modeled.

Welfare Functions with Equity Equity has been a key focus of international climate negotiations. Given the long lag between emissions and climate damages, vast economic inequalities both within and across countries, differential historic contributions of countries to emissions, and the potential of climate change damages to increase global economic inequalities by disproportionately impacting the poor (Diffenbaugh & Burke, 2019; Mendelsohn et al., 2006), equity is arguably just as important as efficiency in the context of climate change policy analysis. A large number of IAMs do not model economic inequalities at all by only using a representative agent for the whole world, as is the case with DICE (Nordhaus, 1992) and the large literature that relies on DICE to draw policy insights. When more regionally disaggregated IAMs such as RICE (Nordhaus, 2011) are used, the

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practice is to take existing and unequal economic distributions as a given and attempt to normalize damages between regions to prevent climate policy being used as a tool for redistribution. The latter approach has been criticized for ignoring the importance of economic inequalities and the role of equity considerations in determining optimal climate policy (Dennig, 2018; Stanton, 2011). Climate economics literature that includes equity within the scope of welfarerelevant criteria emphasizes how climate change is a predominantly distributional issue (Mollica & Campbell, 2009; Schelling, 1995). With an equity lens, climate change is a problem of intragenerational and intergenerational equity, and distributional preferences are crucial in understanding welfare implications of climate policy. To operationalize equity in IAMs, this literature uses the “inequality aversion” parameter to treat the same amount of monetary damage to the rich and poor differentially in welfare terms (Anthoff & Emmerling, 2018). This is also referred to as equity weighting. Essentially, climate damages are assumed to lead to higher (lower) welfare losses from a societal perspective when incurred by people with lower (higher) income. Some have argued that instead of equity weighting of monetary damages, climate models should use equity weighting for well-being, to be consistent with prioritarianism (Adler et al., 2017; Adler & Treich, 2015). When used in IAMs, equity weighting is applied through time (intergenerational inequality) and space (inter-regional inequality). Most of the literature treats the two equivalently. When preferences over inter-regional inequality are separated from intergenerational inequality preferences and different parameter values for the two are used based on empirical calibrations, the estimate for the SCC increases by a factor of 2–3 (Anthoff & Emmerling, 2018). IAMs that go beyond representation of inter-regional and intergenerational inequalities, and represent intra-regional inequality through data on quintiles within countries, also estimate higher SCC values (Dennig et al., 2015). In general, these IAMs with a representation of economic inequalities that use equity weighting through the use of a nonzero value for the inequality aversion parameter demonstrate that ignoring intergenerational, inter-regional, and intra-regional equity considerations underestimates optimal climate policy stringency and incorrectly suggests a delay in climate action (Anthoff & Emmerling, 2018; Budolfson et al., 2017; Dennig et al., 2015). In fact, representing economic inequalities at a more granular level in global IAMs and using empirically calibrated distributional equity preferences in the welfare formulation is as important for climate policy analysis as the NordhausStern philosophical debates on the pure rate of time preference parameter ρ, discussed in section “The Challenge of Distinguishing Positive and Normative Assumptions in Economic Models”. This is especially true when climate damages disproportionately affect the poor (Budolfson et al., 2017; Dennig et al., 2015). On the other hand, not representing economic inequalities at a given point in time, while representing inequalities between the present and the future due to assumed economic growth, creates an asymmetry: Models argue for discounting because of the richer future generation’s ability to pay more, but do not apply this logic within generations to show that a progressive incidence of climate policy costs can be welfare increasing.

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Welfare Functions with Refined Treatment of Risk Climate change mitigation policy can be viewed as a tool for catastrophic risk mitigation for adverse climate outcomes (Weitzman, 2009, 2011). Viewed through this lens, mitigation policy ought to reflect societal risk preferences and include the benefits of mitigating worst-case climate outcomes. Given both the uncertainties in the climate system and its response to higher level of greenhouse gas emissions, as well as the range of possible societal responses to a warming world, preferences for risk mitigation are important for climate policy analysis (Pindyck, 2013). Some researchers have suggested that due to the possibility of catastrophic climate outcomes, IAMs, with their limited ability to model such risks, are “close to useless” as tools for policy analysis (Pindyck, 2013), while others have more generally emphasized the limitations of expected utility frameworks to provide meaningful guidance for the climate context (Weitzman, 2011). Multiple authors have brought in insights from asset pricing into climate-economy models and tried to better incorporate the implications of catastrophic risk for climate policy, especially when trying to account for tipping points in the climate system (Cai et al., 2015). A large focus of this literature is separating risk aversion through time and risk aversion across states of nature using Epstein-Zin preferences (Ackerman et al., 2013; Cai & Lontzek, 2018; Daniel et al., 2019). The modeled results in these papers highlight how the SCC is higher when there is a possibility of catastrophic losses or tipping points that should be avoided given collective risk preferences and when the welfare function allows for the incorporation of such preferences. Using Epstein-Zin preferences to appropriately incorporate risk aversion can also result in the SCC declining through time as uncertainty associated with climate change and climate policy responses resolves (Daniel et al., 2019). The most sophisticated IAMs incorporate stochasticity in the evolution of climate and economic processes, which implicates decision-making under uncertainty with rational expectations instead of limiting the risk analysis to deterministic parametric uncertainty, where only parameter values are assumed to be uncertain. These studies show that incorporating climate and economic uncertainty results in estimates for the SCC that are substantially different (mostly higher) from those produced by incorporating uncertainty along a single dimension, with a higher level of risk aversion increasing the SCC estimate (Cai & Lontzek, 2018). However, these IAMs are computationally intensive and require supercomputers to solve, which may limit researchers’ widespread use of such models. Incorporating Both Risk and Equity Preferences in the Welfare Function IAMs with welfare formulations that allow for the incorporation of equity or risk preferences show that the SCC with these welfare functions is higher. However, IAMs have not incorporated risk and equity preferences simultaneously to test the impact of such a welfare formulation on the level of the SCC. Some authors argue that risk and equity preferences are not really distinct. For example, within a luck egalitarianism framework (Cohen, 1989; Dworkin, 1981a, b), one of the main contemporary theories for distributive justice (Anderson, 1999; Swift, 2008), risk and distributional preferences are arguably not distinct. For

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instance, if people conceptualized distributional preferences using a “veil of ignorance” exercise in the original position (Freeman, 2019; Rawls, 2009), not knowing their position in the societal income or wealth distribution, their motive to care about the distribution of outcomes would indeed be an insurance motive, consistent with their risk preferences. There are also axiomatic justifications for treating risk and equity preferences as equivalent: A social welfare function respecting certain rationality axioms and the Pareto principle must be affine in individual utilities (Harsanyi, 1955). However, there are theoretical and empirical reasons to believe that risk and equity preferences may be related but distinct. Theoretically, there are arguments for egalitarianism that do not use the insurance frame and are consistent with preferences over distributional outcomes, even though they do not affect an individual’s position in the distribution. For instance, social or relational/democratic egalitarianism theories of distributive justice argue against self-interested insurance framing (Anderson, 1999). Empirically, parameter value estimates for risk and equity preferences suggest that individuals may think about them differently (Groom & Maddison, 2019; Sælen et al., 2009) and that individuals’ risk, inequality, and intertemporal substation preferences, which are represented with a single parameter in the standard model used for climate policy analysis, are not perfectly correlated (Sælen et al., 2009). There is also experimental evidence suggesting that individuals violate axioms underlying Harsanyi theorem to achieve ex ante egalitarianism goals, or they have non-consequentialist ethical beliefs (or both) (Andreoni et al., 2020). Therefore, social welfare functions with distinct parametrization of risk and equity preferences may be better grounded in empirical data than existing welfare formulations used for climate policy analysis. If climate policy has both equity-enhancing and risk-mitigating benefits and if preference parameters for risk and equity are meaningfully different, models that do not account for these distinctions will fail to provide the right policy recommendations. Welfare functions for future use in IAMs that incorporate both risk and equity preferences can be classified into two categories: ex ante egalitarianism and ex post egalitarianism welfare models. These functions differ in their answer to the question: “inequality aversion over what?” Ex ante egalitarianism models apply inequality aversion over the expected distribution of climate damages, whereas ex post egalitarianism models apply inequality aversion over realized consumption inequalities in each possible state of the world. These alternative welfare models can be adapted for the climate context and inform climate policy analysis. As an illustration, consider an example frequently used in the literature with payoffs in utility units:

Ann Bob

Prospect 1 Heads 0 1

Tails 1 0

Prospect 2 Heads 0 0

Tails 1 1

Prospect 3 Heads 0 1

Tails 0 1

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With no inequality aversion, prospects 1, 2, and 3 are equivalent. With ex ante inequality aversion, prospects 1 and 2 are equivalent but better than prospect 3 because prospect 3 does not provide Ann and Bob with “equal opportunity” to earn the higher or lower payoffs, i.e., there is inequality in expected payoffs ex ante. The ex post model is indifferent between prospects 1 and 3 but prefers prospect 2 because in each state (heads or tails), there is perfect equality ex post. The formal models are explained in the following sections. Ex Ante Egalitarianism Certain philosophical arguments suggest that any ex post distribution of outcomes is just as long as it comes about through just means. For instance, see Nozick (2013): “the entitlement theory of justice in distribution is historical; whether a distribution is just depends upon how it came about.” Formalizing this view requires one to define an “ex ante” point in time, but as long as there is ex ante equality and “just” transitions from ex ante to ex post states, ex post outcomes are irrelevant. In contrast to the standard CRRA preferences-based welfare function, ex ante egalitarianismbased welfare functions allow for separation of risk and ex ante inequality preferences (Diamond, 1967). The welfare function expresses aggregate welfare as a concave function of individual expected utilities. Formally, this can be expressed as: W¼

I i¼1

gðEui Þ

Here, ui ¼ U(ci) can be assumed to be of CRRA form, consistent with the existing literature. Eui is the expected utility for country i across the possible post-climate damages states of the world. Function g() can be assumed to of CRRA form and used to aggregate the expected utility of different countries. As a concrete example for two countries (India and the USA) and two states of the world (low climate damages versus high climate damages futures): W¼

ðE½uIndia Þ1ηexanteineq ðE½uUS Þ1ηexanteineq þ 1  ηexanteineq 1  ηexanteineq

where for country i, utility in a given state s (low or high) can be expressed as: ui,s ¼

ci,s 1ηrisk ð1  ηrisk Þ

Therefore, ηrisk captures risk preferences, while ηexanteineq captures ex ante inequality aversion. Ex Post Egalitarianism The ex post egalitarianism welfare function also allows for separation of risk and ex ante inequality preferences. However, instead of applying inequality aversion to

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expected utilities, this model applies inequality aversion to realized utilities in each state and then calculates expected state welfare. (See Fleurbaey, 2010 for a more detailed overview.) Formally, this can be expressed as: W ¼ Ews where assuming CRRA functional form, realized state welfare for country i in state s is: ws ¼

I i¼1

1η

ui expostineq 1  ηexpostineq

Similar to the standard model, utility for each country is assumed to be of CRRA form: u¼

c1ηrisk ð1  ηrisk Þ

Therefore, ηrisk captures risk preferences, while ηexpostineq captures ex post inequality aversion. Existing welfare models that incorporate both preferences for risk and inequality face different axiomatic tradeoffs (Trautmann, 2009). Ex ante egalitarianism models violate time consistency and dominance. Time-inconsistency can be addressed by taking into account full histories and applying preferences “resolutely” (Trautmann and Wakker (2010); Andreoni et al. (2020)). But violation of dominance implies that ex ante egalitarianism can suggest a lottery is ex ante (weakly) preferred to a particular outcome even though every realization of the lottery is worse than that outcome. Ex post models violate Pareto axioms. In this context, violation of Pareto implies that each individual could prefer a particular outcome A over another outcome B but the social welfare function ranks B to be better than A. This arises due to ex post models not respecting individual risk preferences (they imply a greater level of risk aversion than individual-level risk aversion). Consider the rationale provided using a climate change-relevant example in Fleurbaey (2010) when pointing out the “dominance” issue associated with ex ante egalitarianism models: “Consider a situation in which an impending climate change will alter the distribution of well-being on Earth. Suppose that only two scenarios are considered possible. In one scenario, the extreme latitudes gain, and the low latitudes suffer, whereas the reverse occurs in the other scenario. Suppose that in either scenario the distribution of well-being is ultimately much worse than in the absence of climate change. Therefore, one is sure that such climate change is harmful. However, if individual expected utilities are not diminished ex-ante, because everyone may gain or lose depending on which scenario is realised, ex-ante egalitarianism considers that climate change is harmless. This is strange since the same criterion considers that the change will ultimately be catastrophic.”

On the other hand, ex post egalitarianism-based welfare functions may not respect risk preferences, even when there is no inequality in any of the relevant states

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(Fleurbaey, 2010). Although there may be philosophical as well as theoretical justifications for using one model class over another, this is a normative matter rather than a positive one. The choice of welfare function has a substantial influence on estimated climate policy, but recommendations from the models are often presented as purely positive empirical estimates. Similarly, the values for preference parameters for the welfare functions may also build in value-laden normative assumptions. This issue is discussed in the next section.

The Challenge of Distinguishing Positive and Normative Assumptions in Economic Models Regardless of the scope of concerns included in the welfare function, estimating the values for the welfare function parameters is normatively fraught. One of the most prominent debates within climate change economics pertains to the parameter value for the “pure rate of time preference,” which determines how future utility should be discounted, but estimating risk aversion and inequality aversion is no less value laden.

Pure Rate of Time Preference As discussed in section “Choice of Welfare Function for Climate Policy Analysis”, the standard welfare function used in IAMs can be expressed as: W¼

T t¼0

U ðct Þð1 þ ρÞt

where ct is the consumption at time t, the total number of periods is T, and ρ is the pure rate of time preference, which determines how much future utility should be discounted. A difference in the assumed values for the parameter ρ translates to substantially different climate policy recommendations. Stern argues that the value for this parameter is a normative choice and sets it to near-zero because using a pure rate of time preference violates anonymity principle for generations and leads to “discrimination by date of birth” against future generations (Stern, 2016). On the other hand, Nordhaus claims that a positive value for the pure rate of time preference is justified because it rationalizes actual empirical data on observed discount rates based on aggregate market behavior (Nordhaus, 2007). Even if this is framed as a positive or descriptive approach, ignoring the intergenerational discriminatory implications of this choice, and estimating an optimal carbon price trajectory to determine what society should do based on descriptive data on what the market currently does, is an inherently normative choice. Partially reconciling the positive and normative positions, some economists have attempted to provide a positive justification for declining discount rates (Arrow et al., 2014; Gollier & Weitzman, 2010). But even if looking at observed market behavior to derive the pure rate of time preference were normatively justified, a number of issues complicate the choice. This exercise

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assumes that market data accurately reflects the global population’s time preferences and that these should guide policy evaluation at an aggregate level, including for intergenerational issues such as climate change. Informal markets, context-specific differences between time preferences for climate change policy and financial market behavior, as well as the existence of market imperfections that create a wedge between true population preferences and observed market data would suggest that using such positive data may be challenging, even for a purely descriptive analysis. It is hard to term the value choice for the pure rate of time preference a purely descriptive or positive matter.

Risk Aversion, Inequality Aversion, and Intertemporal Elasticity of Substitution As discussed in section “Choice of Welfare Function for Climate Policy Analysis”, the CRRA utility function U(c) underpinning welfare analyses in IAMs can be expressed as: U ðc Þ ¼

c1η  1 1η

where c represents consumption and, depending on the IAM, η represents risk aversion, inequality aversion, and/or the intertemporal elasticity of substitution. Empirically, η is estimated from consumption smoothing and savings behavior, the progressivity of tax codes in a subset of countries, development assistance given by OECD countries to developing countries, or financial market data on risk premia (Cai & Lontzek, 2018; Groom & Maddison, 2019). Most models use an infinitely lived representative household, which results in intertemporal substitution preferences and intergenerational inequality aversion preferences coinciding. Given the intergenerational nature of climate change decisions, savings behavior still does not accurately capture preferences for intergenerational equity but is useful in separating time preferences from regional distributional preferences. Papers that separate inequality aversion between regions from inequality aversion within regions note that the former tends to be lower than the latter (Anthoff & Emmerling, 2018; Tol, 2010). Again, this raises the ethical question of whether the observed behavior of OECD countries on financial aid and tax code progressivity differences justifies treating citizens in developed and developing countries differently in global IAMs, based on the preference parameter estimates derived from data on choices of developed countries, and weakens the claim that this is a purely positive matter. Similarly, the choice to apply risk preferences expressed in financial markets to the context of catastrophic climate outcomes where the existence of entire nations might be at stake is normative, even if calibrated to descriptive data.

Value of Statistical Life in IAMs The “value of statistical life” (VSL) estimates willingness to pay for small reductions in mortality risks. IAMs rely on estimates for VSL to calculate mortality- and morbidity-related damages from climate change. In addition to the debates about

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the pure rate of time preference, in IAMs with multiple regions, the use of differentiated and region-specific “value of statistical life” (VSL) that assigns a lower monetary value to lives in the developing world relative to the developed world is normatively fraught, even though some of these may be justified on empirical grounds. As an illustration of how per-capita income in different countries might raise ethical issues with VSL estimates, a recent analysis estimates average VSLs in lower-income countries to be $107,000, while the VSL for upper-income countries is estimated to be $6.4 million (Viscusi & Masterman, 2017). Such differences are especially concerning in the climate context because mortality and morbidity impacts rely on VSL estimates to calculate economic damages that feed into the estimation of the SCC, and mortality impacts significantly impact the SCC (Bressler, 2021). By linking VSL to per-capita incomes, the SCC builds in a lower valuation for climate change-related damages in the developing world, instead of valuing mortality and health-related damages uniformly across the globe. Although some parameter values are necessary to use in IAMs because economic decisions, whether in the climate change context or otherwise, inherently involve tradeoffs, the normative content of these assumptions is not always made transparent. Tradeoffs involving intergenerational or inter-regional well-being, and values for parameters estimating the dollar damages from lost lives, or societal willingness to pay to avoid catastrophic climate outcomes are hard to classify as purely descriptive and/or positive. Some authors go as far as to suggest that some of these flaws embedded in IAMs make them impractical for use in policy making and propose alternative decision frameworks (Pindyck, 2013). However, these issues could also be partially addressed by clarifying the normative content of these value-laden assumptions and contextualizing the SCC estimates to understand the directionality of potential biases.

Measurement, Boundaries, and Scope of Analyses The choice of boundaries that delimit which benefits and costs are included and which ones are considered outside the scope of analysis for climate policy can have a profound effect on estimates for net benefits associated with climate policy. Some of the factors that can substantially affect conclusions on net costs or benefits of climate policy include the consideration of health co-benefits, the focus on stock versus flow measures for sustainability, and the level of detail represented for climate policy instruments as well as their potential interactions with other economic policies. These are discussed in turn below.

Co-benefits in the Benefit-Cost Analysis of Climate Policy Co-benefits, particularly health benefits, and their treatment in economic models raise a number of ethical challenges and have a significant impact on results (Scovronick et al., 2020). A large swathe of policies implicate climate change and traditional air pollution. The health benefits from reduced air pollution effected by policy which has climate change mitigation as its primary rationale can be

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substantial. For instance, China’s policy of free winter heating via the provision of coal for boilers in certain parts of the country has been estimated to cause a 5.5 y decrease in life expectancy due to increased incidence of cardiovascular mortality (Chen et al., 2013). If the analysis of climate benefits is expanded to include health pollution reducing benefits of climate policy, more stringent policy is economically optimal. For instance, a study based on the RICE model shows that including health benefits incidental to climate policy could result in trillions of dollar’s worth of annual benefits from global health improvements, suggesting that a higher stringency for climate change mitigation policy may be optimal when these health benefits are systematically included (Scovronick et al., 2019). However, attributing these benefits to climate policy implies belief in a counterfactual where air pollution considerations are not directly addressed through distinct instruments or are costlier to address through other means.

Stock Versus Flow Measures IAMs focus on the measurement of per-capita GDP, which is a measure of flow, for analyzing the economic impacts of climate change. However, the economic definition of sustainability is linked to the evolution of comprehensive wealth, which is a stock measure (Arrow et al., 2012; Mollica & Campbell, 2009). Therefore, an assumption of increasing consumption is tied to increases in overall welfare; however, the models do not track comprehensive measures of wealth to assess if the growth in consumption is sustainable. This is related to the issue of how health benefits are treated in IAMs because health capital can be a huge driver of per-capita estimates of comprehensive wealth, and the growth rate of health capital and comprehensive health are closely linked (Arrow et al., 2012). Similarly, the extent to which natural capital is included can influence assessments of sustainability, but SCC estimates only imperfectly account for various categories of nonmarket benefits (Burke et al., 2016; Sterner & Persson, 2008), or hard-to-quantify effects such as human conflict (Hsiang et al., 2013) and biodiversity loss that may have large effects on national capital accounts and how climate change affects long-term sustainability. There are also numerous methodological challenges with estimating certain aspects of nonmarket valuation, such as “existence” or “non-use value,” which can be significant when accounted for (Carson, 2012; Hausman, 2012). Representation of Policy Detail The level of detail with which policy instruments and their interactions with other preexisting policies are modeled can influence the conclusions about climate policy’s net benefits or costs. Two examples include whether models account for general equilibrium effects of climate policy and whether models present information on how revenues from a potential carbon pricing scheme are redistributed. General equilibrium economic models analyze climate policy in the context of the entire economy. Therefore, they can incorporate interactions between any new climate policy and existing policies and include responses from different sectors to climate policy. On the other hand, partial equilibrium models provide a more detailed

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treatment of specific climate policies but may miss macro responses to these policies. For example, there is a large literature examining if there is a “double dividend” associated with environmental taxes. Under partial equilibrium analysis, to maximize efficiency, the level of carbon tax should be set at the cost imposed by climate change on the economy. Such a Pigouvian tax internalizes the externality costs and restores the economy to an efficient path. The double dividend hypothesis expands the scope of the analysis to include the incentive effects of higher carbon taxation as well as broader effects of preexisting taxes and their interaction with the carbon tax. If environmental taxes impose a net cost on the economy when existing distortionary taxes are accounted for, to maximize overall economic efficiency, their level should be set lower than the Pigouvian tax level in a first-best setting. This is different from the conclusion based on a partial equilibrium analysis. On the other hand, if there is in fact a double dividend, environmental taxes will result in net economic benefits, and again, a partial equilibrium analysis will fail to account for these benefits. A large literature suggests that in general equilibrium, there is a narrow set of conditions for which the double dividend hypothesis holds, and environmental taxes are more likely to impose a net cost on the economy due to their interaction with the fiscal system (Goulder & Hafstead, 2017). This result suggests that the optimal level of environmental tax, when accounting for these general equilibrium effects, should be lower than the Pigouvian level, which is the marginal social damages due to the environmental externality – what SCC estimates represent. Even for models that show a double dividend from environmental taxes, the effect is limited to a limited range of emissions reductions and is expected to disappear for reducing emissions to net zero. For example, environmental tax reform can produce a double dividend if fixed factors in the production of the polluting good generate Ricardian rents in the economy; these environmental tax swaps can provide a double dividend up to as high as 11% emissions reductions (Bento & Jacobsen, 2007). A double dividend is also more likely if informal markets dominate the economy, existing taxation is inefficient, and there are complementarities between environmental quality and market output (Goulder & Hafstead, 2017). On the other hand, a lack of policy detail representation can also overstate economic costs by not accounting for the distribution of potential revenues from carbon pricing. In detailed national analyses and IAMs-based global analyses, revenue recycling of carbon tax revenues can help make climate policy progressive and increase welfare (Budolfson et al., 2021; Goulder et al., 2019). Not appropriately including and accounting for these progressive recycling schemes can present a false tradeoff between climate action and poverty alleviation.

Summary Given the significant challenges, both technical and normative, associated with the estimation of the SCC, and with the use of benefit-cost analysis for climate change more generally, there are many potential improvements that can make SCC estimates more useful as a policy tool (Burke et al., 2016; Revesz et al., 2014; Stern, 2016;

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Wagner et al., 2021). Although some have called for the use of alternative frameworks to inform decision-making for climate change (Kaufman et al., 2020; Pindyck, 2013), recent and ongoing work on the SCC continues to address some of the critiques in the literature (Rennert et al., 2022). The SCC may be especially useful in contexts where it is already embedded in existing institutional practice. For example, the SCC has informed regulations in the USA that have more than $1 trillion of benefits (Nordhaus, 2017). And although broader alternative frameworks can provide a long-term guiding strategy, a more detailed benefit-cost analysis will still be required to understand the tradeoffs between specific policy pathways adopted to implement that strategy. To address ethical concerns, the normative content driving the SCC, and policy recommendations based on benefit-cost analysis more generally, should be made explicit. Recommendations grounded in specific ethical assumptions should not be presented as purely descriptive analyses. Where applicable, value-based judgments should be open to public scrutiny and informed by input from other disciplines and the general public to improve the credibility of the policy analyses.

Cross-References ▶ Abrupt Climate Changes and Tipping Points ▶ Climate Change and Distributive Justice ▶ Climate Change and Environmental Justice ▶ Climate Change and Intergenerational Justice

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Climate Change and Decision Theory Andrea S. Asker and H. Orri Stefa´nsson

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Climate Change and Decision Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Prisoner’s Dilemma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Expected Utility Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . How You Could Make a Large Difference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . How You Probably (Also) Make an Imperceptible Difference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . But Can Decision Theory Handle Extreme Uncertainty? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

Many people are worried about the harmful effects of climate change but nevertheless enjoy some activities that contribute to the emission of greenhouse gas (driving, flying, eating meat, etc.), the main cause of climate change. How should such people make choices between engaging in and refraining from enjoyable greenhouse-gas-emitting activities? In this chapter, we look at the answer provided by decision theory. Some scholars think that the right answer is given by interactive decision theory, or game theory; and moreover think that since private climate decisions are instances of the prisoner’s dilemma, one rationally should engage in these activities provided that one enjoys them. Others think that the A. S. Asker Department of Philosophy, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden Institute for Futures Studies, Stockholm, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] H. O. Stefánsson (*) Department of Philosophy, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Uppsala, Sweden Institute for Futures Studies, Stockholm, Sweden © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_29

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right answer is given by expected utility theory, the best-known version of individual decision theory under risk and uncertainty. In this chapter, we review these different answers, with a special focus on the latter answer and the debate it has generated. Keywords

Catastrophic risk · Climate change · Climate thresholds · Decision theory · Expected utility · Expected harm · Extreme uncertainty · Imperceptible harm · Risk

Introduction As a reader of this handbook, you are likely to be worried about climate change and would presumably be willing to accept some cost to lessen the harm of climate change. But, like most other people, you are also likely to enjoy some activity that is associated with greenhouse gas emission, the main cause of anthropogenic climate change. If so, then this chapter might help you make rational decisions about whether to engage in such activities. It might be worth emphasizing from the start that our intention is not to tell you what to do when faced with the option to engage in an enjoyable greenhouse-gas-emitting activity. (By “greenhouse-gas-emitting activity,” we mean an activity that requires the emission of greenhouse gas; examples include eating meat, flying, and driving a fossil fuel-powered vehicle.) Instead, our aim is to discuss the tools with which you can evaluate such options. The outcomes of actions that are associated with greenhouse gas emissions are highly uncertain (see, e.g., Broome, 2012; Bradley & Steele, 2015; Pindyck, 2020). That is, while we know that, on an aggregate level, greenhouse gas emissions cause climate change and associated harmful events (such as floods, droughts, famines, etc.), we can never know beforehand what effect (if any) an individual act of greenhouse gas emission has on the climate. As decision theory is a tool (in fact, the tool, some might say) for choosing when you do not know what outcomes your options will bring, decision theory should be able to help you decide whether to engage in a greenhouse-gas-emitting activity. But what answer does decision theory provide? And, more generally, how should a climate-change-conscious agent reason about an enjoyable greenhouse-gas-emitting activity, according to decision theory? These are the main questions that this chapter will address. We start by considering the idea that private climate decisions – as we shall call decisions by individuals about whether to engage in greenhouse-gas-emitting activities – are examples of the prisoner’s dilemma, which, if correct, means that orthodox decision theory recommends engaging in enjoyable greenhouse-gas-emitting activities. We provide some arguments against thinking that the prisoner’s dilemma is the correct way to model such decisions and suggest instead that they should be modeled using expected utility theory. Moreover, we argue that expected utility theory often recommends that climate-change-conscious agents should not engage in enjoyable

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greenhouse-gas-emitting activities. We also discuss why some have been skeptical of this recommendation, and why others have been skeptical of the applicability of expected utility theory to private climate decisions.

Climate Change and Decision Theory Prisoner’s Dilemma In this section, we first describe prisoner’s dilemma in its standard formulation before connecting it to climate decisions. Imagine that Abel and Beatrice were caught by the police while entering a bank they intended to rob. Without confession, the prosecutor can only get them sentenced for unlawfully carrying weapons, which lands them each one year in prison in comparison to ten years for attempted robbery. The prosecutor promises each of Abel and Beatrice that if one of them confesses but the other does not, then she will not press charges against the confessor. If, however, both confess, then the prosecutor will charge both for attempted robbery, but they can expect to get a couple of years knocked off the ten-year sentence in return for having collaborated with the prosecutor. Assuming that the only thing that matters to Abel and Beatrice, when deciding between confessing and not, is the length of their own prison sentence, we can formulate each criminal’s decision problem as in Table 1. The leftmost column represents the actions available to the criminal whose decision problem is being modeled, the top row represents the possible actions that the criminal’s comrade could take. The four cells specifying length in prison are the different outcomes, for the criminal whose problem is being modeled, from the corresponding combination of actions by the criminal and their comrade. Given what we have assumed about Abel and Beatrice’s preferences, that is, that in this decision problem they only care about the length of their own prison sentence, it should be evident that it is the interest of each to confess. Whatever the other person does, each does best by confessing, which, in the language of game theory, means that both confessing is the only Nash equilibrium of the game (named after Nash, 1950). For instance, if Abel confesses, then by also confessing Beatrice can ensure 8 rather than 10 years in prison; whereas if Abel does not confess, then by confessing Beatrice can walk free rather than sitting one year in prison. The same is true for Abel; whatever Beatrice does, Abel does better by confessing. We can state the prisoner’s dilemma more generally and formally. Let P and Q be two action types, for example, confessing or not confessing. We assume that there are two “players” who each can choose between P and Q; one player can choose Table 1 Abel and Beatrice’s prisoner dilemma I confess I don’t confess

My comrade confesses I get 8 years in prison I get 10 years in prison

My comrade does not confess I get 0 years in prison I get 1 year in prison

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between the instances of P and Q in the first column, the other player can choose between the instances of P and Q in the top row. We moreover now assume that each player’s preferences can be represented by ordinal utilities, that is, numbers where a higher number represents a more strongly desired outcome, but where the magnitude of the difference between the numbers is not significant. (In contrast, “cardinal” utilities, which will play a role later, represent how differences between outcomes compare, in addition to how the outcomes themselves compare, according to some agent’s desires.) Finally, (x,y) denotes that the player choosing from the first column gets outcome represented by utility x while the player choosing from the top row gets outcome represented by utility y. Then two players find themselves in a prisoner’s dilemma just in case their decision problem has the structure of Table 2. What is fascinating about the prisoner’s dilemma is that if both players are instrumentally rational – that is, if they choose the option that they believe will best serve their ends – then they will both choose P, and thus get the outcome (2,2) that is strictly Pareto dominated by the outcome (3,3), meaning that they both strictly prefer the latter to the former. So, by each acting rationally, they get an outcome that is, from each player’s perspective, strictly worse than an outcome that they could have obtained by “cooperating.” To see that they will, if rational, each choose P, note that if one player chooses Q, then the other player can get 4 by choosing P rather than 3 by choosing Q; but if one player chooses P, then the other player can get 2 by choosing P rather than 1 by choosing Q. So, whatever the “opponent” does, one does better by choosing P. Intuitively, it might seem that private climate decisions have important features in common with the prisoner’s dilemma (see, e.g., Gardiner, 2001, 2011; Johnson, 2003). For concreteness, suppose that the enjoyable greenhouse-gas-emitting activity under consideration is to go for a Sunday drive in a gas-guzzling SUV (Sinnott-Armstrong, 2005). Now, the occurrence of harmful climate change – the “climate crisis,” as we shall from now on call it – does not depend on whether you go for the drive or not; it will (let us assume) be avoided if and only if the majority of other agents (including corporations) change their behavior. (Harmful climate change is of course already happening, but to simplify, let us use the term “climate crisis” for some particularly harmful climate change that could, at least in theory, still be averted.) Therefore, Table 3 might seem to be a way of formulating the climate decision in question. Table 2 An abstract prisoner’s dilemma

P Q

P (2,2) (1,4)

Q (4,1) (3,3)

Table 3 Climate decision as prisoner’s dilemma Go for Sunday drive Do not go for Sunday drive

Others do not change their ways Climate crisis occurs but I get to enjoy Sunday drive Climate crisis occurs and I do not get to enjoy Sunday drive

Others change their ways Climate crisis is averted and I get to enjoy Sunday drive Climate crisis is averted but I do not get to enjoy Sunday drive

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If this is how to formulate a private climate decision, for a climate-changeconscious person who enjoys Sunday drives, then it would seem that there is only one rational choice: to go for the drive! The same holds for other enjoyable greenhouse-gas-emitting activities. But if that is true, then it is rational for people – even those who are concerned by climate change – to continue pursuing their greenhouse-gas-emitting activities as long as they enjoy them. The climate crisis is going to occur anyway, whatever any individual does, so she might just as well enjoy these activities while she can. Partly for the above reason, climate change is often said to be an example of Hardin’s (1968) tragedy of the commons, that is, an outcome that obtains as a result of actions by a collection of agents, where each agent acted rationally – in light of their preferences – but still the outcome that results is worse – from each agent’s perspective – than an outcome that they could in theory have brought about by acting together. (Why only partly for the above reason? Because we have only considered the decisions of (private) individuals. But climate change is of course mainly the result of the decisions of group agents, such as governments and large corporations. Thus, the tragedy of climate change may only partly be due to private climate decisions being instances of the prisoner’s dilemma.) Moreover, and for similar reasons, a number of climate ethicists have argued that individuals have no moral obligation to refrain from private activities (driving, flying, etc.) that cause greenhouse gas emission (see, e.g., Johnson, 2003; SinnottArmstrong, 2005; Kingston & Sinnott-Armstrong, 2018). To put it simply, these “individual denialists” (as Broome, 2019 calls them) contend that each such private act of greenhouse gas emission does no harm – in particular, the occurrence of the climate crisis is independent of the act – and therefore we do not have a moral obligation to not engage in it. As Sinnott-Armstrong (2005: 297) puts it: Global warming will still occur even if I do not drive just for fun. Moreover, even if I do drive a gas-guzzler just for fun for a long time, global warming will not occur unless lots of other people also expel greenhouse gases. So my individual act is neither necessary nor sufficient for global warming.

A weakness in individual denialism is that it overlooks the fact that although the climate crisis will occur independently of any particular private climate action, such an action could affect how harmful the effects of climate change will be. Moreover, even if – as some hold – any single private climate action will most likely make no difference, it could carry a great expected harm (and benefit). In sum, individual denialists seem to commit two related fallacies. First, they wrongly view climate change and the harm it will cause in binary terms rather in terms of degrees. Second, they fail to consider the fact that a decision can carry great expected harm even if it most likely causes no harm. In section “How You Could Make a Large Difference”, we consider some estimates of the expected harm done by private climate decisions. If the observations from the last paragraph are correct, then it would be incorrect to think of private climate decisions as prisoners’ dilemmas; more generally, it is then inappropriate to model private climate decisions as a game where the

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uncertainty pertains only to the actions of others. Instead, we should evaluate private climate decisions using expected utility theory, which requires that we formulate them in the framework of individual decision-making under uncertainty (where the uncertainty concerns the true “state of the world”). That is what we do in the next section. In subsequent sections, we consider some objections to how we apply expected utility theory to private climate decisions, and some more general worries about the applicability of expected utility theory to such decisions. (The term “expected utility theory” is sometimes reserved for what economists like to call decision-making under risk, that is, when the options carry with them given (or “objective”) probabilities for their potential outcomes. The term “subjective expected utility theory” is then used for what economists like to call decisionmaking under uncertainty, that is, when the decision-maker has to consult her own degrees of belief (or subjective probabilities) for the potential outcomes (see, e.g., Steele & Stefánsson, 2015, Sect. 3). Since we assume that when it comes to climate decisions, all probabilities are subjective – and no options come with given probabilities – we ignore this distinction.)

Expected Utility Theory We start by describing expected utility theory as an abstract theory, before explaining how it can be applied in private climate decisions. Let O be a finite set of n outcomes, denoted o1, o2, etc., up to on, while A is a finite set of alternatives, or options, that is, whatever the agent of interest can choose between, with individual alternatives denoted a1, a2, etc. u is a cardinal utility function on the set of outcomes, which numerically represents how desirable the agent in question considers the outcomes, while p is a (subjective) probability function, which numerically represents the agent’s degrees of belief (i.e., her uncertainty), and where p(oj||ai) denotes the degree with which the agent believes that outcome oj obtains under the supposition that she chooses alternative ai. For now, we leave open how to interpret this supposition, but it is an issue to which we return below. With the above notation in hand, we can define the expected utility (EU) of any alternative, ai, as follows: EUðai Þ ¼

n

u oj p oj ai

j¼1

It is worth noting that everything we say about expected utility in what follows also holds for normative generalizations of the theory, such as risk-weighted expected utility theory (Buchak, 2013; for discussion, see Stefánsson & Bradley, 2019). In other words, we shall remain quite liberal about what counts as “expected utility.” Now, according to expected utility theory, any rational agent has preferences that satisfy a number of constraints, which mathematically entail that the agent

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maximizes expected utility (for some results of this kind, see, e.g., Ramsey, 1926; von Neumann & Morgenstern, 1944; Savage, 1954; Bolker, 1967; Bradley, 2017). These results – the mathematical entailments – are called “representation theorems.” Put slightly more precisely, any version of expected utility theory holds that a rational agent has preferences between the alternatives in A such that, for any two alternatives ai and aj in A, the agent prefers ai to aj just in case the expected utility (according to the agent) of the former is greater than the expected utility (according to the agent) of the latter. We shall get back to the potential practical importance of representation theorems in section “But Can Decision Theory Handle Extreme Uncertainty?”. So, what does expected utility theory imply for the question of whether to engage in a greenhouse-gas-emitting activity, such as going for a Sunday drive in a gas guzzling SUV? That of course depends on one’s desires (or values), as represented by the utility function, u, and one’s degrees of belief or uncertainty, as represented by the probability function, p. As to the former, we have assumed that the agent in question enjoys the activity but is worried about the harmful effects of climate change. That is, she prefers the effects of climate change to be less rather than more harmful, other things being equal; but she also enjoys the greenhouse-gasemitting activity and so prefers to engage in it, other things being equal. The question we shall soon address is how to weight these two preferences against each other when they conflict. What about the probability function? Let us assume that the agent’s uncertainty, as represented by p, is in line with the currently available evidence. So, she knows that climate change is happening, and that it is largely caused by the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gas, and that further greenhouse gas emission will make climate change even worse. But one might wonder: does that hold for any amount of further greenhouse gas emission? Some think not: the greenhouse gas emission associated with a single Sunday drive, say, is so insignificant that it will not make climate change any more harmful (see, e.g., Sinnott-Armstrong, 2005; Budolfson, 2019; Cripps, 2013). Others disagree (see, e.g., Hiller, 2011; Broome, 2012, 2019; Morgan-Knapp & Goodman, 2015; Lawford-Smith, 2016). We shall get back to this disagreement in a moment. But first we note that the practical implication of this disagreement partly depends on which version of expected utility theory one adopts. Recall that we defined the expected utility of alternative ai as follows: EUðai Þ ¼

n

j¼1

u oj p oj ai . But we left open the interpretation of p(oj || ai), saying

only that it denotes the degree with which the agent believes that outcome oj obtains under the supposition that she chooses alternative ai. This supposition can be interpreted evidentially, as a traditional conditional probability (as in the evidential decision theory of Jeffrey, 1965), or it can be interpreted counterfactually (or subjunctively), as the probability that oj would come about if one were to choose ai (as in, e.g., the causal decision theory of Joyce, 1999). The difference between these two interpretations can have interesting implications for what expected utility theory implies for private climate decisions. To see this, suppose that a person reasons as follows:

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If I decide to go for a Sunday drive in my gas guzzling SUV, then that is evidence that others will do so too; not because my going causes them to go, but because if I conclude that – despite the evils of greenhouse gas emission – I will allow myself to enjoy a Sunday drive, then other people like me will probably come to that same conclusion.

A person who reasons like this will judge the decision to go for a Sunday drive differently depending on whether she uses causal decision theory or evidential decision theory. Take the rather vaguely specified outcome that atmospheric greenhouse gas reaches concentration level X, which we assume to be particularly harmful. If a person uses causal decision theory when reasoning about a Sunday drive, then the outcome where atmospheric greenhouse gas concentration reaches this level X will be weighted by the probability that her Sunday drive causes this outcome. In contrast, if she uses evidential decision theory, then the outcome in question will be weighted by the conditional probability that this concentration will be reached given that she goes on a Sunday drive. So, due to the person’s belief about the evidential but not causal relationship between her decision and what others decide, the possibility of reaching concentration X will count more heavily against the Sunday drive if she uses evidential decision theory than if she uses causal decision theory. To establish more formally the above difference between causal and evidential decision theory, consider first the implication of interpreting p(oj||ai) evidentially, that is, as the conditional probability of outcome oj obtaining given that alternative ai is chosen. Let oj be the outcome that atmospheric greenhouse gas reaches concentration level X and aj the alternative to go for a Sunday drive on some particular evening. Then, since the person takes her decision to go for a Sunday drive to be evidence that others will do so too – and since she knows that driving increases the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gas – she will find that p(oj||ai) is considerably higher than p(oj), and, more importantly, considerably higher than p (oj||not-ai), the conditional probability of greenhouse gas reaching level X given that she does not go for that drive. Less formally, she finds that the probability that atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gas reaches particularly harmful levels is considerably higher if she goes for a Sunday drive than if she does not. If she applies evidential decision theory and thus uses evidential suppositions when choosing what to do, this may suffice to deter her from going on that Sunday drive. A person who applies causal decision theory will reason quite differently. When considering the probability that oj would come about if one were to choose alternative ai, one should (to simplify somewhat) keep fixed everything not causally affected by the choice of ai. And recall that we are assuming that the decisionmaker takes her decision to go for a Sunday drive to be evidence that others will do so without causing them to do so. Thus, since oj is the outcome that atmospheric greenhouse gas reaches level X and aj is the alternative to go for a Sunday drive on some particular evening, interpreting “||” counterfactually means that p(oj||ai) may not be (significantly) higher than p(oj||not-ai). Since this is the probability that figures in causal decision theory, the possibility of reaching harmful levels of atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gas may count less heavily against going

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on that Sunday drive according to causal decision theory than according to evidential decision theory. Some philosophers find it obvious that causal decision theory is the correct normative decision theory. One should, on this view, not choose the course of action that generates the “best news,” that is, one should not focus on what is evidence for the best outcome; instead, one should choose the course of action that in expectation causes the best outcome (see, e.g., Joyce, 1999). Others disagree and point out that a decision-maker who chooses the actions that are evidentially (even if not causally) related to the better outcomes will do better in the long run (e.g., Ahmed, 2014). Yet others have a more conciliatory approach and suggest that there may be no fact of the matter as to which of these theories is the correct one (see, e.g., Briggs, 2010). This is not the place to enter into the debate between causal and evidential decision theory. However, in what follows, we shall consider in more detail what the causal interpretation of expected utility theory recommends when making private climate decisions. The reason we assume causal decision theory in what follows is that a recent and ongoing debate about the ethics of private climate decisions can, as we shall see, be fruitfully interpreted as a debate over what causal decision theory recommends, when a climate-change-conscious decision-maker reasons about an enjoyable greenhouse-gas-emitting activity. In the following sections, we review that debate.

How You Could Make a Large Difference Some ethicists have recently argued – largely in response to individual denialists (recall section “Prisoner’s Dilemma”) – that due to the chaotic nature of the climate, it is possible that small changes in the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gas have surprisingly large effects. (Morgan-Knapp and Goodman (2015), LawfordSmith (2016), and Broome (2019) discuss the relevance of this for climate ethics; for the original source, see Lorenz (1963, 1969).) The idea is that because of the atmosphere’s extreme instability and the so-called “butterfly effect” some small intervention like a Sunday drive can cause a large disturbance to the weather (Broome, 2019, pp. 112–113; Cullity, 2019, p. 24). For instance, a Sunday drive in a gas-guzzling vehicle could cause the passing of some metrological threshold (Morgan-Knapp & Goodman, 2015), which could trigger some extreme and potentially very harmful weather events. (Is worth noting that this talk of “thresholds” may be a little misleading since it may seem to suggest that a particular weather event is guaranteed to occur if and only if the threshold is passed, whereas in fact the relationship between greenhouse gas emission and the weather events in question is more stochastic.) Moreover, some (e.g., Broome, 2019) hold that in the long run, the time and place of some harmful events associated with climate change – such as storms, floods, and disease outbreaks – will almost certainly be altered by a Sunday drive, thus affecting who experiences harm, in addition to increasing the severity and frequency of the climate-change-induced harm.

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The notion of thresholds can also be used to illustrate how individual greenhousegas-emitting activities can trigger greater changes in the total amount of emissions. For instance, due to market thresholds, a seemingly insignificant consumption decision – such as to not purchase a flight ticket to Thailand – might trigger a significant change in a large corporation’s behavior – such as an airline deciding to stop flying to Thailand – which could have a substantial impact on total greenhouse gas emission (cf. Singer, 1980 on meat consumption; see also Kagan, 2011; Nefsky, 2011). So, even if a decision about going for a Sunday drive will not affect whether the climate crisis occurs – and even if it is unlikely to have any effect on the climate (an assumption that some question; see, e.g., Broome, 2019) – it could potentially cause extreme weather events that kill many people. In other words, even if the probability that a Sunday drive causes some climate-related harm is small, that probability is not zero. Moreover, the stakes are, by the above argument, very high: the individual action could cause an extremely harmful event. Thus, while going for a Sunday drive is, by assumption, pleasant, it also carries with it expected harm. (The “expected harm” that an activity carries is the sum we get when we, first, multiply each magnitude of harm that the activity could result in by the probability that it results in that magnitude of harm, and, second, add up these probabilityweighted magnitudes of harm.) Kingston and Sinnott-Armstrong (2018) have argued, in response to the claim that going for a Sunday drive carries with it expected harm, that such a drive could at most change the timing of when some meteorological threshold is passed or when some harmful weather event occurs. The reason is that humanity is constantly causing greenhouse gas to be emitted, and thus even if you refrain from going for a Sunday drive, the greenhouse gas concentration that your drive would have resulted in will instead be reached “only a fraction of a second later” (177, emphasis in original). Moreover, they contend: “Even if we grant, for the sake of argument, that a change in timing of a given concentration threshold did correspond to a change in the timing of the relevant effects, it does not matter whether those impacts happen now or a second later” (ibid.). The above argument is mistaken. Emitted greenhouse gas stays in the atmosphere between 300 and 1000 years. Consequently – and whether or not a peak concentration will be reached (cf. Nefsky, 2021) – the small difference in timing does over time correspond to a potentially very large increase in expected harm. Perhaps the easiest way to see this is by considering Fig. 1. Suppose that the two lines represent the predicted atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gas over one hundred years; the orange line is the concentration with the Sunday drive in question, the blue line the concentration without the Sunday drive. Now, at each point, the difference in concentration – as represented by the distance between the two lines – is small; correspondingly, at each time, the increased risk of harmful weather events (storms, floods, droughts, etc.) may be small. But when evaluating the increased risk of climate harms due to the Sunday drive, what matters is not the distance between the two lines at any point in time, but rather the total area between the two lines (over at least 300 years). We know that, at the current and close by concentrations of

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2080

Without Sunday drive

2090

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With Sunday drive

Fig. 1 Difference in greenhouse gas concentration over time

greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, an increased concentration is correlated with an increase in the number of harmful weather events. Therefore, the total area between the two lines – extended for some additional hundreds of years – corresponds to a potentially very large increase in the risk of harmful weather events. Therefore, even if we think that “it does not matter whether [harmful events] happen now or a second later,” it does not follow that it does not matter whether the increased greenhouse gas concentration happens now or a second later. Nefsky (2021) seems to overlook the importance (in particular, in the long run) of this probabilistic correlation between increased greenhouse gas concentration and harmful weather events when she says, in response to a similar point made by Broome (2019), that the chance of making a difference via the butterfly effect [i.e., due to the chaotic nature of the climate] is no more of a chance of making a difference for the worse than it is a chance of making a difference for the better. So, simply delaying a threshold-crossing by an imperceptible fraction of a second is no more likely to make the harmful outcomes more severe than it is to make them less severe.

If what climate scientists say about the probabilistic relationship between atmospheric greenhouse gas concentration and harmful weather events is correct – which we see no reason to doubt – then Nefsky’s response fails. The butterfly effect means that we cannot be sure that a Sunday drive will not prevent some harmful weather event; for all we know, it might prevent such an event, or it might cause such an event, or it might make no difference whatsoever. However, the aforementioned probabilistic relationship should make us believe that, at least over time, the increased concentration that a Sunday drive results in is more likely to cause such harmful events than to prevent them (Morgan-Knapp & Goodman, 2015; Lawford-Smith, 2016 make a similar point). In fact, some think that the Sunday drive is, over the very long run, almost certain to both cause some such events and prevent other such events (see, e.g., Broome, 2019), but that it will on balance very likely cause more rather than fewer such events. In sum, the Sunday drive increases the expected number of harmful weather events. Further criticism has been directed at this threshold argument based on expected harm, for instance, by Budolfson (2019) and Kingston and Sinnott-Armstrong

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(2018) (and to some extent by Nefsky, 2011, 2021). Responses can be found in, for instance, Broome (2019) and Hedden (2020). We shall not, however, discuss this threshold argument further, but instead turn our attention to another argument, based not on thresholds but on imperceptible harm.

How You Probably (Also) Make an Imperceptible Difference Some might think that, even if private climate decisions – such as going for a Sunday drive – may cause some harm, the harm to each person is imperceptible. Moreover, it might seem that such imperceptible – or hardly perceptible – harms are morally insignificant. For instance, according to some estimates, the lifetime greenhouse gas emission of an “average American” reduces life expectancy by six months in total, that is, when the effects on all of humanity is aggregated (see, e.g., Broome, 2012). According to other estimates, based on the social cost of carbon – which is an attempt at monetizing the harm done by greenhouse gas emission – the harm caused by the emission of a “a typical academic who travels” (Broome, 2019: 111) is about $40,000, when all harmful effects are added up. In light of these figures, it may be tempting to draw the conclusion that the expected harm of your lifetime emissions on any one individual is so small as to be imperceptible, or not measurable by our current instruments. It may be even more tempting to draw the conclusion that the expected harm of a single Sunday drive on any one individual is imperceptible. The above argument clearly does not hold for all harms that your lifetime emissions or your Sunday drive may cause. It may however hold for the ex ante or expected harm to each person. For instance, when you go for a Sunday drive, the expected harm that the corresponding increase in greenhouse gas concentration imposes on each person may be sufficiently small to be deemed “imperceptible.” And it is probably not measurable with any precision or certainty. However, it is possible, as we have seen, that the actual (or ex post) harm is very perceptible and measurable. If the climate is as chaotic as climate scientists think, then seemingly trivial acts such as going for a Sunday drive could trigger some extreme weather event that ends up killing someone. Thus, even if the expected harm to each person may be tiny, some of the possible actual (i.e., ex post) harm is far from tiny. So, what we have here is, on the one hand, a very small (possibly imperceptible or not measurable) increase in expected harm to each person, which is very (subjectively) likely given our current evidence, and, on the other hand, a large (and certainly perceptible) possible actual harm to some persons, which may be very (subjectively) unlikely. But there are also examples of possible ex post harms that may be imperceptible. For instance, the increased greenhouse gas emission associated with your Sunday drive may warm the planet (or some region of it) by some amount that is not perceptible to anyone, which could result in the water supply in some region falling by some imperceptible amount, and so on. And this, in turn, might result in some imperceptible increase in pain or discomfort. So, in this case we have a continuous ex

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post harm: Whenever we emit, there may be some imperceptible increase in actual harm (see, e.g., Parfit, 1984; Broome, 2019). To finally come back to the expected utility answer to the question of how to evaluate private climate decisions: both of these tiny harms – that is, both the tiny increase in expected harm to each person and the imperceptible increase in ex post harm – should, we contend, figure in the expected utility calculation of a climatechange-conscious agent when she reasons about an enjoyable greenhouse-emitting activity. But some think that this is a mistake – there are no imperceptible harms (see, e.g., Kagan, 2011). Discussing this matter in detail would get us too far off track, so let us simply assume, for now, that there are imperceptible harms. One might still wonder to what extent imperceptible harms – and, more generally, tiny harms – could be morally significant (see, e.g., Sandberg, 2011). An argument from Parfit (1984) is often used to argue that even imperceptible harms are morally significant. In a simplified version, Parfit’s argument was this: Suppose that we can give a person a number of electric shocks, each of which is imperceptible to the person, but one thousand of which is excruciatingly painful. If one thinks that imperceptible harms are morally insignificant, then it is not worse to give the person one shock than to give the person zero shocks, and not worse to give the person two shocks than one shock, and so on, and not worse to give the person one thousand shocks than nine hundred ninety-nine shocks. Assuming that the “not worse than” relation is transitive – which means that if A is not worse than B which is not worse than C then A is not worse than C – it follows that it is not worse to give the person one thousand shocks than to give them no shock. But then we have clearly reached a false conclusion from a valid argument, and so we should reject the argument’s weakest premises. Parfit suggests we reject the premise that an imperceptible harm is not morally significant. Others, however, reject the premise that the “not worse than” relation is transitive (see, for instance, Temkin, 1987, 1996; Rachels, 1998; see also Spiekermann, 2014). And actually, one might reasonably think that this relation is transitive without claiming that the better than relation is not transitive. For note that one way in which B could be no worse than A is for A and B to be incomparable or incommensurable, that is, realizing different values that cannot be put on a single scale. But incomparability (and incommensurability) is arguably not transitive. For instance, a career as a lawyer with a $150,000 yearly salary might be incommensurable with – or, as some (e.g., Chang, 2002) would say, on a par with – a career as a banker with a $200,000 yearly salary; similarly, a career as a banker with a $200,000 yearly salary may be incommensurable with a career as a lawyer with a $140,000 yearly salary; but clearly, a career as a lawyer with a $150,000 yearly salary is not incommensurable with a career as a lawyer with a $140,000 yearly salary. So, the assumption that the “not worse than” relation is transitive can plausibly be questioned, which means that Parfit’s argument for the moral significance of imperceptible harms contained a questionable premise. But, the reader might wonder, is the above really relevant to climate decisions? Perhaps not. Let us consider the small (perhaps imperceptible) harms that a private

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greenhouse-gas-emitting activity, such as going for a Sunday drive, imposes on each individual. If your lifetime greenhouse gas emission reduces total life expectancy by at least six months – that is, if Broome (2012, 2019) is right – then your (or at least some of your) individual acts of greenhouse gas emission reduce life expectancy by some smaller amount. And, when divided amongst billions of people, this smaller amount becomes very small indeed. Perhaps we want to call it “imperceptible”; at the very least, it will probably not be measurable (by our current instruments). However, when applied to this harm – imperceptible or not – the “not worse than” relation has the structure of the “not shorter than” relation between lives (Broome, 2019: 125). And, of course, the “not shorter than” relation is transitive – and, some (sufficiently large) shortenings of life expectancy are unquestionably harmful. So, Parfit’s argument for why imperceptible harms are morally significant holds for at least this potentially imperceptible harm of private greenhouse-gas-emitting activities. The same can be said of many other such harms. For instance, if your emission causes an imperceptible decrease in the water supply, then when the “not worse than” relation is applied to the harm that this causes, it has the structure of the “no less than” relation as applied to water supplies. That relation leaves no room for incommensurability and is of course transitive. The same moreover holds for the increased probability of death, say, that private greenhouse-gas-emitting activities carry. Whether an increased probability of death in itself counts as a harm, rather than just an increased probability of harm, is contentious, so let us simply assume that you (typically) wrong someone when you increase the probability of their death by (at least) some sufficient amount. Now, your Sunday drive may result in a tiny, perhaps imperceptible (as in, not measurable by our current instruments), increase in the probability that some person dies due to, say, an extreme weather event. Such increases in probability of death may be highly imprecise. But as long as each act of emission increases the probability (imprecise or not), Parfit’s argument holds; the transitivity of the “no more probable than” relation would show that even an imperceptible increase in the risk of death can wrong the person. But perhaps some incomparability remains. For instance, although it would, we assume, be better if everyone refrained from Sunday drives, it might be that the imperceptible increase in temperature caused by some particular Sunday drive makes life more comfortable for some people or animals but less comfortable and/or riskier for others (Hedden, 2020: 549). In that case, the two options – going on a Sunday drive and refraining from doing so – might not be equally good even though neither is better than the other. How to make decisions when two options are incommensurable, or incomparable, or on a par, is a highly debated question. Different proposals have been suggested (see, e.g., Hare, 2010; Bales et al., 2014; Schoenfield, 2014), but it seems fair to say that consensus is lacking. Discussing these different proposals in detail would take us too far from the topic of this paper. But, as Hedden (2020) points out, some of them would recommend going for the Sunday drive, in the case just imagined, while others would recommend against it.

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But Can Decision Theory Handle Extreme Uncertainty? A final family of objections to the expected utility approach to private climate decisions is that the uncertainty involved in such decisions is simply too extreme for the approach to be of any use. There are (at least) two somewhat different objections within this family. One worry is that some possible but very unlikely outcomes are too extreme for the expected utility approach to give any reasonable practical guidance; the other worry is that we lack sufficient knowledge of the relevant probabilities and utilities to be able to calculate meaningful expected utilities. The first of the above worries could be attributed to Martin Weitzman, who in a number of papers proposed his (in)famous dismal theorem (first stated in Weitzman, 2009), which he interpreted as undermining the use of standard cost–benefit analysis (CBA) when evaluating climate policies. For the present purposes, the importance of Weitzman’s theorem is the claim that since climate catastrophes could be infinitely bad, that is, since there is no bound on the possible bad of a climate catastrophe, such catastrophes either cannot be taken into account in traditional CBA or else they completely dominate the analysis. After all, the result of multiplying an infinite negative utility by any arbitrarily small probability is still infinitely negative; hence, the possibility of such a catastrophe, no matter how unlikely, will dominate the analysis unless completely ignored. The same of course holds, more generally, for any expected utility analysis. An option that could result in an outcome that has infinitively negative utility has an infinitely negative expected utility. Now, there is, of course, some chance of a climate catastrophe no matter what we do; in particular, whether you do or do not go for that Sunday drive, there is some chance of climate catastrophe. However, expected utility theory, properly applied, asks, in this case, (amongst other things) about the difference in the chance of a climate catastrophe depending on which of these two options is chosen. But then the infinitely negative utility of a climate catastrophe might seem to suggest that those who apply expected utility theory to reason about enjoyable but greenhouse-gasemitting activities will always come to the conclusion that they should not engage in such activities since any increase in the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gas arguably increases the probability of a climate catastrophe by some tiny amount. But that seems counterintuitive. For instance, imagine a lonely pensioneer who has finally gotten a sought-after grandchild. Visiting the grandchild gives her immense happiness and not being able to see the child gives her great sorrow. The only way she has of visiting the grandchild is by driving her hybrid car, which will, say, get her back and forth on electricity except for the very last couple of miles. These couple of miles cause some greenhouse gas emission. If the person uses expected utility theory to reason about what to do, and moreover understands that any increase in the concentration of greenhouse gas increases the probability of a climate catastrophe, which she assigns an infinitely negative utility, then she will find that she should never visit the grandchild. But that would seem too extreme. Some might respond that what went wrong in the above analysis was that we focused on individual decisions, instead of something like a person’s lifestyle, or

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lifetime emissions. If the person in question lives a climate-friendly lifestyle in general, then she can justifiably go visit the grandchild, even if that particular action has negative expected utility (Nefsky, 2021). Others might respond that while traditional expected utility gives the wrong answer in this case, we can instead apply generalizations of expected utility that make use of hyperreal probabilities (see, e.g., Herzberg, 2011) or that handle infinites by some other means (see, e.g., Bartha & DesRoches, 2017). For instance, since an infinitely negative utility multiplied by an infinitesimal probability need not be infinitely negative, some generalizations of expected utility theory – for example, those involving hyperreal probabilities – might recommend driving to meet the grandchild (assuming that the increase in the risk of catastrophe is infinitesimal). But actually, it is unclear whether either of these responses is needed to avoid the extreme conclusion in the above example. For it is unclear why we should assume that a climate catastrophe could be infinitely bad. As Broome (2013: S30) puts it: “Weitzman assumes we can put no bound on its badness. But that is clearly false. We are a finite species living on a finite planet. There has to be a finite limit on the badness of anything that can happen here.” Take, for instance, an extreme existential catastrophe; suppose that climate change makes life on earth impossible for both humans and animals. This would be enormously bad. Most obviously, it would mean that an enormous number of people and animals who would otherwise exist and lead good lives never come into existence and so do not get to lead good lives. The total (expected) welfare loss would thus be gigantic. But it would not be infinite. We can safely assume that no individual animal or person has the capacity to enjoy infinite welfare. Moreover, even without climate change, the lifespan of our planet is finite. Therefore, the total welfare loss from this existential catastrophe would be finite. Consider next an even worse climate catastrophe: imagine that all people and animals who would lead good lives without the catastrophe still come to exist but lead lives with negative lifetime welfare as a result of the catastrophe – meaning that they would have been better off never existing. Since we can safely assume that no individual animal or person has the capacity to suffer an infinite harm – and since the lifespan of our planet is finite – the welfare loss would be finite even from this catastrophe. In sum, since the bad (i.e., the negative utility) of a climate catastrophe is finite, the possibility of a climate catastrophe does not undermine the use of (some version of) expected utility theory for making climate decisions. The extreme lack of knowledge involved when making climate decisions raises a somewhat different type of worry, which we only briefly consider. Recall (from section “Expected Utility Theory”) that the values that we are meant to plug into the expected utility formula are precise numbers. So, to use it when reasoning about a Sunday drive, one needs to have precise estimates for the probabilities of all the outcomes that the drive could result in. In addition, one needs precise utilities for all these possible outcomes. But, some say, that is too demanding – surely, we do not have precise utilities and probabilities for all the outcomes in which our climate decisions might result (see, e.g., Cullity, 2015). Even worse, there might be relevant outcomes that we are not even aware of – and we might moreover suspect this to be

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the case when making our climate decision – in which case it would seem even less plausible that we could assign all the relevant outcomes precise utilities and probabilities (for discussion of this latter issue, see, e.g., Bradley, 2017; Steele & Stefánsson, 2021). In response, some point out that a number of decision theoretic representation theorems (recall from section “Expected Utility Theory”) show that if a person’s preferences satisfy certain constraints, which are interpreted as requirements of rationality, then it turns out that her graded beliefs can be quantified with precise probabilities and her desires by precise utilities. One worry about this response is that even if these results show that ideally rational people’s desires and beliefs can be quantified with precise numbers, the same is not true of most ordinary people, who of course fail to satisfy some of these purported rationality constraints on preference. Another worry is that the representation theorems do not establish that rational people have access to these precise utilities and probabilities, nor that they use them to evaluate alternatives; these theorems only establish that if a person’s preferences satisfy the rationality constraints, then these preferences can be represented as maximizing expected utility relative to some pair of utility and probability function. But that does not mean that the person in question has access to these utilities and probabilities. So, it is questionable that any person – perfectly rational or not – has access to all the precise utilities and probabilities that would be required to calculate the expected utility of, say, going for a Sunday drive. But that does not mean that the expected utility approach to private climate decisions is hopeless. In fact, some think that some sort of expected utility theory can always be used. Broome (2012: 129), for instance, says: “The lack of firm probabilities is not a reason to give up expected [utility] theory. You might despair and adopt some other way of coping with uncertainty . . . That would be a mistake. Stick with expected [utility] theory, since it is very well founded, and do your best with probabilities and [utilities].” How, precisely, to “do your best with” probabilities and utilities in such cases is, of course, a very difficult question (see, e.g., Bradley & Steele, 2015; Bradley, 2017). But the general point is that even if a person does not have access to precise probabilities and utilities, she could use the framework of expected utility theory to try to come to some estimate of the relative choiceworthiness of her options. Simply framing the problem in terms of expected utility could be of some help, for instance, by reminding her not to ignore very unlikely events. Moreover, in the easy case where one option is sufficiently better than another, then a lack of precise utilities and probabilities need not be a hinder to see that one option has a higher expected utility than another. But even when the evaluation is not so easy, one can use expected utility theory to guide and discipline one’s reasoning. Expected utility theory, in some form or another, is the ideal for which any reasoner should strive, when making decisions under uncertainty. Even if one cannot precisely quantify one’s uncertainty and values (or desires), one can, in practice, get far by considering the expected utilities of one’s options given different plausible quantifications of one’s uncertainty and values.

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Summary We have now illustrated how decision theory can be applied to private decisions about options that require greenhouse gas emission, be it going for a drive in a gasguzzling SUV, flying to Thailand for a holiday, or eating meat. Some want to frame private climate decisions in terms of interactive decision theory, or game theory, and moreover think that these decisions are instances of the prisoner’s dilemma. Therefore, they believe that decision theory recommends any enjoyable greenhouse-gasemitting activity. In contrast, we have argued that the prisoner’s dilemma framing ignores the fact that even if an individual private climate decision is neither sufficient nor necessary for climate change, such a decision can make the effects of climate change either better and worse. In particular, even if a single private climate decision is unlikely to make a large difference, it can carry a great expectation of harm or benefit. Therefore, the correct framing of such decisions is the one provided by expected utility theory. Figuring out what expected utility theory recommends, for some particular enjoyable but greenhouse-gas-emitting activity, is no simple matter, as we have seen. But expected utility theory is the ideal for which any reasoner should strive, even when she is lacking when it comes to some of the parameters needed for the theory to provide an unambiguous answer. In particular, the expected utility framework can and should be used to guide and discipline our reasoning, for instance, when evaluating an enjoyable but greenhouse-gas-emitting activity. (We are grateful to Richard Bradley for helpful comments. Stefánsson’s work is supported by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (Pro Futura Scientia XIII).)

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Climate Change and Psychology James Andow and Aimie Hope

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . How Do We Relate to Nature? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What Prevents Change? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Habits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Loss Aversion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Distance/Discounting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Autonomy/Efficacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Denialism/Skepticism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rationalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What Are the Effects of Change? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Direct Psychological Effects of a Changing Climate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Indirect Psychological Effects of a Changing Climate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . How Can Change Happen? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Scope for Further Interaction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

The chapter highlights four themes within the psychology of climate change that illustrate how psychological findings bear on the philosophy of climate change. The chapter first considers how psychological research has explored the ways in which individuals think about the ethics of the relationship between humans and the environment, developing new constructs capturing various ways of thinking about that relationship and developing tools with which to measure the extent to

James Andow and Aimie Hope contributed equally. J. Andow (*) · A. Hope University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_25

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which participants think about the relationship in the relevant ways. The remaining sections look at why people might find it difficult to act ethically in relation to the environment, the psychological impacts of the climate crisis, and at what psychology can teach us about developing effective interventions to practically respond to the climate crisis. Keywords

Moral psychology · Environmental Psychology · Climate Change · Environmental Philosophy · Environmental Ethics · Philosophy of Climate Change · New Ecological Paradigm · Schwartz Value Survey · Value-BeliefNorm theory · Habit · Loss Aversion · Discounting · Autonomy · Denial · Rationalization · Mental Health · Climate Anxiety · Eco-Anxiety · Experimental Philosophy

Introduction This chapter highlights four themes within the psychology of climate change. The psychology of climate change is a rich, diverse, and fast-moving area of research, and so this chapter does not aim to provide a comprehensive snapshot of the current state of the literature. The insights to be gained from engagement with the literature on the psychology of climate change are to be gained via a sustained engagement with research developments in the field rather than a One-time snapshot. The chapter, instead, draws on the existing literature to date to illustrate four ways that psychological findings bear on the philosophy of climate change. The chapter first considers how psychological research has explored the ways in which individuals think about the ethics of the relationship between humans and the environment, developing new constructs capturing various ways of thinking about that relationship, and developing tools with which to measure the extent to which participants think about the relationship in the relevant ways. The remaining sections look at why people might find it difficult to act ethically in relation to the environment, the psychological impacts of the climate crisis, and at what psychology can teach us about developing effective interventions to practically respond to the climate crisis. For the purposes of this chapter, a broad view of environmental psychology is taken as research in the relevant areas is somewhat interdisciplinary. For something like a snapshot of the psychology of climate change, see Nielsen et al. (2021) and for an overview of environmental psychology more generally Steg et al. (2013).

How Do We Relate to Nature? Key to various projects in the philosophy of climate change is a well-informed understanding of what one might call descriptive environmental ethics or moral psychology (broadly construed). Psychological research can thus be an invaluable

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source of information for such projects as it can examine, for example, the ways in which people view the environment and environmental issues: their perceptions, motivations, and values. The results of such research are thus invaluable for philosophers seeking to understand the roots of the climate change problem and in helping to solve it. Descriptive claims about moral psychology have always played a central role in the philosophy of the environment (e.g., claims about a dominant worldview versus a needed ecological worldview). During the 1960s and 1970s, environmental philosophy came to focus on the relationship between humans and the wider environment in response to environmental problems caused by human activity (e.g., pollution) and with an interest in diagnosing the philosophical roots of environmental destruction. One of the root causes of environmental problems (according to a common diagnosis) was an anthropocentric worldview that regarded the natural world as morally significant and worth protecting only insofar as doing so is of instrumental value to humanity (consider, e.g., White Jr, 1967). This diagnosis is, in part, a psychological one. It is a claim about how people currently think about nature and environmental issues (as well as a claim about the ways those values are entrenched in political, legal, and economic systems). Such a diagnosis suggests a solution to be explored and developed. Perhaps, what is needed is a new moral outlook – a nonanthropocentric outlook that sees intrinsic value in nature. This aspect of early environmental philosophy is closely bound up with early developments in environmental psychology (see Steg et al., 2013, chp 1, for an overview of the history of environmental psychology). Environmental psychologists develop and use scales to measure participants’ attitudes to the environment. The New Environmental/Ecological Paradigm Scale (NEP) or an updated version of it has been one of the most widely used scales (Dunlap & Van Liere, 1978; Dunlap et al., 2000). The NEP was developed precisely to capture the kind of new nonanthropocentric moral outlook that mid-twentieth-century environmental philosophers and others argued was needed, and to measure the extent to which the public already accepted the relevant ideas. Here is the opening to Dunlap and Van Liere’s (1978) article: Numerous writers have argued that our nation’s ecological problems stem in large part from the traditional values, attitudes and beliefs prevalent within our society . . . that our belief in abundance and progress, our devotion to growth and prosperity, our faith in science and technology, and our commitment to a laissez-faire economy, limited governmental planning and private property rights all contribute to environmental degradation and/or hinder efforts to improve the quality of the environment . . . Pirages and Ehrlich . . . argue that our society’s fundamentally anti-ecological [worldview] must be replaced by a more realistic world view if ecological catastrophe is to be avoided. Despite the predominance of an anti-ecological [worldview] within our society, new ideas have emerged in recent years which represent a direct challenge to this [worldview]. For example, we increasingly hear of the inevitability of “limits to growth,” the necessity of achieving a “steady-state” economy, the importance of preserving the “balance of nature,” and the need to reject the anthropocentric notion that nature exists solely for human use . . . [W]e term this new world view the “New Environmental Paradigm” or NEP.

Although typically used as unidimensional measures of environmental values or worldview, the NEP scales are designed to pick up on distinct facets of the New

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Ecological Paradigm. For example, in the revised NEP distinct groups of items are intended to pick up on the following facets: the reality of limits to growth; antianthropocentrism; the fragility of nature’s balance; rejection of exemptionalism; and the possibility of an eco-crisis (Dunlap et al., 2000, some relevant discussion in Hawcroft & Milfont, 2010). Environmental psychologists have studied the extent to which a nonanthropocentric environmental ethic (as captured by measures such as the NEP scale) is endorsed by the public, and whether, for example, endorsement of such an ethic is growing over time (Dunlap et al., 2000), is related to consumer choices (e.g., Thøgersen & Ölander, 2002; Whitmarsh & O’Neill, 2010), or voting behavior (e.g., Aguilar-Luzón et al., 2020). The NEP is one of hundreds of measures of environmental attitudes that have been developed in environmental psychology (see Cruz & Brian, 2020 for a recent review). See Table 1 for items in the NEP (original and revised). Various other relevant measures may be of interest to philosophers concerned with the environment and climate change, e.g., scales concerning ecological attitudes and knowledge (Maloney et al., 1975), environmental concern (Weigel & Weigel, 1978), and cultural environmental bias (Price et al., 2014). One other very prominent measure, which is worth mentioning in detail, is an adaptation of the Schwartz Value Survey (for background, see Schwartz, 2012) which has been called the Environmental Schwartz Value Survey (or E-SVS). There have Table 1 NEP scales (based on Hawcroft & Milfont, 2010) Unique to NEP scale • Plants and animals exist primarily to be used by humans • To maintain a healthy economy, we will have to develop a “steady–state” economy where industrial growth is controlled • Humans must live in harmony with nature in order to survive • Humans need not adapt to the natural environment because they can remake it to suit their needs • There are limits to growth beyond which our industrialized society cannot expand

Common items • We are approaching the limit of the number of people the earth can support • Humans have the right to modify the natural environment to suit their needs • The earth is like a spaceship with [only] limited room and resources • Mankind is [humans are] severely abusing the environment • When humans interfere with nature, it often produces disastrous consequences • Mankind was [humans were] created to rule over the rest of nature • The balance of nature is very delicate and easily upset

Unique to Revised NEP scale • Human ingenuity will ensure that we do NOT make the earth unlivable • The earth has plenty of natural resources if we just learn how to develop them • Plants and animals have as much right as humans to exist • The balance of nature is strong enough to cope with the impacts of modern industrial nations • Despite our special abilities, humans are still subject to the laws of nature • The so-called “ecological crisis” facing humankind has been greatly exaggerated • Humans will eventually learn enough about how nature works to be able to control it • If things continue on their present course, we will soon experience a major ecological catastrophe

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been a few subtly different iterations of this. See Bouman et al. (2018) for an overview, references, and a proposal for an adaption of the related Portrait Values Questionnaire. Participants are asked to respond to a number of value labels, e.g., “Self-indulgent (doing pleasant things)” and “a world at peace (free of war and conflict),” on a scale from
1 to 7 where (where
1 is labeled “opposed to my values,” 0 is “not important,” and 7 is “of supreme importance”). Using the E-SVS, a participant receives a score for each of four clusters of values: biospheric, altruistic, hedonic, and egoistic. Environmental psychologists have then developed competing models of the role that measured environmental values and attitudes play in environmentalism and environmentally significant behaviors. For a brief introduction to these models, see Steg et al. (2013, Chap.18), and for further discussion of the theoretical underpinnings of models including a review of the literature, see Bamberg and Möser (2007). For a comprehensive review of the models and approaches used in environmental psychology, see Jackson (2005) and meta-analysis by Klöckner (2013). In the Value-Belief-Norm (VBN) theory, for example, a “sense of obligation to take proenvironmental behaviours” is central to explaining why individuals engage in environmental actions. Key to explaining such a sense of obligation is the worldview captured by the NEP which comes from an understanding that “environmental conditions threaten things the individual values,” and that “the individual can act to reduce the threat.” A key part of explaining acceptance of the worldview captured by the NEP is, in turn, more basic values (biospheric, altruistic, and egoistic) (Stern, 2000). The VBN is just one of several models of the role that environmental attitudes and values play in producing behavior. Another important model, for example, is the ValueIdentity-Norm model (van der Werff & Steg, 2016; Stern et al., 1999; Stern, 2000). Engagement with research such as that surveyed above clearly has the potential to enrich any conversation in environmental philosophy that is concerned with offering and evaluating diagnoses of environmental problems that give weight to descriptive claims about our moral outlook, values, or worldview. Such engagement might, of course, and probably should include critical engagement with the relevant psychological constructs, measures, and models. Construct validity should not be taken as given. For example, it should not be taken as given that E-SVS “Biospheric” scores reflect what a philosopher might understand by biospheric values (as the scores are computed using some items that seem to express anthropocentric attitudes including treating nature as a “resource,” see Table 2). And see Lundmark, 2007, for some relevant critical engagement with NEP scales. Our focus so far has been on the relevance of environmental psychology to environmental philosophy, rather than the philosophy of climate change; that is because the same general pattern applies in the case of the philosophy of climate change. A concern with descriptive moral psychology is also central to the philosophy of climate change. Questions about anthropocentrism versus nonanthropocentrism – the central concern of scales like the NEP scale – still loom large of course. But a number of other kinds of descriptive claims about moral psychology also play a role in the literature on the philosophy of climate change. These other relevant aspects of moral psychology on which there is relevant research within environmental psychology and cognate fields include our relationships with future generations (Meleady &

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Table 2 E-SVS scale items: based on Bouman et al. (2018)

Biospheric Prevenng polluon

Protecng the

Respecng the Earth

Unity with Nature

(protecng natural

environment

(harmony with other

(fing into nature)

resources)

(preserving nature)

species)

Altruisc Equality (equal

Social Jusce

A world at peace

Helpful (working for

opportunity for all)

(correcng injusce,

(free of war and

the welfare of

care for the weak)

conflict)

others)

Hedonic Pleasure (graficaon of

Enjoying life (enjoying food,

Self-indulgent (doing

desires)

sex, leisure, etc.)

pleasant things)

Egoisc Social power

Authority (the

Influenal

Wealth

Ambious

(control over

right to lead or

(having an

(material

(hardworking,

others,

command)

impact on

possessions,

aspiring)

people and

money)

dominance)

events)

Crisp, 2017), technology (Lorenzoni et al., 2007), government (Tam, 2020), historical responsibility (Gampfer, 2014), and much more. In the context of the kinds of descriptive claim that play a role in the philosophy of climate change – given the nature of the problem – there is also a particular importance for philosophers of climate change to pay attention to cross-cultural research into environmental attitudes and values, and the role they play in producing environmentally relevant behaviors (e.g., Milfont et al., 2010; Milfont & Duckitt, 2010; Schultz & Zelezny, 1999). The experiences of many populations have not had much representation within the literature which has tended to have “WEIRD” samples (i.e., Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) (Henrich et al., 2010). For those wanting further reading, Marquart-Pyatt (2013) provides an overview of research into cross-cultural research on environmental concern and associated research challenges.

What Prevents Change? The problems of climate change are in part problems of inaction including the inaction of individual citizens: Why do people not demand more effective political action on climate change? Why do people not take greater steps to reduce their own carbon

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footprints? Why is climate change not treated as a priority? Philosophical and particularly ethical examination of the phenomenon of climate change thus needs an appreciation of both (a) the psychological drivers of climate change itself, and (b) psychological factors that bear on the efficacy of proposed responses to climate change. The material and topic of the previous section is likely going to be relevant here too. One reason for being interested in descriptive environmental ethics might be, for example, that it is helpful in determining what kinds of solutions to climate change are likely to be (un)successful. Likewise, a rich descriptive understanding of people’s existing ethical outlooks in relation to the environment and environmental issues may suggest new, or speak to existing, hypotheses about the psychological roots of environmentally destructive behaviors. However, research on both psychological drivers of climate change and psychological barriers facing proposed solutions can go far beyond the kind of general insights provided by descriptive environmental ethics of the kind described in the previous section (i.e., that which focused on the endorsement of general worldviews or values). For a review of theoretical frameworks attempting to explain drivers and barriers to proenvironmental action, see Kollmuss and Agyeman (2002). This section highlights six types of barriers identified in the psychological literature. Other surveys identify as many as 29 factors (see Gifford, 2011). For other important surveys of similar terrain that highlight other themes, see Markowitz and Shariff (2012) and Rottman et al. (2015).

Habits What an individual did in the past is highly predictive of what they will do in the future (Linder et al., 2022; Ouellette & Wood, 1998; Sutton & Sheeran, 2003). A habit is simply a behavior with a history of repetition (Orbell & Verplanken, 2015). Unfortunately, many such behaviors significantly contribute to our personal carbon footprints (e.g., the ways we travel, how we heat/cool our homes, how we cook, and wash). Breaking or changing habits is difficult because habitual behaviors have a high degree of automaticity, persist when there is no reward, can be performed without effortful cognitive mediation (e.g., with low self-control), and are cued in stable contexts (Orbell & Verplanken, 2015). Furthermore, the attempt of one individual in a household to change their habit(s) can have widespread impacts on others in a household (i.e., on the habits and routines of others within the household), and the complexity of the negotiations this entails can pose another barrier to change (Walker & Hope, 2020; Nicholls & Strengers, 2015; Graves & Roelich, 2021). However, making more proenvironmental practices habitual can offer the promise of sustained change with aggregated benefits to the environment (Nielsen et al., 2021).

Loss Aversion Loss aversion is the phenomenon of weighting potential losses more than potential gains. One is, for example, unlikely to play a game of coin toss with a fair coin in

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which an outcome of heads results in losing £1000 and an outcome of tails results in gaining £1500. Making changes in one’s life to address the climate change crisis will in many cases involve some costs as well as potential gains. Accounting for loss aversion is potentially very important when predicting consumers’ responses to incentives introduced to steer them toward lower carbon choices and thus the impacts of policy tools such as carbon taxes (see Knobloch et al., 2019). Psychologists have explored the impact of loss aversion in cases such as willingness to swap energy tariffs finding, e.g., that those with higher loss aversion were less willing to swap to a “time of use” tariff (a tariff structured to incentivize energy use at offpeak times and so reduce the use of fossil fuels) (Nicolson et al., 2017).

Distance/Discounting Another important barrier to change is the fact that many of the key benefits of successful climate change mitigation and adaption are (or are perceived to be) relatively far away in terms of social connection, geography, and time, while people’s motivations to reduce their carbon footprint, take political action, and so on prioritize issues that are closer to home (self-interest, one’s family, one’s community/country, and one’s generation). Psychological research can help us get a more informed understanding of how any such (perception of) distance affects individuals’ behavior in relation to climate change (for a review of some relevant literature, see McDonald et al., 2015). The understanding of distance appealed to here is a very broad one and has many potential dimensions. One dimension of distance concerns distance from the self. Insofar as effective climate change action is perceived as having benefits distant from the self, people’s underlying values are going to be significant, e.g., the difference between self-interest and more “transcendent” prosocial or ecocentric values. Psychological models of proenvironmental behavior vary in the role that they give to constructs such as self-interest and altruism. Those who view proenvironmental behavior as being predominantly prosocially motivated tend to refer back to either the Value-Belief-Norm model (mentioned above) or to Schwartz’s Norm Activation Model (e.g., Schwartz, 1977). In turn, those focusing on selfinterest as the main motivator tend to favor the “Theory of Planned Behaviour” developed by Ajzen (1991) (see Bamberg & Möser, 2007 for discussion). However, it is common to recognize that, for instance, endorsement of altruistic and biospheric (rather than egoistic or hedonic) values have been found to be among the best predictors of proenvironmental action, reflecting life goals such as caring for others (Bouman & Steg, 2020). Another aspect of a perceived distance of climate change is spatial distance. The populations who stand to benefit most from effective climate change action are often not the populations whose actions (or failure to act) will suffer the greatest negative impacts. Those in the global North with the highest carbon footprints, for example, are at some distance from those in the global South who are most at risk from climate change (UNDP, 2019). Psychological research bears on this issue. For example,

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Spence et al. (2012) find that the perception that climate change was closer, including spatially (as well as various other dimensions relevant to this section), was associated with higher levels of concern about climate change and preparedness to act. Another relevant aspect of a perceived distance of climate change is time. Effective mitigation and adaption require action in the present to avoid problems in the future. As people tend to discount future value in some way and to some extent, a greater perceived temporal distance between the investment called for and the payoff promised is likely to affect the priority given to taking relevant proenvironmental action. The psychological dynamics of temporal discounting have been studied extensively in economics (Ericson & Laibson, 2019), and there are studies which investigate its application to support for climate policy (Sparkman et al., 2021). Findings include the potential importance of “legacy motives”; Hurlstone et al. (2020) report that intergenerational discounting is mitigated by giving participants messaging that made them more aware of their own death, and of intergeneration power asymmetries, and want to “reciprocate forwards the beneficent acts of prior generations.” Ho et al. (2020) find similar reductions in discounting when participants are asked to vividly imagine specific future actions associated with climate change mitigation action that they would carry out.

Autonomy/Efficacy A distinct, although connected, barrier to change is where individual action is (or is perceived to be) ineffective in the face of a problem on the scale of global climate change (see Aitken et al., 2011). A review of meta-analyses of the existing literature on climate adaptation behaviors found that among the strongest predictors of climate adaptation behavior was the belief that taking measures would be effective and the belief that one has the ability to engage in the relevant behavior (Bechtoldt et al., 2021). An added danger is that the bigger a problem is (or is presented as being), the more likely it will be perceived as beyond an individual’s control or ability to make a difference (Niemeyer et al., 2005).

Denialism/Skepticism What leads people to doubt the reality of climate change, its causes, its effects, and about the efficacy of certain actions and policies? What attracts people to climate change denialism and leads them to take an active part in campaigns of climate denialism? Research investigating the factors underlying climate skepticism and denialism, and testing potential strategies for addressing them, is key to understanding potentially important barriers to wider change. Research has found, for example, that misinformation is much more effective in promoting climate skepticism than framings intended to promote belief in climate change were at promoting belief in climate change (e.g., Rode et al., 2021), and that messaging that emphasizes

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scientific consensus coupled with an “inoculation” against future misinformation can be effective in combatting climate misinformation (e.g., Van der Linden et al., 2017; Maertens et al., 2020).

Rationalization Another barrier to change is that in an attempt to absolve themselves of responsibility and/or manage uncomfortable emotions such as guilt people may rationalize a variety of high-emission behaviors (e.g., air travel) despite having a commitment to, e.g., reducing their carbon footprint (Gifford, 2011). Many studies explore the role of “moral licensing” in such rationalizations. Moral licensing occurs when a moral action is seen to permit a subsequent immoral action (Nilsson et al., 2017); imagine a kind of bank account where “good” deeds give credit that can be redeemed against later “bad” deeds (Dolan & Galizzi, 2015). There is also evidence that this process can work in reverse with individuals undertaking “purging” behaviors to make good on bad deeds (Dolan & Galizzi, 2015). A related concept to moral licensing is that of compensatory beliefs. Although now applied to environmentally significant behaviors, much of the empirical work on compensatory beliefs lies within health psychology. One study, for example, found that dieters tempted with high-calorie foods spontaneously generated compensatory beliefs (e.g., “that future food deprivation will compensate for the present food consumption”) (Monson et al., 2008). Compensatory beliefs can be seen as a cognitive strategy for striking a balance between maximizing pleasure (e.g., eating cake) and minimizing harm (e.g., avoiding unhealthy weight gain) (Rabiau et al., 2006). Unfortunately, where these beliefs are inaccurate and in instances where the belief itself assuages feelings of guilt resulting in subsequent inaction – harm may result. This is especially a risk in the case of environmental behaviors where the costs and benefits tend to be complex to calculate and also less directly impact on the individual making it easier to fudge the accounting (Hope et al., 2018).

What Are the Effects of Change? So far, this chapter has considered one direction of influence. How can psychology identify psychological factors that contribute to the climate change problem (both drivers of change and barriers to action)? Now, the other direction should be considered. What are the psychological effects of the climate change problem? Psychological impacts are a significant aspect of climate change that bears on the philosophy of climate change. Climate change and our efforts to mitigate it and adapt to it (will) have significant impacts on human populations. Psychology can help us achieve a richer understanding of those impacts – without which any ethical analysis would be incomplete. One particular focus in the literature concerns the relationship between environmental conditions and policies, and well-being and mental health.

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Direct Psychological Effects of a Changing Climate Climate change is associated with the increased frequency and severity of extreme weather events, and the impacts of these can lead to wide-spreading negative consequences. These include, for example, disruption to transport and education, reduced access to medicine, loss of homes, the destruction of communities, and increases to conflict. People who experience environmental or associated disasters may suffer from mental health issues and psychological traumas including PTSD, anxiety, depression, and grief concerning the loss of valued places and things (Cianconi et al., 2020). Climate change can therefore have both direct and acute negative impacts on well-being which psychological research can help us better anticipate (and perhaps take steps to mitigate) (Burke et al., 2018). Potentially relevant here also is research on a traditional topic of interest in environmental psychology: the physical and mental health benefits of contact with natural environments (see Martin et al. (2020), for a recent study and literature review). These might be relevant to consider as opportunities for contact with nature are not the same under all envisaged future climate change scenarios (due to the effects of climate change, and mitigation and adaptation efforts).

Indirect Psychological Effects of a Changing Climate The mental health impacts of climate change also include indirect emotional effects such as anxiety about climate change (Clayton, 2020; Doherty & Clayton, 2011). These emotional responses may be elicited by media coverage and may also include hopelessness, anger, grief, and apathy (Clayton, 2020). An individual may, for instance, be concerned about possible future harm to grand/children or experience anxiety about the future environment (e.g., loss of a place due to rising sea levels). The construct of climate change anxiety has perhaps received the most attention in the literature, as a specific and measurable source of anxiety which can be differentiated from other sources that have more serious and direct impacts to the individual (Clayton & Karazsia, 2020). Impacts of climate anxiety can include, for example, insomnia (Ojala et al., 2021), and there are anecdotal reports from media reporting which include “panic attacks, loss of appetite, irritability, [and] weakness” (Doherty & Clayton, 2011). It is worth recognizing that while climate anxiety can be an unconstructive and clearly negative component to some individuals’ well-being, it can also be part of a constructive “adaptive pro-environmental response” (Verplanken et al., 2020). In addition to “climate anxiety,” a range of other terms have been coined to describe the results of studies examining people’s various and complex responses to environmental issues, including the following: “ecoanxiety” or a dread of receiving negative environmental information; “solastalgia” which describes the chronic distress associated with negative environmental change (especially at a local level); and “econostalgia” or the perception that a place was better (e.g., more ecologically diverse) in the past (Clayton, 2020, see also list in Cianconi et al., 2020). In a recent

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study, Stanley et al. (2021)’s findings suggest that it is “eco-anger” rather than “ecoanxiety” or “eco-depression” that is most adaptive, being associated with better mental health and more engagement in activism. (Interestingly, despite many claims/intimations in the literature that these are known or central symptoms of climate anxiety or ecoanxiety, the above and similar lists of symptoms seem to be based ultimately on references to claims made in media coverage of eco-anxiety – likely all based on a single press release – and the referenced media reports mostly explicitly attribute the list to a single “eco-therapist” called Melissa Pickett. Swim et al. (2009)’s reference to Nobel (2007) seems to be typical in this respect. However, such symptoms are of course congruent with a form of anxiety.)

How Can Change Happen? Climate change is a significant problem which humanity somehow needs to solve. A desire to help solve the problem lies behind most applied research on climate change. So far, we have seen some of the ways in which psychology can help us better understand the nature of the problem that climate change presents to humanity. For example, which moral outlooks may be implicated in climate change? Why is climate change happening? What barriers are there to effective mitigation? What kinds of negative impacts does climate change have on us? While these contributions clearly help steer and inform our responses to climate change, the way in which they do so is somewhat indirect. Their main emphasis is in understanding and diagnosing the problem and not directly in proposing strategies or solutions. So, in this final section, the chapter turns to ways in which psychology’s contribution to the design of effective responses (usually described as “interventions”) to the problems of climate change is somewhat more direct, with a more constructive and less diagnostic character. An effective response to climate change requires widespread change of one kind or another – whether at the level of individual consumer behavior, at the level of the political will, or somewhere else. Psychology can contribute by suggesting more or less concrete strategies for supporting and facilitating such changes. In an early agenda-setting paper, Steg and Vlek (2009) identified a number of key lessons in relation to individual behavior change. One is that interventions aiming to address a “knowledge deficit” in relation to climate change are typically not particularly effective in changing behavior. A second is that strategies that involve strengthening people’s commitment to acting in proenvironmental ways, setting goals, getting them to form “implementation intentions,” and providing prompts to encourage action are more effective than simply providing information. A third is that interventions that provide either social support or role models can be effective, for example, by giving information about descriptive norms (e.g., on how much energy similar households to yours use) (Schultz et al., 2007). And there are many other lessons in this vein that one can find in the literature. It is widely found, for example, that benefit framings are more effective than sacrifice framings in climate

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messaging (see Gifford & Comeau, 2011). There are also more structural interventions which aim to adjust the incentives faced by agents to make proenvironmental options more attractive or through “nudging” agents toward the desired behavior, and more relationship-building/community-based approaches (see Grilli & Curtis, 2021 for a recent review of these; Steg and Vlek make some comments too). However, it is noted by many that environmental psychology has tended to focus on influencing individual consumer behavior in ways that often promise only relatively low climate impacts even considered collectively. A more recent agendasetting paper, Nielsen et al. (2021), identifies two “overlooked dimensions” in such research and encourages that they are explored in future research. The first concerns the fact that individuals occupy many roles and their role as consumers may often be that in which they have least influence. Nielsen et al. encourage psychologists to give greater attention to actions and changes that are available to people in their roles as investors/producers, participants in organizations, members of communities, and citizens. The second concerns the fact that some kinds of behavior change would have much greater payoff than others. Nielsen et al. (2021) urge a smarter approach to psychological research in this area with a greater focus on interventions with a high carbon-reduction potential (e.g., influencing dietary changes or choice of home). Nielsen et al.’s encouragements can hopefully be seen as a prediction of themes that will be a greater focus of environmental psychology in coming years. For an in-depth introduction to methods used to encourage proenvironmental behavior, see Steg et al. (2013). And see Ockwell and Whitmarsh (2015) for an in-depth critique of different strategies for behavior change including, for example, public communication campaigns.

Scope for Further Interaction While both philosophical and psychological research on climate change is admirably interdisciplinary, there is scope for greater interaction between the philosophy of climate change and the psychological sciences (and between environmental philosophy and psychology more generally). Before finishing, it is worth highlighting one possible form this might be expected to take: experimental environmental philosophy. Over the past 20 years, it has become more and more common for philosophers to incorporate the methods of empirical psychology into their research and to receive training in empirical methods. This movement is known as “Experimental Philosophy” and has seen the birth of vibrant interdisciplinary, empirical literatures in many areas of philosophy – from the metaphysics of causation to epistemology and to metaethics – in which philosophical and psychological questions are intimately connected (for an early overview, see Knobe, 2007). As yet, however, experimental philosophy has made few inroads into environmental philosophy or the philosophy of climate change. Disciplinary boundaries are of course a little blurry, and much of the empirical work mentioned above might, in some sense, count as experimental philosophy of climate change. However, climate-

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change-oriented projects are certainly not commonly encountered in the experimental philosophy community. Exceptions include the following: Ranney et al. (2019), Martínez and Winter (2021), and Kopec and Bruner (2022). And there was a similar call for such work by Frey (2014). Certainly, there is no identifiable interdisciplinary subfield, for example, at the intersection between philosophical and psychology work on climate change or environmental issues more generally. And key philosophical textbooks and anthologies in the area, even if there is some engagement with empirical psychology, contain no empirical philosophical work but plenty of projects amenable to the contribution of empirical methods (see Budolfson et al., 2021; Gardiner et al., 2010). This chapter does not take any particular view as to why experimental philosophy has made few inroads into environmental philosophy or the philosophy of climate change. A guess might be a sociological one. During the twentieth century, attitudes to the interaction between science and philosophy tend to have been divided within philosophy. On the one hand, there is a form of naturalist position. Philosophers on this side of the divide tend to see philosophy as continuous with the sciences and perhaps hold science in esteem as a mode of enquiry. On the other hand, there is an antiscientism position. Philosophers on this side of the divide are skeptical about such attitudes to science and the ability of scientific methods to contribute to philosophy. It is understandable that an environmental philosophy that rejected the exploitation and domination of nature in which science and its methods were implicated might not be the first area of philosophy to be receptive to the experimental philosophy movement. But, regardless of why experimental philosophy has made few inroads into environmental philosophy and the philosophy of climate change to date, this should be expected to change. Experimental philosophy has recently made headway into applied areas of philosophy such as bioethics (Earp et al., 2020), philosophy of law (Prochownik, 2021), and animal ethics (Persson, 2018). Experimental philosophy has also been argued as having much to contribute to projects in so-called “conceptual engineering” (Nado, 2021; Andow, 2020) – a new term used to capture philosophical projects that aim to improve our concepts, projects which have long been part of environmental philosophy. The philosophy of climate change (and environmental philosophy more generally) should be expected to follow close behind. And, of course, there is a historical precedent for a close relation between experimental and environmental philosophy with Arne Naess having a strong claim to being one of the first philosophers in both fields (Murphy, 2014; Naess, 1938, 1973).

Conclusion This chapter aims simply to highlight a few ways in which the philosophy of climate change can benefit from engaging with psychological research. These were grouped under four themes. Environmental psychology, broadly construed, is helping us to get a purchase on various issues that are central to climate ethics. How do we relate

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to nature? – getting a better understanding of where and how environmental issues and concerns fall within people’s moral worldviews and how these feed into their intentions and behavior. What prevents change? – getting a better understanding of why effective action on climate change can be difficult and the barriers that effective interventions need to overcome or navigate. What are the effects of change? – getting a richer understanding of the negative mental health outcomes that will and are already resulting from climate change and the prospect of climate change. How can change happen? – getting a better understanding of opportunities for change and what strategies might make for effective climate change action. Such a richer understanding of the psychology of climate change is invaluable particularly for an ethical analysis where issues of feasibility and motivation are central.

Cross-References ▶ Climate Change and Decision Theory ▶ Climate Change and Environmental Justice ▶ Climate Change and Global Justice ▶ Climate Change and the Environmental Humanities ▶ Climate Change, Uncertainty, and Policy ▶ Normative Challenges in Climate Change Economics ▶ Philosophical Perspectives on Climate Anxiety

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Climate Change and Legal Theory Michele Carducci

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Historical Relationship Between Climate, Natural Resources, and Law . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Climate System in Legal Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . State Sovereignty and “Planetary Boundaries” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tragedy of the Horizon and Metabolic Rift . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Climate Change and Human Rights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Climate Change and Democracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Legal Practice Between “Tornado” and “Abortion” Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions: Law in the Weather-World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Legal theory has always considered the historical relationship between climate and law under four perspectives: the influence of climate on political regimes, the social dependence of organizations and regulations on the types of energy used, the emergence of the issue of environmental sustainability due to the exploitation of nature, the conditioning of energy production systems on the legal qualification of space, and other legal categories (section “The Historical Relationship Between Climate, Natural Resources, and Law”). With the recent climate emergency, new challenges have arisen. The first concerns the planetary space of the emergency. In particular, the problem arises on two fronts: the relationship between the definition of the space of the climate system and the spatial concepts of individual legal systems (section “The Climate System in Legal Theory”), and the relationship between state sovereignty over natural resources and the plane-

M. Carducci (*) Centro di Ricerca Euro Americano sulle Politiche Costituzionali, University of Salento, Lecce, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_22

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tary scope of climate stability (section “State Sovereignty and “Planetary Boundaries”). However, the climate emergency is also urgent and a matter of time. This situation undermines the linear representation of legal processes (section “Tragedy of the Horizon and Metabolic Rift”). Unprecedented scenarios open in discourses on human rights, which foreshadow the emergence of a human right to a stable and safe climate (section “Climate Change and Human Rights”), and on democracy, whose deliberative and representative functions turn out to be dysfunctional for the times and space of the climate emergency (section “Climate Change and Democracy”). The most recent legal practices try to react to these difficulties in three ways: through the so-called climate change litigations strategies, by embedding the rights of nature in Constitutions or other legal sources, or via the construction of transnational juridical infrastructures consistent with the logic of “planetary boundaries” (section “The Legal Practice Between “Tornado” and “Abortion” Politics”). Keywords

Climate change law · Tragedy of the horizon · Metabolic rift · Status oecologicus · Tornado politics, weather-world

Introduction Climate change is discussed in legal theory from four perspectives: formal, substantial, epistemological, and axiological. The formal perspective includes all the analyses of the sources of international climate law, starting with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) dated 1992. The UNFCCC is an international legal instrument with a dual content: on the one hand, it provides legal definitions based on science, sets objectives, and establishes the principles and obligations of States (see Preamble and Articles 1–6); on the other hand, it enables (with Article 7) the so-called Conferences of the Parties (COPs), a multilateral process aimed at producing further State objectives and obligations, which integrate the Convention. Furthermore, the formula of Article 2, “any related legal instruments that the Conference of the Parties may adopt,” allows COPs to create new rules and even new sources of law, which are added to the Convention itself. The Convention, therefore, is not only a dynamic legal document but also the source of new rules (Boran, 2020). The Convention is to be interpreted on the basis of both Vienna Convention on the law of treaties of 1969 and the Constitutions of the States that signed it, to the extent that the Constitutions contain themselves principles, rules, and obligations that are consistent and compatible with the international ones (Carducci, 2021). Under the substantive perspective, legal theories discuss the consequences of climate change on the sources of law (normative, jurisprudential, and doctrinal) of State constitutional systems. This field includes studies on climate mitigation and adaptation policies (Hollo et al., 2013), those on the law of climate disasters

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(Lyster & Verchick, 2018), and those on the legal nature of causality, damage, and climate responsibility (in terms of both Responsibility and Liability) (Mechler et al., 2019). Research on “climate change litigation strategies” and their function of promoting climate mitigation (Rodríguez-Garavito, 2023) can also be put in the same context. The third perspective has an epistemological character. Knowledge of the legal problems linked to climate change requires understanding the principles of thermodynamics and the mechanism of entropy and energy (H.T. Odum & E.C. Odum, 1976). With the rise of thermodynamics, epistemology has abandoned Cartesian reductionism and the view of the world as a product of cause and effect to open up to the discovery of complex and mutual interactions of matter and energy. This turn has not immediately affected social scientists. Only from the second half of the twentieth century have thermodynamics principles been studied in connection with economic and legal organizations’ physical and natural limits. This interdisciplinary approach is due to authors such as Karl William Kapp and Nicholas GeorgescuRoegen for economics and Niklas Luhmann and Joaquin Herrera Flores for legal theory. Their contribution, however, did not shake most jurists’ ontological and reductionist dualism. In legal systems, a double separation persists between the physical-chemical universe (“things” and “goods”) and the human universe (will) and between human relations and the rest of the planet Earth, as well as an asymmetry between the (short) time of human action and the (unlimited) time of terrestrial thermodynamics. The climate emergency has definitively discarded these dualistic narratives (Kim, 2021): the emerging instability of the whole climate system and all its components (atmosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere) impacts all flows of matter and energy, including the energy/matter of which any human being is composed. The very concept of the Anthropocene reflects this awareness. The debate on the Anthropocene and the climate emergency has led to new research programs focused on the relationship between law and the use of climate sciences, on the legal and political significance of the appropriation of the atmosphere through emissions of CO2, on the consequences of climate change in terms of equity and justice (Folkers, 2020), and on the need to build legal infrastructures and planetary governance tools, capable of providing planetary answers to the systemic problem of climate change (Kotzé & Kim, 2019). Finally, the axiological perspective discusses the relationship between climate change and human rights, democracy, and theories of justice (Brown & Taylor, 2015). The debate on climate change and law span all these perspectives, emphasizing some elements rather than others. Consequently, exposing them in separate “blocks” would not allow a comprehensive view. All four perspectives have in common, implicitly or explicitly, two elements: the knowledge of the historical evolution of the relationship between law, energy and climate, and the consideration of the consequences of the planetary climate emergency on the legal categories of time and space. Therefore, it is worth starting from them.

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The Historical Relationship Between Climate, Natural Resources, and Law The cultural history of climate has analyzed the relationship between climate and the human organization of society, focusing on the intellectual representations of atmospheric phenomena. Instead, legal and political theories have considered the relationship between climate, natural resources, climate change, and law in four lines of research of the so-called Global History: the influence of climate on political regimes, the dependence of the forms of social organization and regulation on the type of energy employed, the emergence of environmental sustainability as a consequence of the exploitation of nature, and the conditioning of the energy production systems upon the legal qualification of space, and other legal categories (Nicolini, 2022). Sieferle and Marquardt (2009) divide the global history of law into energetic eras. Each of them has been characterized by different modes of interaction between places, energy, legal relations, ecosystem functions, and flows of matter. The modes of production and distribution of goods as well as the contents of freedoms and related legal regimes depended on these modes of interaction. Therefore, the human use of energy has not simply interacted with the climate system. It has also changed over time the eco-dependence of human action on nature, and it has altered the energy return of freedoms, namely, the relationship between the energy necessary for the concrete exercise of freedoms and the sources of such energy. In “Paleolithic” era, humanity, living mainly by gathering and hunting to survive, favored the natural cycles of ecosystemic goods, resources, and services, adapting to them. Paleolithic humans were simple “ecosystem consumers” subordinated to nature. In the “biochemical” era, humanity learned to practice agriculture and pastoralism, thereby reproducing and transforming natural resources and assets. Humans were transformed into “ecosystem producers,” being no longer just “consumers.” However, agricultural goods and livestock are perishable goods, to be cared for and preserved. Consequently, the human functioning was still subordinate to nature. In the “fossil age,” on the other hand, humanity discovered new natural resources (the so-called subterranean forest). These were not consumed to survive, as they can be neither eaten nor drunk, but they allowed unprecedented processes of energy transformation. Humans evolved into “ecosystem manipulators” of nature. Human beings definitively emancipated themselves from biochemical nature and produced goods of direct or indirect fossil derivation, with a use and exchange value higher than even the primary subsistence goods. Ultimately, fossil energy dissociated human beings into two asymmetrical dimensions: the consumable one and the natural survival one, within a growing differentiation between basic human needs, which remain eco-dependent – eating, drinking, and reproducing like Homo climaticus (Campillo Álvarez, 2008) – and artificial needs for exchange and consumption like Homo consumens (Bauman, 2007). During the twentieth century, constitutional freedoms were transformed by this dissociation and the Welfare State was also built upon it. In other words, social

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well-being (to be maintained or promoted, depending on the context) was “based on carbon” and on overcoming thermodynamic constraints through the law (Casciarriri et al., 2022), as explained by Timothy Mitchell (2011), Andreas Malm (2016), Jeremy Rifkin (1980), and Michel Serres (2008), that is, achieved through an unprecedented geophysical-constitutional experiment that at the same time consumed, within a few generations, resources accumulated in the subsoil in the previous millions of years, and then released increasing quantities of GHG gases into the atmosphere, thereby yielding pollution, global warming, and climate change (Dixson-Declève et al., 2022; Pirani, 2018). Research on “social metabolism” and “bio-economy” has confirmed this scenario: fossil energy has always promoted freedoms as “material” opportunities (in terms of “progress,” “development,” “growth,” “emancipation,” “social cohesion”), but, on the other hand, it has caused increasing entropy in the Earth system, as fossil resources are exhaustible and they have a negative impact on the Earth system. Several studies have confirmed this idea. Four very recent ones are worthy of note: the one on the so-called equation of the Anthropocene, the one concerning the “consumptagenic” nature of contemporary social subjects, the reconstruction of the energy consumption necessary for social well-being in recent decades, and the one concerning the prevalence of anthropomass over biomass. The “Anthropocene equation” has allowed to measure the pressure of growth and maintenance of human well-being on the physical and chemical cycles of the Earth, demonstrating how that well-being has become, in the span of less than a century, quantitatively prevalent and dominant over any natural process, due to fossil resources consumption (Gaffney & Steffen, 2017; Heijungs et al., 2017). The second study focusses on how the material autonomy of access to rights and freedoms has conditioned civil coexistence, directing it towards lifestyles based on the growth of material consumption, the so-called consumptagenic lifestyles, increasingly predominant over basic survival needs (Friel, 2020). The third study shows that, in the last 70 years, human activities have exceeded the energy consumption of the previous 11,700 years, due to the use of fossil fuels. Finally, the fourth study considers the load of the production of material goods necessary for human consumption on the biomass of the planet (Syvitski et al., 2020). Only the recent Andean Constitutions of the “Buen Vivir” (of indigenous origin, therefore pre-fossil) express an attempt to overcome this vicious circle, abandoning the myth of the Welfare State and attempting to legitimize the “Caring State” and the so-called post-development State (Amirante & Bagni, 2022). However, the phenomena of pollution and anthropogenic CO2 emissions have highlighted another problematic feature of the fossil era: the qualification of space and legal entities according to the energy production systems. The evolution of law is a history of appropring spaces. In this perspective, constitutional power has been nothing more than an “ecological” power (Folkers, 2020), that is to say, a delimitation of the space for the appropriation of natural resources. This “ecological” power has characterized the Western legal tradition, producing an order of space, structured on two different relationships: a place of

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physical objects, in relation to the human being, and a place of exclusively human relations, distinct from physical reality. The distinction thus created a separation between the order of natural things and the order of social relations. With fossil energy, this power has extended to the atmosphere, identifying it as a new territory for the conquest of the “ecological” power of Western law, through anthropogenic CO2 emissions. This representation of all the dimensions of the climate system has generated further consequences in the relationship between law and the Earth system: for example, the division between private law (as an order of relations between human beings and things) and public law (as an order of relations between human beings in the dialectic of freedom and power), between soil and subsoil in the regulation of property rights, between political freedoms and economic freedoms. It was also the basis for the conception of the legal order as a necessary artificial structure opposing the power of nature (de Jasay, 1985). However, this framework does not occur in other legal traditions, from Islamic to “chthonic” ones (Glenn, 2000). For this reason, it has fueled the so-called epistemic extractivism, or the diffusion of Western “ecological” power on other ways of human coexistence in the Earth system (Folkers, 2020). In other words, the Western legal tradition has imposed itself through the eradication of the historical memory of colonized communities and the denial of their knowledge, forcing them to exploit natural resources for purposes unconnected with their rules of coexistence (Grosfoguel, 2019). During the twentieth century, the numerous economic and institutional theories concerning the so-called underdevelopment, dependence, the sovereignty of natural resources, and sustainable development were continuously elaborated within the original matrix of Western law.

The Climate System in Legal Theory Climate is not object of a specific legal definition. The UNFCCC defines climate change as a “a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods” (Article 1.2), and the climate system as “the totality of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere and geosphere and their interactions” (Article 1.3). It also clarifies that the Convention’s objective is “(the) stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system” (Article 2) and recognizes climate change and its adverse effects as “common concern of humankind.” These linguistic formulas are both denotative and connotative since, on the one hand, they identify the “space” of the climate system. On the other hand, they negatively qualify the “effects” of anthropogenic greenhouse gases as a “common concern.” In EU law, the UNFCCC formulas have recently been integrated and updated by Article 2 of EU Regulation n. 2020/852 dated 18th June 2020.

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Legal theory uses these linguistic constructions in various ways. Some theories disregard them and frame the climate within the category of “Global Commons” (Boran, 2020), in which the issue is the classic “tragedy” of access to and use of common resources without reciprocal damage. This perspective tends to confuse the climate with the climate system. The climate cannot be appropriated, being a variation of the temperature over time. On the other hand, all the climate system components can be appropriated. In particular, the atmosphere, the only space for effectively releasing greenhouse gases, can be appropriated (Vanderheiden, 2008). Consequently, it is possible of the “tragedy of the Commons” referring to the “components” of the climate system, not the “system” itself. Other theories use the category of “Commons” in a critical perspective, to demonstrate the limits of the dominant point of view on climate change governance, entrusted to international agreements between States (Boran, 2020). Top-down solutions cannot solve all the problems related to the use of different resources present in the local contexts of the climate system: from soil to water services, biodiversity, ecosystemic vulnerabilities, etc. For this reason, the agreements on the climate would mostly seem destined to fail. On the contrary, the involvement of local actors in different territorial contexts, framed as “Commons,” would favor processes of knowledge of the single territories as well as cooperation and mutual accountability in the fight against climate change (Paavola, 2012). Other scholars reduce the normative constructions of the UNFCCC to a system of state imputation of CO2 emissions and differentiation of responsibilities between States, even if climate change is legally attributed to any human activity, which, independently of its content, contributes directly or indirectly to global warming (see Article 1.2 UNFCCC). Therefore, even these interpretations do not consider the concrete articulation of the climate system. Another interpretation underlines the transformation of the legal nature of CO2 from the simple phenomenon of anthropogenic emission, as indicated in the UNFCCC, to a resource legally identified as scarce due to the new contents of the 2015 Paris Agreement (McKinnon, 2015). The commitment to keep the global average temperature increase below 1.5
, well below 2
C compared to preindustrial levels, has imposed a quantitative legal limit on emissions into the atmosphere with respect to the time required to achieve climate stabilization and the emission reduction objectives indicated by international, supranational, and national legal instruments (2030 and 2050). Consider, for example, EU Regulations n. 2018/842, 2018/1999, 2021/241, and 2021/1119, which define binding annual greenhouse gas emission reductions by Member States from 2021 to 2030, contributing to meet commitments under the Paris Agreement. This limit is generally calculated by using the formula of the so-called global carbon budget, which is the quantity of greenhouse gases that can still be emitted without exceeding the aforementioned quantitative and temporal limits. The new constraints and objectives of the Paris Agreement raise important questions on two fronts: that of the differentiation of the responsibilities of States; and that of the qualification of emissions with respect to the human activities that produce them.

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The first group of questions can be summarized as follows: How can one distribute the carbon budget among the different States? Is it possible to subtract the historical emissions of the States from the residual carbon budget, in order to distribute the remaining emissions fairly? How can one calculate the mitigation and adaptation costs of the various States, compared to the losses and damage caused by previous historical emissions? These questions also include global equity issues, as required by the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement. The second group of questions refers to the issue of the existence or not of a “right to emit” greenhouse gases into the atmosphere (Boran, 2020), given that the UNFCCC does not prohibit it, the possibility of differentiating emissions into “survival” and “luxury” (Boran, 2020) the division of the mitigation costs in terms of this allocation and the possibility to tax the “unnecessary” anthropogenic emissions (Shue, 1993). These questions appear unprecedented. However, their origin can be traced back to the human history of the appropriation of climatic space. It was the geopolitics of the climate system that laid the foundations for those asymmetries and inequalities between human activities, which then had repercussions on the evaluation of “rights to emit.” Initially, the appropriation of the climate system has invested its horizontal dimension of biosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, and lithosphere. From the “conquest” to the colonial empires, geopolitics has produced asymmetries and inequalities exclusively in relation to the horizontal space of the Earth, both with reference to human subjects (just think of the slave trade and slavery) and with regard to natural resources (e.g., extractivism and land grabbing). With the industrial revolution and the fossil era, geopolitical appropriation has become vertical within the atmosphere. Emitting anthropogenic greenhouse gases through the large-scale combustion of fossil fuels has meant appropriating the atmospheric space in its molecular structure (CO2, CH4 etc.), thereby creating a real vertical colonization of the climate system, which has been added to previous horizontal colonization of the Earth. The climate system has always been a space politicized by human action. With the verticalization caused by anthropogenic emissions, this politicization is enriched by three new elements (Folkers, 2020). 1. Unlike the horizontal one, atmospheric politicization is not delimitated in any way, as the thermodynamics of global warming and climate change is planetary, as shown by the scientific descriptions of the “planetary boundaries,” of the “safe operating space,” of the “feedback loop” and of the “global tipping points.” Thus, the appropriation of the atmosphere projects vertically but causes horizontally extending effects on every other part of the climate system. 2. Humanity as a species participates in the politicization of the atmosphere, but with qualitative and quantitative differences in the attribution of emissions, from both an individual point of view (e.g., the distinction between emissions from economic activity and those from consumption activities, cultural, touristic, etc.) and geographic view (emissions in countries where fossil resources are extracted, such as the rentier States, emissions in the countries of production of export goods, emission in the countries of import and consumption of those goods).

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3. The negative effects of this politicization do not consist only in global warming, which occurs everywhere, regardless of the geographical origin of the emission and the type of human action that caused it. They also involve the chemical composition of the atmosphere and all the other components of the climate system, multiplying the imbalances of the horizontal and vertical space of the Earth and of all the human subjects who live there. In this new scenario, the sphere of human justice no longer corresponds to a horizontal political space artificially delimited by law. It coincides with the entire natural space of the climate system, definitively politicized even in its last dimension: the vertical and atmospheric one “conquered” by anthropogenic emissions (Caney, 2012). The denomination of the climate as a “hyperobject” underlines this new spatiotemporal collocation of the human condition, which is difficult to understand through the traditional heuristics of empirical observation (Morton, 2013). The overall consideration of the climate system as the unique space of atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere, and biosphere produces further legal consequences. Within each State, the holder of the public function of protecting the climate system (as indicated by the UNFCCC) can only be the State itself and, therefore, its organs, given that the State holds not only territorial sovereignty but also permanent sovereignty over natural resources (Greco, 2021). This is recalled by various sources of international law, including Articles 1 and 2 of the Chicago Convention of 1944 and the International Law Commission, a permanent subsidiary body of the UN, in the First Report on the Protection of the Atmosphere (A/CN.4/667), of February 14, 2014. This function of protection and custody works for the exclusive benefit of humanity, that is, for each person’s well-being, freedoms, and rights, as stated in the UNFCCC (Preamble and Article 3) and is confirmed by countless sources including Article 25.1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the UN of 1948, the UN Resolution 1803 AG of 14.12.1962, Principles 1 and 21 of the UN Declaration of Stockholm 1972 on the human environment (inserted in the Preamble of the UNFCCC), and above all Article 1.2 of both the UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the UN Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, from 1966. Evidence on the correspondence between the custody of territories and resources, on one hand, and the well-being of people, on the other, also comes from EU law (cf. Case C-266/16 of the Court of Justice of the EU, Opinion of Advocate General Wathelet, according to which state sovereignty over natural resources is a prerequisite of effective custody of territories for the welfare of its inhabitants). Therefore, the State and its organs are subject to the duties of protecting the climate system, corresponding to the territory of its sovereignty. Within the law of each State, this duty is regulated differently. Still, the purpose of protection is always the same: the safeguarding of spaces to protect human beings. Consider the American doctrine of Public Trust, Article 225 of the Brazilian Constitution, Article 20a of the German Basic Law, Article 2051 of the Italian Civil Code, or Article 714 of the French Civil Code.

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In conclusion, the climate system contains various productive elements of qualifications and effects, subject to legal discipline.

State Sovereignty and “Planetary Boundaries” As mentioned, climate change is described as a “common concern of humanity.” This means that the problem of climate change is a matter of planetary humanitarian projection, not reducible only to specific subjects, interests, or rights. For this reason, some argue that there is a need to acknowledge the existence of a “human right to a healthy planet” (“one Planet on Right initiative,” 2021), while others propose to build a real “Earth system law” (Kotzé & Kim, 2019). The planetary logic of the legal discussion about climate change is confirmed by natural sciences, in particular in approaches such as those focused on the “planetary boundaries” and the “Safe and Operating Space” (S.O.S.). Identifying and quantifying the planetary boundaries that are not to be crossed helps to prevent human activities from bringing about irreversible changes in the thermodynamic stability of planet Earth, even when the law of States locally legitimizes these activities. It also makes it possible to verify whether the social welfare objectives of States are compatible with the thermodynamic equilibrium of the Earth system. Therefore, the planetary scenario also highlights the dysfunctionality of traditional concepts of political and territorial unity and state sovereignty with respect to the thermodynamic unity of the climate system. This dysfunctionality undermines some of the foundations of international law and individual States. This holds, in particular, for state sovereignty over natural resources, environmental law, and Tort Law. The legal category of the permanent sovereignty of people and States over their natural resources was established in the second half of the twentieth century for two reasons (Banai, 2016): to strengthen national self-determination after decolonization, thereby allowing State territory to be free from the property rights of foreign investors and States, acquired during the colonial rule; and to promote the exploitation of nature for local economic development purposes. In other words, state sovereignty did not pursue environmental objectives of nature conservation, but the opposite (Brilmayer and Klein 2000–2001). Climate change is forcing the States to redefine this perspective. It poses the classic “dilemma of common aversions” to all States (Weiss & Burke, 2011). All of them have a common interest in avoiding the catastrophic consequences of global warming and climate change. In this perspective, state territory and nature should no longer be conceived as objects of national selfish interests. They should become tools for achieving the stability of the whole planet and therefore of each State. Ultimately, sovereignty over resources would become the object of a “reflective” global interest. Since the security of State resources derives from the security of the whole planetary space, only global cooperation between States would allow to realize the common goal for the benefit of each one’s national interests. However, this need for cooperation is contradictory, for three reasons. First, it still depends on the sovereign will of each State and therefore remains captured by the economic,

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political, and strategic interests of the State, even in the short term. Secondly, the different historical contributions of individual States in anthropogenic emissions must be taken into account. This difference prevents the unitary and homogeneous qualification not only of the responsibilities of individual states towards the thermodynamic stability of the entire planet, but also of the relationship between the national exploitation of natural resources and the level of economic and social development of each individual state. Third, the management of climate change is not only in the hands of States. Global actors such as multinational companies, investment banks, international and supranational organizations are involved in climate governance, directly or indirectly. The State is conditioned by these dynamics. Consequently, the category of State sovereignty over natural resources remains dysfunctional with respect to planetary needs. A similar dysfunctionality also holds as state environmental law is concerned. Climate change is not a simple environmental problem. It relates to a multidimensional and systemic reality involving all human actions and their interconnections. On the contrary, environmental law is built only on evaluating the single or cumulative impacts of certain human actions and on compensations for damage, understood as the only tool for repairing the ecosystemic imbalances of the territory. In this regard, the IPBES (Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services), in its Glossary, speaks of “Institutional Failures”: a) legal failures, given that the regulations simultaneously provide mechanisms to support damaging behavior (such as fossil subsidies) and mechanisms to prevent or punish it (such as enforcement of the “the polluter pays” principle); b) market failures, since all economic activities constantly yield negative externalities, social costs, and transaction costs related to climate change; c) organizational failures, deriving from information and relationship asymmetries between the different actors (public, companies, regulators), involved in the “trap of institutional complexity” (the complexity of the micro decisions that contribute to negative macro effects – Bolognesi & Nahrath, 2020); d) informal failures, ensuing from the loss of trust in institutions due to the inconclusive negotiations based on the presumption that economic and ecological interests are equally balanced and expendable. The UNEP (UN Environment Programme), UNDP (UN Development Programme), and EU have studied specific instances of these failures. However, in so far as climate change is concerned, the detectable insufficiencies of environmental law are placed at two further levels: internally, as environmental law itself can fail in terms of compliance, implementation, enforcement, efficiency, efficacy, and effectiveness (Carducci et al., 2020); externally, as environmental law does not deal with climate change from a planetary perspective. In particular, scholars have emphasized the following four recurrent limits: a) the “chronic disturbance” on ecosystems, due to the sum of impact assessments, regulated by law for separate space-time sectors (considering only the interests of human actors), because of the lack of an integrated analysis in medium and long terms; b) the “tyranny of small decisions,” denounced by William E. Odum, consisting in the fact that the law segments the biosphere, separating it from other spheres of Earth and society; c) the “tyranny of localism,”

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based on the false presumption that participatory local legitimation takes into account planetary perspectives; d) the imitative or bureaucratic reproduction of rules and procedures for assessing environmental impact, which are often indifferent to the complexity of the biodiversity of places and the interconnections between all the components of the climate system (Carducci, 2022). On the other hand, climate change represents a complicated challenge due to the widespread nature of both the causal responsibility of atmospheric changes from greenhouse gases and the distribution of their impacts on the climate system. Climate change has no borders and involves all the elements of the planet Earth, without exception. This planetary characteristic explains the difficulty of framing the phenomenon within the juridical categories of causality, tort, and damage. First, the causal chain leading to climate change is not linear. It does not consist of individual behavior, events, and consequences. Thermodynamic causality is intertwined by innumerable variables and the feedback loops of the various climate system components. The UNFCCC formalizes some elements of this causality. More specifically, the Convention defines four levels of causality, indicated in the Preamble and Article 1. The first level derives from the human activities of greenhouse gas production. These activities are believed to have already “substantially increased the atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases,” causing the first negative effect: the alteration of the natural greenhouse effect. The second causal link depends on the former: “an additional warming of the Earth’s surface and atmosphere,” which, in turn, causes climate change that operates “in addition to natural climate variability.” Finally, global warming and additional climate change are identified as a negative influence on “natural ecosystems and humankind,” with “significant deleterious effects on the composition, resilience, or productivity of natural and managed ecosystems or on the operation of socioeconomic systems or on human health and welfare.” The “negative influence,” so defined in 1992, was updated in 2015, with decision no. 1/CP21 of the UNFCCC, and has been elevated to an “urgent and potentially irreversible threat.” The UNFCCC does not define damages. Article 8 of the Paris Agreement introduces the idea of “losses and damages,” distinguishing between those “associated with the adverse effects of climate change, including extreme weather events and slow onset events” and those “associated with climate change impacts.” Two types of damage manifestations, then, seem to exist: effects directly caused by climate change and negative indirect effects caused by its impacts. Among other things, this differentiation would now seem to be confirmed also by Articles 3 and 9 of EU Regulation n. 2020/852, in the part which lists the six “environmentally sustainable” goals necessary to achieve the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the UN 2030 Agenda and, above all, to combat climate change. In fact, these articles define “environmentally sustainable” economic activities that simultaneously satisfy a double condition: they contribute “substantially” (therefore directly) to the achievement of one or more of the six environmental objectives, and they do not “significantly” (therefore indirectly) damage any of the remaining targets. With the EU Regulation n. 2021/241, this procedure has also been extended to state policies.

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In any case, neither the “loss and damage” formula of the Paris Agreement nor those of Articles 3 and 9 of EU Regulation n. 2020/852 coincide with the category of environmental damage, understood as a single event that has already occurred as a result of a specific action, or with the category of tort, governed by different legal systems. The concrete contents of climate damage are constantly evolving and depend on the progress of scientific knowledge (Gills & Morgan, 2020; Callahan & Mankin, 2022). In other words, identifying and attributing certain impacts to global warming or climate change are reserved to natural sciences. This determines a mismatch between legal categories and scientific explanations. Consider the difference between empirical evidence and scientific evidence of damages due to the fact that the delayed time frame of visible confirmation of the consequences of climate change, determined by thermal phenomena, does not make the causal chain disappear. However, an analogous observation can be made regarding the geographical diversification of the manifestations of the damage (less evident in midlatitude countries, directly perceptible in the tropics). Moreover, the establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), decided by States has been read as an international formalization of the approach of “science first” (Howe, 2014). In this perspective, the IPCC Reports can be framed as an integrative tool for the interpretation and application of the sources of climate law, in accordance with Article 31.2(b) of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (which prescribes that the interpretative context includes “any instrument which was made by one or more parties in connection with the conclusion of the treaty and accepted by the other parties as an instrument related to the treat”). The IPCC defines the detection and attribution of climate change activities: “Detection of change is defined as the process of demonstrating that climate or a system affected by climate has changed in some defined statistical sense without providing a reason for that change. An identified change is detected in observations if its likelihood of occurrence by chance due to internal variability alone is determined to be small.” Attribution is “the process of evaluating the relative contributions of multiple causal factors to a change or event with an assignment of statistical confidence” (Bindoff et al., 2013). In conclusion, the science reported by the IPCC conditions the legal qualifications of harm and tort. Not surprisingly, the reference to science is also suggested by the Oslo Principles on Global Climate Obligations and by Articles 6–9 of the Model Statute for Proceedings Challenging Government Failure to Act on Climate Change (2020) of the International Bar Association. The centrality of science is also the basis of the precautionary principle, contained in Article 3.3 of the UNFCCC. It is a very detailed rule, whose deontological elements cannot be ignored by decision-makers: The Parties should take precautionary measures to anticipate, prevent or minimize the causes of climate change and mitigate its adverse effects. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing such measures, taking into account that policies and measures to deal with

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climate change should be cost-effective so as to ensure global benefits at the lowest possible cost. To achieve this, such policies and measures should take into account different socioeconomic contexts, be comprehensive, cover all relevant sources, sinks and reservoirs of greenhouse gases and adaptation, and comprise all economic sectors. Efforts to address climate change may be carried out cooperatively by interested Parties.

Its contents anticipate the holistic approach that was later recognized by the 2015 Paris Agreement (Article 6.8) and by the aforementioned EU Regulation n. 2020/852. In practice, the climate precautionary principle must be read in a triple perspective: that of mitigation; that of the definitive stabilization of the climate system, required by Article 2 of the UNFCCC; that of the evolution of scientific knowledge and the objectives based on the legal instruments introduced by the various COPs. After the Paris Agreement and the IPCC Special Report of 2018 Global Warming of 1.5
C, the precautionary principle is supplemented by two new legal elements: a quantitative one, limiting global warming between 1.5
C and well below 2
C compared to preindustrial levels (Article 2); a temporal one, establishing the time within which to achieve the thermodynamic equilibrium of the planet (Article 4). In EU law, these two elements are specified by further sources, such as Regulations nn. 2018/842, 2018/1999, 2020/852, 2021/241. Furthermore, the level of scientific certainty concerning the effects of climate change, and not only its causes as already defined by the UNFCCC, disappears in the legal approaches to prudential risk assessment, based on the classic distinction between “false positive” (e.g., accepting liability for a nonexisting risk) and “false negative” (e.g., denying liability for a real risk) (De Jong, 2018). Planetary and local climate risks are now out of the question. This means that the systemic dimension of climate change requires a proactive legal approach, different from the reactive one of traditional Tort Law (Giabardo, 2019).

Tragedy of the Horizon and Metabolic Rift Despite all the complexities described, in the mindset of legal rationalism, the components of the climate system are almost always presented and discussed separately (Bosselmann, 2010). In this perspective, the problems posed by climate change are addressed as single aspects, rather than as a whole. The climate emergency itself is interpreted as the sum of distinct, independent, and overlapping emergencies. On the contrary, the criticalities are inextricably linked for three reasons: they mutually influence each other, they are all caused by human action, and they all affect the thermodynamic stability of the planet Earth. The global initiative called “Scientists’ Warning” (https://www.scientistswarning.org/) promotes a unitary understanding of the planetary emergency, presenting it as an ecosystemic (Ripple et al., 2017) and climate (Ripple et al., 2022) emergency. What does This unity mean from a legal theory point of view? Generally, legal scholars classify any emergency, including environmental ones, on the basis of four characteristics directly or indirectly related to exceptions. These

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would be temporary, sudden, and unpredictable events, not necessarily attributable only to human action (otherwise, they would be classified as “illegal conduct”) and non-transformative of human coexistence (after the emergency, one returns more or less to the previous “normal” situation). In the face of temporary emergencies, risk management and exceptional powers can be discussed. The ecosystem and climate emergency are none of these, though. Rather than a temporary event, climate change is a planetary condition of irreversible and pejorative critical processes. Rather than “unpredictable,” it has been predicted in various ways for decades. Rather than not attributable to human action, it has a prevalently anthropogenic origin. Instead of being non-transformative, it works in exactly the opposite way, towards a future no longer analogous to any part of human history. In such an unprecedented situation, it no longer makes sense to discuss individual “risks.” The whole world is in danger everywhere and so are all components of the climate system. This is why the UNFCCC, in 2015, defined climate change as a “potentially” irreversible “threat.” The UNFCCC, also in 2015, further qualified this “threat” as “urgent.” The time factor adds to the unprecedented nature of the planetary emergency. There is little time to stabilize the Earth’s thermodynamic system, if the goal is to prevent the worsening consequences of climate change from becoming uncontrollable. Science has translated this predicament by using the mathematical formula E ¼ R x U: that is, the emergency derives from the increased risk (R) in the urgency (U) of the limited time available (Lenton et al., 2019). But the new scenario is also described with the formula “Tragedy of the Horizon” (Bolton et al., 2020). This time factor conditions all the world’s legal systems on three fronts. The first front concerns the mismatch between the timing of decisions and the timing of the catastrophic effects of climate change. The “horizon” of the latter does not coincide with that of the economic and political decision-makers. The time cycles of the real economy, financial economy, and political action are very short. On the contrary, the catastrophic effects are produced slowly, but their obtaining is certain. Consequently, the “tragedy” could consist in making future generations pay for the current absence of decision-making mechanisms adapted to the long time scales of climate effects. Furthermore, climate stability should be seen as a global asset on a par with financial stability and global trade. This means that it should be removed from the contingent electoral interests of political majorities and from the lobbying of corporations involved in fossil emissions. However, here too, the “tragedy of the horizon” emerges. On the one hand, there are no permanent institutions dealing with climate stability with autonomous powers independent of political dialectics and economic interests, and this is the “tragic” fact. Moreover, the impossibility of this independence is made evident by the phenomenon of the so-called carbon leakage: the relocation of carbon emissions by multinational companies according to the degree of severity and rigor of the States’ climate policies.

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On the other hand, the time “horizon” prevents from experimenting new organizational models, able to deal with issues no longer exclusively. Hence the phenomena of path dependency, often qualified in terms of “carbon lock-in,” that is, the decision-making inertia of political-energy systems based on fossil fuels. This is a real final game, where a quantitative result to protect all components of the climate system (keep the global temperature increase no more than 2
C) must be achieved within the time frames suggested by the science (reduction of emissions by 2030 to achieve climate neutrality by 2050 and final stabilization by 2100), with contents that are also final (such as, for example, the irreversible decarbonization of the economy). The traditional and rational chronopolitics of institutions, based on the quadrinomial forecast-planning-action-execution, is disoriented and displaced. The law can no longer control the time factor in the ways experienced up to now (Lazarus, 2010). On the other hand, the temporal interdependence between law and climate system reflects the interaction between anthropic systems and the ecosystem, studied by human ecology, bioeconomy, and ecological economics, social ecology, and the analyses of socio-ecological systems (Kramer et al., 2017). In a word, the “tragedy of the horizon” demonstrates that the metabolic fracture between human action and the rest of nature has determined not only the superimposition of anthropogenic emissions on the natural carbon cycle but also the dysfunctionality of the legal time frame for the transformation and adaptation of institutions to the urgencies of the climate system as a whole. The “Climate First/Development First” dilemma, referring to the 17 SDGs of Agenda 2030, summarizes this unprecedented difficulty of law and politics in the era of planetary emergency.

Climate Change and Human Rights Countless international and supranational legal sources now recognize the impact of climate change on human rights. It is sufficient to recall the Joint Statement on Human Rights and Climate Change of the five UN human rights bodies, dated September 16, 2019, and the UN OHCHR document Frequently Asked Questions on Human Rights and Climate Change, dated 2021. The Paris Agreement of 2015, in the Preamble, recalls that the Parties “should, when taking action to address climate change, respect, promote and consider their respective obligations on human rights, the right to health, the rights of indigenous peoples, local communities, migrants, children, persons with disabilities and people in vulnerable situations and the right to development, as well as gender equality, empowerment of women and intergenerational equity.” But the connection between the climate system and human existence is also a scientific acquisition of biophysics, formalized with the expression “One Health-Planetary Health” (Tripartite and UNEP support OHHLEP’s definition of “One Health”: Joint Tripartite (FAO, OIE, WHO) and UNEP Statement, 1 December 2021).

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Climate change poses a cataclysmic threat to public health and human rights. Global health is inextricably linked to planetary health, with a changing climate influencing the conditions necessary for human health and safety while undermining a range of human rights. In this perspective, it is now possible to speak of a human right to a stable, safe, balanced climate and to “compatible emissions” (with climate stability). This right becomes the operational condition necessary to keep the other rights effective over time. Without a stable climate, each human right is threatened. Consequently, claiming the human right to a stable and safe climate constitutes the prerequisite to fulfil all the other human rights: from the substantive ones to life, health, and a healthy environment to the procedural ones of information and participation in climate and environmental policies. The European Parliament Resolution on the European Green Deal dated 15 January 2020 also affirms this point (https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/ document/TA-9-2020-0005_EN.html). In fact, in paragraph 2 of the Resolution it is proclaimed that “all people living in Europe should be granted the fundamental right to a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment and to a stable climate, without discrimination, and that this right must be delivered through ambitious policies and must be fully enforceable through the justice system at national and EU level.” In legal theory, the arguments in favor of the existence of the human right to a stable and safe climate are mainly three: textual, moral, and rhetorical (Pisanò, 2022). The first argument identifies in some existing normative documents, both with a constitutional and international nature, the source of the human right to a stable and safe climate through the connection of their content with the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement. Such a hypothesis is feasible if the Constitution contains useful textual references and the sources of international climate law formally bind the State. In any case, in this way, the human right to a safe and stable climate is embedded in the sources and grounds of national legal systems. It can be used in domestic litigations against the State or companies. The second argument appeals to the State’s climatic obligation as an intertemporal moral bond towards State’s natural resources and future generations. This strategy is more theoretical than practical, but it has the merit of emphasizing the problem of intertemporal justice in climate policies. Not surprisingly, it is also inspired by the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities” (CBDR-RC) of Article 3 of the UNFCCC, which deals with “justice,” “fairness,” and “equity” in climate politics, especially regarding “climate debts,” that is, the debt owed by developed States to developing States due to their former disproportionate contribution of emissions to global warming (Boran, 2020). The debates on climate justice can also be included within this panorama. Indeed, climate justice affects the “planetary boundaries” of the climate system. Consequently, climate justice does not necessarily relate to environmental conflicts, referring to individual territories and social contexts. On the other hand, energy justice opens up a sectoral scenario: energy transition to be considered in terms of equity in the abandonment of fossil sources and equal access to renewable

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sources, without new inequalities and “energy poverty.” Finally, ecological justice ranges from the geopolitical issues of the unequal ecological exchange between the north and south of the world to the relationship between human activity and nature. Theories such as biospheric egalitarianism and species injustice also move from similar ethical premises (Kopnina, 2014). The third argument uses the rhetorical tool of synecdoche to support the existence of an autonomous human right to a stable and safe climate. With the synecdoche, two legal formulas on the subject of human rights, linguistically distinct but referring to realities physically dependent on each other (the territorial realities of legal orders within the planetary climate system) can be associated by the interpreter to affirm the existence of a new legal category, even if not inserted in an explicit document. This stratagem is frequent in Civil Law systems, and it has allowed the adaptation over time of legal words and arguments based on very ancient sources, such as Civil Codes. In this perspective, the German theory of “status oecologicus” can also be mentioned, as a new human condition that is added to the citizen’s “status passivus” (Brugger, 2011). In the democratic constitutional State, citizenship also has a “status passivus,” that is, a set of duties of mutual solidarity to promote justice and substantial equality. But what happens when everyone is exposed to the planetary ecosystem and climate emergency? The new condition requires that the priority of duties is no longer simply “political,” that is, holding only towards one’s fellow men, as in the normal “status passivus.” It becomes a set of “ecosystem” duties and, therefore, duties towards the entire climate system. The human right to a stable and safe climate requires the fulfilment of this duty of “ecosystem” solidarity by the State. On the other hand, the theory of “status oecologicus” appears like that of the “Microbial State,” according to which the sovereignty of the State is now dependent on the fate of the ecosystem and of the entire planet Earth (Fishel, 2017).

Climate Change and Democracy As mentioned, the climate emergency highlights a series of legal dysfunctions. This observation has also led to a discussion of the “organized irresponsibility” of representative democracy itself (Beck, 2008). According to the majority of scholars, the reasons for this difficulty are temporal and spatial in nature. The temporal reason derives from the fact that climate change is an exponential process and by accumulation: current effects derive from past emissions, while the effects of today’s emissions will be experienced in the future. Such a process is difficult for representative democracies to govern. Democratic regimes take decisions in the short term according to the contingent electoral consensus, without taking into account the past and without being able to represent the consensus of future generations. This means that democratic deliberations are structurally irresponsible on two temporal fronts (Thompson, 2009): towards the past since they cannot answer for the consensus and mistakes which have produced today’s climate problems; towards the future, as they separate those who decide

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today from those who will suffer the consequences of today’s decisions in the future (Wynes et al., 2021). The spatial reason depends on the observation that the link between anthropogenic emissions and climatic reactions is of an ecosystemic and planetary type. This link attributes relevance to some places or environments on the planet due to their function in the global climate balance (e.g., Amazon’s carbon sink function). These places, however, fall under the sovereign jurisdiction of individual States, which may be nondemocratic. Therefore, there is an asymmetry of political regimes with respect to the common importance of some ecosystem functions, with consequent difficulty in building shared methods of discussion and decision on global climate challenges. It is not a coincidence that the debates about the “governance of climate change” or a “global climate constitutionalism” highlight this contradiction (Boran, 2020), while the “polycentric” approaches, such as those proposed by Elinor Ostrom to spread local democracy, or the idea of a “complex regime” able to involve actors other than States, serve to promote local or sectoral collective action, but do not contribute to democratizing world climate policies (Ostrom, 2014). Therefore, there is no correspondence between the time and spheres of democratic deliberation (at both state and local level) and the times and places of climate problems (Boran, 2020): in a predominantly undemocratic world, practicing democracy as a global method is illusory. Other theorists, on the other hand, believe that the dysfunctions of democracy have an epistemic nature. In this perspective, four theses can be remembered: those drawing on Foucauldian discourse analysis and the concept of governmentality to observe how processes of democratic deliberation reproduce certain forms of knowledge of climatic problems and legitimization of possible solutions, obscuring alternative discourses and decisions (Skoglund, 2014; Death, 2014); the claim by Timothy Mitchell on the “fossil” nature of modern political representation, unable to free itself from the negative conditioning of the energy system that it helped to legitimize (Mitchell, 2011); that defended by Chien-Yi Lu on the incompatibility between the “spontaneous order” of the global market, promoted and guaranteed by liberal democracies, and the “necessary order” of the planetary climate system (Lu, 2020); the one put forward by Bonaventura de Sousa Santos on the “extractivist” identity of Western democracy, an identity based on the exchange value of all human actions rather than on their use value with respect to the survival needs of the human species (de Sousa Santos & Mendes, 2020). Indeed, liberal democratic representation recognizes and promotes freedom of opinion and pluralism of interests (political, economic, cultural). These conditions do not necessarily favor optimal solutions of climate issues. Lack of scientific competence in decision-makers, the ignorance of voters, veto games between opposing interests, the disputed role of experts, even denial are all concrete possibilities that a liberal democracy cannot suppress, but neither can it consider prevailing over the “uncomfortable knowledge” of the dependence of human life on the thermodynamics of the climate system (Rayner, 2012). In the end, it seems that it is precisely the constitutional status of the human subject, legally constructed as a “political” or “stakeholder” individual, rather than as a “biospheric” subject, to feed this short circuit (Dorninger et al., 2017).

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Even the empirical analysis of democracy does not eliminate doubts about the contradiction. On the one hand, it demonstrates that democracies contribute most to the provision of global public goods, including that of climate stability (Baettig & Bernauer, 2009). On the other hand, it also confirms that the results of policies, measured in terms of emission levels, remain insufficient and that international cooperation between democracies does not eliminate the “free-rider problem” and permits the irresponsibility of nondemocratic States. Indeed, the latter, not having to account for their policies to their citizens, can remain indifferent to planetary ecosystem problems, while benefiting from the global advantages of the climate decisions of others.

The Legal Practice Between “Tornado” and “Abortion” Politics It is possible to complete this review by analyzing what reactions the challenge of climate emergency produces in legal practice and whether these reactions share common assumptions. The scenario of answers is structured around three experiences: the use of the so-called climate change litigations strategies; proposals for the recognition of the rights of nonhuman nature in the Constitutions or other legal sources, and attempts to build transnational legal infrastructures consistent with the logic of “planetary boundaries.” These practices converge on three assumptions for the analysis of legal problems relating to climate emergency. The first assumption concerns the space of legal decisions and considers the anarchic nature of international society, that is, the lack of an apparatus hierarchically superior to the States, which is able to produce unitary planetary reactions to climate emergency. States remain the subjects appointed to implement law, including international law. However, international norms enter state systems generally through instruments of ratification, and thus also become part of the national legal system. Ultimately, the only effective space for decision on the climate emergency is that of individual States. But how do States act within this space? On this front, the second assumption comes into play, referring to the difference between the times of climate emergencies and the times of state legal decisions. It can be summarized by Roger Pielke’s theory on the contrast between “tornado politics” and “abortion politics” (Pielke, 2007). Pielke uses this metaphor to explain the relationship between the public perception of danger, the timing of political decisions, and the use of science. When people know that a tornado can hit their city, they tend to cooperate and act quickly to protect their life and property. In these situations, then, politicians are induced to make more courageous, even unpopular, choices and to emphasize the primacy of public interest rather than the pressure of particular interests, especially of an economic nature. Finally, the fear of imminent danger leads to an increase in public trust in expert knowledge and in a dialogue with science. The need for common salvation and the use of scientific knowledge become a priority and hierarchically superior to any other evaluation of political action. “Tornado politics” describes this scenario.

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Conversely, when the imminence of the danger is not visible, the “tornado politics” effect does not occur, and politics continues to operate as if nothing had happened, both in terms of response times and in terms of dialogue with science, in a context of a public opinion that is not particularly alarmed nor demanding. In this scenario, there remains a logic of compromise and regulation of all the interests at stake, without any hierarchy, according to the decisional perspective of balance or “win-win” (Carducci et al., 2020). A different situation is what Pielke calls “abortion politics,” where the choices rest on conflicting and tragic moral issues, not facts of imminent danger, such as the tornado, but visions of life and the value dimensions of human life. In this scenario, not only unsolvable conflicts and tensions arise, inevitably affecting public decisions and cooperation, but the dialogue itself with science becomes conflictual, and the acquisitions of science can open scenarios that are not always acceptable from a moral point of view. Consequently, in “abortion politics,” a “win-win” balance is not reached, not because hierarchical priority is given to public interests, but because moral conflict is never balanced and science cannot replace moral judgment. Now, how do global warming and climate change fit into this dichotomy? Do they produce “tornado politics” or “abortion politics”? Unfortunately, the two phenomena, summarized in the empirical observation of climate emergency, are similar to “tornado” and “abortion.” How? They are similar to the “tornado,” because they identify a real and already existing danger, such as a tornado, but unfortunately not immediately “visible” (unlike the tornado). This distortion of space-time makes the discussions and decisions on climate emergencies more similar to those typical of “abortion politics,” since the dangers are not immediately “visible” as they would be in a tornado, political and social actors make moral evaluations, which are subjective, rather than those based on knowledge and dialogue with science, with related scarce public cooperation and actions aimed at compromise in the short term, rather than the pursuit of the public interest of common salvation. In turn, however, the contingent compromise is still unsatisfactory for everyone: both for those who endorse moral considerations (e.g., the contrast between movements for climate justice and those who affirm the moral centrality of the economy over nature) and for those who know, through science, the actual “tornado” contents of climate emergencies (e.g., scientists’ criticisms of political inefficiency). The third assumption concerns the contents of state legal decisions, conditioned by the logic of economic globalization. This logic “captures” the State by imposing the priority of economic and financial interests over the reasons for the thermodynamic stability of the planet Earth. A legal formalization of this scenario is offered by the Energy Charter Treaty (https://www.energycharter.org/), a source of international law that creates a sort of “Energy Constitution,” under which the sovereign decisions of States cannot prevail over the investment interests of large multinationals. Some contents of the document make this logic explicit. Article 18 states “The Contracting Parties recognize state sovereignty and sovereign rights over energy resources. They reaffirm that these must be exercised in accordance with and subject to the rules of international law.” However, the official interpretation declared by the States is that

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“Article 18(2) shall not be construed to allow the circumvention of the application of the other provisions of the Treaty” (Final Act of the European Energy Charter Conference, Declaration V). The fact is that no other source of international law, including climatic ones, can prevail over the Energy Charter (in accordance with Article 16(2) of the Energy Charter Treaty and the criterion of the most favorable provision for the investment). Furthermore, Article 47(3) reinforces the “capture” of the State, as it binds it to the interests of investors even after withdrawal, for a period of 20 years after the state decision. For this reason, the States and the European Union are discussing an adaptation of the Charter to the 2015 Paris Agreement (European Parliament resolution of 24 November 2022 on the outcome of the modernization of the Energy Charter Treaty (2022/2934(RSP)) and the Constitutions (Witte, 2018). The aforementioned three legal practices converge in the objective of countering or neutralizing the negative consequences of these three assumptions. The “climate change litigation strategies” are used all over the world to achieve the objectives of climate change mitigation by States or multinational companies, through judicial decisions. They emphasize the use of science in the courts and the prevalence of consequentialist over axiological arguments (Mayer, 2023). Therefore, they aim to overcome the impasse between “tornado” and “abortion politics..” The proposals for the constitutionalizing or legalization of the rights of nonhuman nature are mainly inspired by the 2008 Constitution of Ecuador, the first in the world to recognize nature as a legal subject. They are also discussed in Europe (Carducci et al., 2020) and aim to promote and legitimize a biocentric and ecosystemic legal logic, in order to neutralize the various forms of the “capture” of the State by global economic and financial interests (Viaene, 2022). Finally, the hypotheses of transnational juridical infrastructures test new legal methods to end the international anarchy that weakens States in the fight against climate change (Kotzé & Kim, 2019).

Conclusions: Law in the Weather-World As Tim Ingold (2010) wrote, “knowledge is formed along paths of movement in the weather-world.” This also applies to law. With the climate emergency, the “weather-world” questions the order of things and words of legal knowledge. The legal subdivisions separating the spheres of nature and culture are now inadequate to effectively solve the climate system’s problems in its planetary dimension (Mulgan, 2011). Furthermore, the awareness of this inadequacy makes the present times extremely different from any other previous era of humanity (Kemp et al., 2022). Law, from being an instrument to control and change reality, is transforming itself into an element dependent on the atmosphere. The human community, creator of carbon energy and of the rules that legitimized the liberation of its actions from the limits of nature, is no longer the real subject of change. On the contrary, it has become an obstacle to change, due to the intrinsic

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contradiction that Dipesh Charkrabarty summarizes as follows: “a collectivity whose commitment to fossil-fuel based, energy-consuming civilization is now a threat to that civilization itself” (Charkrabarty, 2012). Therefore it is necessary to rely on the climate and the weather as unavoidable reference points in decision-making. It is an inevitable conceptual earthquake (Crate & Nuttal, 2009). What human beings have made an object well regulated by law (nature) reappears as a subject that imposes relations on all. All people are now interconnected with the atmosphere precisely because of the need to reduce, if not to completely replace, the fossil emissions of greenhouse gases. Ultimately, humanity has transformed the atmosphere into a great “common.” This “common,” however, is orphan of adequate legal systems. Then, the “good” has turned into a “common evil,” which forces one to share the threat, in the paradox of not finding unitary solutions on a planetary level (Galvin, 2020). It seems evident that human law does not conform to the “first law of ecology” (Commoner, 1971): everything is connected with everything else. Hence, the law must be connected to the rest of things, too. But it is equally clear that climate is not time. While the former is a stochastic modeling based on forecasts and statistical calculations of metadata for temperature regulation (for this reason the climate is classified as having an ecosystem regulatory function), time is a dimension built by knowledge and social institutions based on experiences and representations of the life of human beings. This means that the law, in order to solve anthropogenic climate change-driven problems, needs the predictions of science. Decisions based on forecasts, however, imply questioning the present for the future: it involves questioning certainties about social and institutional constructions of time (Kang et al., 2023). This double dissociation between human law and the “first law of ecology,” on the one hand, and between atmospheric and human time, on the other, identifies the epochal challenge of law in the face of climate change. Confronted with this challenge, the function of legal rules can no longer be limited to reduce human impacts on the environment. A teleological transformation of legal systems is necessary, in which the absence of human interference on the planet’s climatic stability becomes the ratio of every rule, exactly as indicated by Article 2 of the UNFCCC.

Cross-References ▶ Climate Change and Decision Theory ▶ Climate Change and Democracy ▶ Climate Change and Distributive Justice ▶ Climate Change and Environmental Justice ▶ Climate Change and Global Justice ▶ Climate Change and Human Rights ▶ Climate Change and Institutions for Future Generations: The Litigation Option ▶ Climate Change and Intergenerational Justice

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▶ Climate Change and Overpopulation ▶ Climate Change and Religion ▶ Climate Change and Republicanism ▶ Responsibility for Climate Harms

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Ripple, W. J., Wolf, C., Newsome, T. M., Galetti, M., Alamgir, M., Crist, E., et al. (2017). World scientists’ warning to humanity: A second notice. Bioscience, 67(12), 1026–1028. https://doi. org/10.1093/biosci/bix125 Ripple, W. J., Wolf, C., Gregg, J. W., Levin, K., Rockström, J., et al. (2022). World scientists’ warning of a climate emergency 2022. Bioscience, 72(12), 1149–1155. https://doi.org/10.1093/ biosci/biac083 Rodríguez-Garavito, C. (Ed.). (2023). Litigating the climate emergency. Cambridge University Press. Scientists’ Warning. https://www.scientistswarning.org/. Accessed 5 January 2023. Serres, M. (2008). Le Mal propre. Polluer pour s’approprier? Éditions Le Pommier. Shue, H. (1993). Subsistence emissions and luxury emissions. Law & Policy, 15(1), 39–60. https:// doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9930.1993.tb00093.x Sieferle, R. P., & Marquardt, B. (2009). Le revolución industrial en Europa y América latina. Intrepretaciones ecohistóricas desde la perspectiva de la teoría de los sistemas de energía y del metabolismo social. Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Skoglund, A. (2014). Homo Clima: The overdeveloped resilience facilitator. Resilience, 2(3), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/21693293.2014.948325 Syvitski, J., Waters, C. N., Day, J., Milliman, J. D., Summerhayes, C., et al. (2020). Extraordinary human energy consumption and resultant geological impacts beginning around 1950 CE initiated the proposed Anthropocene epoch. Communications Earth & Environment, 1(32), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-020-00029-y Thompson, J. (2009). Intergenerational justice: Rights and responsibilities in an intergenerational polity. Routledge. Vanderheiden, S. (2008). Atmospheric justice. A political theory of climate change. Oxford University Press. Viaene, L. (2022). Can rights of nature save us from the Anthropocene catastrophe? Asian Journal of Law and Society, 9(2), 187–206. https://doi.org/10.1017/als.2022.2 Weiss, T. G., & Burke, M. (2011). Legitimacy, identity and climate change: Moving from international to world society? Third World Quarterly, 32(6), 1057–1072. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 01436597.2011.584721 Witte, I. (2018). Interactions between international investment law and constitutional law: Promoting the dialogue. A European perspective on judicial cooperation and deference. Max Planck Yearbook of United Nations Law Online, 21(1), 467–574. https://doi.org/10.1163/13894633_ 021001016 Wynes, S., Motta, M., & Donner, S. D. (2021). Understanding the climate responsibility associated with elections. One Earth, 4, 363–371. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2021.02.008

Part IV Climate Change, Humanities, and Philosophy

Climate Change and the Environmental Humanities Thomas Heyd

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Environmental Humanities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Humanities Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Environmental Humanities: Outlook, Concerns, Aims, Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Environmental Humanities and Climate Change: Some Key Themes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Philosophy and Climate Change: Four Themes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Future People, Systemic Injustices, Responsibilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Climate Narratives, Catastrophism, Alternatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Climate Temporalities, Human Becoming, Present Times . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Culture, Nature as Adversary, Societal Inadequacies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion: Living with Nature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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The aim of this chapter is to sketch some of the contributions of the environmental humanities to an understanding of climate change from the perspective of philosophy. Recently, the environmental humanities have become a recognised area of study, encompassing environmental orientations within the humanities. It is noted that, generally speaking, the humanities engage in a critical and reflective stance regarding ways of understanding the world, while the environmental humanities do so in relation to environmental matters. Four key themes, describing the environmental humanities, namely, values and justice, narratives, temporalities, and the culture of nature, are identified. These themes subsequently are further explored by reflecting on the relation of climate change to various types of injustices, the role of catastrophist narratives, the importance of temporal dimensions, and the interaction of cultural conceptions of nature and human capacities T. Heyd (*) Department of Philosophy and School of Environmental Studies, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_111

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to address this phenomenon. It is concluded that the approaches of the environmental humanities may be useful to reflect on how one may live with climate change. Keywords

Environmental humanities · Climate narratives · Climate temporalities · Climate justice · Culture of nature · Catastrophist narratives · Climate blame · Indigenous · Natural contract

Introduction Global climate change is a phenomenon or process which is becoming ever more apparent worldwide, rapidly transforming landscapes, putting pressure on many species, and threatening the integrity of ecosystems (e.g., see Harvey, 2018). Initially, it was strictly considered a physical process that called for natural scientific research, reliant on the measurement of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, temperature changes, changes in weather patterns, changes in ecosystems, and so on. With the advent of powerful computing systems in the late twentieth century, it became possible to develop mathematical models incorporating most of the relevant factors, allowing thereby the forecasting of future climate change impacts, on the basis of sufficient information regarding initial conditions. Climate science now foresees that the increased levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will continue to affect the planet for the next couple of thousand years (see, e.g., IPCC, 2021). Moreover, it soon became increasingly certain that current climate change is largely, if not entirely, anthropogenic, and that it will affect human life in many important ways, both because of direct and because of indirect impacts (see, e.g., O’Brien et al., 2006). As will be discussed further, below, this situation has generated considerable concern, especially among many younger people who feel that they are being catapulted into an uncertain future not of their making. Clearly, the only reasonable response to present climate change is to engage in four types of action, respectively directed toward (a) prevention, (b) adjustment to existing conditions, (c) preparation for specific types of breakdown, and (d) systemic readying of society for the previous three types of actions. More concretely, these actions have been described in terms of (a) “mitigation,” which entails the substantial reduction of greenhouse gas emissions (Geden, 2016; Rogelj et al., 2015), (b) “adaptation,” which calls for measures that will soften the unavoidable impacts of climate change (Adger et al., 2009), (c) “resilience buildup,” which calls for building in redundancies in crucial systems needed for functioning (Flood et al., 2022), and (d) “transformation of societies,” which calls for socio-political measures that facilitate mitigation, adaptation, and resilience build-up (O’Brien, 2012). Since these actions require the active collaboration of individuals, societies, and international bodies, it became imperative to include research from the social

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sciences (see, e.g., Hackmann et al., 2014; Holm et al., 2013; Pálsson et al., 2013), in addition to the findings of the natural sciences. As a consequence, much effort has been devoted, for instance, to the study of how to motivate changes in individual and collective behavior that may lead to a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions (Geden, 2016; Gifford, 2011; Rogelj et al., 2015), giving a central role to environmental psychology, ecological economics, and applied political science. Furthermore, insofar as the consequences of climate change affect diverse populations in different ways, generally having more serious consequences for poorer populations, or those with more exposure due to particular geographical or economic conditions, or as a result of other differences such as gender or race, crossover fields like environmental studies and geography have taken a leadership role in climate research. Similarly, certain professions, such as medicine, law, engineering, and architecture, have become involved in the study of the impacts of, and of adjustments to, a climatically changing world. Throughout this period of acceleration of research in both the natural and the social sciences, the humanities also have taken on the challenge of thinking through climate change. Philosophy contributed to the ethical consideration of the anthropogenic causes and consequences of global warming, by raising questions regarding differential obligations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in light of different levels of emissions and unequal impacts on diverse populations (see, e.g., Jamieson, 2015). Literary studies applied ecocritical tools to climate change-related writing (see, e.g., Johns-Putra, 2016; also see Buell, 2011). History produced accounts of climatic change impacts on society in earlier times (see, e.g., Burroughs, 2008; Fagan, 2001; also see Sabin, 2010). Also of interest are accounts of the recognition of the possibility of climatic changes in earlier times, going back as far as Antiquity. Aristotle, for example, proposed that under some conditions climate may change (Aristotle, 1958, Metaphysics, 352 a 28 ff.). Theophrastus (1916, Causes of Plants, v. 14. 2–5), moreover, already suggested that climatic changes could have anthropogenic causes: “Theophrastus gathered information on actual temperature changes noticed during his own time in Greece due to draining marshes, altering the course of a river, and deforestation” (Hughes, 1975, pp. 123–124). Even religious studies entered the discussion, arguing that many faiths are compatible with, or even demand, taking a stance regarding the reality of climate change (see, e.g., Levasseur, 2021). Nonetheless, it is noteworthy that the overall involvement and impact of the humanities in research and advocacy concerning climate change has been rather limited. There may be various ways to explain this, though it probably has to do with the logic of disciplinary research, which tends to develop through dialogue with earlier problem settings and solutions internal to respective disciplines. For new issues to be considered, it seems that problems somehow have to “break through” those earlier problem settings. Possibly due to an even greater focus in the humanities on the analysis of each respective discipline’s own interpretive and theoretical assumptions, the take-up of a discipline-external phenomenon such as climate change seems to have been slower than in the social and natural sciences. In the latter, the objects of study already are external to their disciplines, namely, the natural and social worlds,

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respectively (even if the social sciences may take on their own disciplines as objects of study in a self-reflexive way). This situation has, however, begun to undergo some change, in part due to the emergence of what has been called “the environmental humanities”. Loosely speaking, the term makes reference to a variety of approaches to the environment that have in common the type of approach characteristic of the humanities. As will be seen, this approach may be described as the application of a critical stance toward the cultural givens that govern attitudes, policies, expectations, hopes, and fears in relation to environmental matters. As such, the approach represented by the environmental humanities engages climate change more directly than the distinct disciplines composing the humanities generally do individually. In the following, it is examined more closely what this means. First, what distinguishes the approach of the humanities, and of the environmental humanities, is specified a little more, and some of the key themes raised in the literature concerning how the environmental humanities address climate change are described. After this, those themes are explored from the point of view of philosophy in relation to climate change. In conclusion, it is proposed that the environmental humanities open up new ways to think about how to live with climate change.

The Environmental Humanities One way to think of the environmental humanities is in terms of certain subfields of the humanities disciplines, such as environmental philosophy, environmental history, and literary ecocriticism, as well as environmentally oriented geography, religious studies, visual arts, theatre, film, media studies, and journalism (see Hubbell & Ryan, 2021, p. 1). Nonetheless, this kind of listing leaves somewhat uncertain what exactly gives unity to all of these subfields. So, for a start, one may briefly reflect on what seems to tie together the humanities.

The Humanities Approach Standardly, the story is that the term originates in Renaissance Humanism, which sought to recover the worldviews of classical antiquity through Ancient Greek and Roman literature. In terms of areas of study, the Renaissance “Studia Humanitatis,” which included grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy, was an alternative to the religious education prevalent at time. However, scholars have emphasised that this “humanism” was not so much anti-religious as that it supported novel conceptions of individualism and citizenry, and a new set of corresponding values and moral attitudes (The description of the humanities offered here is gathered from a variety of sources, including the Encyclopaedia Britannica (Britannica, 2021; Drees, 2021; Wikipedia, 2023). As “natural philosophy” developed from the seventeenth century onward, the fields of study encompassed by the term “humanities” began to be contrasted with the

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disciplines later identified as the natural or physical, and the social sciences, respectively. The difference between the humanities and the sciences cannot, however, merely be accounted for by subject matter, since philosophy, literature, and history (just to take three of the most iconic of the humanities) may also be about physical, social, and psychological matters. (Psychology plays a somewhat awkward role in the opposition of physical/natural versus social sciences since, on the one hand, it has an individualistic and not a social orientation and, on the other, it has incorporated both physical and social methodologies; for example, by making use of interview methods common to the social sciences (in clinical psychology), while also applying methods and categories common to natural science (in neuroscience). There are other fields, such as Geography, however, which in its respective social and physical orientations similarly occupy awkward places in the categorizations that divide the disciplines in natural versus social sciences.) Physical events are the subject, for example, of Voltaire’s poem about the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake, of the disease epidemic described in Camus’ The Plague, or of the history of the Bohr-Einstein debates (Kumar, 2008). Social events, furthermore, are the focus of social realist literature, Marxian political philosophy, or historical accounts, such as the 1381 Peasant’s Revolt. Consequently, what differentiates the humanities, rather, has to be something about the approach by which events are rendered. Exploring this in depth would take more space than can be devoted to it here. However, it seems fairly evident that the difference is in the fact that the humanities directly examine key cultural givens that resonate in our grasp of the world, such as values, beliefs, epistemic principles, and ontological commitments (as in philosophy), that they self-consciously view events through such cultural lenses while assembling them through narrative methods (as in history), or engage in reflection about the consequences of viewing events through one lens or another (as in the study of literature). Regarding everyday life, it seems evident that humans constantly are on a search of certainty regarding their values, their beliefs, their categories, their affections, and so on, which is the material that the humanities seek to make sense of. But this pursuit of sense also extends into the cognitive and professional disciplines. After all, without a clear understanding of the values that ought to guide medical research, or of the epistemic principles that determine truth in biological or psychological research, or of the ontological commitments in exobiology, for example, none of those endeavours would make sense. In short, the common characteristic of the humanities seems to be the reflective exploration of the very elements of meaning making, which, among other things, serve as grounding for making sense of everyday life, but also for making sense of the foundations of the sciences, be they natural/physical or social and psychological. This way of viewing the humanities makes sense of the inclusion of philosophy, history, and literature studies, and of certain subareas of study in geography, religious studies, visual arts, theatre, film, media studies, and journalism as contributory areas to the environmental humanities. The humanities are “environmental” when the focus is on making sense of human entanglements with the environment, that is, why and in what manner those entanglements are of concern, how they can be known and understood, and what they are in relation to people.

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Environmental Humanities: Outlook, Concerns, Aims, Functions Somewhat surprisingly, the literature on environmental humanities does not offer a clear definition of what this term stands for, even if there appears to be a general approach toward environmental issues characterised by a readiness to enquire about and question common assumptions. (In some contexts, the term used instead of “environmental humanities” is “ecological humanities” (see, e.g., Eckersley (1998) and Rose and Robin (2004); regarding the emergence of the environmental humanities, see, e.g., Nye et al. (2013).) Higgins et al., for example, ask what are “solutions” for environmental problems, whom those solutions benefit, whether they are always desirable, and so on (Higgins et al., 2020, p. 1). They highlight, moreover, that all environmental issues are “‘mediated and remediated through cultural forms: particular narratives, vocabularies, images, objects, and symbols’.” (Higgins et al., 2020, p. 1). Foote and Cohen (2021), specify the particular critical outlook characteristic of the environmental humanities, by proposing that what unites the environmental humanities is a sense of shared and open endeavor addressed toward the remediation of environmental harm, and a powerful conviction that scholarship in the field must revisit its foundational assumptions. (Foote & Cohen, 2021, p. 2)

They add that one of the goals of the environmental humanities is to “engage a broad constituency.” Their proposal is echoed in a way by the claim that the environmental humanities aim to bridge what has been perceived as a gap between the sciences and humanities. Honeybun-Arnolda and Obermeister (2019) propose that the environmental humanities address this challenge . . . by extending and revaluating traditional humanist concerns of ethics, value, justice, meaning and knowledge and reframing our understandings of the natural world and/or built environments as ‘lively ecologies of meaning and value, entangled within rich patterns of cultural and historical diversity.’ (Honeybun-Arnolda & Obermeister, 2019)

Another way in which the gap supposedly is closed by the environmental humanities is in this self-description of the journal Resilience: A Journal of Environmental Humanities: The focus on narrative skill, critical thinking, historicity, culture, aesthetics and ethics central to the humanities and to humanistic social sciences provides a crucial research complement to the endeavors of scientists.” (Resilience, n.d.)

More concretely, it is suggested that the environmental humanities may bridge the perceived gaps among diverse environmental disciplines through an integration of “dialogues between humanities, arts, social sciences and sciences [sic] . . .” (Hubbell & Ryan, 2021, p. 1). The idea of dialogue and conversation is also highlighted by Foote and Cohen (2021), who write that

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[p]erhaps, then, what really defines the loose, still-evolving EH [Environmental Humanities] community of scholars is not its methods, nor its analytic focus, but its gregariousness, its insistence that the practices of making and communicating ecological knowledge should be collective, should proceed in conversation with and across other disciplines, and should test the limits of disciplinary methods. (Foote & Cohen, 2021, p. 3)

An alternative way of framing the role of the environmental humanities is by noting that the humanities are “the study of culture” (Elliott et al., 2018, p. 1). Elliott et al. propose that “[e]nvironmental problems including the current climate change crisis have their origins in human culture and to solve those problems we need the insight of the humanities.” (p. 1) Hubbell and Ryan (2021), moreover, address the interpretive role of culture in relation to nature. So, what the field endeavours is to foster “a variety of new approaches to thinking about the relationship between nature and culture as well as the urgencies of the ecological problems that face the planet. . ..” (Hubbell & Ryan, 2021, p. 1). In summary, the general idea seems to be that the term “environmental humanities” stands for an approach to environmental issues that, drawing on humanities methods and approaches, questions common assumptions, applies the characteristic concerns of the humanities regarding ethics, values, knowledge and meaning, insists on dialogic conversations across disciplines, and, ultimately, seeks to make explicit how nature and culture are related.

Environmental Humanities and Climate Change: Some Key Themes The slowly developing literature on environmental humanities and climate change has been highlighting a few recurring themes, in particular, the discussion of the role of values, beliefs, and representations; the power of narratives, their interpretive function, and their construction; and the grasp of temporalities in relation to the conception and understanding of climate change. All together, these themes express a certain culture of what nature is to humans. In what follows, some very brief examples of how these themes are presented in the literature are provided. Regarding the role of values, beliefs, and representations, Higgins et al., for example, write that scientific-political assemblages of climate change – and their associated ‘problem-solution formations’ . . . are nearly always interpreted through the filter of values, beliefs, and sociocultural imaginaries, sometimes leading to incompatible solutions. (Higgins et al., 2020, p. 3)

Similarly, Doyle claims that Humanities approaches to climate change help lend important insights into the ways in which climate change understanding is shaped by intersecting cultural, social and historical forms and processes which both enable and constrain particular forms of climate action. . .. exploring the role of cultural values, power relations, and representational and socio-material

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practices in the formation and (re)interpretation of climate change knowledge and action are key contributions of the humanities. (Doyle, 2020, pp. 1–2)

While the issue of climate change has been increasingly discussed as a question of justice among nations and generations, there are other dimensions to consider. Foote and Cohen, for instance, note that climate change-related environmental disasters often only become “disastrous” because of the legacy of racial, extractivist, and colonial injustices, as evidenced, for example, during the Hurricane Katrina event (Foote & Cohen, 2021, p. 8). Doyle (2020), furthermore, directly addresses the issue of climate justice, noting the calls of humanities scholars, in particular, feminist and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color), for an intersectional approach to climate and social justice that recognizes the ongoing extractivist legacies of capitalism and colonialism, and of racism and white privilege, in the systemic creation and impacts of climate change. (Doyle, 2020, p. 1; also see Doyle, 2020, pp. 2–3)

The role of narratives in the construction of what is understood as climate change is brought up again and again by researchers, whether from the social sciences or from the environmental humanities (see, e.g., Nisbet & Mooney, 2007; Lövbrand et al., 2015). In the environmental social sciences, the importance of narratives is highlighted, for example, in relation to adaptation and adaptative capacity (see Hovelsrud et al., 2015). Regarding the environmental humanities, Foote and Cohen write that the chapters in their book are united by a commitment to the world-making power of narrative, and especially its commitment to how stories mediate different registers of power and how narratives have historically managed the manifold vitality of the cultures, bodies, and objects that shape and are shaped by them. (Foote & Cohen, 2021, p. 2)

The importance of narratives for addressing climate change is also pointed out, for example, by Honeybun-Arnolda and Obermeister: “The humanities can also aid in story-telling; a communication method that humans are often engaged with and remarkably receptive to” (Honeybun-Arnolda & Obermeister, 2019, p. 4; also see Hulme, 2018). Higgins et al. (2020, passim) take this a step further by devoting a large section of their article to the topic of “climate narratives,” in which they relate catastrophist readings of present climate change events with other impactful events taken up in a similar manner. They also point to narratives that relate “the mutual implication” of human with non-human Earth-dwellers, while being subjected to diverse forms of planetary change throughout past and present times (Higgins et al., 2020, pp. 6–8). In fact, the location in time of the present climate change process, viewed in relation to both past and future events, also is a recurrent theme. Higgins et al. refer to this by the term “temporalities” and devote a full third of their article to it (Higgins et al., 2020, pp. 3–6). They point out that

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[b]ecause our conceptions and perceptions of both time and space are bound up with our imaginations, memories, and the intellectual paradigms available to us, the humanities are uniquely able to analyze our capacities and incapacities for understanding climate change as a spatial and temporal phenomenon. (Higgins et al., 2020, p. 3)

Higgins propose that “[t]he Anthropocene is sometimes represented as a breach in planetary history, and perhaps it is, but it can only properly be understood in relation to other time scales” (Higgins et al., 2020, p. 3). This is the topic of historian Chakrabarty’s (2009) masterfully argued analysis of the challenge posed by climate change in the new Anthropocene epoch. He points out that to truly understand what anthropogenic climate change means it is necessary to bring together two ways of understanding reality that seem incompatible with each other – namely, the historical, which properly speaking tracks (actual or possible) human experience, and the geologic, which tracks physical changes at a scale that is impossible for humans to grasp in its true dimensions. Foote and Cohen, however, propose that the environmental humanities in fact do have the capacity to do just that, because of their “binocular focus on daily, lived experience as well as on large-scale and seemingly impersonal events that either barely register on or suddenly exceed human comprehension” (Foote & Cohen, 2021, p. 3). Robin (2017) similarly reports on the contributions of the environmental humanities to the grasp of climate change under the general theme of “Understanding Humans geologically and Non-Human Life Forms Ethically” (this is the title of her article, Robin, 2017, p. 1). One reason why a proper grasp of the temporal dimension of climate change is important is that, as Elliott et al. write, “[c]limate change in the current scientific discourse is constructed as ‘a crisis for humanity’” (Elliott et al., 2018, pp. 3–4). This construction, however, depends in part on whether the current climate change is unique in either geologic or human history. As will be discussed below, in the section “Climate Narratives, Catastrophism, Alternatives”, there are reasons for at least adjusting the picture of climate change as leading to catastrophe. Finally, returning to the overarching topic of the environmental humanities, these themes together reflect a certain culture of nature – that is, a certain way of conceiving nature in relation to human experience, institutions, values, and practices (on the entanglement of nature and culture, see also Hulme, 2011).

Philosophy and Climate Change: Four Themes Even if environmental philosophy has already engaged with environmental issues at least since the middle of the twentieth century, and has generated a long record of reflections on environment-oriented ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, and aesthetics that may be seen as contributions to the environmental humanities, climate change is still a relatively new area of concern for the discipline. However, as Budolfson et al. argue, “philosophers have much to contribute to the discussion of

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climate change. . .” (Budolfson et al., 2021a, p. 1; also see the other contributions to Budolfson et al., 2021b; Irwin, 2011). The following does not pretend to plumb the breadth of extant and possible philosophical contributions to the environmental humanities on climate change. Instead, it is intended to deepen a little the discussion of the four themes distilled above from the approach of the environmental humanities to climate change: values and justice, narratives, temporalities, and culture of nature.

Future People, Systemic Injustices, Responsibilities In some senses, the problem of present climate change is a case of a good thing going bad through excess, since the planet precisely is habitable due to the existence of greenhouse gases on it. As it happens, presently levels of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere certainly exceed the degree that is beneficial to human and other species. Furthermore, since those concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will perdure long into the future without much of a remedy being at hand to cost-effectively sequester them again, this, certainly, raises questions of justice in relation to future generations. Those generations will have to bear the costs of global warming that result from the excessive burning of fossil fuels, which mostly benefits present generations or has benefited past generations (see, e.g., Shue, 2014). However, the question of whether current generations have obligations to presently not existing people has been considered a difficult problem from the point of view of philosophy (Parfit, 2017; Partridge, 1990). Philosophers have found still additional difficulties in relation to this topic, such as that, somewhat paradoxically, any action that presently are undertaken to prevent future generations from enduring the full impacts of climate change will affect who will come to exist in future times (Meyer, 2021). Various solutions have been tried, though they cannot be considered in any detail here (but see Meyer, 2021). The simplest solution might be to focus on the fact that, as greenhouse gases increase due to present burning of fossil fuels and, consequently, climate changes in ways that are burdensome to live with for humans and other species, the planet increasingly becomes a less welcoming and comfortable place. So, one way to argue for climate justice for future generations might be to say that it is not fair to leave in a worse condition than the current generation found those places that living beings, including humans, need to inhabit (see, for example, Meyer, 2021, Sect. 4.6). Since the concern here for the planet as a whole, given that climate change has global repercussions, the charge would be not to leave the planet in a worse condition than the current generation found it to start with. Since emitting excessive greenhouse gases does progressively worsen the planetary conditions found by each successive generation, justice demands that the present generation stop emitting them, at least at the current rate. Obviously, one may be called upon to justify the claim that “it is not fair to leave the places that living beings, including humans, inhabit in a worse condition than the present generation found them”. However, it

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would seem that it could easily gain support from most major approaches in ethics, such as Kantian deontology, happiness utilitarianism, or Rawlsian justice theory. As variously discussed in the environmental humanities literature, climate change also raises the problem of justice in other ways, insofar as it interacts with systemic injustices arising from factors such as historic racism, the unequal treatment of the genders, or extractivist and colonial attitudes toward Indigenous people. (For a recent discussion, see Arias-Maldonado and Trachtenberg (2019).) Even so, there still are further angles that do not receive the attention that they ought to, such as, for example, regarding the consequences of climate change for the non-human environment and its inhabitants. North American environmental philosophy has long debated whether non-human nature, and the beings that depend on it, could legitimately be attributed intrinsic value. If the claim is justified, environments that undergo significant changes, and species whose capacity to survive is significantly altered by changes in the environments that constitute their habitat, thereby become matters of ethical concern. Aside from the direct consideration of the integrity of non-human nature and the well-being of other species as such, there is the further matter concerning how changes affecting non-human nature affect human populations that have long lived in close dependence relationships with it. This issue is of special importance in the case of Indigenous peoples, who already have to bear with burdensome colonial legacies (see, e.g., Heyd, 2013, 2016; also see McVeigh, 2023) There is still another way in which the problem of justice arises in relation to climate change. This concerns the question of who is to be blamed for the present process of climatic changes. Commonly, it is “humanity” that is held responsible, and this especially is so since the introduction of the term “Anthropocene” for the epoch that humans are shaping (regarding the term Anthropocene, also see Moore, 2016). Though it is undeniable by now that it is indeed humans who are generating the excess in greenhouse gases that is causing climate change (see, e.g., IPCC, 2021), it remains questionable up to what point ordinary citizens are to shoulder the blame for the resulting consequences. After all, even in democratically governed areas of the world, decision makers rarely consult the population regarding the structurally significant decisions affecting matters relating to climate change. Moreover, insofar as the excessive generation of greenhouse gases may justify apportioning responsibilities, it would seem mistaken to blame humans qua humans, since there are populations whose use of fossil fuels is very limited and hardly benefit from the use made by others (see, e.g., Arias-Maldonado & Trachtenberg, 2019). It would seem, rather, that blame ought to be apportioned to those individuals, corporations and groups that prevent or distract decisionmakers from taking the steps that have long been obvious regarding mitigation, adaptation, resilience build-up, and societal transformation. In other words, if climate blame is to be handed out, the proper targets should be lobbyists and those who they are representing, that is, entrepreneurs, corporations and their shareholders who only attend to their shortterm, private enrichment interests and neglect the common good. This means, moreover, that to blame humanity as such constitutes a kind of “blame shifting” from those who effectively have the power to act onto those who

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do not and feel increasingly disempowered by economic constraints, often generated precisely by those who benefit from excessive greenhouse emissions. Aside from being unfair, when combined with catastrophist scenarios, such blame shifting may generate considerable eco-anxiety, especially in the younger generations (see Hickman et al., 2021), even to the point of generating suicidal tendencies in some, at least in countries such as Canada (see, e.g., Labbé, 2022; Millman, 2022). In short, the focus on justice in relation to climate change is of crucial importance, since those sectors of the world that are systemically discriminated, and those future people who are to receive the world from the present, are easily ignored or neglected. Nonetheless, some of the arsenal of ethics arguments appears misused when blame is dished out to populations who have little control over their own, and even less over their planet’s, fates. Such blame should, rather, be applied to those who have the levers of power and fail to act in the necessary ways.

Climate Narratives, Catastrophism, Alternatives As is evident from a quick survey of climate change-related article and book titles, as well as reports by activists, politicians, and professionals, this planet-changing process is regularly being framed as an approaching catastrophe, heralded by multiple path-breaking disasters, such as outsized storms, floods, heat waves, droughts, and so on (For a somewhat more nuanced version of this, which, nonetheless, still re-affirms the view that the world is heading into, or perhaps is already in, “a persistent catastrophe,” see Williston, 2021, p. 3.) This way of describing the consequences of climate change is in no way innocent, since it is by now well-known that fear is a highly problematic motive to act on (see, e.g., Hulme, 2008; O’Neill & Nicholson-Cole, 2009; but for discussion see Reser & Bradley, 2017). In fact, the catastrophist narratives, even if given in good faith, may be contributory to the slow reaction of societies in responding with all the resources available to the present situation. The reason being that, once the notion has sunk in that the world is heading toward a catastrophe, it is difficult to recover one’s pulse and to regain the confidence that a way forward out of the trouble can be found. Of course, it needs to be granted that no one can deny that the environmental and even sociopolitical transformations accompanying climate change indeed are deeply disruptive of ways of life as they have developed in contemporary societies, and often have tragic consequences for ordinary people. However, neither the catastrophist outlook nor the blame shifting approach already discussed are the result of a dispassionate display of the facts as they are collectively known but, rather, the consequence of certain narratives couched in the tragic mode of unavoidable fate, only to be tempered by personal sacrifice and abnegation of the normal aspirations of life. (Regarding diverse modes of representing climate change see Hulme, 2008, O’Neill & Nicholson-Cole, 2009. On the link between apocalyptic narratives of climate change and populisms see Swyngedouw, 2010). In fact, those narratives are absorbed to the point that people are beginning to take some drastic decisions that will deeply change the character of their lives. It has been

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reported, for example, that an increasing number of young women apparently choose to forego having children in the hope of sparing the world the addition of more humans, seen as necessarily harm bringing (see Harvey, 2021) (Whether the next generation necessarily will continue increasing environmental harms appears to be a somewhat open issue. Overall, while younger generations tend to be more engaged in addressing climate change issues (Tyson et al., 2021; Milfont et al., 2021), older people are more likely to participate in pro-environmental behavior (Wang et al., 2021; Wiernik et al., 2013), at least in wealthy Western countries. Values and value changes are both related to generational factors and individual aging (Leijen et al., 2022). On the whole, given that the more recent generations have a higher environmental commitment than previous ones, the combination of generational and aging factors auger well for continuing increases in environmental commitment across Western populations, at least in the foreseeable future.) After all, as Herodotus already pointed out, no one can know whether their existence will have been for better or for worse, before their time is up (this point was made by Herodotus in his report of a conversation between the Lydian king Croesus and the Athenian Solon; for discussion see Dewald, 2011). Existentialist philosophy, moreover, should have made it obvious that the future of anyone one person is open, and equally full of possible fortune as of possible misfortune, in part dependent on innumerable circumstances, some within people’s control and some not. Consequently, before engaging in decisions that may be life-determinant, one may want to closely consider the narratives that people are subject to, as individuals and as collectivities. Furthermore, despite the prevalence of the catastrophist mode, narratives concerning the consequences of climate change actually are rather diverse, generally grounded in particular cultural matrices. Staying within the broadly “Western” European sphere of influence, one may note, for example, that, overall, Norwegians seem not overly disturbed by a warming world, since they assume that climatic change will overall be beneficial for them by opening up formerly overly cold regions (however, see, e.g., O’Brien et al., 2006, p. 50, 55 and passim, who argue that Norwegian complacency will have a price). In Greenland, climate change is of concern to the Indigenous Inuit, insofar as the increasing local warming will impact their traditional ways of life. Yet the majority of the Greenland population also appear to welcome certain benefits of climatic change for their territory, since it is bringing about new mining opportunities of materials, such as of glacial sand (see, for example, Bendixen et al., 2022 and Mahadevan, 2023). For an earlier, more conservative, assessment, see Mitchell, (2008). Other Indigenous peoples also seem to engage in different narratives than the tragic-catastrophist story that has become familiar from mainstream media. In the Andean region of South America, for instance, there is concern over some of the physical changes in the landscape, insofar as they affect the availability of summer meltwater from glaciers (see, e.g., Bolin, 2009; Rhoades et al., 2008). However, in some areas, there also is considerable concern over the loss of culturally significant natural emblems, such as the glaciers covering the summits of Andean peaks (Bolin, 2009; Orlove et al., 2008; Rhoades et al., 2008; Heyd, 2016; Heyd, 2021a). Such

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changes, in turn, provoke self-reflection, typically not over fossil fuel use as over possibly morally troubling behaviour among community members (Rhoades et al., 2008; Ulloa, 2009). In short, the catastrophist account, common in the Western World, is not the only way in which the consequences of climate change are rendered. In fact, the supposition that present climate change has to be disastrous for the human species stems from an extremely foreshortened sense of both human and geologic histories, as will be argued in section “Climate Temporalities, Human Becoming, Present Times”.

Climate Temporalities, Human Becoming, Present Times The anthropogenic origin of present climatic changes certainly is unique, but this does not mean that humans did not ever live through such changes before. On the contrary, even a very perfunctory glimpse at human experiential history prior to the Holocene reveals that throughout at least 115,000 years previous generations of conspecifics, that is, of “anatomically modern humans” (see, e.g., Longrich, 2020), lived through repeated, frequent, and comparatively very severe climatic changes, while simultaneously being exposed to absolutely chaotic climate variability (Burroughs, 2008). In fact, in the European area, temperatures at times suddenly changed up to 7  C within a generation or two, which must have caused very significant upheaval for human populations at the time. Maher, Banning, and Chazan (2011), for example, report that the Preboreal or “earliest sub-phase of the Boreal climatic phase” . . . “is defined by a dramatic rise in global temperature over about 50 years,” which certainly would have been noticeable by people exposed to it, necessitating the application of significant coping strategies within a single generation. We may be aghast at the challenges that the forebears had to master in the Pleistocene, and without the advanced technological means at the disposal of many (but certainly not everyone) today. However, the record shows that humans proved extremely adaptable, and managed not only to survive and reproduce despite the troubling climatic ups and downs, but also to build a very sophisticated cultural know-how that allowed them to settle in all of the planet’s very diverse geographical areas – including in desertic, paleo-arctic, and tropical landscapes, in addition to the temperate areas to which it had until recently been supposed that humans were restricted to (see Carto et al., 2008). In fact, the latest research shows that anatomically modern humans became the extremely versatile and adaptable beings that they are precisely because our ancestors lived through repeated climatic upheavals. While other species, such as the mammoth and all other hominins (including the Neanderthal and Denisovan cousins) succumbed to climatically induced environmental changes, humans continued finding cultural adaptations that allowed us to go on. This has led Roberts and Stewart to describe humans as “generalist specialists,” by which they mean that humans have the ability to specialize in an indefinitely wide range of ecosystems (Roberts & Stewart, 2018). This ability in turn enabled the human species to occupy

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and exploit the planet, since the climatically stable Holocene replaced the climatically very unstable Pleistocene 11,700 years ago, in extraordinary and now quite damaging ways. Certainly, one need not suppose that present climate change was inevitable. However, in retrospect, the consumption of increasing quantities of fossil fuels fits into the general pattern of hyperexploitation of niches, characteristic of the human species. Nonetheless, climate change need not lead to a demise of humans. Precisely, when viewed in the light of the Pleistocene legacy of highly evolved adaptive capacities, coupled with extremely sophisticated forecasting tools, climate modelling, and the accumulated scientific and technological know-how acquired in the innovation-accelerated Holocene, climate change as such should not be an insuperable obstacle (see, e.g., Heyd, 2022). This viewpoint gains support against the determinism inherent in catastrophist narratives of present climate change by noting how environmental challenges, resulting from climatic changes, have been managed in previous historical moments in the Holocene (see, e.g., Brown, 1994; Orlove, 2005). So, for all that is known, climate change as such is manageable, and the best physical and social science supports this viewpoint (e.g., see Adger et al., 2009; Flood et al., 2022; IPCC, 2021). The real challenges, rather, are the socio-economic and political-territorial realities that present societies have slid into: know-how and resources needed for life increasingly are privatized, territories are enclosed in nation-state borders, land to which people could have retreated is subject to laws protecting private property, solidarity among people, nations, and generations increasingly is replaced by unmitigated, multiscalar individualism, and so on. That is, actual challenges arise from the direction that socio-cultural and economic systems have taken, making it difficult for citizens and societies to take the needed steps to adjust in times of climatically induced crises, such as sea level rise, or repeated flooding, or landslides. This last observation opens the door to reflection on the question how present climate change, and its narratives, impact the conception, or culture, of nature.

Culture, Nature as Adversary, Societal Inadequacies On the prevailing catastrophist narrative, nature is given the role of avenger of human misdeeds. This view, in turn, is grounded in the supposition that nature is the adversary of humanity, which therefore has to be dominated and controlled (see, e.g., Gammon, 2010). Largely based on this point of view, grand interventions to manage climate change, such as those that fall under the umbrella term of “geoengineering,”, are proposed. However, such Earth system management schemes probably have uncertain consequences that may not all be controllable (Lynas, 2011). Generally, such interventions are justified on the supposition that the continued existence of human beings depend on them. What is given very little thought to, it seems, is the integrity of the non-human sphere. Arguably, it precisely is due to its neglect that present societies are subject to multiple environmental challenges, such as the loss of biodiversity, in the first place (see Heyd, 2016 and Guillaume; Westra et al., 2008).

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(The neglect for the integrity of the non-human sphere also contributes to important health challenges for humans, including zoonotic diseases such as Covid-19 (see, e.g., Heyd, 2021b; Gibb et al., 2020).) However, there are alternatives to the view that the non-human world or nature is just an obstacle to human flourishing. Here are two, sketched very briefly. First, from the point of view of many Indigenous cultures, humans and nature are always already implicated in webs of reciprocity. That view is grounded in the observation that humans benefit when, instead of building ever greater bulwarks against its agency, they collaborate with the non-human world (see, e.g., Rose, 2005; Turner, 2005). The basic idea is that, while humans are self-aware of their agency, such selfawareness is not a necessary condition for the capacity to act. Seen this way, agency is widespread in the natural world and not unique to the human species (see Heyd, 2005). (A variant on this view is expressed in Daoism, which argues that the supposition that humans can somehow avoid the “flow” governing the natural world is a dangerous and impractical illusion. For an application of this view see Goodman (1980).) The practical consequence of the view that agency is widespread is that people may be more ready to take note of the hazards caused by what Val Plumwood called “hyperseparation”. That is, the false supposition that humans and the rest of the natural world are not continuous with each other and that domination of the latter is therefore justified or even sensible (see, e.g., Plumwood, 2009). The principle of collaboration with the flow of the non-human world is evident, for example, in organic agriculture, which relies on natural methods to control pests. In this way, ecosystemic integrity involving multiple species that would otherwise be affected by pesticides can be maintained. Incidentally, this alternative also benefits humans with foods richer in nutritive value by delivering higher levels of vitamins and preventing industrial chemicals from entering the food system. Similarly, applying the principle of collaboration with nature to flood-prone areas suggests creating spaces in which sudden rainwater bursts are given space to spread out instead of causing hazards for inhabited areas (see, e.g., Gies, 2018). Even within the Western cultural traditions, there are alternative conceptions of the human-natural relationships that explicitly make co-existence and even cooperation possible. Environmental ethics literature abounds with re-set models of humannature relationships, including social ecology, deep ecology, and eco-feminism, which appeal to various notions of human self-care and ecological justice. There also are some approaches that appeal to the concepts that ground the very possibility of productive societies. A case in point is the socio-political framework that since the seventeenth century has been called “the social contract.” This is the basis for Michel Serres’ argument for the adoption of a “natural contract” (Serres, 1990). He points out that, while people rely on a social contract to enable a comfortable life, it is a big mistake to suppose that nature can be relegated to the background in this kind of arrangement. Since present climate change has clearly shown that nature can be counted among the life-transforming “agents” (Heyd, 2005; Latour, 2005; Bennett, 2010), on Serres’ view nature can and ought to be a full partner in an expanded social contract (also see Heyd & Guillaume, 2016). What would be the consequences of applying this idea in practice?

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Among other things, present strategies for mitigation of and adaptation to climate change call for continuously increasing levels of technological intervention that will allow for the exploitation of still greater swaths of the natural world by occupying continuously expanding areas of land for solar, eolic, and hydroelectric energy installations. One such project, for example, calls for massively expanding the area of land to be covered with photovoltaic installations in North Africa, in order to supply Europe with electricity (El-Katiri, 2023). Such undertakings will undoubtedly have ecosystemic consequences, which are hard to assess in advance, and difficult to remedy once in place. Similarly, the present “solution” to mitigate the generation of greenhouse gases resulting from motor vehicle transportation is to transform the car park from fossil fuels to electrically powered. In addition to the impact on the power grid that this shift will mean, once it is fully realized, it also calls for the extraction of greatly increased quantities of rare metals, such as lithium for the making of batteries, from areas formerly left alone (such as the Atacama Desert of Bolivia and the Canadian Arctic). When alternative models of human-natural relationships, such as those sketched above, are applied to the present situation, they suggest new ways of living with nature that, instead of increasing, aim to reduce degrees of intervention in the non-human world. Basic strategies include becoming thermodynamically thrifty, by developing economies of proximity that connect local producers and consumers, building housing that maximizes passive heating and cooling systems, applying urban planning that brings work, home, and leisure areas closer together to avoid commuting, re-utilizing already impacted industrial and urban spaces instead of occupying new terrains, generating energy locally on roof tops and walls before spreading out onto farm land or wilderness areas, relying as much as possible on wind-driven sea transport, and so on (also see Heyd, 2007). Applying such alternative frameworks of human-natural relationships to the present situation should lead to new ways of framing the challenge of living with climate change. Instead of narrating this process as a revenge of nature, in the light of which the only sensible response is terror, it would rather be seen as a result of inadequacies in the organization of human societies. That is, climate change would be seen as the consequence of important power imbalances in human societies, which favor short-term benefits for the few in privileged positions while harming both human and non-human elements of the world. Hence, instead of narrating climate change as catastrophic, it would be understood as a significant challenge that calls for coordinated action from all sectors of human societies. Instead of perceiving it as exceeding human imaginaries, it would be understood through the species’ memories of the multiple dramatic climatic change events in the past. Climate change would be seen as an urgent call to right the various injustices regarding future generations, Indigenous peoples, minorities, and non-human nature that have been linked to it, but re-directing responsibilities toward those who have all along had the power both of preventing and remedying the problems in question. The end result is that shifting to such alternative ways of perceiving the humannatural relationships would support taking on the four pillars for living with climate

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change, which the sciences have already set out in considerable detail, with new vigor and clarity: reducing causal factors (mitigation), adjusting ways of living (adaptation), building up of capacities to bounce back from setbacks (resilience), and changing societal functioning (societal transformation) to facilitate the preceding three types of responses.

Conclusion: Living with Nature This chapter has offered an exploration of the environmental humanities to illuminate climate change from the perspective of philosophy. It started by first considering what unites the disciplines encompassed by the term “the humanities”. This was followed by a consideration of what appear to be the general approaches, aims, and endeavours that are central to the self-conception of the environmentally oriented humanities. After this, the manner of engagement with climate change of the environmental humanities was laid out, by highlighting four of its recurring themes, namely, the role of values and the issue of justice, the role of narratives and their interpretive function, the way that temporalities come to play in this context, and, ultimately, how all of these factors reflect a particular “culture of nature.” Next, these four themes were discussed in an interlinked manner. It was noted that, while climate change creates new injustices, for example, in relation to future generations, and also exacerbates extant systemic injustices stemming from racial, gender, extractivist, and colonial conditions, it also has further justice-related repercussions. For instance, in terms of specific cultural harms inflicted on Indigenous peoples, and with respect to who is held responsible for the upheavals linked to climate change. It was, furthermore, suggested that action regarding the problematic of climate change may in part be stumped by the prevalence of catastrophist narratives that frame all remedies as, in principle, useless given the dimensions of the present situation. It is noted, in turn, that these narratives are in large measure structured by the very limited temporalities by which the contemporary climate change process is framed. Finally, it was proposed that ethical outlook, narrative framing, and temporal outlook all together are products of a particular cultural milieu that views nature as obstacle or adversary. Some alternative outlooks that redress the relation of humans to nature, enabling the taking of actions that the present situation calls for, were briefly sketched. The result would be to view climate change as a product of maladjustments in human societies. Ultimately, it was suggested that such a revision of what climate change is, and what constitutes its origin, opens the way to narratives that will enable people to view climate change as a process that can be lived with. This in turn should support efforts to take all appropriate measures to reduce its power, soften its impacts, allow people to live through its challenges, and to ready societies for all the changes needed.

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Climate Change, Environmental Philosophy, and Anthropocentrism Ela Tokay

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Anthropocentrism and Non-anthropocentrism in Environmental Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Critiques of Anthropocentrism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Non-anthropocentric Alternatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Anthropocentrism and Climate Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Is Anthropocentrism Really the Problem? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Detecting Anthropocentrism: The Renewable Energy Transition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

This chapter introduces the concept of anthropocentrism and its relevance for climate change: what is anthropocentrism, and what are the alternatives? In what sense is it a root cause of climate change? And to what extent are anthropocentric values reflected in proposed solutions? The first section provides an overview of anthropocentrism, looking at some of the main critiques of the concept made by environmental philosophers and ethicists and at the main non-anthropocentric alternatives they proposed, such as biocentrism and ecocentrism. The next section examines the connection between anthropocentrism and climate change, showing how anthropocentrism both legitimizes the practices that contribute to climate change and remains an obstacle to addressing it adequately. It also critically analyzes two important objections: first, the focus on anthropocentrism as the root cause of climate change unfairly implicates all humans and ways of life as the problem, and second, it obscures potentially more relevant causes such as capitalism. The last section considers the extent to which anthropocentrism is E. Tokay (*) Department of Philosophy, Fordham University, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_107

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reflected in one specific plan of action to address climate change: the rapid transition to renewable energy. Taking into account the objections raised against anthropocentrism, this section suggests that an awareness of the anthropocentric dimensions of proposed solutions to climate change can help bring into focus important considerations about what values they uphold and who they truly serve. Keywords

Anthropocentrism · Climate change · Intrinsic value · Moral considerability · Human supremacy · Renewable energy · Biocentrism · Ecocentrism

Introduction Climate change is perhaps the defining feature of planetary life in the age of the Anthropocene: the new geological era marking humanity’s transition to a geological agent capable of rivaling the forces of nature. Once highly contentious, the acceptance that climate change is not only happening but also anthropogenic – caused by certain human activities – is gaining more traction globally. As unprecedented fires, droughts, and floods devastate large swaths of the planet, destroying the lives and livelihoods of humans and countless other beings, the need for alternatives is pressing. Yet, to many environmentalists’ dismay, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases continue to rise. The political, economic, historical, and scientific origins of this state of affairs are undoubtedly important. Many environmentalists and philosophers, however, turn their attention to something taken to be more fundamental. They argue that underlying the many drivers of climate change – the growing global economy, relentless extraction of fossil fuels, nonstop development – lies a worldview that normalizes and justifies such drivers: anthropocentrism (Naess, 1995a; Rolston, 2005; Crist, 2019; Krenak, 2020; Droz, 2022). In basic terms, anthropocentrism denotes the worldview or ideology that only humans matter, but like any worldview, it consists of many dimensions and intricacies (Almiron & Tafalla, 2019). More substantively, anthropocentrism can be characterized as an embodied belief system and way of organizing the world that values humans and their interests more than all other life forms (Crist, 2019). Truly to address climate change, the thinking goes, society must reject anthropocentrism and adopt a less human-centric worldview; otherwise, the same conditions that gave rise to the climate crisis in the first place will be reproduced. This chapter introduces the concept of anthropocentrism and its relevance for climate change: what is anthropocentrism, and what are the alternatives? In what sense is it a root cause of climate change? And to what extent are anthropocentric values reflected in proposed solutions? The first section provides an overview of anthropocentrism, looking at some of the main critiques of the concept made by environmental philosophers and ethicists and at the main non-anthropocentric alternatives they propose, such as biocentrism and ecocentrism. The next section

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examines the connection between anthropocentrism and climate change, showing how anthropocentrism both legitimizes the practices that contribute to climate change and remains an obstacle to addressing it adequately. It also critically analyzes two important objections: first, the focus on anthropocentrism as the root cause of climate change unfairly implicates all humans and ways of life as the problem, and second, it obscures potentially more relevant causes such as capitalism. The last section considers the extent to which anthropocentrism is reflected in one specific plan of action to address climate change: the rapid transition to renewable energy. Taking into account the concerns raised about the exclusive focus on anthropocentrism, this section suggests that an awareness of it, at least in a more qualified sense, can help bring into focus important considerations about the values that proposed solutions uphold and who they truly serve.

Anthropocentrism and Non-anthropocentrism in Environmental Philosophy Anthropocentrism, often used interchangeably with “human exceptionalism,” “human supremacy,” and “human chauvinism,” has consistently remained a central topic of debate among environmental philosophers and ethicists since the inception of academic environmental philosophy in the 1960s and 1970s (Crist, 2019; Peterson, 2020). A complex concept with different connotations, anthropocentrism encompasses a number of ontological and value-laden assumptions about humans, nature, and the relationship between them. The story these assumptions tell is one where humans (and, importantly, as discussed in the next section, a particular class of humans) are categorically distinct from nature. They are intelligent, rational, and free actors with minds – capacities which supposedly do not exist anywhere else in nature. By contrast, nature, including nonhuman animals, plants, and all other living beings, are said to lack these qualities. They are construed as inert, mechanistic, and predictable, justifying their status as mere resources. Insofar as humans are unique and special, says the anthropocentric credo, they have the right to control and manipulate nature to serve their own ends. The intellectual origins of these assumptions can be traced in a myriad of ways. Some attribute them to the hierarchical ordering of the world – the “Great Chain of Being” – found in Christian and Medieval thought that placed humans in a “coveted position” above all other earthly beings (Keller, 2010, p. 59). Lynn White Jr., for example, argued in his (in)famous essay “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” that anthropocentric and exploitative attitudes toward nature are inherent in the Judeo-Christian worldview (or at least in its dominant interpretation), where the sole purpose of nature’s creation is to satisfy humanity’s needs (White Jr., 1967, p. 1205). Others, such as environmental historian and ecofeminist Carolyn Merchant, take anthropocentrism instead to be a legacy of modern science and Enlightenment thought (Merchant, 1980). Merchant chronicles how the philosophical and scientific contributions of René Descartes and Francis Bacon, for instance, helped usher in a new way of understanding nature and nonhuman beings as mechanical and

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completely quantifiable, cementing humanity’s role as master manipulator of nature and legitimizing its commercial exploitation (Merchant, 1980; Keller, 2010). Val Plumwood and Eileen Crist trace anthropocentrism back even further; the former to the rationalism of Plato and the latter to the emergence of animal agriculture and sedentary communities (Plumwood, 1993; Crist, 2019). Regardless of its origins, anthropocentrism is today argued to be the predominant worldview of Western society (Keller, 2010; Crist, 2019). The focus for early environmental philosophers and ethicists was on the particular value system and ethical framework inherent in the anthropocentric worldview, framed around the concepts of intrinsic value and moral considerability. Anthropocentrism in this sense specifies that humans alone are intrinsically valuable – only they have a good of their own – because only they possess some unique capacity, be it rationality, sentience, intentionality, or something similar. Consequently, only humans are morally considerable: only their interests matter and must be taken into account when acting (Goodpaster, 1978). Nonhuman beings, by contrast, either do not have value or if they do, it is purely instrumental; they are not valuable in themselves but only to the extent that they are useful for humans. As such, their interests do not need to be taken into account (Keller, 2010, p. 59). The belief that only humans are intrinsically valuable is reflected in the modern Western legal system, which largely denies legal rights to nonhumans, classifying them instead as property (Stone, 1972). Environmental philosophers and ethicists offer three types of critiques against this anthropocentric value system.

Critiques of Anthropocentrism One of the most widespread lines of criticisms contests the division between intrinsically valuable and thus morally considerable human beings on the one hand, and instrumentally valuable nonhumans on the other hand, by questioning its basis on the possession, or lack thereof, of certain capacities like rationality or sentience. Using the possession of these capacities to ground moral considerability appears problematic given that even among humans, they are distributed unevenly. To ensure that all humans are granted moral considerability, then, a much lower criterion must be implemented, one that would inevitably also include some nonhumans (Singer, 2005). Anthropocentrism, insofar as it justifies drawing a moral boundary around only humans on the basis of possessing a capacity like rationality, thus appears arbitrary or “speciesist,” to use Peter Singer’s terminology (Singer, 2005). Even if there did exist a single capacity that would distinguish all humans from nonhumans, it would still be necessary to question why the possession of that capacity entails superiority. Just as humans are capable of some things that other animals are not, so too do other animals possess capacities that humans lack. This is the point made persuasively by Paul Taylor: Humans are claiming human superiority from a strictly human point of view, that is, from a point of view in which the good of humans is taken as the standard of judgement. All we

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need to do is look at the capacities of nonhuman animals (or plants, for that matter) from the standpoint of their good to find a contrary judgement of superiority. The speed of the cheetah, for example, is a sign of its superiority to humans when considered from the standpoint of the good of its species. (Taylor, 1981, p. 212)

Whereas rationality, for instance, is undoubtedly an important capacity for humans, Taylor contends that it does not make sense to discount the interests of or to devalue other species because they lack it; it is but one feature among many. Moreover, it is worth pointing out that many of the capacities historically thought to belong exclusively to humans are now widely acknowledged to exist in many other parts of nature; capacities including, but not limited to, rationality, intelligence, language, and tool-use (Gruen, 2011). Studies continue to reveal the intelligence of not only animals but also of plants and fungi (Sheldrake, 2020). On a different front, anthropocentrism has been criticized on the grounds that it not only harms nature, but also inadvertently harms humans. Deep ecologist Arne Naess argues that in the modern world, anthropocentrism manifests in the form of an alienated understanding of self and identity, one that leads humans to misunderstand who and what they are (Naess, 1995b). Instead of recognizing that human interests are tied up with and depend on nature’s interests, anthropocentrism pits them against each other; human interests are pursued at nature’s expense. Although Naess was not describing climate change, it can serve as an example of how the prioritization of human interests at the expense of nature’s ultimately harms humans: unbridled extractivism has led to the current climate crisis that threatens the very conditions for humanity’s survival. Eileen Crist has also suggested that anthropocentrism harms humans in the sense that the violence it inflicts on nature tarnishes human dignity and integrity. Treating nature and nonhuman beings as mere instruments or machines renders humans incapable of experiencing the wonder and empathy of which they are capable (Crist, 2019, p. 45). Ecofeminists add another important dimension to the critique of anthropocentrism. Concerned particularly with the connection between the oppression of women and environmental degradation, they consider how relations of power and systems of oppression intersect with environmental problems. Anthropocentrism and the human/nature bifurcation it imposes, they argue, is itself one dimension of a larger network of historically contingent bifurcations, what they refer to as dualisms (Plumwood, 1993). In addition to human/nature, Western society is organized according to dualisms like man/women, civilized/primitive, and mind/body, among others – all of which get conceptually, symbolically, and materially connected with one another. Over time, one side is set up as primary (“human,” “man,” “civilized,” “mind”) while the other side is perceived as a deficient mode of the primary and treated as inferior (“nature,” “woman,” “primitive,” “body”), in this case revealing the connection between anthropocentrism and patriarchy (Warren, 1990). The important takeaway from ecofeminism is that, because anthropocentrism is implicated in this larger dualist structure, a critique of it must be undertaken alongside a critique of other forms of domination. Not all environmental philosophers, however, see anthropocentrism in such a critical light. Whereas a strong denial of nature’s interests and value might not be

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compatible with nature’s flourishing, Brian Norton distinguishes a less harmful version. A weaker form of anthropocentrism can recognize that protecting nature is beneficial for humans – humans need clean air, water, and livable temperatures – even if it means resisting the immediate desire to take the hummer out for a joyride (Norton, 1984). Nature is still instrumental in this scenario, but its protection is justified on the basis of ensuring humanity’s well-being. Relatedly, environmental pragmatists argue that human-interest can be a powerful motivator to implement stronger environmental protections. Given the need to quickly mobilize public and political action on climate change, they argue that writing off anthropocentrism is thus counter-productive (Light, 2002).

Non-anthropocentric Alternatives Responses to the problem of anthropocentrism characterized in terms of intrinsic value and moral considerability supplied by early environmental philosophers took the form of progressively expanding the sphere of moral concern. Not necessarily questioning the enforcement of moral boundaries on the basis of possessing a certain capacity, one approach sought to grant (some) nonhumans intrinsic value by highlighting their possession of those crucial capacities historically denied to them. For Peter Singer, that meant foregrounding other animals’ capacity to experience pain and suffering (Singer, 2005). Recognizing the limitations of such approaches, and concerned with the extent that to which they continued to ground value and moral considerability upon human resemblance, philosophers like Kenneth Goodpaster and Paul Taylor developed a view called biocentrism. For biocentrists, all individual organisms – not just so-called higher animals – can be said to have intrinsic value in virtue of being alive. As living beings, each organism has a good they strive to preserve in a way characteristic of their species. A tree, in trying to sustain its life, has interests that can either be satisfied or not in the same way that an elephant or a human might, even though these might be radically different (Goodpaster, 1978; Taylor, 1981). What counts, in other words, is being alive (Goodpaster, 1978). Biocentrism moves away from anthropocentrism by recognizing that, in being alive, all living things have interests and goods of their own that ought to be considered, though there is still disagreement about how to weigh these interests (Attfield, 2018, p. 22). Ecocentrism or holism expands the sphere of moral concern even further, arguing that entire ecological systems and biospheric wholes “have a good independent of that of their component individuals, and as such have their own moral standing” (Attfield, 2014, p. 11). Deep ecologists go so far as to question whether individuals as such even exist, arguing instead that all organisms and entities that make up the ecosphere are parts of a larger, interrelated whole (Naess, 1995b). By making the entire complex and integrated web of life the subject of moral consideration, they reject the idea that humans are separate from or “above” nature and the physical world, repositioning them firmly within the network of ecological relationships.

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The idea that ecosystems and other biotic wholes have moral standing might make sense intuitively, but given the disanalogy between individuals and systemic wholes, identifying their “good” and where their value lies is more complicated than it might appear. As Holmes Rolston explains, ecosystems are clearly unlike individual organisms in that they are comprised of both biotic and abiotic components. They also have no organized center, no subjective consciousness, and their biological identity changes over time (Rolston, 2005). For this reason, Rolston argues that ecosystems have systemic value: they are selective and productive systems that increase the diversity of the biota over time, manage populations, and bring new species into existence. They produce the very capacities so lauded by humanity (Rolston, 2005). But attempts to move beyond anthropocentrism by extending intrinsic value and moral worth to nonhuman nature, as both biocentrism and ecocentrism attempt to do, might be said to “put the cart before the horse” if it turns out that anthropocentrism is inevitable. Is it not the case that humans are the ones who attribute value, and thus that value is bound to remain distinctively human or human-centered (Peterson, 2020, p. 23)? J. Baird Callicott, defending a Humean-Darwinian axiology, gets around this problem by conceding that intrinsic value in a strict, objective sense is untenable – for value to exist, there must be a human to do the valuing. But nonhuman beings can nonetheless be valued non-instrumentally for themselves. In other words, nonhumans can be valued for what they are in themselves, but this value is subjectively conferred by a valuing subject (Callicott, 1989). By contrast, Rolston maintains that objective intrinsic value does exist in nature, independent of any ties to a valuing subject. The pursuit of an end on the part of any organism or ecological process denotes value, regardless of whether a human is there to value it or not (Rolston, 2005). Framed more explicitly around the issue of climate change, this epistemic debate about anthropocentrism’s inevitability raises the larger question of whether a different way of relating to nature is at all possible. Are humans evolutionarily and naturally bound to prioritize their own species, making something like climate change an unavoidable outcome of human nature? Asking humanity to overcome anthropocentrism and adopt a biocentric or ecocentric perspective would thus be akin to asking them to stop being human (Crist, 2019, p. 49). Although perhaps consistent with some interpretations of humanity’s evolutionary history, environmentalists like Crist stress the contingency and conditioned character of anthropocentrism: “it is not who human beings are by nature nor forever saddled with” (Crist, 2019, p. 50). In short, there are other interpretations of human history and other examples of non-anthropocentric modes of being that the inevitability argument overlooks (Leopold, 1949; Crist, 2019). Far from being resolved, the problem of anthropocentrism and the possibility of developing alternatives continue to be relevant for grappling with climate change. Although many of the early environmental philosophers and ethicists did not explicitly thematize climate change, the next section details how it nonetheless epitomizes many of the problems they introduced.

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Anthropocentrism and Climate Change The anthropogenic causes of climate change are no doubt familiar to many and documented extensively by the scientific community: the excessive burning of fossil fuels, rapid deforestation, mass-industrial food production, and high levels of consumption, among others. But many environmentalists and scholars today see anthropocentrism as playing a more fundamental causal role in these problems in some way. That is, they see climate change as the ultimate manifestation of anthropocentrism and the entitlement it embodies (Opperman & Iovino, 2017, p. 4). Anthropocentrism can be understood as the root problem behind climate change in two senses: first, because it legitimizes the practices that caused and continue to exacerbate climate change, and second, because it serves as an obstacle to addressing climate change. As discussed previously, anthropocentrism promotes the belief that human interests matter more than nature’s and that nature is nothing more than a means to satisfy those interests. In doing so, it essentially provides limitless justification for engaging in ecologically destructive practices that exploit nature and ultimately contribute to climate change. The industrial food system, particularly animal agriculture (or the animal industrial complex), serves as a prime example. Not only do domestic animals emit about a third of global methane emissions (Lakhani, 2022), but housing and feeding them requires enormous amounts of deforestation, eliminating large tracts of forests that would otherwise act as carbon sinks (Crist, 2019, p. 32). Yet according to a report by the Organization for Economic Co-operation Development (OECD) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), meat consumption continues to rise globally (OECD/FAO, 2021). While other factors can explain why humans, especially those adhering to Western diets, prefer to eat the way they do, the explanation from the perspective of anthropocentrism boils the issue down to one of human interests and preferences taking precedence over the well-being of animals and the planet as a whole. The host of ecological consequences, not to mention the horrific suffering inflicted on domestic animals, are all justified on the basis of satisfying human economic interests and taste preferences (Singer, 2005). More generally, the point is that anthropocentrism authorizes the ecologically destructive and unsustainable modes of production that have led to climate change (Almiron & Tafella, 2019). In the same way that anthropocentrism deems it permissible to eradicate an entire species without a second thought, so too does it authorize companies to blow up mountain tops to access the seams of coal embedded within them, or to clear-cut old-growth forests to build oil and gas pipelines (Crist, 2019, p. 47). Another angle from which to see the way anthropocentrism legitimizes ecologically destructive practices is manifest in the very linguistic categories used to represent nature, particularly, natural resources and ecosystem services. These categories cement nature’s status as mere instrument, as having no moral standing of its own (Crist, 2019, pp. 67–68). For Crist, “[t]he term ‘resources,’ simply put, designates the world in terms of its disposability for human needs, wants, and desires” (Crist, 2019, p. 68). The use of these categories themselves precludes the

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possibility of nature appearing as something of worth in itself, other than a mere instrument to meet human needs; depleting these “resources” or exploiting these “services” appears natural. Moreover, the reification of nature accomplished by this language is precisely what facilitates its subsumption into financial markets. As services and resources, ecological activities are turned into individualized packages that can be “traded and sold” on the market, their value appearing only in economic terms (Battistoni, 2017, p. 11). The normalization of anthropocentrism through language is implicit in the phrase “climate change” itself. Invoking a sense of neutrality, it belies the violence involved, the loss and devastation hiding behind a veneer of impartiality: “We are not destroying the biosphere – we are changing it: the former so emotional and ‘biased’; the latter so much more dispassionate and civilized” (Crist, 2016, p. 18). Even the shift from “global warming” to “climate change” in the early 2000s during the Bush administration was politically motivated by the need to make the crisis less terrifying and to occlude human responsibility (Lakoff, 2010, p. 71; Almiron & Tafella, 2019). The concern about the potential of language to reify anthropocentrism is especially evident in recent debates surrounding the naming of the current geological epoch after humans: the “Anthropocene.” While the name and its meaning remain controversial, the predominant narrative it promotes is one that celebrates humanity’s power and ingenuity, extolling its ability to solve the various crises it has unfortunately brought about (Barca, 2020, pp. 7–9). The worry here is that the Anthropocene name perpetuates anthropocentrism by doubling down on the belief in human superiority, power, and entitlement. It “delivers a Promethean self-portrait: an ingenious if unruly species, distinguishing itself from the background of merely living life, rising so as to earn itself a separate name (anthropos meaning ‘man,’ and always implying ‘not-animal’)” (Crist, 2016, p. 16). Instead of heralding a radically new era as the name purports to attest, the naming of this epoch after humans is but the latest instantiation of the anthropocentric worldview, both affirming its superiority and validating its continued control over nature. In addition to legitimizing unsustainable and ecologically harmful practices, the second sense in which anthropocentrism is understood as a root problem behind climate change is because it can explain, at least in part, why disappointingly little action has been taken to address it over the last few decades. With a few exceptions, extractivism continues relatively unabated despite the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) warnings about the dire social and ecological consequences of exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming. Adrienne Buller captures this frustrating paradox: “The strange irony of this moment is that we are at once more aware of and committed to action on our planetary crisis than ever before, and yet we continue to fall woefully short of what we are capable of – let alone what must be done” (Buller, 2022, p. 7). New drilling leases in sensitive areas continue to be issued; governmental commitments to cut emissions and to provide financial aid to developing nations continue to go unmet (Buller, 2022, p. 7; Carrington, 2022). In the same way that anthropocentrism is said to sanction the extractive practices that cause climate change, so too does it permit powerful governments to prioritize their

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economies over the fate of the planet. The anthropocentric belief that humans are set apart from the rest of nature, their interests the most important, remains a barrier to implementing the drastic and large-scale solutions necessary to address climate change (Crist, 2019). The singling out of anthropocentrism as the root cause of not only environmental problems, but of climate change in particular, brings into focus important explanatory considerations sometimes overlooked when the focus remains on the more immediate or direct causes. That is, it reveals the philosophical and deep-seated dimensions of the ecological crisis, without which an understanding of this complex phenomenon remains impoverished. The appeal to anthropocentrism can also provide one type of answer to the question of why humanity has thus far failed to confront climate change, revealing a philosophical and ideological obstacle that undermines effective climate action. The focus on anthropocentrism, however, hides as much as it reveals. The next section discusses two crucial and interrelated problems with this approach. The explanatory force of anthropocentrism is limited, first because it unfairly implicates all humans as the problem and, second, because it obscures potentially more relevant causes of climate change.

Is Anthropocentrism Really the Problem? The first issue with focusing on anthropocentrism as the root problem behind climate change is that the human identity implicit in the concept is universalized, thereby erasing important distinctions between humans. It fails to register differences between cultures, classes, genders, and races, instead lumping all actions and their different environmental consequences together (Peterson, 2020, p. 9). The issue, in other words, is that anthropocentrism is invoked in an undifferentiated and universalizing manner. By implying that all humans are to blame, it overlooks that climate change is really the product of one particular dominant worldview out of many and that some humans are more complicit than others. For instance, 80% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions come from just 10 countries (Jamieson, 2014), and more than one third of all global emissions come from 20 fossil fuel companies (Taylor & Watts, 2019). Billionaires are particularly guilty – on average they, through their lifestyles and financial investments, emit on average thousands of times more greenhouse gases than the average person (Maitland et al., 2022). In the words of Jason Moore, “[a] world of political difference lies between saying ‘Humans did it!’ – and saying ‘Some humans did it!’” (Moore, 2019a, b). Along these lines, the appeal to anthropocentrism also fails to register the many humans who suffer as a result of climate change, and whose interests have been systematically marginalized for centuries. In short, anthropocentrism, in distributing the blame evenly across all of humanity, misses the mark. These concerns about who is implicated and whose interests are prioritized in the invocation of “humanity” is also a major topic in the debates over the Anthropocene concept (Davis & Todd, 2017; Haraway, 2016; Moore, 2019a, b).

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If it is to avoid erasing such distinctions, the appeal to anthropocentrism must be accompanied by a critical reflection on who anthropocentrism implicates and which ways of life get elevated at the expense of others. The work of ecofeminists such as Val Plumwood can help on this point. As mentioned above, ecofeminists stress that anthropocentrism does not operate in isolation – it is itself connected to and amplified by other forms of social domination. For Plumwood, the logic undergirding these interconnections produces a “master model” of humanity, the subject of which is not humans in general, but a particular identity: one that is masculine, European, divorced from nature, and defined by its cognitive capacities (Plumwood, 1993). Far from neutral, the concept of the human inherent in the master model is based on the exclusion of not only nonhumans, but also on the exclusion of all the humans which supposedly deviate from it: Indigenous Peoples, women, and racialized groups. To invoke anthropocentrism as the root cause of climate change, one must always consider: who is truly implicated? Which interests has the anthropocentric world-order privileged at the expense of others? And more fundamentally, who counts as human? Without these considerations, the explanatory potential of anthropocentrism is severely restricted. The second limitation arising from the focus on anthropocentrism is that it potentially conceals other origins of the climate crisis, such as capitalism, consumerism, or colonialism. Focusing on capitalism for the moment, many scholars argue that climate change is best understood as the outcome of an economic system that profits from extracting as much value from nature as possible (Bookchin, 2005; Moore, 2019a, b). More than anything else, economic relations govern the treatment of nature, and it is capitalism’s need to grow that sanctions extractivism. As social ecologist Murray Bookchin argues, the logic of capitalism is inherently contradictory – survival in the market is antithetical to ecological concern (Bookchin, 2005). Part of the worry is that the focus on anthropocentrism instead of capitalism or another relevant cause gives the impression that addressing climate change is only a matter of changing how humans think, assuming a shift in worldview will directly translate to a shift in action, instead of the need to take more serious economic or social action. The relationships between anthropocentrism, capitalism, colonialism, consumerism, and any other causal origins of the climate crisis are undoubtedly complicated and beyond the scope of this chapter. Much could be said about whether anthropocentric assumptions played a role in creating the conditions for the rise of capitalism and colonialism or vice versa (Moore, 2019a, b, p. 84; Plumwood, 1993). But in a sense, part of the concern lies in trying to reduce the climate crisis down to a single cause or origin in the first place. At the very least, one response to this limitation is that anthropocentrism should not be seen as the only cause of climate change in the same way that it might be problematic to reduce the problem down to only a matter of capitalism or consumerism. Instead, it seems important to maintain that an event as complex as climate change is the product of several interconnected issues, the anthropocentric worldview being one of them. Reducing climate change to one single factor is too simplistic.

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Detecting Anthropocentrism: The Renewable Energy Transition In “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement,” Arne Naess coins a distinction between two types of environmentalism: shallow ecology and deep ecology (Naess, 1995a). Shallow ecology is criticized on the grounds that it is anthropocentric: the motivation to preserve the environment stems primarily from the desire to preserve humanity’s survival and to promote economic growth. Naess worries that such an approach is too superficial – it fails to examine the underlying pathology (i.e., anthropocentrism) and thus risks reproducing the same problems it tries to address. Naess’ method of using anthropocentrism as a metric by which to understand and evaluate solutions to environmental problems is also applicable in the context of climate change. The ability to detect anthropocentrism in proposed solutions can help reveal important considerations about the values these solutions uphold and who they truly serve. This section focuses on the anthropocentrism reflected in the transition to renewable energy. Conceding the threat of climate change, more and more nations are beginning to decarbonize their economies by way of large-scale renewable and clean energy projects. According to the IPCC, the transition to renewable forms of energy is both urgent and necessary given that the provisioning of energy for transportation, manufacturing, and other industries is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions (IPCC, 2011). The complete transition to renewable energy sources to meet all energy needs in the United States is an integral part of the Green New Deal, a congressional resolution to tackle both emissions and social inequalities. According to its platform, this involves “sourcing 100 percent of the country’s electricity from renewable and zero-emissions power; digitizing the nation’s power grid, upgrading every building in the country to be more energy efficient, and overhauling the nation’s transportation system by investing in electric vehicles and high-speed rail” (Friedman, 2019). The Inflation Reduction Act, passed in August 2022, also foregrounds the nascent transition to renewable energy, incentivizing the development of solar, wind, geothermal, and hydrothermal energy sources through tax credits and other measures (Pearson & Such, 2022). On the surface, the transition to renewable energy appears sustainable, “green,” and long overdue. What looks like concern for the planet from one perspective, however, also reflects anthropocentrism from another – a “shallow” resolution to a deeper problem. Anthropocentrism is most evidently reflected in the silence on the destruction of nature that the construction of such large-scale, clean energy infrastructure entails. The production of solar panels, electric vehicles, batteries, and other renewable infrastructure requires essential minerals such as lithium, copper, and nickel, the extraction of which is often accompanied by significant ecological and social costs. Large-scale lithium mining projects, for example, require vast tracts of land to be cleared, hundreds of gallons of water to operate, and result in high levels of chemical pollution, all of which threaten ecosystems and nonhuman species (Urkidi & Walter, 2017). Leire Urkidi and Mariana Walter explain that the huge demand for these minerals, coupled with the global decline in the quality of ores, has meant the “expansion of the mining frontier to sensitive and critical ecosystems such as tropical

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and cloud forests, or the very high mountains next to pasturelands and glaciers” (Urkidi & Walter, 2017, p. 375). That this violence largely fails to register or matter in mainstream narratives surrounding renewable energy reveals the prioritization of human energy needs over nature, as well as the view of nature as a mere resource to meet these needs. Keeping in mind the concern about which humans and ways of life are implicated in the invocation of anthropocentrism discussed above, it is important to mention that this ecological destruction intersects in important ways with matters of social justice. Mining has a disproportionate impact on Indigenous lands, and mining operations continue to spread to poorer nations due to their laxer environmental regulations (Urkidi & Walter, 2017). More than prioritizing all humans, the anthropocentrism reflected in the push for renewables more accurately refers to the needs of specific humans: the world’s wealthiest and their comfortable lifestyles. Paul Kingsnorth writes: It is really about “sustaining human civilization at the comfort level that the world’s rich people – us – feel is their right, without destroying the ‘natural capital’ or the ‘resource base’ that is needed to do so” (Kingsnorth, 2017, p. 68). Moreover, the sprint toward “net zero” and the gusto with which governments are adopting these goals is not only not about the planet, but it is also not about human needs either – it is about maintaining the economy, the lifestyles, and the status quo for certain humans (Almiron & Tafella, 2019; Crist, 2019). If energy can be generated without emissions, then “there will be no need to ever turn the lights off; no need to ever slow down” (Kingsnorth, 2017, p. 70). Reflecting on the instrumentalization of nature sanctioned under the guise of sustainability, Kingsnorth writes: And so the deserts [. . .] are to be colonised by vast ‘solar arrays’, glass and steel and aluminium, the size of small countries. The mountains and moors, the wild uplands, are to be [. . .] pierced with rows of 500-foot wind turbines and associated access roads, masts, pylons and wires. The open oceans, already swimming in our plastic refuse and emptying of marine life, will be home to enormous offshore turbine ranges [. . .] The rivers are to see their estuaries severed and silted by industrial barrages. The croplands and even the rainforests [. . .] are already highly profitable sites for biofuel plantations designed to provide guilt-free car fuel to the motion-hungry masses of Europe and America [. . .] This is business as usual: the expansive, colonising, progressive human narrative, shorn only of the carbon. (Kingsnorth, 2017, pp. 70–71)

To be sure, the observation that the aggressive push for renewable energy today reflects some of the core tenets of anthropocentrism is not to invalidate it as a solution or to deny that it is ultimately necessary to mitigate climate change. Many humans and nonhumans are already suffering from the effects of planetary disruption, and the consensus that global emissions must drop precipitously in the coming decade is clear. Instead, highlighting its anthropocentric dimensions brings to the forefront significant considerations about who truly benefits from such projects, why some solutions receive more mainstream attention, and ultimately, the kind of world in which they are invested. These considerations are increasingly relevant as risky geo-engineering projects fall further into the scope of possibility (McKibben, 2022)

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and as technological “quick-fixes” continue to get spotlighted at international summits like COP 27 (Lakhani, 2022).

Conclusion This chapter addresses the widespread consensus among environmental philosophers and activists that anthropocentrism is the driving force behind climate change and therefore must be overcome. The literature emerging from the early years of environmental philosophy and ethics provided several critiques of anthropocentrism, revealing its logical inconsistencies and the harm it ultimately inflicts on humans themselves. Debates centered on how to extend intrinsic value to nonhuman beings, culminating in the development of the biocentric and ecocentric perspectives. But questions about whether anthropocentrism is necessarily problematic or whether it is at all possible for humans to overcome persist. Nevertheless, climate change in many ways can be characterized as an outcome of the anthropocentric worldview; first, in the sense that it authorizes the ecologically exploitative practices that contribute to climate change and, second, in the sense that it has remained an obstacle to effective climate action. While the recognition that anthropocentrism has played some role in bringing about the climate crisis is significant, this chapter warned against over simplified or reductive appeals to anthropocentrism as the root cause of the problem. Boiling climate change down to anthropocentrism unfairly blames all humans and ways of life for a problem that is caused by some humans and also obscures other relevant origins such as capitalism, colonialism, and consumerism. Bearing in mind these limitations, this chapter affirmed that anthropocentrism can be an important lens through which to understand the different motivations and assumptions behind mainstream solutions to climate change, using the transition to renewable energy as an example. Recognizing the way anthropocentrism is reflected in society today brings into focus considerations essential for ensuring a just future where both humans and nonhumans can flourish.

Cross-References ▶ Climate Change and the Environmental Humanities

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The Earth Means the World to Me: Earthand World-Interest in Times of Climate Change Vincent Blok

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Emergence of World in Times of Climate Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . From World Interest to Earth Interest in Times of Climate Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Givenness of Earth and World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion: The Advantage of a Philosophical Concept of Earth and World in Times of Climate Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

This contribution considers the world-historical significance of climate change. Climate change unmasks the stability of the living and acting in the world of human and nonhuman existence and confronts it with its living and acting on Earth, shifts the attention from World to Earth, and raises the question about the place of human and nonhuman existence on Earth. To answer this question, this chapter moves beyond humanist and post-humanist positions and argues for earth and world interest in times of climate change. First, an ontological concept of World is rehabilitated, which enables to distinguish between the Holocene World and the Anthropocene World. As climate change also confronts with Earth as exterior milieu beyond the interior milieu of the Anthropocene World, the chapter subsequently criticizes the self-interest of philosophers of the twentieth century and argues for world interest in times of climate change. It is argued that world interest should not lead to world production, whether it is found in a productive act by the Earth or by humanity, as world production is accompanied by Earth alienation. A gestalt-based understanding of the givenness of Earth as noncausal ontic-ontological ground of the givenness of World is developed. The conceptualization of World and Earth in this chapter helps to differentiate between the V. Blok (*) Wageningen University & Research, Wageningen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_105

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often ambiguous uses of these concepts in environmental philosophy and contributes to contemporary debates in philosophy of climate change. Keywords

Earth · World · World production · Anthropocene · Climate change

“If only we knew, boss, what the stones and rain and flowers say. Maybe they call – call us – and we don’t hear them. When will people’s ears open, boss? When shall we have our eyes open to see? When shall we open our arms to embrace everything – stones, rain, flowers, and men? What d’you think about that, boss? And what do your books have to say about it?” (Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek)

Introduction The experience of climate change and the role humanity plays in global warming are unparalleled. Emerging with the industrial revolution and accelerating after the Second World War, the face of the Earth transformed under the influence of humanity. In many books and reports, climate change is framed as the urgent global problem of the current age and threat of the survival of humanity on planet Earth. It calls for climate action, ranging from humanist efforts to reduce emissions and sustain Earth’s life-support systems to ecomodernist efforts to engineer and manage the humanized planet. It is questionable, however, whether it is possible to do justice to the “world-historical” significance of climate change if it is conceived from the perspective of human history and calls for human action. Rather, climate change should be perceived from a sidereal perspective, i.e., in terms of the history of planet Earth. In Earth history, humans emerged and evolved over hundreds of thousands of years and relatively recently transformed into a geo-force that forms a geological layer of anthropogenic sediments like man-made plastics, metals, and radioactive elements that explain the current change of climate. Seen from this perspective, it becomes increasingly clear that “for most of the last 100,000 years, a crazily jumping climate has been the rule, not the exception” (Alley, 2000: 120). The “worldhistorical” significance of climate change consists in the fact that it confronts humanity with the inherent instability of the climate and volatility of the Earth system (Clark, 2011). These insights should not be taken as an argument that the change of climate which humanity experiences today is not due to human impacts and that any climate action is in vain. Before engaging in climate action, however, a new round of reflection on the “world-historical” significance of climate change as disruption of human’s relationship with the Earth is needed. What is the place of human existence on Earth? “World-historical” is put in quotation marks because climate change shifts the attention from World to Earth. In the phenomenological tradition, it is argued that humans always already live and act in a meaningful world in which they are

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intentionally involved and know how to deal with other human and nonhuman beings in the world. According to Edmund Husserl, for instance, the meaningful world in which humans are at home constitutes a background condition for their consideration of objects in the foreground. This meaningful world is not limited to the cultural world or the world of human practice, but extends to the ecosystems of planet Earth or the oikos in which organisms live in conjunction with the natural environment. World is the ground of the objects in the foreground in the sense that “to live is always to live-in-certainty-of-the-world” (Husserl, 2012: 155). While this basic belief in the givenness of World is never thematized according to Husserl, as the self-evidence of the givenness of World is part of its stability, it can be argued that it is precisely this certainty of World that is disrupted in times of climate change. The experience of climate change makes increasingly clear that World is no longer a relatively stable background of human existence in the world that they always already presuppose and count on in their everyday life and of the contingency and finitude of the current fit of their being in the world. In other words, the worldhistorical significance of climate change consists in the fact that global warming unmasks the stability of the living and acting in the world of human existence and confronts them with the instability of their living on Earth. To the extent that human existence is always already intentionally involved in such a meaningful World as interior milieu – the world in which the environment appears as resource for human consumption, in which they are included as consumers of these resources – the world-historical significance of climate change can be framed as confrontation with the Earth as exterior milieu that remains heterogeneous to any stability of human’s living and acting in the world. It is in this sense that it can be argued that climate change shifts the attention from World to Earth and raises the question about the place of human existence on Earth in this chapter. Before engaging in answering this question, the following reservation must be considered. Many philosophers of climate change tend to rely more and more on scientific findings in their reflections. Clive Hamilton, for example, wrote a great book on the world-making capacity of humanity in times of climate change, but his conceptualization of a defiant Earth is scientistic, i.e., based on findings of the Earth system science. He argues, for instance, that the Earth system is a new object (Hamilton, 2017: 11; 21) and that Earth system science discloses World in times of climate change (Hamilton, 2017: 63). However, as sciences are primarily interested in ontic facts and their regularities while philosophical concepts like “World” and “Earth” concern the ontological level of the meaning of these facts that change due to climate change, it is questionable whether the sciences actually provide access to the living and acting in the world of human existence in times of climate change. As sciences are primarily interested in ontic facts and their regularities in the World of science while “Earth” remains exterior to any interior milieu or World, it is furthermore questionable whether the sciences actually provide access to the living on Earth of human existence in times of climate change. It is highly questionable in this regard whether “surviving the Anthropocene [. . .] depends on science” (Hamilton, 2017: 57). For this reason, this chapter engages in a phenomenology of

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the living and acting on Earth of human existence in times of climate change. (The further elaboration of the phenomenological method is beyond the scope of this chapter. For this, see Blok (2020).) In section “The Emergence of World in Times of Climate Change,” first, the ontological concept of World is rehabilitated. With this, it becomes possible to distinguish between the Holocene World and the Anthropocene World. As climate change also provides an experience of Earth as exterior milieu beyond the interior milieu of the Anthropocene World, the chapter subsequently criticizes the selfinterest of philosophers of the twentieth century and argues for world interest in times of climate change. It is argued that world interest should not lead to world production, whether it is found in a productive act by Earth or by humanity, as world production is accompanied by Earth alienation (section “From World-Interest to Earth-Interest in Times of Climate Change”). A gestalt-based understanding of the givenness of Earth as noncausal ontic-ontological ground of World is subsequently developed (section “The Givenness of Earth and World”). The conceptualization of World and Earth in this chapter enables to differentiate between the often ambiguous uses of these concepts in environmental philosophy and contributes to contemporary debates in philosophy of climate change, as will become clear in the section “Conclusion: The Advantage of a Philosophical Concept of Earth and World in Times of Climate Change.”

The Emergence of World in Times of Climate Change Although climate change shifts the attention from the living and acting in the world of human and nonhuman existence to their living on Earth, it does not imply the end of the world, as philosophers like Timothy Morton argue (Morton, 2013). Climate change indeed leads to the end of the natural world of modernity in the industrialized society, i.e., the end of pristine nature which is not affected by humanity. But this does not mean that only a flat ontology of earthly objects remain and no different level or World remains, as philosophers like Latour (2016) argue. (It is precisely the reduction of World to an object in front of a subject in the humanist tradition, as well as the reduction of humanity to an immanent position which is enmeshed in the natural environment in the post-humanist tradition, which involves the end of the World (Blok, 2021).) It is precisely the experience of climate change that enables to experience World. A first round of reflection on the “globality” of global warming can make this clear. The experience of global warming does not primarily consist in the experience of new physical objects, like raindrops, storms, and tsunamis. What is at stake is a shift in the meaning of raindrops and storms as indicators of global warming. In times of global warming, a global phenomenon is experienced that humans were not aware of in previous times when they only experienced objects: the climate in which they selfevidently live and on which their human existence depends. This climate concerns the whole of being in the sense that in the age of global warming, there is no position possible outside of it; whereas in earlier ages it was possible to externalize waste to

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the environment, humans nowadays realize that every externalization is in the end internalized in the Earth system and impacts Earth’s life-support systems (Blok, 2017). In other words, the experience of global warming is the experience of the whole of being, i.e., of the World in which the one who experiences this whole is included. (This inclusion of human experience in the experience of World is important to keep in mind as this inclusion indicates that the World is at stake and not only a worldview that particular humans might have. While worldviews presuppose a position in front of the world that remains external to it, World constitutes an interior milieu in which human and nonhuman existence is included. If Latour, for example, discuss the globality of the globe – “global is largely, like the globe itself, an invention of science” (Latour, 2004: 451) – he misses this includedness of human existence in this globality and takes an outsider and productionist perspective which is characteristic of all worldviews.) This means that contrary to philosophers of the twentieth century like Heidegger, who argued that the current age is characterized by the oblivion of being, it can be argued that climate change provides the opportunity to have a metaphysical experience of being (Zwier & Blok, 2017), i.e., of “World” in times of climate change. How can World be characterized in times of climate change? The era of climate change can be characterized as the Anthropocene. To be clear, the Anthropocene is not conceived here as an ontic phenomenon, i.e., as a geological epoch that started at a particular moment in time (for instance, the Trinity test on 16 July 1945) and can be established by a community of geologists. If the question is what exactly changed in the era of the Anthropocene, in contrast to the previous era of the Holocene, these changes are not primarily found at the ontic level of new objects that emerge in times of climate change, but at the ontological level of the transition of the understanding of World as a whole in times of climate change (Zwier & Blok, 2017); climate change disrupts the way in which reality as a whole appears – i.e., the stability of the World as background condition for the living and acting in the world of human and nonhuman existence – and the way human being is responsive to this new reality in this new epoch. The occurrence of instability in times of climate change does not mean that the transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene concerns a shift from World as stable background (i.e., Holocene) to World as instable background (i.e., Anthropocene). Earth history shows that Earth always has been volatile (Davies, 2011), and therefore, this volatility is itself not characteristic of the Anthropocene World. The globalized Anthropocene World appears qualitatively different, namely, no longer characterized by local categories like urban versus rural, nature versus culture, or West versus East. The Anthropocene World appears as global interior milieu in which humanity and the natural environment become intertwined; the natural environment can no longer be conceived without the human cultivation, preservation, and development, while Earth’s population by humans makes it impossible to conceptualize humanity without the natural and technological environment on which it depends (Blok, 2017). The natural environment becomes humanized and humanity becomes naturalized in the interior milieu of the Anthropocene World. The advantage of the concept of World beyond the objects

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Fig. 1 Gestalt switch of a duck/hare

humans encounter in the world is that it can help to explain the difference between the Anthropocene World and the Holocene World (Blok, 2021). How are these two Worlds related to each other if they do not concern objects humans encounter in the world but are related to the meaning of these objects? Storms, rain, and floods appear, for instance, as indications of a local climate like a country climate or a maritime climate in the Holocene and as indications of global warming in the Anthropocene. The fact that the same storms and floods appear as indicators of a local climate in the Holocene and of a global climate in the Anthropocene shows that World concerns a metaphysical whole which is itself not to be found at the level of objects in the world, but appears amidst of these objects, and cannot be reduced to these objects. To illustrate this difference at the level of World, the example of a duck’s head that can also appear as a hare can help (Fig. 1). The appearance of the head as duck or hare is not due to the depicted object, duck or hare, or its parts, the mouth, ears, and eyes, as it is the same object that appears as duck or as hare. The difference can also not be explained based on the figure or form of the duck and the hare, because it is the same figure which appears at the same time differently as duck or as hare. Rather, the figure is ambiguous and concerns the meaning of the head which appears amidst the descriptive object as duck or as hare. This is called a gestalt switch, in which the same object, thanks to the gestalt, appears again as a hare and then again as a duck, without the possibility that these two meanings can be reduced to each other. In a similar way, the relation between the Holocene World and the Anthropocene World can be conceived as a gestalt switch, in which the same objects (storms, raindrops, floods) appear again as Holocene World and then again as Anthropocene World. Just like in the case of the duck and the hare, the Anthropocene World cannot be derived from these objects or their parts but appears amidst of these physical objects as metaphysical whole. And yet, this whole of the Holocene World is not a metaphysical figure or form of the objects that appear in this world, because it is one and the same figure which appears at the same time differently and can switch to the Anthropocene World, without the possibility that these two Worlds can be reduced to each other.

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If the concept of the gestalt switch is stretched here to understand the relation between the Holocene World and the Anthropocene World, a psychological interpretation of the gestalt has to be rejected. The gestalt switch of World is not a question of perception or worldview, because then the perceiver supposes to have a position external to this World and is this World object of his or her perception. In case of a gestalt switch of World, however, not only a switch of the perception of the World is at stake. On the one hand, the perceiver grew up in the World outside of him or her. On the other hand, he or she embodies that World outside of him or herself, for instance, in the humanization of the natural environment and the naturalization of humanity in the Anthropocene World. It is therefore better to conceive the gestalt switch as a transformation of the appearance of World and, at once, the way humanity responds to this World. The question of World as metaphysical whole, gestalt, and the relation between these Worlds, the transformation of World, is the task of philosophy. And insofar as the World is threatened by climate change, the reflection on World in times of climate change is the task of environmental philosophy.

From World Interest to Earth Interest in Times of Climate Change To what extent can it be argued that climate change involves a shift in the attention from World to Earth, as is argued in the introduction, if climate change primarily introduces a new Anthropocene World? The experience of climate change does not only indicate the emergence of a new Anthropocene World, as climate change at the same time disrupts this global interior milieu of naturalized humanity and humanized nature. The heterogeneity of Earth as exterior milieu is indicated by the volatility and capricious nature of the Earth and the processes that erupt and interrupt the stability of the living and acting in the world of human existence and makes human life fundamentally insecure. While philosophers like Levinas had to rely on abstract notions like elementary nature (Il y a) to indicate the asymmetry between human existence and the natural environment on which it depends (Levinas, 1969), it can be argued that climate change provides a concrete metaphysical experience of Earth as exterior milieu beyond the interior milieu of World, an experience of human and nonhuman living on Earth beyond their living and acting in the world. This embeddedness of human and nonhuman living and acting in the world in their living on Earth becomes undeniable in the Anthropocene. The shift of the attention from World to Earth does not imply the end of the World, but articulates the experience that the Anthropocene World as global interior milieu remains embedded in and is susceptible to the interruptions of Earth as exterior milieu. The shift of the attention from World to World’s embeddedness in Earth disrupts every preconception of human living and acting in the World. An example of such a preconception is the idea that living and acting in the World can be characterized by being-toward-death. Being-toward-death means that the foresight of human existence of their own individual death in the future informs his or her living and acting in the World in the present, ranging from the flight from death to its resolute anticipation in the face of his or her being-toward-death (Heidegger, 1993). But if

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humans reflect on their own future death, they are not concerned with the World they live in, but “self”-interested in their concern for the singularity of their own or Self. While philosophers of the twentieth century, ranging from Sartre to Levinas and Heidegger to Agamben, were self-evidently “self”-interested in this regard, it is the question whether the self-interest of philosophy should not be replaced by world interest in times of climate change (Blok, 2020). It is not only the case that leaving this World means the end of a human living and acting in the World. It is also the case that the death of World as life-support system leads to the degradation of the conditions of human and nonhuman living and acting in the World and their possible extinction, i.e., to the end of their living in the World. It is precisely the foresight of the death of World as life-support system, which is experienced when humanity crosses the “planetary boundaries of planet Earth” (Rockstrom et al., 2009), that informs human living and acting in the World in the present. It is no longer selfinterest but world interest that informs the living and acting in the World of human existence in times of climate change. The shift from self-interest to world interest can be understood as a shift from the self-production of humanity, for instance, the anticipatory resoluteness of authentic Dasein (Heidegger, 1993), to world production. Such a world production is already called for by traditional philosophers like Marx (1978: 163–164) and Arendt (1958: 52–53) and can also be found in the work of contemporary philosophers of climate change. Clive Hamilton, for instance, argues: “Once humans separated from other creatures and began deliberately to use their world-making powers to modify their environments they assumed responsibility for natural systems and other animals. But now, in the Anthropocene, the fate of the Earth has become entwined with the fate of humans and our responsibility is of a new kind, risen to another level. Before our own welfare, our virtues, and our duties to one another, our inescapable responsibility for the Earth defines us as moral beings” (Hamilton, 2017: 52). Seen from this perspective, humans produce their World as a relatively stable and permanent interior milieu in their “unending fight against the processes of growth and decay through which nature forever invades the human artifice, threatening the durability of the world and its fitness for human use” (Arendt, 1958: 100). Climate change increases even the urgency to produce World as relatively stable interior milieu in humanities struggle against the “power” of the Earth that becomes undeniable in the Anthropocene (Hamilton, 2017). Contemporary efforts for the permanence and durability of the World are not only found in world production but also in various climate actions, ranging from humanist efforts to reduce emissions and sustain Earth’s life-support systems to ecomodernist efforts to engineer and manage the humanized planet. It is questionable, however, whether world production serves world interest, rather than self-interest, if world production produces an interior milieu that primarily serves the survival of human living and acting in this world. As long as world interest leads to world production and World concerns the interior milieu in which humans are intentionally involved, the world interest of human existence is oriented on the human history of their living and acting in the World and insufficient to provide access to their living on Earth as exterior milieu. Every production of World

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concerns the production of an interior milieu in which humans are intentionally involved, and this production produces human living and acting in the World in their struggle against Earth as exterior milieu. Indications of this struggle can be found in efforts to interiorize this exterior milieu as part of the World; phenomena like the meaning of raindrops, storms, and floods in times of climate change are assessed as insignificant by climate deniers, or as significant and adopted in the climate models of the IPCC, or become subject to technological developments to manage and control the planet. In this regard, world production is focused on the management and control of the stability of the Anthropocene World as interior milieu, i.e., of the World as “spaceship” (Buckminster Fuller, 2008). In this conceptualization of the Anthropocene World as spaceship, the exterior milieu on which each and every World depends remains forgotten. In this regard, it can be argued that world production is accompanied by Earth alienation. If climate change makes clear that human living and acting in the World remains embedded in their living on Earth, it becomes clear that world production is insufficient. On the one hand, world production concerns the symmetric relation of human living and acting in the World, i.e., a relation in which being is accessible for thinking and constitutes an interior milieu, while human living and acting on Earth indicates an asymmetric relation, i.e., a relation in which being is inaccessible for thinking and constitutes a milieu that remains exterior. On the other hand, world production is not capable to exclude this exterior milieu, as each and every stability of human living and acting in the World can be interrupted by the eruptions of planet Earth. Rather than world production, environmental philosophy should lead to Earth interest and raise the question about the place of human existence on Earth as origin of each and every living and acting in the World. A feralization of human living and acting in the World is needed to experience their living on Earth, i.e., to make the shift from world interest to earth interest. The shift from world interest to earth interest does however not imply that human living and acting in the World has to be rejected in favor of their living on Earth. To the extent that human existence always already lives and acts in a meaningful World in which he or she is intentionally involved, his or her living on Earth is also dependent on his or her living and acting in the World. To be clear, World is embedded in Earth and not the other way around, but human living and acting in the World is dependent on their living on Earth and vice versa. In this respect, earth interest does not replace world interest, but is better understood as dual interest in World and Earth. At the same time, earth interest doesn’t call for earth production, as human living on Earth is primarily given and doesn’t have to be produced anymore. The givenness of Earth is not only prerequisite for the emergence of human beings on Earth at an ontic level; the Earth emerged in Earth history long before humans emerged on the planet and can be seen as a necessary condition for their emergence. Moreover, if human existence always already lives and acts in a meaningful World in which humans are intentionally involved and know how to deal with other human and nonhuman beings in the World, the givenness of Earth is also prerequisite for their responsiveness to the World around them, that is, for their living and acting in the World at an ontological level. In Earth’s history, Earth was long

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before humans emerged on the planet, and in this respect, human living and acting in the World emerges, unfolds, and expands out of Earth in the era of humanity and threatens to go back into the Earth again at the end of this era in which human living and acting in the World is threatened by climate change (Blok, 2020: 265–274). In other words, human living and acting in the World comes to truth only on the ground of the Earth. It is this givenness of Earth as origin and future end of human living and acting in the World that disrupts the self-evidence of human living and acting in the World as symmetric relation and confronts with human living on Earth as asymmetric relation. It is important to keep the experience of asymmetry with the Earth as exterior milieu in mind, as the experience of this asymmetry often leads to a new symmetry or continuity between human existence and the natural environment – Das bist Du! – for instance, in case of post-humanist philosophers like Haraway (2003) and Latour, who argues for a “principle of generalized symmetry” (1993: 103). It can be argued, on the contrary, that Earth disrupts the symmetric relation of human living and acting in the World and confronts him or her with a fundamental asymmetry of their living on Earth, which cannot be fixed by world production nor by the enmeshment of human existence in the natural environment.

The Givenness of Earth and World The givenness of Earth is in nothing comparable with the givenness of World as the phenomenological tradition would have it (see section “Introduction”). The givenness of World is not self-evident but emerges in Earth history as new background condition – e.g., Holocene and Anthropocene – that remains finite at the same time. In the givenness of World, newness and finitude come together and limit its relative permanence, durability, and stability. This shows that the givenness of World is not radically immanent and absolute, as philosophers like Nancy would argue (2007). It can be argued that the World in the current age is not transcended by the World of the ideai or God but that human living and acting in the World is res-cended by Earth as origin of each and every emergence of World in Earth history. It is precisely this concept of the absolute facticity of World that culminates in the conceptualization of World as spaceship and testifies of Earth alienation. Contrary to the Earth alienation of world production, earth interest acknowledges the Earth as absolute fact and ground of World. Not World is an archaic, but Earth is the unpredictable event that emerged as death star in Earth history and remained more than four billion years without World before humans appeared on Earth, i.e., before it gave rise to human living and acting in the World. (At the same time, it is impossible to claim that the emergence of Earth is the absolute beginning, as there might be other death stars that gave rise or will give rise to human- and nonhuman living and acting in the World. The further exploration of the absolute beginning of Earth is beyond the scope of this chapter.) It became clear that the givenness of Earth as exterior milieu is not so much indicated at the level of the emergence of volcanoes and plate tectonics, as these

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phenomena can always be interiorized in the World. The volatility of Earth is not an ontic phenomenon but an ontological phenomenon; Earth is never exhausted by any particular World and is always richer and deeper than any actual fit of human living and acting in the World. It even could have been the case that Earth never let human living and acting in the World emerge. The givenness of Earth is primarily indicated by the experience of the contingency of the givenness of Earth in Earth history (Meillassoux, 2013) and the ontological experience of the contingency and finitude of the stability of human living and acting in the World in times of climate change. An indication of the finitude of this contingent fit of human living and acting in the World can be found in climate change that shows the being-toward-death of World. It is a very particular and fragile arrangement of World as anthropic principle that accommodates human and nonhuman living and acting in the World, which could have been absent and different and possibly ends in the future. This being-towarddeath of World cannot be interiorized and remains external to any living and acting in the World. With this, it becomes clear that a distinction has to be made between the givenness of Earth and World as background condition. The givenness of World concerns a particular stable background in which human living and acting in the World fits, like the Holocene and Anthropocene World. But what becomes undeniable in the Anthropocene World is that each and every stability of this given World as interior milieu is limited by the volatility and capricious nature of the givenness of Earth as exterior milieu. The givenness of Earth concerns the instable origin of any givenness of a stable background condition in which human living and acting in the World fits, i.e., the exterior milieu that limits each and every interior milieu of World. As such an origin, Earth is the ontic-ontological background of human living and acting in the World as background for the possibility to encounter objects in the foreground. Although Earth is given as origin or ground of World, it is clear that World is not produced by Earth or the cause of World, as is sometimes argued, whether it is understood as cosmogenic power (Stengers, 2000) or generative of new Worlds (Kirby, 1997). Earth cannot be seen as efficient cause of World, nor is World the formal or final cause of Earth. If climate change makes one thing clear, it is that the Earth can no longer be seen as “Mother” who takes care of human living and acting in the World, as she turns out to be unconcerned, if not indifferent, toward her children. Human existence is characterized by world interest in times of climate change, not the Earth itself; Earth does not have an interest to produce World and doesn’t provide a model for World, and World is also not the goal or end of Earth. Even if human living and acting in the World draws on the materiality of the Earth and even if it is argued that Earth distributes itself into the materiality or embodiment of human living and acting in the World, it is not the case that Earth has any positive “interest” in such a distribution. It is also not the case that Earth has a negative interest and produces World in order to withdraw itself. This idea stems from a Christian motive that can be found both in classical philosophy – for instance, Heidegger’s embedding of the forgetfulness of being (seinsvergessenheit) in the abandonment of being (seinsverlassenheit) – and in contemporary philosophy of

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climate change. Timothy Morton, for instance, argues that the Earth, like all entities, “are shy retiring octopuses that squirt out a dissembling ink as they withdraw into the ontological shadows” (Morton, 2013: 3–4). But it is not the case that Earth as exterior milieu withdraws itself from human existence, but, on the contrary, that human world production as interiorization of Earth withdraws itself from this exterior milieu, which is primarily given. If Earth distributes itself into the materiality or embodiment of human living and acting in the World, humans embody this Earth in their living and acting on Earth without involving any positive or negative interest from the side of the Earth. The embodiment of Earth in human being on Earth does also not mean that Earth is the material cause of World. If World does not concern physical objects but the meaning of these objects for human living and acting in the World that emerges, unfolds, and expands out of Earth and goes back into the Earth again at the end of the era of human existence on Earth, the meaning of the World is not materially caused by Earth. Although World is not caused by Earth in any classical sense of the word, World is not an absolute fact but grounded on Earth. How can the relation between World and Earth be conceived if Earth is the noncausal ontic-ontological ground of World? In order to conceptualize Earth as ground of World beyond the causa materialis, causa formalis, causa efficiens, and causa formalis, the gestalt switch has to be considered again. The picture below shows a gestalt switch of a vase that can also show itself as a profile of a face (Fig. 2). In order to understand the gestalt switch from the vase to the profile of the face, gestalt psychologists like Koffka introduced the concepts figure and ground. Just like in the example of the duck and the hare, it is the same figure which again appears as vase and then again as profile of a face. The difference between the vase and the profile of the face is not explained by the figure, but by the background that frames the picture. If the figure is understood from the black part of the background, it appears as profile of a face, and if it is understood from the white part of the background, it appears as a vase. Thanks to the figure and the background, one and the same figure appears again as a vase and then again as a profile of a face. The importance of the background next to the figure becomes clear if a similar picture is considered without a background (Fig. 3). In this example, there is no background; so strictly speaking, the figure can only be understood from the perspective of the black part as vase. Thanks to the absence of the background, the picture only indicates the one-dimensional factuality of a vase and nothing else than that. If the transformation from the Holocene World to the Anthropocene World is understood as a gestalt switch, then this transformation is also only possible, thanks to the combination of figure and ground. Just like it is the same figure that appears again as a vase and then again as a profile of a face, so it is the same figure of the World that appears again as Holocene World and then as Anthropocene World in Earth history. And just as it is the background of the figure that makes the gestalt switch from the vase to the profile of the face possible, it can be said that it is thanks to the Earth as background that the World shows itself again as Holocene World and

The Earth Means the World to Me: Earth- and World-Interest in Times. . . Fig. 2 Gestalt switch of a vase/profile of a face

Fig. 3 One-dimensional facticity of a vase

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then again as Anthropocene World, without the Earth being the cause of World. It can be proposed therefore to conceive Earth as such a background of the plurality of World in Earth history.

Conclusion: The Advantage of a Philosophical Concept of Earth and World in Times of Climate Change The conceptualization of World as figure and Earth as ground can help to clearly differentiate between the often ambiguous use of these concepts and their amalgamation to a hybrid natural-cultural environment in the social sciences and cultural theory. Earth can be defined as exterior milieu that is the ontic-ontological ground of World as interior milieu of human living and acting in the World. This conceptuality of Earth as ground of World can contribute significantly to contemporary debates in environmental philosophy. First, the ontology of World enables to question the flat ontology in contemporary philosophy and to conceptualize the Anthropocene World in contrast with the Holocene World (section “The Emergence of World in Times of Climate Change”). World is like the element in which fish lives. This element is most proximate as the fish lives in it and constitutes its living and acting in the World. This immediate element remains at the same time distant and unnoticed, as the element permeates everything and is incomparable with anything else (Aristotle, 1957). On the one hand, the conceptualization of World beyond the objects humans encounter in the world enables to explain the difference between the Anthropocene World and the Holocene World (section “The Emergence of World in Times of Climate Change”). On the other hand, the difference between the Holocene World and the Anthropocene World enables to articulate this element which normally remains unnoticed in the human focus on beings in the world. Second, the ontology of Earth as ontic-ontological ground of World enables to conceptualize the difference between human living and acting in the World as symmetric relation and human living and acting on Earth as asymmetric relation and to question the hidden anthropocentrism in contemporary philosophies of climate change. Latour, for instance, thinks the Earth only in relation to human existence – “Things are everywhere mixed with people; they always have been” (Latour, 2003: 37) – and reduces it therefore to the interior milieu of World in which human existence is intentionally involved (Latour, 2016, 2017). The same type of anthropocentric orientation can be found in the work of contemporary philosophers of climate change who highlight the role of humanity in world production (Hamilton, 2017). As long as world interest is not embedded in earth interest, an alienation of Earth is at stake in world production (section “From World-Interest to EarthInterest in Times of Climate Change”). Third, contrary to the anthropocentrism of world interest, this earth interest can be framed in terms of the feralization of the human, i.e., the acknowledgment of the embeddedness of human living and acting in the World in their living and acting on Earth. The concept of Earth as onticontological ground of World accepts the facticity of the World in which humans

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live and at the same time the facticity of the Earth in which any World remains embedded. This embeddedness of World in Earth questions the conceptualization of World as spaceship in environmental philosophy, as the Earth remains forgotten in such a conceptualization. Earth turned out to be the noncausal ground of World, which makes the transition of the Holocene World to the Anthropocene World possible (section “The Givenness of Earth and World”). What consequences does the concept of Earth and World have for the call for climate action in times of climate change? Because humanity is using significant more natural resources than Earth can provide and currently need two or more planets to support the modern way of living in the future, it is called for a new phase in the Anthropocene in which human stewardship of the Earth ensures the sustainability of Earth’s life-support systems for human life on Earth. In this regard, the Anthropocene does not only describe the time of climate change, but the unease with globalization and climate change also calls for a new era in human history in which human existence should take responsibility for Earth’s sustainability. The philosophical reflections on the world-historical significance of climate change in this chapter show that climate action should not primarily consist in actions at an ontic level, ranging from adaptation strategies to mitigation strategies to save the climate. Does climate change then call for climate actions at the ontological level, namely, the world production of a post-Anthropocene World in which human living and acting in the World is characterized by the responsibility for the live support systems of planet Earth (Hamilton, 2017)? It became clear that world production is insufficient and results in Earth alienation, as long as it is not embedded in earth interest. A further argument for earth interest emerges if the current Anthropocene World is considered. The Anthropocene World can be characterized by the end of history. The end of history means that the globalization of the humanization of the ecosystems of planet Earth and the naturalization of humanity has reached its completion and nothing new, no post- can emerge. The end of history is indicated in the efforts to move away from self-interest toward world interest, which turned out to remain embedded in self-interest (section “From World-Interest to Earth-Interest in Times of Climate Change”). It is also indicated in the logic of world production. How can it be claimed to move beyond the Anthropocene World of management and controlling the world as spaceship (Blok, 2017), as long as this post-Anthropocene World has to be produced. Does the conceptuality associated with world production not belong to the same productionist logic that is normally associated with management and control? If this is the case, each and every effort to produce the post-Anthropocene World belongs in the end to the Anthropocene World it tries to leave behind. The reason why currently there is no sign of a post-Anthropocene World might be found in the productionist logic of world production, which makes it impossible to engage in the transition to this post-Anthropocene World. Seen from the perspective on Earth as ground of World in the previous section, however, it can be argued that earth interest, rather than world interest, disrupts the end of history of the Anthropocene World. Reflecting on the discussion of the necessity of World as figure and Earth as ground of the gestalt switch of World, it

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can be argued that what is needed is earth interest. Why? If the figure (World) is conceived without the ground (Earth), only the one-dimensional factuality of the environing world remains and no gestalt switch from the Anthropocene World to the post-Anthropocene World is possible. On the contrary, without earth interest, any effort to produce the post-Anthropocene World falls back in the Anthropocene World it tries to overcome. In this respect, it can be said that world production without earth interest is characterized by conformism to World and alienation of Earth. And as long as world production is characterized by Earth alienation, a gestalt switch from the Anthropocene World to the post-Anthropocene World is impossible. Without earth interest, world production enjoys its hedonist conformity to the World and, with this, intensifies the changeless and everlasting end of history. For this reason, it can be argued that climate action not only should move beyond the ontic level of adaptation and mitigation strategies but should also move beyond world production and embed the world interest of human existence in their earth interest. The interest in Earth as ontic-ontological background of the Anthropocene World opens the possibility of a future gestalt switch to a post-Anthropocene World. The possibility of a post-Anthropocene World emerges if the contingency of the givenness of Earth as ground of human living and acting in the World is considered. It is the givenness of Earth as ground of World that shows that the Anthropocene World is in fact finite and a new beginning, i.e., a gestalt switch to another World is always principally possible, maybe even emerged already, even if no sign of it appeared yet in times of climate change. It is the givenness of Earth as ground of World that disrupts the end of history and makes another beginning of World possible. Although this new beginning of a new World is not produced by the Earth or by humanity, this “production” of a post-Anthropocene World is at the same time not without human involvement. World only is in human living and acting in the World, i.e., the post-Anthropocene World only is in the actual responsiveness of human existence to this new World. The further reflection on the role and contribution of human and nonhuman living and acting in the World to the transformation from the Anthropocene World to the post-Anthropocene World, and the appropriateness of the productionist logic to characterize the contribution of human existence to the dynamics between Earth and World, is beyond the scope of this chapter and up to future research.

References Alley, R. B. (2000). The two-mile time machine: Ice cores, abrupt climate change, and our future. Princeton University Press. Arendt, H. (1958). The human condition. Chicago University Press. Blok, V. (2017). Earthing technology: Towards an eco-centric concept of biomimetic technologies in the Anthropocene. Techne: Research in Philosophy and Technology, 21(2–3), 127–149. https://doi.org/10.5840/techne201752363 Blok, V. (2020). Heidegger’s concept of philosophical method. Innovating philosophy in the age of global warming. Routledge.

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Blok, V. (2021). Geo-ethics beyond enmeshment: Critical reflections of the post-humanist position in the Anthropocene. In M. Bohle & E. Marone (Eds.), Geo-societal narratives (pp. 29–54). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79028-9_3 Buckminster Fuller, R. (2008). Operating manual for spaceship earth. Lars Müller Publishers. Clark, N. (2011). Inhuman nature. Sociable life on a dynamic planet. Sage. Hamilton, C. (2017). Defiant earth. The fate of humans in the Anthropocene. Polity. Haraway, D. (2003). The companion species manifesto. University of Chicago Press. Heidegger, M. (1993). Sein und Zeit. Max Niemeyer Verlag. Kirby, V. (1997). Telling flesh: The substance of the corporeal. Routledge. Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern. Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (2003). Atmosponere, atmosphere. In S. May (Ed.), Alafur Eliasson: The weather project. Tate Publishing. Latour, B. (2004). Whose cosmos, which cosmopolitics. Common Knowledge, 10(3), 450–462. Latour, B. (2016). Why Gaia is not a god of totality, theory. Culture and Society, 34(2–3), 61–81. Latour, B. (2017). Facing Gaia. Polity. Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and infinity. An essay on exteriority (A. Lingis, Trans.). Duquesne UP. Marx, K. (1978). The Marx-Engels reader. W.W. Norton. Meillassoux, Q. (2013). After finitude. An essay on the necessity of contingency. Bloomsbury. Morton, T. (2013). Hyperobjects. Philosophy and ecology after the end of the world. University of Minnesota Press. Nancy, J. L. (2007). The creation of the world or globalization. Suny Press. Rockstrom, J., Steffen, W., Noone, K., Persson, A., Chapin, S., Lambin, E. F., Lenton, T. M., Scheffer, M., Folke, C., Schelnjuber, H., Nykvist, B., de Wit, C. A., Hughes, T., van der Leeuw, S., Rodhe, H., Sörlin, S., Snyder, P. K., Costanza, R., Svedin, U., Falkenmark, M., Karlberg, L., Corell, R. W., Fabry, V. J., Hansen, J., Walker, B., Liverman, D., Richardson, K., Crutzen, P., & Foley, J. (2009). Planetary boundaries: Exploring the safe operating space for humanity. Ecology and Society, 14(2), 32. Stengers, I. (2000). The invention of modern science: Situating science. University of Minnesota Press. Zwier, J., & Blok, V. (2017). Saving earth – Encountering Heidegger’s philosophy of technology in the Anthropocene. Techne: Research in Philosophy and Technology, 21(2–3), 222–242.

Environmental Aesthetics and Global Climate Change Emily Brady

Contents Introduction: Aesthetics and Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Tools of Environmental Aesthetics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Multisensory Sympathetic Attention and Immersion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Emotions and Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Temporality and Imagination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Environmental Aesthetics and Loss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Negative Aesthetic Values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion: Aesthetic and Ethical Values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

What are the aesthetic transformations taking place through the effects of global warming and human responses to these effects? How should we conceptualize aesthetic environmental change, especially in the context of intergenerational concern for both nonhumans and humans? As the earth’s systems and its organisms experience climate change, these kinds of questions require an understanding of the aesthetic qualities, meanings, and values of lost species, places, and landscapes, as well as those which emerge through mediation and adaptation. The experience of aesthetic value or “aesthetic appreciation” is central to the study of aesthetics and, in practical terms, offers a more intimate scale for understanding the concrete interactions people have with changing environments and places. To explore these issues, the chapter discusses the tools of environmental aesthetics which can assist in grasping shifts in natural and seminatural aesthetic qualities, meanings, and values across both shorter and longer time scales, including intergenerational and future temporalities. The chapter moves on to address the E. Brady (*) Department of Philosophy, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_103

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kinds of aesthetic qualities of the earth’s systems which are demanding more attention in order to better understand and uncover what is being lost or affected by environmental change. Negative values are then discussed to address how aesthetics is placed with respect to the range of environmental phenomena caused by climate change, such as wildfires, flooding, hurricanes, droughts, and so on. The chapter closes with a discussion of the interrelationship between aesthetics and ethics in the context of environmental change. Keywords

Climate change · Aesthetics · Senses · Art · Environment · Time · Ethics

Introduction: Aesthetics and Environment What are the aesthetic transformations taking place through the effects of global warming and human responses to these effects? How should we conceptualize aesthetic environmental change, especially in the context of intergenerational concern for both nonhumans and humans? Why does aesthetics matter to ethical and geopolitical climate concerns? As the earth’s systems and its organisms experience climate change, these are some of the questions which motivate the philosophical expertise required to understand the aesthetic qualities, meanings, and values of lost species, places, and landscapes, as well as those which emerge through mediation and adaptation. Philosophy has long studied the nature and character of various kinds of aesthetic value, such as beauty, sublimity, ugliness, and, relatedly, wonder. The experience of aesthetic value or “aesthetic appreciation” is central to the study of aesthetics and, in practical terms, offers a more intimate scale for understanding the concrete interactions people have with changing environments and places. “Aesthetic experience,” “aesthetic response,” “aesthetic appreciation,” and “aesthetic judgment” are commonly understood by philosophers as grounded in human perception and the senses, and these terms are often interpreted as referring to particular experiences which engage emotions and imagination. Although knowledge may form part of such experiences, for example, art history or natural history, the primary aim of aesthetic experience is not the acquisition of knowledge (Brady, 2003; Brady & Prior, 2020). Aesthetic values and disvalues grounded in such experience are characterized as involving feelings of pleasure, admiration, or negative emotions in response to perceptual qualities, forms, and meanings in relation to objects, phenomena, processes, and so on. The subject matter of philosophical aesthetics includes the arts, architecture, gardens, nature, and the everyday. In the last 50 or 60 years the rapidly expanding subfield of environmental aesthetics has been driven by questions such as: How does aesthetic appreciation and valuing of natural environments differ from that of the arts (Hepburn, 1984; Brady, 2003)? In the absence of art-theoretical and art-historical contexts, what grounds aesthetic judgments of the natural world (Carlson, 2000, 2020)? How does the distinctive ontology of natural-artifactual environments (for example,

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gardens, agricultural landscapes, land and ecological art, and ecologically restored or rewilded places) shape appreciation and valuing (Brady et al., 2018)? Do aesthetic values undermine or support ethical attitudes toward environment? (Carlson & Lintott, 2008). Despite the rise of environmental aesthetics, only a handful of extended discussions focusing on aesthetics and climate change written by philosophers, specifically, can be found in the English language (Brady, 2014, 2022; Haught, 2017; Nomikos, 2018; Dow, 2019; Jarosz, forthcoming). (Benjamin Richardson 2019, a law scholar, provides significant detail concerning specific kinds of environmental aesthetic changes to places and landscapes in his book “The Art of Environmental Law: Governing with Aesthetics.” Among the many other kinds of disciplinary discussions about aesthetics, arts, and climate change, see: Demos et al., 2021; Roeser et al., 2019; Bristow & Ford, 2018; Ghosh, 2016; Ziser & Sze, 2007.) This chapter engages with these and other discussions, first, to consider how the tools of environmental aesthetics can help to articulate and reflect upon shifts in natural and seminatural aesthetic qualities, meanings, and values across both shorter and longer time scales, including intergenerational and future temporalities. Second, it addresses the kinds of aesthetic qualities of the earth’s systems which are demanding more attention to better understand and uncover what is being lost or affected by environmental change. (For scientific evidence concerning the effects of global warming on people and the planet, this chapter relies upon reports produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (2022) and the “Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services” (2019).) Negative values are then discussed to address how aesthetics is placed with respect to the range of environmental phenomena caused by climate change, such as wildfires, more extreme weather events (flooding, hurricanes, and droughts), and so on. Finally, the chapter closes with a discussion of the interrelationship between aesthetics and ethics in the context of environmental change.

The Tools of Environmental Aesthetics In this section, the key features of aesthetic experience and value are discussed in order to present the distinctive tools of environmental aesthetics in the context of climate change: multisensory sympathetic attention and immersion; emotions; and imagination. Knowledge also plays a role in so far as it supports aesthetic appreciation, though the other tools are more commonly associated with the aesthetic perspective. The section closes with a discussion of how temporality features in aesthetic experience, and how longer-term temporal features can be brought into environmental aesthetics through resources such as imagination.

Multisensory Sympathetic Attention and Immersion Many philosophers argue that multisensory attention which is immersed and situated in a place is a key aspect of the aesthetic perspective with respect to environment and

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environmental change (Hepburn, 1984; Brady, 2003; Saito, 2005; Carlson, 2000). For example, Arnold Berleant conveys such attention when he describes a canoeing trip down the Genesee River in New York: All of the senses joined in an acute awareness of the perceptual qualities of that environment: sight, smell, hearing, tactility, kinaesthesia, all inseparable in our sensory immersion in the riverine setting. This trip combined several interests – research, the practical demands of guiding the canoe and finding a suitable place to pull out each night, and recognizing animals, birds, and the other things we encountered. But most pervasive and powerful was the aesthetic character of the experience, a character that was always present and dominated all other interests (Berleant, 2005: 60).

Berleant’s recollection traces the contours of the aesthetic domain and provides a good example of how the aesthetic stands out relative to other interests in experience. His theory of “aesthetic engagement” challenges the dualism of historical accounts which create a separation between subject and object and remove aesthetic experience from the practical domain. Instead, he argues against “disinterestedness” and in favor of a holistic, contextual, multisensory, and somatic approach (Berleant, 1992). Although aesthetic engagement is applied to the arts, architecture, and various kinds of environments (natural and urban), it has been especially valuable for articulating the immersive aspects of environmental appreciation. Engaged, multisensory immersion enables the kind of attention that is required to detect changes in aesthetic qualities in one’s environment. Consider all of the different kinds of ways in which the effects of climate change are creating new and different qualities in the environment. For example, droughts are lasting longer in various parts of the world leading to desertification. What are the aesthetic qualities that are relevant, and how have they changed? Where there were once glimmering water holes, ponds, and even lakes which sustained nonhuman and humans lives, now there is brown, cracked earth. In cases where the depth of water has dropped significantly, all kinds of previously unseen qualities may be revealed. Consider the case of Lake Powell, a large artificial reservoir in Utah and Arizona created in the 1950s by flooding Glen Canyon and constructing a dam. The area’s most recent human inhabitants, Ancestral Puebloans, lived there centuries ago, but nonhuman inhabitants died and suffered when the area was flooded (Kolbert, 2021). The lake is a popular recreation destination now, mainly for motorboats, but due to severe drought, the water level has dropped dramatically in recent years. Deep, sandstone-colored canyons and the wondrous shapes of geological formations have been revealed, as well as various archaeological sites. Drowned trees are reemerging, “empty jugs had served as buoys when the trees first started to reëmerge from the lake, presumably to prevent boats from getting snagged on them. The jugs now dangled twenty-five or thirty feet off the ground. As we disembarked, an osprey took off from one of the cottonwood’s silvery branches,” writes Elizabeth Kolbert (2021). As the water level drops, through multisensory immersion new forms, colors, sounds, and tactile qualities are perceived. There is aesthetic engagement with new phenomena or species – the dead tree, the osprey, and other effects

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nearby from the lower water level, such as the rapids reappearing in the Colorado River upstream of the lake (Kolbert, 2021). The perception of environmental qualities like these involves attention that is directed at the phenomenon, place, or organism in and for itself. That is, perception is captured or guided by what is seen, felt, heard, sniffed, or even tasted, with attention dwelling on aesthetic qualities rather than practical or intellectual concerns. Such concerns may be part of the background knowledge we bring to the experience, like information about the current ecology of Lake Powell and its canyons. However, it is the sensory, affective, and imaginative aspects of the experience that dominate and underpin the aesthetic values and meanings discovered through the experience. In this respect, aesthetic value is commonly articulated as a type of intrinsic or noninstrumental environmental value, where something is not valued as a means to some end, rather it is found to have value in and for itself (Brady & Prior, 2020). In this way, environmental aesthetics offer a route toward sympathetic attention with regard to all kinds of environments being altered through climate change. Ethical perspectives toward environments, humans, and nonhumans alike involve sympathetic attention. Consider forms of care and respect which involve taking up outward-directed rather than self-interested attitudes. In a similar way, aesthetic perspectives that are focused on various multisensory qualities are outward directed and involve appreciation of environments, humans, and nonhumans in noninstrumental ways. Importantly, such attention emerges from a perspective which is situated within an environment rather than a distanced visual-only perception of landscape (Berleant, 1992). This is significant for understanding the difference between contemporary theories of environmental aesthetics in contrast to anthropocentric and humanizing forms of landscape appreciation as both theorized and practiced in the Picturesque Movement, as it has become known (Carlson, 2020; Brady, 2003). The legacy of the Picturesque is seen in a two-dimensional, ocularcentric approach which “advocates aesthetic appreciation in which the natural world is experienced as if divided into art-like scenes” (Carlson, 2020). Although vision is central to engaging with environment for both humans and nonhumans, the field of environmental aesthetics has sought to distance itself from the Picturesque and the narrow approach to environment that its legacy has shaped. Indeed, sympathetic attention is only possible through outward-directed aesthetic interest in phenomenon, landscape, or organism for the very features which make them particular. To do so is to appreciate nature more on its own terms than ours and to aim for multisensory, immersed perception rather than overly humanizing forms of valuing (Hepburn, 2001). Such appreciation has potential for a more complete grasp of aesthetic value in so far as it encompasses a greater richness of qualities. For example, consider the appreciation of a European Robin (Erithacus rubecula). To experience a robin in a particular landscape, perhaps looking from a window to the expanse of a garden, would be to perceive only the shape, form, and colors of the bird against a backdrop. To be in the garden listening to melodic song or noticing her active feeding alongside one’s own digging among the shrubs and earth offers a richer appreciation which expands perception and attends to the particularity of the bird and her beauty.

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Emotions and Knowledge There is general agreement among theories of environmental aesthetics with regard to the role of the senses and the immersive character of environmental aesthetic situations, as discussed above. However, when it comes to the role of emotions, imagination, and knowledge, there is some divergence of views. The contemporary debate has been shaped by two contrasting approaches: “scientific cognitivism” and “noncognitivism” (Brady & Prior, 2020). Scientific cognitivism grounds aesthetic judgments in the familiar features of multisensory, environmental experience but with the added requirement of the natural sciences for grounding “appropriate” experience and judgment. Imagine a forest that has been affected by a naturally occurring wildfire. Knowledge that the fire may have beneficial effects for the forest’s ecology can enable the appreciator to find value in what might otherwise seem to have ugly qualities, appearing grey, charred, and lifeless. While the intention is to ensure nontrivial or subjective aesthetic judgments that can lead to all kinds of problems with respect to environmental protection, the theory has been the subject of criticism for the reductive, narrow perspective it defines. By contrast, many “noncognitive” theories embrace a more pluralistic foundation in terms of what does and should shape aesthetic responses and judgment. They do not exclude scientific knowledge, rather they adopt forms of critical pluralism in order to fold in, alongside the natural sciences (glaciology and atmospheric science), indigenous and local ecological knowledge, and the range of perspectives – stories, folklore, myths, and cosmologies – that can assist in aesthetically characterizing environmental change (Brady, 2023; Jarosz, forthcoming). With respect to emotion, the “arousal model” argues that scientific cognitivism is limited in so far as it cannot capture how emotional responses shape aesthetic appreciation (Carroll, 1993). This theory shows how emotions have a legitimate, nonsentimentalizing place in environmental aesthetic appreciation and, using arguments from the philosophy of emotion, shows how emotion-based aesthetic judgments can have an objective rather than merely subjective or idiosyncratic basis. Returning to the wildfire example, dismay and sadness may be emotions that make good sense in that context, given the loss of life witnessed (charred stumps reaching across a broad expanse and no visible signs of life), but also hope and relief when life returns to the forest ecology. In the different case of a wildfire from drought caused by climate change, a range of emotions are fitting to the situation, anguish and despair in the face of the loss of nonhuman and human lives and the destruction of habitats and homes which leave survivors without food or shelter. Anger, too, would seem to be a reasonable emotion in this situation, especially if the immediate cause of the fire was preventable; a careless campfire during a fire ban, or even a deeper, broader anger directed more generally at human irresponsibility with respect to global warming. In light of climate change, mass extinctions, and other environmental catastrophes, there has been emerging work on more holistically focused emotions and moods, such as forms of ecological grief and “solastalgia” (Albrecht, 2020a; Fudge, 2021). Solastagia has been described as: “an expanding domain of human emotion

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tied to feelings of grief and loss at that which has already negatively changed or disappeared in the here and now” (Albrecht, 2020a: 14). When considering environmental degradation, the humanizing of the earth marked by the geological age of the Anthropocene, mass extinctions, and the climate emergency, anxiety has been discussed as a widespread emotion felt in response to the current state of the earth and its inhabitants (Morton, 2018). In the cases mentioned here, aesthetic features are woven through an overall sense of loss connected to place and ecology, such as the loss of a beautiful glade of old growth pines which had been cherished by inhabitants for both their aesthetic and ecological qualities. Emotions are discussed further, below, in the context of “difficult aesthetic appreciation” and forms of negative aesthetic value.

Temporality and Imagination As many chapters in this volume demonstrate, climate change is trans-temporal and intergenerational. It occurs on temporal scales which stretch across generations of the lives of humans and nonhumans and the places they inhabit. As a temporal phenomenon, climate change can also be characterized as strongly time lagged. That is, climate science and models provide information about current impacts and near future impacts as well as probabilistic assessments reaching to the end of the twentyfirst century, at least. Temporal considerations feature in the field of aesthetics, but more attention to intergenerational thinking is needed for the same reasons that other philosophical areas have done so. Integrating intergenerational thought into aesthetics more deeply aligns, for example, with new directions in ethics which address climate justice (Shue, 2014). How does environmental aesthetics already theorize temporality? Philosophers have shown how aesthetic experience is often dynamic, unpredictable, and spontaneous in terms of the objects, processes, or phenomena perceived (Nomikos, 2018; Brady, 2014). The harsh sound of a crow calling comes and goes, repeated, and then stops altogether. Vultures are seen, at first, low in the sky, effortlessly and gracefully climbing upward in thermals until they eventually become distant to the eye. During the spring months, in some parts of the world, the dawn chorus of birds enlivens a place, with that song dying away in the summer when the breeding season is over. The fresh fragrance of a trickling spring accompanies a summer hike up a mountain, with the same spring being much harder to detect on a winter hike when its surface is frozen. In each of these cases, multisensory qualities come and go depending on various environmental factors affecting the aesthetic situation. Aesthetic experiences like these are provisional, with all kinds of changes shaping what is discovered and valued. As a central feature of Japanese aesthetics, transience has been discussed at length in aesthetic appreciation of nature (Saito, 2007). More broadly, the arts and literature are replete with references to the transience of natural things – seasonal and weather changes, the life cycles of plants and insects, and so on. All kinds of ecological, meteorological, and hydrological processes create conditions of transience and ephemerality with respect to what is being perceived in aesthetic

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experience. By contrast and for emphasis, the aesthetic qualities of more traditional forms of artworks are much less changeable, whether that is the graceful lines and colors of a landscape painting or the abstract shapes of a sculpture made of stone (Hepburn, 1984; Brady, 2003; Carlson, 2020). It should be noted that other kinds of art forms do embrace change, from music, installation, and video art to ecological artworks which depend upon interactions with nature. What about the more expansive scale of time needed for conceptualizing aesthetics in relation to intergenerational environmental change? The sublime is a long-standing aesthetic category proposed by philosophers for capturing aesthetic experiences of great size or power (Brady, 2013). Conceived in relation to time, the sublime presents a mode of the mathematical sublime that is related to quantity not through infinite number or space but rather through points in time stretching successively backward or forward. The temporal sublime enables an aesthetic sensemaking of great things that have existed over longer time frames and which are being lost because of climate change, such as glaciers, species, coastal areas and islands, and so on (Brady, 2022). Working backwards in time, the sublime provides one type of valuing framework for what has existed for hundreds or thousands of years. Looking forward in time, the temporal sublime holds promise for imagining the scale of changes faced by the earth and its inhabitants. In observing the changes to Lake Powell, the temporal sublime describes an aesthetic response to the majesty of the newly revealed canyons but, also, the negative emotions evoked by seeing the reemergence of the environment destroyed through drowning the area. This concept of the sublime has been shaped by Western philosophical thought but it can be widened to engage with alternative conceptions of time as found in indigenous epistemologies and cosmologies, and how they shape multisensory, affective, and imaginative encounters with past and future (Jarosz, forthcoming; Whyte, 2018). With respect to seasonal change, global warming is already causing new migration patterns in birds, a phenomenon which will have aesthetic effects, too, in terms of how people experience their natural surroundings. But climate change demands attention to even more expansive time scales (Mikkonen, 2022; Brady, 2014, 2022). The ozone hole in the stratosphere over Antarctica has been caused by CFCs destroying ozone molecules over many decades. The loss of ice in various parts of the cryosphere, which has been linked to global warming, has been most vividly captured by glaciologists and climate scientists through images of “before” and “after.” In case after case, the first scientific data and images available of a glacier are presented side by side with images of present-day glacial retreat or disappearance, across the cryosphere on earth. Temporal scenarios such as these are joined, often, by both climate modeling and forms of fiction. Atmosphere-ocean general circulation models and earth system models, for example, enable scientists to explain and predict how the global climate system operates (Parker, 2018). In the realm of aesthetics and the arts, apocalyptic and dystopian narratives depicted in novels and films, as well as collaborative projects between artists and scientists, are assisting with imagining and concretizing what the earth and its atmosphere will be like in 100 years and further into the future. Emotions and imagination are entangled in solastalgia; for example, emotions felt in

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the face of ice loss are shaped not only by present perception but also by memories and imagination (Wadham, 2021). Memories and accounts of the past state of environments or species provide individual and community recollections or empirical baselines which assist in understanding environmental change and the work needed for mitigation and adaptation. There is a long history in philosophy of imagination conceived of as a central power of the human mind. A narrow definition of the concept is difficult and, in my discussion here, I shall draw generously from various imaginative abilities as theorized by philosophers, including: thinking of something not present to the senses; entertaining mental images; envisaging alternative ways in which the world might appear; thinking of future possibilities; the power behind creativity and invention; and the power which drives the creation of works of art (Stevenson, 2003). Within historical and contemporary aesthetic theories, imagination has been conceptualized as a mental capacity which enriches and deepens appreciation (Kant, 2000; Hepburn, 1984). Ronald Hepburn, for example, writes that imagination enables the appreciator to “shift attention flexibly from aspect to aspect of the natural objects before one, to shift focus from close-up to long shot, from textural detail to overall atmospheric haze or radiance; to overcome stereotyped grouping and clichéd ways of seeing” (1984: 47). As with emotions, imaginative activity can be directed at aesthetic qualities in and for themselves without falling foul to the sort of free rein that might humanize or trivialize nature (Hepburn, 2001; Brady, 2003; Mikkonen, 2018). Imagination offers deeper engagement than our perceptual resources alone, through visualizing and the inventive leaps that produce entirely new standpoints. Multisensory imaginings of places now and into the future can assist in grasping aesthetic features of environmental change – features that are very much part of the relationships with place which sustain human and nonhuman communities (Brady, 2023). Imaginatively stepping into the shoes of future generations can help us to grasp what we are leaving to them and, perhaps, motivate change for the good. Now and into the future much of our knowledge of climate change is and will be iterative rather than definitive. As we work through different possible scenarios, imagination has a significant part to play. Envisaging possible worlds and alternative technologies are key ways in which this aesthetic tool can assist in planning forms of mitigation and adaptation (Brady, 2003, 2023; Richardson, 2019; Fudge, 2021). Novel ways of designing and constructing buildings and other structures create climate resilience and enable communities to flourish. Inventive imagination has been a feature behind many kinds of new technologies, including forms of renewable energy which already provide alternatives to fossil fuels. Various technologies come, however, with their own forms of aesthetic resistance, as we see in objections to wind turbines when they are placed close to communities or in areas valued for their natural or perceived wild qualities (van der Horst, 2018; Richardson, 2019). In some cases a failure of imagination is at work, or a failure to consider the value and potential of greener forms of energy and the needs of climate justice. In some cases, creative imagination can bring home the urgency of the climate crisis (Richardson, 2019). For example, Xavier Cortada’s socially engaged artwork, “The Underwater” seeks to raise awareness about sea level rise in Miami: “I

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developed The Underwater to help my neighbors understand our vulnerability to rising seas and give them the tools to take action. Learning together and working together today, we can build a more equitable tomorrow” (Cortada, 2022). Miami residents can find out their home’s elevation above sea level and place an “Underwater Marker” in their yard to learn what to expect with rising sea levels. He also provides “Underwater Intel” an online source which brings the community together to learn more about climate change and how it will affect South Florida.

Environmental Aesthetics and Loss Based on current knowledge and predictions, what kinds of aesthetic qualities are being lost in the world, and how can environmental aesthetics help in understanding such losses? Exploring the loss and projected loss of particular qualities and seeking to capture their meanings and values are important tasks for a range of fields, not just philosophy. The arts, firsthand aesthetic experience, and forms of indigenous knowledge, for example, all provide relevant context and information with respect to environmental change and loss. The rise of the cross-disciplinary area of “extinction studies” can also contribute to understanding, in particular, the nature and value of various life forms and their permanent loss (Fudge, 2021). Climate change is encouraging ways of marking loss or preserving that which will be lost. Funerals have been held to mark the loss of glaciers and the Ice Memory Foundation (2022) is working on extracting ice cores in order to archive material from melting glaciers and “preserve ice memory.” In this section, the methods of aesthetics in grappling with climate change are expanded by applying “descriptive aesthetics” to two kinds of aesthetically understudied environments, the cryosphere and the aerosphere. Ice, snow, slush, rocks, and earth feature in glaciers and other frozen places that are disappearing. Sky, space, and atmosphere lie at the center of climate change but in the field of aesthetics, these environments has been trumped by the forests, mountains, rivers and lakes, parks, gardens, and rural places that provide data for environmental aesthetics, for they tend to lie closer to home for many people. How is it possible to access the aesthetic data of places that are inaccessible or remote (depending on the appreciative community in question, since remoteness is a relative concept)? Philosophers of the arts often draw upon literary and artistic expression to draw out issues and provide examples. With respect to aesthetics and climate change, adopting the method of “descriptive aesthetics” can be used as a tool to provide a mode of access. Environmental aestheticians already employ aesthetic descriptions of the world, from specific examples and case studies to quoting literary sources or describing their own, firsthand experiences. However, Arnold Berleant develops the idea of “descriptive aesthetics” in a more formal way and explains its methodological role: “accounts of art and aesthetic experience that may be partly narrative, partly phenomenological, partly evocative, and sometimes even revelatory” found “most often as parts of other kinds of writing - novels, poems, nature writing, criticism, philosophical aesthetics” (1992: 26). Descriptive aesthetics assists in motivating

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attention to aesthetic qualities and values and, as a method, serves to expand the resources that inform environmental aesthetics. For example, the visual and literary arts provide a relevant source for reflecting on aesthetic experience, meanings, and value (Li & Ryan, 2017; Parsons & Zhang, 2018). Literature and nonfiction writing about the natural world are central to the field of ecocriticism, and in recent years there has been an upsurge in this genre, as well as forms of “cli-fi,” or climate fiction (Whyte, 2018; Bristow & Ford, 2018; Demos et al., 2021). Descriptive aesthetics aligns well with engaging environmental aesthetics with diverse cultural traditions and appreciative communities, with a critically informed plurality of narratives, including indigenous and traditional ecological knowledge, playing a role in environmental aesthetic experiences, too (Brady, 2022, 2023; Mikkonen, 2018, 2022; Jarosz, forthcoming). Bringing descriptive aesthetics to bear on the cryosphere and climate change, Devora Neumark’s “Letters to the Ice” is a “public project that invites people from around the world to engage directly with the grim reality that global ice loss is currently catching up to the worst-case scenario predictions” (Neumark, 2021). Communicated through a web-based platform, these letters describe firsthand experience of the qualities, meanings, and emotional attachments to ice experienced from different places and perspectives in the world. They provide individual narratives and forms of aesthetic testimony which enrich our understanding of the cryosphere and reveal a shared sense of loss (Brady, 2023). Turning to the aerosphere, much can be learned from artistic and other expressions which present and interpret the qualities of sky and weather, such as painterly expressions of clouds or wondrous digital images of space. Yuriko Saito (2019) relates how the sky can be appropriated by artists who in turn are able to illuminate its qualities. Employing the Buddhist notion of “emptiness,” she considers how various artworks play on this idea when they approach the sky as a blank canvas. The sky can be “brought down to earth” too (2019: 75), through artworks such as Anish Kapoor’s “Cloud Gate” (2004). Continuing with the theme of emptiness in cosmic art, he discusses how some works can, in a Zen-like manner, enable us to “empty ourselves of the human conceptual framework” (2019: 81). Saito is wary of attempts to take this notion too far, since aesthetic experiences of sky art necessarily remain rooted in the human perspective, but it can nevertheless serve to deepen our understanding. Recent work in philosophy and other disciplines also captures the changing qualities of weather and how the arts can contribute to an understanding of this especially immersive mode of aesthetic experience which is shared across the globe on a daily basis (Diaconu, 2022; Randerson, 2018). Aerosphere aesthetics can support a better understanding of non-land-based forms of environmental degradation to the atmosphere, such as air pollution, light pollution, depletion of the ozone layer, and the ways in which humans are changing the sky and atmosphere through industry and technology. Although often appearing to the human eye as “empty” and vast, airplanes, drones, and, higher above, satellites populate areas above land. A more ecological understanding requires a perspectival shift which recognizes that more-than-human life uses the air as a medium of existence: the interrelationships and interdependencies of air and its organisms

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include the bats, bees, butterflies, dragonflies, no-see-ums, gulls, raptors, geese, swifts, and other beings whose habitat is the sky, especially so in cases of migration. The air is their territory, their home, their means of living, migrating, and surviving. As on the land and in the sea, these organisms compete with human activities for the resources they need to flourish. Nature writing and the arts have recently moved beyond charismatic megafauna to capture the wonder of birds and insects, therefore providing new resources for aesthetic data gathering (Foster, 2021). The atmospheric sciences can provide knowledge about the ways that sky and space are being affected by humans, and this will assist in grasping just what has been lost, but the narratives of art can provide equally valuable resources. “Feels Like Summer” a music video by Childish Gambino (2021) is flushed with yellows and oranges to convey heat, with the video’s catchy but melancholy music and song expressing the awful affects of climate change: Every day gets hotter than the one before Running out of water, it’s about to go down Go down Air that kill the bees that we depend upon Birds were made for singing, wakin’ up to no sound No sound

Access to the arts through digital means, such as YouTube, offers visual and musical forms of descriptive aesthetics with an extremely far reach; “Feels Like Summer” had 256,331,412 views at the time of writing this chapter. With regard to cryosphere and atmosphere/aerosphere, descriptive aesthetics can inform philosophical discussion and be usefully supplemented by forms of knowledge. In addition to firsthand aesthetic experience (where possible), these resources help to capture past, current, and future aesthetic values and meanings, and will have particular importance with respect to environmental change.

Negative Aesthetic Values The field of aesthetics studies both positive and negative aesthetic experience, however, aesthetic concepts of mixed or negative aesthetic value, such as tragedy, the sublime, and ugliness, have been overshadowed by positive values such as beauty. In the philosophy of art, tragedy, “painful art,” and negative emotions have been given some treatment (Levinson, 2014), and although ugliness has been explored by other disciplines, it is relatively understudied in environmental aesthetics. More attention to these categories, as well as developing aesthetic categories for new contexts and phenomena, will go hand in hand with working out how to respond to and articulate the dis/values which come in the wake of climate change. Among the catastrophic effects of climate change is an increase in the frequency and intensity of weather events like hurricanes, floods, droughts, and wildfires, with disastrous consequences for people and nature. How are we to capture the negative

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aesthetic characteristics of these climatic phenomena? Weather presents a useful starting point for considering climatic aesthetic experiences and their data. Meteorological processes are experienced firsthand by human and nonhumans across the earth and at every level, that is, in the air, on the land, and on and beneath water. With their emphasis on multisensory and environed appreciation, everyday and environmental aesthetics are especially relevant when it comes to experiencing weather (Saito, 2005; Diaconu, 2022). Sun, shade, clouds, rain, fog, snow, and wind are felt on a daily basis, and in ways that shape many aspects of human and nonhuman lives. Being caught in a storm is experienced aesthetically through visual, auditory, olfactory, and tactile senses, with the subject immersed among the elements. The relationship between climate and experiencing subject suggests the centrality of bodily aesthetics and firsthand, visceral experience of the effects of weather? Heatwaves and drought are experienced aesthetically through negative qualities such as sweating, oppressiveness, as well as visual changes in landscapes like dead grass, plants, cracked earth, low water levels and dried up rivers, creeks, and lakes. Accompanying emotions such as despair may permeate our relationships to changing weather and its effects on the land, despair for cooler weather or – more serious – witnessing losses of human and nonhuman life. The disastrous costs of climate change and extreme weather weather events are likely to challenge positive valuing, aesthetic or otherwise, and destabilize our attachments to the places we live. Returning to the sublime, this concept is helpful for articulating aesthetic experiences of some extreme climatic events. Sublimity captures qualities of great height, vastness, or tremendous power in the natural world that cause an intense emotional response that is distinguished by a mixture of negative and positive emotions: feeling overwhelmed, anxious, exhilarated, and excited. Some theories of the sublime point to a feeling of insignificance (or humbling effect) in the face of powerful forces, which is resolved into feeling “at home” in the world despite these forces (Brady, 2013).The concept might apply to various climatic events of extraordinary scale, power, size, or duration; however, the sublime has always been theorized as situating the subject in a position in which there is no real danger, so that one can appreciate various sublime qualities. Experiencing a hurricane from a safe place may evoke excitement and awe, but that experience is likely to shift if it becomes known that there are awful consequences from flooding or high winds. Knowledge that the increased frequency of such events is linked to climate change can add another layer of dread or “meteoranxiety” (Albrecht, 2020a), shifting the response to solely negative emotions and, thus, not sublime. The range of narratives offered by negative descriptive aesthetics can be effective in expressing or representing climate change. “Before” and “after” images of coral reefs, glaciers, forests, agriculture, arctic habitats, and so on have become commonplace in public discourse to convey damage and loss. Firsthand observations by people living in affected places describe negative qualities in vivid terms, for example, the effects of the 2019–2020 Australian bushfires: “The bushfires, so huge in extent and so intense as they raze the forests, have blotted out the sun with thick, acrid smoke. In some places, day has turned into night. In others, the colour of the sky is . . . burnt orange.” (Albrecht, 2020b) The olfactory sense, smell, is strongly

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connected to memory, which brings a temporal thread into aesthetic experience. Recollecting the destruction and massive flooding caused by Hurricane Irene in 2010, Vermont resident John Graham recalls the strong smell of dirt as the land slid away, taking the family home with it into the river torrent (Crane, 2021). Matthew Auer (2019: 9) has argued that in a climate-changed world positive aesthetic experiences will be “increasingly rare,” and that there will be an overall increase in ugliness. As such, Auer encourages a better understanding of negative aesthetics in order to navigate both on-the-ground aesthetic experience and how the creative interventions of the arts imagine climate change in the future. The extreme weather events and their consequences discussed thus far occur within relatively short time scales. Considering longer time scales, severe drought and desertification are creating more pervasive desert landscapes in certain regions of the world. Deserts are sometimes experienced and portrayed as barren wastelands of “sterility, death, darkness, and evil” (Tuan, 1995: 143), so negative aesthetics will be relevant, especially for communities where drought has destroyed livelihoods by turning once fertile land into unproductive landscapes. In developing a vocabulary of aesthetic concepts with respect to desert landscapes (and phenomena such as sandstorms), nature writing and indigenous narratives already provide rich descriptive resources (Tynan, 2020; Abbey, 1988). How this aesthetic vocabulary develops and shifts over time will depend upon the circumstances and relationship to the land of the particular aesthetic appreciative community in question, since deserts are found across the world. Although a critical approach is needed with respect to how one adapts aesthetic judgments and preferences in light of environmental change, desert landscapes and ecologies are also found to be beautiful in their tranquility and rich flora and fauna or sublime in the great expanses, big skies, and horizons which they afford. While climate change will continue to have disastrous effects on the human and nonhuman world, this does not in itself preclude the possibility of positive aesthetic values in places affected now and in the future (Brady, 2014, 2022; Nomikos, 2018). Negative descriptive aesthetics has an important role to play, however, a critical pluralist approach is needed. Some forms of cultural production are reductive, as we see in the “glacier-ruins narrative” which calls for the critical examination of disaster narratives such as presentation of the “horrifying beauty of glacial loss” that can be found in both film and other art forms which attempt to capture climate change (Stewart & Johnson, 2018: 446). A sensitive approach is called for, also, to move aesthetic representations beyond narrower, uncritical romantic narratives; aesthetic experience in the field can provide place-based, visceral engagement that is developed relationally over shorter or longer periods of time (Nomikos, 2018). Firsthand experience of communities living and working in places affected by climate change – including scientists in the field – can assist in presenting more accurate narratives, too, which include both positive and negative aesthetic values. Mia Bennett argues for participation with communities on the ground in order to shape a more sensitive approach: “Diversifying Anthropocene aesthetics might produce livelier, more sensitive depictions of a climatically altered planet whose most vulnerable places are often still inhabited” (Bennett, 2021: 929). To this end,

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various indigenous and community-based work provides a good starting point. Sheila Watt-Cloutier, who is an Inuk born in Kuujjuaq, Nunavik, writes that “The land that is such an important part of our spirit, our culture, and our physical and economic well-being is becoming an often unpredictable and precarious place for us” (Watt-Cloutier, 2015: xix). Changing weather patterns, conditions, and the changing appearance of the landscape present new challenges for navigation, hunting, and other activities (Watt-Cloutier, 2015: 202). Imagine how one’s aesthetic experience will shift, and how such precarity is viscerally experienced amidst melting ice, more biting insects, and new, invasive species of plants resulting from a warmer arctic climate (Watt-Cloutier, 2015: 210). Adopting aesthetic theories that are more place based will be important in order to capture the diversity of aesthetic experiences of changing landscapes and ecologies. But place based does not mean fixed or unchanging, for climate migration is a significant feature of climate change now, and more so in the future. Oftentimes, people will bring their aesthetic interests with them through forms of mobility, such as migration. Divya Praful Tolia-Kelly’s postcolonial conception of “material ecologies of citizenship” shows how diasporic sensibilities and identities are retained or shift in “environmental citizenship”: “Citizenship for British Asians is where belonging, attachment, dwelling and heritage are co-constructed through the encounter with place; that is with the aesthetics, form and grammars of nature; with landscape; and with the process of connecting with them through memory and body” (Tolia-Kelly, 2010: 149). Aesthetic interests are not fixed, for example, “The aesthetics, histories and cultures of British Asian English landscapes stretch out to Lake Nevisha, the Indian Ocean and the English Lakes and are locked into a circulatory process of transformation” (Tolia-Kelly, 2010: 148). An understanding of how aesthetic sensibilities develop and become interwoven through connections to past and present places should be a significant feature, too, of any critical approach to understanding aesthetic loss.

Conclusion: Aesthetic and Ethical Values What is the relationship between aesthetic and ethical values in our aesthetic experience of climate change–affected environments? To what extent does knowledge of the harm and devastation caused by climate change shape or undermine aesthetic appreciation? To answer these questions, two categories of views are presented: “aesthetic pessimists” and “aesthetic optimists.” The former refers to views which are skeptical about the degree to which beauty is found in a climatechanged world now and into the future and, therefore, they emphasize negative aesthetics. The latter group are more optimistic, maintaining that both positive and negative aesthetic values can be found, and they are hopeful about ways in which our tastes may adapt. The humanities, social sciences, and sciences all provide support which shows that our world is changing fast and that our shared future will be one of deep precarity and loss of life. Aesthetic pessimists argue, generally, that with such

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widespread precarity and harm there is little or no place for positive aesthetic values (Auer, 2019). Auer (2019: 9) objects to attempts by Brady (2014) and Nomikos (2018) to find positive aesthetic values, the main worry being that people’s lives will be so negatively impacted that positive appreciation will be very limited and tainted with regret: “Pervasive ugliness will limit opportunities for pleasurable experiences, but so may the constant stress of having to satisfy physiological needs - a reality that may affect tens of or even hundreds of millions of people as early as 2050.” Moore and Hurd agree with Auer that as climate change’s effects become even more pervasive, we will need to cultivate a deep sense of aesthetic loss with respect to humans and nature and should refrain from attempts to adapt our aesthetic preferences as part of overall climate adaptation practices. Aesthetic optimists acknowledge the evidence provided by climate scientists and others of the pervasive devastation, loss, and precarity caused by climate change now and into the future. However, they argue that while knowledge of moral harm penetrates aesthetic experience, this knowledge does not by necessity “dictate the aesthetic result” (Alcaraz León, 2010–11: 47). It is “morally permissible,” for example, to find beauty in what one knows to be an invasive species (Stecker, 2019: 137). Brady (2014, 2022) suggests that beauty may be found, for example, in the observation of a new bird species in the landscape, but she also recognizes that this does not preclude recognizing and lamenting harm and the tragic loss of life that could have prevented had humans made the changes needed to prevent such loss. Nomikos (2018: 1) agrees with this stance and brings it into the context of place and “aesthetic texture” of everyday life, which can “provide a source of aesthetic consolation that can make the challenges of GCC easier to manage.” Similarly, Di Paola (2018) argues that we may find courage to face the Anthropocene through the cultivation of virtues in the context of gardening practice, where we learn and exercise virtues such as wonder, ingenuity, humility, perseverance, mindfulness, and cheerfulness. Perhaps lying at the most optimistic end of the scale, Fudge’s (2021: 161) view proposes that tragedy and grief are certain in the face of mass extinction, yet we may find aesthetic consolation through wonder and the sublime: “While we don’t know what future species will look like, we can reasonably anticipate that they will arise through the same wondrous, chaotic, unpredictable, yet inexorable processes that gave rise to us and every other species.” Aesthetic optimists appear to more fully embrace forms of difficult aesthetic appreciation. The aesthetic category of “terrible beauty” (Korsmeyer, 2005) captures a range of challenges and is relevant to showing how the optimist can respond to the pessimist. Experiences of terrible beauty mix negative and positive emotions; for example, as seen in Kolbert’s moving account of Lake Powell and how drought from climate change is revealing the wondrous geology that was previously hidden under the water. Terrible beauty can become sheer ugliness or negative value when grief and despair become overwhelming. In this kind of situation, it would seem that aesthetic appreciation, as such, stops altogether. It is important to highlight that aesthetic considerations form just one part of understanding climate change and the future of the earth, and it does not follow that taking an interest in beautiful, wonderful, majestic, ugly, fascinating, disgusting, and other qualities means that

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one is somehow advocating aesthetic values over other values. Aesthetics does not stand in isolation from ethical, ecological, social, and political concerns, philosophically or in practice (Carlson & Lintott, 2008). With respect to climate change and its unprecedented scale of environmental change, in going forward it will be crucial to register potential aesthetic-ethical harmonies and conflicts. Consider the myriad ways in which aesthetic dis/values are relevant as technological changes emerge more and more in efforts to combat, mitigate, and adapt to climate change (Richardson, 2019). In addition to the energy transitions which are already altering landscapes and seascapes – and which will be needed more and more to combat global warming (IPCC, 2022) – potential geoengineering technologies of the future, in addition to posing serious risks, could have large-scale aesthetic effects such as stratospheric aerosol injections changing the color of the sky. Climate change requires aesthetic resilience, that is, tapping into our toolkit of sensitive perception and multisensory immersion, sympathetic attention, emotions, imagination, and forms of descriptive aesthetics. This toolkit assists in uncovering aesthetic meanings and values, recognizing aesthetic losses, and grasping forms of negative value. As philosophers have shown, aesthetic appreciation can help to support harmonious human-nature relationships which, in turn, hold promise for encouraging environmental responsibility (Brady et al., 2018). It also requires embracing the trans-spatial and trans-temporal nature of such change, demanding global and indigenous perspectives and resources for shaping and supporting our environmental aesthetic sensibilities (Jarosz, forthcoming). If we follow aesthetic optimism, then there is hope for implementing our aesthetic sensibilities in a climatechanged world while, at the same time, ensuring the development and exercise of appreciative virtues such as sensitivity, humility, openness, wonder, and care.

Cross-References ▶ Climate Change, Natural Aesthetics, and the Danger of Adapted Preferences

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Climate Change, Natural Aesthetics, and the Danger of Adapted Preferences Gillian K. J. Moore and Heidi M. Hurd

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Weak Theory of Sustainability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Inherent Resistance of Aesthetic Goods to Quantification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Circularity of Using Adapted Aesthetic Preferences to Justify the Environmental Degradation That Caused Those Preferences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Implications of the Growing Gap Between Aesthetic Needs and (Adapted) Aesthetic Preferences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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This chapter explores reasons to doubt the defensibility of the “weak theory of sustainability” that informs and justifies the use of cost-benefit analysis by environmental regulators. As the argument reveals, inasmuch as the weak theory equates what is sustainable with what sustains the satisfaction of human preferences, it has the surprising philosophical wherewithal to make climate-changing activities sustainable, at least in principle. This would be so if human ingenuity made possible the replacement of ecosystem services with technological alternatives. And it would be particularly so if the aesthetic goods that derive from nature – goods which are resistant to quantification – are excluded from environmental cost-benefit analyses. But it is also true if those aesthetic goods are reduced to

G. K. J. Moore University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD, USA H. M. Hurd (*) University of Illinois, Champaign, IL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_104

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mere human preferences that can be measured through indirect market-based means, for aesthetic preferences are remarkably adaptive. Inasmuch as people can be expected to come to appreciate landscapes degraded by climate change, those who defend a weak theory of sustainability can expect that climate change will not long be at odds with what people find aesthetically pleasing. However, as the growing literature on “nature-deficit disorder” suggests, while aesthetic preferences may be elastic, aesthetic needs are not. As climate change progressively strips us of nature’s goods, we will lose the ability to meet crucial aesthetic needs. The irony is clear: As our aesthetic preferences bend towards the acceptance of ecological loss, we will predictably lose our preferences for meeting our own enduring aesthetic needs. We can thus expect climate change to cause us to prefer what we do not need and to need what we do not prefer. And this implies that climate change is the reductio ad absurdum of the weak theory of sustainability that dominates contemporary environmental regulation. Keywords

Aesthetics · Adaptive preferences · Climate change · Cost-benefit analysis · Nature deficit disorder sustainability

Introduction Could anyone seriously argue that anthropogenic climate change is sustainable? Climate change threatens the wholesale disruption of the four biogeochemical cycles of the planet and is thereby expected to further reduce already depleted natural resources, degrade already deteriorated habitat, diminish already compromised ecosystem services, increase already devastating weather events, and accelerate what is predicted to be the sixth greatest extinction in Earth’s history. Surely it is the very point of credible theories of sustainability to reign in the forces of the Anthropocene. However, the theory to which utilitarians, generally, and welfare economists, in particular, are in fact committed – what has been called the “weak theory of sustainability” (Daly, 1991, p. 250; Dobson, 1996) – is theoretically capable of justifying as “sustainable” the global devastation that climate change threatens to exacerbate. And this theory is hardly confined to the ivory tower. On the contrary, this weak theory of sustainability in fact underlies the past forty years of environmental regulation both in the United States and abroad and explains why environmental law has proven impotent at curtailing climate changing activities and other forms of environmental destruction. While there are external critiques to be made of this weak theory of sustainability and its regulatory legacy that would justify law- and policy-makers in embracing stronger theories demanding more aggressive environmental protections, our interest in this contribution is in exploring the internal defensibility of the weak theory of sustainability. According to the weak theory, an activity is sustainable if it does not

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provably diminish people’s ability to satisfy their preferences. Inasmuch as this theory of sustainability is simply the application of utilitarianism to the question of whether and when environmental goods can be exploited, it invites all the counterexamples and counterarguments that have been lodged against utilitarianism more generally. Our interest, however, is confined to the particular inconsistencies and counter-intuitive consequences that follow from adopting the kind of virulent utilitarianism that the weak theory of sustainability brings to environmental management. We shall thus leave it to others to point out the ways in which proponents of weak sustainability must grapple with familiar problems for utilitarianism (e.g., why surgeons cannot harvest organs from healthy but lonely homeless people to save many others; or why interrogators cannot use torture to extract valuable information from uncooperative prisoners). Our concern in this chapter is with three seemingly insurmountable problems that a weak theory poses for anyone seeking to craft a conceptually coherent and normatively defensible theory of environmental sustainability. First, aesthetic goods (and perhaps other sorts of goods, as well) are constitutively resistant to quantification. They are thus impossible to include in the sorts of costbenefit calculations that are the bread and butter of those working to implement the weak theory of sustainability. Second, efforts to reduce aesthetic goods to aesthetic preferences and measure them via indirect market-based means are deeply problematic because aesthetic preferences are highly adaptive. People come to aesthetically accept, and then to aesthetically prefer, whatever becomes the status quo. And this sets up a circularity concern; for it would be bootstrapping for the weak theory to justify the degradation of the environment by the fact that people will (eventually) prefer that degraded environment, when it is the degradation of the environment that will cause people’s preferences for that environment. Third and finally, while people’s aesthetic preferences are provably adaptive, this is not true of their aesthetic needs. As the growing literature on “nature deficit disorder” persuasively indicates, human welfare is enhanced by aesthetic interactions with healthy ecosystems and diminished by the loss of those experiences. So as climate change progressively strips us of nature’s goods, we will lose the ability to meet crucial aesthetic needs. And worse yet, we will lose our ability to measure the extent of those losses, for without healthy ecosystems, we will be increasingly unable to advance our study of the ways in which healthy ecosystems meet welfare-enhancing aesthetic needs and the ways in which our needs are impaired by climate change’s global devastation of natural systems. And the adaptability of our aesthetic preferences will add insult to this injury, for we will predictably lose our preferences for meeting such aesthetic needs and very likely thereby lose our preferences for studying the aesthetic needs that we are not meeting. We can thus expect climate change to cause us to prefer what we do not need and to need what we do not prefer. This, then, is the three-part structure of the critique that we shall advance in this contribution concerning the weak theory of sustainability and the 40-year experiment with its implementation. As we shall conclude, inasmuch as a weak theory of sustainability is content with environmental changes that do not thwart people’s preferences, the adaptability of our environmental preferences will perpetually

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provide proponents of such a theory with a license to cause environmental destruction that impairs our ability to meet our needs. And as we aesthetically adjust to the calamitous effects of climate change, our adapted preferences might well license the remarkable conclusion that climate change is sustainable. In our view, this makes climate change the reductio ad absurdum of the weak theory of sustainability. And it constitutes all the proof that anyone should need of the weakness of regulatory systems that curtail environmental exploitation only when people prefer to do so.

The Weak Theory of Sustainability On a weak theory of sustainability, individuals, organizations, and governments have obligations to preserve total capital. Total capital is comprised of both raw Earthly resources – what many now call “natural capital” (Hawkin et al., 2000; Kareiva et al., 2011; Helm, 2016) – and what can be called “artificial capital,” a term that captures Marx’s category of “instruments of labor,” namely, products generated from raw resources by the investment of human ingenuity and labor (Marx 1996, Chap. 7). On this theory, raw resources can be consumed so long as aggregate social welfare is preserved or enhanced by the goods into which these resources are converted or by other forms of compensation. When the loss of natural capital can be offset by the substitution of artificial resources, there can be no objection, on this theory, to such a substitution, and hence, no objection to the complete exhaustion or elimination of those natural resources. Thus, as Robert Solow writes: “The duty imposed by sustainability is to bequeath to posterity not any particular thing . . . but rather to endow . . . whatever it takes to achieve a standard of living at least as good as our own. . . We are not to consume humanity’s capital, in the broadest sense.” (Solow, 1992, as cited in Dobson, 1996, p. 411). And what constitutes the measure of substitutability? When can our consumption practices comfortably outpace the ability of a natural resource to replenish itself or the ability of a natural system to maintain functional integrity (e.g., by exceeding the sequestration capacities of carbon sinks)? The answer, on this theory, is given by the net effect of such excesses on human welfare. If adaptation strategies are available that allow humans to suffer environmental losses without a long-term depreciation in welfare, then the demands of sustainability are compatible with such losses. And if ready substitutes generated artificially will provide the same measure of welfare as did the goods and services that derived from natural capital, then there is no basis for complaining about their substitution. Thus, if the substitution of plastic trees for real trees will not diminish human welfare (because they can be engineered to perform all the functions valuable to humans that real trees currently provide), then this concept of sustainability will deem the substitution of plastic forests for natural ones to be sustainable (Krieger, 1973). One might find it hard to imagine that anyone could straight-facedly propound a theory of sustainability as weak as this while simultaneously insisting on the value of environmental protection. In other words, one might think that our contribution is about to torch a straw man. Sadly, the weak theory of sustainability is precisely the

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theory that has guided the United States’ protection of the environment for more than 40 years. Ever since President Ronald Reagan’s seminal 1981 executive order on federal regulation (Exec. Order No. 12,291, 46 Fed. Reg. 13,193 (Feb. 17, 1981), all executive branch agencies have been required to tabulate the human costs and human benefits of proposed regulations and to promulgate rules only when their human benefits outweigh their human costs. Successive executive orders by republican and democratic presidents alike have recapitulated and given muscle to this requirement by requiring agencies to submit their cost-benefit analyses for review by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs within the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (See, for example, Exec. Order No. 12,866, 58 Fed. Reg. 51,735 (Sep. 30, 1993), specifying that “(e)ach agency shall tailor its regulations to impose the least burden on society, including individuals, businesses of differing sizes, and other entities (including small communities and governmental entities), consistent with obtaining the regulatory objectives, taking into account, among other things, and to the extent practicable, the costs of cumulative regulations.” With rare exceptions that became even rarer under the Trump Administration, environmental regulations are thus permitted when, but only when, they will be provably profitable to those whose profits can be quantified or provably preferred by those whose preferences are otherwise measurable (Lambert & Hurd, 2021). The weak theory of sustainability is thus the philosophical expression of the long-dominant view in Washington, D.C., that environmental losses should be prevented only when so doing will deliver gains in measurable human welfare. And it is the best explanation available for why American environmental law has been impotent in response to the climate changing profiteering of large industries, for their benefits have been easily provable, while the costs of climate change – many of which have been deliberately obfuscated by expensive campaigns sustained by those large industries – have been hard to quantify. There are multiple external critiques of the weak theory of sustainability and the regulatory approach that such a theory motivates. Hedonic utilitarians who favor Bentham’s conception of the good over that of modern welfare economists insist that inasmuch as sentient nonhumans experience pleasure and pain, their utiles ought to be tabulated in the cost-benefit analyses of prospective regulations; and when so counted, these analyses will consistently favor limitations on climate changing activities (Singer, 2009). Other consequentialists equate the costs and benefits to be tabulated by regulators not with impacts on the satisfaction of human preferences, but by impacts on human welfare or happiness more objectively conceived (Adler, 2011, 2019). Deontologists contest the consequentialist underpinnings of a weak theory of sustainability by contesting that what is good, however defined, should be maximized. On their accounts, people have duties of environmental protection that sometimes, and perhaps often, demand allegiance even when violating them would satisfy human preferences or advance human welfare. And virtue theorists insist that a weak theory of sustainability is inconsistent with the demands of virtue, for what virtue requires is the cultivation of character traits that motivate us to share the Earth’s limited resources and sustain its life-supporting ecological systems in ways that answer to a theory of distributive justice that includes nonhuman entities as independently deserving recipients (Hurd, 2012).

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We propose to set aside the external critiques of a weak theory of sustainability and focus instead on its internal defensibility. As we shall argue in the next three sections, the weak theory of sustainability that undergirds the past 40 years of American environmental regulation and well explains why corporate profits have been pursued at the expense of global climate stability founders on three insurmountable obstacles.

The Inherent Resistance of Aesthetic Goods to Quantification A familiar objection to the view that cost-benefit calculations ought to drive environmental regulations points to the impossibility of quantifying many things that are of value. This objection appears particularly salient with regards to aesthetic goods. How does one calculate the breathtaking beauty of a vivid sunset? How does one quantify the majesty of snow-capped peaks or commodify the tranquility of waving prairie grasslands that reach to the horizon? Inversely, how does one put a price on the devastation of an uncontained mega-fire in a remote wilderness, the tragedy of aquatic mammals drowned in ghost fishing nets, or the loss of starry skies to light pollution? It is common for those asked to contemplate these questions to postulate that aesthetic goods – even ones as profound as these – are, as a category, simply trivial in comparison to the categories of goods that that can be effectively monetized through market mechanisms. Perhaps those who seek to determine whether corporate consumption of nature’s treasures ought to be curtailed through exercises of government bureaucracy are right to dismiss demands to compute the aesthetic benefits of those evolutionary achievements. After all, Jeremy Bentham believed that there is no reason to think of aesthetic goods as special. As he famously insisted, “Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry” (Bentham, 1830, p. 206). But recall that John Stuart Mill disagreed: “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied” (Mill, 1863, ch.II, para.3). In Mill’s view, there is a crucial distinction between the “higher” and “lower” pleasures – between the pleasures that depend upon distinctively human capacities and the lower pleasures that are shared with animals by virtue of requiring mere sentience. As Mill insisted, there are three distinct sources of higher pleasures: (1) acts involving intellectual complexity, (2) acts engaging the moral sentiments, and (3) acts involving aesthetic appreciation (Mill, 1863, ch. II, para. 4). To discount the latter is to ignore an enormous range of human experience and the focus of a great deal of human energy. Indeed, if one carefully examines one’s daily choices and activities, one will see in a great many of them an extraordinary preoccupation with aesthetic concerns – from what to wear, to how to make a bed or set a table, to what route to work will be most enjoyable, to how to prepare and present food, to what music to play in the background, to how one’s office and living spaces appear, to where to walk one’s dog or take a run, to the cultivated appreciation of wines, spirits, and culinary delights, to evenings spent at concerts, theater, and symphony performances, to the

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pleasures of sitting out-of-doors when the weather is nice, to hours spent sewing, knitting, crocheting, or scrapbooking, to bodybuilding and cosmetic surgery, and ultimately, to pursuits that reveal the intellectual foundations for these sources of aesthetic enjoyment – from courses in viticulture and enology to the study of art history, from tours of art museums to enrollment in gardening clubs and classes, from music lessons to membership in church choirs, from cooking classes to workout sessions with trainers, and so on. Far from being a trivial component of human life, aesthetics permeates virtually all that we do and provides the basis for much of what we value and why we value it. As the character John Keating (played by Robin Williams) says to his students in the coming-of-age movie The Dead Poets Society: “We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for” (Haft, Witt, Thomas & Weir, The Dead Poets Society, 1989). So if regulatory decision-making cannot accommodate and give weight to aesthetic goods, it cannot be thought to capture costs and benefits that are of paramount importance to well-lived lives. Several strategies are currently employed that seek to reduce aesthetic goods to mere human preferences and then to measure them by market means as if they were akin to preferences for ice cream and sailboats. Such strategies should not be surprising, since on the view of those who propound the regulatory use of costbenefit analyses, the value that things possess is entirely exhausted by how much they are preferred by humans. To know how much material goods are preferred, we need only give consumers dollars and watch how they spend them in marketplaces in which prices are considered reliable reflections of the costs of production. While there are no marketplaces in which people can purchase sunsets, star-filled skies, calving glaciers, or the miraculous mycorrhizal transmission of water and nitrogen between the trees in a forest, those who are convinced that all things of value can be valued economically have adopted heuristics that allow them to price such goods in roughly the same way that Tupperware, tires, and asparagus are priced. Two such heuristic mechanisms for quantifying nature’s “intangibles” are the use of “hedonic surveys” and “contingent valuing.” Hedonic surveys simply ask people what they would be willing to pay for environmental goods if they had to purchase them on the open market. Contingent valuation employs an array of indirect market methods to isolate the prices that people actually pay for environmental goods. For example, economists will work to determine how much more buyers will pay for properties that have views than for equivalent properties that lack views, or they will measure how much more people will pay to vacation in beautiful landscapes than in cityscapes. The notion is that the value of beauty – which, again, is thought to be nothing more than the preference for beauty – is accurately cashed out as the difference between real estate prices, in the first case, or as the additional price paid for a vacation in a desirable natural setting, in the second case. There are a host of reasons to think that these strategies are incapable of accurately capturing the true value of aesthetic goods – or even the true measure of people’s aesthetic preferences. And this is for two reasons. First, aesthetic goods

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are not goods simply by virtue of being preferred. And second, aesthetic preferences are inherently different from consumer preferences so as to resist measurement by market heuristics. We will have more to say about the first of these arguments in section “The Implications of the Growing Gap Between Aesthetic Needs and (Adapted) Aesthetic Preferences” below, so let us here focus only on the second of these claims. While consumer preferences may exhaust the value of consumer goods because the sole value of such goods lies in the degree to which they are preferred, aesthetic preferences do not exhaust the value of aesthetic goods for those who prefer them. This is because people aesthetically prefer things that are not, and cannot be, quantified, and the resistance of aesthetic goods to quantification is precisely why people prefer them. While the theoretical annual energy potential of waves off the coasts of the United States is estimated to be as much as 2.64 trillion kilowatt hours, or the equivalent of about 66% of US electricity generation in 2020, it would be laughable to think that this – and anything like it, be it oceanside property values or prices paid for beach balls – encapsulates the aesthetic value of the waves that crash on the cliffs of Oregon or the Jersey shore. And this is because we find aesthetic value in crashing waves in large part because their aesthetic properties are not commodifiable: their ability to carve shorelines in artistic patterns, their genesis in the gravitational forces exerted on the Earth by the Moon, and to a lesser degree, the Sun, their almost deafening roar, and their churning of rich organic materials that invite a feeding frenzy among noisy gulls who create a cacophonous symphony in the sky are valued precisely because they are not like the things in the material world that derive their sole value from how much humans are willing to pay for them. Or put differently – but in terms that those who defend a weak theory of sustainability insist are either meaningless or incomprehensible – many aesthetic goods are, and are thought to be, intrinsically valuable and are preferred precisely because human preferences for them do not, and are thought not, to exhaust their value. It is thus impossible to cash out the value of aesthetic goods, or even of aesthetic preferences for those goods, when the very nature of those goods is such that people prefer them because they believe their preferences for them are trivial in comparison to the value of those goods.

The Circularity of Using Adapted Aesthetic Preferences to Justify the Environmental Degradation That Caused Those Preferences Proponents of a weak theory of sustainability are convinced that they can triumph even if they cannot convince critics that cost-benefit calculations concerning environmentally degrading practices accurately tabulate people’s aesthetic preferences for the natural goods that are sacrificed. This is because, as weak sustainability theorists will insist, people have remarkably adaptive aesthetic preferences. So long as their needs are met, people cannot be expected to miss what they have never known. “How many people lose sleep because it is no longer possible to see a live Dinosaur?” asks Wilfred Beckerman (Beckerman, 1994). How could one grieve for

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the aesthetic loss of passenger pigeons, when the last one of the species died in 1914, well before anyone alive today could know what it was to see “a feathered river across the sky”? (Greenberg, 2014) While anthropogenic climate change may drive blue whales, native vanilla plants, and African Baobab trees to extinction, it may prove to be weakly sustainable if future generations will never miss what they have lost and if benefits to human welfare compensate for whatever losses are inflicted upon those who experience these losses as losses. That this is the case is not controversial. Scholars across disciplines have documented dramatic shifts in public preferences for nature’s various states across time, place, and cultural milieu. The starkly sublime landscapes in vogue at the time of the Hudson River school differ enormously from the gentle pastoral scenes depicted by Constable and Turner half a century prior (Gobster, 1999). A complex soup of social and cultural factors feeds public preferences for certain landscapes over others – an indication that aesthetic preferences for certain natural forms over others evolve less from internal characteristics of the appreciated nature than from external characteristics of the appreciators. Inasmuch as human society will persist in constant flux, so too will the aesthetic preferences of its citizens for their environments. Whether this is true to an extent that would permit widespread aesthetic enjoyment of lamprey and strip mines is evidenced affirmatively by the large number of examples that suggest that environmental damage and ecological destruction are commonly viewed as aesthetically desirable. Public opposition to culling herds of deer and eradicating the beaver-like nutria that are devouring southern wetlands, efforts by recreational and commercial fishers to revive the smelt populations in Lake Superior, and complaints by Eastern hikers when stands of Japanese honeysuckle are removed illustrate how aesthetic preferences can part ways with the conditions of ecological health. As climate change further disrupts natural systems, we can expect that aesthetic preferences for damaged landscapes will increasingly become the norm. Restoration practitioners and conservationists are frequently stymied by aesthetic preferences for ecologically undesirable conditions – by the common admiration of horizon-reaching agricultural fields of monocultural corn, soybeans, and wheat and decadently blooming riparian corridors of highly invasive purple loosestrife (Moore, 2022; Moore & Hurd, n.d.). Aesthetically valuing agricultural petrochemical deserts as idyllic pastoral scenes and thickly blooming purple flowers as breathtaking displays of nature’s exuberance blinds people to the grievous ecological harms these landscapes represent. Restoration ecologists’ attempts to reverse damaged landscapes are often met with pushback by those who prefer the aesthetics of the familiar to those of the ecologically functional. Prairies are among the most biodiverse and rapidly vanishing biomes, but their restoration requires the opening of shady, green woodlands and often involves the use of disturbance factors like fire, which prompt significant controversies in cases where scenic value conflicts with ecological need (Shore, 1997; Moore, 2022). Even in seemingly obvious cases of aesthetic affronts to nature, such as intensive logging, perceptions of aesthetic acceptability have been shown to occur with increased familiarity (Ribe, 2002).

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Yet however true it is that people will eventually find beauty in dead corals, desertified drylands, and ice-free polar seas, proponents of weak sustainability cannot point to such adapted aesthetic preferences to help justify policies that exacerbate the devastating effects of climate change, because to do so would invite the charge of circularity. To find that preferences for a policy that have been caused by that policy help tip the cost-benefit calculus in favor of the policy is to commit a version of the petitio pincipii fallacy. It is to presume the very conclusion that is to be demonstrated. It is to find a policy legitimate on the basis that it is preferred, when it would not have been preferred had it not been for the implementation of that policy to begin with. Far from constituting an argument for a weak theory of sustainability, those who point to the adaptability of aesthetic preferences are guilty of bootstrapping their way to a conclusion that was implicit in their premises.

The Implications of the Growing Gap Between Aesthetic Needs and (Adapted) Aesthetic Preferences Those who champion cost-benefit analysis in environmental regulation, and who thereby implicitly embrace the weak theory of sustainability, might confess that it would be illegitimate to count preferences for a policy that were caused by the pursuit of that policy as reasons to favor that policy. Still, they might argue, the fact that people can be predicted to find aesthetic contentment in whatever their environmental circumstances eventually become softens the adverse impacts of environmental degradation. So long as people’s material, social, political, and spiritual circumstances are not diminished, the fact that they will suffer aesthetic losses should not be a reason to think that aggregate social welfare will decline over the long run, because the adaptability of their aesthetic preferences will ensure that such losses will not be experienced as losses for long. So even if those adapted preferences cannot be counted in support of policies that prove environmentally degrading, the adaptability of aesthetic preferences provides a basis for denying that environmental degradation will cause long-term aesthetic losses. If the many other losses caused by environmental degradation (e.g., losses of ecosystem services) can be offset, mitigated, or compensated for by technological means, then aggregate social welfare may be preserved or enhanced in the long run, despite devastating ecological changes. And the fact that what people find to be aesthetically pleasing or powerful in nature today will be lost to them tomorrow is not a reason to think that they will be aesthetically impoverished, for they can be predicted to find beauty tomorrow in what is not judged beautiful today. Put bluntly, just as children who are raised with plastic Christmas trees today cannot imagine why anyone would prefer real ones, so those who find their forests replaced by plastic trees tomorrow can be expected to wonder why we ever would have thought real ones to be superior. But there are two problems with this argument. First, while people generally want what they like and like what they want, there is a significant literature that demonstrates that it is both possible and not uncommon for people to have preferences for things that do not provide them with satisfaction. (Those who have studied

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addiction, for example, have contributed particularly compelling examples to this literature, for it is surprisingly common for addicts to want “fixes” that no longer provide them with the felt satisfaction or euphoria that initially led them into addiction. Moore, 2020, pp. 496–497, 508–509, 533–534; Holton & Berridge, 2013, p. 239) Second, while it would seem plausible that people would want what they need and need what they want, the connection between wants and needs is similarly a loose one. Together, these gaps raise real doubts about whether aesthetic preferences that are adapted to degraded environments still yield true satisfaction and meet basic needs. Let us focus on the second of these questions – on the question of how closely adapted aesthetic preferences track aesthetic needs. There is a large and rapidly growing social science literature concerning what Richard Louv famously described as “nature deficit disorder”(Louv, 2005) – that is, the relationship between the loss of natural experiences and the diminution of human welfare. This literature strongly suggests that people have aesthetic needs for natural experiences. And they have these needs whether they know it or not. As their aesthetic preferences adapt to ecological degradation, their aesthetic needs for ecological health will persist. And thus, as climate change progressively corrupts ecological systems, an ever-widening gulf can be expected to develop between people’s aesthetic needs and their aesthetic wants, so that as time goes by, people will want what they do not need and they will need what they do not want. The literature on nature-deficit disorder is rich in examples of the ways in which losses of natural experiences translate into losses of welfare that often remain invisible to those whose welfare is compromised (Children & Nature Network’s Research Library: https://research.childrenandnature.org/). Beginning in the 1970s, hundreds of experimental, quasi-experimental, and correlational studies have documented the ways in which cognitive functioning, directed attention, selfcontrol, psychological well-being, the capacity for imaginative play, sociability, and the sense of affiliation with other species are diminished by the inability of children to access and play freely within natural areas (Chawla, 2015). Numerous studies have specifically demonstrated positive associations between students’ exposure to living vegetation around schools and students’ academic performance (Föllmer et al., 2021; Kuo et al., 2021; Kweon et al., 2017; Leung et al., 2019). Merely having window views of green landscaping improves test scores of students in schools and universities alike and does so in a way that positively correlates with the density of trees and shrubs that are visible (Matsuoka, 2010; Benfield et al., 2015). And the data from a recent large study showed that tree canopy cover within the larger attendance area of schools is positively and significantly associated with test scores in math, science, and English language arts (including reading). The results of this study also showed a significant positive association between the amount of blue water in a school’s attendance area and test scores in science and social science (Lin et al., 2020). Interestingly, while long-term exposure to nearby nature appears a now-well-accepted driver of academic performance in students at all levels, recent investigations demonstrate that short-term exposure to greenness delivers cognitive benefits at all educational levels, as well. In a broad literature

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review, researchers found that directed attention restoration from mental fatigue occurred in students from early elementary grades through university who experienced short (10–90 min) exposures to natural areas (Mason et al., 2021). Numerous other studies have traced the impacts of frequent childhood contacts with nature on personality characteristics in adulthood. For example, one such study found that frequency of contact with nature in childhood predicts increased creative imagination and curiosity in adulthood, as well as decreased anxiety and depression, even after controlling for standard demographic variables (socio-economic status, education, etc.). Interestingly, this study further found that frequency of contact with temperate forests particularly closely predicts these cognitive and affective benefits in adulthood (Snell et al., 2020). As these and many other examples strongly indicate, human welfare crucially depends upon positive experiences of natural aesthetics. While people might cease to consciously experience environmental losses as aesthetic losses, these studies demonstrate that those losses continue to function as aesthetic losses that adversely impact human welfare. In short, the fact that people’s aesthetic preferences are adaptive does not mean that their aesthetic needs are similarly so. People may thus need real forests even if they come to prefer plastic ones and even if plastic forests might be engineered to meet all the other needs that real forests today provide. Of course, the critic might insist that the above studies do not prove that people’s aesthetic needs cannot be met by anything less than healthy, well-functioning ecosystems. The most the studies suggest is that people need regular exposure to natural elements, but such studies leave open whether these needs might be met by exposure to ecologically degraded areas in which, say, invasive species have displaced indigenous ones because anthropogenic disruptions (development, pollution, climate change, etc.) have interrupted healthy cycles and synergistic dependencies. Perhaps all the benefits reported in the above studies would be available if people periodically gazed upon highly invasive but superficially beautiful Japanese honeysuckle; or perhaps they could be achieved simply through exposure to hybridized ornamentals within small islands of curated plantings. (Indeed, some studies have suggested that employee stress is reduced simply by having potted plants on employee desks. (Largo-Wight et al., 2011)). There are four rejoinders to this complaint. First, the studies above are enough, by themselves, to defeat the weak theory of sustainability at the extreme: Namely, they are enough to suggest that, however successfully engineers might technologically compensate for the loss of “eco-services,” people will have needs for attributes of biomes that cannot be met by fake substitutes – by plastic trees, cardboard cacti, nylon kelp, or television images of fire. Second, “green psychologists” do not know enough about nature-deficit disorder to know how well people might meet their aesthetic needs (as opposed to wants) within increasingly degraded ecosystems or within small fragments of nature that lack systemic integrity. Humans evolved within natural systems that stimulated all five of their senses. When people are left with vast areas desertified by climate change or closed-canopy monocultures of red maples that opportunistically consume prairies when fire is suppressed, will their auditory, olfactory, and tactile senses be starved by the absence of forces that once proved

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importantly stimulating – for example, insects, birds, breezes, and babbling brooks? Third and relatedly, biologists and ecologists do not know enough about degraded ecosystems to know how long such ecosystems can sustain themselves or can sustain the attributes that meet the aesthetic needs of people. It may be that as climate change accelerates, all but the hardiest species will struggle to survive; and it may be that those that remain fall shy of satisfying the panoply of aesthetic needs that humans have acquired. Fourth, and finally, what both ecologists and green psychologists do know is that climate change and other anthropogenic forces have already not just degraded but destroyed areas in which people once met aesthetic needs. As environmental refugees further crowd already-crowded urban areas in desperate efforts to escape villages submerged by rising seas, salinized agricultural fields, flooded riverine valleys, and lands plagued by prolonged drought, they leave the degraded for the destroyed; they leave damaged nature for no nature at all. So, while it may remain unclear just what kinds of natural experiences are directly or instrumentally required to meet people’s aesthetic needs, the above studies amply suggest that as degradation approaches destruction, people will lose the capacity to meet needs and thereby lose the conditions essential to sustained wellbeing.

Conclusion If people can and do need aesthetic goods that they may not consciously prefer, then it seems that weak sustainability theorists may find themselves impaled on the horns of a dilemma. Either they must substitute a concern for hypothetical aesthetic preferences for their present concern for actual aesthetic preferences, asking what people would subjectively prefer if they were fully informed (and then seeking a way to quantify such hypothetical preferences). Or they must adopt an objective theory of human welfare that denies that what maximizes human welfare is what maximizes the satisfaction of subjective human preferences, real or hypothetical (Adler, 2011, 2019). Both these strategies are problematic, because both part ways with fundamental tenets of the utilitarianism undergirding modern welfare economics upon which the weak theory of sustainability mandated for use in environmental regulation ultimately depends for its moral inspiration. The substitution of hypothetical preferences for actual ones threatens a kind of “preference laundering” that invites charges of paternalism. It permits the substitution of what people ought to prefer for what they in fact prefer in a manner that substitutes others’ views about their good for their own. And the move from maximizing the satisfaction of preferences to maximizing the fulfillment of needs similarly demands a theory of what people need that invites the substitution of others’ view of the good for those possessed by individuals themselves. Inasmuch as utilitarians have long insisted that individuals know their own preferences and needs better than can anyone else, efforts to substitute hypothetical preferences or needs for actual ones fly in the face of the essential utilitarian commitment to grounding what is good in what people want for themselves. The upshot of this analysis is that weak sustainability is, by its own terms, an impoverished theory of sustainability. And this implies that the last 40 years of

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American environmental policymaking that has been predicated on this theory rests on an untenable foundation. Crucially, what the theory of weak sustainability and its regulatory legacy founder upon is the inability to account for and incorporate aesthetic goods that defy commodification, both because efforts to quantify aesthetic preferences are laughably crude and because many aesthetic goods are goods even if they are not preferred. While the catastrophic impacts of climate change that we are already experiencing (floods, fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, ocean acidification, species extinctions, etc.) may well cost people things that they subjectively value today but will not consciously miss tomorrow, there are sound reasons to think that the aesthetic impoverishment of our world will result in the impoverishment of the human condition – and this will be true even if humans cease to know it is true. For the more that anthropogenic climate change degrades our environment, the more we will lose the baseline from which to measure the impacts of climate change on our wellbeing. While people’s aesthetic preferences may adapt to new baselines so that the ugly becomes beautiful and the destroyed becomes inspirational, their aesthetic needs will remain. That they cease to miss what they continue to need should not be confused with the achievement of sustainability, for while ignorance may be (aesthetic) bliss, it will mask genuine losses in human wellbeing. Anthropogenic climate change is thus the reductio ad absurdum of the weak theory of sustainability and the American environmental regulatory regime that has failed to curtail profligate exploitation of the planet’s carbon sinks. As anthropogenic climate change adds aesthetic losses to the many other losses it causes, we adapt by preferring what we have over what we have lost. But since we need what we have aesthetically lost, and since a weak theory of sustainability measures only what we prefer, not what we need, it dooms us not just to living poorer lives in an impoverished world, but, ironically, to finding that world pleasing.

Cross-References ▶ Adaptation Duties ▶ Climate Change and Psychology ▶ Environmental Aesthetics and Global Climate Change

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Climate Change and Religion Robin Attfield

Contents Religious Declarations on Climate Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Northcott’s Interpretation of Such Statements and Attitudes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Implications of White’s and Passmore’s Stances . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Bearing of Stewardship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Concluding Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

This chapter investigates the varying stances of the great religions on climate change, their historical backgrounds, and reasons for the diversity to be found among their recent statements. It responds to criticisms of the stewardship interpretation of Christianity and considers the contrasting view that the roots of contemporary ecological problems including that of climate change lie in religious acquiescence in early modern economic individualism. The degree of lasting impact of these stances is held to depend on the attitudes of the different religions to structural change and reform. Keywords

Climate change · The great religions · Lynn White Jr., stewardship · Laudato Si’ · Economic individualism · Structural change

R. Attfield (*) Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK e-mail: attfi[email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_42

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Religious Declarations on Climate Change Ahead of the much-anticipated CoP-21 Climate Change Conference held at Paris in late 2015, many religious leaders or representative groups submitted statements and declarations about the stance of their religion on climate change and related issues. Several such statements are summarized in Jenkins, Berry, and Kreider (2018), in their section “Religious Engagements with Climate Change” (pp. 6–13). As Jenkins and his fellow-authors acknowledge, some religious groups had made statements on climate change much earlier. Thus the World Council of Churches set up a Climate Change Program in 1988 (Jenkins et al., 2018, p. 6), the same year as Patriarch Dimitrios of the Orthodox Church issued a “Message on the Day of Prayer for the Protection of Creation,” including among the threats to “the life of our planet” the so-called “phenomenon of the greenhouse” (Kerber, 2020, p. 352). The Church of Scotland presented its first assessment of climate change in 1989 (Pullinger, 1989; Hulme 2016). Further, the Dalai Lama made his first speech on climate change in 1990 (Jenkins et al., 2018, p. 6; Hulme, 2016, pp. 239–248). Then in 2000 the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life published a report on Global Warming: A Jewish Response (Hulme, 2016); and in 2002, the Oxford Declaration on Global Warming, which was signed by 70 leading climate scientists, policymakers, and American Christian leaders, recognized that “the Christian community has a special obligation to provide moral leadership and an example of caring service to people and to all God’s creation” (Climate Forum, 2002; Hulme, 2016). Similarly, a wide range of religious groups sought to make clear their stances on climate change in the months prior to the Paris Conference of 2015. Probably the best known is the Encyclical of Pope Francis I, Laudato Si0 . While this was regarded by its author as a development of Catholic social teaching, it goes further in rejecting “the technocratic paradigm” and its instrumentalist approach both towards other people and towards the whole of creation. Laudato Si0 thus rejects approaches that intensify human domination of the earth and exploitation by the wealthy of the poor, and implicitly distances itself from anthropocentrism as well as from societal immiseration (Francis I, 2015; Jenkins et al., 2018). For an interesting and largely affirmative critique of Laudato Si0 , see Jamieson (2015), who argues persuasively that, despite his misguided denials, Francis I actually expresses a biocentrist stance, and one, at that, that stresses the centrality not of economic or technological solutions, but of objective values. Another significant statement from a major religion was the “Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change” (2015), prepared at the Islamic Conference on Climate Change of that year. This statement contrasted the vocation of human beings to the role of khalifa (steward or caretaker) of the Earth with their corrupt and harmful performance of that role. It called on oil-producing states to phase out greenhouse gas emissions, and on all states to commit to a strategy of zero emissions (Jenkins et al., 2018, p. 7). Likewise the “Rabbinic Letter on the Climate Crisis” (2015) interprets climate change as humanity overworking God’s creation, and failing to allow Earth to rest. Big oil is criticized in this context. Jewish communities are called on to integrate

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currently damaged ecological relations into their historic commitment to social justice (The Shalom Center, 2015, Jenkins et al., 2015, p. 7). Meanwhile the “Buddhist Climate Change Statement to World Leaders,” which was signed by the Dalai Lama and by Buddhist leaders from many countries, expresses concern about climate change on the basis of traditional Buddhist teaching. Climate change is held to disclose lack of insight. Thus phasing out fossil fuels, moving towards clean energy and attaining a 1.5 degree ceiling on rises in average temperatures are held important not only for stabilizing planetary systems but also for spiritual renewal (McGrath, 2015; Jenkins et al., 2018, p. 7). There was also that same year a “Hindu Declaration on Climate Change,” which, in the words of Jenkins et al., “focuses on the suffering” that climate change causes. It interprets the resulting human duties as relating to “principles of reverence for life and understanding of karma,” and “calls for personal service” (Jenkins et al., 2015, p. 7), and also for national and international action (Hindu Declaration on Climate Change, 2015). Further, two interfaith statements of that year found common ground between the religions on climate change issues. Thus the “Interfaith Climate Statement” associated with the Paris Conference “affirmed that all faith recognize a moral obligation to avoid harm, respect fairness, and care for the vulnerable” (Jenkins et al., 2018, p. 7). The authors of this statement were closely following the call to climate action of the same year from the Parliament of World Religions, “Embracing Our Common Future,” which, as Jenkins and his fellow-authors relate, also mentions duties to future generations and respect for all life (Jenkins et al., 2018, p. 7). To return to Christian declarations, Operation Noah, an ecumenical UK-based Christian coalition, issued a public statement on climate change in 2012, the “Ash Wednesday Declaration.” Its subtitle was: “Climate change and the purposes of God: a call to the Church.” It declared climate change a “confessional issue,” as the Barmen Declaration had been for the Confessing Church of Germany in 1934, and declared that “For our generation, reducing our dependence on fossil fuels has become essential to Christian discipleship” (Operation Noah, 2012; Hulme, 2016, p. 237). However, an American Christian group, the evangelical Cornwall Alliance presented a very different message in an open letter to the Pope, sent a few days before he published Laudato Si0 . They congratulated him on his care for the Earth and for God’s children, but raised concerns about the quality of aspects of climate science and about the worldviews underpinning climate policy advocacy. “Interpreting the Bible as mandating a preference for the poor, the authors of the letter concluded, ‘It is both unwise and unjust to adopt policies requiring reduced use of fossil fuel for energy’” (Hulme, 2016, p. 237). And earlier, in their 2009 “Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming” they had criticized “the notion that planetary systems are vulnerable to human action and argue that fossil fuel energy is important to human flourishing” (Jenkins et al., 2018, p. 7). This group has been characterized as “supportive of fossil fuels and skeptical of climate action” (Jenkins et al., 2018, ibid.). The divergence of the Cornwall Alliance from other Christian declarations, from other monotheistic declarations, and from the statements and the declarations of other religions (as made both severally and jointly) calls for interpretation.

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Admittedly this Alliance accepts the Biblical prioritization of the poor, and yet their rejection of climate science, as well as of related policies and campaigns, cries out for commentary. But before this can be provided, Michael Northcott’s understanding of the significance of the kind of predictions of climate catastrophe that underlie the majority of the above declarations needs to be considered, and, in a different way, the statements of the Cornwall Alliance as well.

Northcott’s Interpretation of Such Statements and Attitudes While climate science might seem to be a politically neutral undertaking, Northcott explains, in a section entitled “Shooting the Messenger,” that predictions of climate catastrophe are a threat to fossil-fuel-based industrial capitalism, and as such are already liable to be resisted by the fossil fuel industry and its supporters. Besides, if energy needs to be rationed, with the rich as well as the poor affected, then climate science is prone to be embraced by the left and resisted by the right (Northcott, 2013, p. 16). In addition, there is a more direct danger posed by climate science to oil and gas companies. For a threat is posed by climate science to the value of the stocks of fossil fuels. If people believe they should be left in the ground (as burning them will destabilize the climate), this reduces their value. So the owners and their supporters want this not to be believed (ibid 17), and consequently seek to cast doubt on climate scientists and their credibility. Similar resistance befell Rachel Carson’s sciencebased and doom-laden message of 1962 (ibid. 17–18; Carson, 2000). Northcott also compares these scientific messages to the apocalyptic message of the New Testament (in books such as Mark and Revelation). The rhetoric used by Carson in Silent Spring (1962), for example in her choice of title of the book itself, shows this not to be a fanciful comparison. Further, some instances of climate writing, such as James Lovelock’s The Revenge of Gaia (2006a) (untypical of environmentalism as it was), James Hansen’s Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity (2009), and David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future (2019), disclose a similarly apocalyptic tone (Northcott, 2013, pp. 13–15). The suggestion is not that Christians will rush to support any apocalyptic message, but rather that such messages disturb and potentially destabilize vested interests and those concerned to maintain the established order, just as New Testament apocalyptic did in its day, and are equally prone to generate resistance of a political and ideological nature, taking forms such as climate denial, calumnies directed at climate scientists and their institutions (such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), and the deployment of well-funded ingenuity in defense of the fossil fuel industry, comparable only to that deployed not long ago in defense of the tobacco industry (sometimes by the same organizations or the same people). In view of the political implications, this should not cause surprise. Resistance is strongest among the advocates of choice and of free-market capitalism, opposed to the kind of regulations that are needed to restrain beneficiaries and corporations such as oil companies (20–21).

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Further, the connection between Christianity and the sometimes apocalyptic messages from climate scientists is not restricted to their parallel tendencies to trouble establishments. Thus Northcott writes of one theologian as follows: “John Zizioulas argues that Revelation represents a new literary genre of ‘cosmological prophecy’, in which Christians are called to think of the Kingdom of God not only in terms of but also in terms of the survival and wellbeing of the entire creation” (Zizioulas, 1997; Northcott, 2013, p. 27); and this has implications in the current age for preserving the natural environment. There again, Paul, writing at Romans 8: 19–21, foresaw a new peace between humanity and creation (Northcott, ibid., 29). This cosmic understanding of the Christian gospel implicitly makes the warnings of climate science central to the Christian message in the third millennium. Northcott’s stance thus coheres with that of the World Council of Churches, of Pope Francis, and of Operation Noah (see section “Religious Declarations on Climate Change”), but raises the question of what he could say to explain the very different stance of the Cornwall Alliance. That stance would be readily explained if the portrayal of Christianity (and equally of Judaism) of Lynn White Jr. could be accepted, both as anthropocentric and as authorizing the human domination of nature (White, 1967); yet the stances of the World Council of Churches, Pope Francis, and of Operation Noah would go unexplained, as would that of the Rabbinic Letter on the Climate Crisis. White’s interpretation will be returned to shortly. Northcott, however, presents a distinctive understanding, which should be considered first. It would be open to Northcott simply to treat the Cornwall Alliance as a group sympathetic to oil corporations, and their statement as symptomatic of a right-wing response sympathetic to big business, which, however, has been partly modified and influenced by the Bible’s prioritizing of the poor. In fact, though, Northcott has a deeper explanation of the kind of Christianity which is supportive of individual property and of capitalist corporations. According to Northcott, Lynn White fails to notice that Francis Bacon (1561–1626) was the key source of the association between Christianity and the domination of nature, and mistakenly ascribes this approach to Christianity in general (Northcott, 2013, p. 106), rather than to majority Protestant Christianity of the Early Modern Period. For Northcott, the Christianity of the Middle Ages had largely been land-friendly and community-oriented (see the coming paragraph), despite Aquinas’s instrumentalist view of non-human animals (ibid., 277). But these attitudes were to change through the teachings of Bacon’s contemporary, Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), and of John Locke (1632–1704), as well as those of Bacon himself. Northcott follows Joan O’Donovan in holding that “in the early Church, Cyprian and Zeno of Verona viewed the communal sharing of things according to need as a true human imitation of God’s equal beneficence to all men in bestowing natural gifts of, e.g., sunshine and rain, stars and wind” (O’Donovan, 1998, p. 24; Northcott, 2013, p. 132). Human sharing of divisible goods such as land mirrored God’s provision of these indivisible goods. But the modern approach involves the attempt to organize society’s allocation of both divisible and indivisible goods on the basis of

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rights, whether rights of access or rights of use. Northcott proceeds to trace the origins of this modern approach in the works of Grotius, Hobbes and Locke; in the coming paragraphs his analysis is considered. Thus a different attitude to property from the traditional Christian view arose with Grotius and Hobbes; the environment becomes “an object of ownership in itself,” with individual property rights to land imposed by the state (Coyle & Marrow, 2004, p. 213; Northcott, 2013, p. 132). Grotius suggests that “the first imperative of international law is that ‘foreign property is respected’” (Carty, 1986; Northcott, ibid.), and Hobbes follows Grotius in suggesting that the state (like the individual) has a right to use whatever means may be needed for its self-preservation, since it is for each state to judge what belongs to whom “by the right of nature” (Hobbes, 1642, De Cive; Tuck and Silverhome 1998). Hence, according to both of these authors, coercion is justified wherever either property or state borders are infringed. This already makes the environment subject to enforcible property rights. It can here be added that, while many of Hobbes’ theories were regarded as controversial (not least among the English bishops), this common theme of Grotius and Hobbes seems to have gone largely unchallenged for many decades. The next step, according to Northcott, underlies the carbon emissions trading of the contemporary world. For values tend to be recognized only when they become part of the productive economy and are monetized. Thus the value present in the avoidance of harms represented by reductions in greenhouse gas emissions is held “to have more productive power when it is translated into monetary terms and becomes tradable against other values” (Northcott, 2013, p. 129). But this key premise goes back to the philosophy of the seventeenth-century Christian philosopher John Locke, who, in his Second Treatise of Civil Government, justified the dominant place “of money values in modern political economy when he proposes that money is the means by which work is preserved from the decay that afflicts the fallen natural order since it is ‘a lasting thing which man may keep without despoiling’” (Locke, 1689, Sect. 46; Northcott, 2013, p. 129). As Northcott proceeds to explain, Locke’s approach has actually been pressed into service in a recent defense of carbon markets, and more particularly of the “grandfathering” of emissions permits, or the granting of them to those “with the longest history of substantial serial pollution.” Thus Luc Bovens has argued, in “A Lockean Defense of Grandfathering Emission Rights,” that “the atmosphere is analogous to unmanaged and unproductive land of the kind that Europeans settled in the New World, and to which Locke argued they had acquired rights provided they made the land more productive and that they did not own so much land that they wasted it. Emission rights reflect the Lockean principle that those who ‘usefully’ turn a polluted atmosphere into a productive resource by deriving wealth from the burning of fossil fuels ought to continue to enjoy at least a proportion of the property rights they had so acquired” (Bovens, 2011; Northcott, 2013, p. 129). Bovens’s approach, it should be added, is a minority one among environmental ethicists, who more often propose the allocation of such rights in accordance with current needs; but it serves to illustrate the changed post-Reformation attitudes (Christian attitudes included) to the land and the environment, deriving from such

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seventeenth-century figures as Hobbes, Grotius, and Locke. Locke, certainly, had not lost touch with longstanding Christian attitudes; for example, he advocated that children should be taught to avoid cruelty to animals (Locke, 1693). But with regard to the convertibility of value to money, his stance helps explain the ethos and the attitudes of modern capitalism and its participants, right through to the oil companies of the present. Similarly the contributions of Grotius to international law can be welcomed by Christians aware of the implicit cosmopolitanism of Christianity, as they were by Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Letters and Papers from Prison (Bonhoeffer, 1953, p. 120); yet his views on the state and on property, publicized as they were by Hobbes, served to strengthen support across Europe (and later across the rest of the world) for the rights of individual and corporate property-owners. There again, Bacon’s vision of collaborative scientific investigation, so organized as to enhance human welfare, was rightly welcomed by the early scientists of the Royal Society (many of them bishops) (Purver, 1967), and embodies Christian beliefs about the regularity of the created order and the importance of understanding it better for the sake of human benefit; yet at the same time his attitudes, supportive of the human domination of nature, and his rhetoric, with its sexist overtones (Merchant, [1980] 1990), signify exploitative attitudes to which Northcott rightly draws attention. When the Cornwall Alliance letter and its divergence from other Christian and theistic declarations about climate is compared with the critique supplied by Northcott, two responses emerge. One is that the Cornwall Alliance’s skepticism about climate science reflects a right-wing political stance characteristic of big business and its supporters, whereas the various other theistic declarations (including those of Judaic and Muslim groups) contrive to steer clear of these influences and stay true to the prophetic traditions of the Old Testament (which all these theistic traditions look back to in common). The other is that the Cornwall Alliance letter reflects the stance of capitalist corporations that take for granted the majority attitudes to property of Early Modern Protestant Christianity, as developed in the writings of Grotius, Hobbes, and Locke (and widely echoed in other theistic traditions across the modern period), in contrast with the other theistic groups issuing climate declarations, which follow older versions of (respectively) Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. The Cornwall Alliance expresses an emphasis shared with the various declarations on the priority and the care that should be shown to the poor and to the Earth, but its attitude to fossil fuels fails to embody the kind of stance to shared resources such as the land and the atmosphere which the traditions of all three theistic religions may be understood as upholding. Here it is appropriate to return to the “Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change” (2015). This Declaration points to defective performance by humanity of its role of khalifa or steward of the Earth, and clearly reverts to a pristine understanding of Islam when it calls on oil-producing states to phase out greenhouse gas emissions. Similarly, the Rabbinic Letter on the Climate Crisis’ (2015), which also criticizes big oil corporations, reverts to traditional Jewish teaching when it berates humanity for failing to rest the Earth and thus implicitly failing to observe the Sabbath. Both of these documents criticize oil companies or oil-producing states

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for falling short of religious norms. Thus they uphold the relevant parts of the responses presented in the previous paragraph. The inference that Northcott himself would support the above responses is partially confirmed by a passage from his earlier work, A Moral Climate: The Ethics of Global Warming. There he writes: “The excess greenhouse gases produced by industrial capitalism are the fruits of the modern devotion to the gods of secular reason, technological power and monetary accumulation, and the sidelining of traditional understandings of community, justice and the sacred” (Northcott, 2007, p. 14). Here a Christian statement is encountered that in significant ways resembles and can be construed as echoing those of Islam and of Judaism, as just presented.

The Implications of White’s and Passmore’s Stances However, there is a need to delve more deeply into modern claims about religious attitudes to the land and the environment, so as to grasp what is at stake. As was mentioned earlier, White’s article “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis” presents Judaism and Christianity both as anthropocentric and as authorizing the human domination of nature (White 1967). While many actions and much economic behavior of Christians, Jews, and Muslims of recent centuries (responses to climate change not least) may appear to support these interpretations (the letter of the Cornwall Alliance among them), White’s claims that these were the attitudes of the Old Testament, the New Testament, and of medieval Christianity have been widely criticized. John Passmore quite soon rightly rejected White’s account of the Old Testament and of traditional Judaism (Passmore, 1974). Thus anyone who reads Psalm 104, which presents God’s concern and provision for non-human species as well as for humanity, or Chaps. 38–41 of Job, which stress human limitations and the significance of the non-human creation, has to recognize the non-anthropocentric attitudes that underlie much of the Old Testament, and needs to interpret passages about human dominion, such as Genesis 1 and Psalm 8 accordingly. Having exonerated Judaism of these charges, Passmore wrote instead of “GrecoChristian arrogance,” by which he meant the teachings of Paul, and those of Stoicism by which he believed that Paul’s teachings were influenced. But, as Alan Holland has argued, Passmore’s main Roman source, Cicero, may well fail to reflect the emphases of the Greek founders of Stoicism (Holland, 1997), and, as Carmen Velayos Castelo argues, Stoic statements about everything being made for humanity in any case exempted the universe itself (Castelo, 1996). Further, despite some apparently anthropocentric passages, Paul (in Romans 8) appears to include the whole created universe within the scope of redemption, rather as the Old Testament prophets had done. Hence, and despite some problem passages, the charge of Greco-Christian arrogance turns out not to be credible. When the focus shifts to the early church and the church fathers, an approach which Passmore identified in some pagan sources is prone to emerge all-but-explicitly expressed as a Christian stance. This is the approach of stewardship, for which

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humanity is God’s steward or trustee of nature. Clarence J. Glacken adduces several patristic or later writers, from Basil the Great, Ambrose, and Theodoret to Cosmas Indicopleustes, who wrote of the human role in caring for, farming, and adorning the created world (Glacken, 1967, p. 192, 194–6, 298–99, 300), and summarizes the stance of Cosmas as “the most striking early statement of man’s stewardship of nature because he is the earthly representative of the divine” (Glacken, 1967, p. 300). Glacken also earlier represents the stance of the Bible itself as a whole as one of stewardship (Glacken, 1967, p. 168). It is far from fanciful to trace the origins of the Islamic teaching about humanity as God’s khalifa to the Jewish and Christian teachings of the Bible, granted that Islam venerates the Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament), and thus passages like Genesis 1 and Psalm 8. Lynn White was an expert on medieval technology, and composed a fine scholarly book on this subject, full of nuances and qualifications about the attitudes expressed by the medieval introductions of deep ploughing, calendar illustrations, and the use of the stirrup (White, 1962). But in his much more famous paper in Science of 1967, the nuances and qualifications disappeared, and (for example) deep ploughing was made to seem to be a specifically Christian innovation (White, 1967), although the details presented in White’s book showed that it probably originated among pagans in Roman times, and was spread as much by the pagan Vikings as by their Christian contemporaries. These simplifications, in combination with disregard for the text of the Old Testament, allowed of the presentation of Christianity as anthropocentric and as regarding humanity as the would-be master of nature, even though many of the farming practices depicted by Virgil, Pliny and Columella could have been used to portray the ancient Romans in a similar light (Attfield, 2009). White correctly wrote of medieval Christian achievements with regard to clocks and organs, both finding a place in many great medieval cathedrals (White, 1962). This activist tendency would have warranted the interpretation that many medieval western Christians implicitly saw themselves as created co-creators, a theme not developed by White, but foreshadowed by Passmore as present in pre-Christian antiquity and later among the philosophers of the Romantic period (Passmore, 1974, pp. 32–35), and recently made explicit by the theologian Philip Hefner (Hefner, 1993). But it does not bear out White’s representation of Christianity as anthropocentric and as embodying a despotic attitude to nature. No more does it suggest that the despoliation of the Earth’s climate in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through anthropogenic climate change was a natural outcome of longstanding Christian attitudes. White suggests St. Francis as a patron saint of ecologists, regarding him as holding uniquely different attitudes to fellow-creatures from those of mainstream Christianity. But, as Susan Power Bratton has shown, Francis stood in a long line of Christian saints and hermits who showed tenderness towards animals, and whose cult in medieval times must have fostered animal-friendly attitudes, alongside the instrumentalist stance of theologians such as Aquinas (Bratton, 1988). Another prominent thinker of this period whose attitudes developed into a non-anthropocentric stance was the Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides, who in his later life taught that every creature was created for its own sake, and regarded

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animals as falling within the scope of ethics (1135–1204; Kasher, 2002; Alhadeff, 2016). This shows that Judaism as well as Christianity at least sometimes upheld attitudes of community towards fellow-creatures. A contemporary implication of such animal-friendly views is that the interests of animal species should be taken into account when policies concerning climate change are being deliberated and discerned (see Attfield, forthcoming).

The Bearing of Stewardship While Northcott is correct in holding that White ignored such seventeenth-century figures as Bacon, Grotius, Hobbes, and Locke (Northcott, 2013, p. 106), who might have supplied evidence for the domination-oriented approach to nature that he ascribed to Christianity as a whole, his own account of that century appears to ignore the advocacy of stewardship on the part of Sir Matthew Hale (1609–1676), to which Passmore draws attention (Passmore, 1974, pp. 30–31). It is also silent about the explicitly anti-anthropocentric teachings of the influential Christian biologist John Ray (1627–1705), another advocate of humanity’s stewardship of the natural world. In his Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation (1691), Ray blended this approach with one of aesthetic appreciation of the world’s beauty, and with a vitalist philosophy of nature derived from the Cambridge Platonists, Henry More and Ralph Cudworth. Ray’s work and themes were continued in the work of his friend William Derham in his Physico-Theology (1713; Glacken, 1967, pp. 415–423). To his credit, Passmore mentions both the Cambridge Platonists and Ray as firmly opposed to the idea that everything was made for the benefit of humanity (Passmore, 1974, pp. 20–21), and for the most part in opposition to the mechanistic doctrines of René Descartes (1596–1650). Their stance may have been a minority one, at least within the English political establishment of those years, but it was nevertheless influential, particularly within biology (Glacken, 394–95, 415–26). The theme of stewardship has also exercised a long-term influence. Thus in recent times, the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew (successor to the Patriarch Dimitrios who was cited above), who has become known as “the Green Patriarch,” has written of humanity as being “called to be stewards, and reflections of God’s love by example,” and of indigenous peoples throughout the world as being “stewards and guardians” of forests and other vulnerable sectors of the environment (Kureethadam, 2014). Kureethadam is himself a Catholic priest, who (in the same book) applies science and belief in stewardship to many aspects of the environmental crisis, including climate change. There again, the United States Conference of Bishops have advocated “the care and stewardship of creation” among their “Seven Themes of Catholic Social Teaching” (United States Conference of Bishops, 2020). And stewardship is a central theme of the ecumenical British organization Operation Noah, as a basis of their concern about climate change and advocacy of structural change to combat it (Operation Noah, 2012; Hulme, 2016, p. 237). The treatment of stewardship by Jenkins and his fellow-authors is both relevant and at the same time disappointing. They cite the present author as engaging ‘the

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Abrahamic form of stewardship with climate change to develop an account of humanity as “trustees of the planet”’ (which is the title of one of the chapters of Attfield, 2015). ‘Climate change’, they go on to say, ‘exemplifies a situation of expanded human responsibility, in that humans must now take care of the planetary systems on which they depend’. Attfield’s ‘moral anthropology’, they add, ‘seems tailor-made for the Anthropocene’ (a helpful affirmation absent from Attfield, 2015); this affirmation they explicate well as follows: ‘If climate change reveals humanity’s extraordinary Earth-transforming powers, the stewardship paradigm presents believers with strong reasons to acknowledge these powers, to accept responsibility for them, and to exercise them on behalf of God and future generations.’ But disconcertingly they proceed at once to remark that ‘stewardship frameworks are liable to the criticism that they entrench anthropocentric arrogance and legitimate an exploitative ideal of global ecological control’, citing here Primavesi 1991 and Lovelock 2006; and with this remark they move on, apparently abandoning ‘Abrahamic stewardship’ altogether (Jenkins et al. 2–18, 11). It should be acknowledged, however, that they proceed to discuss the kind of nonAbrahamic stewardship endorsed in many aboriginal religions, as expressed in the 2009 Anchorage Declaration, which emerged from a gathering in Alaska of representatives from the Arctic, North America, Asia, the Pacific, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Russia, and which supported such worthy goals as food sovereignty and “a binding emissions reduction target for developed countries” (Indigenous People’s Global Summit on Climate Change, 2009, p. 2). According to Jenkins et al., this “version of stewardship is sharply distinguished from the typical Abrahamic form by shaping responsibility through interdependence and reciprocity with bioregional relations, rather than through accountability to a transcendent God” (Jenkins et al. 2–18, 11). This welcome Declaration adds to the breadth of calls from the world’s religions for strong climate action. Its recognition of human interdependence with the natural world is also to be welcomed Indigenous Peoples Global Summit on Climate Change, 2009, p. 1). But for those who doubt the coherence of responsibility being based on reciprocity with that world (in whole or in part) or with Mother Earth, there are limits to what such an account can deliver. So it is worth returning to consideration of the defensibility of Abrahamic stewardship against the criticisms apparently credited by Jenkins and his fellow-authors. Should the criticism of anthropocentric arrogance be credited? The first response to make is that this is a criticism of all forms of “Abrahamic” stewardship based on characteristics of just some of its forms. For it is true that Jean Calvin held the view that everything in creation has been made for humanity, but went on to hold that people are to use the world around them responsibly, so that no one is deprived of its resources. Non-human animals, he held, have no intrinsic value; but they are not to be mistreated because they are creatures of God, and thus fellow-creatures (Calvin, Institutes [1536] 2001). Similarly, Aquinas held that animals have instrumental value only, but advanced a range of anthropocentric reasons against cruelty towards them (Aquinas, 1964). It should also be granted that Islam is committed to metaphysical anthropocentrism, but holds that the exercise of khalifa involves taking full account of the interests of future generations of humanity (Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change 2015), and is

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free to hold, with Calvin, that non-human animals are, like human beings, creatures of God. At the same time, as has already been noted, several biblical passages, such as Psalm 104, are incompatible with anthropocentrism, and numerous Christians (such as Basil) and Jews (such as Maimonides) have also rejected that stance. Accordingly, an appropriate verdict about the charge of anthropocentric arrogance is that it is at best an overgeneralization, for large numbers of adherents of theistic stewardship are not anthropocentric at all. There again, even when this charge is deployed against adherents of stewardship who really are anthropocentric, the charge of arrogance is out-of-place, in view of the grounds supplied from within this position for the avoidance of cruelty to animals and for the conservation or preservation of the natural environment for the sake of future human generations. Much the same should be said about the much-repeated parallel charge of managerialism (see the essays of Clare Palmer and of James Lovelock in Berry, 2006; Palmer, 2006; Lovelock, 2006b). For this amounts partly to the same overgeneralized accusation about anthropocentrism, and partly to the charge that adherents of stewardship treat natural resources as commodities to be deployed for the benefit of short-term human interests. But this latter charge is misplaced even when targeted at adherents of stewardship who accept anthropocentrism (see the essay of the current author in Berry, 2006). The misplaced nature of the other charge (“legitimating an exploitative ideal of global ecological control”) becomes evident as soon as some of the statements of theistic stewardship are considered. First the statement of the General Synod Board for Social Responsibility of the Church of England needs to be reviewed: We all share and depend on the same world, with all its finite and often non-renewable resources. Christians believe that this world belongs to God by creation, redemption and sustenance, and that he has entrusted it to humankind, made in his image and responsible to him; we are in the position of stewards, tenants, curators, trustees or guardians, whether or not we acknowledge the responsibility. Stewardship implies caring management, not selfish exploitation; it involves a concern for both present and future as well as self, and a recognition that the world we manage has an interest in its own survival and wellbeing independent of its value to us. Good stewardship requires justice, truthfulness, sensitivity, and compassion. It has implications for individuals, organisations, and states. (General Synod Board for Social Responsibility, 1991, p. 2; Attfield, 2015, pp. 49–50)

This statement is clearly opposed to “global ecological control” and to any form of questionable exploitation. It may suffice to cite here one other parallel statement, this time in the form of an Advice adopted by British Quakers: We do not own the world, and its riches are not ours to dispose of at will. Show a loving consideration for all creatures, and seek to maintain the beauty and variety of the world. Work to ensure that our increasing control over nature is used responsibly, with reverence for life. Rejoice in the splendour of God’s continuing creation. (Quaker Faith and Practice, 1.02; Advice 42; Britain Yearly Meeting, 2005)

This Advice is even more explicit. It recognizes an increasing human control over nature, urging readers to exercise this control responsibly (as the stewardship

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standardly does); yet no one could read into it “an exploitative ideal of global ecological control.” While the term “stewardship” may in some other quarters be appropriated as a form of management-speak, as all terms are prone to be, the charges against theistic stewardship of exploitation and support for global domination are groundless. (For an ampler response to Lovelock on this matter, see Attfield, 2006.) Yet the charge of anthropocentrism was recently applied to a wide range of religions that endorse a theistic form of stewardship by J. Baird Callicott. Callicott certainly exempted Daoism and Buddhism, as the above-mentioned Buddhist Climate Change Statement to World Leaders bears out. (Hinduism, as the above Hindu Declaration on Climate Change attests, could also have been exempted.) But according to Callicott, most of the “protean sects” (sic) of the Abrahamic religions are stigmatized as anthropocentric, “metaphorically speaking”: Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical, and Pentecostal Christianity (the author is silent about Orthodox Christianity); Orthodox, Conservative, and Reformed Judaism; and Sunni and Shiite Islam (Callicott, 2013, p. 167). But, while there may be pockets of anthropocentrism among Evangelicals (including possibly the Cornwall Alliance), this list, as has been seen, is altogether inaccurate until it reaches Islam. Callicott proceeds to claim that “the Judeo-Christian stewardship environmental ethic artfully combines metaphysical anthropocentrism with moral non-anthropocentrism,” citing B. Horwood (1991). He proceeds to explain that for this “interpretation of Genesis” the non-human creation has intrinsic value, and God then creates “man” to have “dominion” over it, which, “God later explains” means “to dress and keep” this intrinsically valuable creation. Human beings thus “enjoy a unique metaphysical status, which at once confers on us unique privilege but also unique moral responsibility” (Callicott, 2013, p. 167). But this is not anthropocentrism, not even of a metaphysical kind. Metaphysical anthropocentrism claims that everything was made for the sake of humanity, which the position just elaborated does not do. It does certainly speak of human dominion, but that dominion is interpreted as involving responsibility to care for and protect the non-human creation. In other words, it accepts the distinctive character of human agency and the responsibilities that accompany it. While this view of humanity may itself be designated a metaphysical stance, it is far removed from being an anthropocentric one, even when anthropocentrism is “metaphorically” understood. An attitude of domination has admittedly been present in the industrial capitalism of the early modern and modern periods (see section “Northcott’s Interpretation of Such Statements and Attitudes”), but not even this phenomenon warrants the designation of metaphysical anthropocentrism. Accordingly, religious stewardship emerges as a commendable approach, which, far from being (as such) either anthropocentric or domination-oriented (or “despotic,” in Passmore’s terminology), can and often does support strong action on climate change. But can this also be said of anthropocentric forms of the stewardship stance? This returns the focus of attention to Islam, and to the Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change (2015). This Declaration, concerned as it was about humanity’s role as God’s khalifa on Earth, urged oil-producing states, as has been

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seen, to phase out greenhouse gas emissions. In other words, even this form of anthropocentric stewardship approach is capable of advocating structural change. Further, exponents of this approach, such as Fazlun Khalid, stress the imperative to preserve species and habitats for the sake of all future human generations, and are able to point to several Islamic traditions of a preservationist nature, which are best understood on this basis (Attfield, 2006; Khalid, 2019b). Besides, Al-Hafiz Masri maintains that according to Islamic law the natural elements are the common property of all creatures, and not only of human beings (Masri, 1992, p. 6); this statement comprises a significant departure from (at least) ethical anthropocentrism. It is not claimed here that all Muslims recognize the implications of the role of khalifa of the Earth. When Khalid was speaking in Cardiff recently, he was asked what attitude the governments of oil-exporting Islamic states would take to his proposals for change. His reply was that they would in all probability lock him up (27 March 2019; Khalid, 2019a). Change on the part of these states will take time, as governments gradually take into account the need to invest in green energy in the interests of their countries’ and peoples’ future. Yet it remains important that Islamic voices are being heard stressing the need for change (Khalid, 2019b); for, just as oil companies such as BP are at least notionally already purporting to be altering their direction, so may many of the states of the Middle East when a combination of religious and economic pressures attain sufficient strength.

Concluding Remarks As Michael Northcott remarks, it is crucial that campaigners for climate change mitigation and adaptation should seek structural change, as has just seen to be done by the Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change. Northcott presents an economic argument, which he calls the Jevons paradox, to show that domestic changes on the parts of individual consumers and households make minimal difference. Thus when consumers buy less fuel from non-renewable sources, the market price of such fuel is prone to fall, such that other consumers consume more. What makes a difference is government regulation and planning (Northcott, 2013, 204). This is the reason why (for example) Britain had not used energy fueled by coal for several months (at the original time of writing, July 2020, as opposed to the time of revisions in March 2023). Such governmental action is urgently needed on a larger scale. When the various statements and declarations of religious bodies about climate change are reviewed, far from all prove to embody such a seeking of structural change. The Rabbinic Letter on the Climate Crisis’ (2015) criticizes “big oil,” just as the Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change does, focusing on oil-producing governments. The Buddhist Climate Change Statement to World Leaders focuses on individual spirituality, but also supports governmental action to attain the 1.5-degree ceiling, subsequently adopted by the Paris Conference. The Hindu Declaration on Climate Change likewise calls for national and international action, but its emphasis is on personal service. Such statements need a sharper focus on structural reform if governments such as that of (for example) India are going to take notice.

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The earlier Indigenous People’s Global Summit on Climate Change (2009) advocated more binding emissions reduction targets for developed countries. This was a sagacious call, which could have influenced the national commitments made prior to the Paris Summit of 2015. On the other hand, it did not influence them enough, because, if aggregated, those commitments jointly indicate a rise in carbon emissions of roughly twice the 1.5-degree ceiling needing to be observed if the islands inhabited by some of these indigenous peoples are to escape inundation. Prior to the Glasgow Conference of the Parties (due in 2020 but postponed until 2021) another, stronger statement would have been timely. To turn to the various Christian statements, Pope Francis’s Laudato Si0 advocates care of the poor (like the Cornwall Alliance), but also care of the Earth. This encyclical is capable of both structural and individualist interpretations, as is the statement of the US Catholic bishops, “Seven Themes of Catholic Social Teaching” (2020). Further, more explicit Catholic statements, focused on the Glasgow summit and its aftermath, would be welcome. Much the same applies to the various World Council of Churches messages, although it should be granted that the statements of Operation Noah, such as their Ash Wednesday Declaration of 2012, have been relatively explicit, particularly on reducing humanity’s dependence on fossil fuels. By contrast, the “Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming” of the Cornwall Alliance (2009), through rejecting the vulnerability of planetary systems to anthropogenic forces, abandoned any implications for climate actions in the form of structural change by denying its central presupposition. Here it may be added that the various religions need to recover their traditional values and virtues, if they are to be in a position to support strong climate action. They need to avoid falling captive to the industrial capitalism (or to its counterpart, industrial communism, which generated such long-lasting ecological problems as the shrinking of the Aral Sea in Central Asia). At the same time, they need to make use of modern technology, through vehicles of communication such as round-the-clock news reporting and modern social media, if they are to press their message on national and international decision-makers. As was done in the statement “Embracing Our Common Future” of the Parliament of World Religions (see section “Religious Declarations on Climate Change”) they also need to stress, whether or not on a basis of stewardship or of the role of khalifa, contemporary human duties to future generations and the relevance of respect for all life, and apply these teachings to the need to mitigate climate change, not least through structural change.

References Alhadeff, C. J. (2016). Zazu dreams: Between the scarab and the dung beetle. Eifrig Publishing. Aquinas, T. (1964). Summa Theologiae (60 vols.). Eyre and Spottiswoode, McGraw-Hill. Attfield, R. (2009). Social history, religion and technology: an interdisciplinary investigation into White’s ‘roots’. Environmental Ethics, 31(1), 31–50. Attfield, R. (forthcoming). The ethics of the climate crisis. Polity Press. Attfield, R. (2006). Environmental sensitivity and critiques of stewardship. In R. G. Berry (Ed.), Environmental stewardship: Critical perspectives—Past and present (pp. 76–91). T&T Clark.

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Climate Change, Relational Philosophy, and Ecological Care Bruce Jennings

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ecological Recognition: Solidarity and Care . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Philosophy’s Answer to the Ethical Challenge of Climate Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Toward Recognitive Governance: Care and Solidarity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Care . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Solidarity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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This chapter discusses the notion of “care” as a supporting ethical rationale for policies and efforts to mitigate and adapt to global climate change. A conception of care as paying attention to the moral dignity, standing, and needs of others is presented. It then asks how care, so understood, can contribute to a new understanding of the appropriate relationship between humans and nature. How can ecological care and recognition avoid the pitfalls of a human-centered (anthropocentric) understanding of that relationship and provide instead an understanding based on the symbiosis and interdependence of humanity and the broader web of all life and the planetary systems on which it relies? Philosophical, ethical, and political challenges posed by climate governance and climate action are discussed. Using a relational mode of normative theorizing, the chapter identifies what may be emerging as a new worldview or political morality centering around social practices of right recognition. Two examples of recognitive and relational practices are discussed from the point of view of bridging social ethics and ecological ethics: care and solidarity. B. Jennings (*) Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_35

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Keywords

Care · Citizenship · Climate change · Democracy · Ecological ethics · Social practices · Solidarity · Trusteeship

Introduction One of the most important aspects of the current climate crisis is to repair the world of broken connections, to heal broken relationships between human beings and natural systems, to reconnect and relate not just in any ways, but in ways of right relationship from the standpoint of the flourishing of life on the planet as a whole This chapter discusses the notion of “care” as a concept and as a motivating factor in human action, with particular emphasis on the role of care as a supporting rationale for policies and efforts to mitigate and adapt to global climate change. In order to see how care can relate to climate change, it is useful to distinguish between two quite broad approaches to moral philosophy that are commonly identified (Walker, 1998; Rorty, 1988). Walker calls these the theoretical-juridical and the expressivecollaborative models of morality. Partly because so much of the recent writing on care ethics has been bound up with parallel lines of thinking in feminist philosophy and social theory, care is generally discussed using an expressive-collaborative or relational perspective. That is, care is most often not treated as a principle or virtue to be applied to a practical situation, but rather as a social practice of right recognition and right relationship among human beings and between human and nonhuman forms of life (Held, 2006). Seeing care as a practice of normative recognition is what a relational mode of theorizing in moral philosophy provides. The mainstream view in the literature on care ethics is that care is fundamentally linked to a way of seeing and responding, to recognition and attention, and caring is paying attention to the moral standing, needs, and flourishing of others.

Ecological Recognition: Solidarity and Care The main section of this chapter explores the ways in which this conception of care—“ecological care” as morally right recognition—provides a compelling rationale for a new understanding of the appropriate relationship between humans and nature; not a human-centered (anthropocentric) understanding of that relationship, but an understanding based on interdependence within the web of life on Earth. This section begins with a brief review of philosophical, ethical, and political challenges posed by climate governance and climate action. Next, taking up the relational mode of theorizing in moral philosophy, which focuses on interpretations of lived relational experience, it discusses what may be emerging as a new worldview or political morality centering around social practices of right recognition, such as care and solidarity.

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Practices are patterns of social action that give people standards to meet and norms to follow. Practices mediate our relationships with others in strong and persistent ways. Recognition generally means the ways in which human beings perceive one another and how they position themselves toward one another. Perception and positionality communicate meaning and confer status. I speak of just recognition and right relationship because I mean to use the notions of recognition and relationality in a normative sense not merely a descriptive one. Recognition of membership in the human moral community is antithetical to removal or erasure from it. Built into the idea of recognition is a deep logic of hospitality—embracing difference and inviting inclusion (Ricoeur, 2005). Recognition has to do with a just and morally right perception of what each of us owes to other human beings. The affirmation given in solidarity and the attention paid in caring, for example, attest to the moral standing of others. Such relational practices of recognition avow that concern and respect are due to others as persons of inherent, not simply instrumental, worth. The negation of solidarity is silence in the face of wrongdoing to another; the negation of care is abandonment in the face of another’s isolation and need. Understood in this way, practices of recognition are dynamic and subject to change but nonetheless exhibit a certain endurance and continuity in a society, a culture, and in the personality and self-esteem of individuals. They generate actionguiding reasons and motivations. They affect authority, power, distribution, and exchange, and they can contribute to the re-interpretation of social rules, roles, and relationships, out of which large scale social change emerges. As human beings aspire to be recognized, so they strive to recognize. The overarching theoretical schema here is that practices of right recognition will foster transformations in patterns of social and moral relationality in a society, which in turn will reinforce new modes of intentionality and agency, both at the collective and the individual level. Two examples of this circuit from recognitive practices-to relational patterns-to modes of agency are briefly discussed: care and solidarity. They illustrate how conceptual bridging can occur between social recognition among humans and ecological recognition between humans and nature.

Philosophy’s Answer to the Ethical Challenge of Climate Change Humankind lives in a historical and political moment when philosophical critique prompting and guiding social change is urgently needed. We stand in the midst of what Stephen Gardiner (2013) has aptly called “the perfect moral storm” of climate change and other large-scale anthropogenic changes in the functioning of biological and geo-physical planetary systems. Human economic and political activities— energy generation, fossil fuel extraction and burning, agricultural practices, and deforestation—are deeply implicated in climate change and other Earth system functioning. Human health is merging with ecosystemic health and function, and both are dependent on larger biogeological processes and systems—land use, biodiversity and integrity, water utilization and the hydraulic cycle, and nitrogen and phosphorous loading on regional and planetary scales (IPCC, 2022).

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Can philosophy, especially ontology and moral philosophy, rise to this occasion and make a substantial contribution to the social intelligence of our societies in coping with this perfect storm? I suggest that moral philosophy will not be able to provide guidance for climate action and governance if it merely addresses climate change as one more in a series of problems or dilemmas. However, by using an enriched vocabulary of moral value and normative social theory, we can bring moral philosophy to bear more forthrightly and more robustly in defense of the living world (Jamieson & Di Paola, 2016). And an ecologically and relationally oriented philosophy can help to reconstruct—rather than resolutely deconstruct—a worldview that provides a more ecocentric, interdependent, and holistic appreciation of the human condition and the human good (Connolly, 2017; Latour, 2004). To be sure, this prospect poses a serious anomaly to reductionistic and mechanistic ways of affording (wrong) recognition to nature and to its moral standing in relationship to human beings. It also radically challenges many of the political economic imperatives of postindustrial capitalism and neoliberal global arrangements that now dominate over supposedly sovereign nation states. Simply put, the ideas and institutions upon which our current capability to respond collectively to climate change rests are out of step with the natural realities and threats we are discovering. Our collective capability to take climate stabilizing action is in question (Schmidt et al., 2016). Indeed, as Earth system scientist, Johan Rockström, has said: “We need a mind-shift to reconnect people with nature, societies with the biosphere, the human world with Earth” (Rockström & Klum, 2015: 21). If a mind-shift is needed as a precondition for policy and action shifts, then it poses both a philosophical challenge and a practical imperative. The prospect of a mind shift on climate action and human ethical responsibility raises anew the need to think through the relationship between philosophical theorizing and a normative worldview or a “political morality,” a term I borrow from the legal and political philosopher Ronald Dworkin (2011). A political morality is a discourse that articulates what the ends and means of governance should be, what constitutes a good social order to strive toward, and how power should be used through regulation of social, economic, and personal conduct. A political morality underlies both governance and citizen action (in a democracy) on the collective, institutional level and private life-style patterns and decisions on the personal level. A new political morality is needed to clarify how and why a new page must be turned in the long story of relationships between humans and nature; and that the planet Earth won’t tolerate business as usual much longer without deleterious consequences. This means that one of the most important aspects of the current climate crisis is to repair a world of broken connections, to heal broken relationships between human beings and natural systems, to reconnect and relate not just in any ways, but in ways of right relationship from the standpoint of the flourishing of life on the planet as a whole (Brown & Garver, 2009). A normative perspective of right recognition between human beings and nature is just as fundamental philosophically and morally, as right recognition and relationality among humans. My discussion tacks back and forth between those two relational domains. I begin by articulating a pattern of moral recognition and relationality that applies to human interaction and

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interdependency. Then I explore some of the modifications or caveats pertinent to the application of these normative visions to human to nonhuman interaction. Climate change in all of its ramifications, from the planetary to the watershed and landscape level, is the primary context and setting for this extension of traditional anthropocentric moral discourse. To put this point in a slightly different way, from a philosophical perspective the central question posed by climate change—and the central response of climate action and governance in the years ahead—turns on the proper account of “normativity.” In philosophical usage, this term has to do with what warrants us in conferring responsibility on human beings—through language, social sanction, psychological motivation, and political power and legal authority—for their conduct (Korsgaard, 1996). Practices of right recognition and right relationality, such as solidarity and care provide, if not the ultimate answer, at least a fecund way of construing what the warrant of accountability and responsibility is. To be human is to be answerable and answering; it is to be trusted, entrusted, and oriented toward what is trust worthy (Brandom, 2019; Honneth, 2014). To underscore the inclusion of nonhuman life in a normative world, we should speak of ecological solidarity, ecological care, and ecological citizenship. As the Covid-19 pandemic has tragically reminded us, when attempting to mitigate disease and social disruption, governance has limited recourse to power and coercion per se, but needs to rely on persuasion, trust, and an ethos of legitimate authority, as well as scientific information. And for the last 20 years, at least, we have been reminded of the same thing in the attempts to mitigate global warming and climate change through environmental governance and social movements for climate action. When I teach courses on climate change and public health, initially many of my students believe that both climate governance and health governance proceed sequentially: experts first compile scientific information and infer from that evidence appropriate measures to be taken, then public health or climate policy analysts inform and guide policymakers and the citizenry. Finally, scientists sit back and watch while their findings are trusted; rational—indeed ethically obligatory— steps are taken; and their recommendations are followed. This view of how science and public policy should work together is both widespread and naive. Empirical scientific research, evidence, and findings alone are not sufficient for either public health or climate governance. They must be supplemented by social and cultural normativity; by a new sense of the true weight and responsibility that accompany the practical assignment the Earth has given to humanity. Much of what climate science and Earth system science can tell us concerns future disruptions we can reasonably forecast without yet knowing the precise form they will take or the extent of their consequences. When societies are sensitized to such prolonged uncertainty and risk, they respond with fear and a narrowing of intellectual and emotional attention (Beck, 1992; Rosa, 2015). Psychologically, wish-fulfillment tends to displace a resolve to face up to the mutuality of hardship. People newly faced with the precarity of future expectations and the loss of attachments to habitual ways of life tighten their grip on them, no matter how objectively unsustainable, and turn toward blaming the other, the victims, rather than extending empathy and solidarity toward them (Weintrobe, 2021).

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Is there a path beyond the present neoliberal governance that uses the risk aversion, fear, and precarity keenly felt today—all largely created by the global economic system—as reasons and motivational appeals to reinforce the legitimacy and power of that very neoliberal political economy? I believe there is, as does psychoanalyst Sally Weintrobe (2021, 9–18; 83–99), who seeks it in the caring dimension of the human psyche. For my part, I would depict that path, or at least one plausible philosophical contribution to it, in the following way. Climate action and governance may be advanced by three cognitive and affective transformations. The first transformation is to reorient our predominant cultural understandings of the human place in the natural world. This is both a scientific and a philosophical undertaking. Second, it is essential to restructure the predominant institutional and structural economic system of neoliberal global capitalism that drives so much of the human activity behind climate change (Klein, 2014; Malm & the Zetkin Collective, 2021). Third, it is necessary to reconceive our value priorities away from consumption and competitive individualism and toward an enriched sociality and mutuality. The values of possessive individualism are unsustainable because they depend for their viability and appeal on a fossil carbon economy; the recognitive and relational values of care, solidarity, and common cause can prosper in a future based on renewable energy and on the energy of renewal (Banting & Kymlicka, 2017a; Brown, 2015). The marshaled intelligence of humankind—represented by four decades of concerted international scientific study—provides compelling prudential reasons why further delay in drastically reducing atmospheric carbon (through both reducing emissions and enhancing sequestration in forests and other natural sinks) is irresponsible. Further delay risks triggering long-term lag effects that are much more severe than previously recognized. Our present course will blow past a prudent 1.5  C rise in global temperature and head us toward between 2  C and 4  C rise by the end of this century. That is between a world of merely massive destruction and one of devastation (Wallace-Wells, 2020). But if we are fundamentally to alter our conduct and redirect our institutions, what substantive reasons of inherent value will be required? The challenge of climate change is such that philosophy will have to alter fundamentally its discourse and broaden its moral horizons if it is to provide an account of normativity appropriate for a climate changed world. The pursuit of this goal will be advanced, I believe, by adopting a relational and recognitive perspective in moral and political philosophy, as more fully specified and described below (O’Neill, 2021). My effort to discover the application of recognitive ethics to climate change will be to show the ease and fluidity with which nonhuman species and systems can be drawn into the basic normative grid that a political morality based on practices of right recognition and right relationality establishes. Indeed, an anthropocentric ethic and an ecocentric ethic are converging. The question of how nonhuman beings can be said to have moral considerability and standing as interdependent members of a political and moral community of dignity and respect, care and concern, is not fundamentally different from the question of why future generations (human beings not yet born) should have the same membership status in regard to current governance and large scale activities that affect Earth systems functioning, and hence predetermine the life of future members and symbionts, both human and nonhuman.

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Fundamentally, the reason philosophical work is pertinent to the climate crisis is that practices of right recognition and relationality provide the grounding of moral meaning, commitment, and motivation in the human community. In turn, that commitment and motivation are prerequisites for effective climate mitigation, adaptation, and governance. Thus the route from philosophical normativity to social and behavioral change in practice is indirect. It is mediated by practices of recognition and relationality. To see how that mediation might work, something more needs to be said to center the epistemological and methodological dimensions of relational theorizing in moral and political philosophy. Then we can turn to the link between climate change and the recognitional practices themselves. A relational mode of understanding the right and the good—the norms or “shoulds” of human life—does not attempt to derive action judgments from universal abstract principles, but rather explores the terrain of interdependent life conducted within and through networks of relationships and practices. Relational ethics and what I am calling a political morality aims to prescribe and specify the substantive content of practices. In relational theorizing, the aim of moral inquiry is not to establish impartial and transcendent rules to be obeyed by humans insofar as they are rational. The aim is to guide relational beings toward systemic conditions and developmental potentials for flourishing life, human, and nonhuman alike. Moral practices do not repress natural capabilities, they liberate them. And nonhuman beings are not excluded from the moral point of view but are welcomed into it, so they too can flourish in their own species-specific ways. Relational theorizing is concerned with structures of meaning and power that shape the self-understandings, reasons for action, and emotional sensibilities of human beings in social and political life. Social structures of power and cultural structures of meaning can constitute individual self-identity and agency, and purposive and evaluative human agency can constitute and reshape those structures in turn (Code, 2006; Nussbaum, 2011). Society and culture are viewed neither as ontologically separate from, nor superordinate to, individuals and groups who compose them (Gergen, 2009; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). It is important to note that the explanations embraced by relational theorizing need not entail determinism or reductionism, much less objectification. Instead, the actualized capabilities in question themselves are seen as constitutive features of moral standing, agency, and individuated self-realization within the broad behavioral repertoires of various types of species being. It is always in and through relational interdependent action that the categories of ethical discourse come to life and become concrete so that virtues of character are developed, rights are respected, duties fulfilled, and beneficial collective consequences are pursued and obtained (Nedelsky, 2011).

Toward Recognitive Governance: Care and Solidarity As I use the term here, ecological or climate “governance” is not limited to the official activities of government alone. Governance in the broad sense is an interlocking system of collective action steering mechanisms ideally guided by impartial rules of law and comprised of the administrative and representative

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political institutions of government, economic and social institutions, and cultural systems of norms, meanings, and rules. In a democracy, the steering of these systems of collective action is ultimately subject to judgments concerning the justice and legitimacy of current and proposed future policies by a discursive participatory citizenry. This citizenry continually engages in a process of pluralistic debate refereed by reason and the persuasive force of the better argument. Such participatory dialogue is often referred to as the civic or “public sphere” of society. It is a place of norms and ideals—a declarative discourse of what is, and what should be, the case; and a subjunctive discourse of what could be the case (Habermas, 1996). Discourse within the public sphere signals the normative will of the democratic citizenry to the steering institutions of governance. At the core of the public sphere is a political morality of intentional action motivated by reasoned understanding and moral imagination. Political moralities have histories. Older political moralities are altered by incremental changes or are more suddenly transformed by logically incompatible values. The political morality on the wane today is largely confined to the historical tenets of the anthropocentric freedom of global carbon capitalism and possessive individualism. New political moralities on the rise can have different focal points of attention and compass points of direction. Those supporting them are looking for answers to questions that the prevailing morality cannot easily answer. They are trying to develop new and revised theoretical frameworks that have a better fit with today’s world. For example, in current discussions of equality and racial discrimination, the root cause of the injustice has moved from the psychological attitudes of individuals to historical and structural conditions that have been in place for several generations. From that perspective, opening prospects of greater accomplishment and economic parity to those racially discriminated against will require structural and institutional change in addition to changing psychological attitudes and cultural mores (Savoy, 2015; Rothstein, 2017). As noted earlier, the primary function of a political morality is to assess the performance of the steering mechanisms of a society in light of critical moral norms and ideals, such as equal concern and respect, nondomination, nonobjectivation, and nonabandonment. Specifically today a successor political morality needs to oversee and tutor a form of democratic governance suited for a less human-centered and more ecologically oriented world. Ironically, this will be a climate changed world with actual ecosystems far more degraded and less resilient than they are today. And yet, most likely, it will be in such an ecologically diminished world that we will be guided by the attentiveness of recognitional practices of ecological care. Plenitude, resilience, integrity, and beauty will all be there to be attended to (Jennings, 2016). Social and ecological care will thus not only have different objects of concern, but also different normative contents than they had in the twentieth century. Such a political morality should provide a new conceptual vocabulary in which old words, such as liberty, rights, property, and happiness, can take on new meanings. A relational political morality opposes the belief that politics and morality are inherently individualistic and transactional. It offers a new magnetic pole for the ethical compass of ecological governance. Likewise, the notion of practices of recognition covers a wide range of moral cognition, emotion, and interdependency.

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Below I highlight care and solidarity. But the category of practices of right recognition leading to practices of right relationality is a broad one. Other such practices involve concepts such as atonement, community, empathy, belonging, loyalty, reconciliation, membership, mutuality, friendship, and kinship.

Care Care is a normative conception that has been the focus of theoretical and philosophical study for centuries in virtually all major world cultures and religions. One ancient and classical example is the play Antigone by the Greek playwright Sophocles written in about 441 BCE. It involves the struggle between the claims of political obedience and the claims of familial responsibility, in this case a sister’s familial obligation to perform burial rites for her dead brother when the law of the city-state has condemned his corpse to remain unburied. The sister, Antigone, must choose between her private duty to provide the care of burial and other rituals of honoring the dead and her public duty to forgo such care in obedience to the justice of the law. Here the claims of the city (polis) meet those of the family (oikos), but also the claims of the dead clash with those of the living, and the relationship between nature and culture must be reconciled with the relationship between past and future. Today in the context of debates concerning climate change, we see tragic conflicts and choices not unlike those dramatized by Sophocles. Many climate actions and ecological arguments appeal strongly to the duties of care, protection, and flourishing for today’s children and for future generations of human beings, as well as to the duties of care for nonhuman life and natural systems. Care as a moral and political concept comes into conflict with countervailing political, legal, and economic factors that impede timely and effective measures to mitigate and adapt to the changes now being observed in planetary biophysical systems. In addition to being a normative concept used in political and moral debate, care has a clear psychological dimension. Care is a duty in the mind, a cognitive commitment; it is also a desire of the heart, an affective contentment (Kittay, 1999). Commitment and contentment—righteousness and happiness (combined in the Greek term eudaimonia, which connotes a life being well lived)—are the twin engines of moral agency and conduct in virtually all societies. An important question then is how does this multifaceted capability called care get cultivated and nurtured, especially during childhood and adolescence, but ultimately throughout life (Tronto, 1994). The capacity to care, and the right to be cared for, are central to living the good life. In any society, the giving of care to an aging generation in need, say during the last 20 years of their lives, begins with the cultivation of the emotional capability to provide care to others within the younger generation during the first 20 years of their lives (Kittay, 1999). The consideration of care as a normative concept—a right and an obligation—and a consideration of care as a developmental psychosocial capability come full circle and join hands in the dynamics of the practices of care and

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related notions such as solidarity and citizenship. Caring capability is essential to a functioning, interdependent and intergenerational society. It is essential to motivate political belief, support, and activity in the public realm of a democratic society in the midst of climate change. This synthesis or symbiosis is what provides care with its normative force in practical reasoning when it is activated in a recognitive social practice and a web of other practices of recognition (Tronto, 2013). One can imagine effective climate action to stave off disastrous climate change and global warming being motivated on the basis of individual self-interest alone. A society of people devoid of care might be able to achieve justice—or at least effective governance—if they were intelligently prudent and had will, time, and means. But as the doomsday clock of climate is already nearing midnight, it seems less and less likely that enlightened self-interest alone, however well-funded and technologized, will suffice. We shall need emotional as well as intellectual intelligence in the time to come. The recognitional practices of care offer a template of that dual capability and maturity. Effective climate action politics and governance, and the power of evolutionary and familial transmitted capability to care are joined at the hip. The following insight by eco-theologian Michael Northcott provides a striking illustration of the template of cognitive and emotional relationality that care provides. He does this in reference to love: We learn that we are loved, not through rational study of universal truths, but through particular, partial relationships of love, care, and reciprocity which we experience at significant moments in our lives. And just as we cannot love humanity in general without first experiencing the love of particular persons, and returning that love, so we cannot love nature as a whole, in abstraction from particular places or communities of species which we inhabit (Northcott, 2000: 77).

Love and care are not the same thing, of course. Nonetheless, the experience of love Northcott describes here can prompt us to be attentive to right recognition more generally. We cannot be responsible in the face of abstractions such as humanity as such or nature as a whole. The trajectory from knowing that you are cared for and knowing how to care for others requires encounters with particularity. The trajectory of knowing that you are recognized and affirmed as a person with moral standing and knowing how to rightly recognize others in solidaristic affirmation also must be thought of generally because these are universal norms, not playthings for us to confer or withhold, as we will. Nonetheless, it is through concrete encounters that we learn to respect and fulfill general norms in our lives together. An ecological political morality is about moral standing and on being morally “considerable,” as philosopher Kenneth Goodpaster (1978) put it. He noted that identifying and assessing moral considerability requires both moral imagination and concrete encounter. Like solidarity, care involves the recognition and affirmation of the standing of others, especially those whose standing is being denied, ignored, or violated. Moral standing and being morally considerable are not only legal statuses. They are enactive practices. They come into being through the ways in which people treat one another, which in turn affects each person’s freedom or scope of agency.

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Conceptually and attitudinally, practices of care, like all practices of right recognition, shift away from individualism and independence toward mutuality and interdependence. This point can be pushed one step further. Something distinctive about recognitive practices of care is their posture of directed attention and attentiveness. In other words, paying or giving attention to another and paying heed to another’s needs, above all the need for moral consideration and presence (fidelity and nonabandonment). Caring is the promise not to forsake. To care is to be entrusted with providing presence and fidelity at a time when they are vitally important to another. When attention is paid, people become visible to one another as subjects of acknowledgment and respect. Practices of care shift away from the individualism of self-reliance to an individuality validated by reliance on others (Carlson, 2010). What is distinctive about the concept of care compared with such concepts as justice, rights, interests, and efficiency (each of which have been applied to both social ethics and to ecological ethics in various ways) is that care shifts the perspective and the starting point of ethical thinking. It is not premised on respect for autonomous, independent selves. It is premised on relationships born out of vulnerability, insufficiency, need, and interdependence (Kleinman, 2019; Carel, 2016). Consider then the move from social care to ecological care. What is morally considerable in any one person—her rights, her dignity, her claim to be treated with equal respect—inherently derives from the developmental relationships of care and nurture in that person’s life. If this fact conveys ethical value and significance on the chain of intergenerational human care that has been provided for socially, will it not also convey ethical value and significance on all the supporting conditions that natural ecosystems and other species provided to those human agents of mothering, parenting, and care? My parents could not have taken care of me if the ecosystem in which they lived had not fed, provisioned, and taken care of them. Put more passively, if you prefer, my parents could not have lived at all, much less cared for their child, but for the plenitude of the natural environment around them. What forms of moral agency should we be looking for in the ongoing practices of ecological care? And is care a matter of private life and morality only, or does it also have a place in public life? Care is often understood as a private virtue—tending to the needs and well-being of children or elderly, ailing parents, for example. Since historically, in most cultures, much of the private and personal care work has been performed by women and girls, this tendency to equate care with the private realm of the family and the household has gone more or less unquestioned. Many feminist philosophers are suspicious of care theory because they feel it pulls women back into the private, domestic realm (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). Care begins with the particulars of society, culture, and psychology—its starting point is the latent possibilities of a given place at a given time and with ongoing forms of meaningful agency pressing against structures of power. It builds on senses of historical memory and tradition, and it feeds on the gratitude felt when one recognizes the service and contributions that others have made to one’s way of life. Care begins with the recognition of symbiotic interdependence and then intervenes in—interrupts—an ongoing form of life in order to be present to the need,

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vulnerability, and suffering it contains, finally winning through to a better kind of species activity and life well-lived. Care tends to move our ethical attention away from the generic, abstract, and universal toward practical and concrete social, historical, or personal situations. It inherently leads us to view our own lives and agency as bound together with the rights, well-being, health, and dignity of others here and now. Nonetheless, a moral discourse that takes ecological care seriously does make a fateful wager. It bets that the ontological range of human care and caring can expand and be influenced to do so by critical reasoning and moral imagination. It gambles that an ecological political morality can take hold in the postfossil carbon world. If so, the recognitive practice of care can link social care and ecological care, and encompass not only the human realm, but the entire biosphere and ecosphere. It can arise developmentally out of an engagement with the vocation of “repairing,” as care theorist Joan Tronto (1994) puts it, a needful, vulnerable, and diverse living world. In other words, ecological care can grow in the direction of ecological citizenship. Like long expanses of railroad tracks on the prairie, the democratic polis and the steady state household converge ahead. I hope this is not an optical illusion. To be an ecological democratic citizen is to be entrusted with sustaining the fabric of the many practices of right recognition and right relationship in a society. Thanks to climate change, the relationship of humans and nature is an absolutely essential component of that fabric now, which we can no longer take for granted or afford to ignore out of moral blindness.

Solidarity The recognitive practices of care and solidarity certainly have much in common. They are both oriented toward a normative response to wrongdoing against others of all kinds. Wrong recognition, moral misprision one might say, contributes to the social invisibility of those who are hurt, ill, at peril of violence, and those who are being treated with such indifferent or malicious inequality that they are denied moral standing and membership in communities of mutual respect, concern, and cooperation. This denigrates their agency and voice, blocking social and political participation to the extent that they are unlikely to be able to extricate themselves from this unjust and damaged position through their own efforts alone. Care and solidarity are two parallel forms of mutuality and rescue for excluded others. One way to characterize the difference between care and solidarity is to say that the affirmation of solidarity extends by definition to those for whom moral standing can be reclaimed and restored with the help of others. The attention to the other paid by care includes such circumstances, but in addition it pertains to those with very little agency or standing remaining in their lives. The dying whose agency is fading; the newly born whose agency is only beginning and who needs the protection and support of care to allow the developmental process of maturation to take place. From this point of view, care is ontogenetically primary, because the receipt and assistance of care early in life makes possible the capacity to provide solidaristic recognition

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and affirmation to others later in life (Gopnik, 2009). Solidarity is called for in the presence of injustice; care is called for in the presence of all kinds of vulnerabilities. Perhaps something like empathy forms a developmental psychological bridge between the two. Empathy takes root in care, then blossoms in the social ecology of the many practices and instances of solidarity in one’s life. To avoid or hide from solidaristic opportunities is to hobble the humanity in oneself. Consider the following observation by political theorists Keith Banting and Will Kymlicka. They define solidarity as inclusive solidarity and articulate its moral importance: “In the contemporary context of increasingly diverse societies.. . solidarity.. .transcends ethno-religious differences, operates at a societal scale, and has civic, democratic, and redistributive dimensions. Such an inclusive solidarity, we contend, is needed to sustain just institutions.” (Banting & Kymlicka, 2017a: 10). If inclusive solidarity is necessary to sustain just institutions, then, one might add, sustaining just institutions is key to mitigating climate change. Here we have a clear example of the mediation of recognitive practices between human and ecological ethics. In addition, from an agency perspective, solidarity involves a public recognition of the ethical standing (significance, entitlement, considerability) of others in/by the civic polity and the moral community. Solidarity entails affirmation through standing up for the unjustly treated (and standing up against those committing the injustice). Beyond that, standing up with and standing in as the unjustly treated gives voice to a compelling demand that exploitative relationality be displaced by just relationality (Jennings & Dawson, 2015; Jennings, 2018). Even at the individual level, even if solidarity aids only one person, it evokes the freedom from oppression as a common good, a state of mutual well-being among all members of the association. If that freedom is denied to some physically and materially, it is thereby denied to all morally and civically. This is the point of tangency between solidarity and the common good. Another mediation, then, takes us from social solidarity to ecological solidarity. It is through the historical development of concepts such as rights, standing, agency, and moral considerability practiced in the human context that it has been possible in recent decades to bring some nonhuman individuals and species into the boundaries of the moral community, with ethical standing extended to them on the basis of the wrong of humanly inflicted pain and suffering and on the basis of a notion of basic rights to fulfilling species-typical needs that often are in conflict with human interests and conduct. In sum, solidarity is an orientation, a relational stance and posture, centered around mutual acceptance, cooperation, and mutual support in time of need. One simply plans and lives one’s life differently in a society with a strong ethos of solidarity than one does in a society in which that ethos is lacking. And the relationality between human and nonhuman life also changes when we stop splitting hairs between human and nonhuman flourishing. The presence or absence of an ethos of solidarity affects not only what one does do but also what one can do. Solidarity affects the set of doors to choose from as well as the ability to walk through the one chosen. Does not that example have an analogy in the construction of naturalistic land bridges over roadways to accommodate migrating species? Or

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the assisted relocation of species in population decline due to climate change related loss of normal habitat in one area? It is true that ecological solidarity usually requires some measure of deliberate human assistance; in various legal and regulatory settings human surrogates are needed to represent the interests of other species or ecosystems. But that does not reduce the meaningful moral standing within an interdependent community of living beings that is being enacted in these situations. Many people with chronic impairments require the assistance of other humans, and sometimes companion animals give them care as well as companionship. Yet, that per se does not negate the rights, dignity, or recognition of the human individual. Why should needing a spokesperson and advocate in a legal proceeding to protect the interests of a forest or a landscape do so? Having moral considerability does not entail that one is cognitively aware of that fact. A related and perhaps even more ethically fundamental point for the bridge between social and ecological solidarity is that solidarity entails a recognition and acceptance of membership in a web of obligations to affirm, attend to, and deal fairly with others, in the expectation that they will fulfill their own obligations of membership toward you in the same way. This is the core norm and stance of the practice of solidarity, individually and collectively. However, the failure or inability of others to live up to their obligations toward you does not cancel your obligations of solidarity with them. The question solidarity asks is “How should we live?” not “What’s in it for me?” Both ethical analysis and research in sociology and political science indicate that self-interested participation in solidaristic practices is not the driving force of those practices (Banting & Kymlicka, 2017b; Spade, 2020; Solnit, 2009; MacFarquhar, 2015). Solidarity is much more than a mutual protection arrangement. Solidarity has both the push of commitment (obligation) and the pull of contentment (satisfaction and self-esteem). The upshot is that solidarity moves beyond human social individualism and toward eco-relationality. In solidarity, we recognize that individual well-being does not exist in a state of isolation but in an ecology of common flourishing that can neither be achieved nor fully enjoyed by individuals acting on their own. Such is the promise of a new political morality taking hold. This direction of moral and political movement is more important today perhaps than it has ever been as we watch time running out to take effective measures to lessen the impact of climate change. Solidarity inherently leads us to view our own lives and agency as bound together with the rights, well-being, health, and dignity of others here and now, and in the future. Again, this is one of the ways recognitive practices and values can prompt climate action and morally conscientious political support for policies of economic and technological change.

Conclusion The time has come to turn from specific practices of recognition to the entire nexus or ensemble of multiple practices of recognition in a given culture and society. Discussions of the particular phenomenological experience (the stance and posture)

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of each distinct practice of recognition can promote a kind of tunnel vision. It is important to bear in mind that showing care for—or solidarity with—other creatures are not isolated practices but are conducted within a web of other recognitions, each revealing but one facet of the multifaceted political and moral life of civic membership and mutuality. In part, this will involve developing new values, new institutions, and new ways of living creatively, constructively, justly, and humanely. Adaptive governance and planning are fundamentally about nurturing this type of civic and moral learning. The challenge with such civic and moral learning is that many traditional values, including those discussed in this chapter, will need to be reaffirmed and transformed at the same time, and indeed, this dialectical process of continuity within transformation will take place in the midst of turmoil and conflict on a wide scale. The two most significant questions facing the world as climate change accelerates and becomes more destabilizing to planetary systems are: first, how to govern political desperation and properly channel the power it generates; and second, how to accommodate and navigate the challenge of normative continuity amid biophysical and social-institutional transformation. In this chapter, I offer only a fragment of the broken crystal of our future: the partial answer of care, solidarity, and consequent responsibility on behalf of a world much larger than ourselves.

Cross-References ▶ Climate Change and Democracy ▶ Climate Change and the Environmental Humanities ▶ Climate Change and Virtue Ethics ▶ Climate Change Sociology: Perspectives and Dilemmas

References Banting, K., & Kymlicka, W. (2017a). Introduction. In K. Banting & W. Kymlicka (Eds.), The strains of commitment: The political sources of solidarity in diverse societies. Oxford University Press. Banting, K., & Kymlicka, W. (Eds.). (2017b). The strains of commitment: The political sources of solidarity in diverse societies. Oxford University Press. Beck, U. (1992). Risk society: Towards a new modernity. Sage Publications. Brandom, R. B. (2019). A spirit of trust: A reading of Hegel’s phenomenology. Harvard University Press. Brown, P. G., & Garver, G. (2009). Right relationship: Building a whole earth economy. BerrettKoehler Publishers. Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism’s stealth revolution. Zone Books. Carel, H. (2016). Phenomenology of illness. Oxford University Press. Carlson, L. (2010). The faces of intellectual disability: Philosophical reflections. Indiana University Press. Code, L. (2006). Ecological thinking: The politics of epistemic location. Oxford University Press. Connolly, W. E. (2017). Facing the planetary: Entangled humanism and the politics of swarming. Duke University Press.

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Dworkin, R. (2011). Justice for hedgehogs. Harvard University Press. Gardiner, S. M. (2013). A perfect moral storm: The ethical tragedy of climate change. Oxford University Press. Gergen, K. J. (2009). Relational being: Beyond self and community. Oxford University Press. Goodpaster, K. (1978). On being morally considerable. Journal of Philosophy, 75(6), 308–325. Gopnik, A. (2009). The philosophical baby: What children’s minds tell us about truth, love, and the meaning of life. Picador. Habermas, J. (1996). Between facts and norms: Contributions to a discourse theory of law and democracy. MIT Press. Held, V. (2006). The ethics of care: Personal, political and global. Oxford University Press. Honneth, A. (2014). Freedom’s right: The social foundations of democratic life. Columbia University Press. IPCC. (2022). Climate change 2022: Impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability. In H.-O. Pörtner, D. C. Roberts, M. Tignor, et al. (Eds.), Contribution of working group II to the sixth assessment report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change. Cambridge University Press. Jamieson, D., & Di Paola, M. (2016). Political theory for the anthropocene. In D. Held & P. Maffetonne (Eds.), Global political theory (pp. 254–280). Polity Press. Jennings, B. (2016). Ecological governance: Toward a new social contract with the earth. West Virginia University Press. Jennings, B. (2018). Solidarity and care as relational practices. Bioethics, 32, 553–561. https://doi. org/10.1111/bioe.12510 Jennings, B., & Dawson, A. (2015). Solidarity in the moral imagination of bioethics. Hastings Center Report, 45, 31–38. Kittay, E. F. (1999). Love’s labor: Essays on women, equality and dependency. Routledge. Klein, N. (2014). This changes everything: Capitalism versus the climate. Simon and Schuster. Kleinman, A. (2019). The soul of care: The moral education of a husband and a doctor. Viking. Korsgaard, C. M. (1996). The sources of normativity. Cambridge University Press. Latour, B. (2004). Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern. Critical Inquiry, 30(Winter), 225. MacFarquhar, L. (2015). Strangers drowning: Impossible idealism, drastic choices, and the urge to help. Penguin Books. Malm, A., & the Zetkin Collective. (2021). White skin, black fuel: On the danger of fossil fascism. Verso. Nedelsky, J. (2011). Law’s relations: A relational theory of self, autonomy, and law. Oxford University Press. Northcott, M. S. (2000). From environmental utopianism to parochial ecology: Communities of place and the politics of sustainability. Ecotheology: Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, 8(5). https://doi.org/10.1558/ecotheology.v5i1.1796 Nussbaum, M. C. (2011). Creating capabilities: The human development approach. Harvard University Press. O’Neill, W. R. (2021). Reimagining human rights: Religion and the common good. Georgetown University Press. Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017). Matters of care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds. University of Minnesota Press. Ricoeur, P. (2005). The course of recognition. Harvard University Press. Rockström, J., & Klum, M. (2015). Big world, small planet: Abundance within planetary boundaries (p. 21). Yale University Press. Rorty, A. O. (1988). Mind in action (pp. 271–298). Beacon Press. Rosa, H. (2015). Social acceleration: A new theory of modernity. Columbia University Press. Rothstein, R. (2017). The color of law: A forgotten history of how our government segregated America. Liveright Publishing. Savoy, L. (2015). Trace: Memory, history, race, and the American landscape. Counterpoint.

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Schmidt, J. J., Brown, P. G., & Orr, C. J. (2016). Ethics in the anthropocene: A research agenda. The Anthropocene Review, 3(3), 188–200. Solnit, R. (2009). A paradise built in hell: The extraordinary communities that arise in a disaster. Viking. Spade, D. (2020). Mutual aid: Building solidarity during this crisis (and the next). Verso. Tronto, J. (1994). Moral boundaries: A political argument for an ethic of care. Routledge. Tronto, J. (2013). Caring democracy: Markets, equity, and justice. New York University Press. Walker, M. U. (1998). Moral understandings (pp. 7–14). Routledge. Wallace-Wells, D. (2020). The uninhabitable earth: Life after warming. Tim Duggan Books. Weintrobe, S. (2021). Psychological roots of the climate crisis: Neoliberal exceptionalism and the culture of uncare. Bloomsbury Academic.

Philosophical Perspectives on Climate Anxiety Petr Vaškovic

Contents Introduction: Climate Emotions and Climate Anxiety . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Original Theories and Definitions of Climate Anxiety . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Earth Emotions and Climate Anxiety . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Apocalyptic Climate Anxiety . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Two Waves of Climate Anxiety . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Climate Anxiety and Modern Forms of Animism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Interconnectedness of Climate Anxiety and Other Climate Emotions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Taxonomical Approach to Climate Emotions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Christian Existential Perspectives on Climate Anxiety . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Climate Anxiety Through the Lens of Tillich’s Christian Existentialism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Climate Anxiety Through the Lens of Kierkegaard’s Proto-existentialist Philosophy . . . . . Phenomenological Perspectives on Climate Anxiety . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Climate Anxiety and the Lifeworld . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Climate Anxiety as a Threat to the Place of Safety . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion and a Provisional Philosophical Definition of Climate Anxiety . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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The aim of this chapter is to examine the relevant philosophical accounts of climate anxiety and to provide a comprehensive overview of the existing literature on the subject. This will be done by outlining the three main philosophical approaches to climate anxiety. First will be considered the scholars who have put forward their own original theories or definitions of climate anxiety. These are philosophers such as Albrecht, who has developed an entirely new classificatory scheme of Earth-related emotions, or scholars like Smith, or McGrath, who look at climate anxiety through a cultural-historical lens. The second group consists of authors who analyze climate anxiety through the interpretive framework of Christian existential philosophy, mostly working with Tillich’s definition of P. Vaškovic (*) Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_144

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anxiety. However, some of them also borrow concepts from other existential thinkers, most notably from Kierkegaard. The final, third group is made up of scholars who take a phenomenological approach to analyzing climate anxiety, using the methodological framework provided by philosophers such as Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre. After outlining these three main philosophical approaches to climate anxiety, the chapter offers a brief discussion of the findings, which is followed by a definition of climate anxiety that is derived from these findings and from the two comprehensive taxonomies of climate emotions developed by Landmann and Pihkala. Keywords

Climate anxiety · Eco-anxiety · Climate emotions · Christian existential philosophy · Phenomenology · Heidegger · Tillich · Abram · Albrecht

Introduction: Climate Emotions and Climate Anxiety Ecology is not just about “global warming, recycling and solar power” but also about “love, loss, despair and compassion,” we read in the introduction to Timothy Morton’s book The Ecological Thought (Morton, 2010, p. 2). That is to say that the ongoing climate crisis can have a detrimental effect on an individual’s emotional well-being. The most comprehensive research to date on the issue of anxiety caused by climate change, which surveyed 10,000 young people in 10 different countries in both the Global North and the Global South, found that 59% of the respondents reported feeling extremely worried about climate change, while 84% expressed at least moderate concern. ((Hickman et al., 2021). A similar study, but on a smaller scale, conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication in 2018 found that 72% of Americans believe “that the issue of global warming is either “extremely,” “very,” or “somewhat” important to them personally,” while around 51% of the respondents claimed that global warming makes them feel helpless. Cf. Leiserowitz (2018).) The numbers are alarming and suggest that climate anxiety is slowly but surely becoming a major societal issue. (The severity of the situation has prompted the World Health Organization to develop an extensive policy brief in June 2022 which describes the interconnections between climate change and mental health (World Health Organization, 2022).) Given the ubiquity of climate anxiety, one might expect to find a large body of research on the subject. But rather surprisingly, academic discussion of climate anxiety emerged only recently. Since the early 2000s, climate anxiety has been increasingly studied in a variety of fields, ranging from psychology, education studies, sociology to political science and even theology. This chapter begins with a brief overview of this interdisciplinary research, then outlines the relevant philosophical accounts of climate anxiety, and provides a comprehensive overview of the existing literature on the subject. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the findings and an outline of a philosophically relevant definition of climate anxiety.

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In order to begin this section, it is best to first look at the genealogy of the term “climate anxiety.” Anxiety has a long and rich history in philosophical and psychological literature, having been first extensively studied in the late nineteenth century by Schelling and Kierkegaard. In particular, Kierkegaard’s treatment of anxiety became the basis for existential phenomenological theories of anxiety developed by later phenomenologists such as Heidegger, Sartre, and Tillich, as well as some existential psychologists like Yalom or May. In contrast to that, the term climate anxiety appears to be fairly recent, and its origins are not easy to trace, as there have not been many sustained attempts at a genealogy of the term. (This chapter maintains the terminological distinction between climate anxiety and other negatively valenced climate emotions such as climate guilt, climate anger, or climate shame. These emotions are very different from each other, as shown by the most comprehensive taxonomies of environmental emotions developed by Pihkala (2022b) and Landmann (2020). However, this chapter does not differentiate in any strict manner between the terms climate anxiety, ecological anxiety (or eco-anxiety), and environmental anxiety, as they are closely related and all express concern about the deteriorating state of the natural environment.) Albrecht credits the journalist Lisa Leff for being the first to use the term “eco-anxiety” in her 1990 article Ecology carries clout in Anne Arundel (Albrecht, 2019, p. 76). However, an even earlier mention of climate anxiety can be found in a 1970 paper by Crawford Robb, who uses the term “ecological anxiety” to reflect a worry about human disturbance of the “overall natural balance” (Robb, 1970). But even though the term appeared as early as the 1970s, it is not used in any consistent manner in the 1970s, 1980s, or even 1990s. A serious interdisciplinary discussion of climate anxiety only emerged in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. In following this discussion, one cannot help but notice that many scholars work under the assumption that climate anxiety is not an isolated emotion, but that it belongs to a broad group of similar affective phenomena that are all related to the changes in the natural environment, i.e., that climate anxiety is just one of the many climate emotions. (Pihkala defines climate emotions as affective phenomena “which are significantly related to the climate crisis.” See Pihkala (2022b, p. 1).) In recent years, the study of climate emotions has garnered significant attention from scholars across a range of disciplines. And although climate anxiety seems to be at the forefront of this research, scholars are also interested in studying other negatively and positively valenced emotions such as climate hope (Ojala, 2012, 2015), climate grief (Cunsolo & Ellis, 2018), guilt (Smith & Leiserowitz, 2014), or even climate envy (McGrath et al., 2018). This chapter will focus on scholars who predominantly use the term anxiety when writing about the negative emotional impacts of climate change. But it should be noted that some of them use this term interchangeably with other negatively valenced emotional states. For example, as will be seen, David Abram considers anxiety and despair to be equivalent emotions. Another scholar, Byron Smith, sees apocalyptic climate anxiety to be the same as apocalyptic climate fear. However, inconsistency in the use of climate emotions is to be expected, and it is not necessarily problematic. The difference between anxiety and despair is so subtle

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that it does not pose a significant problem for Abram to use the terms interchangeably. A problem might only arise if one were to confuse terms as different as, let’s say, climate anxiety and anger. That being said, one of the reasons for these inconsistencies in the use of climate emotions is the lack of a comprehensive taxonomy of these emotions that would be widely accepted in interdisciplinary research. (Pihkala is of the opinion that there “is currently a lack of research about the array of various climate emotions.” See Pihkala (2022b, p. 1).) There have been only a few attempts to develop such a classification in the recent years. Perhaps the earliest typology of environmentally relevant emotions was Böhm’s 2003 study Emotional reactions to environmental risks. However, it is rather limited, covering only negatively valenced emotions, which are divided into four different categories depending on their relational and temporal characteristics. (Böhm distinguishes between four distinct types of emotions related to the environment. First, she defines (i) prospective (e.g., fear) and (ii) retrospective (e.g., sadness) consequence-based emotions. Those are different from ethics-based emotions that are further subdivided into (iii) other-related emotions (e.g., anger) and (iv) self-related emotions (e.g., guilt). Cf. Böhm, G., Emotional reactions to environmental risks: consequentialist versus ethical evaluation. Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 23, 2003. (Böhm, 2003).) Böhm’s study was followed in 2012 by Kals and Müller and then in 2018 by Hahnel and Brosch (2018), all of whom introduced several positively valenced emotions in their typologies (Kals & Müller, 2012). However, these typologies only covered a subset of environmentally relevant emotions, which led Landmann to synthesize these accounts in her 2020 paper and construct what could be called the first comprehensive taxonomy of environmentally relevant emotions. Landmann proposes a concise yet exhaustive classification of seven distinct environmental-emotion types, distinguishing between (i) self-condemning emotions (guilt, shame, embarrassment), (ii) other-condemning emotions (anger, disgust, contempt), (iii) self-praising emotions (pride), (iv) other-praising emotions (elevation, admiration, awe, being moved, gratitude, love), (v) other-suffering emotions (compassion, empathy, emotional contagion), (vi) hedonistic emotions (joy, pleasure, amusement), and lastly (vii) threat-related emotions, which comprise fear, hopelessness, and anxiety (Landmann, 2020). What distinguishes anxiety from other climate emotions according to Landmann is that it is an emotion which emerges from the anticipation of future negative consequences of climate change. Pihkala builds on Landmann’s taxonomy, expanding her list and offering a total of 16 broad environmental emotion types. He groups anxiety along with worry and dread, seeing them as emotions dealing with threat and risk perception. One of the strongest markers of anxiety according to Pihkala are the feelings of “uncontrollability, unpredictability and uncertainty” in relation to some future threat (Pihkala, 2022b, p. 12), while the anxious individual often feels “disturbed, distressed, helpless[,] hyperactive” or overwhelmed (Pihkala, 2022b, p. 13). Pihkala also notes that climate anxiety scholars share the basic view that anxiety is “is futureoriented and related to a threat about which there is significant uncertainty” (Pihkala, 2020, p. 2).

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This chapter will follow the taxonomies developed by Pihkala, Landmann, and Böhm. This means that scholars using the term climate anxiety will be considered to be working within the semi-broad category of threat-related climate emotions. This will help to clarify any ambiguity caused by inconsistent usage and allow for the inclusion of related terms such as climate despair, worry, or even fear. With this in mind, it is now possible to outline the different philosophical approaches to climate anxiety. Philosophical research on climate anxiety can be divided into three broad categories. First, there are philosophers who have developed their own original theories or definitions of climate anxiety. These scholars come from a variety of backgrounds, including analytic philosophy, environmental philosophy, eco-phenomenology, eco-theology, or ethics. The second category includes a fairly large number of scholars who analyze climate anxiety using the interpretive framework of Christian existential philosophy, mostly working with Paul Tillich’s definition of anxiety. Finally, there are scholars who take a phenomenological approach, drawing on the work of thinkers such as Husserl, Heidegger, or Sartre. Each of these approaches will be considered separately in this chapter, as they are very different in their methodologies.

Original Theories and Definitions of Climate Anxiety Earth Emotions and Climate Anxiety It seems appropriate to begin with Glenn Albrecht, a leading environmental philosopher who offers one of the most nuanced definitions of climate anxiety as part of his broader project to provide a new lexicon of emotional terms related to the human relationship with the natural environment, which he calls the Earth emotions. Albrecht begins with the observation that there are certain emotional states that are very closely tied to the state of a person’s biophysical environment. In order to distinguish and classify these states, Albrecht proposes a distinction between the psychoterratic and somaterratic domains. The psychoterratic domain – to use Albrecht’s own words – deals “with the health relationship between the psyche and the biophysical environment, while the somaterratic domain is focused on the health relationship between the body and the biophysical environment” (Albrecht, 2019, p. 64). Based on this distinction, Albrecht further distinguishes between somaterratic and psychoterratic health issues. A somaterratic health issue can emerge, for example, as a side effect of air pollution: an individual might develop respiratory problems as a result of living in a heavily polluted area. On the other hand, psychoterratic illness occurs when the mental well-being of an individual is threatened by severing the natural and healthy links between them and the environment in which they live (Albrecht et al., 2007). Albrecht then goes on to describe both positive and negative psychoterratic emotional states, with the bulk of his work consisting of descriptions of the latter. He presents the reader with highly original neologisms, describing negative psychoterratic emotional states such as solastalgia (the pain or distress caused by

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the loss of “solace connected to the negatively perceived state of one’s home environment”) (Albrecht et al., 2007, p. 96), terrafurie (earth rage), topoaversion (a feeling preventing one from returning to a place that was once beloved, but had now irrevocably changed), and many others. With regard to anxiety, Albrecht presents a nuanced perspective, suggesting that one should distinguish between four different kinds of environmentally relevant anxiety. The first is eco-anxiety, characterized as a generalized worry about the future that arises in response to a “changing and uncertain environment” (Albrecht, 2011, p. 49). Another definition of eco-anxiety provided by Albrecht describes it as a “nonspecific worry about our relationship to support environments” (Albrecht, 2018) or a “generalized sense that the ecological foundations of existence are in the process of collapse” (Albrecht, 2012). Albrecht is of the opinion that eco-anxiety is not necessarily pathological and therefore debilitating for the individual. On the contrary, it is often experienced by individuals who are concerned for the state of the natural environment and engaged in positive environmental action. Eco-anxiety could thus be seen as an emotional response of an individual who is genuinely concerned about the climate crisis. Albrecht calls the second distinct form of environmentally related anxiety meteoranxiety. This is an emotion specifically related to “the vicissitudes of the weather” (Albrecht, 2019, p. 77). Meteoranxiety thus includes a worry about the possible occurrence of extreme weather phenomena such as hurricanes, droughts, or floods. This form of anxiety is exacerbated by the availability of weather news and forecasts in modern society and is more likely to be experienced by those living in areas at risk of extreme weather events. The penultimate form of environmentally related anxiety has a rather unusual name: mermerosity. The term is derived from the Greek word for mourning (ME
ρμερoς), and it designates a “chronic state of being worried or anxious about the possible passing of the familiar and its replacement by that which does not sit comfortably within one’s sense of place” (Albrecht, 2019, p. 78). It is a somewhat counterintuitive concept that takes some getting used to. Put simply, a person experiencing mermerosity mourns in anticipation of some future ecological loss. For example, an individual may be concerned about the future extinction of some endangered species due to climate change and that individual may begin the process of mourning long before that extinction even occurs. The final form of environment-related anxiety defined by Albrecht is global dread. It is an intense worry that anticipates a “hugely negative future state of the world” (Albrecht, 2019, p. 80). Global dread then generates some of the most extreme forms of anxiety, and it can manifest itself as obsessive apocalyptic thinking.

Apocalyptic Climate Anxiety A similar emphasis on apocalyptic thinking can be found in Robert Stolorow’s work on climate anxiety. At the outset, Stolorow warns the reader not to think of climate

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anxiety as some form of existential Angst, but as an emotion with distinctly apocalyptic characteristics (Stolorow, 2021). The distinction Stolorow makes is subtle but important, and to illustrate it, he asks the reader to imagine the following situation: in less than five billion years, when the sun runs out of hydrogen, it will leave its stable phase and begin to die. During this process, the sun will grow, enveloping the inner planets and the Earth, becoming a red giant. One naturally feels horror and fear when one imagines this future destruction of the entire solar system. One might be tempted to see this horror as a form of existential anxiety, similar to Heideggerian anxiety. But Stolorow warns the reader not to make this mistake. When one imagines the end of the entire solar system, one is not anxious about one’s own death, but about the future end of human civilization itself. In other words, imagining the sun swallowing the Earth, one does not fear for oneself (as one will be long dead by then) and thus one’s anxiety is not existential, but one’s anxiety is directed to the future and “anticipates the collapse of all meaningfulness” (Stolorow, 2021, p. 121). Stolorow claims that this is also true of climate anxiety, arguing that climate anxiety is a form of apocalyptic anxiety. Why is this the case? Stolorow explains that any rational human being will only engage in those forms of activity that seem meaningful to him or her (in both the short and long term). One works day and night not only to improve one’s own life but also to improve the lives of one’s descendants and future generations. Stolorow claims that the possibility that the sun could engulf the entire solar system or that climate change could destroy human civilization renders all individual action meaningless because it creates a situation in which there is no future to aspire to. This makes climate apocalyptic anxiety extremely traumatic for the individual, and it may also make them want to escape it, possibly leading to climate denialism. Stolorow suggests that intersubjective sharing of this trauma could help to alleviate climate anxiety and could eventually lead to positive climate-oriented action. Byron Smith is another philosopher who underscores the apocalyptic aspects of climate anxiety. (Even though the title of Smith’s paper reads “Climate Change and Fear,” Smith uses the terms “fear” and “anxiety” interchangeably, as he builds on the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar, who, as Smith writes, did not “follow the continental conceptual distinction between fear and anxiety.” See (Smith, 2011, p. 83), footnote 6.) Smith notes that climate fear and anxiety are not as novel emotions as they might first appear, but that Western civilization has a long history of living with such “apocalyptic nightmares” (Smith, 2011, p. 79). Worries about the imminent end of all life on Earth would not have been alien to people living in medieval society or even to citizens of the late Roman Empire. However, despite superficial similarities, climate fears and anxieties do contain some novel elements when compared to ancient apocalyptic fears and anxieties. To name some of the most significant differences: first, individuals living in ancient and medieval societies were anxious about events or external forces over which they exerted only little control. A citizen of Rome in 400 AD might have worried about a threatening barbarian invasion; a resident of medieval Paris might have been anxious about the Black Death. However, both events were largely beyond their control. Modern people are anxious about climate change which, on the other hand, is entirely of their own making.

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Second, climate anxiety is caused by a change in climate that is global in scale, whereas ancient disasters were usually confined to a particular city or a small region. Third, what is new about climate change is that it is an unintended by-product of the success of human civilization. It came about as a side effect of desired economic growth and of a global rise in living standards. This leads to a paradoxical situation where people become anxious as a result of the economic success of the society in which they live. (To list the remaining differentiating factors identified by Smith: (i) climate change is collective in agency. It is not the result of a hasty and panicked decision by a handful of individuals, but it is caused by society as a whole; (ii) climate change is cumulative. Different individuals contributed to the build-up of CO2 in the atmosphere by small amounts over decades; (iii) climate change is non-linear in effect. There are certain thresholds or tipping points which, when reached, cause a large and unpredictable change in climate; (iv) there is a delay of many years or even decades between the emissions and the effects being felt; (v) negative impacts are unevenly and unfairly distributed. Countries in the Global South, which are usually least responsible for climate change, will often be the ones who will first suffer its harmful effects; (vi) climate change is persistent, making the damage intergenerational; (vii) the causes and many of the effects of climate change are not easily perceivable or visible; (viii) the threat is impersonal, i.e., there is no evil mastermind holding each human being to ransom; (ix) climate change is an extremely complex phenomenon, and it is impossible for any single individual to fully comprehend its scope and all of its negative effects.)

The Two Waves of Climate Anxiety Another philosopher who looks at climate anxiety from a historical perspective is Sean McGrath. However, the scope of McGrath’s analysis is narrower than Smith’s, as he focuses on the perception of climate anxiety in the second half of the twentieth century. McGrath begins with the premise that climate anxiety cannot be equated with a fear of a specific catastrophic event, but that it is rather an “unconscious and paralysing anticipation of the end of everything” (McGrath, 2019, p. 65). He then argues that historically there have been two distinct waves of climate anxiety. The first wave was concerned with technological development and with the possibility that technology might eventually dominate human life and negatively impact non-human life on Earth. To put it bluntly, the first-wave climate anxiety was caused by the worry that humanity might corrupt nature through technology. The advent of technological domination was predicted by Heidegger, but little was done to prevent its negative impact on non-human species and wilderness. McGrath agrees with Stephanie Mill’s pessimistic observation that the environmental movement has failed and that, after decades of activism, wilderness has been devastated by technology. First-wave climate anxiety thus grew out of the assumption that nature is by default in a state of equilibrium or balance and that this balance can easily be disturbed by unbridled technological and industrial growth. To cement his point, McGrath mentions some movies from the second half of the twentieth century that reflect this first-wave climate anxiety. He refers to films such

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as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, or The Matrix, all of which depict a world in which technology has run amok. The underlying logic of these movies is the same: humanity is overtaken by its evolutionary success and in the end becomes an exploitable resource, “managed, quantified, liquidated and ground down into fuel” (McGrath, 2019, p. 65). What lies at the root of the first wave of climate anxiety is the nature-technology binary, which replaces the obsolete distinction between God and nature (McGrath, 2019, p. 67). McGrath maintains that the first wave of climate anxiety has already passed. The deepest anxiety of a person living in the twenty-first century is no longer that he or she will upset some sacred balance inherent in nature. (McGrath notes that the view of nature as a balanced whole is already outdated, as it is only preserved in New Age spirituality and some strands of alternative medicine.) No, the modern individual worries about something else entirely. If the first-wave anxiety was accompanied by a worry about technologizing the balanced order of nature, the second-wave climate anxiety fears the opposite, namely, that technology will break down and be unable to keep nature under control. According to McGrath, the concept of nature underlying the second-wave anxiety differs significantly from the concept of nature underlying firstwave climate anxiety. This is because in second-wave anxiety, nature is no longer perceived as a balanced and stable entity, but rather as an uncontrollable, inhumane, and frightening force (McGrath, 2019, p. 67). The exploitation of nature had run its course, and the second wave of climate anxiety suddenly allows people to see nature in its true form. Drawing on the conception of nature presented by planetary science and quantum theory, this new form of climate anxiety reveals nature as an “inhuman horror of meaningless material events” that is capable of sweeping aside all that is considered “good, true and beautiful” (McGrath, 2019, p. 68). Second-wave climate anxiety thus has considerable revelatory potential. It disrupts the somewhat naïve image of nature as the hospitable Mother Earth, a cradle to which humanity can return. It shows that if the technological foundations of society were to collapse, humanity would suddenly be thrown back into a harsh and inhospitable environment. Climate change – the rising sea levels, droughts, and other extreme weather phenomena – give rise to anxiety not because they might lead to the collapse of nature, but because they would bring about the collapse of technology and the end of the world as one knows it. McGrath argues that McCarthy’s The Road is a perfect example of a book that brilliantly embodies this anxiety and the effort to redefine nature. Thus, the second-wave climate anxiety holds the potential to – so to speak – “unmask” nature. McGrath maintains that the image of nature that accompanies second-wave climate anxiety is more accurate than the image that accompanied the first wave. What McGrath means to say is that it is more accurate to perceive nature as an inhospitable and frightening place. This leads him to ask whether the term “nature” should not be redefined in the light of this revelation, which is further supported by the discoveries made by planetary science. If the term “nature” is to have any meaning at all, it must be interpreted broadly to include not only the hospitable landscapes of Earth but also the surface of Venus or the moon, where temperatures can reach hundreds of degrees Celsius (McGrath, 2019, p. 70).

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Climate Anxiety and Modern Forms of Animism David Abram begins his reflections on climate anxiety from a similar starting point to McGrath, distinguishing between two opposing environmental emotions (or attitudes) that he argues have gripped humanity in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. On the one hand, he sees the optimistic individuals who maintain a positive outlook and believe that no obstacle is too great that it cannot be overcome by technological development. The individuals taken by the optimistic emotion see anthropogenic global warming as a small hurdle that will eventually be overcome by human ingenuity. On the other side of the spectrum are the anxious individuals: those are people who are pessimistic about the future and who are filled with dark visions of a possible end of the human civilization brought about by the climate crisis. Climate anxiety and what might be called (techno)optimism – these are the two distinct “collective moods” that affect different individuals in society (Abram, 2018, p. 1). City dwellers, who are heavily exposed to new media and technology, tend to lean toward the latter, looking to the future with hope and optimism, believing that new developments in robotics, AI, or a discovery of alternative power sources could avert the looming environmental crisis. On the other hand, people living outside urban areas, often tied to agriculture or nature-based lifestyles, are more likely to be frightened by the signs of impending ecological collapse. These people experience what Abram calls an “uncanny anxiety,” which is not so much an anxiety for themselves but rather an anxiety for nature and for the environment in which they live. That being said, Abram acknowledges that these two groups are not entirely separate. People who live in the countryside are often techno-optimists because they too are exposed to modern technology and are aware of its usefulness. Similarly, city dwellers can often be anxious about climate change because they are exposed to news and images of the destruction and degradation of nature. This leads Abram to conclude that virtually anyone can be affected by either of these emotions. However, an individual cannot experience both at the same time. Rather, it is often the case that one is “buffeted back and forth” between these emotions, i.e., one is for 1 min optimistic, believing that some newly emerging technology might help to avert the climate crisis, but just a moment later, the same person falls into a dark state of mind and becomes anxious about the horrors that the future might hold. Abram’s aim is to disentangle the complex psychological dynamics between these two conflicting emotions. The answer he offers, however, must be read in the context of his wider research into animism. Abram explains that the defining characteristic of animism, a mode of perception common to many indigenous cultures, is that it makes no distinction between animate and inanimate things. In animistic cultures, every object that an individual encounters is potentially animate, alive. Abram argues that the reason why certain indigenous communities expect awareness and vitality in non-human or other-than-human phenomena is simply because the animistic perception of reality is the natural (or, one might say, default) mode of human perception: “Our most immediate experience of the earthly world, and of the myriad bodies that compose this world, is of a multiply animate cosmos wherein no thing, no sensible presence or body, is definitively void of expressive

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agency or life,” Abram writes (Abram, 2018, p. 6). It is therefore completely natural for human beings to feel connected to the natural living world that surrounds them. This leads Abram to argue that even Western society still practices animism, just in a different, more concentrated, form. A basic example of Western animistic practice is alphabetic literacy. When a person opens the morning newspaper, the written letters speak to them, and they hear voices and see visions of the events described in the text. This is similar to the experience of indigenous animistic cultures, who perceive animals, plants, and even inanimate objects as speaking to them and expressing some form of meaning, just as the morning newspaper conveys meaning to the modern individual. This is the modern form of animism that infuses meaning, or “magic,” into the individual’s relationship with the signs they use. Abram’s argument then hinges on the observation that Western society is attempting to recreate even more complex forms of animism. He claims that the development of smart technologies, especially of the Internet of Things, which integrates sensors and processing capabilities into basic everyday objects that can communicate with their users, is just another attempt to recreate the animistic experience of living in a “world wherein everything is alive, awake, and aware” (Abram, 2018, p. 15). The modern individuals surround themselves with smart watches, fridges, and even smart umbrellas that communicate with them, creating the impression of a living and interconnected world. But whereas an indigenous woman might encounter radical Otherness in her animistic practices through her interactions with the natural world, modern technological animism offers no such opportunity for encountering something that is radically Other. All the things one communicates with have been constructed and programmed by other human beings (Abram, 2018, p. 16). Unlike the mysterious and awe-inspiring natural landscapes that indigenous people navigated, modern smart technology is nothing more than a man-made tool, an elaborate extension of the human nervous system. Despite this, modern humans remain attached to their gadgets, not only because they are engaging and captivating but also because these intelligent objects awaken “a biophilic proclivity. . .a penchant for participation with other-than-human presences,” the renewal of the “old world” in which everything is alive (Abram, 2018, p. 22). This ties back to the initial question about the difference between (techno) optimism and climate anxiety, which can finally be answered: Abram argues that engaging with modern intelligent objects (participating in techno-animism) leads to a loss of the more “animal” senses that humans possessed. In other words, one becomes so captivated by technology that they become blind and deaf to the troubles of the Earth. What it comes down to is that the modern techno-animistic individual is no longer attuned to the natural environment. Climate anxiety is then nothing more than a strong natural response to anthropogenic climate change. Abram writes that an individual sustains “horrific wounds” when coming to terms with the damage that humanity inflicts on the environment (Abram, 2018, p. 23). But because the modern individual is caught in the captivating trap of modern technology, which keeps them unconcerned, techno-optimistic, and stimulated, they are less likely to notice the anxiety and despair which is a natural response to the deterioration of one’s environment.

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The Interconnectedness of Climate Anxiety and Other Climate Emotions Ondřej Beran, a philosopher writing in the analytic tradition, takes a more deconstructive approach and questions the assumed heterogeneity of climate emotions. Beran argues that climate emotions are often difficult to distinguish from one another and that they even overlap at times (Beran, 2022). So, for instance, when one worries about the destruction of the natural environment, one might experience both anxiety and grief at the same time. The interconnectedness of certain climate emotions leads Beran to postulate a convenient acronym, which ought to represent the cluster of emotions that are felt by individuals concerned about the natural environment. The acronym is ECEGADMAT, and it stands for Environmental/Climate/Eco(logical) Grief/Anxiety/Depression/Melancholia/Anger/Trauma. To use Beran’s own definition, the ECEGADMAT cluster is an experience “consisting of partly overlapping but discernible components that can be specified further but should not be taken individually as exhaustively representative of the whole complex” (Beran, 2022, p. 59). This shows that Beran is aware of the fact that the emotions within the ECEGADMAT cluster are not interchangeable. He therefore makes clear and precise distinctions between these different affective states. When it comes to anxiety, Beran defines it in contrast to grief, explaining that while grief is past-oriented and often stems from the loss of a concrete object, anxiety, on the other hand, is a futureoriented emotion that is without a concrete object. But even though anxiety and grief can be easily distinguished on the abstract-theoretical level, this does not mean that they are experienced as distinctly at the individual level. Beran claims that if what one is feeling is at the same time past-oriented (grief-like) and future-oriented (anxiety-like), this does not necessarily mean that one is feeling two distinct emotions. He thus concludes that people experiencing ECEGADMAT do not feel only one distinct part of it – for example, anxiety – but that they feel several emotions at once and that this experience is often very confusing. In other words, Beran is drawing attention toward the broad range of climate emotions people can experience on a daily basis. He believes that far too often, one climate emotion is highlighted and emphasized, while others are ignored simply because they are felt less intensely. For this reason, ECEGADMAT, understood as a “family concept” in Wittgenstein’s sense, is a more appropriate way of discussing climate emotions.

A Taxonomical Approach to Climate Emotions Then there are scholars who take a more classificatory approach to addressing climate anxiety. This is the case of the Finnish environmental scholar Panu Pihkala. Although Pihkala is a theologian by trade, his work is worth mentioning, as he is perhaps the most prolific interdisciplinary writer on climate anxiety and his work provides a comprehensive overview of interdisciplinary research both on climate anxiety and on other climate emotions. This breadth of research has enabled him to

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develop one of the first comprehensive taxonomies of environmental emotions, which was already mentioned in the introduction to this chapter (Pihkala, 2022b). But Pihkala’s work is not just a compilation of existing interdisciplinary research; it also offers novel insights and perspectives. In one of his earlier studies, he suggested that environmental anxiety should be understood as a pastoral challenge (Pihkala, 2016). Later, he argued that there should be more emphasis on hope in the narratives surrounding climate change and climate anxiety (Pihkala, 2018b). But perhaps most important, philosophically speaking, is the distinction he makes between eco-anxiety and climate anxiety. The distinction is subtle but important: he explains that the term eco-anxiety can be used to describe any anxiety which is related to the ecological crisis, while climate anxiety denotes such anxiety that is significantly related to anthropogenic climate change (Pihkala, 2020). In other words, the term climate anxiety should only be used in relation to anxiety related to anthropogenic climate change. One of Pihkala’s early papers suggests that climate anxiety is only one small aspect of the broader phenomenon of eco-anxiety, hinting at a possible hierarchy within the different forms of environmentally related anxieties and/or within the broader taxonomy of climate emotions (Pihkala, 2019). Pihkala also makes the important point that climate anxiety can be both explicit (when one recognizes that the feeling of anxiety that one feels is related to the climate crisis) and implicit (when one is in denial about the climate crisis and does not make the connection to one’s own anxiety) (Pihkala, 2022a).

Christian Existential Perspectives on Climate Anxiety The second branch of philosophical research on climate anxiety is represented by scholars who use the theoretical framework of existential philosophy, mostly drawing on the works of Christian existential thinkers. This is hardly surprising, given that anxiety has been within the scope of existential philosophy ever since its inception. However, the philosophical understanding of anxiety has evolved and changed over the centuries. The emotional state now known as anxiety has been an integral aspect of a broader condition called melancholia ever since antiquity. Ancient Greek thinkers considered melancholia to be a sign of moral failure, and scholars in subsequent centuries staunchly kept to the view that this emotional state was pathological and useless (Horwitz, 2013, p. 28). It was not until Kierkegaard’s revolutionary insight that philosophers realized that anxiety is the only mood that has no object. (Kierkegaard uses the term mood (Stemning) when referring to anxiety. Subsequent existential thinkers and phenomenologists have also adopted the term mood, as it better conveys the pervasiveness and persistence of anxiety than the term emotion, which is usually used to describe a short-term affective state.) It is a “nothing that can only bring anxiety,” writes Kierkegaard in his The Concept of Anxiety. ((Kierkegaard, 1980, p. 42): “. . .it is a nothing that can only bring anxiety. Therefore, I must point out that it is altogether different from fear and similar concepts that refer to something definite, whereas anxiety is freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility.”) And this indeterminacy or non-intentionality of anxiety – as Heidegger, Jaspers, Tillich,

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Sartre, and other existential phenomenologists went on to note – is what makes it not only unique among other moods but also useful. These philosophers have then used anxiety as an existential “diagnostic tool” with the potential to facilitate one’s existential self-development. They found a way to use a mood that for centuries had been either ignored or simply perceived as pathological. This “pragmatic” view on anxiety had – thanks to existentialism and psychoanalysis – become ubiquitous in the twentieth century (Horwitz, 2013, p. 118). The same pragmatic attitude also carries over into the existential research on climate anxiety. Most of the scholars that will be mentioned in this section draw on the work of the Christian existential philosopher Paul Tillich, whose analysis offers a rather positive and pragmatic view of anxiety. Tillich does not see anxiety as a pathological affective state, but rather as an emotion with revelatory and transformative potential.

Climate Anxiety Through the Lens of Tillich’s Christian Existentialism A good starting point is the work of Magdalena Budziszewska and Sofia Jonsson, who establish a clear link between climate anxiety and Tillich’s analysis of existential anxiety. But before exploring their work, it is important to establish what anxiety means in the context of Tillich’s philosophy. Anxiety, to use Tillich’s own words, is “the state in which a being is aware of its possible nonbeing. . .[it is] the existential awareness of nonbeing. . .[a] finitude experienced as one’s own finitude” (Tilich, 2000, p. 35). Tillich distinguishes three main forms of existential anxiety: an anxiety about fate and death, an anxiety about emptiness and meaninglessness, and an anxiety about guilt and condemnation. According to Budziszewska and Jonsson, climate anxiety manifests signs of all three of these categories. The threat of an environmental collapse and of the end of human civilization forces individuals to reflect on their own mortality (the first category of fate and death); it also undermines the value of human activity as such, because it threatens the legacy that any human being can leave to future generations (the second category of emptiness and meaninglessness); and finally it also brings with it the risk of collective human extinction or the extinction of other species (the third category of guilt and condemnation). Budziszewska and Jonsson then extend Tillich’s anxiety framework by incorporating the seven central existential themes outlined by the existential psychotherapist Ernesto Spinelli – those being Meaning, Responsibility, Authenticity, Isolation, Death anxiety, Temporality, and Spatiality of existence (Budziszewska & Jonsson, 2021, p. 6). Using the theoretical framework provided by Tillich and Spinelli, Budziszewska and Jonsson conduct an empirical study, based on which they identify some of the most salient features of climate anxiety reported by the participants. First of all, they find that many participants show increased levels of death anxiety. Interestingly, respondents rarely feared local and direct consequences of climate change (such as floods, heat waves, tornadoes, etc.), but instead worried about the breakdown of the social contract that could result from a climate catastrophe (Budziszewska & Jonsson, 2021, p. 10). Apprehension of the possible breakdown

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of civilization and of possible human extinction brings climate anxiety very close to the anxiety about nuclear war and to other similar forms of apocalyptic anxieties. Second, they observed that the intensity of anxiety varies according to an individual’s physical and emotional proximity to the negative effects of climate change. Another existential manifestation of climate anxiety is the sense of loss of meaning and hopelessness that can arise when a person is confronted with the global failure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But perhaps the strongest existential category negatively affected by climate anxiety was found to be relatedness. Human beings, write Budziszewska and Jonsson, are beings-in-relation, which means that the dimension of intersubjectivity is crucial for one’s self-identity and for the creation of meaning. Climate anxiety and the looming climate crisis may disrupt this sense of relatedness. For example, participants in the study often reported feelings of isolation when faced with negative reactions from family and friends after sharing their concerns about the climate. Budziszewska and Jonsson conclude that every person experiencing climate anxiety faces an existential choice: one can either accept or reject existential relatedness to others. Rejection leads to detachment and indifference toward others and the outside world, whereas acceptance leads to a deeper engagement with others and with nature. Therefore, acceptance can even lead to climate activism. A similar psychological study based on Tillich’s classification of anxiety was conducted by Brandon Scott and Carl Weems. The study looked at a group of 386 people who had been affected by a natural disaster, focusing on their changed relationship with nature and their anxiety regarding possible future extreme weather events. The study found that of these 386 people, the highest percentage (74%) felt the Tillichian anxiety of emptiness, followed by the anxieties of fate (71%), guilt (62%), and condemnation (60%) (Scott & Weems, 2013, p. 7). Another scholar who draws heavily on Tillich is Maria Ojala. She maintains that existential philosophy offers a particularly useful way of looking at climate anxiety, because it allows the emotion to be interpreted as a subset of existential anxiety and thus as an affective state that is not necessarily pathological. Instead, climate anxiety can be understood as a rational and a constructive response to a threat to the individual’s value system, seen as a “mature way of facing one’s responsibility as a human” (Ojala et al., 2021, p. 5). That is, Ojala argues, because existential anxiety is often closely linked to a sense of responsibility for things that the individual regards as meaningful and worth protecting. This leads Ojala to suggest that existential anxiety could even be seen as a moral feeling (Ojala, 2005). Ojala also provides insight into why climate change is so anxiety-provoking. As noted, Tillich sees anxiety as the existential awareness of non-being, which then affects the human being in its entirety. A human being – Ojala goes on to explain – is made up of three distinct parts: the ontic part, which manifests by death anxiety; the moral part, which is connected to the anxiety of guilt and condemnation; and, finally, the spiritual part, which is linked to the anxiety about meaninglessness (Ojala, 2016, p. 44). Climate change threatens all three of these parts. First, it threatens the life and well-being of each individual, as well as the existence and well-being of humanity in general (the ontic part). Second, climate change raises questions about the sustainability of Western society’s consumerist lifestyle and its

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impact on the environment (the moral part). Finally, given the serious challenges facing the global population in the future, one might even lose faith in the meaningfulness of one’s own actions (the spiritual part). The reason why climate change causes such an intense anxiety is that it affects the ontic, the moral, and the spiritual parts of a human being simultaneously – it affects a human being in its entirety. Pihkala also highlights the spiritual, or one might say eco-theological, dimension of Tillich’s analysis of anxiety, noting that eco-anxiety has strong links with several fundamental existential notions (Pihkala, 2022a). First, eco-anxiety is linked to the idea of authenticity, because the ecological crisis can literally force individuals to reflect on the meaning of their lives or even force them to re-evaluate their deeply rooted value systems. Second, eco-anxiety can lead to existential isolation, as it may make it difficult to relate to the outside world. Third, eco-anxiety can lead to existential guilt. Here, Pihkala draws on Yalom and May, who argue that existential guilt makes individuals feel that they are not fulfilling their true potential as human beings. Finally, Pihkala comes to a similar conclusion as Budziszewska and Jonsson, namely, that eco-anxiety is strongly linked to death anxiety. (See Pihkala (2018a) for an analysis of the connection between anxiety, eco-theology, and death.)

Climate Anxiety Through the Lens of Kierkegaard’s Protoexistentialist Philosophy Although the majority of scholars base their existential analyses of climate anxiety on the work of Tillich, there are some exceptions. Timothy Robinson and Ruby Guyatt, for example, see the emergence and spread of climate anxiety in contemporary society as a manifestation of a crisis of hope. Robinson argues that climate anxiety overwhelms individuals, paralyzing their capacity to act and to find meaning and wholeness in life (Robinson, 2020, p. 2). Guyatt builds on Robinson’s work by examining Kierkegaard’s account of hope. She presents Kierkegaardian hope as a tool for undermining climate anxiety and the hopelessness it engenders. Guyatt explains that Kierkegaardian hope is based on the possibility “of future movement towards the good—a good which is possible, yet uncertain” (Guyatt, 2020, p. 4). As she notes, Kierkegaardian hope is not an “idle” or “false” hope (i.e., hope grounded in the belief that someone else – be it God or technology – will solve the problem of climate change), but a hope that sees the current state of affairs as inadequate and empowers the individual to take action and be a positive agent in the world. This “active” hope can then act as a counter-force to climate anxiety.

Phenomenological Perspectives on Climate Anxiety Climate Anxiety and the Lifeworld The third major strand of philosophical research on climate anxiety takes its cue from phenomenology. One might start here with the work of Christion Myers, who draws on Husserl and Heidegger to address not only climate anxiety but also climate

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change denial. At the heart of Myers’ argument is the idea that climate change is perceived by individuals as an existential threat insofar as it calls into question the intersubjective “structures of meaning that constitute community or intersubjective identity,” i.e., that what the phenomenologists call the lifeworld (Lebenswelt) (Myers, 2014, p. 55). Climate anxiety is then taken as an external sign of this threat, and it is this anxiety – Myers believes – that leads to climate denial. In order to proceed, it is necessary to briefly outline the phenomenological notion of a lifeworld. The term was coined by Husserl, who defined Lebenswelt as the “pregiven world people perceive in common” (Myers, 2014, p. 60) and also as the experiential context shared with others that allows individuals to make sense of the world and of the things within that world. The lifeworld is thus the “horizon of all possible experience” (Myers, 2014, p. 60), or, to put it bluntly, the lifeworld is that which allows the individual to perceive the world and the things within it as selfevident, as obvious, as something that does not require interpretation and extended theoretical study. The fact that all human beings share the same lifeworld allows for communication between individuals and for intersubjectivity as such, because it provides the basic coherent and continuous framework to which all individuals can relate. Heidegger expands on Husserl’s work, making the important observation that people inhabiting a particular lifeworld usually tend to take things for granted as long as they function as expected. (It should be emphasized that Heidegger is an important figure in discussions of climate anxiety. The aforementioned analytic philosopher Beran also cites Heidegger’s definition of anxiety when distinguishing between climate anxiety and ecological grief. Cf. Beran (2022).) In the well-known example from Being and Time, Heidegger argues that a hammer is perceived by a human being (Dasein) as a natural extension of herself for as long as it performs its function. That is, one feels comfortable and identified with an object until the moment it breaks. Myers maintains that breakdowns occur at different levels and require different approaches. While a breakdown of an ordinary object such as a hammer can be easily identified by an individual and subsequently repaired, a more general problem such as the ecological crisis cannot be so easily identified, nor can it be fixed by any one single individual. The reason for this, Myers argues, is that the thing to be fixed – the thing that is problematic – is not a singular object, but the “lifeworld practices we share with others” (Myers, 2014, p. 61). That is because some lifeworld practices are highly problematic. However, their problematic nature may not be obvious at first glance as everything may appear to be working on the surface: while a hammer or a car may work just fine, one does not necessarily realize that it is the shared lifeworld practice of using the hammer to build a large house or the act of driving the car that is actually causing a higher-order problem by increasing the production of CO2. From this, Myers infers that the role of anxiety is to inform individuals about the harmful effects of their behavior. That is because anxiety has the capacity to point out deficiencies in their lifeworld practices and to provide a means of rectifying them. The problem is that climate anxiety arises as a result of the long-term global accumulation of greenhouse gases – that is, it arises as a result of questionable collective lifeworld practices. As such, it is not an emotion that can be addressed at

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the individual level but needs to be addressed collectively within the society as a whole. This leads Myers to recommend a Heideggerian solution to climate anxiety. His advice is to try to live authentically, i.e., to eschew comfortable and widely accepted social norms and models of behavior that one subscribes to simply because it is “what people do” (Myers, 2014, p. 64). Such an authentic approach, Myers argues, would allow individuals to question and change the dominant climatedamaging practices of the lifeworld.

Climate Anxiety as a Threat to the Place of Safety A slightly different perspective is offered by Susi Ferrarello, who undertakes a phenomenological analysis of climate anxiety, mapping out the “emotional geography” of people affected with anxiety disorders and attempting to describe and understand the ways in which these individuals perceive reality (Ferrarello, 2021, p. 25). Ferrarello defines climate anxiety by contrasting it with two related but distinct types of anxiety: phobic anxiety and existential anxiety. She begins by giving a brief overview of Sartre’s theory of emotions, as set out in his Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions. In this book, Sartre proposes a novel theory, claiming that external objects or beings that appear threatening to a given individual have the power to alter the emotional perception of the entire environment in which that given individual finds herself. To illustrate the way in which negative emotions distort one’s environment, Ferrarello cites a study by Smith, in which individuals suffering from arachnophobia describe spiders as “emotional ‘black-holes,’ magically stretching and compressing the fabric of their world” to such an extreme extent that “the fabric of the phobic’s world” becomes one where “quotidian laws, such as that of cause and effect, no longer seem to apply” (Smith et al., 2012, p. 61). Ferrarello points out that an individual is always part of an environment, just as the environment is always part of the individual. When an environment is distorted by a negative emotion, the individual has no way of escaping it. The individual is trapped. It is not possible to simply “get out” of a negative emotion such as horror or anxiety at will. Emotions have their own dynamics, and one cannot choose when an emotion will arise, nor can one command an emotion to subside. A phobic person therefore lives in a state of constant tension, always expecting that some external trigger, such as the spider mentioned above, will change their environment and throw them back into the abysmal black hole from which it is so difficult to escape. This form of phobic anxiety may at first seem similar both to existential anxiety and to climate anxiety. This is because all three of these anxieties trigger the reaction described above, leading to panic and a subjective distortion of the environment. However, Ferrarello argues that although all three anxieties manifest themselves in similar ways, they have different causes. The difference, though subtle, is significant: phobic anxiety focuses on threats (e.g., spiders) that can damage one’s integrity, whereas existential anxiety is a more general form of anxiety that arises from the realization of the possibility of non-being, of death. Phobic anxiety occurs only sporadically, when one encounters a threat that triggers that particular phobia.

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Existential anxiety, on the other hand, underlies all human experience. The third form of anxiety – namely, climate existential anxiety – is drastically different from both phobic and existential anxiety. Ferrarello understands climate existential anxiety as a form of Albrechtian solastalgia, a sense of distress experienced by an individual when they witness the destruction of their home environment. What Ferrarello sees as the most important aspect of climate existential anxiety, missing from both existential and phobic anxiety, is a sense of place that is being threatened. Every individual sees themselves as part of a particular place that provides everything essential for their emotional and physical well-being, for their survival, and also for the well-being of their community. Climate existential anxiety threatens this place of safety, which is not only an actual physical location but also the intersubjective structure that holds together the lives of all the individuals living in that place. A threat to the place of safety is also a threat to meaning as such, for one worries that one’s life will become empty and meaningless if that place is ever destroyed. Ferrarello then goes on to list a number of factors that can lead to climate existential anxiety. These include not only climate change but also things like resource extraction or political violence. Finally, it should be noted that Ferrarello also distinguishes between an acute and a chronic form of climate existential anxiety. Sudden natural phenomena such as floods and earthquakes are acute triggers because these natural disasters can drastically and abruptly change and destroy one’s environment. On the other hand, phenomena such as drought or sea-level rise are chronic factors, because they cause gradual and long-term environmental degradation.

Conclusion and a Provisional Philosophical Definition of Climate Anxiety The philosophical accounts of climate anxiety that were outlined in this chapter are very different and sometimes even contradictory. Does this mean that no overarching philosophical definition of climate anxiety can be developed? Not necessarily, as there is a common thread running through these different accounts. That is because the broad characterization of climate anxiety as a future-oriented emotional state related to uncertain environmental threats, as found in Landmann’s and Pihkala’s taxonomies of climate emotions, is consistent with the philosophical perspectives on climate anxiety discussed in this chapter. As was seen, most of the accounts placed similar emphasis on the fact that climate anxiety is experienced as a sense of (i) indeterminate (or one might even say omnidirectional) (ii) threat coming from both (iii) the foreseeable and unforeseeable future. The existential and phenomenological interpretations also emphasized that climate anxiety is capable of (iv) rendering one’s life meaningless due to the fact that it is accompanied by (v) catastrophic or sometimes even apocalyptic worries. All five of these defining aspects of climate anxiety were clearly evident in the accounts outlined above: Albrecht defined climate anxiety as a non-specific worry about the changing environment; Smith found similarities between climate anxiety and the ancient future-

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related apocalyptic fears; Abram saw climate anxiety as an uncanny “collective mood” stirred by the instability of the natural environment and its unpredictable future; Budziszewska and Jonsson pointed out that climate anxiety is closely linked to death anxiety and to the anxiety about societal breakdown, human extinction, and the collapse of all meaningfulness; Ojala also emphasized the proximity to death anxiety and the worry about a possible loss of all meaning in the future; Robinson and Guyatt saw the spread of climate anxiety as a crisis of hope – as a lack of hope for the future of humanity; Myers understood climate change as an existential threat to the intersubjective lifeworld practices and to the structures of meaning; Stolorow saw climate anxiety as a form of apocalyptic anxiety; and Ferrarello argued that climate anxiety arises from anticipating the destruction of one’s home environment. Of all the aspects mentioned above, the threat of meaninglessness caused by catastrophic worries seems to be not only the most significant but also the true distinctive feature of climate anxiety that sets it apart from other climate emotions. If one were to provide a definition for climate anxiety, these two aspects could serve as its foundation. In his book Why Worry About Future Generations, Scheffler observes that in the face of a global catastrophe such as climate change, individuals may find many of the activities they previously considered worthwhile now utterly meaningless and may see no reason to engage in them at all. In the midst of catastrophic ecological collapse, an anxious person might still find time spent with family and friends valuable, but he or she is likely to see collaborative social, cultural, scientific, or other long-term projects as worthless. But hopefully, as this chapter has shown, even climate anxiety has a silver lining. Scheffler notes in this regard that confronting meaninglessness teaches individuals that the value and purpose of most of their activities depend on nothing less than the long-term survival of humanity and of the planet itself (Scheffler, 2018, p. 44), which is to say that the catastrophic nature of climate anxiety, and the sense of meaninglessness that accompanies it, has the potential to instill a sense of responsibility in individuals: responsibility not only for themselves and their loved ones but also for the wider human community and the other-than-human nature.

References Abram, D. (2018). Magic and the machine. Emergence Magazine, 1. 181–192. Albrecht, G. (2011). Chronic environmental change and mental health. In I. Weissbecker (Ed.), Climate change and human well-being: Global challenges and opportunities. Springer. Albrecht, G. (2012). Psychoterratic conditions in a scientific and technological world. In P. H. Kahn & P. H. Hasbach (Eds.), Ecopsychology: Science, totems, and the technological species (pp. 241–264). MIT Press. Albrecht, G. (2018). Psychoterratica. Archived and accessible through: https://archive.org/web/ 20190302031900/. http://www.psychoterratica.com/more.html Albrecht, G. (2019). Earth emotions. Cornell University Press. Albrecht, G., Sartore, G.-M., Connor, L., Higginbotham, N., Freeman, S., Kelly, B., & Pollard, G. (2007). Solastalgia: The distress caused by environmental change. Australasian Psychiatry, 15(1), supplement 1, 95–98.

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Beran, O. (2022). Who should have children? (us?) when should we have children? (now?). SATS, 23(1), 55–74. Böhm, G. (2003). Emotional reactions to environmental risks: Consequentialist versus ethical evaluation. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 23, 199–212. Budziszewska, M., & Jonsson, S. E. (2021). From climate anxiety to climate action: An existential perspective on climate change concerns within psychotherapy. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 0(0). Cunsolo, A., & Ellis, N. R. (2018). Ecological grief as a mental health response to climate changerelated loss. Nature Climate Change, 8, 275–281. Ferrarello, S. (2021). The role of bioethics in emotional problems: A phenomenological analysis of intentions. Routledge. Guyatt, R. (2020). Kierkegaard in the Anthropocene: Hope, philosophy, and the climate crisis. Religions, 11(6), 1–12. Hahnel, U. J., & Brosch, T. (2018). Environmental trait affect. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 59, 94–106. Hickman, C., et al. (2021). Climate anxiety in children and young people and their beliefs about government responses to climate change: A global survey. The Lancet Planetary Health, 5(12), 863–873. Horwitz, A. (2013). Anxiety: A short history. The John Hopkins University Press. Kals, E., & Müller, M. (2012). Emotions and environment. In S. D. Clayton (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of environmental and conservation psychology. Oxford University Press. Kierkegaard, S. (1980). Concept of anxiety. Princeton University Press. Landmann, H. (2020). Emotions in the context of environmental protection: Theoretical considerations concerning emotion types, eliciting processes, and affect generalization. Umweltpsychologie, 47(2), 61–73. Leiserowitz, A. (2018). Climate change in the American mind. Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. McGrath, S. (2019). Thinking nature: An essay in negative ecology. Edinburgh University Press. McGrath, F., et al. (2018). Green without envy: How social capital alleviates tensions from a Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) program in Indonesia. Ecology and Society, 23(4), 1–24. Morton, T. (2010). Ecological thought. Harvard University Press. Myers, C. (2014). Understanding climate change as an existential threat: Confronting climate denial as a challenge to climate ethics. De Ethica. A Journal of Philosophical, Theological and Applied Ethics, 1(1), 53–70. Ojala, M. (2005). Adolescents’ worries about environmental risks: Subjective well-being, values, and existential dimensions. Journal of Youth Studies, 8(3), 331–347. Ojala, M. (2012). Hope and climate change: The importance of hope for environmental engagement among young people. Environmental Education Research, 18(5), 625–642. Ojala, M. (2015). Hope in the face of climate change: Associations with environmental engagement and student perceptions of teachers’ emotion communication style and future orientation. The Journal of Environmental Education, 46(3), 133–148. Ojala, M. (2016). Facing anxiety in climate change education. Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, 21, 41–56. Ojala, M., Cunsolo, A., Ogunbode, C. A., & Middleton, J. (2021). Anxiety, worry, and grief in a time of environmental and climate crisis: A narrative review. Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 46, 35–58. Pihkala, P. (2016). The pastoral challenge of the eco-reformation: Environmental anxiety and Lutheran ‘eco-reformation’. Dialog: A Journal of Theology, 55(2), 131–140. Pihkala, P. (2018a). Death, the environment, and theology. Dialog, 57(4), 287–294. Pihkala, P. (2018b). Eco-anxiety, tragedy, and hope: Psychological and spiritual dimensions of climate change. Zygon. Journal of Religion and Science, 53(2), 545–569. Pihkala, P. (2019). Climate Anxiety. MIELI Mental Health Finland.

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Pihkala, P. (2020). Anxiety and the ecological crisis: An analysis of eco-anxiety and climate anxiety. Sustainability, 12(19), 1–20. Pihkala, P. (2022a). Eco-anxiety and pastoral care: Theoretical considerations and practical suggestions. Religions, 13(3), 1–20. Pihkala, P. (2022b). Toward a taxonomy of climate emotions. Frontiers in Climate, 3, 1–22. Robb, C. (1970). The evolving machine – The larger context of modern technology. Electronics and Power, 16(1), 9–12. Robinson, T. (2020). Reimagining Christian Hope(Lessness) in the Anthropocene. Religions, 11(4), 1–11. Scheffler, S. (2018). Why worry about future generations? Oxford University Press. Scott, B., & Weems, C. (2013). Natural disasters and existential concerns a test of Tillich’s theory of existential anxiety. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 53(1), 1–15. Smith, B. (2011). Doom, gloom and empty tombs: Climate change and fear. Studies in Christian Ethics, 24(1), 77–91. Smith, N., & Leiserowitz, A. (2014). The role of emotion in global warming policy support and opposition. Risk Analysis, 34(5), 937–948. Smith, M., Davidson, J., & Henderson, V. L. (2012). Spiders, Sartre and ‘magical geographies’: The emotional transformation of space. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 37(1), 60–74. Stolorow, R. D. (2021). Heidegger’s angst and apocalyptic anxiety. Metalepsis: Journal of the American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis, 1(1), 120–122. Tilich, P. (2000). The courage to be. Yale University Press. World Health Organization. (2022). Mental health and climate change: Policy brief. World Health Organization.

Climate Change and Myth Jan A. Koza´k

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Social Myths . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Academic Study of Climate Change and Myth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Mythemes of Environmentalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

Within the confines of human culture, phenomena like climate change or biodiversity loss are integrated in powerful narratives that belong to the category of social myths. Social myths (very often based on historical or scientific facts) possess an authority akin to sacredness and can inspire strong moods and motivations in people. In this chapter, the scholarly debate on climate change activism as a form of religion with its own mythology is reviewed. The review is then followed by a closer look at the historical origin and development of environmental ideas and mythemes in the context of the climate change debate. Two main lineages are offered by scholarship: on the one hand Romanticism, Transcendentalism, and by extension the holistic, mystical, animistic, and “pagan” undercurrent of European thought, on the other Protestantism, especially Calvinism, with its focus on sin and asceticism. The main mythemes are then presented: the image of the “Fall”, the disruption of natural harmony by first the agricultural revolution and later technology; the visions of the looming apocalypse; the opposition of (Cartesian) dualism and (eco-friendly) holism; the opposition of sacred (wild) space and the profane (urban), corresponding to the opposition of pure to polluted and healthy to unhealthy. The mythemes are then J. A. Kozák (*) Charles University, Prague, Czechia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_145

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connected to specific secular ritual practices – diets, consumer behaviors, etc. – and situated in the wider context of contemporary culture. Keywords

Social myths · Mythology · Implicit religion · Alternative spirituality · Transcendentalism

Introduction While phenomena like climate change or biodiversity loss are real, their inscription into human culture has a specific character and dynamism. A vast and complex pool of information and research is absorbed and reduced by culture and society into simplified competing narratives which have strong moral and ethical components and which lead to social and political action. They thus fit into the concept of “social myth” as defined by Bouchard et al. (2018), as narratives that inspire strong emotions and ethos (i.e., specific values and norms) that lead to particular (rituallike) behaviors. In the case of environmentalist cosmology related to the climate change debate, some quasi-religious behaviors associated with it are those concerned with the ritual purity of certain goods (certified ecological products) and various dietary requirements (veganism, etc.), which are comparable to, for example, the kashrut rules in Judaism. In their radical versions, these climate change narratives present many features otherwise known from the religious imagination. Proponents of radical climate change activism “tell a story of an original and true natural harmony in the world (now the outcome, however difficult to reconcile, of un-guided Darwinian evolution), until this Eden-like condition was disrupted about 10,000 years ago by the rise of agriculture, soon followed by civilization” (Nelson, 2014, 253). It is a story of a “Fall”, but now without supernatural agents. After the Fall, humanity pollutes the Earth with increasing intensity – as the ages progress – all the way to a new “Iron Age” (the rockiest of the mythological periods), whose new name may be the “Fossil Age” or, more mainstream and general in scope, the so-called “Anthropocene”. In such narratives, the visions of looming ecological Armageddon are strong, and often prophesied to be irreversible unless major changes in human behaviors are quickly made (Nelson, 2014, p. 269). On the other hand, if humanity follows the right path, it will restore a more blissful state when everything was “powered” by renewable sources. A strand of scholarship (see the review in section “Academic Study of Climate Change and Myth” below) focuses on these mythico-religious aspects of climate change narratives and finds them vital for the understanding of the strong presence of emotional, spiritual, and existential features in the phenomenon: A full understanding of environmentalism requires seeing it as a secular faith, movement concerned with ultimate questions of humans’ place and purpose in the world. This

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perspective explains much about its development, its emphasis on individual action, the vehemence of its opposition, and its political failure in the last generation. (T. R. Dunlap, 2006, p. 1)

The concept of social myths is useful for locating the competing cosmologies underlying much public debate. One of these has nature as capable of quick recovery from human interference, especially if aided by wise management policies. Schwarz and Thompson (1990) call this the “myth of nature benign”, often favored by believers in free market economics. In contrast, radical environmentalists, who often also express egalitarian and communal values, depict nature as very vulnerable, and potentially damaged by any human activity – which counsels cautiousness about free market-based economic development. This is the “myth of nature ephemeral”. As Pepper notes: Each myth functions as a cultural filter, so that adherents are predisposed to learn different things about the environment and to construct different knowledges about it. In this way beliefs about nature and society’s relation with it are linked with particular rationalities, that support the modes of action appropriate for sustaining the myths. (Pepper, 1997, 3)

This chapter will first introduce the concept of social myths and apply it to the case of radical climate change narratives. It will then review the more general scholarly literature on environmental mythology, stressing the polemical nature of the debate and its contested features. The last section will offer a closer look at some of the most prominent mythemes found in the climate change narratives.

Social Myths While in everyday speech the term “myth” usually means something close to falsehood, for anthropologists, religious studies scholars, and others studying human cultures it denotes something else – a sacred narrative – and does not contain the negative valuation typical in common usage: Studies of myth almost invariably open with the caveat that the reader should not confuse the popular, pejorative usage of the term myth as a synonym for falsehood, distortion, or delusion with the scholarly usage which stresses that myths have unquestioned validity within the belief systems of the social groups which cherish them. (Flood, 1996, pp. 31–32)

Myths are powerful narratives that shape societies and their values. They are not scientific theories or legal claims that could in principle be proven right or wrong, but rather axioms that often ground the very categorizations of something as right or wrong. In what follows, the word “myth” will be used in such evaluatively neutral, and meta-evaluatively central, sense. The approach to myth presented in this chapter is informed by a series of recent works on modern mythology. One of the most influential is Bouchard et al. (2018), which synthesizes earlier discussions about political myths (Edelman, 1967; Tudor,

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1972; Bennett, 1975; Flood, 1996; Bottici, 2007) and presents the notion of “social myths”. Social myths possess an authority akin to sacredness, [. . .] permeate the minds of individuals, touch them deep inside, and motivate their choices, either by mobilizing them, by sending them forth in pursuit of bold plans, or on the contrary by inhibiting them. (Bouchard et al., 2018, 8)

The same emphasis on the role of emotions can be found in the discoursemythological approach (Kelsey, 2017), “points to affective qualities beyond discourse that are significant to the salience of myth” (Kelsey, 2017, 14). Kelsey emphasizes that [a]ffective practices are more than just emotions since they are the discursive and psychological processes and interactions that both stir emotions and use emotions to communicate broader conceptual information, personal feelings, and social values. (Kelsey, 2017, 17)

The social myths of contemporary Western society are thus not to be seen as irrational aberrations, but rather as core structuring social narratives. Only some of these are explicitly religious (Flood, 1996, 31), while the majority are implicitly religious (Anthony & Robbins, 1990; Bailey, 2010) or secular. Some of these social myths are based on historical facts (e.g., national mythologies – see Chlup, 2020); some are seen as mere stories but with great social importance and impact( e.g., fictional myths – see Kozák, 2023); some are anti-systemic, contested, or taboo (e.g., some conspiracy theories – see Madisson, 2014; Robertson & Dyrendal, 2018). A special liminal position is occupied by mythologies associated with alternative spiritualities (Kapusta & Kostićová, 2021), which often lie at the crossroads of religious, conspiratorial, fictional, and political – e.g., narratives of ancient spiritual wisdom now lost because modern civilization succumbed to the lure of materialism and instrumental rationality. These narratives point to the ancients, and/or indigenous peoples, and/or other variously more enlightened and attuned communities, as models for a more harmonious relationship with nature and among people (see Wilson, 2004; Žižek, 2000, 70). This particular cluster of narratives is not only reflected in fictional mythology (e.g., the film Avatar 2009), but is also more generally diffused in the cultural imagination (Alber & Takvorian, 2021; Mehnert, 2016; Taylor, 2013), and may under certain circumstances take on political and/or conspiratorial form. What all these kinds of myths have in common is not the fact that people necessarily believe in their factuality but that they have a special, sacred-like status: they are fascinating, they are told and retold, they give people and communities examples to follow, patterns to imitate, moral values to embrace, cognitive orientation and mapping, and existential grounding. Environmental and climate change mythologies are, in at least two respects, similar to national mythologies. As national myths, environmental myths are generally based on facts. While national myths are based on real historical events

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(however selected and interpreted), climate change myths are based on scientific facts (with the same caveat). In both cases the facts serve as “anchors” (Bouchard et al., 2018, 50) for a narrative imbued with strong and deep affective content, which explains our place in the world and the challenges humanity faces. Environmental mythology is also intertwined with the mythology of alternative spirituality, as they share the same origin (the nineteenth-century reaction to the “dark side” of modernity: alienation, industrialization, rationalization, instrumentalization, materialism) and surveys confirm the sustained connection of alternative spirituality to environmentalism (Bloch, 1998).

Academic Study of Climate Change and Myth Describing environmentalism as a religion is not equivalent to saying that global warming is not real. Indeed, the evidence for it is overwhelming, and there are powerful reasons to believe that humans are causing it. But no matter its empirical basis, environmentalism is progressively taking the social form of a religion and fulfilling some of the individual needs associated with religion, with major political and policy implications. (Garreau, 2010, p. 66)

The mythology of climate change narratives has (until now) not been studied as a separate issue but is discussed in the literature as one aspect of the debate about environmentalism and religion. The scholarly debate evolved by “deepening attention to the role of myth in shaping environmental behaviors, to the bearing of religious thought on the articulation of an environmental ethic” (Berry, 2013, p. 454), when scholars inspired by anthropological studies of the interplay of culture and nature (Nash, 1966; Rappaport, 1968) noticed the role of cultural cosmologies that form the perception of and attitude to nature (Wright, 1970; Passamore, 1974; Toynbee, 1976). One of the most influential early texts in this debate is Lynn White’s article “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis” (White Jr, 1967). White argues that the source of the current predicament lies in the fact that “modern Western science was cast in a matrix of Christian theology” (1967, p. 1206), so for example the concept of linear time and teleology which characterizes Christianity translates into the modern faith in perpetual progress. The main problem for White is the fact that Western civilization contains deeply ingrained Christian cosmological axioms: “God planned all of this explicitly for man’s benefit and rule: no item in the physical creation had any purpose save to serve man’s purpose” (White Jr, 1967, p. 1206). This is in contrast with the Antiquity where “every tree, every spring, every stream, every hill had its own genius loci, its guardian spirit”. Therefore, “[b]y destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects” (1967, p. 1206). White concludes that “[s]ince the roots of our trouble are so largely religious, the remedy must also be essentially religious, whether we call it that or not” (1967, p. 1207).

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The reaction to this thesis produced a wide field of scholarship with two main branches: 1) “Environmentalism and religion” or “religious environmentalism”, which studies the interplay of established religions with environmentalism and the religious sources of environmental ideas but treats religion and environmentalism as two distinct phenomena. Berry (2013, p. 454) offers two different subsections of this branch – “ecotheological apologism” and “sociological operationalization”, the first one situated in the humanities (often represented by theologians), the second one in social sciences. Ecotheological apologism reacted to White’s thesis with wide spectrum of positions from affirming his analysis to arguing against it – Taylor (2009, p. 12) distinguishes four types “apologetic”, “confessional”, “indifferent”, and “hostile”, and according to Kearns the ecotheological subbranch can be further subdivided into “Christian stewardship”, “eco-justice”, and “creation spirituality” (Kearns, 1996). On the other hand, the sociologists focused mainly on scrutinizing White’s claims by surveys and empirical research (e.g., Eckberg & Blocker, 1989; Greeley, 1993; Kanagy & Nelsen, 1995; Sherkat & Ellison, 2007). Contemporary studies of the type “environmentalism and religion” cover everything from religion-centered studies (e.g., on Christian environmentalism by Douglas, 2009 and on “greening” of Christianity by Carlisle & Clark, 2018; on Hinduism by Dwivedi, 2006; or on various indigenous traditions, e.g., Bird-David, 2003), by area-centered studies (e.g., Myanmar by Watanabe, 2019 or Turkey by Wickström, 2014) or on various current topics like post-secularism (Wickström & Illman, 2017), or critical race theory (Baugh, 2019, 2020), etc. 2) “Environmentalism as religion” or “environmental religion”. This branch is called by Berry (2013) “theoretical functionalism”, because it builds on the ideas of Émile Durkheim and sees environmentalism as a religion resembling phenomenon. It is precisely in this branch that appears most prominently the scholarship focusing on the mythological dimension of environmentalism. It is here that the concept of implicit religion can be found in wide usage (Bailey, 1997, 2010; Greil & Rudy, 1990; Anthony & Robbins, 1990; Jindra, 1994) and gradually also the concept of nature religion (akin to civil religion) formed (Albanese, 1991). Another fruitful aspect of this field of studies was opened by Thomas Luckmann’s (1967) The Invisible Religion, which allowed for new perspectives on seemingly non-religious phenomena like sports or pop-culture. The claim that (American) environmentalism is functionally religious appears for the first time in Brinkerhoff and Jacob (1987). Following this avenue, popular recreational phenomena related to nature or wilderness like hiking, camping, or surfing have been interpreted as secular rituals situated in sacred spaces and as modern counterparts to the religious practices for reaching the experience of transcendence (Chidester, 1996; Bartkowski & Swearingen, 1997; Williams & Harvey, 2001; Taylor, 2007; Hall, 2020).

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The wider effects of these scholarly trends are summarized by Berry: The notion that environmental movements were akin to religion made a noticeable impact outside the academic study of religion. Environmental historians found it helpful to narrate the rise of environmentalism using the terminology of religion: The distinction between priestly and prophetic roles served to distinguish between regulatory and visionary figures, and the movement’s ceremonial aspects (Earth Day, etc.) made sense through the lens of ritual theory. (Berry, 2013, p. 461)

One important issue that must be addressed here is the implicit or even explicit polemical nature of the scholarly debate on “environmental religion”. While many useful and recommendable monographs have been written that approach the topic from a relatively neutral position mapping its roots and the development of its ideas (e.g., Dunlap, 2009; Gatta, 2004; Milton, 1993, 2002; Pepper, 1997; Rønnow, 2011), it has also been noticed (Benthall, 2008) that recognizing or defining environmentalism and climate change narratives as religion and/or mythology is inherently problematic, because the notion of religion as an analytical category is not and has never been neutral. This implicit value judgment (“it’s not real, it’s not science, it is just a religion, a superstition!”) can be hidden in the academic texts behind the façade or rational arguments and historical narrative, but takes on full form in essayist texts like Agamben (2019) or Michael Crichton’s often referenced address to the Commonwealth Club (2003), which deserves a direct quotation, as it correctly captures parts of the mythology that underlies the climate change debate, but with the aim to delegitimize it, to proclaim it as a mere error: Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it’s a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths. There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe. Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday—these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. (cf. also Belanger, 2014)

Positions similar to Agamben’s or Crichton’s can be found also among the monographs on the border between academic and popularizing style, e.g., Rögnvaldur Hannesson (2014). Concerned authors of this sort usually do not refrain from judgment and present a dichotomy of “reasonable environmentalism” versus “ecofundamentalism” which is according to them akin to religious fundamentalism and therefore intrinsically bad. The issue with these authors is that while they bring in intriguing observations and interpretations (often building on the previous generation of more neutral scholarly tradition), their polemical tone and one-sidedness of the argumentation makes them a source that needs to be used with caution.

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Two very prolific academic writers on environmental religion (and by extension also climate change mythology) who deserve a separate mention are Bron Taylor and Robert H. Nelson. Nelson’s core thesis (advocated also by others, e.g., Vogel, 2002; Radkau, 2012) goes along the lines of Max Weber’s famous argument about the origin of capitalism, as Nelson (2004, 2010, 2011, 2014) views environmentalism as “implicit Calvinism”, with a clearly identifiable mythological narrative (elements like “the Fall, “sin”, and “redemption”). Nelson thus offers a more nuanced, better documented, and less judgmental version of the “Crichton thesis”. In contrast to Nelson, who is the most articulate proponent of the mildly negativevalued identification of environmentalism with religion, Taylor (1991, 2001, 2004, 2009) represents the opposite. He also categorizes environmentalism as a religion, but without the implicit negative valuation. As a scholar of religion, Taylor embraces the fact that environmentalism and climate change narratives have religious and mythological dimensions and sees a great potential in it. His approach could be interpreted as an elaboration of the idea from the above-cited seminal essay by Lynn White: “the remedy must also be essentially religious, whether we call it that or not” (1967, p. 1207). Similarly to the critics of environmentalism and climate change narratives, Taylor distinguishes two types of environmental religion differing in intensity: “green religion (which posits that environmentally friendly behavior is a religious obligation) and dark green religion (in which nature is sacred, has intrinsic value, and is therefore due reverent care)” (Taylor, 2009, p. 10). To understand how the ideas and mythemes of dark green religion form and spread Taylor uses the concept of environmental milieu (2009, p. 14) which is akin to Colin Campbell’s notion of cultic milieu (1977). Within these milieus, the “individuals and groups are remarkably receptive to each other’s ideas, and they generally understand themselves to be in resistance to the cultural mainstream.” According to Taylor, “dark green religious and moral sentiments are embedded in worldviews and narratives that are believed to cohere with science—but they are also often grounded in mystical or intuitive knowledge that is beyond the reach of scientific method” (2009, p. 14). The difference between authors like Taylor and Pepper, who are sympathetic to environmentalism and more critical authors like Nelson or Vogel is clearly seen in the narrative they construe. Nelson bases his interpretation on the analogy to Calvinism, basically proclaiming that radical environmentalism is (side by side with, e.g., communism) a modern secular branch of Judeo-Christianity. In contrast to this, Taylor connects environmentalism primarily with the “pagan” ideas of animism, holism, and pantheism which gained popularity in the nineteenth century emerging as an antithesis both to established Christianity and to Enlightenment rationality and which are presently typical features of the phenomenon of alternative spirituality (sometimes called “New Age”).

The Mythemes of Environmentalism A short and concise overview of the main mythemes and elements of environmental cosmology, as offered by the historians of environmental thought and contemporary scholars (for a detailed overview see Kozák, 2024), can be presented as thus:

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1. Dualism versus holism: Environmentalism sees itself as closely connected with the idea of holism. All beings are connected in a “Great Chain of Being”, either conceived in religious and/or philosophical terms (“Web of Life”, “Gaia”) or in more concrete or academic terms like balanced ecological systems, feedback-loops, and autopoiesis. According to the philosophers of environmentalism, this underlying fact of interconnectedness has been disrupted by the advent of Cartesian dualism and the modern scientific metaphor of the world as a machine. The two clashing mythemes are then the Machine versus the Organism. There is a paradox hidden in holistic criticism of dualism as it creates its own second-level dualism where holism is the binary opposite of dualism. 2. Sacred versus profane space: The Romantics and Transcendentalists (who are perceived as the forefathers of environmentalism) reacted to the disenchantment of the world by re-enchanting the Nature. The newly expanding urban landscape is seen by them as a bleak, ugly, overpopulated, and polluted space of alienation and is contrasted with beautiful, spiritual nature outside, where all things are connected in healthy harmony. Especially wilderness is a seat of primordial holiness, a place where one can rejoin the Unity of Being. The wilderness then becomes a sacred space that needs to be protected as a form of a new naturalist sanctuary. This opposition of sacred and profane space is closely connected to the phenomena like trekking, camping, surfing, naturism, or nature tourism – most of which date their roots to the nineteenth century and its re-enchantment of nature. 3. The polluted versus the pure: The opposition of sacred and profane is closely intertwined with the opposition of pollution versus purity, health versus illness. Nature is pure by definition, while civilization is polluted. Civilization also bring pollution into the sacred spaces of nature, defiling it. Natural things are healthy, while the products of civilization, especially all things connected either to technology or industry are unhealthy. This mytheme has a strong impact on (secular ritual) behavior as it engenders a wide variety of dietary practices like raw foodism, paleolithic diet, veganism, etc. The symbolic markers “natural” or “organic” in consumer goods derive their attractivity from the “sacred” and therefore “pure” status of nature as rendered by the mytheme. 4. The three-stage narrative (historical): The historical development of environmentalism follows a three-stage structure starting with (1) original pre-modern holism, which is then disturbed by the advent of (2) dualism, mechanistic paradigm, seen as the “dark age” (thus being in clash with the mythology of Enlightenment, which sees itself through the metaphor of “light”), but there is a (3) new dawn coming, heralded since the 1960s, of a new holistic paradigm, that will supplant the erroneous and harmful dualism and will lead to a more “climate change friendly” civilization. If humanity keeps on following the dualistic Enlightenment program, it will not be able to deal with the climate change problems. 5. The four-ages narrative (cosmological): This narrative follows a similar “U-curve” as the historical one but takes place on much larger scale. It has several stages reminiscent of the myth of Four Ages from Classical Antiquity:

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(i) The original state of harmony, the “Eden”, corresponds to the tribal huntergatherer period of human prehistory. This is the “First Age”, “Golden Age”. At this point all was “powered by renewable sources” and humans adapted to wilderness instead of adapting the wilderness to themselves. (ii) The first “Fall” is the Agricultural Revolution, which ushers the “Second Age”, corresponding to the Antiquity and Medieval periods, when humans started “raping” Gaia with their ploughs and started significantly changing the environment, including massive deforestation and irrigation activities. This age also sees the rise of aggressive patriarchal religions, which allegedly replaced older peaceful matriarchal religions. (iii) The second “Fall” comes with the “Age of Discovery” (i.e., European colonization), followed closely by the Industrial Revolution. This is the “Third Age”, corresponding to Modern period. This age also sees the rise of the Newtonian-Cartesian mechanistic paradigm which reduces all nature to a mere material resource. (iv) The third “Fall” (ushering the “Fourth Age”) comes with the Technological Revolution, which is characterized by enormous rise of energy consumption (and material and waste production) across the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. It is this age which is unique because of the ability of humankind for a complete self-annihilation – either via nuclear or climate change apocalypse. Humanity is now living in this dreadful age after the third Fall and the doom is near. If people don’t mend their ways, the world as we know it will end in a disaster. The mythemes found in the climate change narratives do not exist in a vacuum but are elements of deep structures which make up contemporary cosmology and give shape to the shared imagination and ways of thinking. The same cosmology shows itself unhindered in popular culture – films like Avatar (2009), 2012 (2009), The Day after Tomorrow (2004), Soylent Green (1974), etc. – but also within the vast consumer culture, especially in the milieu of alternative spirituality (holistic, organic, natural products, the wellness culture). While scholars of environmentalism agree on many aspects of the cosmology (e.g., the “Fall(s)”, the apocalyptic expectations, the sanctification of nature, etc.), they generally offer two competing explanations of the origin of these mythemes. One group – e.g., Bron Taylor, David Pepper, or David Peterson del Mar (2014) – tends to connect the roots of environmentalist mythology with Romanticism, Transcendentalism and by extension with the holistic, mystical, magical, animistic, and “pagan” undercurrent of European thought, while interprets such as Robert H. Nelson or David Vogel derive the mythemes rather from the opposite direction – Protestantism, especially Calvinism, with its focus on sin and asceticism. A balanced medial position stressing both strands with similar emphasis is offered by, e.g., John Gatta (2004). It seems that the authors more critical of the climate change narratives tend to stress the Protestant linkage, while authors more sympathetic to it and closer to the position of climate change activists themselves tend to stress the holistic and animistic linkage.

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The equation of environmentalism with Calvinism, even if it is a fruitful research perspective, can at the same time be also a rhetoric strategy of delegitimization. While the study of climate change activism as a type of religion or a religion-like phenomenon has a scholarly tradition dating back at least to the 1960, the environmental mythology specifically is as of 2022 regrettably understudied and deserves its own field of studies which is now still in its infancy. This chapter is a synthesis of the state of the art from the perspective offered by the framework of the social myths and the discourse-mythological approach. This chapter focused on sacred narratives and mythological formations in contemporary culture and there is a chance the reader might misunderstand the spirit of the endeavor: discussing the discourses and mythemes and their formation does not mean that these are “mere” discourses and therefore the contemporary climate change issue is “just a narrative”. There is a reality out there which is the final judge of all science and speculation, however humans do not have a direct unmediated access to it. The access is mediated by the nexus of human cognitive and cultural apparati, which produces artifacts like discourses, narratives, or mythemes. These are basically biases, but at the same time the only channels of meaningful contact with reality, ordering the chaotic data into patterns, models, and paradigms. Thus, they are the “conditions of possibility” (mediating the access) and simultaneously the “conditions of impossibility” (always reducing, misleading, and distorting). The tension between what is real and what is mere mirage is always present when the social myths are analyzed, and the temptation to choose one or the other has to be resisted, as they are inseparably intertwined. Not only is all data theory laden, but within human culture all theoretical paradigms have their affective sides and are integrated with social dynamisms and shared symbolisms.

Summary This chapter presented the concept of the “social myths” and applied it to the narratives connected to the climate change. These narratives have a strong affective aspect and contain a number of motives and narrative structures known from mythology, therefore can be understood as belonging to one of the types of modern mythology. The climate change mythology contains mythemes of organism vs. machine, holism vs. dualism, sacred vs. profane, pure vs. polluted and diachronically construes a narrative of a primordial Fall (neolithic revolution) and future Apocalypse.

Cross-References ▶ Climate Change and Cultural Anthropology ▶ Climate Change and Religion ▶ Climate Change Conspiracy Theories

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Climate Change, Philosophy, and Fiction Marta Benenti and Lisa Giombini

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cli-Fi and Literary Genre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cli-Fi as a Genre in Literary Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cli-Fi as a Genre in Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cli-Fi and Thought Experiments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Notion of Thought Experiment in Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cli-Fi as Thought Experiment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Setup Scenarios . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Use of Imagination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Real-World Consequences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cli-Fi and Narrative Transportation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Narrative Transportation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Counterarguing Reduction in Cli-Fi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Proximity to Real-Life Experiences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Emotion and Identification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Both authors contributed equally to the conception of this work and read and approved the final manuscript. However, Lisa Giombini authored sections 1, 2, and 3 (up to the paragraph titled “Set up scenarios”), while Marta Benenti authored sections 4, 5 and 3 (from the paragraph titled “The Use of Imagination”). M. Benenti Department of Humanities (DISUM), University of Eastern Piedmont (UPO), Vercelli, Italy L. Giombini (*) Department of Philosophy, Communication and Performing Arts, Roma Tre University, Rome, Italy e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_123

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Abstract

This chapter addresses fictional narratives as a specific kind of fiction capable of eliciting particular effects on their recipients. The first section of the chapter considers the status of climate fiction (cli-fi) as a literary genre, and identifies a set of standard properties that qualify most works in the category. The second section addresses the specific fictional engagement prompted by cli-fi and discusses its relationship with thought experiments. The third section examines, from a psychological angle, whether and how climate narratives can induce changes in the recipients’ beliefs and attitudes toward environmental issues. The chapter closes by listing some of the research questions raised by cli-fi that still await exploration. In the conclusion, it is tentatively suggested that, although the experience of consuming cli-fi will not change the planet, it might nonetheless heighten recipients’ concerns and willingness to take action against climate change. Keywords

Climate change · Cli-fi · Fictional narratives · Literary genre · Sci-fi · Thought experiments · Narrative transportation

Introduction In the last two decades, climate change has emerged as a dominant theme in literature, cinema, and, correspondingly, scholarly studies. Such novels as Margaret Atwood’s popular trilogy MaddAddam (2013), Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife (2015), Ian McEwan’s Solar (2010), Tom Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth (2000), Pulitzer-winning Richard Powers’ The Overstory (2018), and movies such as The Day After Tomorrow (2004), Interstellar (2014), Snowpiercer (2013), and Don’t Look Up (2021) have been labeled “climate fictions,” or patterning after the more established “sci-fi, “cli-fi.” Vindicated in 2012 by reporter and activist Dan Bloom, the label is attracting growing attention from writers, audiences, and scholars in ecocriticism and environmental humanities (Mayer & von Mossner, 2014; Trexler, 2015; Mehnert, 2016; Johns-Putra, 2016; Ryle, 2017). This interest largely depends on the fact that most climate fictions deal more or less explicitly with a variety of themes that are pressing to our current society. These include questions concerning the meaning of life in the so-called Anthropocene; the role of individuals and communities facing disruptive ecological devastations and subsequent social crises; possible ways of reorganizing people’s lives so as to cope with dramatic environmental changes; the task of sciences and technology in the face of mitigation needs; the rights and duties we have toward future generations, and more. An additional reason for this increasing interest is the hope that cli-fi may be able to make the elusive nature of climate change more tangible (Ghosh, 2016). In the suggestive definition proposed by Timothy Morton (2013), climate change is indeed a “hyper-object” in that it is a real thing that however can only be seized in its

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disparate manifestations. As it is conveyed by scientific accounts, climate change is perplexingly both a global and a local phenomenon. It is perceived as occurring in an abstract and distant time, somewhat unrelated to the present-day situation, and there is also a great deal of uncertainty about the magnitude of its effects. Faced with these sources of confusion, scholars in literary criticism, psychology, and philosophy of literature have speculated that, by incorporating such a complex phenomenon and its social implications into works of entertainment, cli-fi may reveal dimensions of climate change that transcend the communication capacity of other nonfictional media (Trexler, 2015). This has contributed to making cli-fi particularly relevant in public debate today not simply as a new and original literary trend, but also, and crucially, as one that can have political and social impact. In this chapter, cli-fi will be addressed from a philosophical perspective as a specific kind of literary fiction, characterized by certain structural properties and capable of eliciting particular effects on its recipients. Among the many possible issues raised by climate fictions, three will be addressed here: the nature of cli-fi as a distinct type of narrative device; how cli-fi functions in soliciting the reader’s imaginative engagement; and whether works in cli-fi may be suited to generating changes in the recipients’ beliefs and attitudes as regards climate change. The chapter is structured as follows. Section “Cli-Fi and Literary Genre” considers the status of cli-fi as a literary genre or subgenre and identifies a set of standard properties that qualify most works in the category. Section “Cli-Fi and Thought Experiments” addresses the specific fictional engagement prompted by cli-fi and discusses its relationship with thought experiments. Section “Cli-Fi and Narrative Transportation” examines whether and how climate narratives can be seen as conducive to changes in readers’ and watchers’ mindsets about climate change. Each section concludes by listing some open questions that remain to be explored. It is tentatively suggested that, although the experience of consuming cli-fi will not change the planet, it might nonetheless heighten recipients’ concerns and willingness to take action against climate change.

Cli-Fi and Literary Genre In recent years, an increasing number of journals and magazines have claimed that global warming has spurred the creation of a whole new genre of fiction – cli-fi. However, especially among literary critics, perplexity remains about whether climate fictions should be considered as belonging to a separate literary and cinematographic genre. To a large extent, this is a problem for sociologists and literary and film scholars. Yet, at the basis of this debate lies a genuinely philosophical question, one that is worth discussing here.

Cli-Fi as a Genre in Literary Studies One intuitive way of addressing the literary status of cli-fi is by considering its relation to science fiction. Mainly concerned with the historical roots of these works,

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some authors argue that cli-fi should be considered in every relevant respect as a subgenre of science fiction (Milner & Burgmann, 2018, 2021; Whiteley et al., 2016). According to comparative literature critics Milner and Burgmann (2021), for example, cli-fi has broken out from sci-fi’s yoke and has later established itself as an independent strand within this literature. As evidence of this filiation, they insist that not only cli-fi works but also those practitioners who relate to such fictions – cli-fi writers, readers, publishers, film directors, viewers, and fans – mainly refer to what can be considered the science fiction “selective tradition” (Williams, 1963). In other words, they tend to acknowledge sci-fi as the legitimate ancestor of cli-fi. Moreover, they add that cli-fi articulates a certain “structure of feeling” (ibid.), i.e., a network of beliefs, tendencies, and ideologies that assigns a central role to narrative topoi of science fiction, including the use of postapocalyptic scenarios, dystopia, and the effects of technology. Not everyone agrees with this analysis, however. Relying on the multifaceted diversities of cli-fi works, other interpreters argue that cli-fi can neither be taken as a subgenre of science fiction nor as a genre in its own right. As literary critic Adeline Johns-Putra contends, cli-fi should rather be interpreted as a “topic found in many genres” (Johns-Putra, 2016, 267), such as science fiction, dystopia, fantasy, thriller, romance, but also in narratives that do not straightforwardly belong to any given genre, like social or psychological fictions. Indeed, while many cli-fi works may be categorized as science fictions describing postapocalyptic futures, a considerable number of climate change novels are set in the present and feature climate change as a political, ethical, or even psychological problem, a cause of anxiety and delusion for the characters (Johns-Putra, 2016, 269). A different view is advocated by those who argue that what we are experiencing nowadays “is just the beginning of a whole new world of literary and cinematic expression” (Holmes, 2014). British scholar Adam Trexler, author of Anthropocene Fictions (Trexler, 2015), the first book-length study of cli-fi in the literature, has a particularly radical take on the issue. For Trexler (2015), cli-fi should not simply be regarded as a distinct narrative movement, but also as one capable of transforming contemporary literature altogether. Engaging with climate change, Trexler argues, the novel will have to undergo profound innovations, adapting existing formal conventions to suit the new setting of a climate-changing world. All the tensions that are integral to the meaning-making of a novel – that between fact and invention, history and place, and society and interiority – will and are already being “radically reordered” as a consequence of climate change (Trexler, 2015, 15). As novelist Jeff Vandermeer has consistently stated “the entire time I’m writing [. . .] global warming looms over me and shines through me and is all places and in all ways is shining out and looming over. How can it not be in the subtext of much of what we write?” (Vandermeer, 2015). In this sense, climate change does not simply appear “into” novels. Rather, it spans a huge, diverse terrain requiring radical innovations of fiction tout court. As evinced, literary critics have little sense of whether any specific qualities make this ensemble of works stand alone as a genre (Trexler, 2015, 8). The debate is likely complicated by the fact that most literary and film representations of climate change

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are so recent that the related cultural phenomenon could be too fresh to be categorized once and for all. More generally, though, one might fear that this disagreement is doomed to remain such, unless it is possible to preliminarily agree on the larger question of what it is that makes a set of works a separate genre.

Cli-Fi as a Genre in Philosophy In philosophy, the debate about genres might be described as revolving around two main poles (Evnin, 2015). On the one hand, genres can be identified based on features they share (e.g., Suvin, 1979). On the other hand, genres can be defined by their specific historical tradition, which can be traced back to one or more ancestors (e.g., Evnin, 2015). Both these competing views have been shown to carry some disadvantages, as they are unable to account for certain important aspects of literary and more broadly artistic genres. Briefly stated, while the feature-based definition of genre struggles to account for the fact that genres change through history, the tradition-based one has difficulties identifying the constants in a certain genre in spite of historical changes (Terrone, 2021, 3–4). Lately, one way out of this conundrum has been gaining consensus, which exploits Kendall Walton’s (1970) notion of “standard features.” A given feature is considered “standard” if possessing it determines the work’s membership in a particular artistic category (Walton, 1970, 339–340). Along the same lines, Enrico Terrone (2021) has argued that literary genres such as sci-fi, romance, horror, noir, and fantasy should better be treated in terms of standard features, thus allowing for genres classification to be dynamic and open to innovations, and yet preserve forms of identity. Clusters of standard features are not to be understood as essential to a given genre. They are rather symptomatic clues of a work belonging to the genre. In this sense, while their presence can help us situate a work within a category, their absence is not by itself sufficient to exclude the work from it. Adopting the vocabulary of standard features seems particularly fit to capture the mutability of the continuously evolving category of cli-fi works, without forcing them into overly static genre grids. Adhering to the view that no boundaries can be erected between literary genres, novelist and scholar Matt Bell (2021), for example, has argued that we should adopt a definition of cli-fi that is as inclusive and broad as possible. Just as the climate crisis is a global and pervasive phenomenon, Bell maintains, climate narratives tend to rely on a broad variety of different topics, perspectives, narrative devices, and literary methods, depending on each author’s style, culture, and sensitivity. These include, for example, the effects of climate change on human life in the present and the future, on Earth and possibly in different settings; a politically and socially engaged concern, often addressing the climate crisis through considerations of economic and social inequality; the rise of authoritarian governments and the consequences of mass migrations; and a concern with the lives and survival of nonhuman entities such as plant and animal species, natural and human landscapes, genes, and biomes. From a stylistic point of view, widespread facets in cli-fi are the

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employment of techniques typical of sci-fi, fantasy, thrillers, and so-called speculative fiction: the use of empathy and emotion to devise and portray possible futures; the recourse to a combination of discourses from fields as diverse as natural science and history, politics and economics, religion and philosophy, as well as psychology and sociology; and the incorporation of dystopian, postapocalyptic, and catastrophic elements (Bell, 2021, 101–102). In this broad range of topics and approaches, it is possible to identify three basic aspects of climate narratives that encompass most of the listed components and function thereby as “standard features” for the genre. The first is the constant reference to climate science in the story. While cli-fi works may not necessarily be concerned with scientific accounts of climate change per se, many narratives use science to scrutinize the meaning of global warming for human societies and nonhuman beings. Scientific models and predictions entangle fictional vicissitudes in the narrative in a variety of ways (Trexler, 2015; Milner & Burgmann, 2018; Terrone, 2021). A common one involves including a scientist among the novel characters. In many cli-fi novels, scientists play a fundamental role, helping to frame questions about the meaning of climate change for the wider public, advancing possible strategies to respond to climate challenges, advocating for political environmentalism, and ensuring scientific respectability to the narrative speculations (Trexler, 2015). Many different types of science are practiced by cli-fi characters, including oceanography, botany, chemistry, geology, genetics, palaeontology, and sociobiology. For example, Clive Cussler’s Arctic Drift (2008) features a group of marine biologists studying changes in chemical composition of the Pacific Ocean’s waters; Susan M. Gaines’ Carbon Dreams (2000) assigns a key role to a biological chemist investigating the evolution of global climate in history; and Ian McEwan’s Solar has a Nobel-winning physicist pursuing a solar-energybased solution for climate change as its protagonist. A second important feature is the role played by climate change as what can be called “a determiner” for the narrative’s plot. In many cli-fi works, climate change performs a central function in deciding the development of the story, affecting the actions and lives of the characters, and drastically influencing the situation. Without considering the presence or effects of climate change, the narrated events could not take place, would appear unjustified, or could not develop as they do. For example, in the movie Snowpiercer (2013) by Korean director Bong Joon-ho, after an attempt to stop global warming via climate engineering, the remnants of humanity live in a train – the Snowpiercer – that circumnavigates an Earth covered by ice. Climate change is depicted in this movie as the “Big Bad” causing a tragic social struggle that wouldn’t make sense without the threatening effects of global warming. In Paolo Bacigalupi’s novel The Drowned Cities (2012), a postapocalyptic world recovering from an environmental disaster is plagued by an all-encompassing war where the old exploit the young, the young kill the old, and any permanent friendship is a risk. Climate change’s dramatic consequences figure here as the rationale for the vicissitudes happening to the two main characters and affect their choices. Similarly, N.M. Jemisin’s book The Fifth Season (2016) is set on a continent called “The

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Stillness,” beset by massive earthquakes and volcano threats, where human civilization must endure the fifth season, a period of recurring catastrophic climate disasters. Climate change shapes every facet of Stillness society intertwining ecological devastation with issues of environmental racism and historical oppression. The third standard feature possessed by cli-fi narratives is the impact that climate change has on the lived experience of the characters, their everyday life, relationships with other human beings, and mental health. There is an increasing trend in cli-fi narratives toward exploring the ethical or existentialist dimensions of climate change. In cli-fi works taking place in contemporary or near-future settings, in particular, climate change is addressed as a social, moral, and personal phenomenon affecting the characters’ psychological balance and causing distress or doubts. Climate change represents a profound ethical dilemma for the protagonist of Boyle’s novel DATE A Friend of the Earth – torn between a world that is falling apart and the rekindling love with his ex-wife – and for the young woman character depicted in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior (2012), who unexpectedly faces the scientific and moral impact of global warming right onto her family life. Alternatively, climate change is the prime cause of anxiety and delusion for the characters of J.M. Ledgard’s novel Submergence (2011), describing a couple’s estranging and alienating experiences with war and climate change, and for the protagonist of Jenny Offill’s Weather (2020), depicting a woman’s family life and her parental concerns about climate change’s impact on future generations. The theme also resonates in Cormac Mc Carthy’s Pulitzer-winning The Road (2006), which pictures a postapocalyptic climate-changed future deprived of hope, focusing on the intimate relationship between a father and his son. Importantly, most cli-fi works exhibit a combination of two or three of these standard features. For example, both Ledgard’s and Kingsolver’s novels have scientists playing the main character roles while at the same time exploring their emotional engagement with the problem of climate change. Similarly, in Mc Carthy’s The Road, climate change is depicted as the determiner of the story, yet the novel also focuses on the intimate, psychological intricacies of the father-son relationship. However, there are many borderline cases of fictional narratives whose membership in the cli-fi genre can be disputed. For example, in Adam McKay’s highly debated movie Don’t Look Up (2021), no explicit mention is made of climate change, yet the impending catastrophe symbolized by the approaching comet is a clear allegory for the climate crisis, tragically overlooked by governments, politics, and the media. The film, however, displays other standard characteristics of cli-fi, such as the presence of scientists among the protagonists and an interest in examining the emotional and psychological impact of the impending catastrophe on people. In Cristopher Nolan’s Tenet (2017), a sci-fi action movie revolving around the possibility of going back in time, climate change represents instead the determining factor of the events narrated, and science plays a central role in the development of the plot. Nevertheless, the consequences of the climate crisis are completely disregarded by the director, as the movie is primarily designed as a thriller. Also complicated is the case of the First Reformed (2017), directed by Paul

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Schrader. Here, although global warming plays a key role in the storyline’s unfolding and is investigated primarily from a psychological and existential perspective, science is almost entirely left apart.

Open Questions Given that the number of published cli-fi works will arguably grow in the future, it is reasonable to assume that the standard features characterizing the genre might also increase, decrease, or change depending on the evolution of the genre and the sociohistorical context. With climate change effects on society becoming more and more perceptible, what aspects, characteristics, or elements will define the new generation of cli-fi?

Cli-Fi and Thought Experiments In the previous section, we have seen how cli-fi can be defined as characterized by a series of standard features that identify works in the genre. But what is the specific narrative structure shared by cli-fi narratives? How do they engage their audiences? Based on the assumption that works of fiction invite recipients to engage in imaginative games that have specific rules (Walton, 1990; Currie, 1990; GarcíaCarpintero, 2013), this section considers the kind of imaginative engagement elicited by cli-fi and, leveraging on its standard features, it suggests that it functions much like thought experiments do.

The Notion of Thought Experiment in Philosophy The notion of thought experiment has a venerable tradition in philosophy. Broadly conceived, thought experiments are imaginative processes that allow one to get a grip on some aspect of reality by imagining a certain experimental setup from which certain consequences are expected to follow. While some thought experiments make up for the physical, technological, or ethical impossibility to run their real-world counterpart, others aim at shedding light on particularly abstract states of affairs, providing examples for conceptual analysis, or at supporting or countering particular theories (Brown & Fehige, 2019). When performing a thought experiment, the subject is asked to imagine a given initial situation. After visualizing the context of departure, she is invited to attend to some consequences happening in the postulated scenario, which lead her to draw some conclusions. Typically, such conclusions are meant to apply not only to the situation one is asked to imagine but also beyond it, as, for example, to facts taking place in the real world; theories about reality or a specific portion of it; or common sense assumptions concerning a certain state of the matter. For example, the well-known Twin Earth experiment (Hilary, 1973) has consequences that impact not only the fictional scenario where the experiment takes place (the Twin Earth universe) but also the reality outside this imaginative setup, namely

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our semantic theories. In a similar way, extending beyond its specific fictional scenario, the Trolley Problem (Foot, 1967) allows us to probe our moral intuitions as to whether an action’s moral value is determined solely by its outcome. In both cases, understanding is gained in an intuitive manner without necessarily requiring specific technical preconceptions or backgrounds (Wiltsche, 2019).

Cli-Fi as Thought Experiment Relevantly for our present investigation, the debate about thought experiments crosses over into the one about fictional narratives. A tight analogy has been invoked between fictional narratives and thought experiments based on the fact that they both mobilize imagination and have a basic narrative structure, comprising a setup, a development, and some conclusions. Philosophers have often appealed to these and other structural resemblances to address the contentious question of how it is possible to learn from literature (e.g., Davies, 2007; Elgin, 2014; Swirski, 2007). While the applicability of the analogy holding between literary fiction and paradigmatic thought experiments can be debated (Egan, 2016; Huemer, 2019), the structure of thought experiments seems particularly effective when it comes to accounting for the nature of cli-fi as a narrative genre.

Setup Scenarios First of all, just like thought experiments, climate fictions invite us to engage in a certain scenario that sets up more or less explicitly the conditions and the constraints of our imaginings. Cli-fi scenarios usually involve, either in the background or in the foreground, the phenomenon of climate change, which takes the shape of one or a combination of the standard features of the genre listed above. Consider, for example, the 1973 movie Soylent Green, often listed among the ancestors of nowadays climate fictions. The viewer is immediately immersed in a (at that time, for the film is set in 2022) futuristic New York City where some unspecified climate catastrophes, along with pollution and overpopulation, have caused famines and the consequent shortages of food and water. The distance between the few rich and the overwhelming mass of poor and homeless has become so wide that the elite lives in fortified houses, buying real food on the black market, while the rest of the population feeds on tasteless and odorless synthetic tablets. In addition, human relationships are described as reduced to violence and exploitation (women are treated literally as furniture for the rich’s apartments and the starving poor are wiped out by bulldozers). To take another prominent example, the setup conditions of the award-winning film Interstellar combine the impact on the characters’ affective lives of a near-future Earth tormented by the progressive reduction of food and water resources, with a massive presence of sciences – biology, physics, and aerospace engineering – articulating the terms of the narrative. From the very beginning of the story, scientific discourses, data, and forecasts about future climate

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changes frame the arena, define the conceptual setup, and guide the viewers’ understanding of the complex narrated events. Analogously, engineering attempts to stop global warming constitute the background of Snowpiercer, along with extreme living and social conditions that brutally affect the lives of all the train inhabitants.

The Use of Imagination Another element that makes thought experiments particularly apt to account for the specific engagement prescribed by cli-fi is the way in which such narratives prescribe entering a scenario and following its consequences by using the imagination. Just like in thought experiments, this kind of imaginative engagement is such that the imaginer visualizes the described context, rather than simply thinking that something might be the case. Precisely in virtue of this capacity to elicit imaginative processes, thought experiments are used in philosophy and beyond, for they give us instructions to vividly represent situations with which we are not in direct contact, but consideration of which might affect our convictions (Livingston & Pettersson, 2016). Being narratives, cli-fi works are explicitly designed to elicit imaginings in recipients. By adopting an imaginative attitude toward the story contents, they engage one to enter a given imaginary scenario, become absorbed, and follow its development. This process turns the narrated facts – ranging from environmental descriptions to the character’s inner beliefs, desires, and feelings – into observables, thereby helping close “the gap between theoretical concept and empirical fact” (Wiltsche, 2019, 3684). The adoption of a “quasi-observational” attitude (Gendler, 2004) allows the recipients of cli-fi to undergo life-like experiences within the worlds depicted and to empathize with those characters who are portrayed as directly experiencing environmental issues. The gap between theoretical conceptions about climate change and empirical facts is thereby reduced for the recipient. In a motto, by exploiting imaginative processes elicited by its narrative structure, cli-fi makes us see climate change rather than merely inviting us to think about it. For example, as soon as we get absorbed in McCarthy’s The Road, we have the impression of seeing the desolate, postapocalyptic landscape where the plot unfolds, hence feeling – or empathizing with the feelings of – a deep, excruciating fear for a beloved one when confronted with a hopeless fate. Even in an extremely realistic scenario such as that of Woman at War (2018), whose plot does not explicitly leverage environmental catastrophes, imaginative mechanisms make us feel close to the protagonist’s motivations for sabotaging the local aluminium industry, so that we can seize the conflict she faces when her environmentalist activism threatens her family plans. Other cli-fi works manage to make the scientific causes and effects of climate change readily available for their readers’ imaginings. T. Coraghessan Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth, for instance, puts readers in direct touch with events whose extreme outcomes are only forecasted by climate scientists, such as monsoonlike rains, unbearable temperatures, deforestation, and overpopulation.

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Real-World Consequences Finally, much like thought experiments, most climate fictions have consequences that affect not only the world depicted by the narrative but also our own views and expectations about reality, with which the fictional world shares many important features. Imaginings about the consequences of global warming and its social and psychological effects that have been stimulated by the story may affect the real world in which we inhabit. In this way, climate fictions may allow us to understand something that extends beyond the boundaries of the narrated story. Importantly, this understanding does not necessarily consist of increased scientific knowledge of the world. Cli-fi seems to promote our comprehension of climate change and its implications in a way that differs from that provided by scientific information. While scientific information focuses on collecting, justifying, and proving scientific facts about the climate, cli-fi narratives, in virtue of their thought experiment-like structure, may promote an understanding of the immediate consequences of climate change. Instead of clarifying the inner causes and measurable effects of climate change, they make it relatable how certain implications of global warming would affect the social, relational, and emotional dimensions of human existence. Scholars theorize that one important way through which climate fictions may foster this process of understanding is by bringing the complex phenomenon of climate change under the imaginer’s cognitive control (Ghosh, 2016; Wiltsche, 2019). They may do so by designing scenarios that seek a balance between ours and the fictional world, through which consequences of the climate crisis can be made intelligible in an intuitive and nontechnical manner. Arguably, if such imaginary scenarios did not take into account familiar experiences and everyday situations, recipients might find it more difficult to draw meaningful connections between the story and their actual reality (Wiltsche, 2019, 3690). On the other hand, if imaginary scenarios did not diverge from actual reality through fictional devices, recipients might find it difficult to identify the consequences of climate change, which in many cases remain concealed or hidden in media accounts of the phenomenon. In conclusion, it is worth underlining that not all climate fictions present climate change and global warming as real or occurring within their own experimental scenarios. Thought experiments that take off from cli-fi narratives need not assume the reality of climate change as their premise. On the contrary, cli-fi novelists, screenwriters, or directors might take a skeptical view on, or even go as far as to deny environmental threats. This is the case of Michael Crichton’s controversial novel State of Fear, where the author’s doubts on global warming are conveyed through the use of a scientific-like apparatus including graphs, footnotes, appendices, and scientific references. This, however, does not prevent the issue of climate change – be it real, forecasted, questioned, or even denied – from constituting the core of the thought experiment elicited by the work, providing a getaway to a more direct understanding of an otherwise ungraspable phenomenon.

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Open Questions The analogy between works of cli-fi and thought experiments can be questioned on the basis of the same objections generally raised against the analogy between narrative in general and thought experiments. Although the notion of thought experiment can help account for the cognitive value of works of cli-fi, there may be limitations to this model (Egan, 2016; Huemer, 2019). Not all genres of fictional narratives are experienced by recipients as if they were inviting us to create a setup scenario in our mind, observe what happens, and draw some conclusion. Fictional narratives that aim for an accurate depiction of a certain political, historical, or social situation, for example, may not be properly approached by recipients as thought experiments. In the case of climate change–themed fictional works, how far can the notion of a thought experiment be extended? Furthermore, one could wonder what type of understanding is fostered by climate narratives and how it relates to scientific or fact-based nonfictional knowledge. This issue gets to the heart of what it means for fiction to be distinguished from fact. Fiction is generally understood as a fabrication distinct from scientific representation. Yet, as said, many cli-fi novels and movies attribute a key function to climate science in the story, thus evading the tension between scientific prediction and fiction. This raises the critical issue of what it means, for a fictional work, to contain scientific facts or truths, particularly those associated with natural sciences. Are the evidence-based assumptions of climate science, including natural and anthropogenic facts, distorted or misconstrued by being portrayed as fiction (Trexler, 2015)?

Cli-Fi and Narrative Transportation In the previous section, we saw that cli-fi may have the potential to increase our understanding of what it means to live in the kind of world that our increasingly negative scientific reports about climate change purport to describe. But what mental underpinnings are responsible for this process? And how to explain its possible effect? In this section, we address these issues by introducing the psychological mechanisms involved in cli-fi consumption and by surveying their implications.

Narrative Transportation Philosophers and psychologists have provided good reasons to believe that fiction consumption can influence recipients’ beliefs and resulting behaviors. What is debatable, however, is the way in which this influencing works. One widespread answer in psychology makes appeal to so-called “narrative transportation” (Gerrig, 1993; Green & Brock, 2000). The phenomenology of narrative transportation is rather common: we all have undergone the experience of being so immersed in reading a novel or watching a movie that we lose track of time, forget about what is going on in the world around

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us, feel deeply affected by the story, or all these things together. Such phenomenology and its underlying psychological mechanisms have been metaphorically described by Richard Gerrig (1993, 10–11) as a journey. Accordingly, readers or watchers are transported to the different world depicted by the narrative; some of the bridges connecting their world of origin to the destination world become temporarily inaccessible, and they come back from the journey somewhat changed by that experience. Along the lines drawn by Gerrig, many psychologists have provided evidence that corroborates the felicity of this metaphor (Green & Brock, 2000; Dal Cin et al., 2004; Hinyard & Kreuter, 2007; Mazzocco et al., 2010; Hormes et al., 2013; Johnson et al., 2013, among others). Transportation is defined by these scholars as a mental process whose main constituents are the focus of attention toward the narrated world, emotional reactions to the narrative, and mental imagery about its content. This process is understood as producing changes in the network of beliefs of the audience, such that it may influence their dispositions to act in the real world. Psychological literature typically refers to this phenomenon as “narrative persuasion” (Green & Brock, 2002; De Graaf et al., 2012; Moyer-Gusé & Dale, 2017). Transportation is typically characterized by three psychological mechanisms that play a significant role in the way we get immersed in the narrative and, most importantly, in how we “come back” to the real world. Firstly, there is the reduction of counterarguing induced by the narrative. When immersed, readers and watchers tend to decrease their tendency to cast doubts, criticize, critically evaluate the story, and the information it conveys (Green & Brock, 2000, 703). A second important feature is narrative’s capacity to make the narrated experiences akin to real, personal experiences. Imagination in general and mental imagery in particular are usually considered responsible for this effect. Finally, an important role is played by the feelings the narrative arouses toward the story’s characters (Green & Brock, 2000, 719; De Graaf et al., 2012). Empathy for characters can indeed bring recipients closer to the narrated experiences and the beliefs such characters entertain. But what happens when recipients are imaginatively confronted with fictional narratives concerned with climate change? And how can specific aspects of cli-fi have an impact on the process of transportation?

Counterarguing Reduction in Cli-Fi The first element to consider is that the counterarguing reduction stimulated by narrative immersion may have an important effect in making cli-fi consumers more sensitive to climate change concerns. Based on the idea that criticism requires not only some cognitive ability but also the motivation to put it at work (Gilbert et al., 1993), psychologists suggest that transported audiences may be less likely to dispute what is stated in a narrative. Interrupting the narrative flow to counterargue some of its features would indeed diminish the pleasure one takes in it, and therefore the required motivation. Moreover, since narratives are usually proposed with the intent to entertain rather than offer information or convey scientific truths, they are

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seldomly perceived by recipients as attempts to modify their attitudes. Therefore, they do not provide many explicit invitations for critical thinking and counterarguing, which result, at least partly, in appearing inhibited (Green & Brock, 2000, 703). This seems especially relevant in the case of fictions addressing climate science. The narrative-induced lowering of cognitive resistance may contribute to making recipients more receptive toward what is being narrated. One prominent example of a cli-fi work whose power to affect watchers’ beliefs and dispositions to act has been empirically assessed is the popular movie The day after tomorrow. The research led by Anthony Leiserowitz showed that the movie had “a considerable impact on the global-warming risk perceptions” of moviegoers and partially shifted their “conceptual models of how global warming [. . .] work,” even more than official scientific risk communications (Leiserowitz, 2004, 24–28). Overall, most watchers declared that they were more inclined to consider climate change as a national priority and to take action to reduce emissions and engage in personal, political, and social action. Filling in an existing gap in the experimental literature, Matthew SchneiderMayerson et al. (2020) tested the persuasive impact of narrative transportation on cli-fi readers instead of moviegoers. Participants were selected among American citizens who considered global warming as a real and human-caused phenomenon but underestimated the seriousness of its consequences. Those in the “treatment” groups were given short cli-fi stories to read, while those in the control group were given a short story unrelated to climate change. Before and after the reading, all participants were asked to rate their own beliefs, worries, and hopes concerning global warming. In addition, individual experiences of transportation were also rated. Researchers found that both cli-fi stories positively affected participants’ beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors about global warming and its anthropogenic nature, and increased their risk perception (Schneider-Mayerson et al., 2020, 6). Moreover, readers’ narrative transportation was found to play a significant mediation role in fostering these effects (Schneider-Mayerson et al., 2020, 10).

Proximity to Real-Life Experiences Narrative’s power to make narrated experiences look like real-life experiences appear as a second important factor for narrative immersion in climate fictions. According to Green and Brock (2002), who authored the “Transportation-Imagery Model of Narrative Persuasion,” mental imaging, or the capacity to form images in one’s mind, plays a crucial role in the transportation process. By activating the “mind’s eye,” imagineers undergo quasi-perceptual experiences where they have the impression of directly experiencing what they are actually only imagining. It has been observed that perceptual and mental imagery episodes can be so phenomenally similar that fictional events may be misremembered as real insofar as the memories they give rise to have a similar degree of vividness to real memories (Henkel et al., 2000; Gendler, 2004). As long as real, personal experiences are fundamental in grounding one’s beliefs, it is reasonable to suppose that narrative-elicited mental imagery can do the same.

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This effect constitutes an important tool for enabling the imagination of potential climate futures. As has been empirically confirmed (Schneider-Mayerson, 2018), vivid depictions of weird weather and natural disasters allow readers to visualize the consequences of climate change in a more impactful way, leading to stronger personal engagement. Strong images of the effects of global warming deepen our imagination of climate futures and make these futures easier for us to grasp, recall, and relate to our personal experiences. Similarly, Schneider-Mayerson (2018) reports many instances of cli-fi readers who have increased their awareness of “our reliance on and embeddedness in fragile ecosystems” (Schneider-Mayerson, 2018, 486). While not being particularly impressed by scientific facts of drought, sea-level rise, and species extinction, subjects in the survey attested to the value of cli-fi as a tool for enabling the imagination of the social, cultural, and political repercussions of climate change and their potential impact on daily life. A further crucial element that contributes to explaining the possible effects of narrative transportation in climate fictions is the fact that people tend to estimate the likelihood of a phenomenon based on their ability to imagine its occurrence. Studies in cognitive psychology have shown that the probability of events is standardly assessed “by the ease with which the relevant instances [of the event] come to mind” (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973, 221). Accordingly, the easier an event is for us to recall in our minds, the more likely its occurrence will be estimated. For example, we tend to consider a car accident more probable after seeing a crashed vehicle on the road (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973, 230), as we have images of the event that we can mentally refer to. This mechanism is known as “availability heuristic” (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973; Gerrig, 1993; Strange & Leung, 1999). Cli-fi novels and movies make climatic scenarios and their consequences heuristically available to the consumer as tangible and detailed events, easier to manage cognitively and thus more likely to happen. Moreover, given that individuals have difficulty visualizing future periods beyond 50 years, if not less (Tonn et al., 2006), memorable literary and cinematographic depictions can enable audiences to extend their imagination into distant climate futures otherwise hard to grasp. For instance, people may perceive the environmental consequences of climate change such as drought and floods as more real after reading novels such as Claire Vaye Watkins’ Gold Fame Citrus (2015) or Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow (2013), while a movie like Interstellar may make a future global famine appear more looming.

Emotion and Identification This brings us to a third factor that may substantiate cli-fi narratives’ capacity to affect their consumers’ beliefs and attitudes, namely the role played by emotions and identification with the story’s characters (Keen, 2007; Gibson, 2015). Empirical studies suggest that attachment to characters has a central function in narrativeprompted belief change (Green & Brock, 2000, 704; Green et al., 2012). When readers and watchers enter a narrative world, they become emotionally involved with the people they encounter there (Gerrig, 1993, 179–191). Although there are differences between fiction-induced and garden-variety emotions, an important part of

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narrative impact comes through identifying with a character or taking on their perspective. Recipients who identify with a character tend to feel the emotions that stem from the character’s experience, rejoicing with them over their successes and suffering empathically over their setbacks, problems, and disappointments. Studies also attest that identification processes are fostered by the perceived similarity between the reader/watcher and the characters, their worldviews, values, or ideology (Sestir & Green, 2010; De Graaf et al., 2012). Empathic identification may have interesting consequences in the context of cli-fi. By dampening social and psychological differences between audience and characters, identification increases recipients’ risk perception on a more subjective and interpersonal level – one related to family, relationships, emotions, and feelings (Schneider-Mayerson, 2018, 486). This is the case especially for those climate fictions that focus on exploring the existential and psychological impact of climate change on the characters. In a novel such as Offill’s Weather, for example, we are invited to share with the main protagonist her growing worries about climate change and the decline of Western civilization. As she dives into anxiety about the coming apocalypse, we are induced by the narrative to empathize with her emotional experiences – feelings of isolation, anger, and alienation. In Ledgard’s novel Submergence, on the other hand, we are faced with the emotional repercussions of climate change on the main characters’ personal and romantic life. By narrating the intense and impossible love story between a professor of biomathematics and a British agent, the novel dramatically intertwines the couple’s individual destiny with the fate of our species and planet. In this way, readers are driven to both sympathize with the unfortunate couple and espouse their concern for the prospect of extinction. In both these novels, what is depicted is the “structure of feeling” of a near future in which climate change is an undeniable, palpable presence for people. While such works do not provide their audiences with any vivid picture of possible climatic futures or offer any detailed scientific account of the phenomenon, they do encourage narrative transportation through character identification. Upon immersing ourselves into the parallel universe of Offill’s and Ledgard’s novels, we understand how stronger our sentiment would be if we took the climate catastrophe more seriously. Having put ourselves into the characters’ shoes, we might be more driven to reflect on how our family life, relationships, and bonds would be affected were climate change a real and imminent threat.

Open Questions Doubts can be cast on the impact and effects of narrative transportation. For instance, what is the actual duration of the belief changes induced by narrative transportation and what are its impacts on recipients’ behavioral changes? While narrative transportation in cli-fi has been shown to affect readers’ and watchers’ perception of urgency toward climate risks in the short term, recent studies highlighted how such effects radically decrease as time passes (Hormes et al., 2013; Schneider-Mayerson et al., 2020). Furthermore, one can question the kind of behavioral changes that cli-fi consumption might have. Studies suggest that while climate fictions can increase or stimulate climatic concerns in the audience, these environmental anxieties only

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seldomly give rise to significant behavioral changes in the audience, such as voting dispositions or willingness to participate in climate activist or protest movements (Schneider-Mayerson, 2018). Another source of concern relates to individual dispositions. On the one hand, not everyone is equally inclined to be transported to narrative worlds – and therefore be changed by the journey. The degree of transportability, the individual tendency to become transported into the narratives one engages with (Dal Cin et al. 2004), has been shown to play a crucial role in whether people are affected by a certain narrative (Mazzocco et al., 2010), thereby making it more difficult to generalize results about narrative persuasiveness of cli-fi works. On the other hand, it has been suggested that, when testing the impact of narrative transportation, more weight should be put on the extent to which the narrated story is connected with the recipients’ personal beliefs, dispositions, tastes, and interests (Ichino, 2019). In the case of cli-fi, one individual variable specifically affects the persuasive power of cli-fi, namely one’s preexisting beliefs about climate change. No matter how much one may be transported by a story, if one is strongly resistant to believing that climate change is real, the convincing effects will be undermined. Empirical studies have shown that engaging with cli-fi might not be enough to convert climate skeptics into environmental activists (Schneider-Mayerson, 2018, 492). Climate deniers might simply dismiss these narratives as proof that climate change is a fiction, exaggerated for dramatic effect. A final worry relates to whether negative depictions of climate change can make for effective environmental engagement (Schneider-Mayerson, 2018). The vast majority of cli-fi employs the disaster frame to depict climate change scenarios, which also reflects how we most often imagine and discuss climate change in nonfictional contexts. Fear-inducing representations of climate change, however, may have a counterproductive impact on people’s environmental concerns and related public engagement strategies. Research in environmental psychology has shown that negative and fearful representations may constitute an obstacle to successfully sensibilizing people. The efficacy of narrative transportation may be limited to positively toned texts instead (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993; Adaval & Wyer Jr., 1998; Lowe et al., 2006). When climate change is depicted as an unavoidable disaster, this may produce a sense of helplessness and a wish to avoid the topic. This has led psychologists to suggest that climate narratives highlighting resilience strategies, preparedness against risk, and opportunities for social innovation and growth have a greater chance to persuade their audiences (O’Neill & NicholsonCole, 2009).

Summary This chapter has investigated the growing branch of fiction literature that deals with the effects of climate change on human and nonhuman systems. Scholars debate on whether this branch should be considered as a separate genre, as a subgenre of science fiction, or rather as a cross-genre topic. Reasons for this

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disagreement are to be found in the fact that the body of cli-fi works is so vast and varied that it hinders clear-cut definitions. Some features, however, can be considered standard for works in this category. These include the presence of scientific information in the plot, the key role played by climate change in the development of the storyline, and a focus on the emotional effects of climate change on the characters. Such contents are conveyed in the narrative by means of a structure that may be seen as analogous to that of thought experiments in philosophy and science. Like thought experiments, cli-fi narratives postulate an imaginative scenario (normally based on climate change) from which recipients are asked to draw some real-life consequences. Moreover, similar to thought experiments, cli-fi stories help our understanding by making us experience what the social, individual, and relational implications of a climate-changed world are or would be like. The last section of the chapter has examined how this increased understanding may result in a change in audiences’ beliefs and attitudes. Psychologists agree that one important mechanism underlying narrative-induced belief changes is so-called narrative transportation. In the case of cli-fi consumers, narrative transportation could stimulate reduction of counterarguing, heighten perception of the concreteness of the narrated events, and favor empathic identification with the characters. Together, these elements might encourage audiences to see and feel climate change as a real and tangible phenomenon, thus increasing serious critical reflection and understanding. Cli-fi opens up several new research directions. As literary works about climate change continue to generate debate across multiple disciplines, we can look forward to a fruitful debate on the subject in the years to come.

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Climate Change and Fashion: At the Intersection of Ethics and Aesthetics Laura T. Di Summa

Contents Fashion and the Environment: Where We Stand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ethical, Aesthetics, and the Everyday . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Aesthetically Beautiful, Ethically Sustainable . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What Aesthetic Strategies Can Accomplish: More Sides to the Debate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

The attention that prominent fashion houses have been paying to climate change and environmental concerns has never been so prominent. Fashion week of 2019 and 2020 made such a concern a staple of the fashion discourse. Designers and fashion houses are exploring fabric alternatives such as Piñatex (derived from discarded pineapple skins), they are advertising their runways as “carbon neutral,” and fashion colossuses such as Burberry, Gap, Levi’s, and H&M are vowing to reduce greenhouse gas emission by 30% by 2030. However, the genuine nature of such intentions is not impermeable to criticism. While “sustainable fashion” – arguably the “it” vocabulary choice of the past couple of years – certainly has its praiseworthy sides, it is also, at times, another strategy to spike consumerism. In this chapter, I aim to investigate the viability of fashion’s current interest in environmental concerns in light of an analysis of fashion’s most indisputably prominent side: its relation to the aesthetic realm. Playing along the lines of the analytic debate gauging the relative impact of ethical values over aesthetic values and vice versa, I will consider how aesthetic demands can be steered by the necessity of ethical reflection without for this reason erasing, or at least hiding, the appreciation of style, glamour, and couture. I will conclude with a reassessment and potential solution, based on the inherently performative side of fashion, to the L. T. Di Summa (*) Philosophy Department, William Paterson University, Wayne, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_108

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question of whether sustainable fashion can be seen as a current, viable, and potentially effective way of responding to contemporary environmental concerns. Keywords

Sustainability · Fashion · Climate · Ethics · Sustainable fashion · Aesthetic value

A crucial point in the analysis of fashion is its commitment to both aesthetics and ethics, and to the synergy and evolving relationship between the two, a commitment that, I will argue, also has the potential to deliver, or at least cast a light, on the relationship between fashion and the environment, and on how to assess the theoretical and practical developments of contemporary debates on sustainable fashion. While I take this approach to be largely uncontroversial, it is nonetheless worth supporting its theoretical framework by looking at three distinct ways in which a combination of aesthetic and ethical approaches can benefit the philosophical analysis of fashion and the environment. The first reason is that recent work in aesthetics, and especially work on everyday aesthetic and aesthetic practices, firmly maintains the necessity of a dialogue between the two. The Kantian idea of a pure aesthetic realm, of disinterested judgments, and intersubjective universal agreement on judgments of beauty is at odds with much of the artistic production, contemporary and not. Aesthetics has a sociopolitical dimension, is rooted in everyday values, and has the ability to steer those values, thus fueling debates on the weight of aesthetic values over ethical values and vice versa. Fashion, with its connection to everyday life – after all, we all fashion ourselves somehow – offers itself to the nuances of such debates and also prompts further questions, for example, the influence that aesthetic choices on social media (think of Instagram photos and advertising) have on the values that shape personal and collective identity. Following from this point, and a second reason for this chapter’s belief in the necessity to contemplate both the aesthetic and the ethical dimension, is the intimate connection between fashion and ethics. While this is too broad of an issue to be tackled in this chapter, it is impossible not to point to the role played by fashion in relation to issues of gender, race, the body and its physicality, and the perception of fashion choices in society. It is a complex debate and one characterized by multiple dichotomies. Fashion is a powerful tool; it can even become a political tool for gender and race recognition and liberation, but it can also be a hindrance and ultimately serve the opposite goal – a dichotomy often emphasized in feminist literature (Wolfendale & Kennett, 2011). In the same vein, the experimental nature of fashion allows for innovation and for the reconsideration and questioning of values. It can become a poster for social, political, and economic campaigns, but it can also serve consumerist purposes, sometimes even when trying to advocate for more progressive ethical values. Lastly, the present status of fashion may very well be the main reason for looking at fashion and the environment through both an ethical and an aesthetic lens. Fashion weeks of 2019–2020 shared a uniform message: sustainable fashion. In Milan,

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Missoni handed out little solar powered sun lights by artist Olafur Eliasson during its show. Dior, meanwhile, garnished the runway with more than 160 real trees, all of which were set to be replanted after the show, and (already) environmentally conscious designers such as Stella McCartney doubled up by increasing the use of recycled materials. To crown everyone’s effort, the Kearing group, which owns some of the most prestigious fashion houses, used the occasion to announce the companies’ mission to become completely carbon neutral by 2025 (Blanchard, 2019). Reviews of the shows did not entirely hide the fear that such a strong emphasis on sustainability could wane soon, as yet another sensationalist moment to adorn the runway (Dixon, 2020). But perhaps it is here to stay. Perhaps an authentic move toward sustainability started precisely after Milan’s 2020 week, when people air-kissed each other and parties were canceled, when it became impossible to ignore the world outside and the growing fear of the Covid-19 pandemic. Arguments opposing fashion consumerism and promoting innovation are becoming progressively more visible. Small designers, which mainly advertise through social media platforms such as Instagram, curate their collections through images that emphasize diversity, social progress, and sustainability. Under the hashtag #whomademyclothes, thousands of people are bringing awareness to the ethics of fashion production while also sponsoring their creations. Nylon made fashion possible during the War; ethically sourced natural fibers can make it possible tomorrow. These are some of the reasons why we should consider both aesthetic and ethical concerns is revealing when looking at fashion, climate change, and sustainability. It is a feature of the present fashion world, a feature of the analysis of fashion per se, and an important area of debate for scholars working in ethics and aesthetics. I will begin this chapter with a section, of descriptive and informative nature, outlining the present status of fashion in relation to the environment and climate change. In this section, I will also address a few examples of fashion brands, designers, and innovators that are actively addressing the ethics of fashion by supporting and advocating sustainable approaches. The second section introduces a philosophical strategy combining aesthetic and ethical reflection as tools to address the ethical, social, political, and economic issues surrounding contemporary fashion and its effects on the environment. It is in light of such a strategy that I will, in the last section of this chapter, propose a solution, or at least an assessment of sustainable fashion. It is my belief that aesthetic demands can be steered by the necessity of ethical reflection without for this reason erasing the appreciation of style, glamour, and couture: ethical awareness and aesthetic sensibility and sophistication can coexist and pave the way to fashion’s environmentally conscious future.

Fashion and the Environment: Where We Stand There is a staggering and growing number of publications on sustainable fashion, and on the “revolution” it is supposed to initiate. Academic as well as commercial ones share a common feature: an emphasis on the terrifying data showing the evils of the fashion industry, its cost on the environment, on the economy, and on laborers.

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The fashion industry is the third most polluting industry on the planet, with a price tag affecting both the environment and the people working in it. In 2015, “the fashion industry consumed 79 billion cubic meters of water, emitted 1,715 million tons of CO2, and produced 92 million tons of waste” (Little, 2018: 12). In 2020, the World Economic Forum identified the fashion industry as the second largest consumer of the world’s water supply and sees it as responsible for 10% of the humanity’s carbon emission. In addition, 85% of textiles are dumped each year and the garments we buy often require dry cleaning or other forms of cleaning that send thousands of bits of plastic, with a virtually eternal degradation rate, in the oceans (McFall-Johnsen, 2020). We are beginning to see some responses. A first step in this direction has been the creation of a Global Fashion Agenda, first instituted during the Copenhagen Fashion Summit in 2016. The initiative introduced the Pulse Score which pools data from the Higgs Index, a tool gauging sustainability developed by large brands and apparel coalitions such as Kering, H&M, Target, and Li & Fung, and from the Pulse Survey, which is instead based on the opinions of experts on goals, processes, and results. In fact, quite a few large companies have made their dedication to sustainability clear. Patagonia, arguably one of the most well-known examples, is built around the importance of environmental awareness, but other titans such as Nike, Walmart, and Levi’s have also made steps in this direction. Nike has launched the Circular Innovation Challenge in order to promote recycling solutions, Walmart is a member of the Sustainable Apparel Coalition which investigates metrics for sustainability – from the use of materials such as hemp to nonpolluting dyes – and Levi’s has pledged to have all its products made in organic cotton (Levi’s Well-Thread Collection) and produced in factories supported by the Worker Well-Being Program. Nor should small companies be ignored. Smaller and boutique fashion brands, especially those targeting millennials and younger generations, have long been showing an investment toward sustainability. They focus on small batch production, organic fabrics, and they often advertise the buying of their products as an opportunity to contribute to humanitarian and environmental causes. In the past, these companies have occupied a niche spot, but thanks to online marketing and to the importance of platforms such as Instagram they are becoming impossible to ignore. In addition to perusing their offerings and collections online, consumers are informed about the sustainability of their practices. The incredibly popular Outdoor Voices, which markets athletic and leisure clothing, is an example. The website offers information on strategies, progress, and future steps. Wolf and Badger, a shopping platform, but also a media outlet addressing environmental concerns, sells exclusively products from independent and ethical designers. Reformation, a Vogue-praised Los Angeles company, makes everything from sustainable and upcycled materials. The list is endless, and it is readily available on everyone’s Instagram feed. A common feature of these companies, and something more visible in small companies as the ones mentioned above than in the case of multibillion retailers such as Walmart, is their ability to touch consumers directly. It is evident, from the efforts made by these companies, that the key for both commercial success and tangible

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results on the environmental front is to build a sense of inclusion through which consumers can see themselves as active participants in the progress toward sustainability. It is a marketing strategy; it is hard to doubt it, driven by the need to profit from sales, but it has potential. Purchasing stylish garments under the promise of also contributing to the ethical good renders consumers’ choices easier; during the difficult year(s) marked by COVID-19, perhaps especially during those testing times, the promise of aesthetic satisfaction and the reward derived from “doing good” have worked as an engine for these brands. The upshot is clear, and one can say it is promising: Sustainability can be achieved if consumers are educated while also lured by products that are both beautiful and environmentally conscious. Feeling part of the change without sacrificing a basic desire for new and attractive goods increases environmental awareness and can further lead to positive changes. I will soon return to this point. But what are exactly the changes needed, and, in turn, what are the messages that activists and like-minded companies are pushing? One single avenue of reform is not sufficient. If sustainable fashion is to be the future, change needs to happen on a number of concomitant fronts. In “Sustainability Must Drive Design,” Elizabeth Bye outlines some of these strategies while focusing on design aspects of fashion and specifically on the idea of a “multidimensional designer,” namely, a designer with manifest awareness of the product life cycle (Bye, 2020). The areas on which designers can have an impact are the following: material, patterns, fit and assembly, and use, care, and disposal. Solutions range from the adoption of eco-friendly materials and fabrics, to the reduction of waste. The use of CAD (computer-aided design), for example, can allow for better customization of garments which results in less discarded fabric sent to landfills. When it comes to use, care, and disposal, the change requires a shift in the way we think of clothing. The “I have nothing to wear” mantra is not just an invitation to mindless consumerism, but one of the causes behind the disproportionate amount of clothing that we keep discarding. Solutions can be found by purchasing garments that can work in combination (think of Donna Karan’s “seven easy pieces”), not only by selecting a smaller number of well-made clothes, but also by reducing dry cleaning and the washing of clothes, for clothes do not need to be washed as often as we tend to think (Bye, 2020: 60–62). A further alternative to relentless shopping is to promote subscription models; subscription models allow consumers to use an item of clothing for a short period of time; the item can then be returned and used by others. Rent the Runway is a successful example of this model. Because of the culture of images and exposure promoted by social media, being photographed in new and fashionable outfits has become almost essential; companies such as Rent the Runway offer this opportunity without breaking the bank. Bye also provides another interesting case study, Vigga. A Danish company, Vigga responds to a common problem for parents: children’s clothing. Children grow fast with new clothes needed very frequently; Vigga, through a subscription, offers quality maternity and children clothing that can later be used by other families. Reducing the environmental impact of fashion is also a matter of rethinking its geography. In addition to the problem of air transportation associated with the

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outsourcing of fashion production, a significant problem has been the industry’s reliance on cheap labor and unregulated markets that are not vocal about environmental, sociopolitical, and broadly ethical issues. Companies can intervene by developing lean strategies that cut production costs and allow to stay local; they can also actively implement policies to regulate production abroad, policies that in turn can be made available to consumers thanks to advancements such as the 2012 California Transparency in Supply Chain Act, which provides information on labor practices. A further, and sore, problem is social inequity. Robin Murray and Joseph K. Heumann, in “Ready to Wear: From Fashion to Environmental Injustice,” note the impossibility of talking about the environmental impact of fashion without considering social justice issues such as race, gender, and working-class struggle (Murray & Heumann 2014: 46–65). Recycling is a major issue in this respect: factories for recycling and waste disposal facilities are placed in countries where environmental regulation is minimal and labor is unregulated. Even the act of “donating” clothes to the Salvation Army, Goodwill, and other charities has an insidious downside: 95% of donations are not even unpacked; they are mostly shipped to Africa where they are bought in bales at 10 to 15 cents per pound (Murray & Heumann 2014: 55). The consequences are disastrous: The overabundance of used US clothes makes the production of local clothes futile; local factories go out of business leading to both unemployment and the disappearance of local fashion traditions. To complicate things further, Tansin Hoskins in a chapter entitled “Reforming Fashion” notes how what we often regard as attentive and environmentally conscious companies may instead be guilty of “philantro-capitalism” (Hoskins, 2014: 166–183). Differently put, to increase profits, companies embellish their advertising campaigns with positive sounding messages. An example is the footwear giant TOMS. Founded in 2006 by Blake Mycoskie, the company incentivizes customers through “BOGO” (buy one give one) and even has consumers enter a “Giving Trip” prize allowing winners to visit a poverty-stricken village to hand over shoes. But donating shoes does not help, it is hardly what Africa needs, and it is not a solution to poverty. These shoes, Hoskins remarks, are dumped there. In fact, these are not even the TOMS shoes one can buy in the USA; unlike the ones in Western markets, they are cheap plimsolls made in Ethiopia. In addition to tighter norms regulating the geography and consume of fashion, it is important to rethink the overall cycle of clothing. Many today believe that the key is not just better recycling, which, as seen, is already affected by its own set of issues, but upcycling. Upcycling is what needs to be added to recycling to afford a truly circular economy, namely, one that utilizes materials and products already in existence to create new products of greater value. Tyler Little gives examples of companies such as Matt & Nat, which uses recycled water bottles as the inside lining of luxury bags, and Rareform that makes backpacks out of billboards (Little, 2018: 36). Upcycling and the advantages of the sharing economy and subscription models as the ones described earlier are particularly popular strategies today; their popularity

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lies also in their aesthetic appeal – for upcycled products and the quick rotation of goods allowed by sharing and subscription systems allow for a constant set of “new” and thus more desirable products. A further and last strategy to work on the aesthetic appeal of environmentally savvy companies and goods is to rely on the advertising that can be offered by celebrities. The use of celebrities taps on the overall issues of likeability: If someone we already like and respect is making certain choices, we may make similar ones. The lineup of celebrities who have embraced environmental causes is endless: think of Emma Watson to Gwyneth Patrow (Minney, 2011). Such strategies are grounded in the importance of media and advertising and on their effect on everyday decisions. Media use and exposure are constant features of our daily lives; they are therefore likely to affect choices such as what to purchase and wear. In this section, I have listed a number of problems, and possible solutions, to the environmental costs of the fashion industry and to the possibility of embracing sustainable solutions. This is not meant to be a comprehensive list, and it only scratches the surface of a debate that involves discussions in environmental studies, fashion studies, economics, ethics, sociology, and more. The goal was to provide the reader with a view of the land while also hinting, especially through examples and strategies such as upcycling and sharing and subscription-based companies, that part of the solution, or at least of the discussion we should be having, is based on the awareness of both ethical and aesthetic features, and of their impact on each other. This is, also, the fundamental philosophical core of this chapter: Allow me to turn to this point.

Ethical, Aesthetics, and the Everyday Philosophers have been debating the relationship between ethics and aesthetic values since antiquity, and the debate is ongoing. In this section, I aim to connect such analysis with tenets from everyday aesthetics (Saito, 2001, 2017) and social aesthetics (Berleant, 2016) in the hope of clarifying fashion’s ethical and aesthetic stance in relation to the environment and sustainability. A first reason to rely on everyday and social aesthetics is that the debate on the environment and climate change is global – geographically and socially. Populations in different areas of the world are affected by changes in climate to different degrees, but the consequences of climate change are overwhelming enough to affect everyone on the planet for generations to come. Similarly, and as seen in the previous section, any discussion on fashion requires a global perspective. These are not insular debates: Everyone is called as a participant: they are debates about our everyday, the planet we currently inhabit, and the clothes we decide to buy and wear. Second, there is the attention paid to social issues. The practices investigated by scholars in everyday aesthetics are not only social practices, they are practices that, because of their connection to society and the ways in which we inhabit it, can have

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an effect on values and on our overall sensibility. Saito, for example, has shown how aesthetic sensibility and aesthetic choices affect the moral dimension of daily life and the decisions we make: There is a connection between everyday aesthetic practices and the normative discourse, one that can translate into actions toward better worldmaking (Saito, 2017). Furthermore, several of Saito’s examples are based on nature aesthetics and show direct engagement with environmental concerns (Saito, 2001). By relying on Yi-Fu Tuan’s notion of “topophilia,” which states that our attitude toward and resultant appreciation of a place cannot be dissociated from the personal, cultural, and societal relationship we have with it, Saito shows how participating in an aesthetic task can not only make one appreciate the aesthetic results of such a task, but also lead to positive results on the ethical, community, and social level. Attention to the environment is also visible in the aesthetic of architecture and urban spaces and their connection to the population inhabiting them and to how the place is inhabited, as Jane Jacobs aptly showed in her ground-breaking The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jacobs, 1961). We see this in the work of architect Shigeru Ban, the 2014 winner of the Pritker Price. Aesthetic solutions such as the ones used by Ban directly relate to phenomena like global warming and immigration. Think, for example, of his tents, which were used as emergency shelters in Rwanda, Haiti, and Nepal showing the necessity of integrating community and values into buildings (Goodyear, 2014). Built with light and inexpensive materials, most notably cardboard, the tents are harmonious and beautiful, while also easy to build. Ban’s aesthetic choices in design and materials contribute to the ethical mission behind his work by allowing us to reflect not only on the emergency conditions they address, but also on the basic human need for shelter and for the dignity that comes with it (Di Summa-Knoop, 2020). These examples, taken from everyday aesthetics, urbanism, and architecture, are significant because they are indicative of a connection with social issues and social practices, a connection that, as we have begun to see, needs to be established also in the case of fashion – as it would be improbable to think of fashion without its social and community dimension. But it is also important to notice how these examples cement the importance of the theoretical claim underlying this chapter, namely, that an ethical discussion on fashion must be conducted in tandem with a discussion of its aesthetics. The same principles conjoining the aesthetically pleasing design of Ban’s tent with their ethical purpose can be applied to the kind of fashion we want to be able to see, purchase, and enjoy in the future; sustainable fashion, briefly put, should aim at striking such a balance. We have then reached two points. The first is that an analysis of fashion and the environment can be conducted under the lens of debates in everyday aesthetics. The second is that, as a topic that can be scrutinized within such a framework, fashion offers the opportunity of looking at the normative effects of aesthetic strategies. To what extent can aesthetic choices inspire change and ethically conscious decisions in the fashion industry? Are there any downfalls? And to what extent is such a solution comprehensive? I will address these questions in the next section of this chapter.

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Aesthetically Beautiful, Ethically Sustainable In this section, I would like to outline a series of strategies that can pave the way for a more sustainable approach to fashion. What characterizes them is their reliance on the ability of aesthetics to lead to normative transformation, thus promoting a more ethically conscious understanding of fashion, its production, and consumption. It is important, before I begin, to outline two caveats. The first is that these strategies should not be taken as individually satisfactory, and we should not forget their significant shortcomings. The second is that, by pointing to solutions that stem from the aesthetic realm, I do not mean to dismiss other avenues to promote a greener and more sustainable future for the fashion industry. Ethical education, activism, radical political, social, and economic changes, the establishment of new laws and policies, etc., are also highly effective ways of improving the current situation. The reason why I am here choosing to focus on aesthetics is because such an approach has not yet been sufficiently investigated, and because it appears to fit congenially with a topic, fashion, which is primarily concerned with aesthetics and the ability and desire, of producers as well as consumers, to make aesthetic choices. Let me begin. A first solution is to simply produce beautiful and ethically sustainable garments without advertising or explicitly emphasizing a commitment toward sustainability or ethical choices. In this way, consumers can end up purchasing something that is both beautiful and sustainable without consciously realizing it. This serves the purpose of augmenting the number of sustainable clothes sold, but it is hardly supporting a cultural shift in how we approach fashion. One of the points emphasized in this chapter is that the issue at hand is both global and social: It requires collective involvement and awareness. While an ethical choice on the part of the designer, for making beautiful and sustainable clothes, is praiseworthy, it is not by itself sufficient. After all, consumers would remain free to purchase such items simply because of their aesthetic appeal, while ignoring their commitment to sustainability. Such a commitment should instead be intentionally manifested. But manifesting it is not easy, and the ways in which it can be manifested are not as straightforward as one may think. As seen in the second section of this chapter, commitment is often tied to profit goals; by itself, this is not necessarily a negative factor as it is perfectly plausible, and acceptable, to gain profit from ethically sustainable products, but not all cases are the same. To what extent are consumers truly informed of the steps taken by various brands and companies to improve on their standing? Are the efforts undergone truly effective or, as seen in the case of TOMS, barely addressing the issue? In addition, once consumers are persuaded that their purchase may serve an ethical purpose such as fare wages, recycling, etc., there is the risk that they may be unlikely to invest further energies in investigating how and to what extent such goals are reached. “Doing good” is important and noble, of course, but it is equally important to gain awareness of how companies and consumers can and are supposed to “do good.” Endorsing the intention of promoting

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sustainability is only the beginning: Clarity on the methods and strategies to be adopted is also needed. For these reasons, it is worth considering what changes can be initiated by relying on aesthetic strategies. Fashion belongs to the realm of aesthetics, and as seen, aesthetic choices can have normative power and help redirect the ethical compass of the fashion industry (and its consumers). In line with what is seen in relation to Saito’s take on everyday aesthetics, one can support sustainability by promoting a shift in aesthetic preferences. This solution applies quite fittingly to fashion. Fashion is often defined as the eternal recurrence of the new, and shifts in what is considered trendy and fashionable occur virtually every season. Athleisure, street style, the recent move to a more conservative “Victorian” look, the rise of vintage, heroin chic, and many other iconic looks are often at odds with each other, but they easily coexist, thus rewarding our need for novelty and diversification. Frankly, part of the fun of following fashion resides precisely in its experimental nature: What is “in” fashion? What is the next season going to be like? Investing on this feature of fashion can be a powerful tool to promote sustainable clothes. What if what I am admiring is not a colorful leather jacket, which is likely to have been manufactured with little respect for the environment, but one using sustainable materials? What if what attracts me about a garment is not the fact that it is new, but its ability to change overtime, to become some kind of a collection piece, something I can personalize and alter according to my desires and will to experiment? Saito, whom we mentioned in the previous section believes that environmentally conscious projects thrive when the local population is directly in the planning and overall design of the project. By making an environmental change “theirs,” a task their community had the opportunity and capacity to decide over, the project would have become more familiar, something they would have cared about perhaps just as much as something they voluntarily added to their backyard. In the case of fashion, a similar move can be enacted by making consumers participate more directly in environmental causes through the choice of sustainable garments that also fit, emphasize, and contribute to one’s sense of identity and style. One of the features of fashion is to define the contours of identity, both personal and collective. An aesthetic shift would entail a framing of such an identity that includes care and consideration for environmental causes. It is not just a matter of sympathizing with, say, sustainable fabrics; it is a matter of making consumers identify with such choices. Advocates of athleisure, which is today overwhelmingly popular, identify with a healthy and active lifestyle that is not at odds with a sense of refined aesthetic and design. When buying Alo Yoga, Outdoor Voices, etc., consumers buy into who they are, or at least into who they would like to be. What they are buying is an image of themselves, one they like and care to show. It is possible, I argue, to suggest a similar move in the case of sustainable fashion: “I buy sustainable clothes because sustainability is a value I endorse as the person I am.” I have been emphasizing the importance of the global nature of the debate on fashion and the environment, a nature that in turn calls for collective awareness and action. It is my belief that a shift in what we regard as aesthetically beautiful can aid

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activist efforts by instilling in consumers a sense of ethical responsibility, one that is powerful on both an individual and collective level. If what we regard as aesthetically beautiful is something that is simultaneously ethically sustainable and a way of contributing to one’s sense of personal identity, then the shift is likely to be not only aesthetically, but also ethically pervasive. The current climate, also because of the drastic changes brought by the Covid-19 pandemic, may be the right one to enact such a mood. In many ways, consumerism is less appealing than it used to be – with stores closing and laborers losing their jobs. A fashion world that looks at clothes as carriers of values and identity may, at this juncture, be more significant and desirable. The shock of the pandemic is also likely to make consumers reflect on the importance of a sense of collective identity, one that goes beyond national borders. This collective identity can only thrive in a world that recognizes global problematics, such as climate change, and moves toward a solution. Sustainable clothes are not just items we buy; they can become constitutive of who we are and will be in the decades to come.

What Aesthetic Strategies Can Accomplish: More Sides to the Debate In this chapter, I have advocated for an environmentally conscious approach to fashion and outlined solutions facilitating the production and consumption of sustainable clothing. But unlike most defenses of such goals, which hardly venture out of a reflection on the ethics of fashion, mine is tilted toward aesthetics. Specifically, I have been focusing on the ability of aesthetic strategies to lead to ethical awareness and a following shift in the way in which we think of the present and future of fashion. Fashion is directly linked to our perception of who we are; by making sustainable clothes a portion of our identity, by choosing those designs, we sign up for an aesthetics that puts ethical values at center stage. When aesthetic choices are safely grounded on identity and our ability to makes choices that affect who we are, they naturally assume normative power and become representations of ethical values such as the ones driving sustainable fashion. In this section, my goal is to explore the extent to which such a strategy, based on aesthetic choices and their relationship with identity, can also cast a light on a number of other ethical issues and difficulties associated with fashion. The connection between fashion and identity has potential, visible when, as advocated in this chapter, consumers decide to appreciate sustainable clothing because they are seen as contributing to the notion of who they are, but the strong link between fashion and identity is also risky. Two problems and areas of debate immediately come to mind. The first is that the kind of identity in place in the case of fashion is not simply based on values such as our regard for the environment: It has a physical, embodied dimension. When fashion is at stake, the notion of bodily identity must be mentioned and taken into consideration. Fashion is often guilty of advertising an idealized version of the body’s appearance, one that is at times blind to the diversity of bodies, sizes, shapes,

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proportions, etc. The advertised preference for unnaturally thin bodies and the lack of appropriate clothing for those wearing plus sizes are surely not unfamiliar problems to the readers. A second problem is that the relationship between fashion and identity is also a matter of culture and traditions. Western looks dominate the markets, and little attention is given to local traditions. And when minority traditions, trends, and styles are embraced, they are often replicated mindlessly and in ways that are borderline with one-way examples of cultural appropriation. These two issues (but others could also be mentioned) are tied to the question of sustainability. To what extent are sustainable clothes produced in ways that are respectful of the environment and of the bodies of consumers, varied and diverse as they are? And given the attention to the global landscape that is required in advocating a sustainable approach to fashion, what kind of consideration is to be given to local traditions and to the myriad of styles and ways of adornment we encounter across countries and populations? Combining the two questions, sustainable fashion looks at the future of our planet: To what extent does it take into consideration the bodies that inhabit it? The cultures that characterize it? These are questions that must be kept in mind by advocates of sustainable fashion, for without expressing a commitment to their importance sustainable garments remain items on a rack – objects to be purchased just as every other object. I cannot here offer a comprehensive solution, but I believe that the approach advocated in this chapter, an approach connecting the notions of fashion, identity, and sustainability, can offer a promising starting point. I defended the importance of fostering consumers’ personal investment by making them see sustainability not just as a “plus” in relation to what they would routinely buy, but as an aesthetic choice complementing the notion of who they are. When such choices are made, what is at stake is more than a look we may want to achieve; there is something about the person we are, or at least about the person we would like others to perceive. Direct involvement comes with agency, and agency calls for a broader understanding and appreciation of the multiple aspects of identity. Such an appreciation includes the look of our bodies as well as the culture and traditions that shape us. The choice of sustainable clothing will then have to coexist and complement a number of other choices that underlie our identity. If, for example, it is important for someone to wear clothes that evoke African sartorial traditions, then the choice of sustainable clothes will have to echo that choice and authentically coexist with it. Sustainable items that disregard such matters would not be perceived as contributing to one’s identity. By relating sustainable fashion to identity and to the importance of building and displaying identity through clothes, we necessarily merge the discussion on what is ethically sustainable for the environment with what is ethically correct when dealing with our bodily and cultural identity. Of course, this is not easy, but it is more promising than simply discussing sustainable fashion in isolation or on the same level of the plethora of other environmental issues. Difficulties will continue to emerge as identity is a complex

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and nuanced issue, but despite such difficulties seeing sustainability as a feature of identity and not just as an external goal can lead to more lasting results. The hope is for an aesthetic shift followed by an ethical one: The two can act in synergy. We can learn to see beauty in diversity, we can produce fashion items that celebrate such diversity, we can produce them sustainably, and finally we can learn how to appreciate, at once, the value of diversity and sustainability.

References Berleant, A. (2016). Aesthetics beyond the arts: New and recent essays (pp. 105–117). Routledge. Blanchard, T. (2019). Is 2019 the year fashion finally takes sustainability seriously? Vogue Britain. https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/has-fashion-finally-got-sustainable-2019 Bye, E. (2020). Sustainability must drive design. In S. B. Marcketti & E. Karpova (Eds.), The dangers of fashion: Towards ethical and sustainable solutions (pp. 43–70). Bloomsbury. Di Summa, L. (2020). Aesthetics and ethics: On the power of aesthetic features. Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics (JCLA), 43(1), 56–70. Dixon, E. (2020). The problem with sustainable fashion. CNN Style https://www.cnn.com/style/ article/the-problem-with-sustainable-fashion/index.html Goodyear, D. (2014). Paper palaces: The architect of the dispossessed meets the one percent. The New Yorker. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/11/paper-palaces. Accessed 12 Aug. Hoskins, T. (2014). Stitched-up: The anti-capitalist book of fashion. Pluto Press. Jacobs, J. (1961). The death and life of great American cities. Random House. Little, T. (2018). The future of fashion: Understanding sustainability in the fashion industry. New Degree Press. McFall-Johnsen, M. (2020). These facts show how unsustainable the fashion industry is. World Economic Forum. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/01/fashion-industry-carbonunsustainable-environment-pollution/ Minney, S. (2011). Naked fashion: The new sustainable fashion revolution. New International Publications. Murray, R., & Heumann, J. K. (2014). Film and everyday eco-disasters. University of Nebraska Press. Saito, Y. (2001). Everyday aesthetics. Philosophy and Literature, 25(1), 87–95. Saito, Y. (2017). Aesthetics of the familiar: Everyday life and world making. Oxford University Press. Wolfendale, J., & Kennett, J. (Eds.). (2011). Fashion. Philosophy for everyone. Wiley-Blackwell.

Part V Climate Change and Ethics

Consequentialism and Climate Change Mattia Cecchinato

Contents Introduction: Consequentialist Environmental Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The No-Difference Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Accepting the No-Difference Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rejecting the No-Difference Problem: Knock-on Effects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Making a Difference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Moral Mathematics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rule Consequentialism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Virtue Consequentialism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Individual Climate Action and Effectiveness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Evaluative Uncertainty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion: The Consequences of Consequentialism on Climate Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

The environmental crisis challenges the adequacy of traditional moral theories, particularly in the case of act consequentialism – the view that an act is morally right if and only if it brings about the best available outcome. Although anthropogenic climate change threatens the well-being of billions of humans and trillions of non-human animals, it is difficult for an act consequentialist to condemn actions that contribute to it, as each individual action makes no difference to the probability of whether climate change will occur. Or so one argument goes. This chapter examines the limits and possibilities of a consequentialist approach to climate ethics. It discusses various types of consequentialist theories applicable to the current environmental situation. It outlines outcome-based

M. Cecchinato (*) University of Oxford, Oxford, UK e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_59

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strategies to address the no-difference problem and to promote individual climate action. Finally, it considers environmental cases of evaluative uncertainty and how a consequentialist could deal with them. Keywords

Consequentialism · Utilitarianism · Environmental ethics · Climate change · Global warming · The no-difference problem · Inconsequentialism · Moral mathematics · Future generations

Introduction: Consequentialist Environmental Ethics Though it comes in many forms, it is characteristic of consequentialism to morally evaluate something by the goodness of its consequences. Ethicists call “act consequentialists” those who believe that the relevant units of moral evaluation are the consequences of each individual act: Act Consequentialism. I should perform an act X if and only if the consequences of X are impartially best – they are better than the consequences of any other act available to me.

On this view, acting rightly means doing one’s best to improve the world by promoting the most good. If the outcome would have been better had I acted differently, then my act was wrong. Note that the good must be promoted impartially, that is, each unit of good is equally important no matter for whom it is good; whether it is something good for a friend or for a distant stranger. So, the moral status of an action is established through a comparison between the way things would be if that action were performed and the way things would be if any other action were performed instead. Other theorists, however, believe that the relevant unit of moral evaluation is an act’s conformity to the most good-promoting set of rules, and so one should evaluate the consequences of an act only indirectly. Consider: Rule Consequentialism. I should perform an act X if and only if the consequences of accepting a set of rules which recommends doing X would be impartially best – they would be better than the consequences of accepting any other set of rules available to me.

This is still a form of consequentialism because the rightness of the set of rules is justified by the goodness of its consequences. One can further divide consequentialist theories in virtue of the distinction between an act’s actual consequences and act’s expected consequences (i.e., a function of justified value probabilities). Consider: Actual Act Consequentialism. I should perform an act X if and only if the actual consequences of X are impartially best – they are better than the actual consequences of any other act available to me.

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Expected Act Consequentialism. I should perform an act X if and only if the expected consequences of X are impartially best – they are better than the expected consequences of any other act available to me.

When the effects of a certain course of action are reliably predictable, the differences between Actual Act Consequentialism and Expected Act Consequentialism are mostly negligible. For instance, if a nuclear bomb is detonated in a foreign country purely as an act of political vengeance, one can reliably predict that many will experience excruciating suffering or die without compensating benefits. Such an act is wrong on both Actual Act Consequentialism and Expected Act Consequentialism. However, things become more complicated if, for example, one considers environmental policy. Predicting the future state of the world’s climate 100 years from now is only possible within a range of predictions with varying degrees of certainty. On the one hand, an environmental policy that one has overwhelming reason to believe will lead to good results might – for reasons beyond one’s control – have catastrophic side effects on the far future. On the other hand, policies that now seem unhelpful may ultimately deliver optimal future outcomes. Actual Act Consequentialism would judge the moral appropriateness of such environmental policies on the basis of their actual contributions to the history of the world (regardless of the evidence that is currently available), while Expected Act Consequentialism would judge their moral appropriateness based on the justified probability estimates of their potential contributions to the history of the world (given the evidence that is currently available). The former comes with the risk of leaving us clueless about the ultimate rightness of a given intervention, while the latter comes with the risk of evaluating harmful interventions as morally right and beneficial interventions as morally wrong. But what exactly determines the goodness or badness of a state of affairs? Which evaluative properties should be maximized according to consequentialism? To answer this question, one needs to combine consequentialism with a theory of value. Or, in other words, a theory of what makes a state of affairs good or bad. For instance, classic utilitarianism – the most traditional form of consequentialism – holds that the morally proper action is the one that maximizes the net balance of happiness over suffering. However, there is significant disagreement among consequentialists regarding the nature of the good. Is the good pleasure, happiness, or the flourishing of a sentient creature? And what about the value of desire-satisfaction, achievements, freedom, art, culture, biodiversity, or ecosystems? Consequentialists have been at the forefront of challenging the anthropocentric view of value and recognizing the intrinsic value of non-human entities, particularly non-human animals. Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, claimed in 1789 that the welfare of non-human animals should be included in one’s moral calculations. This sort of consequentialism was later developed by Peter Singer in his book Animal Liberation (1975). Singer propounds sentientism, the view that only sentient beings’ conscious experiences hold positive or negative value and have interests that deserve moral consideration for their own sake. On this view, natural areas and

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non-sentient entities can also be morally relevant, but only on instrumental grounds. Ecological habitats are necessary to support the happiness of many sentient creatures, but they do not have value in and of themselves. Robin Attfield (1991, 2003, 2014) has opposed sentience-based consequentialism by advocating for a form of biocentric consequentialism. On his view, all living creatures are intrinsically valuable and worthy of moral concern. They have interests that arise from their capacity to pursue their own good in a goal-directed manner. Events or actions that promote their interests benefit them or make them better off, while those that disrupt their interests harm them or make them worse off. However, Attfield’s biocentric approach is inegalitarian, in that not all living beings matter to the same extent. Some creatures have higher capabilities and thus more valuable interests according to their own species-specific nature. So, Attfield argues, harm to a plant is not as morally relevant as harm to a cat or a person, making his view more plausible than versions of biocentric egalitarianism (see Stroppa’s chapter ▶ “Plant Ethics and Climate Change” in this volume for a discussion on plant ethics). Avram Hiller (2014, 2015) goes beyond individualistic biocentric consequentialism, by arguing that the goodness or badness of a state of affairs at least partly depends on its ecosystemic values. This view aligns with those of theorists such as Jamieson (2002) and McShane (2004), who also acknowledge the value of ecosystems. Hiller refers to this view as system consequentialism. After defining a system as a whole composed of independent parts, Hiller claims that a consequentialist should not simply add up the goods of the relevant individual elements to calculate the best state of affairs, but should also consider the overall ecosystemic goodness produced, or the level of the ecosystem’s flourishing. But biocentric and system consequentialism need to explain how it is possible for non-conscious entities to be welfare subjects. How can anything be good or bad for them? One may argue that, for an entity to matter morally for its own sake, it must possess the capacity for conscious experiences, that is, a capacity for experiences which are such that there is something it is like to have them, for example seeing colors, smelling coffee, or feeling warmth. There is an important sense in which, when I am fully unconscious during anesthesia or a dreamless sleep, nothing seems to matter, even though I am still alive. Of course, some good things can be instantiated irrespective of my unconscious state, like the birth of my child. But these positive events are only good for me once I become aware of them, or for the overall evaluation of my lifetime well-being. They are never good for the slice of time during which I was fully unconscious. Like my stomach, an oak tree may have goal-oriented biological functions, but although bettering the health of my stomach can improve my well-being, the stomach itself does not have its own well-being to improve in a morally robust sense. So, the argument goes, a living organism or elements of an ecosystem which lack the capacity for consciousness do not seem to be an appropriate object of intrinsic moral concern (however, see Bradford Forthcoming for recent criticisms of this view). Now that I have introduced a variety of key consequentialist views, I will put aside particular value theories such as those of biocentric and system consequentialism to restrict my focus to the examination of a number of consequentialist

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approaches to global climate change (but see Driver 2011 for a more extensive introduction to consequentialism).

The No-Difference Problem According to the 2022 sixth assessment report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), if humanity continues to emit greenhouse gases at the current rate, the world could potentially warm by a catastrophic 4.4
C (8
F) by the end of the century. Such a raise in global temperature levels would likely have devastating outcomes. Millions of people would face premature deaths from heat exposure, lots of species of animals would become extinct, new diseases would spread, along with other cascading and long-term impacts. The rise in temperature would also prevent the existence of many future lives, as most people would opt for fewer children, or none at all, due to the adverse conditions. Even a rise of 2
C would have massive climatic impacts on the planet, including the melting of ice caps, flooding of coastal cities, harm to ecosystems, increased frequency of extreme weather events, and exacerbated violent conflicts over Earth’s limited resources. Tremendous pressure will be put on food production and access, resulting in increased malnutrition and micro-nutrient deficiencies, especially in vulnerable regions. Given the overwhelming evidence for these catastrophic consequences, each person seems to have a moral obligation to do something about their emissionproducing activities. While political and government action is crucial, it is also true that if enough individuals were to significantly reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, the harmful effects of climate change would be mitigated. Using public transportation instead of cars, avoiding air travel, choosing vegan options over animal products, and reducing the use of single-use plastic bags are often suggested as ways for individuals to positively contribute to the current environmental situation. But there is a problem concerning the very justification for these moral obligations – a problem that is especially hard for the act consequentialist. Even though a global collective effort toward low-emission lifestyle choices would mitigate climate change harms, an individual taken in isolation is not in a position to make any difference. The consequences of global warming will occur regardless of whether I decide to fly to, say, Costa Rica this summer. And if the overall magnitude of climate change harms will remain unchanged regardless of my individual emission-producing activities, then how can I be said to act wrongly in doing such activities? This argument has been referred to as the argument from inconsequentialism (Sandler, 2010), the inefficacy problem (Nefsky, 2019), or the no-difference challenge (Lawford-Smith & Tuckwell, 2020). For the purposes of this discussion, I will refer to it as the no-difference problem. The central idea is that, even if a collective voluntary effort to reduce emissions would prevent a climate catastrophe, act consequentialism would not prescribe such efforts as an appropriate response. This view requires me to consider how the history of the world would be if I, as an

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individual, acted differently. And in the case of anthropogenic climate change, it appears that the history of the world would be unchanged no matter what I do, leaving me without any moral reason to do anything about it. This seems counterintuitive, given that the history of the world would go much better if the majority of us were to choose to emit less. As Shelly Kagan says: Consequentialism appears to fail even in its own favoured terrain, where we are concerned with consequences and nothing but consequences. Intuitively ... the acts in question need to be condemned because of the results that eventuate from everyone’s performing them. Such a situation ought to be grist for the consequentialist’s mill. Yet despite this, it seems as though the consequentialist simply isn’t in a position to condemn the relevant acts – given the fact that for any given individual, it simply makes no difference whether or not the individual’s particular act is performed. (Kagan, 2011, p. 107)

The problem is clear in the case of direct emissions from individuals – anthropogenic climate change will occur irrespective of whether I choose not to drive on Sunday. But the problem seems even worse in the case of indirect emissions from individuals, such as those resulting from air travel. Environmentalists often argue that flying is morally problematic because of the high levels of hazardous gases emitted by airplanes. But how much of this pollution is owed to each individual passenger? It is the airplane that produces the gases rather than the passengers themselves. And the choice of an individual passenger very rarely affects whether a given flight will take place. Whether there will be a flight from London to New York on a certain day is not contingent on whether I decide to join that flight. So, when indirect emissions are concerned, my behavior does not even seem to have marginal effects on climate change. The fact that consequentialism appears unable to provide a straightforward solution to the no-difference problem has been seen as a reason to reject this theory and adopt a different ethical framework. Stephen Gardiner, for example, claims that if an ethical theory lacks the resources to recognize the moral urgency of addressing a global threat, then it is seriously defective and should be rejected (2011, p. 218). He uses act consequentialism as an example of an ethical theory that fails to pass this door-die test. How can a robust ethical theory admit the existence of a potentially catastrophic environmental problem, and yet imply that nothing should be done about it? Consequentialists have offered a variety of responses to this challenge. While some bite the bullet, most maintain that there are ways in which individual actions can make a difference to climate change. In what follows, I examine the major responses.

Accepting the No-Difference Problem It is not surprising that some individuals feel that they lack an individual responsibility to reduce their own output of greenhouse gases. After all, I do not personally increase the likelihood of global warming if I fail to recycle my plastic bottles – it is the collective scale of humanity’s emissions that causes the problem. Some take this

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argument to show that people do not have any individual moral obligation to pollute less. Baylor Johnson, for example, after naming the threat of anthropogenic climate change “the tragedy of the commons” (T of C), asks whether an agent is morally required to undertake individual steps toward lower emissions, and answers: The only reason to adopt unilateral restraint is to avert a T of C. So if unilateral restraint cannot reasonably be expected to achieve its purpose, there is no reason, and hence no moral reason to adopt it ... No one person’s use is large enough to harm the commons. Harm results only from the aggregate level of use. (Johnson, 2003, p. 277)

In It’s Not My Fault, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (2005) similarly argues that it is not wrong for an individual to engage in activities that have inconsequential environmental outcomes, such as a Sunday drive. In his view, any attempt to ground environmentally friendly individual obligation is doomed to failure. Only a global political agreement can successfully address the climate crisis, and as such, it is only governments that have an obligation to act. To illustrate his point, he uses the example of a dangerous old bridge. The obligation to make the bridge safe seems to fall on the government. And even if the government fails this obligation, it doesn’t follow that I am personally required to fix the bridge in my free time. This case, in Sinnott-Armstrong’s view, shows how individual moral responsibility does not always track collective moral responsibility. It may be true that, in cases involving collective harms, obligations arise largely at the level of the government. But citizens may still have an obligation to take individual action if the government fails to meet its commitments. If the old bridge is in a dangerous state and the government is not taking action to fix it, and if each citizen filling in one crack on their own could collectively fix the bridge, then each citizen may have an obligation to do so. If someone were to die as a result of the bridge being unsafe, each citizen may bear a small individual moral responsibility, since they knew that the government would not address the issue and that their individual effort to help would have been relatively minimal. This analogy could be applied to the case of collective climate action as well. It is clear that governments are failing to take sufficient action, leading to consequences so severe that an individual citizen cannot simply wait for someone to fix the environment for them, ascribing the whole responsibility to the systemic level.

Rejecting the No-Difference Problem: Knock-on Effects Some may argue that the no-difference problem fails to take into account the full extent of the environmental effects of individual actions. Such actions, although seemingly inconsequential in themselves, may have knock-on effects on the choices made by others and thus bring about a larger collective outcome. Perhaps it is true that my Sunday drive will not harmfully contribute to global warming on its own. But it might have an influence on other people who, inspired by my example, assume that they can also go on weekly Sunday drives. The same could be true for my flight

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to Vienna. It may encourage others to make similar travel choices and benefit the airline business. In other words, by acting in a certain way and advertising my own choices, I may elicit others to adopt the same moral stance and create snowball effects. This view was defended by Jan Narveson (1976) and challenges the strict separation between individual and collective outcomes. It is intended to provide a fully consequentialist solution to the no-difference problem based on the moral importance of setting a positive example. Sinnott-Armstrong (2005) remains skeptical of the moral significance of these knock-on effects. First, the scale of this climate crisis, he argues, is too large for an individual to make any difference, even with a little help from admirers. Getting other people to cooperate would be just as pointless as recycling. This seems especially true for the choices of most ordinary individuals, who, most of the time, do not have a chance of significantly influencing the choices of large populations. Second, it seems that people often overestimate the impact of their own acts on others, making it difficult to accurately assess the frequency and strength of such potential knock-on effects. Third, Sinnott-Armstrong describes the case of David: David is no environmentalist. He already has a habit of driving his gas guzzler for fun on Sundays. Nobody likes him, so nobody follows his example. But David still has a moral obligation not to drive his gas guzzler just for fun this Sunday, and his obligation has the same basis as mine, if I have one. (2005, p. 292)

So, Sinnott-Armstrong concludes, these sorts of knock-on effects on others are too contingent to ground robust moral obligations.

Making a Difference There are other ways to reject the no-difference problem. Avram Hiller (2011) maintains that daily individual actions associated with emissions do make a difference (in expectation) to the occurrence of anthropogenic climate change harms, and this provides a consequentialist reason to evaluate such actions as morally problematic. He argues that if one accepts the plausible moral principle that “it is prima facie wrong to perform an act which has an expected amount of harm greater than another easily available alternative,” and one recognizes that individual emitting actions, for which there are many alternatives, have a non-trivial expected harm, then one must conclude that it is morally required to refrain from these actions (2011, p. 352). Hiller appeals to some empirical findings. One such finding is John Nolt’s (2011) calculations that the average American’s greenhouse-emitting actions over the course of their lifetime cause serious harm to at least one person. Another result is provided by the National Academy of Sciences, which found that a 25-mile car drive accounts for roughly one-fourth of the emissions produced by an average American’s daily activities. Combining these findings, Hiller estimates that a 25-mile car drive causes one-fourth of a day’s worth of serious harm. In other words, according to Hiller, “going on a Sunday drive is the moral equivalent of ruining someone’s

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afternoon” (Hiller, 2011, p. 357). If Nolt’s calculations are accurate, Hiller argues, individual emitting actions are prima facie wrong, since they have expected harms which are comparable to ruining someone’s afternoon when alternative options are easily available. However, Hiller’s argument depends on a share-of-the-total view of expected harms (Parfit, 1984, pp. 67–70). There is a share-of-the-total within a life – the total expected harm of a lifetime’s greenhouse gas emissions is divided by the number of days lived by the average person in order to calculate the expected harm of a single Sunday drive – which, at least on some views, is appropriate given that each Sunday drive is carried out by the very same person. But there is also a share-of-the-total across different lives – the total expected harm of anthropogenic climate change as a whole is divided by the number of contributors in order to calculate the expected harm caused by an average life. The problem here is that the shares of expected harm are traced back to individuals despite the joint causation (Lawford-Smith & Tuckwell, 2020). It is unclear whether the contribution of any individual is necessary or sufficient to bring about the total expected harm, since anthropogenic climate change wouldn’t occur if others were not participating in the emitting activities as well. It is thus unclear whether individual emitters can be said to bring about corresponding individual expected harms. John Broome (2012, p. 77) has also defended a view similar to Hiller’s, but on the basis of different calculations. He concluded that each individual act with a specific emitting action has some expected harm, but to a lesser degree than that estimated by Hiller.

Moral Mathematics One can place Hiller’s argument within a broader strategy to address the no-difference problem. This strategy argues that the problem rests on a mistake in “moral mathematics” – a misunderstanding concerning the distribution of individual moral responsibility in cases of morally significant collective activities. Many of those seeking a consequentialist solution to the problem have appealed to the notion of “chances of making a difference” (in Reasons and Persons Derek Parfit says that to overlook small chances is one of the five mistakes in moral mathematics). This approach has been articulated in various forms by Parfit (1984), Norcross (2004), Kagan (2011), and Morgan-Knapp & Goodman (2015). The arguments put forth by these theorists aim to show that, in cases of collectively harmful enterprises, there is always some small probability that an individual action could make a non-trivial difference. These small probabilities, they argue, morally matter. In Do I Make a Difference? Shelly Kagan (2011) argues that individual actions always have some chance of making a major difference in triggering cases, i.e., cases in which there are precise thresholds at which enough individual acts trigger a morally relevant outcome. For example, the chances that my Sunday drive’s emissions are the ones to cross the threshold for substantial climate change harm may be small, but if they were indeed the emissions that crossed the tipping point, they

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would cause a great deal of harm. Kagan contends that as long as there is some non-zero chance that one of my Sunday drives will cause an enormous net negative difference by reaching the emission threshold exactly, there is a moral reason not to take the risk. On Kagan’s view, one can treat triggering cases utilizing a standard consequentialist tool, namely, the notion of expected utility. This involves choosing whichever act that would result in the best expected state of affairs, rather than striving to achieve the best state of affairs outright. Since in triggering cases it is still possible to make a sizeable negative difference, a consequentialist will say that you are acting wrongly as the expected utility is negative. Indeed, in cases where the probability of making a negative difference is extremely small but the potential harm is extremely large, multiplying the probability by the magnitude of the potential harm results in a substantial expected utility, enough to outweigh the benefits of alternative courses of action. The tininess in chance is balanced out by the largeness in badness. Julia Nefsky (2011) criticizes Kagan’s assumption that, in all utility calculations, the size of the expected harm triggered by an individual act will always outweigh any small chance of bringing it about. If the chances of triggering harm are slim enough, one might even take expected utilities as a justifying reason to emit freely. Nefsky (2017) suggests instead that ethicists should reject the idea that if an act does not make a difference to an outcome, then the act does not play a significant causal role in bringing about the outcome. Even if an act makes no difference, it can still be a non-superfluous causal contributor. And whether an act helps facilitate an outcome is what morally matters on her view. But it is uncertain whether this option is available to the consequentialist, who is never interested in helping for its own sake, but for the sake of making the world a better place (perhaps this option could be appealing to a form of consequentialism that embraces a value theory wherein being a non-superfluous causal contributor to a suboptimal outcome is intrinsically bad). Alongside threshold cases where each individual act has a small chance of triggering the outcome but most likely makes no difference, there are also nonthreshold cases, where each individual act makes a small, imperceptible difference to the overall outcome. Climate change harms may well be an example of such non-threshold cases. Consider the following version of Parfit’s Harmless Torturers case (1984, p. 80): Innocuous Torturers. An electric shock device is connected with one thousand victims, with a strength range of 0 to 1000. At a strength of 0, no electric current is present. At a strength of 2, a slight current is present, but this is too low to be perceived by the victims. Each increase in strength results in an imperceptible increase in voltage. However, after many increases, the victims begin to experience pain, and at a strength of 1000, they endure excruciating pain. Currently, the machine is set at a strength of 0, but each of a thousand observers can press a button to make a small, imperceptible increase in electric current, earning $500 in return.

In this scenario, the outcome of excruciating pain is dependent on the collective action of multiple individuals, each of whom can only cause an imperceptible amount of pain. There is no single threshold where one action can trigger the morally

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relevant outcome, nor is there a small chance of making a difference. Regardless of whether an individual decides to press the button, the outcome is entirely determined by the collective decision of others. Cases of environmental harm caused by collective actions may be analogous to Innocuous Torturers in all relevant respects. Kagan (2011) argues that, under reflection, non-threshold cases are nothing other than triggering cases, and therefore, one can handle them by applying the expected utility machinery (see also Norcross 2004 for a similar treatment of non-threshold cases). He appeals to the fact that non-threshold cases involve vagueness, and so they are vulnerable to a sorites paradox – an ancient philosophical puzzle that is generated by vague terms with unclear boundaries of usage. This goes as follows. In Innocuous Torturers the victims do not feel pain at a strength of 0 or 1. If pressing a button does not make a difference to how much pain is experienced by the victims, and if they do not feel pain at 1, then they cannot feel pain at 2. And if they do not feel pain at 2, then they cannot feel pain at 3, and so forth. Therefore, the victims do not experience pain at a strength of 1000, which is a contradiction. To avoid this paradox, on Kagan’s view, one must deny the existence of non-threshold cases. There must be points where an individual act makes a difference to the severity of pain – threshold points where the victim reports a different level of pain. Nefsky (2011), though, argues that Kagan’s argument either relies on problematic assumptions about the accuracy of experiential reports or relies on a controversial solution to the sorites paradox, namely, to draw a sharp threshold in cases of vagueness. In either case, there is a problem yet to be addressed (for a possible solution, see Broome 2019, pp. 121–125). However, accepting the existence of threshold points may not be enough to make individual interventions morally wrong. For example, if each time the button is pressed there is a quarter of a chance that the victims will experience a barely perceptible increase in pain, this harm may not appear significant enough to outweigh the benefits of obtaining $500. Proponents of expected utility may point to the number of victims – a thousand in this case. They may argue that although each individual act causes only a minuscule amount of harm, one should aggregate these tiny harms when calculating the total expected disutility of pressing the button. But it is far from obvious whether one can obtain plausible moral verdicts by aggregating tiny harms. Consider this case discussed by Tim Scanlon: Jones and The Transmitter. Jones has suffered an accident in the transmitter room of a television station. Electrical equipment has fallen on his arm, and we cannot rescue him without turning off the transmitter for fifteen minutes. A World Cup match is in progress, watched by many people, and it will not be over for an hour. Jones’s injury will not get any worse if we wait, but his hand has been mashed and he is receiving extremely painful electrical shocks. Should we rescue him now or wait until the match is over? Does the right thing to do depend on how many people are watching? (Scanlon, 1998, p. 235)

Scanlon’s answer is that one should rescue Jones now, regardless of how many people are enjoying watching the match and would suffer a minor inconvenience if one were to deprive them of their amusement. But if it is morally appropriate to aggregate tiny harms, then knowing how many people are watching the World Cup

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could make a difference to whether one should save Jones or not. Many people find this to be implausible (however, see Norcross, 2002; Tomlin, 2017; Horton, 2018 for some challenges to Scanlon’s argument, non-aggregative views, and limited forms of aggregation).

Rule Consequentialism Act consequentialism, as an individualistic version of consequentialism, does not seem to recognize the collective nature of harms resulting from the climate crisis. Perhaps the consequentialist should not ask “What would the history of the world be like if I did this?” but “What would the history of the world be like if everyone did this?”. Rule consequentialism takes seriously this generalization test and is concerned about the effects of general adherence to a set of rules, rather than the consequences of individual actions as such. This is why rule consequentialism is usually understood as a form of indirect consequentialism: the optimific moral standard applies directly to sets of rules and only indirectly to individual interventions. For example, on ideal code rule-consequentialism, argued for by Richard Brandt (1979) and Brad Hooker (2000), the moral status of an individual action – whether it is permissible, required, or impermissible – depends on whether it is permitted, required, or forbidden according to an ideal moral code, that is, a code whose universal (or near-universal) adoption would lead to the best possible world. Rule-consequentialism is uniquely well-positioned to capture the intuition that there is an obligation to do what is necessary to mitigate catastrophic climate change even though each of us, individually, cannot make any difference. Since the badness of anthropogenic climate change stems from collective activities, it would be a mistake to distribute moral responsibilities directly to individuals. Rather, the focus should be on promoting conformity to a moral code that forbids harmful collective activities such as excessive use of fossil fuels. A moral code that permits the general adoption of highly emitting activities would make the world a worse place than it would be otherwise, and this is why my highly emitting actions are morally wrong, even if performing one of them would make no difference on its own. Rule consequentialism seems to naturally address the collective nature of the climate crisis and provides a plausible moral framework for assessing the wrongness of individual polluting acts. But although proponents of other forms of consequentialism need to do more work to respond to the no-difference problem, rule consequentialism is not without its own criticisms. One obvious problem is that it is difficult to know what the most optimific moral code would look like. It is already notoriously challenging for the act consequentialist to reliably calculate the expected value of a single act given its unforeseen (and unforeseeable) side effects in the far future. Some theorists argue that since act consequentialism is concerned about which act will lead to the best effects overall – counting all the effects – it leaves the agent clueless about the rightness of anything she does (Lenman, 2000). But it

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seems even more difficult to determine which set of rules, as a package, would bring about the greatest good. This multiplies the cluelessness. Not only would one need to (i) somehow calculate the expected value of the collective adoption of any possible individual rule (to identify the most optimific rules in expectation), but one would also need to (ii) somehow calculate the expected value of the collective adoption of any possible combination of rules into a set (to identify how these rules are to be combined into the most optimific package). Both of these steps are necessary, since certain rules may be optimal taken individually, but sub-optimal taken as a part of a larger set of rules. And both steps are very hard, if possible at all. For example, how can one know whether the most optimific moral code would contain constraints against increasing inequalities if doing so would greatly improve the current environmental situation? And if one does not know which is the most optimific moral code overall, how can one be sure that it would include a rule requiring individual climate action?

Virtue Consequentialism Some theorists have attempted to solve the no-difference problem by appealing to a consequentialist understanding of virtue ethics. Dale Jamieson (2007) and Ronald Sandler (2010) argue that a focus on the character traits of good consequentialist actors, rather than their actions, can account for individual obligations in a robust way. This view, known as virtue consequentialism, holds that the virtuous person ought to cultivate the set of character traits that promote the most net good. Since virtuous character traits include a personal concern for the environment and for the welfare of those who would be negatively affected by environmental degradation, virtues motivate individual interventions. If I were to unnecessarily drive every Sunday, this would be evidence of my lack of care for climate change harms and a reflection of my morally deficient character. One obvious problem with this view is that it is difficult to calculate which combination of character traits will ultimately bring about the best possible state of affairs. But even setting aside cluelessness worries, virtue consequentialism might still be unable to fully address the no-difference problem. If my failure to recycle is inconsequential with respect to the harms of climate change, it is unclear why my failure should count as a vicious act. Now, on virtue consequentialism, what matters about an act is what the act reveals about the sort of character a person has. But if virtues are understood as those character traits that are most likely to maximize the good, and I decide to fly frequently and unnecessarily to other countries because I justifiably believe that refraining from it is pointless, then it is difficult to see why I would be cultivating the wrong sort of character by doing so. In defense of virtue consequentialism, it could be said that character traits often come as a package. Perhaps what motivates you to stop flying is the fact that you care so much about all the future harm due to disruptive climate change that you just

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don’t want to have anything to do with it. And perhaps the character trait of being someone who directs their life through caring might not be removable from one’s overall character without producing a substantially worse person. For this and other reasons, the disposition of being a caring person may happen to promote the most good. But one may still doubt that the caring person will necessarily care about emitting actions if these make no difference to climate change harms. If so, the appeal to virtue consequentialism does not provide a satisfactory solution to the no-difference problem, as it remains unclear whether it is vicious to fly or drive when the effects of these individual actions on the environment seem inconsequential.

Individual Climate Action and Effectiveness Perhaps avoiding direct emissions of greenhouse gases is not the most effective way to minimize climate harms. My own emissions, after all, are a negligible part of the global emissions causing the environmental threat. I could refrain from driving a car for my entire lifetime, spend all my spare money purchasing offsets against my own emissions, and yet neither of these things would be detectable on a global scale. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that I don’t have any moral obligation to improve the current environmental situation. It could just mean that I should direct my efforts toward more effective ways to mitigate global warming, such as advocating for policy-level changes, contributing to climate activism, or researching green sources of energy. As Peter Singer writes, actions like avoiding driving “are good things to do, but we should not fool ourselves into believing that the problem of climate change can be solved by individual actions of this kind” (Singer, 2016, p. 26). Given the limited effectiveness of daily individual actions, one argument goes, act consequentialists should ensure that their efforts are directed toward extraordinary, or even heroic, individual actions – the most optimific means of addressing the environmental crisis. One worry in addressing the no-difference problem through an effectivenessbased approach is its demanding nature. Rather than placing a moral demand on reducing personal carbon footprints, act consequentialism would call for individuals to make substantial sacrifices, such as changing careers to dedicate much of one’s time to the improvement of climate policies or climate science. These actions, while more likely to make a non-trivial difference to the prevention of global warming, would also come with high personal costs in terms of the pursuit of one’s other projects, goals, and interests. But there is also another problem with this view. Like Sinnott-Armstrong (2005), one may doubt that ordinary individuals have a chance to enact extraordinarily effective political interventions, no matter how much they campaign. And one may similarly believe that ordinary individuals do not have a chance of making a difference to the scientific research on climate change, unless they possess exceptional talent. Thus, an individual interested in promoting the most expected value may prioritize other interventions that are more likely to succeed

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and could prevent a comparable amount of harm, such as research on pandemic prevention.

Evaluative Uncertainty The no-difference problem is not the only challenge faced by consequentialist moral theories in relation to anthropogenic climate change. The current environmental situation also involves a variety of uncertainties, both empirical and evaluative. There is empirical uncertainty due to the limited knowledge of the ways global warming will shape the future. And there is evaluative uncertainty because it is difficult to determine the value of a given state of affairs even when all the relevant physical facts are known. For example, what should one think of climate change if one believes that both human and animal lives are valuable, but one is uncertain about their cross-species comparative value? Or how should one evaluate the harm caused by extreme global warming, which includes the increased risk of human extinction, when one is uncertain about the negative value of preventing future lives from coming into existence? Krister Bykvist (2014) argues that consequentialists should address evaluative uncertainty in a similar manner as they address empirical uncertainty. They should maximize expected overall value, in which the expected value of a course of action consists in the average utility of its possible outcomes weighted by their probabilities. On Bykvist’s view, this can be done by determining which acts are rational given an agent’s beliefs, even though the agent may have a certain degree of uncertainty regarding the rightness of a certain act. But it may be difficult to identify the most rational course of action when the degree of evaluative uncertainty is very high. Let us consider some of the most puzzling cases. One may need to estimate the negative value of preventing lives from coming into existence, since, because of climate change, there may be fewer people in the future than there would otherwise have been. But it could be argued that there is no value here to assess at all, as it is not necessarily bad to prevent the existence of future people, even if, all things considered, they would have been happy. The idea is that adding an extra good life to a possible future does not affect its overall value; the future would contain the same level of goodness without the additional happy life. But this view seems to generate some contradictions, or at least this has been argued in debates within population axiology. Consider, for example, the value of three populations (the number represents the positive well-being level of the two people that constitute the population, and “—” represents the non-existence of the second individual in A): A ¼ (5, —) B ¼ (5, 5) C ¼ (5, 10) Of course, C is better than B, as C is much better for an individual and is not worse for anyone. But if the addition of an extra happy life does not make a

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difference to the overall value, then A and B would count as equally good. Given that C is better than B and B is as good as A, it follows that C must also be better than A. But if the addition of an extra happy life cannot make an axiological difference, then C must be just as good as A. This is a contradiction, as C is better than A but also not better than A. One natural way to avoid this contradiction is to say that adding happy lives makes the world a better place at least to some extent. But, as noted by Bykvist (2014), there is still evaluative uncertainty regarding the extent to which the relevant state of affairs would be improved by an additional happy life. So, there is still evaluative uncertainty with respect to the original question of how bad it is to prevent the existence of many happy lives because of anthropogenic climate change (there are alternative approaches to these sorts of cases. See Greaves, 2017 for an introduction to population axiology). This kind of evaluative uncertainty also affects another set of questions regarding population size. Some theorists argue that choosing to have fewer children is an appropriate response to the threat of climate change. This adjustment, after all, would greatly reduce the overall number of people contributing to emissions. There are, of course, strong non-climatic moral reasons against ending the life of an existing person. But the situation is different when it comes to the permissibility of creating a new life that wouldn’t otherwise exist. And while small lifestyle adjustments (e.g., choosing to recycle) have marginal effects on a typical human being’s lifetime emissions, a prospective parent choosing to have one less child appears to have a much greater impact. Jamieson suggests that not having children is the most effective way for an American to significantly reduce carbon emissions (2008, p. 189). The American can then have weekly Sunday drives with their SUV, take unnecessary transatlantic flights, eat fast-food, turn on the thermostat, and nonetheless have a lower impact on global warming than if they brought into existence one environmentally friendly American child. According to a study, “a US family who chooses to have one fewer child would provide the same level of emissions reduction as 684 teenagers who choose to adopt comprehensive recycling for the rest of their life” (Wynes & Nicholas, 2017, p. 3). These findings raise questions about the moral implications of having children in a world threatened by anthropogenic climate change. But one cannot determine the overall moral verdict of a consequentialist with respect to such procreative choices without considering the other consequences of having children. For many individuals, the decision of whether to have a child is one of the most meaningful decisions they will ever make. Regardless of their preferred number of children (whether it be many, one, or none), the satisfaction of this preference is likely to be a primary determinant of their own well-being. And the act consequentialist will take into account the parents’ well-being in his calculations. But more importantly, the axiological significance of causing a child to exist as a conscious, well-off being remains highly controversial. The consequentialist generally answers affirmatively to the question of whether more happy people increase the overall value of the world. It is, however, unclear to what extent this is true and how bad the non-existence of such lives might be. And if one doesn’t have an answer to how much value an extra life adds to a state of affairs, one doesn’t have an answer to

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whether the consequentialist should recommend people to have fewer children as a response to the current climate change crisis. Another question that involves evaluative uncertainty is how to make value comparisons between human lives and non-human animal lives when assessing the expected utility of a possible future. One may think that, all else being equal, each sentient life contributes equally to the value of a state of affairs (with the counterintuitive implication that there is no stronger moral reason to save a child over a lizard in a rescue situation). Or one may think that, at least on average, a human life contributes more to the overall goodness of the world than a non-human animal life; not merely in virtue of species membership, but because of the intrinsic individual qualities of a human’s mental life, which allow for more and higher goods. If so, how much greater welfare does a human life carry? Questions concerning cross-species axiological comparisons are particularly difficult to deal with, and yet are crucial when assessing the effects of climate change. Many of these effects will directly harm countless non-human animals. But there will be winners too. As Jeff Sebo (2022) notes, species with shorter lifespans and smaller bodies like insects and parasites will likely proliferate in a warmer world, so that their population could exponentially increase, while the populations of species with longer lifespans and larger bodies like mammals will simultaneously decrease. Without a way to make cross-species comparisons of welfare, one can’t tell whether anthropogenic climate change will make things worse or better for non-human animals, all things considered. There is indeed a debate about whether invertebrates are capable of conscious experiences such as pleasure and pain (Mikhalevich & Powell, 2020; Birch, 2022). If invertebrates are sentient, then they should be able to instantiate some level of wellbeing. And given the massive magnitude of invertebrates on the planet, their total level of well-being could be very high and would greatly influence the consequentialist calculus.

Conclusion: The Consequences of Consequentialism on Climate Change The impending consequences of anthropogenic climate change are likely to involve an immense magnitude of harm. One might want an ethical theory that acknowledges the fact that each of us has a moral obligation to do something in response to this environmental threat. But the individual actions of each of us cannot prevent or even significantly mitigate it. This is a problem for consequentialist moral theories – the no-difference problem – since on these views each of us ought to engage in the course of action that will result in the best outcome available. If an act cannot make a difference for the better, there is no moral reason to perform it. And so, the argument goes, consequentialism won’t encourage you to recycle, buy green energy, avoid unnecessary driving, or perform any action that would reduce your own carbon footprint. Consequentialists have a wide range of strategies to respond to the no-difference problem. Some argue that individual emissions have non-trivial expected harms,

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while others appeal to the significance of knock-on effects on the behavior of others. Some contend that the no-difference problem is based on a misunderstanding of moral mathematics. And others agree that minor lifestyle adjustments have insignificant environmental impacts but argue that, rather than being a reason to do nothing, this is a call to action for more effective interventions. Finally, there are those who embrace versions of virtue or rule consequentialism. None of these strategies are invulnerable to objections, but that is hardly a surprise in practical ethics. What matters here is that, although the no-difference problem is often seen as a crucial objection to consequentialist moral theories, such theories are remarkably resourceful. But even if one of these consequentialist strategies were successful, it would still be difficult to determine the most optimific course of action given the current environmental situation. There is both empirical uncertainty about the likelihood of an action’s outcome, as well as evaluative uncertainty about how to assess it morally. Even if one had a general understanding of which species will flourish and which species will perish in a warmer world, one could not know whether this will make the world better or worse, all things considered. This example of evaluative uncertainty shows how hard decisions concerning climate change can be. In a sense, the fact that consequentialism naturally recognizes the importance of evaluative uncertainty may be seen as a desirable feature of this view. A moral theory delivering easy answers in spite of such uncertainty would be greatly underestimating the complexity of the world when it’s a matter of doing the right thing.

Cross-References ▶ Plant Ethics and Climate Change Acknowledgments For very helpful comments, I am grateful to Roger Crisp, Theron Pummer, Tom Kaspers, Gianfranco Pellegrino, Louise Mackie, Luca Stroppa, Kida Lin, Boryana Todorova, Patrick Williamson, Gary O’Brien, and Ewan White. I am finally thankful for the support of an Open Philanthropy Scholarship.

References Attfield, R. (1991). The ethics of environmental concern (2nd ed.). University of Georgia Press. Attfield, R. (2003). Environmental ethics: An overview for the 21st century. Blackwell. Attfield, R. (2014). Can biocentric consequentialism meet pluralist challenges? In A. Hiller, R. Ilea, & L. Kahn (Eds.), Consequentialism and environmental ethics (pp. 35–53). Routledge. Bentham, J. (1789). An introduction to the principles of morals and legislation. Clarendon Press, 1907. Birch, J. (2022). The search for invertebrate consciousness. Noûs, 56(1), 133–153. Bradford, G. (Forthcoming). Consciousness and welfare subjectivity. Noûs. Brandt, R. (1979). A theory of the good and the right. Oxford University Press. Broome, J. (2012). Climate matters: Ethics in a warming world. W. W. Norton.

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Responsibility for Climate Harms Arthur Obst

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Collective Action Ethics: Collectivist and Individualist Accounts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ethics in a Tragedy of the Commons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Justifying Climate Individualism: Denying the Description . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Problem of Inconsequentialism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Efficacy of Individuals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Case for Collectivism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Confucian Collective? Against the Individualist Assumption . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Justifying Climate Individualism: Affirming the Prescription . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Virtue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Contribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Universalization and Fair Shares . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Extent of Individual Responsibility for Climate Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demandingness Constraints . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Against the Demandingness of Individual Emissions Reductions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Within the last two decades, a philosophical field of individual climate ethics has taken off. This subdiscipline interrogates the individual’s moral responsibility in causing and preventing climate harm. On the one hand, environmental movements have long emphasized the importance of individual lifestyle changes in solving collective action problems like air pollution. In this tradition, personal obligations to reduce carbon emissions are well-founded. This is the climate individualist view. Against this thinking, skeptics of climate individualism argue that unilateral emissions reductions will not make a difference to climate A. Obst (*) University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_49

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harms and insist that individuals instead have moral obligations to promote effective institutions through collective action. This is the climate collectivist camp. Climate individualists have replied to the climate collectivist’s charge in two ways. First, they have denied the description by arguing that individual emitting behaviors do cause harm or otherwise might make a difference. Second, they have denied the prescription by arguing that individual emissions reductions are required even if they do not make a difference. This chapter critically summarizes the arguments that have arisen in this debate, including the problem of inconsequentialism, the moral grounds of collective responsibility, and noncausal accounts of individual responsibility for climate harms. Ultimately, this chapter identifies a consensus in the literature that climate individualism is correct. It then turns to the emerging and contested discussion regarding the extent of individual obligations to minimize contribution to climate harms. Keywords

Climate change · Ethics · Individual responsibility · Climate harms · Causal impotence · Inconsequentialism · Obligations · Structural injustice · Demandingness · Collective action · Promotional duty

Introduction Elijah was born to a modest family in New Orleans in 1983, over a century after the industrial revolution and the advent of fossil fuel. Elijah dropped out of school at 16 to support his younger sister upon their parents’ early death. By living in their parent’s paid-off coastal home and buying frugally, Elijah can barely cover costs by working two minimum-wage jobs. After a few years, his sister begins working parttime, and this little help allows Elijah some free time to pursue his education. Then, Hurricane Katrina hits; his sister dies in the catastrophe, the storm destroys his home – uninsured – and now he finds himself without a place to live. In the 15 years since, he has drifted from friend’s couches to homeless shelters, only rarely able to build the income to afford an apartment and never for more than a year at a time. Worse yet, as the realities of climate change become ever starker, he can now expect extreme weather to happen more frequently and increasing resource scarcity to imperil his already precarious livelihood. All the while, Elijah will have little to no ability to adapt to his increasingly dangerous environment. Elijah’s story is fictional but not unrealistic. Elijah’s story parallels Sally’s story, which Iris Marion Young describes in her book Responsibility for Justice (Young, 2011, p. 430). Like Sally’s imminent homelessness, Elijah’s suffering cannot be adequately understood as interpersonal wrongdoing, like Jack intentionally stealing Jill’s bicycle (Jamieson, 2010, p. 436). Yet, an injustice has surely occurred. The poor and marginalized are the least able to adapt to the volatile changes and expected harms of climate change, all while being the least responsible for causing the changing climate. People like Elijah will increasingly find their choices restricted,

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and their resources depleted as the worse effects of climate change occur in the coming years. Despite his severe plight, Elijah nonetheless experiences a certain kind of perverse privilege: the worst climate impacts will probably not happen in the American South, but in the global South – before any consideration of ability to adapt (Bethiany et al., 2018). The climate harms inflicted upon Elijah count as structural injustice. Seemingly, a single culprit does not trigger climate harms. No individual caused by themselves the circumstances that result in widespread environmental vulnerability. Likewise, nobody initiated or willed the extreme weather, the flooding, the drought, or the water and food scarcity that is to come; neither did they intend Elijah’s suffering and possible death that will follow. But Elijah’s circumstances cannot be traced to any single law either. Arguably, economic dependence on fossil fuels is more an accident of history and industry than dictated by any active policy. Even a single government’s inaction cannot be fairly blamed in isolation: the rest of the world’s carbon emissions vastly overdetermine dangerous climate change. Finally, neither can Elijah’s situation be correctly understood as a brute fact of the world: the dangerous impacts of climate change that he will have to face would not have occurred without the widespread use of fossil fuels and the sociopolitical backdrop that could not or would not prevent dangerous climate change. In 1992, Dale Jamieson wrote, “We face the possibility that the global environment may be destroyed, yet nobody will be held responsible” (Jamieson, 1992, p. 149). Considering the structural and collective dimensions of climate injustice and Elijah’s suffering, is any individual person (at least partially) responsible for climate harms? What moral obligations might result from this responsibility? These have been central research questions in a new practical field of philosophy, climate ethics, over the last 15 years. Despite the size of the climate problem, contributors to this literature almost unanimously agree that individual responsibility exists in some form. However, views of this responsibility differ. Two broad camps have emerged. The first camp, the climate individualists, argues that individuals have moral obligations to reduce their contribution to climate harms by unilaterally decreasing their greenhouse gas emissions. The second camp, the climate collectivists, rejects or downplays individual moral obligations to reduce private GHG emissions, insisting that individuals only or primarily have moral obligations to promote climate justice in the public sphere through collective action. This chapter summarizes the factors and arguments that have led to this cleavage in the literature, lending particular attention to how the literature has developed over the years that have passed since Augustin Fragnière’s excellent survey of the individual climate ethics literature (Fragnière, 2016). Ultimately, this survey affirms Fragnière’s conclusion that there is a consensus among climate ethicists that the climate individualist position is correct. Additionally, per his call, philosophers have begun to spend more time considering the extent of this responsibility in recent years. Section “The Extent of Individual Responsibility for Climate Justice” reconstructs this emerging discussion. As a final note, this literature review frequently considers “average American” climate responsibilities as a test case, in line with the trend in the literature. The

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analysis will usually extend to the citizens of other high emitting, affluent nations, but perhaps less so to citizens of low emitting or developing countries. Applying the individual climate ethics literature to this large but neglected part of the global population would be an excellent place for further philosophical inquiry.

Collective Action Ethics: Collectivist and Individualist Accounts Ethics in a Tragedy of the Commons In 1968, Garrett Hardin famously argued that the unregulated sharing of natural resources predictably results in environmental degradation (Hardin, 1968). Hardin offers the example of herders using a common pasture. The individual herders each solely keep the benefits of every animal they pasture. Moreover, each animal added to the commons does not itself cause harm. However, if enough animals are added over time, the commons are overgrazed. Even if the herders recognize the threat of overgrazing, they choose to add animals to the commons. Inevitably, the land deteriorates, and in time, all the herders suffer. Hardin concluded that individual rationality results in collective disaster: a tragedy of the commons. Formally, a “Tragedy of the Commons” (T of C) occurs when “many independent agents derive benefits from a subtractable resource that is threatened by their aggregate use” (Johnson 2003, p. 273). A resource is subtractable when its supply of benefits can be depleted through overuse. The agents are independent when no collective agreement or other social mechanism prevents their overuse of the commons. Finally, commons are threatened by aggregate use when it is not pressured by any individual, but by the accumulated use of many (ibid). While Hardin used the parable of the pasture to demonstrate a tragedy of the commons, he thought its salient perverse incentive structure manifests in other environmental contexts: namely, overpopulation and air pollution (Hardin, 1968, p. 162–163). Since his writing, others have extended his analysis to other realms, including climate change. While some would reasonably object to this framing of the climate problem (Gardiner, 2011a), the ostensible parallel should be evident. The benefits of the atmospheric “commons” can be depleted through the runaway greenhouse effect. Yet, individual GHG emissions do not harm themselves: only in their grand aggregate does dangerous climate change occur. Finally, the anthropogenic agents of climate harms – whether individual persons, companies, or nations – seem independent in the relevant sense. In his original paper, Hardin suggested that T of C’s required “a fundamental extension in morality” (ibid., p. 1243). This makes sense: if individuals pursuing their self-interest result in collective catastrophe, then the obvious solution is individual altruism: individuals ought to care about the commons, not themselves. If so, one might think that a straightforward moral obligation follows: individuals ought to restrict their use of the commons to a level that would be sustainable if all other users similarly reduced their use, and they must do this regardless of what others do (Johnson, 2003, p. 272). If so, then the climate individualist position is vindicated:

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one should reduce one’s carbon consumption to the level at which every person globally could emit sustainably. However, in a 2003 paper, the philosopher Baylor Johnson rejected this principle. He argued that the perverse incentives constitutive of T of C scenarios mean that voluntary, unilateral reductions have no reasonable expectation of success (Johnson, 2003, p. 277). Moreover, according to Johnson, the only reason to adopt unilateral restraint is to avert a T of C: “if unilateral restraint cannot reasonably be expected to achieve its purpose,” which it cannot, “there is no reason, and hence no moral reason, to adopt it” (ibid). In fact, focus on unilateral reductions plays into climate tragedy by leaning into the independence condition. To avoid this trap, one must focus on climate action they can do together rather than focus on what one can do alone. Individuals ought to “work for a collective agreement that could avert a potential T of C” like climate change (ibid., p. 283). Ultimately, Johnson affirms the climate collectivist position. Climate individualists have used two main strategies to refute Johnson’s argument. The first strategy is to reject that climate change has the structure of a T of C. To appropriate the terminology of Julia Nefsky, let us call this individualist strategy denying the description. The second strategy insists that moral obligations to reduce GHG consumption exist even if this consumption causes no harm and makes no difference to collective outcomes. In effect, this approach asserts the moral salience of private action, even when private action is impotent and futile. Let us call this individualist strategy affirming the prescription. In the next two sections, I reconstruct each flavor of individualist arguments, as well as the criticism they have received.

Justifying Climate Individualism: Denying the Description Recall that a T of C has three structural features: a subtractable resource, independent agents, and aggregative harms. To deny the description, climate individualists must successfully show that climate change lacks one of these three features. If it does, then unilateral emissions reductions would ostensibly not face systematic barriers to achieving their purpose of diminishing collective catastrophe. The independence and aggregative conditions of climate change have received the most scrutiny from climate individualists. Marion Hourdequin was the first to challenge the independence condition in the individual climate ethics literature (Hourdequin, 2010). I consider her argument, and possible replies, in section “A Confucian Collective? Against the Individualist Assumption”. However, climate ethicists have argued at greatest length about the applicability of the aggregative condition: the claim that individual contributions to climate change cause harm only in aggregate. Many climate individualists reject the aggregative condition, insisting that personal emissions do cause harm. If so, then a welltrodden no-harm principle could undergird a moral responsibility to reduce individual emissions. However, this move faces a significant challenge: the problem of inconsequentialism.

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The Problem of Inconsequentialism Picture yourself at the edge of a flooding river, its uncontrollable torrent fueled by heavy rains. A tiny village sits downstream: its inundation seemingly inevitable. If you decided to empty a quart of water into the deluge, do you become causally implicated in the flood? Do you thereby cause harm to the village’s occupants? Intuition seems to say no (Sinnott-Armstrong, 2005, p. 299). Although extremely tragic, the flood’s imminent harm is already assured, your contribution too small to make a difference. Analogously, one’s personal GHG emissions might appear too tiny to implicate an individual causally in dangerous climate change or cause harm. While Americans have the dubious honor of having one of the highest per capita emissions globally, their carbon contributions remain tiny compared to the 34 gigatons of global carbon emissions in 2020 alone. The scale becomes even more formidable when one recognizes the climate problem’s intergenerational dimension: the fossil economy is older than anybody alive today. Richard Heede of the Climate Accountability Institute has estimated that humans emitted 1480 gigatons of carbon between 1751 and 2014 (Frumhoff, 2014). In the 7 years since, humans have released an approximate average of 35 gigatons of carbon each year. This figure includes the largest absolute drop in carbon emissions ever recorded between 2019 and 2020 attributable to Covid-19 lockdowns (McSweeny & Tandon, 2020). Running the numbers, humans have now emitted about 1690 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere during the industrial age. How much has the average American contributed to this tally of global emissions? Combining 2016 World Health data with modest projections, the typical American (aged 40) has emitted an average of 18.4 metric tons of CO2 per year across their lifetime (World Bank Group, 2016). That accumulates to 736 metric tons of carbon or one two billion five hundred millionth of global emissions since 1751. In numbers, that is 1 in 2,500,000,000. (As an interesting aside, the average American’s share of total global emissions in the year 2020 alone was one two billionth. This remains steady with Augustin Fragnière’s, 2016 estimate (Fragnière, 2016, p. 800). So, as it turns out, factoring in the entirety of the carbon emissions from 1751 to 2020 results in only a 20% reduction in the average American’s share of emissions. This percentage decrease is nothing to scoff at, but nevertheless is smaller than one might expect. This relatively measured decrease in current Americans’ global emissions share coheres with the fact – noted by Richard Heede – that, as of the end of 2014, more than half of all emissions had been released since 1988. While the personal emissions of contemporary Americans remain a nearly infinitesimal slice of total carbon emissions, these numbers still reflect the contemporary American’s vastly disproportional share of emissions not only today but across hundreds of years of industry.) Personal emissions begin to resemble less a quart of water to a flood and more a drop in the ocean. Given the immensity of the climate problem, and the negligible to nonexistent causal role personal emissions play, it is tempting to think that your carbon emissions are morally trivial. Joakim Sandberg calls this line of thinking the argument from inconsequentialism (Sandberg, 2011). When

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presented as a challenge to climate individualists, it becomes the problem of inconsequentialism. Philosophers press the argument from inconsequentialism in different ways. Several philosophers argue that individual emissions do not cause harm because of the problem of inconsequentialism, but still leave open that private emissions reductions may be morally obligatory for reasons other than the no-harm principle (Jamieson, 2010; Sandler, 2010; Garvey, 2011; Nefsky, 2017; Budolfson, 2019). In various ways, these philosophers take the problem to reveal missing or overlooked contours of our moral landscape, rather than posing a knockdown objection to the climate individualist position. Other philosophers, however, go a step further and argue that the problem indeed proves fatal to climate individualist accounts or, minimally, contend that no argument yet offered adequately dispel this conclusion (Sinnott-Armstrong, 2005; Sandberg, 2011; Maltais, 2013; Cullity, 2015; Kingston & Sinnott-Armstrong, 2018; MacLean, 2019; Rieder & Bernstein, 2020). If successful, the problem of inconsequentialism affirms Johnson’s assumption that climate harms meet the aggregative condition of a T of C: its causal mechanism – GHG emissions – are harmless in isolation, but harmful in aggregate. Therefore, climate individualists who challenge the aggregative condition must answer the problem of inconsequentialism.

The Efficacy of Individuals There are at least two ways that climate individualists have rejected the argument from inconsequentialism as I have presented it so far: the first principled, the second empirical. Let us take each in turn. The first more principled strategy is to accuse the problem of making “a mistake in moral mathematics,” to borrow a phrase from the philosopher Derek Parfit. In a globalized world, the harms of individual actions become more and more difficult to calculate. However, Parfit insists that we cannot do sloppy ethical arithmetic by “ignoring small or imperceptible effects” (Parfit, 1984). One should not confuse imperceptible for nonexistent. For instance, the benefits or harms of an individual act might diffuse over so many people or places that it becomes unnoticeable. Yet, this does not render these benefits or harms morally irrelevant. Perhaps the aggregative condition makes precisely this mistake. In collective action problems, it certainly may appear that individual acts of a certain kind make no difference themselves, but when performed by many people result in harm (Kagan, 2011). However, this immediately raises a puzzle. How can it be true that a single token act – like individual GHG emissions – can make no difference, and yet in aggregate cause substantial harm? To refute such a possibility, the philosopher Shelly Kagan offers the case of the Harmless Torturer. He asks us to imagine a peculiar kind of torture machine comprised of 1000 identical switches. With each switch flipped, a tiny current of electricity runs through the human subject. Each jolt is imperceptibly small, but with all 1000 flipped, the subject experiences tremendous pain. Yet, after every single turn

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of an individual switch, the subject reports no pain. Accordingly, a consequentialist seems forced to conclude that flipping the switch is a morally neutral act. Yet, the harmless torturer – through repeated flips – causes needless agony for the victim: a wrong under any plausible moral system. This case presents a puzzle indeed, but Kagan opts for a simple solution: to deny the hypothetical is possible. “It simply cannot be that every state feels like the one before it,” Kagan insists, if agony eventually results. “At least one state must feel different from the one that came before” (ibid., p. 132). Catriona MacKinnon extends Kagan’s analysis to challenge the notion that individual emissions make no difference to climate change. It seems plausible to think that the first anthropogenic carbon emission made no difference to the climate. If so, then surely the same is true for the second emission and the third; eventually, we reach a point where the climate has clearly changed, but no incremental emission made a difference (McKinnon, 2014, p. 40). At this point, you must deny that this change is humancaused or you must concede that at least one individual emission made climate change worse (Hiller, 2011; McKinnon, 2014). Undoubtedly, there is something intuitively compelling about the notion that aggregate harm like climate change cannot occur without at least one of its aggregative parts harming. However, even if this is true, it seems incapable of refuting an aggregate structure of sorts. The puzzle of the harmless torturer arose because Kagan constructed the example to ensure no single flip crossed a harm threshold, but the presence of harm thresholds for climate harms not only seem possible but near certain. Global sinks like trees and oceans mean anthropogenic emissions must exceed the earth’s absorptive capacity before the greenhouse effect strengthens. The earth’s biosphere can absorb 23 billion tons of carbon each year (IPCC, 2014). This constitutes, then, at least one demonstrable threshold for anthropogenic climate forcing: individual GHG emissions could not increase global warming up until this threshold is crossed (Fragnière, 2016, p. 801). In other words, personal emissions must only cause climate harms in aggregate, rendering them harmless taken alone. If so, the aggregate condition would obtain. Due to the challenges involved in presenting a principled rejection of inconsequentialism, many climate ethicists turn to the empirics of climate to demonstrate that individual emissions do in fact cause harm. The immediately relevant empiric is that the “natural sink” threshold has already been passed (Almassi, 2012; Nolt, 2013a). So, individual emissions may now harm by increasing global warming a tiny amount each time, which imperceptibly impacts people. Here, it is crucial to remember Parfit: imperceptible does not mean harmless. Continuous climate harms include sea-level rise eroding land, farming becoming steadily more difficult due to unpredictable weather and drier seasons, and an increasingly less pleasant environment generally (Broome, 2016, p. 161). Your contributions to these continuous harms may be invisible, but limiting your carbon emissions reduces these harms at least a little (Lane, 2012, 59; Rentmeester, 2010). Even if individual emissions do cause imperceptible climate harm, this is not the whole story. Climate change with certainty causes some of its harm through varying magnitudes of discrete events, such as a typhoon or a heatwave (Hiller, 2011;

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Morgan Knapp & Goodman, 2015). Insofar as human GHG emissions cause dangerous climate change, somebody’s emissions likely triggered these extreme weather events. There are at least two ways to graph the nonlinear relationship correlating increasing greenhouse gas concentrations with extra harm. The first is step-shaped (Cullity, 2019). On this account, the emissions produced by individual actions do not cause continuous damage and so probably land on a flat part of the graph. These emissions are harmless. Yet, some personal emissions do trigger extreme weather events or other discrete harms, and so cause great harm. In fact, the possible harm from individual emissions is so great that the expected harm of emitting might remain morally significant despite the very low likelihood that one’s emissions will cause harm. This parallels other, less contentious, moral wrongdoing. A person who dumps toxic waste near a populated area cannot defend their action by citing the low likelihood of the material entering the water supply because the extreme harm of this unlikely event imbues toxic polluting with an unacceptably high expected harm to others (ibid). To ignore the worst-case outcome of one’s behavior because its probability is small is to make yet another mistake of moral mathematics (Parfit, 1984). The second way of graphing climate harms is chaotically jagged. John Broome thinks this method of graphing is the only one to acknowledge the atmosphere’s extreme instability. Broome invokes Edward Lorenz’s concept of a “Butterfly effect.” To Broome, the fact it is a serious scientific question whether the flap of a butterfly’s wings could cause a tornado in Texas should make it obvious that the 340 million joules of energy burned during a Sunday drive could alter future weather and cause serious harm (Broome, 2019). Given the climate’s sensitivity, Broome thinks that we can be sure that the global whether a few decades from now will be entirely different if you go joyriding than if you had stayed home (ibid.). If so, your Sunday drive exposes different people to climate harms, whether cholera, heatstroke, or hurricanes. Therefore, it is untrue that individual carbon emissions cause no harm at all. The aggregative condition must be false. Such replies to the problem of inconsequentialism have faced criticism. The most basic issue with both accounts is related to the significance of the risk individual emissions pose. Even if individual GHG emissions risk significant harm, it does not necessarily follow that this risk is significant (Sinnott-Armstrong, 2005, p. 302; Sandberg, 2011, p. 243–244; Maltais, 2013, p. 593; Cripps, 2013, p. 42–43; Kingston & Sinnott-Armstrong, 2018, p. 80). This is an important distinction; the risk of a significant harm, if low enough, is not significant. If a person inhabits an island where a violent storm washes away all habitation on average every 10,000 years, the chance of this devastating event occurring seems to be sufficiently small to render the risk insignificant (Cripps, 2013, p. 42). Of course, the threshold for a significant risk is probably lower when opposing a risk on others. Even so, this threshold cannot be too low, as small risks of morally significant harms abound in everyday life. Every time you drive your car, you impose a (small?) risk of injury or death on others, and yet driving is usually

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considered to be morally acceptable. Moreover, one may not even be aware of the multitude of significant harms they pose to others in daily life. Garrett Cullity points out that research in social psychology supports the prediction that increases in ambient noise levels cause a greater incidence of violent behavior (Cullity, 2019, p. 27). If loudly mowing your lawn is morally permissible despite this tiny risk of significant harm, why does your tiny risk of significant harm prove a decisive moral case against emitting? Some individualists press the moral significance of individual emissions by multiplying individuals’ tiny fraction of total global emissions by the immense amount of harms climate change will cause in aggregate. Through such back-ofthe-envelope calculations, John Nolt calculated that an average American across their life can expect to cause serious harm to 1–2 people (Nolt, 2011). Avram Hiller uses this calculation to estimate that an afternoon of joyriding is the moral equivalent of ruining someone’s afternoon (Hiller, 2011, p. 357). However, a different way of advancing the insignificance objection against climate individualism is to argue that individual emissions must cause marginal harm to acquire moral significance. For personal emissions to cause marginal harm, they must make a difference to climate harms all by themselves (Sandberg, 2011, p. 231). It is not clear that individual emissions cause harm in this way, and so Nolt’s and Hiller’s “simple-division” approach might be misleading (Kingston & Sinnott-Armstrong, 2018). Recall that individualists appeal to the possibility of climate thresholds to argue that individual emissions risk significant harm. If a personal emission triggered a hurricane, it might appear that the emissions did cause marginal harm. However, it seems that if the individual had never emitted the GHG that caused the hurricane, the storm still would have occurred. After all, given other people’s emitting behaviors, a single triggering emission would have been emitted by somebody else split seconds later anyway (Cripps, 2013, p. 20; Kingston & Sinnott-Armstrong, p. 180). If so, then the marginal effect of restricting personal emissions might be only to stall climate thresholds by a fraction of a second. This seems to undercut individual emissions’ moral significance: briefly delaying harm doesn’t have the moral importance of reducing or preventing harm (ibid., p. 177). The point? Even if one’s emissions trigger a devastating climate threshold, they still may not have the marginal effect of increasing total harm to others. A version of this worry may also apply to Broome’s argument from chaos as well. Even if it is true that the sensitivity of the climate system makes it highly likely that one’s emissions will make some people worse off, it is less clear that reducing personal emissions will have the marginal effect of reducing impersonal climate harms. In fact, on the jagged graph, the most direct impact of individual emissions seems to be no more than a “shake of the climate dice”: the weather will be completely different in a decade or two, which may result in net benefits just as readily as net harms. Moreover, even if the future weather will be different, the future climate is determined by global emissions – not your own. In this way, individual emissions’ expected utility, factoring in chaos, might come out in a wash. Despite these limitations, Broome and other individualists’ replies do seem to adequately refute the claim that individual emissions make no difference and will

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never cause others harm. While the question remains whether the harm traceable to individual emissions rise to the level of moral significance, causing any harm through one’s emissions is morally different than one’s emissions not harming at all. The individualist replies to the argument of inconsequentialism surveyed here should trouble the aggregate assumption.

The Case for Collectivism The applicability of the aggregate assumption to climate change is important because it seems to have important implications for the way individuals should discharge their climate responsibilities. If the aggregate condition proves false and individual emissions can deteriorate the commons and harm others, one would have a duty of justice to reduce one’s emissions (Broome, 2012). However, now suppose climate harms were purely aggregative, to the point where one’s emissions caused no marginal harm at all. In that case, you could have no individual moral obligation to prevent climate harms yourself as such harms are beyond your control (Seager et al., 2012). When individuals cannot prevent harm alone but retain the ability to prevent harm together, they may have a collective obligation to join forces with others (Hindriks, 2019). In everyday cases, this obligation might look like joining with fellow bystanders to lift a heavy object off a crushed person or forming a coalition of herders to regulate overgrazing. On scales as large as the county, nation, or globe, of course, joining forces locally may not be enough. For this reason, individuals historically have delegated their collective responsibility to prevent harm to governments or institutions. However, when these collective bodies fail to discharge collective responsibility, individuals acquire renewed obligations to create or improve institutions to do the needed work (Gardiner, 2011b). Elizabeth Cripps calls an obligation to bring about the necessary collective action, such as instituting just modes of governance, a “promotional duty” (Cripps, 2013). Discharging this “second-order” responsibility in a climate context involves seeking to change the social and political environment so that governments fulfill their firstorder responsibilities of mitigation and bearing the burdens of adaptation (Caney, 2014, p. 134–147). Prime candidates for promotional duties include voting green (Maltais, 2013), writing articles advocating for or otherwise contributing to a “global citizenship movement” (Jamieson, 2011), boycotting or otherwise pressuring corporations to adopt sustainable practices (Cuomo, 2011), letter-writing and protest (Cripps, 2013), pressuring universities to divest from fossil fuels (Godoy, 2017), or even fundamentally restructuring political and economic institutions through revolution (Boscov-Ellen, 2020). What justifies such promotional duties? Cripps identifies two grounding moral principles relevant to climate change: a collectivized principle of beneficence (ibid., p. 50), and a collectivized no-harm principle (ibid., p. 74). The collectivized principle of beneficence states that a set of human beings are obligated to cooperate to prevent serious suffering of other human beings if they can do so at minimal cost to

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each. This principle undergirds the moral obligation to join forces with others to lift a heavy object off a crushed person and explain the wrongness of doing nothing. Likewise, Cripps argues that the unstructured but climate-relevant collective of “The Young” has a collective duty to organize themselves to mitigate climate change (ibid., p. 57). On the other hand, the collectivized no-harm principle states that a collective of human beings has a moral obligation to organize themselves to prevent serious harm resulting from the aggregation of their avoidable individual acts (ibid., p. 74). This principle grounds the moral obligation to organize with other herders to prevent cumulative overgrazing and the harm that would predictably result. Likewise, Cripps argues that the collective of polluters has a duty to act on mitigation, adaptation, and compensation given their collective responsibility for climate harms. By underscoring the connection between collectives and moral duty, Elizabeth Cripps’ account of promotional duties dovetails with Iris Young’s social connection model of responsibility for structural injustice (Young, 2011). Recall that structural injustice, such as that experienced by Elijah, seems to occur not because of individually culpable persons violating moral norms or this or that unjust policy, but due to the uncoordinated behaviors of many public and private actors (frequently) working within a T of C dynamic (ibid., p. 47). Under the social connection model, individuals retain responsibility for structural injustice due to their “contributions by their actions to the processes that produce unjust outcomes” and their “belonging together with others in a system of interdependent processes of cooperation and competition through which we seek benefits and aim to realize projects” (Young, 2011, p. 105). As Elijah’s story illustrated, climate change is an instance of structural injustice. Young’s social connection model is a possible way of parsing individual responsibility for structural climate injustice, and so – unsurprisingly – many authors have applied the social connection model to climate change (Young, 2011, p. 103; Eckersley, 2016; Godoy, 2017; Larrère, 2018; Boscov-Ellen, 2020; Dwyer, 2020; Sardo, 2023). However, so long as individual responsibility for justice flows from one’s mere membership in a relevant collective, the corresponding responsibility will be constrained. This mere membership feature of Iris Young’s and Elizabeth Cripps’ accounts results in a mutual upshot: one’s promotional duties should be the primary (Cripps) or only (Young) way to discharge one’s climate responsibility. This result falls out of both accounts because one’s membership in a collective like the Young, polluters, or the socially connected will frequently be non-intentional and beyond one’s control (to varying extents). Therefore, any correlative responsibility must be different than a more everyday “liability” model of responsibility where one can be held culpable for a discrete act of wrongdoing or harm (Young, 2011, p. 97). Accordingly, on such collectivist views, individuals cannot be held “blameworthy in [such] a full-blooded, guilt-inducing sense” for their contributions to climate injustice (Cripps, 2013, p. 141). Why can’t they? On a “liability” model where one attributes wrongdoing to an individual, there is a wide consensus in the Western philosophical tradition going back to Immanuel Kant that the relevant wrongdoing must result from the individual’s freely chosen actions, or agency (Zheng, 2018). If one’s climate responsibility

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is not a result of bad intentions or avertable harms, then one’s individual responsibility for climate change will not entail liability: it will instead be solely forwardlooking (Young, 2011, p. 173). Moreover, as we have seen, the duty to promote just institutions can be fulfilled in a myriad of ways. In Kant’s words, one’s promotional duty is imperfect. As a result, there is no single action an individual does that violate one’s collective climate responsibilities, rendering it more difficult to blame an individual for failing to discharge them. This difficulty in holding individuals accountable for engaging in collective climate action and the significant effort collective action entails may explain why individuals often either opt to green their personal lives or engage in no climate action at all (Schwenkenbecher, 2012, p. 183–184). The difficulty in assigning blame to discrete climate actions results, largely, from the impersonal nature of collectivist accounts of individual climate responsibility. Structural climate injustice is maintained by ordinary behavior that is not wrong in itself (Zheng, 2018). This is why it is wrong to assign blame to individuals for their climate participation, but it also raises the question as to why it’s the individual’s job to enact climate justice in the first place. The threat of a climate institutionalist conclusion looms: institutions – and institutions alone – might be morally obligated to enact just climate policy. If so, individuals lack climate duties of any sort, as climate justice is the purview of government bodies. Yet, despite all the disagreements, we have surveyed so far, no climate ethicist seriously entertains such a strong institutionalist conclusion – including Jessica Fahlquist, who probably comes the closest (Fahlquist, 2009). To their credit, both Young and Cripps are aware of the threat that a collectivist account of individual responsibility for justice may lead to individuals feeling detached from their climate responsibilities (Young, 2011, p. 165–170; Cripps, 2013, p. 142). Elizabeth Cripps alleviates the concern by simply reminding us that even if an established institution is tasked with promoting climate justice, this body’s failure returns responsibility to individuals. On the other hand, Iris Young thinks the institutionalist conclusion ignores how government institutions’ success depends on its citizenry’s active support and engagement. If so, the climate institutionalist position all but ensures injustice will endure, and hence the moral necessity of the climate collectivist position becomes clear.

A Confucian Collective? Against the Individualist Assumption Recognizing the possibility of a climate institutionalist position highlights an essential commonality between climate individualists and climate collectivists: they are both, in a salient way, individualist (Dout & Obst, forthcoming). This consensus, however, renders both views vulnerable to the problem of inconsequentialism (Bernstein, unpublished). If Young and Cripps’ answers to the institutionalist challenge seems indecisive, it is likely because they do not claim that individuals, alone, can reliably make a difference to collective outcomes through discharging their collective climate duties. After all, ordinary persons can only make tiny

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contributions to large-scale collective outcomes, which is as true of climate justice legislation as climate harms. Confronted with this problem of inconsequentialism, the moral import of a collective outcome does not obviously make demands on the tiny individual, especially when such a responsibility does not follow from the individual being liable in some way for the collective problem. Ultimately, then, both the climate individualist and the climate collectivist must explain why individual acts are morally salient despite seeming so inconsequential (Hiller, 2011; Jamieson, 2014). One individualist strategy to establish the moral salience of personal emissions is to challenge the isolation of individuals. Climate collectivists assume that individual actions can be distinguished meaningfully from collective action: individuals make no difference, only the activities of the collective matter. However, Marion Hourdequin argues that a Confucian perspective on morality challenges this view. Recall that a T of C requires that individuals be independent: that there is no social force legislating individual consumption and individuals cannot influence one another or entice cooperation through their unilateral actions. Hourdequin would say that the individualist assumption of a T of C fails to attain in most real-world cases because “persons are constituted by and through their relations with others” and learn to be moral persons from one another (Hourdequin, 2010). On this Confucian view, “unilateral” GHG reductions may have expressive value to others: they may communicate one’s concern for the commons, the virtue of restraint, and the prescriptive need for reduced consumption at a larger scale. This possibility may expose the alleged distinction between the personal and political as illusory. If individual “private” conduct has a magnetic effect on others, then the alleged impotency of individual behavior may rest on a mistake. Against the embedded assumptions of collective action problems and the problem of inconsequentialism, the personal may be political after all. Climate collectivists, perhaps unsurprisingly, tend to be sympathetic to such an appeal. If individual GHG reductions can serve to discharge one’s promotional duties, then climate collectivists are usually open to such actions having moral value (Johnson, 2011; Cripps, 2013; Kingston & Sinnott-Armstrong, 2018). Notably, Hourdequin’s Confucian proposal relies on empirical claims regarding social psychology that are difficult to confirm. For one, truly private acts – like turning down the thermostat or taking shorter showers – seem invisible to others and so ostensibly cannot serve as moral communication. For another, even a public act like eating vegan or bicycling to work may fail to serve as moral communication on their own (Johnson, 2011, p. 150). However, such acts may still acquire promotional value when paired with verbal communication that explains the moral reasoning behind that behavior. Nevertheless, if private, truly unilateral action lacks the communicative capacity needed for promotional value, then the distinction between private and collective action may prove relevant. Moreover, even if all acts of carbon reduction had promotional value, the distinction may remain helpful so long as classic “political” actions like protest and voting yield more reliable climate results than individual emission cuts (Booth, 2012).

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These empirical considerations may indeed limit the power of Hourdequin’s argument. Perhaps private emitting has so little communicative value that something very much like the individualist assumption persists. Still, one must remember that both the climate individualist and the climate collectivist face the problem of inconsequentialism. If the climate collectivist position is correct, then a duty to promote climate action exists despite individual impotence. If so, for consistency’s sake, the climate collectivist cannot consider individual impotence as sufficient to rule out personal mitigation duties. The possibility remains that individual emissions reductions have morally salient promotional value, even if they seem overwhelmingly inconsequential.

Justifying Climate Individualism: Affirming the Prescription As we have seen, there are many ways a climate individualist might deny that climate change exhibits the structural features of a T of C, and thereby preserve the possibility that unilateral emissions reductions make a difference to climate harms. However, even climate individualists who think this strategy is promising may have the instinct that individual mitigation duties exist independent of its success. After all, frivolous emitting’s intuitive wrongness seems prior to any of the messy empirical considerations surveyed in section “Justifying Climate Individualism: Denying the Description”. If so, a second strategy is to insist that individual moral obligations to reduce GHG emissions exist even if personal emitting causes no harm and makes no morally relevant difference to climate change. I call this individualist strategy affirming the prescription. There are a great number of ways philosophers have affirmed the prescription. Here, I briefly summarize four such arguments: virtue, contribution, universalization, and fair shares.

Virtue The first way that climate ethicists might affirm the prescription is by advancing a virtue ethical account of individual obligations to reduce environmental impact generally or carbon emissions specifically. On a virtue ethical account, an action is right to the extent that it is virtuous, and it is virtuous if it exhibits a virtue: i.e., a character trait that is generally conducive to promoting the good (Sandler, 2010, p. 176). Ronald Sandler (2010) suggests a moral requirement to practice virtues such as fairness and to avoid vices like materialism may ground climate individualism. Dale Jamieson (2011) has argued that embracing the virtue of respect for nature should motivate one to respond to climate change. Alternatively, Paul Knights (2019) suggests that resisting T of C outcomes through unilateral restraint hit the virtues of compassion, concern, care, empathy, sympathy, and humility. Yet, short of rejecting the normative theory of virtue ethics altogether, critics of such approaches

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have denied the ability of such virtues to ground moral obligations to avoid this or that act of GHG emitting (Sandberg, 2011, p. 246; Kingston & Sinnott-Armstrong, 2018, p. 170). Finally, there is a consensus among virtue ethical approaches that willfully contributing to a morally objectionable T of C entails the vice of hypocrisy, while limiting one’s environmental impact through GHG reductions or other restraint entails the virtue of integrity (Sandler, 2010; Hourdequin, 2011; Hedberg, 2018; Knights, 2019). In the words of Marion Hourdequin, “an individual who worked for emissions limiting policies while steadily and frivolously increasing her emissions would be working at cross purposes,” in such a way as to constitute hypocrisy (Hourdequin, 2011, p. 449). However, Hourdequin does admit that this apparent tension does not rise to the level of contradiction. If so, then it’s less clear why an individual treating the personal and political spheres differently manifests hypocrisy, especially if the problem of inconsequentialism applies more forcefully to the private sphere. Another problem is that appeals to integrity are incapable of establishing mitigation obligations for those who do not already value collective climate action or the environment, a potentially troubling limitation (Rieder & Bernstein, 2020). Nonetheless, integrity accounts of individual climate obligations remain popular.

Contribution Even if it turned out that individual consumption does not cause marginal plastic pollution, smoggy cities, or dangerous climate change, it is difficult to give up the intuition that such individual actions do not have some morally significant relationship with the relevant collective harms to which they contribute. Even if my actions do not cause the problem, actions like mine do, and any environmentalist worth his salt ought to recognize the moral significance of this fact (Rieder & Bernstein, 2020, p. 9). For a while, ethicists have argued that one’s own actions are of special moral import: it is ethically significant to keep “clean hands” of wrongdoing, even if one’s actions make no difference to wrongful outcomes (Williams, 1973; Glover & ScottTaggart, 1975). Recent climate ethicists have attempted to elucidate this idea. Some have done so by asserting that it is morally wrong to be a member of a harming collective, as such participation renders one complicit in their wrongdoing (Kutz, 2000; Lichtenberg, 2010; Raterman, 2012). Alternatively, some have argued that one can make a causal contribution to a moralized collective outcome even if one makes no difference at all to that outcome (Pellegrino, 2018; Nefsky, 2017; Baatz & VogetKleschin, 2019). If this is right, individual contributions would plausibly become moralized. The obvious collectivist reply to all such appeals is to reassert that contribution requires making a difference. In anticipation of this reaction, Julia Nefsky provides a compelling explanation for how this intuition arises, even as it is mistaken (Nefsky, 2017, p. 2758–2760).

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Universalization and Fair Shares Another way to explain the intuition that contribution to collective harms is morally wrong is to appeal not to any empirical contribution one’s act makes, but to a Kantian hypothetical: what if everyone did that? If the answer is “they couldn’t” or “bad things would result,” then Kant insists one has either a perfect (in the case of the first answer) or an imperfect (in the case of the second answer) duty to refrain from that behavior. It seems like this test is at the heart of many environmentalist instincts (Manning, 1984). It seems to explain the wrongness in walking across a prairie restoration project or tossing a plastic bottle to the side of the road, even if it is challenging to attribute interpersonal or environmental harm to such acts in isolation. This universalization principle has explanatory power in even non-environmental collective contexts where individual acts still seem impotent, such as voting in a democracy. If one adopted the maxim: “Since one vote makes veritably no difference in the outcome of an election, one need not vote,” then a universalization test results in no citizen voting, making nonsense of a democracy (Miller, 2016, p. 408). Likewise, perhaps one person’s “vote” to cut back on GHG emissions by using less GHG-emitting energy will make no difference to climate change, but this does not mean that one ought not to make that vote (ibid.) It seems plausible, then, that this Kantian moral test could produce an obligation for every commons user to restrict his or her use to a level that would be sustainable if all other users reduced their use in a similar way, and to do this regardless of what others do – the very principle Baylor Johnson rejected from the outset. Such Kantian approaches, despite their intuitive power, run into problems. Probably the most pressing issue, which confronts any application of Kantian ethics, is in identifying what the relevant maxim is in the case of individual emissions. Let us apply the moral test to the act of joyriding in a gas-guzzling car. On the one hand, one might think the maxim of this act is “having harmless fun,” which could not result in a contradiction itself (Sinnott-Armstrong, 2005, p. 303). Alternatively, one could understand the relevant maxim to be “emitting unsustainably.” If everybody emitted unsustainably, then there would be climate chaos, and burning fossil fuels (eventually) would probably become impossible. Therefore, to emit unsustainably oneself requires others not emitting unsustainably – a contradiction when universalized. However, even if this test undergirds a perfect duty to emit sustainably, this duty seems incapable of ruling out any single act of emitting. After all, such an emission – taken alone – is not unsustainable. One way around this problem is to apply a different kind of universalization test: a fair shares calculus. Christian Baatz points out that dangerous climate change has rendered greenhouse gases a scarce good, subject to rules of fair allocation. It is easy enough to get an initial sense of an individual’s “fair share” of global emissions: divide the remaining carbon budget by the global population. This calculation results in an individual emission’s allocation of 2–3 t CO2 per year (Baatz, 2014, p. 5). A personal carbon budget morally justifies the climate individualist position; moreover, while it does not prohibit frivolous emitting outright, the fair shares argument

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puts American citizens in a difficult situation due to the American average of 16 t CO2 emitted per year. Indirectly, then, stringent individual emissions limits become required. Or, so one would think. As straightforward as the fair shares account appears upon first presented, it faces a serious challenge that Chris Cuomo calls the insufficiency problem: personal sphere reductions are insufficient for adequate national mitigation (Cuomo, 2011, p. 201). According to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), commercial and residential emissions accounted for only 12% of the US emissions in 2018, while electricity production and transportation emissions across both the private and non-private sectors tallied to 55% (United States Environmental Protection Agency, 2018). The final 33% resulted from industry and agriculture, which exceed the scope of the personal sphere entirely (ibid.). Ultimately, attributing emissions to the personal, corporate, or public spheres is no easy task. Still, one thing is certain: the “policies, practices, and profit motives of metalevel actors and decision-makers. . . dramatically limit the efficacy of individual efforts” (Cuomo, 2011, p. 202). The insufficiency problem has two notable implications. First, an individual American’s ability to reduce per capita emissions is significantly constrained. Second, individuals may not be morally required to reduce their emissions to a “fair” per-capita level. Let us take the former implication first. As the EPA’s estimates clarify, a large fraction of national emissions is attributable to commercial operations (most substantially, those of large corporations) and national energy infrastructure. For ease, let’s call these “structural emissions.” Individuals have very little ability to alter structural emissions, yet structural emissions significantly determine per-capita emission levels (Baatz, 2014, p. 10). This is the largest reason why individual efforts to reduce emissions – taking public transport, eating vegan, turning down the thermostat – face the problem of insufficiency. Quite simply, individuals are not the only relevant actors responsible for the United States’ high per capita emissions (Hartzell, 2011). But, if so, then as long as you depend on your country’s carbonintensive products and energy infrastructure to subsist, you will never get your yearly carbon emissions to a globally sustainable level (Aufrecht, 2011). The second implication is more worrying for the fair-share account. Early in the climate ethics literature, Henry Shue distinguished subsistence emissions from luxury emissions (Shue, 1993). As their names suggest, subsistence emissions are necessary for “a minimally decent standard of living,” while luxury emissions are not required for subsistence. Henry Shue introduced this distinction to make the point that it would be unfair to require some individuals to forfeit their subsistence emissions so others could retain their luxury emissions (ibid., p. 42). Recent authors almost universally agree, asserting that individuals have a right to their subsistence emissions (i.e., Vanderheiden, 2008; Moellendorf, 2014). Importantly, however, the first implication of the insufficiency problem entails that in carbon-dependent structures – which correlate with a country’s affluence – subsistence emissions can be rather high: well above the “fair” per-capita level of 4 t CO2 (Baatz, 2014, p. 10). If individuals do have a right to their subsistence emissions, then affluent citizens have a right to emit (far) beyond their fair share.

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This result troubles a fair share account for individual obligations to reduce emissions unless further justifications can be given for lowering emissions once one is permitted to emit beyond one’s fair share. Fortunately, such a justification has been offered.

The Extent of Individual Responsibility for Climate Justice One natural way for a fair shares account to justify obligations to reduce emissions in the face of the insufficiency problem is to assert that affluent citizens have a right only to emissions necessary for a minimally decent life (i.e., their subsistence emissions). Christian Baatz opts for this tactic by adopting an interpretation of a “minimally decent life” that includes not only enough food, water, and shelter to live but also what amounts to the pursuit of central life projects and even creature comforts. As an example, he offers the case of an elderly person living in a rural area in the United States. In her situation, an obligation to reduce her emissions to a bear-means level would require not using her car to socialize with others and insulating her home using funds she can hardly afford. Considering such requirements, Baatz thinks a moral requirement to reduce her emissions in such a way would be overly stringent (Baatz, 2014, p. 10). While initially plausible, Baatz’s rather expansive view of subsistence emissions raises the question of whether affluent citizens can have obligations not to develop or indulge demanding conceptions of decent lives when such a life entails actual or possible climate harms (Bowman, 2014; Duus-Otterström, 2014). The final task in this literature review is to survey a quickly expanding literature on this question regarding the extent of individual responsibility. One upshot of this literature review so far has been that there is a consensus across the individual climate ethics literature that individuals have at least some obligations to reduce personal emissions, even while justifications for this responsibility vary widely. Yet, there is hardly any consensus regarding the extent of these obligations, and recently climate ethicists have devoted attention to fill this theoretical gap.

Demandingness Constraints By suggesting that individual obligations to reduce emissions down to a bare subsistence level are overly stringent, Baatz joins a camp of philosophers who insist that moral obligations to reduce emissions ought not be overly demanding (Fahlquist, 2009; Raterman, 2012; Fruh & Hedahl, 2013; Lawford-Smith 2016b; García-Portela 2019). The basic idea is that a moral requirement to give up important life goals and projects is too much to ask (Williams, 1973; Scheffler, 1982). Yet, there is a risk that morality might demand this from us in an increasingly interconnected world. Right now, moral reasons pull us from all sides: the moral reasons to alleviate poverty and famine, the moral reasons to withdraw financial support from factory farming, sweatshops, or “problematic” entertainment, as well

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as the moral reasons to withdraw oneself from the myriad of other injustices that pop up everywhere one looks (Lawford-Smith, 2016a; Fragnière, 2018). If moral reason to withdraw from these “New Harms” proved sufficient to establish moral obligations, then a radical change of lifestyle would be required (Lichtenberg, 2010, p. 558), possibly interfering with a life well lived (Neuteleers, 2010). In light of all this, Augustin Fragnière thinks that we cannot apply a straightforward “no-harm” principle to explain the wrongness of emitting. In local, everyday contexts, a duty not to harm would mainly involve “refraining from things we would never have considered in the first place, like killing and raping and robbing” (ibid). If this everyday duty applied to New Harms like carbon emissions, then personal lifeprojects would be doomed (Fragnière, 2018, p. 648). Far beyond “low hanging fruits” reductions, a no harm duty would mean “no more flights, no more cars, no more heating or warm water, no more screens,” and the list goes on (ibid., p. 651). Rather than bite this bullet, Fragnière argues that even while carbon emissions cause harm, the diffused character of this harm makes it not as bad morally speaking as more direct “old harms.” Therefore, demandingness can constrain obligations to reduce emissions (ibid., p. 653).

Against the Demandingness of Individual Emissions Reductions A significant number of ethicists do not leave room for demandingness constraints. In general, utilitarians who accept an impersonal imperative to maximize pleasure and minimize pain are unsympathetic to such constraints: if more good results by you tightening your belt and forgoing unnecessary greenhouse gas emissions, that’s what you ought to do (Berkey, 2014; Nolt, 2013b). Unless individuals make severe changes in their lifestyles, dangerous climate change will almost assuredly occur. So how could one have a right to these lifestyles? Rather than rejecting demandingness constraints altogether, other climate ethicists have attempted to question the assumption that significantly reducing carbon emissions would be overly burdensome. Here, I mention two such strategies. The first is to highlight the role carbon offsetting can serve in discharging one’s responsibility to reduce emissions. The second is to empirically question the degree to which substantial emissions cuts would conflict with a life well-lived.

Carbon Offsetting John Broome is notable for his view on the moral relevance of carbon offsetting to individual responsibility. His view starts from the empirical premise that climate harms result from an increase in global carbon concentrations and that individuals cause harm by increasing this total. As a corollary, “you do no harm by your emissions if you do not add to the global concentration” (Broome, 2016, p. 159). Therefore, if you emit carbon but reduce atmospheric carbon elsewhere, you cause no harm because the global carbon concentration does not change (ibid.). But this is precisely how carbon offsetting is supposed to work. Therefore, his view that one has a moral obligation to reduce one’s emissions to zero is not that stringent after all,

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because one can achieve this moral demand by offsetting the carbon emissions attributable to you (ibid., p. 163). If Broome’s reasoning holds up, these circumstantial empirical facts transform an obligation to emit no carbon from overwhelmingly difficult to an easy payment of about $7.83 per ton of carbon emitted, or $125 a year (Thorpe, 2019)! This sounds almost too good to be true, and some insist that’s exactly what it is. The first issue is the scientific legitimacy of offsetting: there are serious worries that many offsetting projects are not effective, despite their claims. Accordingly, there is an ever-present danger that carbon offsetting will not offset one’s emissions after all (Hyams & Fawcett, 2013, p. 93). This is especially troubling if the promise of offsetting causes one to increase their local emissions. The second issue is moral. Some writers have compared offsetting to the practice of buying “indulgences” from the medieval church to absolve of one’s sins (Goodin, 1994), while others argue that offsetting offers a consumerist solution to a problem driven by consumerism (Monbiot, 2006). Both worries emphasize how offsetting seems to prey on weak motivation, so it cannot offer a general solution to climate change (Hyams & Fawcett, 2013, p. 96). Moreover, as offsetting will become more expensive when people catch on to how it may quickly alleviate their climate guilt, offsetting may not remain cheap for long. When this happens, offsetting may no longer ease demandingness concerns, even if it does now.

Climate Ethics with an Ethnographic Sensibility If demandingness really can constraint one’s climate responsibilities, then individual moral obligations to reduce emissions will be context-sensitive to the demands of doing so. This point is now well-recognized in the literature, but it has not been unpacked until relatively recently. Derek Bell, Joanne Swaffield, and Wouter Peeters argue that using qualitative social science methods to collect original data about individuals’ emitting behaviors and environmental reasoning may help provide a systematic understanding of what role contextual factors should play (Bell et al., 2019). They call such an approach “climate ethics with an ethnographic sensibility.” Bell et al. take the first step towards this ethnographic project by studying the environmental decision-making behind personal air travel. They asked participants about their justifications for flying, a particularly carbon-rich emitting behavior. By collecting real people’s reasoning, they identified potentially compelling moral justifications including seeing relatives and friends who would be practically impossible to see without flying (ibid., p. 624). But they also found cases of so called “special pleading,” where peoples’ ethical deliberations seemed to either underestimate the moral significance of climate harms or overestimate the moral importance of the costs of pro-climate behavior (ibid., p. 620). Examples of possible special pleading include flying because of modest cost-saving benefits or flying to save a few hours (ibid., p. 626–627). These justifications for carbon-emitting seem much weaker than needed to be able to constitute a demandingness constraint. Yet, many of the research participants appealed to them to morally justify flying. The results of Bell et al.’s pilot study are, of course, preliminary. Yet, they seem to suggest that individuals frequently make weak demandingness appeals. If

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ethnographic interrogations reveal these to be quite common, demandingness constraints will prove far less applicable than commonly believed. After all, there are a multiplicity of wasteful emitting habits that may be easy or even personally advantageous to abandon (Schwenkenbecher, 2012, p. 280; Hedberg, 2018, p. 71). Moreover, demandingness can hardly trouble a moral obligation always to push oneself to consume and emit less (Raterman, 2012, p. 433). While these considerations do not dispel demandingness constraints entirely, they do limit demandingness’ scope.

Conclusion This chapter has covered substantial philosophical ground. It first presented Baylor Johnson’s argument as to why there are no individual moral obligations to unilaterally reduce contributions to a T of C like climate change, and then considered two individualist replies: that of denying the description and affirming the prescription. This survey revealed a consensus among climate ethicists that one of these strategies succeeds, although how and to what degree varies substantially. Finally, it analyzed the extent of individual climate responsibility and how it may or may not be constrained by demandingness. Dangerous climate change is perhaps the greatest moral challenge of our time, and so the question as to the existence and extent of our individual climate responsibilities deserves the considerable philosophical attention it has received. Moreover, as should be clear, the previous discussion is not only relevant to climate change but has implications for all relevantly similar social and political issues. Accordingly, care must be taken not to make a special case out of moral responsibility for climate harms. After all, in our interconnected world, many pressing problems of collective harm appear to have the structural features of a tragedy of the commons (Norton, 2003; Sandler, 2010; Shockley, 2016; Rieder & Bernstein, 2020). Candidates include animal suffering, biodiversity loss, deforestation, disease spread, pollution, poverty, worker exploitation, and many other violations of both human and nonhuman rights. Therefore, the discussion surrounding responsibility for collective harm will not, and should not, end here.

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Climate Change and Virtue Ethics Enrico Galvagni

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Two Benefits of Virtue Ethical Approaches to Climate Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Virtue Ethical Approaches Capture Our Moral Phenomenology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Virtue Ethical Approaches Can Tackle the Problem of Inconsequentialism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Catalogue of Environmental Virtues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Old Virtues Reconceived . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . New Virtues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . An Objection to Virtue-Oriented Approaches to Climate Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Over the past two decades, virtue ethicists have begun to devote increasing attention to applied ethics. In particular, the application of virtue ethical frameworks to the environmental ethics debate has flourished. This chapter reviews recent contributions to the literature in this field and highlights some strengths and weaknesses of thinking about climate change through a virtue ethical lens. Section “Two Benefits of Virtue Ethical Approaches to Climate Change” explores two benefits of applying virtue ethics to climate change: (a) we can better capture the phenomenology of our moral experience, and (b) we avoid the problem of inconsequentialism. Section “A Catalogue of Environmental Virtues” analyzes various practical proposals that have been put forward in the form of specific environmental virtues. Section “An Objection to Virtue-Oriented Approaches to Climate Change” reconstructs a fundamental objection to the idea of using a virtue ethical normative approach to tackling the urgent and imminent dangers of climate change. E. Galvagni (*) Department of Philosophy, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_152

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Keywords

Virtue ethics · Virtue theory · Climate change · Character · Environmental virtues · Green virtues · Inconsequentialism

Introduction Virtue ethics is usually defined as an ethical theory in which (1) the virtues (morally good, excellent, or prizeworthy character traits) play a salient role; and (2) the virtues are taken to be the fundamental concepts of ethics and are not defined in term of some other concepts (such as consequences, duty, etc.; see Driver, 1998; Hursthouse & Pettigrove, 2022). Such an approach to ethics has gained more and more traction in the past few decades and is now taken to be one of the main ethical theories rivaling consequentialism and deontology. In line with this increasing attention toward virtue and character, philosophers have begun to use virtue ethical frameworks to think about problems in applied ethics. Environmental virtue ethics is a result of this recent development. A handful of forerunners, such as Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), Aldo Leopold (1887–1948), and Rachel Carson (1907–1964), started thinking about environmental ethics in terms of virtue and character well ahead of their time. However, the field of environmental virtue ethics is a newcomer to the academic debate. Only 20 years ago, scholars could still truthfully affirm: “little has been written in environmental ethics from a virtue ethics perspective” (Cafaro, 2001, p. 3). Two decades later, this has changed substantially. While some work had been done in the 1980s and 1990s (e.g., Hill 1983; O’Neill, 1993), the academic debate started to attract a great deal of attention only from the early 2000s, with the publication of some books now considered milestones in the field: Louke van Wensveen’s Dirty Virtues: The Emergence of Ecological Virtue Ethics (2000); Philip Cafaro’s Thoreau’s Living Ethics: Walden and the Pursuit of Virtue (2004); and Ronald Sandler’s Character and Environment: A Virtue-Oriented Approach to Environmental Ethics (2007). Soon after, some of the leading virtue ethicists, such as Rosalind Hursthouse and Christine Swanton, assumed the task of demonstrating how virtue ethics could be used to rethink the relationship between human beings and nature (Hursthouse, 2007; Swanton, 2010). In a few years, environmental virtue ethics went from being a “small but growing field” (Welchman, 1999, p. 414) to an “indispensable” and “vibrant area of environmental ethics” (Sandler, 2013, p. 8). Despite this burgeoning development, the contributions devoted to the application of virtue ethics to the specific problem of climate change remain rare. In a recent paper, Dominic Lenzi laments that “virtue ethics has been largely absent from [the] debate” (Lenzi, 2022, p. 1) surrounding climate change. While the academic papers devoted to environmental virtue ethics are now innumerable, the virtue ethical study of the specific phenomenon of climate change has not been a primary area of research. Before proceeding further, it is important to understand why this is the case. Environmental approaches of the kind proposed by virtue ethicists are more holistic than normative approaches which are primarily based on rights or

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consequences. Rather than studying and developing a possible solution to climate change as a specific problem, virtue ethicists have often focused on how cultivating certain character traits contributes to improve the “ethical relationships between human beings and the natural environment” (Sandler, 2013, p. 1). It is hoped that this will also contribute to mitigating climate change and its effects. However, climate change specifically is not often discussed by environmental virtue ethicists. Given the focus on virtues and character that virtue ethicists adopt, cultivating environmental virtues is not thought of as a way to solve specific problems but rather is taken to be a more profound attempt to reconceive the place of human beings in relation to the natural world. In other words, this approach conceives of the virtues as a solution to something wider than the problem of climate change. This is why most scholars who have shaped the debate surrounding the application of virtue ethics to environmental issues have rarely written about climate change. Their holistic approach is the reason why environmental virtue ethics, rather than being merely an application of virtue ethics to a set of specific problems, has emerged in recent years as a branch of virtue ethics itself. Some environmentalists now argue that one cannot simply develop a virtue ethics based on human flourishing and then apply it to environment. Rather, the fact that human beings’ happiness and wellbeing is influenced by the way we live and respond to our environment makes it so that environmental concerns must be built into our basic normative concepts. This is why Philip Cafaro, one of the most prominent scholars in the field, affirms that environmental virtue ethics “both deepens our understanding of environmentalism and gives us a better sense of what it would really mean to be benevolent, temperate, properly humble or wise people” (Cafaro, 2015, p. 438). In order to have a proper theory of the virtues, we need to have an environmentalist approach to virtue ethics. But what are the benefits of such an approach to our management of the real and urgent problem of climate change?

Two Benefits of Virtue Ethical Approaches to Climate Change Although the literature explicitly devoted to virtue ethics and climate change is dwarfed by that on environmental virtue ethics more generally, two main benefits of virtue ethical approaches to climate change can be identified. A virtue ethical approach to this problem (1) better captures our moral phenomenology and aligns to our everyday experience; and (2) provides a tool against the problem of inconsequentialism, namely that individuals have no responsibility for the production or prevention of climate change because their individual actions have no direct, clear, and measurable impact on this phenomenon. This section briefly presents these two points in turn.

Virtue Ethical Approaches Capture Our Moral Phenomenology The first benefit of a virtue ethical approach to climate change is that it successfully captures our moral phenomenology. This benefit is often highlighted by virtue

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ethicists not only in relation to climate change ethics, but also with respect to virtue ethics in general. A moral theory based on virtue, they argue, provides us with a more accurate description of our moral experience than rival theories such as consequentialism and deontology. Environmental virtue ethicists think of their approach as one that is able to capture our common sense and everyday moral intuitions more adequately than competing moral theories. For instance, one of the first and most influential academic papers on environmental virtues – Thomas E. Hill Jr’s “Ideals of Human Excellence and Preserving Natural Environments” – opens with an attempt to understand what is wrong with a “wealthy eccentric” who recently “bought a house . . . surrounded by a beautiful display of grass, plants, and flowers, and it . . . shaded by a huge old avocado tree” and decided to “cut the whole lot down and covered the yard with asphalt” (Hill 1983, p. 211). Hill thinks that as long as we look for consequences and right infringements, we will struggle to find anything objectionable in his behavior (suppose he enjoys the new view more than the more than the old one, that no one has been harmed in the process, etc.). And yet, we feel some “moral discomfort” when presented with these facts. Hill’s suggestion is often taken to be the initiatory gesture of environmental virtue ethics: in cases like this, “we may not regard an act wrong at all though we see it as reflecting something objectionable about the person who does it” (Hill 1983, p. 215). Our moral reaction of discomfort at the wealthy eccentric’s acts, Hill believes, is explained by realizing that what is morally objectionable is not the man’s action but rather his character. This is an aspect stressed by many other proponents of a virtue ethical approach to environmental ethics. For instance, Philip Cafaro (2001) argues that the forerunners of environmental virtue ethics (Thoreau, Leopold, Carson) all thought that people conceive of the ideal relationship between human beings and nature in terms of virtue and character. Ronald Sandler confirms this by affirming that virtue concepts are “more subtle and rich evaluations of both character and conduct than the standard deontological and consequentialist categories” (Sandler, 2013, p. 3) and are more representative of the way human beings think of environmental issues. Sophie-Grace Chappell stresses the same point: the description of climate emergencies “produces responses in us that are very natural to talk about in the vocabulary of the virtues” (Chappell, 2020, p. 178). When people think about their interaction with the natural environment, they tend to use aretaic concepts, which are both evaluative and descriptive (such as ‘selfish,’ ‘disrespectful,’ ‘cruel,’ ‘careful,’ ‘considerate,’ ‘sensitive,’ ‘grateful,’ etc.), rather than deontic ones, which are merely evaluative (‘right,’ ‘wrong,’ ‘permissible,’ ‘impermissible,’ ‘obligatory,’ etc.). For instance, most people would not judge someone going for a high-emission fun ride on a Sunday afternoon in the deontic terms of obligation or prohibition. Rather they rely on aretaic concepts and identify the agent of such an action as selfish, inconsiderate, disrespectful, and so on. Virtue ethicists claim that an ethical theory that adopts these terms as central ethical concepts will be in a better position to describe, persuade, and motivate individual agents to act in certain ways. In the case of climate change, for instance, virtue ethical approaches assert that our moral judgments are usually aimed at people’s characters rather than to the

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consequences of their actions. Each individual act may not have any relevant consequences in exacerbating climate change but is not, therefore, irrelevant to the problem. The aretaic concepts of virtues and vices apply nonetheless to the agent in question. This leads to the second and more substantial benefit of a virtue ethical approach to climate change.

Virtue Ethical Approaches Can Tackle the Problem of Inconsequentialism A second benefit of virtue ethical approaches to climate change is that they can provide a solution to the problem of inconsequentialism. Although there is widespread agreement in the research community that climate change is caused by collective human activity, it is controversial whether we can attribute individual responsibility for it. Many prominent scholars argue that there is no causal connection between one individual’s emissions and the global phenomenon of climate change. One individual’s emissions do not make any causal difference to climate change, if considered in themselves. Famously, some philosophers have argued that this implies that going for a high-emission fun ride on a Sunday afternoon is not something that is morally bad (Sinnott-Armstrong, 2005; cf. Barry & Øverland, 2015; Galvin & Harris, 2014, among others). The problem of inconsequentialism can be put simply: if one’s emissions do not make any relevant or noticeable difference in the production or prevention of climate change, why should we blame or praise individuals for their environmentally objectionable actions? Various philosophers have argued that a virtue ethical approach fares substantially better than other accounts when presented with this problem. This is so because virtue ethics affirms that we should conceive of some actions as bad even if they have no causal connection to climate change, as long as they manifest some vice or lack of virtue. On such proposals, we can rightfully affirm that an inconsequential high-emission fun ride is bad because it is a manifestation of indifference, selfishness, and arrogance when performed by someone who is aware of the existence of climate change and the harm it produces. The fact that there is no direct or causal connection between the individual action and the harmful consequences of climate change is irrelevant to our judgments about the agent who performed the vicious action. This is likely to be the most promising advantage that virtue ethics has to offer to the debate on climate change. It is therefore worth exploring a few formulations of this point. The first explicit attempt to apply a virtue-based framework to climate change is in Dale Jamieson’s “When Utilitarians Should Be Virtue Theorists” (2007). After presenting various reasons why other theories (Kantianism, Contractualism, Act-utilitarianism, etc.) all have troubles when dealing with “the world’s biggest collective action problem” (2007, p. 165), Jamieson argues that “non-contingency” should be a feature of a moral theory able to present a possible solution to climate change. The idea of non-contingency is that various agents should “act in ways that minimize their contributions to global environmental change” but their “acting in

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this way should generally not be contingent on an agent’s beliefs about the behavior of others” (2007, p. 167). According to Jamieson, such a feature is best achieved by a moral theory that is centered around virtue rather than a calculation of consequences. As he puts the point, “[i]nstead of looking to moral mathematics for practical solutions to large-scale collective action problems, we should focus instead on non-calculative generators of behavior: character traits, dispositions, emotions and what I shall call ‘virtues’” (2007, p. 167). Regardless of what others choose to do, we should minimize our emissions. Developing certain virtues (we will see in the next section a list of them) is the most effective way to deal with a phenomenon such as climate change. This is because it is produced by the collective actions of many, over various generations, and on a global scale. Jamieson’s proposal, however, is not to adopt virtue ethics but that in order to achieve the best results in a world affected by climate change, “utilitarians should be virtue theorists” (2007, p. 180). In the opening lines of this chapter, two conditions for a theory to be a form of virtue ethics have been listed. According to Jamieson, the second of those conditions is not necessary for an ethic to achieve positive environmental results. In other words, while Jamieson argues forcefully that moral theories should integrate a discussion of what he calls the “green virtues,” he admits that we can define those virtues in terms of a more fundamental ethical concept: consequences. As such, his proposal counts as a form of virtue-consequentialism rather than virtue ethics. In a later paper, Roland Sandler also voices his dissatisfaction with the ways in which act utilitarian and Kantian ethics attempt to deal with environmental concerns. Sandler takes climate change specifically as “the paradigmatic longitudinal collective action environmental problem” (Sandler, 2010, p. 168) and argues that “justifications for making the effort to respond to longitudinal collective action environmental problems are, on the whole, particularly well supported by virtueoriented normative theories” (Sandler, 2010, p. 167). His point, similar to Jamieson, is that, on one hand, act utilitarians will struggle to justify the moral prohibition of certain inconsequential actions (such as driving a high-emission car for fun), since these actions cause pleasure in the rider and no harm to others. On the other hand, Kantian ethics will struggle to account for the fact that climate change emerges as a by-product of certain activities and does not imply treating others as mere means or having an attitude of disrespect toward them. Sandler’s conclusion is that “environmental ethicists should be virtue-oriented ethicists, rather than non-virtue-oriented utilitarians or Kantian ethicists” (Sandler, 2010, p. 182). While Sandler’s sympathy is toward a virtue ethical approach, the problem of inconsequentialism can be solved by the adoption of any “virtue-oriented normative theory [which] evaluates actions according to what a person’s dispositions ought to be (i.e., in terms of what is the virtuous thing to do)” (2010, p. 182). Developing a line of thought similar to Jamieson (2007) and Sandler (2010), in a recent paper, Dominic Lenzi argues that “we do not require a causal account of the harmful action that each individual contributes in order to justify moral responses” (Lenzi, 2022, p. 3). This is because “[a]ll that virtue ethical views require is that characteristic ways of living can produce climate harms” (Lenzi, 2022, p. 4) and this

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is taken to be uncontroversial. If we think of climate change as a product of people’s vices, which we often do (see section “Virtue Ethical Approaches Capture Our Moral Phenomenology”), “their correct attribution implies a judgment of moral blame” (Lenzi, 2022, p. 8). In other words, “[f]ailing to do what we can . . . is morally blameworthy, because it reflects vices of injustice, callousness, indifference, and so on” (Lenzi, 2022, p. 8) rather than because it generates bad consequences. His conclusion is that a virtue-oriented ethic, either in the form of virtue ethics or virtue consequentialism, will best deal with the specific nature of climate change. While these proposals differ in some respects, they are unified by the idea that a global collective action problem can be best dealt with by a moral theory that integrates some environmental virtues. The problem of inconsequentialism, usually being considered an obstacle when tackling climate change, can be avoided by focusing on character and the virtues rather than consequences and rights. It is worth noticing here, however, that the characteristic advantage of thinking about climate change with a virtue-oriented approach does not necessarily imply the necessity of virtue ethics as defined in the introduction. A virtue consequentialist approach would be just as effective. Consequentialists and utilitarians could develop their theories into indirect proposals that adopt the virtues as tools to maximize utility (cf. Driver, 2001, 2020). Jamieson’s claim seems to be that, by utilitarian standards, one should adopt a virtue-based approach to the problem of climate change. Similarly, Sandler admits that “[t]he broader theoretical context or metanormative underpinnings of [his proposed virtue-oriented] normative theory could be virtue ethical (e.g., neo-Aristotelian) or utilitarian (e.g., virtue utilitarian)” (2010, p. 169). In other words, the benefits that they identify in the application of virtue ethical frameworks to the problem of climate change also appertain to virtue consequentialist or virtue utilitarian theories.

A Catalogue of Environmental Virtues In the previous section, two benefits of a virtue-based approach to climate change have been explored. In order to achieve such benefits, most environmental virtue ethicists have worked to identify and describe a number of character traits that we ought to cultivate in order to improve our relationship with the natural environment. According to Roland Sandler, as well as many other environmental virtue ethicists, “providing substantive accounts of environmental virtues and vices is crucial to generating the normative resources” (2013, p. 8) of this moral theory. In her seminal paper “Environmental Virtue Ethics” (2007), Rosalind Hursthouse has argued that a list of environmental virtues will likely include two kinds of items. First, it will include old virtues reconceived and integrated within an environmentalist theory; and second, it will develop new virtues that have not yet been identified. Following Hursthouse, this section reviews (1) some of the old virtues that have been reconceptualized as environmental virtues; and (2) other brand-new virtues that have emerged in relation to recent concerns with the natural environment. It is important to keep in mind, however, that almost every virtue can be given an environmental

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spin. The list in this chapter, therefore, should not be taken as an exhaustive account. Rather, it includes some of the virtues that have received more traction in recent years. Before we review some of the most prominent environmental virtues, it is worth stressing that the adoption of different normative frameworks will yield different results. If one endorses a virtue-based consequentialist proposal, along the lines developed by Jamieson or Driver, one will include in one’s list of environmental virtues only those character traits that generally produce the best consequences. On such a view, the test that a character trait needs to pass to be counted as a virtue consists of asking: does the cultivation of this trait produce the best consequences? Differently, a virtue ethical approach that takes the virtue concepts to be fundamental moral notions may use different criteria to discriminate between virtues, vices, and indifferent character traits. For instance, a character trait could be counted in the list of virtues merely because it expresses mental states that are morally good, regardless of whether they reliably produce good consequences (e.g., Slote, 2001). Depending on which ethical framework we choose, a list of green virtues will include or exclude certain items. The selection of green virtues analyzed below includes some of the most common and least controversial examples of character traits that will improve the general relationship between human beings and the environment. Without being explicit about this, most virtue ethicists seem to believe that these virtues will also contribute to solving climate change.

Old Virtues Reconceived Benevolence is one of the traditional virtues that is most likely to have an important impact on our treatment of the environment. As Jennifer Welchman has argued: “[b]enevolent interest in our own descendants is a powerful motivator” and can provide proactive behavior in creating “initiatives designed to maintain or improve environmental quality” (Welchman, 1999, p. 416). “Environmental benevolence” is also proposed, analyzed, and developed by Geoffrey Frasz, who argues that an “environmentally good person takes an active interest in promoting the flourishing of all the other members that make up the land” and not only of human beings. “This expansion of the sphere of concern to nonhuman others” is the key feature of “environmental benevolence” (2005, p. 126). Benevolence of this environmental sort is also an “active concern for whole species and particular places, biogeographic zones, ecosystems, and watersheds” (2005, p. 126) in addition to a concern for other people’s welfare. Benevolence as an environmental virtue, therefore, is taken to be a form of traditional benevolence whose scope of action and concern has been expanded to include people that do not yet exists as well as non-human creatures. Gratitude is another virtue that, if reconceived in an environmental way, is often seen as a contribution to ecological goals. While a disposition to feel appropriate gratitude is traditionally conceived of as a virtue that involves only other people whose intentions are the object of gratitude, environmental virtue ethicists have tried

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to reconceptualize gratitude to include nature and the environment. For instance, Karen Bardsley has explored “possible grounds for feelings of gratitude, or a sentiment closely akin to gratitude, toward the natural environments that support human life” (2013, p. 28). Bardsley argues that intentional actions are not necessary for gratitude to be appropriate, and that gratitude is therefore owed to non-human creatures and environments too. Among other recent contributions on this virtue, Nathan Wood has argued that conceiving of “gratitude as an environmental virtue” (2020, p. 483) requires that one “actively wills [nature] to be what it is” (2020, p. 483). In this way, gratitude is expanded into becoming a disposition to accept and value the otherness of nature for its own sake rather than because of an advantage that it procures to human beings. Humility is a virtue that traditionally concerns social interactions among persons. Nonetheless, environmental virtue ethicists have insisted that one of the character flaws most common among people who mistreat the environment and the natural world is arrogance or the lack of proper environmental humility. In the words of Thomas E. Hill: “The Alps, a storm at sea, the Grand Canyon, towering redwoods, and ‘the starry heavens above’ move many a person to remark on the comparative insignificance of our daily concerns and even of our species, and this is generally taken to be a quite fitting response. What seems to be missing, then, in those who understand nature but remain unmoved is a proper humility” (1983, p. 219). Hill believes that someone who “viewed all nonsentient nature simply as a resource” (1983, p. 220) is psychologically very likely to lack humility, to conceive of themselves as the dominator or the possessor of nature, ignoring the detrimental effects that these vices have on the environment. More recently, environmental humility has been developed as one of the central green virtues and as an antidote to the detrimental effects that humanity has on the natural world (Gerber, 2002; Pianalto, 2013; Pulkki, 2022). Temperance is another virtue that, albeit present in many traditional accounts, has recently been valued in environmental ethics. Often recast in the form of “simplicity,” temperance is seen as a character trait that contributes to both individual happiness and the harmonic life of the natural environment. Gambrel and Cafaro detail their account of “material simplicity” as the combination of “the knowledge of what is truly enjoyable, fulfilling, and meaningful in life; and the wisdom to know when enough is enough” (2009, p. 86). Someone who cultivates the virtue of temperance or simplicity will not let themselves be swallowed up by the constant need of new material commodities. Temperance in its environmental extension is a cure to the vices of acquisitiveness and greed. Simplicity in this context is famously advocated by Henry David Thoreau, a convinced believer that “[m]ost of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind” (Thoreau, 1951, quoted in Sandler, 2013, p. 1). A specific application of the virtue of temperance to the issue of eating meat is provided in Halwani, (2022). Other traits could be added to this list of traditional virtues reconsidered in an environmental light, including hope (Kretz, 2013), patriotism (Cafaro, 2010), and courage (Fredericks, 2014).

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New Virtues Among the new virtues that have been developed in relation to environmental concerns, there are some interesting proposals. It should not be surprising, however, that the new virtues are substantially less numerous than the old ones. As Hursthouse puts it, “the introduction—or discovery—of a new virtue is a formidable task” (2007, p. 216). Orientedness is the name one could give to what others have simply described as the “virtue of being rightly oriented to nature” (Hursthouse, 2007, p. 163). Hursthouse proposes this virtue as a better philosophical candidate to Paul Taylor’s account of “respect for nature” that he developed in his book Respect for Nature (1986). Orientedness consists of being rightly disposed to respect and protect not only life, but nature in all its aspects. While Taylor’s label of “respect” for nature gives us a good sense of what the virtue is about, Hursthouse argues that respect as an attitude is more problematic than the corresponding virtue. According to her, “an attitude of respect for nature turns out to involve acquiring a set of dispositions and capacities” (2007, p. 163) that effectively constitute a virtue. This virtue manifests itself in various ways, such as refusing to participate in processes that lead to the destruction of forests or the pollution of the oceans, but also “not to slash mindlessly at spiders’ webs, to look at fossils carefully and try to understand their shape, to be glad rather than sorry that the Grand Canyon is not rimmed with machines dispensing Coca-Cola” (Hursthouse, 2007, p. 167). Wonder, although properly speaking the name of an emotion, has been taken to be associated with a new, environmental virtue. Hursthouse argues that “being rightly disposed with respect to wonder” is a virtue that consists in “being disposed to feel wonder the right way, towards the right objects, for the right reasons, to the right degree, on the right occasions, in the right manner, and to act accordingly” (Hursthouse, 2007, p. 161). Manifestations of wonder would not only lead people to appreciate nature, but also to be amazed at it and its value. Consequently, they would defend it from destruction and exploitation. More recently, Liezl van Zyl has distinguished between two forms of wonder: surprise-wonder and appreciativewonder. She argues that only appreciative-wonder is an emotion with a corresponding environmental virtue and that “it plays a role in environmental ethics that is analogous to the role that the capacity for empathetic concern plays in interpersonal ethics” (van Zyl, 2021, p. 89). Among other new virtues one may count Jamieson’s “mindfulness” (2007, p. 181), namely the virtue that consists of “appreciat[ing] the consequences of our actions that are remote in time and space” (p. 182), and Kawall’s “reverence for life” (Kawall, 2007).

An Objection to Virtue-Oriented Approaches to Climate Change So far, this chapter has provided a review of some benefits of a virtue-oriented approach to climate change and a number of virtues that, if cultivated, will allow us to reshape our relationship with nature and, consequently, tackle climate change.

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What can possibly go wrong? Several objections have been raised against environmental virtue ethics. It is not within the scope of this chapter to provide a list of all possible concerns. (For longer lists of important objections see (Kawall, 2017; Cafaro, 2015).) Only one important objection that relates directly to the focus of this chapter will be developed. As simple as it is strong, this objection is that the impact of a virtue-based approach would be too slow and, therefore, ineffective in dealing with the imminent danger of climate change. Critics such as Joachim Wündisch (2014) have pressed the point that educating the population on new virtues is a slow process, and climate change is imminent. Therefore, the virtues are not a good solution to the problem. With Wündisch’s words: “Virtues, values and emotions are not easily changed” and can be modified only “over long periods of time” (2014, p. 197) which generates “a central complication: timing” (p. 197). Climate change is an extremely urgent concern for humanity. While the holistic approach of virtue ethics may be an important way of reconceiving the relation between human beings and nature to achieve harmony, it is not what we need now. When humanity will have circumvented the catastrophic effects of climate change, a new approach to nature shaped by environmental virtues will be important to construct a harmonic, post-climate change environmentally just society. But for now, the solution must be different. A similar criticism is developed by Jeremy Bendik-Keymer (2012). BendikKeymer argues that, within a “bureaucratically organized world” (2012, p. 273), even a fully virtuous person will end up behaving in such a way that perpetuates the risks of climate change. The point is that our circumstances and our behavior are constrained and limited by the society we find ourselves in. So, a virtuous person in a large, bureaucratic society will not be able to contribute to tackling climate change if the “economic and political systems are highly ill-adapted to the sorts of challenges posed by the sixth mass extinction, and climate change” (2012, p. 273). BendikKeymer expresses his sympathies to the possibility that virtue has simply gone “out of focus and [needs] to be refocused by a better sense of our context” (2012, p. 275). He does not deny what most environmental virtue ethicists stress, namely that reconceptualizing old and new virtues can help us foster the relationship of our species to nature in the long run. However, the constraint of time remains. Such a reconceptualization, development, and inculcation of the green virtues will likely take a few generations to be effective on a large scale and climate change seems to be happening at a faster pace. Political and legal action, rather than virtue and character, are taken to be the only possible solutions to a very imminent danger. The main point stressed by Wündisch and Bendik-Keymer, among others, is simple: the virtues are welcome and may improve our relationship with nature in the long run, but we would be overly optimistic if we thought they can be developed and put in place within a large portion of the population before climate change becomes uncontrollable. One could respond, as Jason Kawall (2017) does, that even if it is true that “we need to address social, political, and economic circumstances” the question of “character and virtue re-emerge” (2017, p. 669) because only virtuous agents will drive institutional change for the better. But this claim can be challenged: the simple acknowledgment of

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the catastrophic effect of climate change may be enough to convince people that they need to adopt a different lifestyle, vote for a different party, and the like. One could be selfish and arrogant with respect to the environment and still vote green out of fear that climate change will deprive him of the enjoyments of his old age. It remains unclear, therefore, why the long and difficult cultivation of the virtues, which include emotional atonement, character development, education, etc., should be necessary to tackle the emergency of climate change. Environmental regulation can be achieved with green votes, which in turn can be obtained through educational campaigns which are much more feasible and quicker than the process of inculcating virtues. In one of the very few papers devoted directly to the issue of climate change and virtue ethics, Sophie-Grace Chappell, after arguing in favor of a virtue-based approach, admits that she has no solution to this challenge. She insists that a philosophical approach to climate change that is based on the virtues “is not primarily about what-should-we-do-right-now questions” but rather focuses on “the dispositions that will make us into the kind of people who will give the right answers to what-shouldwe-do-right-now questions” (Chappell, 2020, p. 188). However, there seems to be little hope that a sufficient number of people will have these dispositions in time to stop climate change and its devastating effects. The critics of the virtue-based approach, therefore, argue that for the specific challenge of climate change, effective cooperation must be enforced through national and international regulation.

Conclusion A brief review of the history and recent developments of environmental virtue ethics has revealed three important points. First, although environmental virtue ethics has recently become more popular, not much has been said directly on the problem of climate change. This remains an area for future research. Second, the benefits that a virtue ethical approach may have when applied to climate change (such as the way it captures our moral phenomenology and tackles the problem of inconsequentialism) are shared with other virtue-oriented approaches, such as virtue consequentialism. Third, most proponents of virtue-oriented approaches, including virtue ethical ones, admit that the cultivation of environmental character traits is not likely to happen quickly. The virtues, therefore, seem not to offer an especially effective way to tackle climate change. Granted, once we have solved this urgent problem, cultivating the green virtues will continue to help us achieve a more harmonic relationship with nature. The virtues have the potential to be of paramount importance in the realization of an environmentally just society. For the imminent floods and droughts, however, virtue may not be enough.

Cross-References ▶ Climate Change Action as Collective Action ▶ Climate Change, Environmental Philosophy, and Anthropocentrism

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▶ Climate Change and Environmental Justice ▶ Climate Change and Psychology ▶ Climate Change, Relational Philosophy, and Ecological Care ▶ Responsibility for Climate Harms Acknowledgments Research for this chapter was generously supported by the Scottish Graduate School for Arts & Humanities (SGSAH) [grant number AH/R012717] and a St Leonard’s College European Doctoral Stipend Scholarship (St Andrews). I also wish to thank Heather Jeffrey, Joel Joseph, and Luca Stroppa for their comments on previous drafts of this chapter.

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Jamieson, D. (2007). When utilitarians should be virtue theorists. Utilitas, 19, 160–183. Kawall, J. (2007). Reverence for life as a viable environmental virtue. Environmental Ethics, 25, 339–358. Kawall, J. (2017). Environmental virtue ethics. In N. E. Snow (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of virtue (pp. 659–679). Oxford University Press. Kretz, L. (2013). Hope in environmental philosophy. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 26, 925–944. Lenzi, D. (2017). Relativism, ambiguity and the environmental virtues. Environmental Values, 26(1), 91–109. Lenzi, D. (2022). How should we respond to climate change? Virtue ethics and aggregation problems. Journal of Social Philosophy, 1–16. O’Neill, J. (1993). Ecology, policy and politics: Human well-being and the natural world. Routledge. Pianalto, M. (2013). Humility and environmental virtue ethics. In M. W. Austin (Ed.), Virtues in action. Palgrave Macmillan. Pulkki, J. (2022). Humility imparts the wonders of nature: A virtue-ethical elaboration of some of Michael Bonnett’s thoughts. Environmental Education Research, 29(6), 852–862 Sandler, R. (2007). Character and environment: A virtue-oriented approach to environmental ethics. Columbia University Press. Sandler, R. (2010). Ethical theory and the problem of inconsequentialism: Why environmental ethicists should be virtue oriented ethicists. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 23(1/2), 167–183. Sandler, R. (2013). Environmental virtue ethics. In H. Lafollette (Ed.), International encyclopedia of ethics. Wiley. Sinnott-Armstrong, W. (2005). ‘It’s not my fault’: Global warming and individual moral obligations. In W. Sinnott-Armstrong & R. B. Howarth (Eds.), Perspectives on climate change: Science, economics, politics, ethics (pp. 285–307). Elsevier. Slote, M. (2001). Virtue from motives. Oxford University Press. Swanton, C. (2010). Heideggerian environmental virtue ethics. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 23(1–2), 145–166. Taylor, P. (1986). Respect for nature. Princeton University Press. Van Wensveen, L. (2000). Dirty virtues: The emergence of ecological virtue ethics. Humanity. Van Zyl, L. (2021). Wonder and environmental virtue. In G. Pettigrove & C. Swanton (Eds.), Neglected virtues. Routledge. Welchman, J. (1999). The virtues of stewardship. Environmental Ethics, 21(4), 411–423. Wood, N. (2020). Gratitude and alterity in environmental virtue ethics. Environmental Values, 29(4), 481–498. Wündisch, J. (2014). Green votes not green virtues: Effective utilitarian responses to climate change. Utilitas, 26(2), 192–205.

Climate Change and Environmental Justice Clement Loo

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Brief Primer on Environmental Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Origins of the Concept of Environmental Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Components of Environmental Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Climate Change and Distributional Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Responsibility for Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Warming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Disproportionate Impacts of Climate Change and the Cost of Adaptation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Climate Change and Participative Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Role of Lower and Middle-Income Countries and Vulnerable Communities in Climate Governance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Climate Change, Colonialism, and the Role of Indigenous Knowledges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Applying Principles of Environmental Justice to Responses to Climate Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bali Principles of Climate Justice and the Bali Action Plan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Paris Agreement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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This chapter provides a broad overview of the relationship between climate change and environmental justice. It provides (1) a brief review of the concept of environmental justice, (2) discussion about how environmental justice applies to climate change, and (3) several examples of how environmental justice has been integrated into climate governance. Keywords

Environmental justice · Climate justice · Participative justice · Distributive justice C. Loo (*) University of Minnesota Morris, Morris, MN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_57

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Introduction The objective of this chapter is to provide the reader with a broad overview of literature about the intersection between environmental justice and climate change. The text that follows is intended to help the reader gain a basic understanding of how environmental justice is often understood by political philosophers and how environmental justice has informed scholarship as well as practical policy efforts aimed at reducing the harms associated with climate change. To be more specific, the remainder of this chapter will (1) discuss how environmental justice is often defined and conceptualized by scholars and advocates. To do this, it will draw upon the often referred to case of Warren County, North Carolina, to outline the distinction between distributive and participative environmental justice. This chapter will also (2) review how distributive and participative environmental justice has been applied to scholarship aimed at developing theoretical frameworks for thinking about the harms and risks arising from anthropogenic climate change. And, finally, it will (3) offer several examples of how consideration of environmental justice has been integrated into international agreements that are intended to prevent or establish a global response to global warming.

A Brief Primer on Environmental Justice A reasonable place to start when one is discussing how environmental justice is relevant to climate change, and vice versa, is to review the history of the environmental justice movement. Understanding the conditions that led to environmental justice becoming a topic of political and scholarship helps the reader to understand the objectives of those who advocate for environmental justice. Understanding the objectives held by the proponents of environmental justice, in turn, helps one understand the nature of environmental justice.

Origins of the Concept of Environmental Justice The environmental justice movement, at least within the United States, arguably had its origins in the 1980s with the recognition that there were and are distinct disparities along racial lines when it came to exposure to environmental harms and risks. A number of scholars, such as Robert Bullard (2000), point to a specific series of events occurring in North Carolina in the late 1970s and early 1980s as an important inflection point in the genesis of the environmental justice movement and environmental justice as a field of scholarly inquiry. In the summer of 1978, polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB)-contaminated oil from the Ward PCB Transformer Company was – in an effort to avoid paying the costs of and expending the effort for proper disposal – dumped along highway ditches across 14 counties within North Carolina (Bullard 2000). As part of their response to the aforementioned event, the State of North Carolina proposed (and eventually

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completed) the construction of a toxic waste landfill site in Warren County, North Carolina, to contain the more than 60,000 tons of PCB-contaminated soil recovered from the polluted ditches. The decision to build the landfill in a predominantly lower-income Black community, after very little consultation with members of that community, spurred a series of protests (U.S. Department of Energy, 2009). These protests resulted in several important outcomes. The first of these was that the State of North Carolina’s decision to build a toxic waste disposal site in Warren County without substantive consultation with members of the community resulted in that community organizing to resist the construction of the facility (Bullard, 2000). Those living within Warren County understood and explicitly argued that not only was the planned PCB landfill an environmental concern, the process employed by the State of North Carolina to decide where to place the landfill was a violation of social justice; insofar as it was discriminatory putting lower-income Black households at greater risk relative to higher-income and white households. The contention that the construction of the Warren County PCB Landfill was both an environmental concern as well as a social justice and civil rights concern led to the second outcome that is noteworthy for this chapter. More specifically, it resulted in the NAACP becoming involved in the efforts aimed at stopping the State of North Carolina from disposing of the PCB-tainted soil in Warren County. The involvement of the NAACP in the Warren County protests is one of the first instances in the United States when an organization known primarily for its civil rights works became involved in advocacy that was explicitly concerned with environmental stewardship. The involvement of the NAACP is significant because it suggests that at Warren County an environmental threat was explicitly identified in the national discourse as being a topic relevant to social justice. And so, the Warren County protests are one of the first times where the civil rights/antiracism and environmental movements merged to advocate for environmental justice. The third important outcome of the Warren County protests is that it spurred the beginning of formal scholarship and research focused on the various disparities associated with environmental policy and governance. More specifically, the efforts to prevent the construction of the PCB landfill in Warren County resulted in the two seminal studies illustrating distinct disparities along racial lines in the siting of potentially environmentally hazardous facilities. The first of these studies involved a partnership between the United Church of Christ (UCC) and a team from the University of Michigan (Chavis & Lee, 1987) and the second was a brief written by the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO, 1983) following a commission from Walter E. Fauntroy, the District of Columbia’s Delegate to The U.S. House of Representatives. Both the UCC (Chavis & Lee, 1987) and GAO (1983) reports had similar findings, specifically that there were measurable differences between predominantly white communities and communities of color when it came to the likelihood that those communities contained at least one hazardous waste facility. The GAO (1983) report, which focused on states in Region IV of the Office of Management and Budget’s Standard Federal Regions (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee), found that

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there were four offsite hazardous waste landfills within the region. Three of the four sites were in communities with majority Black populations (GAO, 1983). The UCC (Chavis & Lee, 1987) report, which was more broad and interrogated the relationship between race and risk of exposure to toxic waste across the United States, found that 3 out of 5 Black or Hispanic Americans and approximately half of Asian/Pacific Americans and American Indians lived in communities containing at least one uncontrolled toxic waste site. Indeed, the UCC (Chavis & Lee, 1987) report notes that communities containing uncontrolled toxic waste sites, on average, had twice the percentage of persons of color compared to communities without toxic waste sites. The GAO (1983) and UCC (Chavis & Lee, 1987) reports, in demonstrating that there were substantial disparities along lines of race in regard to exposure to environmental threats, made it clear that social, political, and economic marginalization have important impacts on environmental topics. The recognition that there was a relationship between marginalization and environmental outcomes, in turn, spurred a boom in research aimed at better understanding that interaction. The scholarship resulting from this boom explored a number of topics. Some scholars, such as Robert Bullard (1994, 2000, 2005), Susan Cutter (1995), and Dorceta Taylor (2014, 2016), examined empirical questions about how factors such as race and class affected exposure to environmental risks and the underlying causes for disparate environmental outcomes. Other scholars such as W. Neil Adger (2001), Julian Agyeman et al. (2003), Kristin Shrader-Frechette (2002), and David Schlosberg (2004, 2007) developed theoretical and conceptual frameworks to help us have common ways to understand environmental justice within scholarship and advocacy. In this chapter, I will focus primarily on the second body of work, which is concerned about the nature of environmental justice, and discuss how that work applies to climate change. To be even more specific, below I will outline ShraderFrechette’s (2002) and David Schlosberg’s (2004, 2007) bipartite accounts of environmental justice and discuss how such an account of environmental justice has helped us to (1) more clearly recognize the environmental justice concerns associated with a number of expected impacts of climate change and (2) to negotiate more effective and fair responses to climate change.

Components of Environmental Justice Continuing from the above, I will follow the lead of Kristin Shrader-Frechette (2002) and David Schlosberg (2004) and will roughly divide topics and cases associated with environmental justice into two categories (with the explicitly stated recognition that those two categories interact and are unavoidably and inextricably linked). Those categories are (1) instances where distributive disparities are more salient and (2) those where participative disparities are more salient. Cases where the primary concern is distributive justice are instances where the issues of interest regard whether the benefits and burdens, or risks, are shared among

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relevant parties in a fair manner. As Ronald Dworkin (2000) and many other philosophers writing on the topic of justice have noted, fairness can be understood in a number of ways. Within the environmental justice literature, fairness – when it comes to the distribution of environmental costs and benefits – is sometimes discussed in terms of costs being paid by those responsible for environmental harms (ShraderFrechette, 2002). I will refer the reader to the earlier-discussed Warren County example. If one adopts the responsibility-based approach to distributional environmental justice, one might suggest that placing the PCB landfill in Warren County is a distributional injustice because it focuses the risk associated with clean-up of the PCB improperly dumped by the Ward Transformer Company on persons who had no role in introducing the PCB into the environment or producing the PCB. Another way that distributive environmental justice is defined is in terms of costs being paid by the parties who gain any benefits associated with those costs (ShraderFrechette, 2002). Referring again to the Warren County case, one who is taking this approach to distributive justice might suggest that building the PCB landfill in Warren County would be unjust because it externalizes the environmental costs associated with the Ward Transformer Company’s activities to the residents of Warren County. Given that the citizens of Warren County are not the beneficiaries of the profits earned by the Ward Transformer Company, it is inappropriate for them to pay costs that result from Ward Transformer Company’s actions. A third manner that distributive justice is framed within discourse about environmental justice is with reference to capacity to bear the burdens of concern (Handmer et al., 1999). This treatment of distributive environmental justice is one that is most commonly found within literature about climate change; however, it could also be applied to the Warren County Case as well. If one were to apply this third understanding of distributive justice to Warren County, one might suggest that one reason why the siting of the PCB landfill in Warren County is unjust is because – due to poverty, systemic racism, and their impacts on access to healthcare and capacity to obtain judicial remedies for various harms – the residents of Warren County would find it particularly difficult (relative to others) to adapt to or otherwise respond to the likely threats and harms posed by a neighboring PCB landfill. Thus, placing a PCB landfill in Warren County would be expected to lead to greater harm than placing a similar landfill in a county that would have greater capacity to address the impacts of such a facility. The other element of environmental justice, participative environmental justice, is more salient in cases where the focus is on disparities reducing the capacity of marginalized persons and communities to affect decisions or to join in governance institutions that affect their well-being. Instances where participative justice is more salient are instances where differences in power, influence, and recognition are of central importance (Loo, 2014). When scholars and advocates are concerned about participative justice, they are concerned with correcting social, political, and economic disparities that limit the capacity for persons or communities to effectively advocate for and promote their interests. As Nancy Fraser (2000) suggests,

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“maldistribution can be remedied indirectly, by a politics of recognition: to revalue unjustly devalued identities . . ..” Referring a final time to the Warren County, there are at least three prima facie concerns regarding participative justice: (1) systemic racism in the United States that often serves to limit the capacity of Black persons and communities to self-advocate, (2) the effects of income and wealth in regard to the mechanisms to publicly voice grievances in regard to government and governance, and (3) the lack of consultation with the community during the process through which the State of North Carolina opted to place the PCB landfill in Warren County. Systemic racism within the United States has many mutually reinforcing adverse impacts on the capacity of Black and Brown persons and communities to effectively promote their interests within governing institutions. People of color continue to be underrepresented in all levels of government (Brown & Atske, 2019), education within the United States. Further, education seems to exclude Black and Brown persons as well as fail to adequately meet their needs (Wei et al., 2019). Additionally, there continue to be marked income disparities across race within the United States (Akee et al., 2019), which was apparent in Warren County where – according to the 1980 census – roughly 24.9% of families had annual incomes that were at or below the poverty line (North Carolina State Data Center, 1989). All of the previously listed factors limit the capacity of the residents of Warren County to advocate for and have their concerns heard by the state agencies choosing the site for the PCB landfill. Lack of representation in government and lack of access to education would limit the capacity of the community to be informed of impending decisions affecting their well-being and to have advocates in place within decisionmaking bodies that could speak for their interests. Lack of financial resources would serve to limit the capacity of the members of the community to retain the sort of legal representation they would require to effectively access the courts as a tool to challenge decisions that unjustly cause them harm. Such lack of capacity to be informed about decisions, be represented in government, and/or challenge unjust governmental decisions through the courts is particularly important when the agencies making decisions make no effort, as was in the case of the decision to place the PCB landfill in Warren County, to consult with the members of the affected community.

Climate Change and Distributional Justice Now that this chapter has taken some time above to review two of the key concepts underlying the scholarship about environmental justice, distributive and participative justice, it will move on to discuss how both enter into conversations about climate change. All three categories (as discussed above) of distributive environmental justice are evident in the literature concerned with climate justice. The responsibility-based approach to distributive environmental justice tends to be found in arguments suggesting that higher-income countries (HICs) should bear greater burdens in

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greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation and provide economic support for lower- and middle-income countries (LMICs) when it comes to climate adaptation because HICs are responsible for a greater share of cumulative GHG emissions. The disproportionate impact understanding of distributive justice enters into arguments about climate justice that emphasize the disproportionate impacts of expected warming, changes in precipitation patterns, and sea-level rise on island nations and coastal communities. Finally, the capacity-to-respond account of distributive justice is found in scholarly literature concerning the differential capacity of different communities and countries to respond to climate change due to wealth and the impacts of colonialism. A few examples from each of the aforementioned bodies of literature are reviewed below.

Responsibility for Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Warming In his discussion about responsibility vis-a-vis climate change, Dale Jamieson (2010) states, “(t)he climate change issue can be seen at its core as centring on rich people appropriating more than their share of a global public good and, in addition, harming poor people by casually contributing to extreme climatic events.” Paul Bou-Habib (2019) says something very similar while arguing that HICs should bear a greater share of the costs associated with climate mitigation and adaptation. He notes, “Developed states bear a greater causal responsibility for global warming insofar as they have emitted greater amounts of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the past” (Bou-Habib, 2019). What both Jamieson and Bou-Habib are noticing is that when one compares GHG emissions across different countries one cannot help but notice that emissions are not evenly distributed; there are distinct differences in the intensity of emissions and in terms of cumulative emissions. If one is concerned with the current intensity of emissions, one finds that several countries in the Middle East emit far more GHGs per capita than any other countries. As of 2000, Qatar emitted the equivalent of 67.9 tons of CO2 for each of its citizens; the next most intense GHG emitter was the UAE, which emitted 36.1 tons per capita (Baumert et al., 2005). In the same year, the United States emitted the equivalent of 24.5 tons of CO2 per capita (Baumert et al., 2005). On the other hand, the least intense per capita emitters, such as India, emitted as little as the equivalent of 1.9 tons of CO2 per capita (Baumert et al., 2005). There are similarly wide disparities when it comes to cumulative GHG emissions. When one considers total emissions by various countries from the Industrial Revolution to the beginning of the twenty-first century, one finds that the United States alone is responsible for 29.3% of all the global GHG emissions released between 1850 and 2002 (Baumert et al., 2005). If one combines the cumulative emissions of the countries of the European Union with those of the United States, then one can account for nearly 60% of anthropogenic GHG emissions (Baumert et al., 2005). Indeed, review of the figures regarding GHG emissions suggests that there are clear disparities between countries when it comes to the amount of GHGs that each has contributed. Given that the countries that have emitted the most GHGs are also

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those that are relatively the wealthiest, arguments have been made that – on the grounds of distributive justice – HICs should bear the majority of the burden for climate mitigation and adaptation. One such argument is the one offered by Simon Caney (2005). Caney (2005, 2009) contends that standard theories of distributive justice within political philosophy suggest that we should privilege the interests of the global poor relative to the global rich. Caney (2005) further argues that the Polluter Pays Principle, which contends that the fair distribution of the costs associated with the remediation of an environmental harm should be determined by causal responsibility for the presence of those harms, is also applicable to the problem of determining who should be held responsible for the greatest share of the costs for the global response to climate change. More specifically, Caney (2005) suggests that, when one combines concerns about privileging of the interests of the global poor with the Polluter Pays Principle, it becomes clear that distributive justice suggests that the HICs who are responsible for the greatest share of GHG emissions have a duty to “deal with climate change.”

Disproportionate Impacts of Climate Change and the Cost of Adaptation Another set of distributive concerns relevant to climate change involve disparities associated with the risks and harmful effects of climate change. As Jethro Petit (2004) suggests, climate change is a particular threat to the survival of many communities in the Global South. However, the disparities regarding the adverse impacts of climate change are not only between HICs in the Global North and LMICs in the Global South. Indeed, as Peggy M. Shepard and Cecil Corbin-Mark (2009) point out, “Vulnerable communities, even in the most prosperous nations, will be the first and worst hit (by climate change).” More specifically, even within relatively high-income countries – such as the United States – it will be Indigenous communities, people of color, and lower-income communities that will be especially burdened and least able to adapt to extreme heat events, respiratory illnesses, migrating tropical disease vectors, food insecurity, and stronger storms (Shepard & Corbin-Mark, 2009). Island nations as well as coastal communities will be particularly vulnerable to sea-level rise, stronger storms, and reduced availability of fresh drinking water (Adger, 2001). Moreover, adapting to these risks is often costly and requires robust economic and political institutions (Adger, 2001). To effectively adapt to the abovelisted threats posed by climate change, coastal and island communities must undergo some combination of migration, the creation of infrastructure such as seawalls or desalination facilities, or extensive environmental restoration projects (such as the erosion mitigation and the restoration of sand bars, coastal wetlands, and barrier islands). The scale of climate adaptation projects requires both a great deal of capital expenditure and organization and thus requires the investment of a great deal of

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resources; resources that are substantially less accessible to marginalized communities (O’Brien et al., 2008; Handmer et al., 1999). Climate change is also expected to have substantial adverse impacts on agriculture and food systems, which will also disproportionately harm lower income communities and the citizens of LMICs (Loo, 2019; Gruen & Loo, 2015). Higher temperatures, shifting seasons, changing precipitation patterns, more extreme weather events, increased incidence and severity of droughts, and reduced access to fresh water – all expected results of climate change – will likely lead to substantive reductions in the yields of staple crops (Loo, 2019; Gruen & Loo, 2015; Adger, 2001). Such reduction in yields will likely lead to food prices increasing quite sharply over the next several decades (Gruen & Loo, 2015). Increases in food prices are particularly harmful for lower income communities and those who live in LMICs in the Global South (Gruen & Loo, 2015). This is for two reasons. First, LMICs in the Global South (particularly in Africa and South and Southeast Asia) tend to be net importers of food; the majority of staple crops are grown in Canada, the United States, and Europe (Gruen & Loo, 2015). Even in HICs, lower income communities, Indigenous communities, communities of color, and rural communities tend to also have reduced access to fresh food, often have less access to locally grown food, and are reliant on food imported from elsewhere (Loo, 2014). And, second, members of marginalized communities – most notably those in LMICs – spend a much larger proportion of their household income on food compared to those living in wealthier areas (Gruen & Loo, 2015). In some communities within Southeast Asia and Central Africa, households at present commonly spend upward to 60–80% of their income on food (Gruen & Loo, 2015). When combined, increasing food prices, reliance on food grown elsewhere, and a lack of excess funds suggest that climate change will result in lower income and marginalized communities and persons having substantially less access to food (Loo, 2019; Gruen & Loo, 2015; Adger, 2001). This, in turn, suggests that climate change will lead vulnerable persons to be at a disproportionately much higher risk for famine, hunger, and malnutrition (Loo, 2019; Gruen & Loo, 2015; Adger, 2001).

Climate Change and Participative Justice Conversations about climate justice are not limited to concerns about distributive justice; there are a number of ways that participative justice has also entered into discussions about climate change and, more specifically, discussions about how to best work together toward a global response to anthropogenic warming of the planet. When climate scholars and advocates refer to participative justice, they are usually concerned with some combination of three topics: (1) the role of lower and middle-income countries (or marginalized communities more generally) in climate governance, (2) the relationship between climate change and colonialism or the importance of decolonization in interventions aimed at addressing climate change, and (3) how Indigenous knowledges might inform our response to anthropogenic global warming.

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The Role of Lower and Middle-Income Countries and Vulnerable Communities in Climate Governance In the past decade (2010–2020), climate justice, particularly in regard to participative equity when it comes to governance and decision-making, has become an increasingly central focus for more progressive climate activists (Bäckstrand & Lövbrand, 2016). As Karin Bäckstrand and Eva Lövbrand (2016) note, a significant number of the protests and demonstrations held during Conference of the Parties (COP) meetings held through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) at Durban, Warsaw, and Lima were intended to shift the climate agenda to more robustly consider participative justice. Bäckstrand and Lövbrand (2016) report that in 2011, when COP 17 was held in Durban, the People’s Movement on Climate Change (2011) argued that (T)he two centuries of increasing emissions and ecological destruction coincide with two centuries of worsening economic inequality between and within countries; with the increasing concentration of wealth to a narrow global elite, and the universalization of want to the mass of humanity; with the colonial and neo-colonial subordination of countries; with the corporate takeover and exploitation of Southern natural and productive resources; with the loss of Southern economic and policy sovereignty to powerful economic organizations such as the World Bank, theInternational Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization.

Academics also began making arguments that organizations and institutions intended to coordinate international climate efforts, to be effective and equitable, needed to better integrate participative justice into their frameworks and practices. I have argued elsewhere that more effective climate governance requires that LMICs play a much more central role in guiding discourse and the agenda for multilateral climate negotiations (Loo, 2015). This is for several reasons. As noted above, LMICs are much more vulnerable to the potential harms associated with climate change and thus have an arguably greater vested interest in outcomes associated with mitigation and adaptation efforts (Loo, 2016). Furthermore, given considerations of self-determination, autonomy, and sovereignty, adaptation efforts should be guided by the communities and nations those efforts affect (Loo, 2015). This is noteworthy because LMICs are the most vulnerable for many of the harms associated with global warming, adaptation efforts will be in fact focused on LMICs. Finally, LMICs also have unique challenges and barriers that affect the effectiveness of interventions aimed at reducing the risks associated with higher average temperatures (Loo, 2015). Other scholars, such as Jennifer Gidley et al. (2009), have also suggested that political scientists theorizing about frameworks for approaching climate governance might better integrate participatory and “cultural-interpretive” approaches to their work. Gidley et al. (2009) went on to state that climate governance frameworks could be better informed by considering more community-based methods for planning and research, which would likely improve outcomes and participation of those living in the most vulnerable communities. Gidley et al. (2009) also argued that scholars theorizing about climate change should critique the Western development

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model, given its colonial and pro-industrial nature, and consider how Indigenous perspectives might inform visions of possible futures.

Climate Change, Colonialism, and the Role of Indigenous Knowledges A more thorough discussion of adopting more decolonial approaches with respect to climate responses and the integration of Indigenous perspectives and knowledges into climate discourse can be found in the work of scholars such as Kyle Powys Whyte (2017, 2018, 2020; Norton-Smith et al., 2016). One relatively common element of such work is a recognition that, for many Indigenous communities, vulnerability to climate change is often the result of inequalities arising from historical and ongoing settler colonialism (Norton-Smith et al., 2016). Colonialism, as well as the economic theories and systems that it has spread across the globe, is a driving force underlying the industrialization that is responsible for the past 150 years of GHG emissions that are at the root of anthropogenic climate change (Whyte, 2017). As Whyte (2020) argues, “(t)he colonization process, whether several hundred years ago or more recently, typically involves warfare, forced assimilation, land dispossession, asset seizure, financial deprivation, workforce discrimination, sexual and gendered violence, and food and health insecurities.” The effects of colonization, such as those listed above, act to limit the capacity of Indigenous peoples to effectively self-govern and act as stewards of their lands (Whyte, 2020), which – in turn – acts to interfere with the capacity of Indigenous communities to take the steps required to adequately respond to climate changebased threats (Whyte, 2018; Norton-Smith et al., 2016). For example: While Indigenous peoples, as any society, have long histories of adapting to change, colonialism caused changes at such a rapid pace that many Indigenous peoples became vulnerable to harms, from health problems related to new diets to erosion of their cultures to the destruction of Indigenous diplomacy, to which they were not as susceptible prior to colonization. Indigenous peoples often understand their vulnerability to climate change as an intensification of colonially-induced environmental changes. (Whyte, 2017)

Such interference with the capacity of Indigenous communities to care for their land in the ways that they find appropriate is also worth noting that the vast majority of the Earth’s biodiversity can be found in the territories of Indigenous peoples (Whyte, 2020). Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, climate change causes a number of unique harms to Indigenous peoples. As Whyte (2017) notes, Indigenous persons are more likely to be displaced by climate change, climate change is more likely to undermine the integrity of Indigenous cultures and economies, and disruption of ecosystems due to climate change will have effects upon the treaty rights and sovereignty of many Indigenous nations by disrupting access to designated

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harvesting areas and interfering with their ability to negotiate with various governments. One way to respond to the interwoven effects of colonialism and climate change, as well as more generally improve the collective response to climate change, is to better integrate Indigenous methods and knowledges into our climate discourse and interventions. As Whyte (2017) points out, numerous scholars have noted that Indigenous knowledges are essentially “systems of monitoring, recording, communicating, and learning about the relationships among humans, nonhuman plants and animals, and ecosystems.” These knowledges are encoded in the vocabulary and grammar of Indigenous languages, Indigenous approaches to pedagogy and mentorship, norms regarding relationships that people have with their relatives both human and nonhuman, and histories regarding how communities adapted to past changes (Whyte, 2017). Attending to and integrating Indigenous knowledges more broadly in conversations about climate change and climate adaptation can reveal strategies that are informed by information, experience, and expertise that may not exist outside of indigenous communities. Whyte (2017) describes examples of both Indigenous land stewardship practices, such as the use of fire for habitat conservation and the traditional strategies used by various Indigenous communities to manage game, as well as Indigenous strategies to convene groups to engage in fruitful discourse across different communities. Being better informed by Indigenous worldviews and frameworks of analysis would arguably improve global conversations and understanding of climate change. Whyte (2018) refers to Anishinaabe conceptions of kinship relationships and the reciprocal responsibilities that arise from those relationships as a case that might be informative for how the broader global community might better consider its approach to sustainability and climate governance. Whyte (2018) notes that the Anishinaabe recognize a much broader set of kinship relationships than would be considered the norm from an Ameropean perspective. As Whyte (2018) states, “Anishinaabe kinship relationships connected, via reciprocal responsibilities, humans with other humans, humans with nonhumans, whether spirits, plants, animals, or elements (e.g., water) and humans with particular places. The ways in which responsibilities are organized into interdependent systems facilitate . . . adaptive capacity.” Whyte (2017) also notes that many Indigenous communities have, having experienced histories of colonization and disruption, collective understandings that other communities do not. That is, many Indigenous peoples have experienced catastrophic disruptions to their relationships with the land and ecosystems they were familiar with as the result of colonization, which may mirror the disruptions that the entire global population may experience as the result of climate change (Whyte 2017). Such being the case, Whyte (2017) states, “reflecting on why our (Indigenous) ancestors’ would have perceived the present as dystopian provides guidance on how to live under post-apocalyptic conditions.” Developing a better understanding of how many Indigenous communities persisted in the face of the threats and harms of colonization may provide those of us who have not experienced similar

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disruption with a better understanding about how we might meet climate change in a similarly resilient manner.

Applying Principles of Environmental Justice to Responses to Climate Change In the above, this chapter reviewed how concepts drawn from environmental justice advocacy and scholarship have been applied by climate scholars in a number of ways. Ideas originating from work concerned about distributive environmental justice have served to support theorizing about how we should understand responsibility when it comes to bearing the costs of climate mitigation and adaptation. It also discussed several parallels between distributive climate justice and scholarship emphasizing the importance of the disparate impacts of climate change on folks across different socioeconomic categories. It further reviewed some of the literature about the impact of wealth disparities and capacity of various communities to effectively respond to the risks associated with climate change; this literature is also informed by literature about distributive environmental justice. This chapter then went on to discuss some recent climate scholarship that has been informed by participative approaches to environmental justice. Indeed, it examined how considerations about participative justice are at the root of arguments about the need for LMICs to play a more robust and central role in setting the agenda in regard to climate governance. It also reviewed some work from scholars who argue for the need to adopt a perspective emphasizing decolonization when thinking about how we, as a global community, should approach our collective response to climate change. Finally, it went over some of the scholarship about how Indigenous knowledges could help the global community to more effectively respond to climate change. Though much of what this chapter discussed above has been about how environmental justice has informed climate scholarship, environmental justice has – particularly recently – also been a central consideration for those engaged in practical efforts to reduce GHG emissions and to adapt to the expected harms of climate change. One instance that comes to mind of environmental justice influencing and informing climate change advocacy can be found within the Bali Principles of Climate Justice. Another example of how environmental justice has come to inform global strategies to respond to climate change can be found in many of the articles of the Paris Climate Agreement.

Bali Principles of Climate Justice and the Bali Action Plan During the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development (also known as WSSD 2002 or Earth Summit 2002) in Johannesburg, a group of climate, sustainability, and social justice-oriented advocacy groups (The organizations in question include Corp Watch, the United States; Friends of the Earth International; Global Resistance;

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Greenpeace International; groundwork, South Africa; Indigenous Environmental Network, North America; Indigenous Information Network, Kenya; National Alliance of People’s Movements, India; National Fishworkers Forum, India; OilWatch Africa; OilWatch International; Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice, the United States; Third World Network, Malaysia; and World Rainforest Movement, Uruguay.) collectively wrote and endorsed a document that they titled the Bali Principles of Climate Justice (Corpwatch et al., 2002). This document, explicitly modeled after the Principles of Environmental Justice created by the participants of the People of Color Environmental Justice Leadership Summit (The Principles of Environmental Justice are a list of 17 principles written by the delegates of the First National People of Color Leadership Summit that was held in 1991 in Washington, DC. These principles are often referred to as one of the guiding documents for the environmental justice movements. The 17 principles call for political, economic, cultural, and environmental self-determination of all peoples; assert a universal right to safe and healthy environments; and demand reparations in the form of policies aimed at restoring the environmental damage concentrated in marginalized communities (please see https://www.ejnet.org/ej/principles.html for more details).), included 27 principles intended to inform the UNFCCC COP 13 that met in Bali in 2007. A number of the 27 principles are clearly informed by consideration of either distributive or participative environmental justice. Several principles, such as principles 7–9, refer to the notion of the “ecological debt” incurred by HICs and a number of transnational firms that are responsible for the majority of historical GHG emissions (Corpwatch et al., 2002). The principles contend that due to such debt, HICs, and other parties that have contributed a particularly large share of historical GHG emissions should be considered liable adapting to climate change and the clean-up of any pollution associated with their activities. The principles appealing to ecological debt demonstrate a recognition that those who are harmed by the impacts of climate change ought to receive compensation and reparation for their losses. The above-described notion of ecological debt is likely informed by accounts of distributive justice concerned with sharing costs of addressing an environmental hazard based on responsibility for causing that hazard. The principles concerned with ecological debt identify the mismatch between those responsible for GHG emissions and those harmed by climate change as being morally salient insofar as the mismatch generates justice-based obligations, the discharging of which would be expected to more fairly distribute the burdens associated with climate change. Another manner that distributive justice informs the Bali Principles is the focus on avoiding externalizing the costs associated with climate mitigation and adaptation. Principle 15 states: “Climate Justice affirms the need for solutions to climate change that do not externalize costs to the environment and communities, and are in line with the principles of a just transition” (Corpwatch et al., 2002). Principle 15’s call to avoid externalizing the costs of climate mitigation and adaptation to the environment and communities that are harmed by GHG emissions, rather than assigning the costs to the parties that produce those emissions, is another example of the approach to distributive justice that holds that the fairest distribution of costs is

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one that assigns the costs associated with a given activity to the parties that are responsible for that activity. It is important to note that, while the Bali Principles are clearly informed by concerns about distributive justice, they seem more concerned with participative justice. Four of the Bali Principles address concerns about how to fairly distribute the costs associated with climate change; however, 11 are concerned with ensuring participative fairness when it comes to climate governance. Indeed, principles 3, 20, and 21 all – in one way or another – assert the right of Indigenous peoples to speak for themselves and to advocate for their interests in multilateral climate negotiations and call for a shifting of practices and institutions to better support that right. Principle 21 states such most explicitly and strongly noting: Climate Justice affirms the right of Indigenous peoples and local communities to participate effectively at every level of decision-making, including needs assessment, planning, implementation, enforcement and evaluation, the strict enforcement of principles of prior informed consent, and the right to say “No.” (Corpwatch, 2002)

These three principles, including principle 21, are exemplars of principles informed by the notion that justice demands that marginalized parties have equitable access to the institutions and processes involved in social, political, and economic decisionmaking – particularly in instances when they are affected by the decisions being weighed. Moreover, principles 4, 5, 6, 18, 19, 22, 23, and 24 contend that – in addition to the importance of attending to the perspectives and interests of Indigenous peoples – marginalized communities and groups more generally must fully participate in decision-making concerned with climate change and be free from coercion, oppression, and exploitation. Principle 5 states, “Climate Justice demands that communities, particularly affected communities play a leading role in national and international processes to address climate change” (Corpwatch, 2002). Furthermore, principle 19 asserts, “Climate Justice demands that public policy be based on mutual respect and justice for all peoples, free from any form of discrimination or bias” (Corpwatch, 2020). Other principles refer specifically to the need to attend to the voices of women, youth, and vulnerable communities, as well as the need to address factors contributing to marginalization such as poverty, alienation from traditional cultures, and economic systems that emphasize extractive models of production and wealth growth. In its 27 principles, the Bali Principles serves as one of the first public statements from climate advocacy organizations that explicitly and strongly link environmental justice to efforts to respond to climate change. Though environmental justice had, prior to the drafting of the Bali Principles, had most likely informed climate advocacy as well as mitigation and adaptation efforts; the Bali Principles still serve as a framework document that provides a model for how to integrate environmental justice into work focused on climate change. Thus, the Bali Principles play an important role shifting the conversation about climate change to one where justice was far more central of a concern.

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Indeed, while it is not clear whether the Bali Principles were in fact considered by the delegates attending COP 13, it is clear that several of the elements of the Bali Action Plan (BAP) (UNFCCC, 2007) – which was drafted during COP 13 – did attend to environmental justice in a more explicit manner than documents drafter during previous COPs. To be more specific, the BAP includes several clauses that address distributive justice. It notes that responsibilities to respond to climate change, while common, are differentiated. The BAP suggests that how costs are distributed amongst nations should be informed by consideration of both responsibility for historic emissions as well as capacity to implement interventions to reduce GHG emissions or to adapt to the effects of a warmer climate. Such recognition that justice requires careful consideration about fair distribution of cost manifests most clearly in a number of clauses within the BAP that are concerned with the transfer of technological and financial resources from HICs to LMICs to support climate mitigation and adaptation. Clause (i) of subsection (c) in article 1 of the BAP states: International cooperation to support urgent implementation of adaptation actions, including through vulnerability assessments, prioritization of actions, financial needs assessments, capacity-building and response strategies, integration of adaptation actions into sectoral and national planning, specific projects and programmes, means to incentivize the implementation of adaptation actions, and other ways to enable climate-resilient development and reduce vulnerability of all Parties, taking into account the urgent and immediate needs of developing countries that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change, especially the least developed countries and small island developing States, and further taking into account the needs of countries in Africa affected by drought, desertification and floods. (UNFCCC, 2007)

Moreover, while the BAP much more distinctly and strongly emphasizes the importance of distributive justice, consideration of participative justice can also be found within its text. In particular, the BAP notes in several areas the importance of attending to the needs of local and Indigenous communities, particularly when it comes to mitigation in LMICs. Within the preamble of the first annex of the BAP, one clause states: “Recognizing also that the needs of local and Indigenous communities should be addressed when action is taken to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries” (UNFCCC, 2007). It should be noted that this chapter does not refer to the BAP because it is an example of environmental justice being robustly integrated into multilateral efforts to respond to climate change. Rather, the BAP is significant because it is one of the first times where environmental justice seems to be distinctly a consideration. However, the BAP for the most part does not pay much attention to the importance of justice in regard to climate change. That said, by the time that the Paris Agreement (UNFCCC, 2015) was drafted in 2015 at COP 21, the UNFCCC much more thoroughly integrated environmental justice into its approach in regard to the global effort to limit the harms arising from anthropogenic climate change.

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The Paris Agreement Reference to environmental justice and its importance when it comes to climate change can be found throughout the Paris Agreement. Indeed, there are more than a dozen cases where concerns about environmental justice have been integrated into the text of the agreement. In the preamble of the Paris Agreement alone, there are 4 clauses that arguably center on environmental justice. These clauses explicitly recognize that there are inequitable distributions of the harms, vulnerabilities, costs, and capacities to respond associated with climate change. They also, consequently, explicitly state the importance of equity between HICs and LMICs and the prioritization of addressing poverty – because it is a key contributing factor to the disparities related to climate change. The environmental injustices acknowledged in the document’s preamble go on to inform the many of the subsequent articles of the agreement. Article 2 (which is the first substantive article of the Paris Agreement; Article 1 is largely a list of definitions of terms specific to the document) opens by stating: This Agreement, in enhancing the implementation of the Convention, including its objective, aims to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change, in the context of sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty. (UNFCCC, 2015)

Further, Article 4 opens with a similar call to prioritize the elimination of poverty and the promotion of equity as a core element of the global response to climate change (UNFCCC, 2015). Referring to the earlier sections of this chapter about distributive justice, it seems clear that the drafters of the Paris Agreement are attending to concerns about disparities in regard to the distribution of wealth and other material goods. The opening clauses of Articles 2 and 4 also suggest that the negotiators of the Paris Agreement acknowledge the relationship between poverty and environmental threats. Article 4 also, in its 13th, 14th, and 15th clauses, acknowledges disparities in regard to national contributions of GHGs as well as the disparities in terms of the impacts of climate change. The above-listed clauses also suggest that signatory countries should take such disparities into consideration in the development of their national strategies to mitigate and adapt to climate change. Article 6 provides more specific guidance to signatories about how they should respond to the disparities in terms of the impacts of climate change and notes in clause 6 that the Conference of Parties should share the costs incurred by climate-vulnerable LMICs when they undertake efforts to adapt to the effects of global warming (UNFCCC, 2015). Article 9 is also concerned with addressing the maldistribution of risks, costs, and harms associated with climate change. The first clause of Article 9 states: Developed country Parties shall provide financial resources to assist developing country Parties with respect to both mitigation and adaptation in continuation of their existing

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obligations under the (United Nations Framework) Convention (on Climate Change). (UNFCCC, 2015)

The fourth clause of Article 9 goes into even greater detail and asserts the signatories’ agreement that the provision of scaled-up financial resourcesshould aim to achieve a balance between adaptation and mitigation, taking into account country-driven strategies, and the priorities and needs of developing country Parties, especially those that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change and have significant capacity constraints, such as the least developed countries and small island developing States, considering the need for public and grant-based resources for adaptation. (An additional call for the provision of resources to LMICs by the Conference of the Parties is found in the final clause of Article 10, which states: “Support, including financial support, shall be provided to developing country Parties for the implementation of this Article, including for strengthening cooperative action on technology development and transfer at different stages of the technology cycle, with a view to achieving a balance between support for mitigation and adaptation. The global stocktake referred to in Article 14 shall take into account available information on efforts related to support on technology development and transfer for developing country Parties” (UNFCCC, 2015))

In the above clauses, the framers of the Paris Agreement demonstrate their desire to strive toward greater equity in regard to the fair distribution of costs for climate mitigation and adaptation by proposing strategies to redistribute resources to address antecedent disparities in wealth. Moreover, parts of the fourth clause of Article 9 hint at concern regarding participative justice. In noting that adaptation and mitigation should take “into account country-driven strategies, and the priorities and needs of developing country Parties” (UNFCCC, 2015), the authors of the Paris Agreement suggest their recognition that perspectives and interests differ across communities and that equitable and just governance and decision-making requires attention to those differences. The integration of participative justice into the Paris Agreement’s articles is even more robustly evident in Articles 4, 7, 11, and 13. Clause 6 of Article 4 explicitly focuses on the roles of LMICs in climate governance with an open recognition that LMICs and island countries – due to their particular circumstances – should develop and communicate to the broader conference of parties context-specific strategies for GHG mitigation. Article 7 reinforces the call to centralize the perspectives of LMICs by stating the following in clause 2: Parties recognize that adaptation is a global challenge faced by all with local, subnational, national, regional and international dimensions, and that it is a key component of and makes a contribution to the long-term global response to climate change to protect people, livelihoods and ecosystems, taking into account the urgent and immediate needs of those developing country Parties that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change. (UNFCCC, 2015)

Clause 3 further highlights the role of LMICs in the global response to climate change stating:

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The adaptation efforts of developing country Parties shall be recognized, in accordance with the modalities to be adopted by the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to this Agreement at its first session. (UNFCCC, 2015)

Clause 5 provides even greater detail in its call for the mechanisms of climate governance to attend to the perspectives of marginalized persons by noting: Parties acknowledge that adaptation action should follow a country-driven, gender-responsive, participatory and fully transparent approach, taking into consideration vulnerable groups, communities and ecosystems, and should be based on and guided by the best available science and, as appropriate, traditional knowledge, knowledge of Indigenous peoples and local knowledge systems, with a view to integrating adaptation into relevant socioeconomic and environmental policies and actions, where appropriate. (UNFCCC, 2015)

Article 11 extends upon Article 7’s consideration of the perspectives and interests of LMICs and marginalized persons through the inclusion of several clauses stating the need for improving the capacity of those parties to participate in the global response to climate change. The second clause of the article asserts: Capacity-building should be country-driven, based on and responsive to national needs, and foster country ownership of Parties, in particular, for developing country Parties, including at the national, subnational and local levels. Capacity-building should be guided by lessons learned, including those from capacity-building activities under the Convention, and should be an effective, iterative process that is participatory, cross-cutting and gender-responsive. (UNFCCC, 2015)

Finally, Article 13 – when introducing one of the enforcement mechanisms (the transparency framework) of the Paris Agreement – pays particular attention to avoiding an imperialistic relationship between HICs and LMICs. To be more specific, clause 3 of Article 13 spells out the need to refrain from coercion of LMICs as a tool to promote compliance, stating: The transparency framework shall build on and enhance the transparency arrangements under the Convention, recognizing the special circumstances of the least developed countries and small island developing States, and be implemented in a facilitative, non-intrusive, non-punitive manner, respectful of national sovereignty, and avoid placing undue burden on Parties. (UNFCCC, 2015)

Taken together, the above-discussed clauses of the Paris Agreement suggest that its drafters understood that environmental justice is relevant in terms of both how we should conceptualize the problems associated with climate change as well as being an important consideration in terms of establishing the processes and institutions underlying the actions we take to respond to it. That is, they saw that disparities in regard to contribution of GHG emissions, harmful impacts of higher temperatures, and capacity to adapt and mitigate contribute to or are among the harms of climate change. The drafters of the Paris Agreement are aware that an effective and just response to climate change requires better centering the perspectives and interests of

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vulnerable nations and communities as well as addressing factors that contribute to the marginalization of various groups.

Conclusion To conclude, while it would be impossible to provide a wholly comprehensive review of the relationship between environmental justice and climate change in 30 pages, hopefully this chapter has provided the reader with a better understanding of that relationship. Hopefully, the reader is better able to parse the distinction between distributive and participative justice and is better aware of how distributive and participative environmental justice might be informative for both conceptualizing the threats and harms associated with climate change as well as efforts to develop strategies for addressing those threats and harms.

Cross-References ▶ Adaptation Duties ▶ Climate Change and Distributive Justice ▶ Climate Change and Gender ▶ Climate Change and Global Justice ▶ Climate Change and Human Mobilities ▶ Climate Change and Human Rights ▶ Climate Change and Social Movements ▶ Compensation Duties ▶ Mitigation Duties ▶ Responsibility for Climate Harms

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Climate Change and Intergenerational Justice Tim Meijers

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Something Rather Than Nothing? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . How Much Do We Owe Future Generations? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What Do We Owe? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Risk, Uncertainty, and Precaution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Who Owes What? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Creating Future People . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Institutions and Citizens for Intergenerational Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of the kind of questions one has to answer to take position on the question of who owes what to future generations in the context of climate change and discusses several possible answers as well as their upsides and downsides. It first asks whether we have duties of justice to future at all, raising several challenges to the idea of including future generations under the scope of justice. Second, it asks how much we owe to future people: equality, sufficiency, or just basic human rights. Even if there are theoretical reasons to embrace a more demanding account, there may be political or feasibility reasons to endorse a less demanding view. The third question is what we owe to future

This work was supported by the Nederlandse organisatie voor wetenschappelijk onderzoek [VI. Veni.191F.002]. I want to thank Axel Gosseries, Dick Timmer, Gianfranco Pellegrino, and Siba Harb for comments on a draft on this chapter. T. Meijers (*) Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_55

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people: what kind of world, with what kind of goods and opportunities, do we owe to future people? Before concluding, the chapter discusses the distribution of duties to future people among contemporaries, the idea that we might have to limit the amount of future people, and possible institutional responses to challenges of intergenerational justice. Keywords

Climate change · Future generations · Scope of justice · Currency of justice · Theories of justice

Introduction Climate change shapes the world in which future people will live. However, climate change is not an exogenous development, it is influenced by humans. Our climate has already changed, and further change is inevitable. But how things develop hereafter, and how well we are prepared for the change that is coming, is something over which we – humanity – have control. We have choices to make. The stakes are high. It matters that we take the right decision. How much sacrifice should we make to slow down or limit (the impact of) climate change – to mitigate and adapt? This depends, to a large degree, on what we owe to future generations. Hence, for a complete picture of how we ought to respond to climate change, we need to have a theory of intergenerational justice. Climate change is not just an intergenerational issue. It may seem this way to those who are relatively protected (by wealth or geographical location) from the consequences of climate change today. The effects are increasingly felt across the globe, and many important questions around climate justice concern justice among contemporaries, particularly on a global scale. Questions of climate justice play at the intersection of the global and the intergenerational (Moellendorf, 2012). But our theories of justice not always seem well placed to deal with such issues (This is why Gardiner (2011) refers to climate change as the perfect moral storm, which brings together global, intergenerational, and theoretical “storms”). This chapter discusses the core elements of a theory of intergenerational justice, with a focus on climate change. It will discuss duties to future generations. It will not go into questions of justice between the old and the currently young or age-group justice more generally (see, e.g., Bidadanure, 2021), although climate change raises issues in that domain as well (e.g., the climate duties of parents, see Cripps, 2017). Most philosophers agree that it matters morally that future generations can live well, as will most readers. But the grounds and content of these duties are controversial when it concerns generations further into the future, which may impact the nature and magnitude of our climate duties. The chapter starts with a discussion of the challenges to the very idea of intergenerational justice (i.e., that there are duties of justice between generations). Then from these fundamental, theoretical, questions, we will work toward more applied questions. Moving from the theoretical to the

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applied may give the impression that we can simply apply theories of justice to issues of climate change. This is not the case. The issues around climate change present special challenges. Arguably, climate change is a test case for theories of justice. By that I mean that it is quite likely that we will have to rethink some of our most fundamental moral commitments when dealing with a problem that covers the entire planet and expands temporally far into the future. We will have to rethink our commitments about the grounds of justice, moral responsibility and collective action, the scope – temporal and spatial – of justice, and so on. With this in mind, we can ask: who owes what to future generations in the context of climate change? For this, we need several elements: we need to think about how much we owe (section “How Much Do We Owe Future Generations?”), and what it is that we owe (section “What Do We Owe?”) to future generations. Much about the future is uncertain, and we have to work with probabilities; we need to ask how these risks are factored in (section “Risk, Uncertainty, and Precaution”). This is a question of distributions across generations. The next question is one about the distribution of the costs of intergenerational justice among contemporaries: who should carry the burdens that come with securing intergenerational justice; who should act, who should pay (section “Who Owes What?”). We then move on to more practical questions. Apart from reducing emissions and investing in green technology, you may think we need to limit population size (section “Creating Future People”). Finally, we will ask what kind of adjustments to our political system one may think could help to secure that we act on the demands of intergenerational climate justice (section “Institutions and Citizens for Intergenerational Justice”). Section “Conclusion” returns to the elements of a theory of intergenerational justice. So, who owes what to future generations?

Something Rather Than Nothing? Asking “who owes what” presupposes that we owe something. Most of us believe we have moral reasons to be concerned about the plight of future generations (For a more elaborate discussion, see Meijers (2018) (on which this section draws). See also Roser & Seidel (2016), ch. 3). The question heading this section may sound silly. Of course, we owe something to future generations! Probably you believe it would be better if future generations flourished rather than suffered. Flourishing would be better. Probably you hold another, stronger, belief too: that it would be impermissible to leave a world in which people suffer from climate change, and perhaps would not be able to lead flourishing lives, instead of leaving a world in which they do flourish. Not acting would be not only worse, but also wrong. This distinction is important. Theories of justice are (usually) not interested in ranking different states of the world in terms of goodness, but they aim to identify what kind of world we have binding moral reasons (i.e., a duty) to bring about. When these claims concern worries about justice toward the currently young, most theories of justice would have no trouble explaining why it would be bad if those aged 0–10 now would not lead good enough lives or would over their lifetimes

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have much less than current generations do. These future generations are already here; they are our contemporaries at least for a significant part of their lives. Yet, both the claim about sustainability being better and not acting sustainably being wrong are problematic when it comes to impacts in the remote future. An example will show why. Suppose the current generation (G1) has a choice between two policies: curbing emissions (curb) or continue to emit business as usual (basu). If they opt for curb, people living 200 years from now (G5) will lead good lives. If they pursue basu, the members of G5 will lead drab lives (although their lives would be worth living). Intuitively, G1 should pursue curb. But curb involves radical change: a sustainable society that radically curbs emissions looks different. Perhaps there would be no cars, no planes, less traveling. Cities would be organized differently. Our existence is precarious, in the very specific sense that we could only have been created by the people who conceived us at the very moment they did so. In a society that curbs emissions, different people will meet and have children, or even if they have children with the same people conception will happen at a different time. It is likely that few, if any, of the people who would exist under curb would also exist under basu. Who exists in the future changes depending on decisions taken now, and even a seemingly trivial change in the lives of future procreators changes the identity of the members of remote future generations. Assume, at least for the sake of the argument, that G5 consists of entirely different people in alternative scenarios. There is no overlap in terms of identity between the two possible future populations. For the members of G5 under basu, this life is the only one on offer. Had G1 pursued curb, other people would have been alive. How can we say that curb is better than basu if it is better for nobody in particular, that is, no person is better off in the alternative scenario? Can it be worse even though it is not worse for anyone? What G1 has done wrong also becomes unclear. Who, exactly, is wronged by basu? The putatively wrongful action – pursuing a policy that makes future generations worse off – is also a necessary condition for the very existence of the people who are allegedly wronged. This is the nonidentity problem (Parfit, 1984). This problem arises for all moral theories – theories of justice included – that embrace the person affecting restriction: something can only be bad if it is bad for someone. This means that if something is not bad for someone it is not bad at all. The first strategy to deal with the nonidentity problem is to deny this restriction (For a more elaborate discussion of responses to NIP, see Roberts (2015)). One may embrace a form of impersonal consequentialism, a principle of beneficence for example. For this to work, one has to believe that a state of the world can be better without being better for anyone in particular. Perhaps it is wrong not to bring this better state of affairs about. Maybe we have a duty to bring about a world in which people lead better rather than worse lives, even if doing so makes no specific individual’s life better. Concretely, compare world A in which Ann and Bob lead extremely good lives to world B in which Cate and Dick live very poor lives. Nobody lives in both possible states of the world. Arguably, world A is better even though it is better for nobody in particular.

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Many theorists of justice would be hesitant to embrace a form of impersonal consequentialism, such as utilitarianism, to get around the nonidentity problem. Apart from the fact that many theorists of justice have fundamental disagreements with utilitarianism (e.g., Rawls 1971), aggregative theories run into problems of their own when confronted with questions about population size (Most notably the repugnant conclusion, see Parfit (1984) and see the chapter on ▶ “Climate Change and Population Ethics” in this volume). Hence, other replies are called for. Some try to redefine harm in terms of a threshold, rather than (merely) a comparative notion (Shiffrin, 1999; Meyer & Roser, 2009). Perhaps one is harmed by being brought into a flawed existence: for example, if one was to suffer from malnutrition, danger of physical harm, or precariousness. Perhaps leaving G5 a world in which they will live under a threshold due to hostile climate and extreme weather conditions that harm them, without making anyone worse off. If one is hesitant to stretch the notion of harms to include noncomparative elements, one could point out that there can be harmless wrongs. For example, I might put peoples’ lives in danger by shooting a bullet into a crowd. Even if the bullet does not hit anyone, and nobody even notices a shot has been fired, I have wronged the members of the crowd by placing them in danger. A similar argument could be made in the case of climate change: perhaps the members of G5 are not harmed (i.e., made worse off) by basu, but are wronged (Kumar, 2003). But what, exactly, does the wrong consist of in? It cannot be a wrong to a particular person, but it may be understood as a wrong to the kind of creature they are – persons, humans (Reiman, 2007) – or a feature they possess such as dignity or rationality (see, e.g., Vrousalis, 2013) or because it runs against the generic interests of human beings. These are referred to as “wide person affecting” reasons (Parfit, 2017). The challenges we have discussed so far are challenges to moral duties in general, not to duties of justice in particular. But even if we can establish that we owe future generations moral duties, we would still need to establish that what we owe them are duties of justice. Justice is only a part of morality, and duties of justice are of a particular kind (see, e.g., Broome, 2012). Although there are different ways to distinguish between justice and morality, generally we assume duties of justice take priority over other moral considerations, to be more stringent, more demanding, and arguably enforceable. Some theorists of justice argue that duties of justice arise among members of a society, that they are principles of social justice. The need for principles of justices arises from and aims at shaping social interactions, in the same way as duties of friendship only arise among friends. Several types of justice-generating relationships have been defended in the literature, and theorists disagree as to whether they arise among those living in a particular state (for statists and nationalists) or at the global level (cosmopolitans). This question poses itself intergenerationally as well: do we stand in a justice-generating relation with remote future generations? With this worry in mind, it is already hard to see how we could have duties of justice to the future members of our own political entity. However, climate change is a global issue, and it is probably even harder to show that all currently alive people stand in the right

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kind of relationship with all, globally speaking, future people. Let us call this the problem of the grounds of intergenerational justice. Several philosophers have argued that we do stand in a justice-generating kind of relationship with future people. Arguably, we are part of the same intergenerational community (Thompson, 2009; De-Shalit, 2005). Others aim to show that we are engaged in cooperation for mutual advantage through indirect reciprocity (Heath, 2013; Gosseries, 2009). Both shared community membership and cooperation for mutual advantage are prominent candidates for the grounds of duties of justice. Yet others point to the fact that new generations come into existence continuously and that current generations are connected to remote future generations through generational overlap. From this overlap, one could deduce a chain of duties. The currently old have duties to the currently young. And when the currently young are old (and the currently old dead), they will have duties to the next generation. Importantly, it would be wrong for the currently old to put the young in a situation where they cannot act on their duties to the generation after them (Gheaus, 2016; Mazor, 2010). Others take a different route and argue that justice is not relational, but that duties of justice are general duties owed to everybody regardless of our relationship with them. What matters is that future people are our moral equals, or that they are members of the human species. This is sufficient to trigger duties of intergenerational justice. This does not necessarily mean that we should treat contemporaries and remote future people in exactly the same way – or that we owe them exactly the same. One may think that a part of justice is nonrelational, whereas another part results from our close interactions, and only insofar as we do have close interactions. An example would be basic needs for all humans (regardless of relations) but equality with those with whom we closely interact. But one could also be of the view that the whole of justice is nonrelational, and that we should treat the wellbeing of future people with the same concern as those with whom we temporally coexist. Whether these challenges undermine the possibility of duties of justice to future people is a matter of debate. Some think they are decisive, and that duties of justice – or morality in general (Heyd, 1994) – do not extend to future generations (Dworkin, 1994; Beckerman, 2006). On the other hand, perhaps our intuition that future generations matter is so strong, that we assign it axiomatic status. This would mean that even though the grounds of our duties to future people may be unclear, the right moral theory simply has to be able to accommodate this intuition (Certainly many will have this intuition for the generations immediately following us, while perhaps our intuitions are less strong about people living, say, 2000 years from now. Some philosophers point out that regardless of whether we have duties to future generations, we may still have reasons to care about their flourishing. So, we may have nonmoral (or perhaps ethical) reasons to care about how future generations fare. See, e.g., Heyd (1994); Davidson (2019); and Scheffler (2013)). If this is right, these challenges are primarily theoretical, not so much practical, that is, they have little bearing on what we have to, morally speaking, do. Even if one is not convinced that the replies on offer are sufficient to dispel worries about the grounds of our duties of justice to future people, one should not

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overstate the practical importance of these puzzles in the context of climate change. Climate change is ongoing, it already affects people currently alive as well as the members of the generations immediately after us, that is, the currently young (Tank, 2022). Not all of those affected are possible people. Many of them are future (as opposed to possible) or currently very young people who will be worse off because of climate change. That is enough reason to tackle the issue. The same goes for the grounds of intergenerational justice challenge, which also lacks practical bite: the currently young, with whom our lives overlap, will suffer the consequences of climate change. They are our contemporaries. The case for limiting climate change and setting adaption to ongoing climate change in motion is morally overdetermined. It is only our duties in the longer term, climate duties included, to remote future people that are put into question by these issues.

How Much Do We Owe Future Generations? Let us assume that the challenges to duties of intergenerational justice raised in the previous section can be dealt with one way or the other, and that it makes sense to believe that the scope of justice is intergenerational. This implies we have duties of justice to future generations, and this will cover duties to limit and combat the effects of climate change. Now we have to ask what principles of intergenerational justice would look like? (For an excellent synopsis of theories of intergenerational justice from wider theoretical perspectives, libertarianism included, see Gosseries (2008). I have discussed several of these issues in Meijers (2018). See also Vrousalis (2016)) A key aspect of a principle of justice is a commitment to the question how much we owe to future generations. Answers provided by the literature vary. This section discusses three families of answers. Minimal theories of intergenerational justice embrace the idea that we owe future people much less than our contemporaries: we should not harm them or violate their rights. Threshold accounts are more demanding: we should make sure that future generations have enough. Finally, most demanding are egalitarian accounts of intergenerational justice that embrace equality across generations. Let us start with the least demanding accounts of intergenerational justice. On such a minimal account, we would owe something to remote future people, but not as much as to contemporaries. One may defend such an account for two reasons. First, one may think that it is simply correct that we have weaker duties to those with whom we do not temporally coexist. It is important that such a move requires a justification: if one believes that we have considerably weaker duties to future generations, one has to show what the morally relevant difference between contemporaries and future people is. One such argument – familiar also from debates in global justice by those rejecting a global scope of principles of justice – points out that our relationship with future generations is radically different. This relates to the grounds of justice worry discussed in the previous section: how much we owe depends on why, on what grounds, we have duties of justice. For example, one may argue that we have all sorts of special duties to those with whom we coexist

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because our lives are intertwined. We cooperate, share a coercive legal system and a public culture. Because we do not cohabitate with remote future people, they are owed general duties. A less demanding intergenerational view is perhaps the right view. Because of the differences between them and contemporaries, we owe them less. Such a view would claim we owe less to those with whom we do not overlap, not because of distance in terms of time, but because, unlike our contemporaries, our lives are not intertwined. Second, one may defend a relatively undemanding theory of intergenerational justice for more strategic reasons. Maybe you think we owe future generations a lot more, but because of the issues raised above there is deep theoretical disagreement. Yet, you may also think it matters that we act, and agreement on a minimal theory of intergenerational justice is better than none. The assumptions behind these more minimal views may be less problematic or controversial, so it may be easier to come to a disagreement. Perhaps more importantly, a more minimal theory of intergenerational justice might find a broader basis of support politically. This could be comparable to the role one may hope human rights play globally, even if one thinks duties of global justice require more than just protecting peoples’ human rights. What could such a minimal theory of intergenerational justice look like? The most straightforward duty is one not to harm the interests of the members of future generations. The issues discussed in section “Something Rather Than Nothing?” seem fatal to a comparative notion of harm: nonidentity undermines the straightforward sense of placing harm at the heart of a theory of intergenerational justice (Page, 2007). As mentioned, some propose a threshold notion of harm. The appeal of a threshold notion of harm lies, partially, in the fact that we can still talk about harming particular people, so the nonidentity problem has less traction. The idea of a threshold is particularly plausible when we are talking about objectively terrible lives: we may think that it is bad for some to come into existence, for example, when they lead short lives full of pain. But one can also defend a higher threshold and say that it is a harm not to be able to lead an autonomous or even flourishing life. On such a higher threshold, climate change poses a clear threat. Whatever one’s conception of what a good life consists in, people’s flourishing will be restricted in some relevant domains of life. Harvests may fail, homes will be destroyed, people will die prematurely because of extreme weather events or disease. However, this approach stretches the notion of harm considerably. The upshot would be that a life that falls short in terms of the threshold (say, periods of malnourishment) could constitute a harm, even if the life is one worth living. There are other ways to get to a similar view on what we ought to do in the face of climate change without stretching the notion of a harm, but it would entail giving up the idea that a wrong is always a wrong to a particular person. You may think we have a duty not to violate the rights of future people and tap into existing discourse about human rights. According to some, human rights are rights we have not because of the particular person we are, but because of the type of being (i.e., human beings) we are. Future generations may be wronged, regardless of whether they are harmed (being worse of), when their basic rights are violated. That is to say: it is wrong to place people in a position where their rights are violated, even if they would not have

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been better off (say, they would not have existed) in the absence of the rights violation. Climate change violates the rights of those currently suffering from extreme weather, but future people will see, at least, their right to life, health, and subsistence threatened (Caney, 2010; Bell, 2013). Although I have referred to harm and human rights-based accounts as minimal or undemanding accounts of intergenerational justice, it is important to point out that even these approaches with their seemingly minimal demands have quite radical implications in the case of climate change. This is certainly true for the citizens of countries that are now having a disproportional environmental impact. To make sure that we do not harm, or do not actively violate the rights of, future people, radical action is required in terms of climate change adaptation and mitigation. This is an important point: even a theory of intergenerational justice that sets relatively modest targets – do not harm future people, do not violate their human rights – ends up being rather demanding because of the situation in which we find ourselves today. Human rights often take a negative form. A right to life, for example, could be understood as not creating circumstances in which people will die (or die prematurely). One may think we owe future generations (much) more than protection from (threshold-)harm or human rights violations, but that they have positive rights as well. That is to say, we owe more to future people than not violating their rights: we may have reasons to protect their rights as well. And rights could take a positive form too: besides owing future people protection from premature death, we may also owe the conditions for a good life. According to intergenerational sufficientarianism, members of future generations are owed, as a matter of justice, lives above a certain sufficiency threshold. Human rights-based views that embrace socioeconomic rights and positive duties (i.e., to benefit people, not just to refrain from violating their rights) could take such a form. The level and content of the threshold can vary, and could be set at basic needs or higher to cover everything needed for a flourishing or free life. Inequalities above the threshold are not a concern of justice for sufficientarians (or at least less so): once we have saved enough for future people to live above the threshold (or not damaged the capacity of the planet to sustain them at this level), further savings are not required. John Rawls in A Theory of Justice defends an institutional equivalent of sufficientarianism, the Just Savings Principle (Rawls, 1971). The savings principle requires that we pass on (and if they do not exist yet, create) stable just institutions to future generations, so that they, too, can live under just institutions. What we owe future generations, at least those within our own particular polity (e.g., Meijers, 2017), are the material, economic, and natural conditions under which they live together in a just way. On such an account, the duties of intergenerational justice are satiable: once the threshold has been met, no further transfers are required. If you think sufficientarianism is a convincing theory of justice among contemporaries, you probably think it is an appealing theory of intergenerational justice as well. If one defends egalitarianism, one believes justice requires an egalitarian distribution. Taking such a position you may – absent a morally relevant difference between contemporaries and future people (Many egalitarians think the scope of egalitarianism is restricted, for example, within the state. You may be an egalitarian

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nationally and endorse a more minimal theory of global justice. Similarly, you may think egalitarianism applies among contemporaries, but not between nonoverlapping generations) – believe we have to be egalitarians across generations as well. You may believe, as luck egalitarians do, that differences that are arbitrary from the moral point of view should not impact how well one’s life goes. The point in time at which you are born is something arbitrary, and something over which you have no control whatsoever. Hence, you may think, inequalities between generations are unfair and should, if possible, be avoided or minimized. Unless, perhaps, a generation is responsible for being worse off. Another justification for equality across generations (understood differently) would be an indirect form of reciprocity: perhaps we have a duty to pass the world on in (at least) as good a state as we had received it from our predecessors. The question then, of course, is what “at least as good as” means – it cannot mean the same. It will have to be something of equal value. This raises the question of what the bundle of goods we have to transfer to future people looks like, that is, what it means for a bundle of goods to be of equal value. This is the topic of the next section. Whatever answer we give to the question how much we owe to future generations, a question that has arisen is whether the pattern of intergenerational justice is the same pattern as we apply within a generation. We cannot do full justice this issue here, but if one believes that the pattern differs, this should come with a justification. One needs to point out what the morally relevant differences are between contemporaries and future generations in order to defend differential duties. How demanding a seemingly more demanding view such as intergenerational egalitarianism is on us living today depends on several empirical factors. Some believe it likely that future generations will be better off than we are (conditional, perhaps, on us managing climate change in an acceptable way) due to economic growth and technological progress. If this is true, it may be permissible or even required from the point of view of intergenerational justice to pass some of the costs that come with addressing climate change today (monetary and otherwise) to remote future generations (Armstrong, 2017). If one thinks it likely that future generations will probably not be better off (unless we make massive investments in climate change adaptation and mitigation), intergenerational egalitarianism will end up being more demanding. The views discussed so far focus on the position of individuals or at least the institutions they live under. But those who defend aggregative moral views such as utilitarianism may object that this is not all that is at stake. Consider, for example, two possible imaginary futures. In one future, the human population will continuously exist of 6 billion happy people for the rest of human history. In the other, the human population will consist of 40 billion equally happy people for an equally long history. The second imaginary future contains a lot more happy people, and intuitively it seems better. Things become more complicated if we stipulate that the 40 billion would be slightly less happy than those in the 6 billion people world: would we still think it better, even though everybody is slightly less well off? Theories of justice are usually taken to be nonaggregative (Rawls, 1971), but intergenerational questions inevitably touch on how many people there will

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be. And even though one may claim that it does not matter how many people there are, as long as those who exist lead good lives, the utilitarian intuition that there being more happy people would be better regains some intuitive pull. The theorist of justice, however, may point out that a world with more people might very well be better, but justice is concerned with rightness not goodness.

What Do We Owe? Saying that we owe future generations equality or sufficiency is the first step, but it does not tell us what, concretely, we owe to future people. Or, in other words, what they have a right to. What is in the basket of goods that we should transfer to future people? Do we owe them money, natural beauty, just institutions, untouched natural resources? In other words, we would need to ask: equality or sufficiency of what? Money, well-being or capabilities? Justice to remote future people cannot require exactly the same as justice among contemporaries. The latter may require direct transfers, for example, but future people can only be transferred opportunities. Moreover, our relationship with future people is mitigated by intermediate generations, who have to pass what we have saved on to the generations after them, hence we depend on them to pass on what has been saved (and they may not). What we owe to future people cannot just be the monetary value of the transfers. To be sure, it may be nice for future people not to be burdened by large national debts and to have plenty of money in the bank. But money (or debt) may matter relatively little in a planet plagued by the environmental consequences of climate change. It is also unlikely that we can just transfer exactly what we received from passed generations. The planet changes as we pass it on to future generations, and no plausible theory of justice can demand that the planet remains unchanged. Nonrenewable resources are used, ecosystems altered. This is inevitable. When thinking about what we transfer, we will have to ask what is the value, in nonmonetary terms, of what we pass on to future people. There is an extensive debate about what the currency of justice is, and this debate has an intergenerational branch. There is no need to go into the details here (see Meijers, 2018). What we should keep in mind is that an appealing currency will most likely be quite complex, and not reducible to one kind of thing. Take a simple currency such as subjective well-being. Maybe, you think, it matters that future people are as happy, subjectively speaking, as current people. But peoples’ preferences are malleable, and adaptive. Suppose that current generations leave very little for future people, but also raise and shape the preferences of future people to be extremely frugal (or future people adapt their preferences effectively to their situations themselves). The current generation will have much more (because they save much less), but future people may not be unhappier. Arguably, this is unappealing for a theory of justice (Page, 2007). Perhaps you think we should think about what we owe to future people in terms of opportunities. The question becomes what opportunities are valuable. To be sure, future people need options. But having more opportunities is not necessarily better.

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The opportunities need to be of a particular kind. We need to make sure future people can flourish in all the relevant domains of human life. This is why many people embrace something like the capabilities approach as an appealing metric of intergenerational justice: it identifies different domains in which people need to have sufficient possibilities in order to flourish: well-being cannot be reduced to one particular metric. What capabilitarianism denies is that losses in one domain of human life can be made up for if there are increases in other domains. So, by looking at different functionings future people are entitled to, we can develop a clearer view of whether opportunities are substitutable or not. This last sentence sounds more complicated than it is. In the context of climate change, quite literally, the question is what kind of world we should leave for future generations. Think of the following type of world (following, e.g., Gardiner, 2011, 44): Dome-world: Humanity did not stop climate change, and the air on earth has become unbreathable. Humans did, however, manage to create large domes in which people live and grow food. People lead decent lives in these domes.

Probably you think dome-world is not very attractive, or at least that it is not a good substitute for a healthy and livable planet. Dome-world is not good as a livable planet: we may have shielded future people from the consequences of climate change, but we should have stopped climate change instead. If you believe this, you think that certain goods are nonsubstitutable. Just as plastic pandas and electronic birds (Zwarthoed, 2016) are no substitute for actual pandas and actual birds, passing on dome-world would make future people worse off. This, you may think, is even true if people are happy in dome-word (because of manipulated or adaptive preferences) and even if people in dome-world have a wide variety of (meaningful) possibilities to lead their lives. The set of resources past generations passed on is, you may think, not an adequate set. Some of the things lost are not substituted in the right way. Climate change radically changes our planet. Which of the losses this brings about can we adequately compensate for? If certain crops no longer grow, perhaps we can develop new more resilient (and equally delicious and nutritious) crops. What matters that people can still feed themselves. But what about clean air or biodiversity? There are two ways in which goods may be substitutable. First, some other good may serve just as well to perform a particular function. Take nonrenewable energy sources. If they are depleted, but replaced by new and safe sustainable energy sources, it would seem that future generations miss out on nothing significant. What matters is that they get what they need (namely, energy), not that they get one particular way of getting what they need (e.g., by burning oil). Fossil and solar energy fulfill, arguably, the same function. Or new, more resistant nutritious crops: the function is nourishment. The second way in which a good may be (non-) substitutable is that one function can be replaced by another. Perhaps we can replace the experience of natural beauty with the experience of man-made beauty; both are aesthetic experiences (probably like most readers, I doubt that is an adequate

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replacement). You may think that even if life in dome-world is pretty good, certain things that are lost are not compensated for in the right way. We will have managed to keep some functions intact, while others have been destroyed without there being adequate replacements, such as being able to roam freely or to enjoy unspoiled natural beauty. What is bad about dome-world may have little to do with substitutability. You may also worry about dome-world for other, non-anthropocentric reasons (although these are usually not seen as reasons of justice) such as the damage done to ecosystems, biodiversity, and animal and plant populations. Maybe you think that certain things have intrinsic value. You may, for example, think that no amount of economic progress can quite make up for mass extinction even if future people are not directly impacted by there being fewer species. Maybe mass extinction is not an injustice to future generations, though it does make the world worse. Taking position on which kinds of goods are substitutable and which are not probably requires taking some position on what a good life consists in. Without such a view, it is hard to get a grasp on what adequate intergenerational transfers are. Hence, we have to ask what it is that future people have reasons to want. This might be epistemically as well as morally problematic. Can we know what future people want, and are not we just extrapolating our preferences? Although there is an epistemic problem there, and possibly a worry about intergenerational domination (current generations determining what options future people have), the objection should not be overstated. First of all, future people will, most likely, be people like us. They may not want the exact same things as us, but they will need the same kinds of things to pursue their plans in life. They will need a planet that feeds them, clean air to breathe, a safe and stable society, and so on. Approaches that produce so-called “objective lists,” the capability approach, define capabilities at a rather high level of abstraction leaving plenty of room for future generations to define their own conceptions of the good life (see, e.g., Nussbaum, 2000). Intergenerational distributive justice differs from justice among contemporaries because direct distribution is not possible. We can make transfers to the least well-off of the current generation, but we cannot make direct transfers to remote future generations. Yes, we can transfer knowledge and technology, institutions, and a natural world. But these aim at creating the conditions under which future people get their fair share, under which justice-relevant goods can be produced. Part of what we transfer for this reason, one may argue, is a world in which it is likely that future people can treat each other fairly. Take, for example, theories that emphasize the importance of political equality, and basic liberties such as freedom of speech and association. You may think that, apart from there being a fair distribution, it matters from the point of view of justice that people live together as equals. But given that we do not temporally coexist with remote future people, these requirements of justice seem relatively moot intergenerationally: there can be no political or relational equality between us and people living 200 years from now. How can worries about relational equality be placed into a theory of intergenerational justice? Rawls’s controversial move away from egalitarianism in the intergenerational realm seems somewhat more attractive

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with this in mind. Rawls defends a just savings principle, which requires that we transfer to future generations just stable institutions as well as their material conditions. In other words, what matters to Rawls, is that future generations can live together in a just way, relating to their contemporaries as equals. How is climate change relevant for these kinds of goods, that is, the capacity for future people to live justly among each other (relationally or distributively)? According to Rawls, it only makes sense to talk about the demands of justice when the circumstances of justice apply. One of these conditions is moderate scarcity: social cooperation has to be both productive and possible. In conditions of extreme scarcity, say when there is simply not enough food for everybody to survive, cooperation is not possible: people are literally fighting for their lives. In order to transfer just institutions, we need to transfer a planet in which it is possible for people to cooperate. Otherwise – and some believe climate change has already moved us in this direction – we need different moral categories than justice to make sense of the human predicament, that is, “Ethics for a broken world” (Mulgan, 2014). To avoid this, we need a planet on which societies can sustain fair cooperation, something climate change may jeopardize by causing societal collapse, floods, mass migration, famines, and so on.

Risk, Uncertainty, and Precaution Philosophical thought experiments sometimes assume that we know what different possible future states of the world will look like. But climate change is not like a thought experiment. We know that it will happen (and is happening). We do not know what, exactly, will happen. To be sure, we are not completely oblivious: the IPCC reports very high levels of confidence in several outcomes (say, a larger increase of sea levels in high-emissions scenarios). Yet, the margins of uncertainty may be uncomfortably wide when tipping points, after which we may be confronted with run-away climate change, are in play (McKinnon, 2011). At best, when dealing with the future, we are dealing with probabilities. We know that if we pursue a certain course of action – say if we aim for 1.5 degrees of global warming instead of 2 – it is much more likely that things will turn out relatively alright. How does uncertainty and risk feed into what we owe to future people? This question matters for two reasons. First, we need to know how much we should save, and for how many contingencies we should plan. If we treat possible bad outcomes as certain outcomes, we will have to save more. Second, sometimes we are confronted with tragic choices: do we, for example, prioritize the currently poor or future generations? We need to know whether we should assign as much weight to future events (given that we are dealing with probabilities). Say that we can save 1000 by preventing a disaster now, or prevent an event that has a 50% likelihood of occurring in 200 years which would (if it materializes) kill 1900 people? Here is one line of argument, often part of a cost–benefit analysis of climate action. We should maximize the expected value of climate action. When deciding in a situation where the probabilities are known, it makes sense to try to maximize

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expected utility. For example, when I cycle to work I know there is a small probability I will get severely injured in an accident. Yet, I cycle to work: even though the outcome of an accident would be bad, the limited likelihood of it occurring makes cycling to work the rational thing to do. Similarly, we should discount the future by weighing in the desirability of the outcome and the likelihood that it will come about (Caney, 2009). Discounting is the practice of assigning less value to something the further in the future it is. Most of us use discounting as a psychological mechanism: we often postpone doing something even though we know we will have to do it anyway. Importantly, we postpone even if we know that doing it later will likely be more costly. Think, for example, of postponing a visit to the dentist: one may postpone a trip to the dentist to deal with a dental issue, even if one knows that the trip is inevitable and the treatment will likely be worse if we wait longer. The postponer (in this case irrationally) assigns smaller value to future pain, that is, she discounts. When it comes to climate change, suppose we know that there is an n% (pick any number) likelihood that a climate disaster will happen in 100 years. Suppose that if it happens the disaster will kill 1000 people. There are several possible reasons to discount the badness of the disaster. You may think that just because it happens further in the future makes it less bad than 1000 people dying now. This is pure time preference, and it is met with near universal disapproval: that something bad happens further in the future does not make it less bad. Another argument for discounting would appeal to the fact that we do not know that the disaster will happen, we only know that it is likely. We should not treat an event that has, say, a 50% likelihood of happening the same way as an event that will certainly happen, especially when deciding where to allocate scarce resources. When incurring costs to prevent disasters, one may argue, we should weigh the probabilities in. We should not spend as much on preventing a disaster that has a small chance of happening as on an equally bad event that will certainly happen. When it concerns an unlikely but very bad event, “the expectation of harm caused by a catastrophe is the badness of the catastrophe multiplied by the very small probability that it will happen” (Broome, 2012, p. 193). This, effectively, means priority for the present: preventing bads now or in the near future will very often have greater weight: the further into the future, the more uncertain. And the uncertainty margins grow wider the further into the future we look, hence the weight assigned to events that may take place in the future decreases when these margins widen. Cost–benefit analysis – and with it this type of discounting – becomes even harder once we realize sometimes, we have genuine uncertainty about the future: sometimes we do not and cannot know what the likelihood of an outcome is. Moreover, it is problematic that we – current generations – discount things we cause for things that may severely set back the interests of others. Maximizing expected utility may be a good decision rule for individuals making decisions under conditions of uncertainty, but not for how we should treat risks we create for others (Caney, 2009). One may also draw a different kind of conclusion from the fact that we are faced with risks and uncertainty. Rather than discounting unlikely very bad outcomes, we should try to focus on avoiding the worst possible outcomes. High loss outcomes should be avoided, even if they are relatively unlikely to come about, and especially

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when doing so can be done at a relatively low cost to high-emitting individuals (Caney, 2009 178–179). This would be a precautionary principle: avoid the worst possible outcome. When thinking about what kind of future to bring about, we should look at under which conditions the worst (or worst somewhat likely) outcome is the least bad (McKinnon, 2011). This becomes especially relevant when thinking about tipping points, when assigning probabilities becomes hard, and we do not know exactly when we reach them and what the effect of reaching them would be. Because if it happens, it would be disastrous, for example, if the planet became largely uninhabitable because climate change leads to a hostile atmosphere, we have to try to avoid a scenario in which they are a possibility even if unlikely.

Who Owes What? We have focused on the “beneficiary” side of a theory of justice: remote future people. But we have said much less about who the duty bearers are. I have written as if humanity as a whole bears these duties, but this can only be true metaphorically. The burdens – financially or in terms of lifestyle adaptation – will have to be distributed among individuals and states within a generation as well as across generations. Who owes what intergenerationally? One important question here is whether duties fall on states only or on individuals as well. This is an important discussion, but here I will assume states are responsible (But see Jamieson (2014)). An answer to this question faces significant challenges, for two reasons. First, while intergenerational questions could, in principle, play at the level of the state (think of intergenerational transfers of sovereign debt or preservation of cultural or natural heritage), climate change is a global phenomenon: neither emissions nor the effects of climate change respect state borders. Even prominent defenders of nationalist views acknowledge that tackling climate change fairly requires a global response. Hence, the distribution of climate duties – including those to remote future generations – is also a question of global justice. Second, climate change is an issue that is not only intergenerational in the forward-looking sense, but a large part of the emissions causing climate change today were emitted in the past. And many of those responsible for these emissions are no longer alive. Hence, we need to ask how we fairly distribute the burdens of historical emissions. If we were to look at climate change in isolation one could be tempted by the following type of solution: at least for the emissions going forward, we should simply distribute emission rights equally across the planet. Perhaps we should share our common burden equally. Yet, focusing on emissions and climate change alone would be a mistake: we cannot think about justice in one domain without considering the wider implications from and to other domains (Caney, 2012). Emissions egalitarianism hardly seems fair in such a broader context. The world is a hugely unequal place. Should the poor and the rich contribute equally? If we demand equal contributions, those who have the least will lose the most. Take, as an example, the duty to reduce emissions. An equal distribution of the reduction burden would have very unequal costs: for those who emit a lot, cutting down is perhaps burdensome but

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not extremely costly. But for those who emit very little, most emissions result from meeting basic needs. Bringing down emissions would, for those already badly off, come at an unacceptable cost. In fact, emphasizing the need for development, one may even think that less well-off states have a right to undergo development and increase emissions or have rich states pick up part of the costs that come with developing sustainably. Perhaps, instead, we should opt for an ability to pay principle: the burdens of intergenerational justice should fall on those who are able to shoulder them. Ability to pay is an appealing, but also problematic principle. One issue is that those who have the ability to pay are not necessarily those who caused the problem in the first place. Suppose a wealthy country invests in a green transition. Should they continue to contribute as much as an equally rich polluting state? Alternatively, we could insist that the polluter pays: the costs of intergenerational (climate) justice should be carried by those who pollute. Again, this has some bite, but if we apply this principle to the state (and not to individuals) some relatively poor states who emitted quite a bit historically would have to foot a hefty bill. Finally, one could propose that the beneficiary pays: those who benefit from the emissions should pick up the bill. This principle has problems, too. For example, one may benefit from an injustice without being responsible for the injustice, which is troublesome (and a consequence polluter pays avoids) These principles all fall short, the distribution either fails to track responsibility or results in unfair division of costs (Schuppert, 2011). Quite likely, we need a mix of these mid-level principles, or a general theory of distributive justice. Climate change is not one distributive question. At the very least, we are dealing with the costs that come with mitigation and costs that come with adaptation, and some have argued that the answer to the who owes what question may very across these questions. For example, the need for adaptation is mostly the result from emissions already made, so a backward-looking principle such as polluter pays might be more suitable (Vanderheiden, 2011). In practice, what precisely the right principles are to distribute the costs of combating climate change may not matter much. As Henry Shue points out: “As a matter of fact all considerations strongly tend to converge towards the same conclusion about which states are responsible to act in order to slow climate change” (Shue, 2015). These are the rich states: most are historically responsible, have the ability to pay, and clearly benefit most.

Creating Future People We determine not only the conditions in which future people will live, but also the size of future generations. This raises two set of questions. One is whether the size of intergenerational transfers depends on how many people there are. If we know that future generations are larger, do we need to transfer more? Views that focus on the individual will say yes: individuals are owed enough or the same. Views that focus on the generational level, for example, forms of reciprocity (i.e., we have to transfer

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as much as we have received from the previous generation) may recommend another course of action (see Gosseries, 2009). The second question emphasizes that population size is not given. How many people there are in the future is something over which we have control. Does intergenerational justice require limiting the number of people there are? As to limiting our impact on the planet, we can limit consumption (consume less), emissions (consume sustainably), or the number of people emitting (See the discussion about the IPAT (Impact ¼ Population  Affluence  Technology) formula, for example). Following Malthus, environmentalists have traditionally emphasized the need to limit population size (Ehrlich & Ehrlich, 1968). Is limiting population size part of intergenerational climate justice? There are two separate questions. First, should governments try to influence fertility limits, and second do individuals have moral reasons to limit the number of children they have? The first question is the most controversial and quickly brings repressive one-child policies to mind. Government interference with the reproductive life of its citizens is problematic (Heyward, 2012). However, it is important to note that there are a variety of ways in which governments can influence fertility levels. In fact, it is impossible not to exercise influence. Governments determine the conditions in which people decide how many children they have, even if policies are not explicitly aimed at influencing fertility levels. For example, policies aimed at improving the position of women and tackling financial precarity suppress birth rates (e.g., Sen, 1996; Meijers, 2016). These policies are not problematic, on the contrary: lower birth rates are, in these cases, a side effect of acting on the demands of justice. One may also think that individuals have a duty to limit the number of children they have. When thinking about an individual duty to have less children, we cannot ignore structural inequalities, poverty, and limited opportunities for women that are important determinants of fertility. On the global level, fertility levels are highest in those places where people are already badly off and in countries that are historically low emitters (and have contributed relatively little to climate change). For those in more affluent places, having less children is a real possibility and would make a bigger difference (children of the affluent will pollute more) (see Casal, 1999). The question for the affluent becomes whether having many children (or children at all) is like engaging in other polluting activities such as eating meat or commuting by plane (Young, 2001), or whether having children is somehow “special” and merits an exception (Robeyns, 2021). These are hard and fascinating questions. But we can ask, do they really matter for climate change policy? It is quite likely that the next few decades are key for climate change: we need to act relatively quickly. Even if lowering fertility is morally permissible, it only has an effect over a much longer timespan. The population of the planet is projected to stabilize by 2100 (UNDP). Pushing birth rates down further today will not have immediate effects. The largest generation ever to have been born still has to reach reproductive age, and even if they have less children than previous generations, population will continue to increase. Demography, in that sense, is destiny. Barring a sudden drop in population, through major

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natural disasters, a much deadlier pandemic, or nuclear war, there is no way to radically limit the number of polluters in the medium term. If this is right, unlike limiting consumption or developing greener ways to consume and produce, limiting fertility levels can only play a very limited role in immediate climate action (but see Cafaro, 2021; Barry, 1999), although there may be other reasons of (intergenerational) justice to limit demographic growth in the long term.

Institutions and Citizens for Intergenerational Justice We now have a picture of the elements of a theory of intergenerational justice in the context of climate change, but we have said very little about how to enact it. There are several questions of implementation. One set of questions is about how, technically, we can and should limit CO2 emissions. This raises a host of ethical questions. Take, for example, nuclear energy. In terms of emissions, nuclear energy offers opportunities, but clearly the storage of nuclear waste raises significant other worries (Taebi & Roeser, 2015). Similar questions about risk and uncertainty arise when thinking about geoengineering. I will not discuss the ethical issues of these technical fixes here. I will focus here on another issue, that of compliance. Assuming that we can reach some agreement on what we owe to future people – and it is plausible that there is quite a bit of agreement that doing nothing is no longer an option – we need to ask how we can create compliance with the demands of intergenerational justice. Theories of justice usually focus on the basic structure, the institutional set-up, of society being just. This makes sense for issues of climate change, too. Although individuals may have duties to reduce their emissions, the big changes will have to come from changing the way in which our societies and their institutions work. So, what kind of institutions would promote or advance compliance with the demands of intergenerational justice (González-Ricoy & Gosseries, 2016). An important feature of our relationship with future people is the asymmetry of power: although we hold considerable power over them, there is very little they can do to us. Whereas contemporaries whose rights and interests are ignored can speak up and protest, future generations cannot do this. This makes noncompliance relatively easy. The first place to look, then, would be to constrain the power of present generations over those living in the future. Several authors have pointed out that democratic governments do not always seem well placed to do so. Given that election cycles are relatively short, typically 4–5 years, one may worry about the short-termism in politics (or the “tyranny of the present,” Gardiner, 2014). Politicians who want to be reelected in 4 years might not have an interest in imposing costly measures with positive long-term effects. There are ways to counteract this short-termist tendency in democracies. One way would be to entrench the rights of future generations, for example, in the constitution (Ekeli, 2009). The German constitution, for example, specifies responsibility for future generations (German Constitution article 20A), and the constitutional court has in 2021 applied it in climate cases. Constitutional protection limits the capacity of the current generation to legislate and make policy that goes against responsibility

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for future generations. Others have proposed to make protections of future generations part of international law as well, arguing we should consider legislating against crimes like “ecocide” and “postericide” (McKinnon, 2017). Appeals to international law and treaties have already been made successfully in court to force governments to comply with agreed-upon reductions in CO2 emissions (e.g., in the Dutch 2019 Urgenda case). Legally entrenching the rights of future people gives citizens and civil society the legal means to go against governments that ignore their intergenerational duties. Other proposals take aim at placing the demands of intergenerational justice prominently when laws are drafted and voted into effect. After all, future people are affected by the laws we make (and do not make) right now. Based on an all-affected principle (which says that laws should be democratically approved by all affected by the law), it seems that future generations should have a say in the laws that affect them. We may extend the temporal scope of issues that concern parliamentarians by including the young in parliament. But future generations – who by definition do not exist yet – cannot be represented in a straightforward sense (Karnein, 2016). They cannot vote and cannot get elected. But others can act as their representatives. Perhaps we should reserve seats in parliament for representatives of future people. These representatives could speak and vote with their interests in mind when laws are being made. Extraparliamentary institutions might help too, such as an ombudsman for future generations. Hungary and Israel have both had such an ombudsman. Even without veto-power or voting rights, parliamentarians or an ombudsman may influence democratic deliberation. They would force, for example, parliamentarians to respond to objections raised, and they could try to get issues onto the agenda. This could influence decision-making within parliament as well as the attitudes of voters. Some have argued that tinkering with institutions will not be enough, but that we should aim at making citizens and voters care more about what happens in the future (and elsewhere in the world). There are several ways to tinker with moral motivation. Moral and civic education is one, pointing out that we have good reasons (not only moral reasons) to care for future generations. For example, we could emphasize that the success of our plans in life is entangled with theirs (Scheffler, 2013). At the radical end of the spectrum, philosophers propose to make people better by engaging in moral bio-enhancement. Persson and Savulescu argue that people as they are, especially in combination with democratic institutions, are badly placed to deal with the challenges we are faced with. Our moral intuitions focus on direct harm, are parochial, and short-termist. If we want to hang on to democracy while avoiding disastrous outcomes, we need less selfish, more empathetic citizens (Persson & Savulescu, 2012). Obviously, these kinds of proposals are met with skepticism, and some consider the idea of tinkering with people not only a violation of autonomy and freedom, but outright dangerous. The question their analysis raises, however, is crucial. The way in which our democratic institutions behave, and citizens vote and consume is evidence of relative indifference to the long term. A radical rethink of what our institutions look like, and the way citizens vote, consume, and participate, is urgently needed.

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Conclusion So, who owes what to future generations? This chapter does not offer an answer. But it aims to hand readers the subquestions that need an answer to put together their own view. At the fundamental level, we need a view about the moral status of future people, and how the fact that our relationship with them differs impacts on our duties toward them. How demanding do we think intergenerational justice is, is the next question. Are future people owed equality, sufficiency, or something more minimal, such as respect for their human rights, their dignity or life free of harms caused by climate change? And what is an acceptable basket of goods to transfer, what kind of world can we leave them without violating their rights? And how do we divide the burdens that come with acting on these duties in an unequal world? Is limiting the population part of the puzzle? And what kind of changes to our political system should we make to get our societies onto a path away from ignoring what many believe to be a tremendous injustice?

Cross-References ▶ Climate Change and Distributive Justice ▶ Climate Change and Environmental Justice ▶ Climate Change and Global Justice ▶ Climate Change and Human Rights ▶ Climate Change and Overpopulation ▶ Climate Change and Population Ethics ▶ Climate Change, Natural Aesthetics, and the Danger of Adapted Preferences ▶ Climate Change, Uncertainty, and Policy ▶ Responsibility for Climate Harms

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Climate Change and Population Ethics Trevor Hedberg

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Issues in Population Ethics and Implications for Climate Policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Nonidentity Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Theoretical Outlooks in Population Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Antinatalism and Procreative Limitarianism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Population Size and Total Greenhouse Gas Emissions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

Population ethics is the subfield of philosophy that focuses on the moral aspects of how actions affect who exists in a particular population and what quality of life they have. The choices regarding what policies are adopted in response to climate change will affect the identities of those who exist in the future, the size of future populations, and the quality of life that future people will have. This chapter examines the nonidentity problem, various theoretical outlooks on population ethics, some recent policy proposals aimed at reducing fertility, and the relationship between population reduction and the impacts of climate change. After summarizing the relevant issues, the relevance of the discourse to climate policy is highlighted, and points of consensus and dissensus are noted. Disagreement on some of the key theoretical questions in population ethics is significant and poses a challenge for deriving meaningful conclusions about climate policy. Fortunately, emerging points of consensus on other aspects of climate policy and its

T. Hedberg (*) University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_64

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relationship to population provide reasons to think moral decision-making about these matters is far from hopeless. Keywords

Climate change · Population ethics · Overpopulation · Population growth · Nonidentity problem · Total utilitarianism · Average utilitarianism · Repugnant conclusion · Antinatalism

Introduction Global climate change is now producing a wide range of detrimental effects: rising sea levels, increased frequency of severe weather events (e.g., droughts, floods, hurricanes, heat waves), an expanded livable range for disease-carrying insects, regional decreases in farmable land, reduced food productivity from the oceans due to ocean acidification, and a rise in species extinctions as animals struggle to adapt to the rapid temperature changes (IPCC, 2014; Hoegh-Guldberg et al., 2018). Calculating the moral significance of such diverse impacts on this scale is difficult, but one means of doing so involves estimating the number of human beings who will die from climate change (Nolt, 2015). For example, even without accounting for economic damages, flooding, heat waves, or certain other ways human health could be impacted, the World Health Organization (2014) still estimates that at least 250,000 people will die annually from climate change from 2030 to 2050. Springmann and his coauthors (2016) offer a gloomier estimate: they claim climate change’s impact on food security and agriculture is already responsible for 529,000 deaths each year. Moreover, casualty estimates almost surely underestimate the actual number of people who will be impacted by climate change. Most victims of climate change will not die; they will instead suffer from dehydration, illness, malnourishment, or displacement. Also, while it is perhaps impossible to calculate the precise number, a great many nonhuman animals will endure the same types of suffering – with some species going extinct in the process. The temperature increase will also be long-lasting: without developing and deploying exceptional geoengineering technology, temperatures could remain elevated for tens of thousands of years (Archer et al., 2009; Zeebe, 2013). Given the severity and duration of climate change’s impacts, it is not surprising that policymakers, environmental scientists, and environmental ethicists all broadly agree that a robust international response to climate change is required. While there remain difficult moral and political questions about exactly how the duties of mitigation, adaptation, and compensation should be allocated among the world’s many nations (Caney, 2020; Hedberg, 2023), this chapter focuses on a different aspect of climate policy: how it affects global population. Despite knowing much about climate change’s impacts, some philosophers and economists argue that the relationship between responses to climate change and the corresponding impacts on global population is not as well understood. Consider, for instance, these remarks from John Broome (2012):

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We do not know what value to set on changes to the world’s population. If the population shrinks as a result of climate change, we do not know how to evaluate the change. Yet we have reason to think that changes in the population may be one of the most morally significant effects of climate change. The small change of catastrophe may be a major component in the expected value of harm caused by climate change, and the loss of population may be a major component of the badness of catastrophe. . . So we face a particularly intractable problem of uncertainty, which prevents us from working out what we should do. Yet we have to act; climate change will not wait while we sort ourselves out. (pp. 183–185)

Broome is surely correct that the way a population is impacted by climate change (whether through changes in its size or in those people’s average quality of life) holds moral significance. His worry is that the domain of population ethics – the subfield of philosophy that focuses on the moral aspects of how actions affect who exists in a particular population and what quality of life they have – has not produced conclusive answers about what characteristics make a population better or worse overall. Thus, it is not possible to be certain about whether a choice of climate policy has morally acceptable effects on the present and future people. This chapter surveys some of the most prominent issues in population ethics and considers their relevance for climate policy. These issues include the nonidentity problem, theoretical disputes about how different populations should be valued relative to one another, antinatalism and other views that support a reduction in global population size, and the relationship between population size and climate change. The chapter closes with some summary remarks about points of consensus and dissensus and some speculation about future research in the subfield.

Issues in Population Ethics and Implications for Climate Policy This section begins with the most theoretically abstract issues and gradually progresses toward debates that are more firmly connected to current decisions that must be made about climate policy. In each subsection, the general topic or debate is introduced, then the connection to climate change is explained, and then any conclusions that can be reached about climate policy are discussed.

The Nonidentity Problem Sometimes, actions affect the identities of people who will exist in the future. This observation gives rise to a complex moral puzzle known as the nonidentity problem – a term coined by Derek Parfit (1984, Chap. 16) in his influential discussion of the issue. To understand what is vexing about the nonidentity problem, consider an ordinary person named Susan. Susan is who she is in part because of the specific genetic material that was united to create her. If Susan’s parents had conceived with different sexual partners or even just conceived with each other at a slightly different

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time, a different sperm and egg pair would have been united. In those cases, Susan would not have been conceived: an entirely different person would have been born. This observation about how happenstance can affect the genetic makeup of a future child may be innocuous, but it becomes morally problematic when paired with a common assumption made about harm. When someone is harmed, one of the most straightforward explanations as to why appeals to the ways in which the victim has been made worse off than they otherwise would have been. A victim of assault is made worse off by the physical pain and emotional trauma of the experience than they otherwise would have been. A victim of theft is made worse off because they have lost valuable money or possessions that they would still have if not for the theft. This view, known as the counterfactual comparative account of harm (CCAH), also provides a means to gauge how bad the harm was: one can assess how much better off the person would have been if the harm had never occurred and thereby figure out how great the loss was. While many find CCAH a plausible means of explaining and evaluating harms, it generates a deeply counterintuitive implication regarding future people: under certain conditions, it appears that future people cannot be harmed by actions that seem quite wrong. To illustrate this, consider a variation of Parfit’s (1984, pp. 361–363) Depletion case: Society faces a choice about whether to deplete or conserve certain natural resources during the next century. If these resources are depleted, then generations living 100 years from now will have a significantly reduced average quality of life and their average welfare will not recover for many centuries, though they will still have lives worth living; however, those alive during the next 100 years will have a marginally higher quality of life. In contrast, if these resources are conserved, then generations living during the next 100 years and those living further into the future will enjoy on average the same quality of life. Now imagine this society chooses to deplete their natural resources over the next century. Does this decision harm future people?

Such a case can generate instinctive reactions of wrongdoing because it looks exploitative – a few generations enriching themselves at the expense of future generations – and because this depletion of resources reduces future generations’ welfare significantly but secures only a small increase in welfare for the benefitting generations. But imagine for a moment that the society had chosen to conserve the resources. The differences in economic and social policy required to achieve this goal would have caused different people to meet and form relationships. Even in cases where the same people met and procreated, their procreation might well occur at a different time, leading to a different sperm and egg pair uniting to form their child. After a few generations of this, the future people living in a state of conservation will be a completely different set of people than those who would have lived in the state of depletion. Thus, the people who live in the depleted world cannot say they were made worse off because society chose to deplete the resources. After all, if the society had pursued a policy of conservation, the people who would have lived in the depleted world would not exist at all!

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The parallels between Depletion and choice of climate change policy are clear. If the current generation chooses to invest significant resources in mitigating climate change and pursuing adaptation and compensation measures to aid the vulnerable, then future generations affected by climate change will enjoy a higher quality of life: the effects of climate change will be less severe, they will be better able to respond to the environmental changes, and some of those who suffer despite those efforts will receive compensation. But what if those policies were not pursued? Future generations would have a lower quality of life on average, but the people living in that scenario would be completely different after a few generations than the people who would have otherwise existed. Responding to climate change demands such an extensive overhaul to existing social and economic systems that it will have similar effects on population composition to pursuing the conservation policy in Parfit’s Depletion scenario: within a few generations, the population living in a world of preventative climate policy will be completely different than the population living in a world characterized by runaway climate change. Just like those living in a Depleted world, the future people living in a world of runaway climate change would not exist at all if alternative policies were pursued. In this sense, those future people would not be made worse off by a choice not to respond to climate change, which means that according to CCAH, they are not harmed by this choice. Does that mean that pursuing such a course of action would be morally permissible even if it significantly lowers future people’s average welfare? If all steps in this reasoning are accepted, then that conclusion might well follow, but most philosophers reject the nonidentity problem. Perhaps the most straightforward way of responding to the nonidentity problem is to reject CCAH (Hedberg, 2020, pp. 168–170). This account of harm has difficulty dealing with cases of preemption, such as when two hitmen each fire a lethal shot at the same target (Hanser, 2008, p. 436). If one of the hitmen had decided not to shoot, the target would still be fatally shot by the other hitman. In other words, one of the individual hitmen does not make the target worse off by shooting, so according to CCAH, this action does not cause harm. But that result looks wrong: to many, preemption cases appear to be counterexamples to CCAH. This account of harm also has problems distinguishing between causing harms and failing to provide benefits. Not providing a monetary gift to a stranger does, in a sense, make this person worse off than they would be if they received the gift, but it would seem like a mistake to equate this with “harming” them. This may provide another reason to reject CCAH or at least to think it is not a comprehensive account of what constitutes harm. There are also several other strategies for rejecting the reasoning that underlies the nonidentity problem. For instance, perhaps the identity-altering actions are not harmful but still wrong (Woodward, 1986; Elliot, 1989). There are other types of wrongdoing, such as undetected voyeurism and non-harmful promise-breaking, that may fit this description. And even if the actions were neither wrong nor harmful, some would argue that they constitute vicious behavior (DeGrazia, 2012, pp. 180–181). One might argue that raising global temperature for short-term benefits and pushing the costs onto future generations reflects a type of apathy or

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disregard for the impersonal welfare of future people – a character trait that a virtuous person would not have. Even if these attempts to rebut the nonidentity problem fail, there are good reasons to believe this theoretical problem is not particularly applicable to the world’s climate crisis. The nonidentity problem manifests primarily concerning consequences that will occur in the far future. Climate change no longer fits that description: its effects will be long-lasting, but they are also already being observed and affecting people’s welfare. Additionally, the nonidentity problem assumes that the people in the future (whose identities depend on some past, ordinarily harmful action) still have lives that are worth living. This will not be the case for all victims of climate change: some will be affected by climate change so severely that their lives may have negative welfare, meaning that they may well have been better off not having existed at all. For these two reasons, even David Boonin (2014, p. 216), the most thorough defender of the reasoning that underlies the nonidentity problem, doubts it has significant practical implications. Although the nonidentity problem has occupied a prominent place in the literature on population ethics, it appears largely irrelevant to decisions related to climate change. Perhaps other theoretical issues in population ethics will have more pertinent implications for climate policy.

Theoretical Outlooks in Population Ethics Imagine comparing the relative value of two populations. Population A has 10 million people and Population B has 20 million people. Everyone’s welfare in both Populations A and B is equal and very high. Is Population B better than Population A? According to Total Utilitarianism, the value of a population should be determined by the total welfare that population contains. This can be calculated by multiplying the total number of people in a population by their average welfare. Average welfare in Populations A and B is the same, but since Population B has twice as many people, it has a higher total welfare. Thus, if Total Utilitarianism is accepted, Population B is better than Population A. That conclusion strikes many as quite plausible. Total Utilitarianism handles some cases of population comparison well, but it carries a strange implication that Derek Parfit (1984) named the Repugnant Conclusion: For any possible population of at least ten billion people, all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better, even though its members have lives that are barely worth living. (p. 388)

Parfit gave the Repugnant Conclusion its name because he, like many other philosophers, found this implication too counterintuitive to accept. The notion that it would be better to bring about a massively large population with everyone having

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such a low quality of life rather than a much smaller population of people living flourishing lives strikes many as a mistake. Others, however, are not convinced this initial reaction is warranted. A sizeable coalition of philosophers has recently argued that the Repugnant Conclusion is not necessarily repugnant (Zuber et al., 2021). They identify several reasons why people’s intuitions about the Repugnant Conclusion may be unreliable. For example, human beings generally struggle to conceptualize extremely large numbers and similarly struggle to aggregate large quantities of small numbers. People considering the Repugnant Conclusion in the abstract may also struggle not to insert themselves into the populations under discussion and might have inaccurate thoughts about what lives barely worth living would actually be like. Suppose the Repugnant Conclusion should not be rejected due to its counterintuitive nature. If that is the case, then the future population of the world might still be better than the current population overall even if climate change reduces average welfare considerably – so long as there is a great enough population increase in the future to offset this decrease in average welfare. It might even provide positive moral reasons not to curtail population growth even though adding more emitters to the world makes mitigating climate change more difficult. That conclusion follows too swiftly, though. The Repugnant Conclusion assumes that people in the larger population all at least have lives worth living – even if they are just barely worth living. But the effects of climate change will not always produce this result: some victims of climate change will be harmed so significantly that they either die or live in a state such that their lives have negative welfare – in other words, live in a state where their lives are no longer worth living. In this respect, a world of runaway climate change is relevantly dissimilar to the world that embodies the Repugnant Conclusion. Another problem with extending the Repugnant Conclusion scenario to the real world is that the population increase in the Repugnant Conclusion is unfathomably enormous. To conceptualize this, imagine a population of 1 million people that are all living pretty good lives. Estimate their welfare at a value of +50. Suppose a life barely worth living has a value of +1 . For a population of people whose lives were (on average) just barely worth living to have more total welfare than the hypothetical population of 1 million people, this new population would need to have more than 50 million people – population would have to increase by more than 50 times its original amount. Earth’s human population, which currently sits at roughly 8 billion, cannot increase by anything like that order of magnitude – at least not on foreseeable time scale and without the colonization of other planets. Moreover, the only way to achieve substantial population increase would involve radical infringements on people’s procreative autonomy since people would need to have far more children than they typically want. Most would regard such coercion as morally objectionable, and the burdens of such frequent procreation would fall disproportionately on women. Despite these practical limitations, the Repugnant Conclusion may have a different implication that is more significant: perhaps it offers a compelling reason to favor one of Total Utilitarianism’s competitors. The natural opposing view is Average

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Utilitarianism – the view that the value of a population is determined not by the total welfare of its members but by the average welfare of its members. Average Utilitarianism avoids the Repugnant Conclusion because adding lots of people with low welfare would not make a population better if it reduced the average welfare of a population. If Average Utilitarianism is true, then the priority for climate policy would be doing whatever possible to bolster the average welfare of future people (presumably by reducing the impacts of climate change), even if doing so reduced the number of future people that would exist. Although Average Utilitarianism does avoid the Repugnant Conclusion, the view carries its own set of counterintuitive implications. For instance, in some circumstances this view entails that it would be morally preferable to create people with terrible lives. Imagine a population with a single person living in excruciating suffering. According to Average Utilitarianism, it would be better if this population had 1000 additional people who were suffering horribly but just slightly less than this one person. This new population would have higher average welfare than the original population, but the massive increase in negative welfare means that total welfare of this new population would be drastically lower than the original population where only a single person was suffering. Additionally, Average Utilitarianism implies that it can sometimes be better to create lives with negative welfare rather than lives with positive welfare. Suppose a population contains 1000 people with an average welfare of +50. If given a choice between creating 10 people each with a welfare of 5 or 100 people each with a welfare of +5, Average Utilitarianism suggests it would be better to create the smaller group where everyone has negative welfare. After all, the average welfare in that population still ends up being higher than creating the larger group where everyone has a modestly positive welfare. The untenability of Average Utilitarianism and Total Utilitarianism has pushed theorists in this area of philosophy toward a range of other positions. One possibility is to adopt a variable value view (Hurka, 1983). According to this position, the value of an additional person added to a population diminishes as the size of a population grows. But when populations are large, this view runs into some of the same problems as Average Utilitarianism. It is not easy to modify variable value views to avoid these problems while maintaining coherence and avoiding other unintended problems (Chappell et al., 2022). A different possibility involves adopting a critical level view where adding lives to a population only makes a population better if the people added are above a specified level of positive welfare. But this position is even more vulnerable to the sadistic conclusion than Average Utilitarianism. Since lives that have positive welfare but are below the critical level are deemed to add no value to a population, it will often be “better” to add a small number of bad lives to the world rather than a larger sum of lives with a positive welfare just below the critical level. There are still other theoretical options to consider. One could modify a critical level position into a critical range view. According to this position, “adding an

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individual makes an outcome better to the extent that their wellbeing exceeds the upper end of a critical range, and makes an outcome worse to the extent that their wellbeing falls below the lower limit of the critical range” (Chappell et al., 2022). Lives within the critical range are valued as neutral, and only lives above or below that range affect a population’s value. This view avoids the most extreme forms of the Repugnant Conclusion and the Sadistic Conclusion, but it introduces additional complexity and implies that there is a substantial difference between intrinsically good and intrinsically bad lives (because the entire critical range separates these two types of lives). A further option would be to adopt a person-affecting view. The previous approaches to population ethics discussed in this subsection are all impersonal views. What sets person-affecting views apart is that they assume that an outcome cannot be better or worse unless it is better or worse for some specific person. So when comparing two populations, a population can only be better or worse than another if there are some people whose welfares are shared between those populations. One common intuition in the ethics of procreation is that it is more important to make existing people happy rather than create new people (Narveson, 1967). Person-affecting views accommodate this intuition well. Unfortunately, they also face challenges that impersonal views can bypass (Ord, 2020, App. B). Perhaps the biggest is that person-affecting views must always conclude that populations are incomparable if there is no overlap in their populations. This renders these views largely useless when making decisions that involve non-overlapping groups of people, including cases where people’s identities in the future are entirely dependent on choices made in the present. Additionally, it is possible to generate value comparisons that are cyclical and non-transitive, such as A > B, B > C, and C > A. Such results also lead to circumstances where these views offer little insight into how to make decisions among the options available. It is not possible here to consider all the advantages and disadvantages of the various theories of population ethics, but even this short survey should demonstrate that there are no easy answers regarding which theoretical outlook in population ethics is most plausible. In fact, a variety of impossibility theorems in the field show that no available axiology can satisfy all intuitively plausible criteria (Greaves, 2017). Difficult choices must be made about which intuitions to abandon. The ongoing debate in population ethics about the value of different populations is what gives rise to uncertainty about what ought to be done when considering policies that may affect the size and composition of future populations. The dissensus in this area explains John Broome’s worries about pursuing the morally correct climate policy: what should be done given the theoretical puzzles that remain unresolved in this area? One strategy is to consider the comparative merits of various population policies that could be implemented in the real world rather than focusing on abstract questions about what combination average welfare and population size is optimal. This approach, along with a very different assessment of the value of population size, will be considered in the next subsection.

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Antinatalism and Procreative Limitarianism Antinatalism in its purest form is the view that it is always morally wrong to procreate. This position carries the implication that the ideal population size is zero. Such a position may seem so counter to ordinary beliefs and practices that it is beyond taking seriously, but a surprisingly robust literature on this position – both defending it and critiquing it – emerged during the first quarter of the twenty-first century (Lougheed, n.d.). Hedberg (2020, Chap. 7) distinguishes between two types of antinatalism: conditional antinatalism and unconditional antinatalism. A conditional antinatalist views procreation as morally bad due to presently existing conditions. An unconditional antinatalist, in contrast, holds that procreation is always morally bad. Unconditional antinatalism is clearly the more extreme position, and as one might expect, it has a rather small number of defenders. The most prominent advocate of unconditional antinatalism among contemporary philosophers is David Benatar (2006, 2013, 2015). His most well-known arguments in defense of this position are (in simplified form) as follows: 1. The absence of pain is good, but the absence of pleasure is not bad; thus, nonexistence, which features the absence of pain and pleasure, is better than existence, which features both pain and pleasure. 2. Almost all human lives are more characterized by discomfort and misery than pleasure and satisfaction, so it is better not to begin these lives at all. 3. Human beings are certain to cause a great deal of harm to others during their lives, and it is wrong to create new members of a species that will cause serious suffering and death to others; thus, it is wrong to bring new human beings into existence. There is not sufficient space here to recast the extensive debates that have arisen around these three arguments, but one important observation should be noted: these arguments have little to do with climate change. If society wished to adhere to this brand of antinatalism, that would certainly have radical implications for many social policies, but any connection to climate change would be indirect. Benatar and his sympathizers are not delusional about social norms regarding procreation: they know people will continue to be born. They also do not support reducing population by outright murder or other morally atrocious means. Thus, it’s doubtful they would oppose climate policies aimed at reducing the suffering of future people. They might, however, advocate for prioritizing policies that reduce population rather than policies of climate mitigation and adaptation if those policy initiatives were somehow in conflict. The more pertinent type of antinatalism with respect to climate policy is conditional antinatalism. Some philosophers have observed the similarities between procreation and excessive consumption and argued that these activities are, at least given the world’s ongoing environmental crises, equally morally wrong (e.g., Young, 2001; MacIver, 2015). Every person born must consume resources to

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survive, so every new person brought into existence has an ecological footprint. Some recent estimates put the Earth’s long-term sustainable population size between 2 and 3 billion people (Lianos & Pseiridis, 2016; Dasgupta, 2019; Tucker, 2019). If these figures are even remotely accurate, then the Earth’s population must reduce significantly in the long term if humanity is to live sustainably. With the ongoing climate crisis, one can argue that it is morally irresponsible to create more people and thereby contribute to making the problem worse. Interestingly, however, most of those sympathetic to this line of argument do not take the conclusion all the way to antinatalism. Typically, they argue for some form of procreative limitarianism: people can still have some biological children, but they cannot have as many as they please. Sarah Conly (2016) argues that there is no right for prospective parents to have more than a single child. Travis Rieder (2016) argues in favor of a small family ethic, though he does not specify what the precise limits on procreation are. Both Christine Overall (2012) and Trevor Hedberg (2019, 2020) argue for a limit of one child per person. While all these authors take the environmental argument against procreation seriously, they each suggest that there are countervailing reasons, such as the economic challenges associated with a population shrinking too quickly or the importance of a biological child to some people’s life plans, that render some procreation morally permissible. Nevertheless, all these authors agree that procreation requires robust moral justification and that people are not morally permitted to procreate as much as they please. Authors disagree about exactly what procreative limits are most appropriate and what governmental policies could be ethically justified to incentivize less procreation, but some trends in the literature have begun to emerge. Drawing in part on Phil Cafaro’s (2022) survey of the literature, here are some emerging points of consensus: 1. Very few authors endorse antinatalism or its implication that the long-term global population goal should be zero people. 2. Most authors investigating the intersection of climate ethics and population argue that some moral limits on procreation are appropriate. 3. There is overwhelming support for policies that lower fertility by improving women’s autonomy, such as promoting gender justice or increasing access to contraception. 4. There is some support for policies that incentivize small families but virtually no support for coercive or punitive policies aimed at reducing family size. The general lack of support for coercive population policies originates primarily from their morally appalling histories. Such policies have often been associated with human rights abuses such as forced abortions and involuntary sterilizations. They have also often been connected to pernicious forms of population control in which certain groups of people – usually those of a particular race or socioeconomic class – were targeted with aim of having them procreate less. These concerns played a large role in why explicit political and academic discussions became so rare for the two decades following The United Nations Conference on Population and Development in 1994 (Campbell, 2012). The main lesson from the history of population policies

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appears to be that they lead to steep moral costs that are not justified by their intended long-term benefits. Hedberg (2020, p. 75) also mentions a practical reason for disfavoring coercive population policies: promoting such policies is likely to generate political and cultural backlash. While it is possible that peoples’ values shift in the future, coercive population policies will certainly not garner the political or public support needed to be enacted in democratic societies anytime soon. Because the public’s revulsion to these policies is so high, advocating for them (as opposed to more modest, less coercive measures) would be counterproductive. People who might take less extreme proposals seriously will dismiss these policy measures and be less likely to consider further discussion. If some version of procreative limitarianism is the correct moral outlook, then presumably population stabilization and reduction should be pursued so long as doing so does not hinder mitigation, adaptation, or compensation efforts. Population growth is one of the major drivers of climate change (IPCC, 2013), and lowering fertility could contribute significantly to the mitigation efforts that should take place during the next several decades (O’Neil et al., 2010). Since some measures for lowering fertility (such as increased access to contraception) are relatively inexpensive, it should be possible to implement some population reduction measures without impeding other strategies for responding to climate change. Presumably, antinatalists would also support these conclusions. In the longer term, they may seek voluntary human extinction, but in the short term, they are united with procreative limitarians in seeking a halt to population growth and reduce the suffering of those who will continue to inhabit the planet for the foreseeable future.

Population Size and Total Greenhouse Gas Emissions One of the recurring claims in discussions about climate change mitigation and population is that it would be advantageous for climate mitigation if population growth were slowed or halted (e.g., Porritt, 2010; O’Neil et al., 2012; Casey & Galor, 2017). Hilary Greaves (2019) argues that this claim is misleading. The underlying intuition behind this claim is that fewer emitters would naturally lead to a smaller contribution to climate change. In a sense, that intuition is correct: if other factors are held equal, then lowering population size will lower the emissions rate. The emissions rate, however, is not the primary determining factor in how severe climate change will be. Peak warming will be determined by cumulative net emissions (Allen et al., 2009; Matthews et al., 2009). Thus, how much warming occurs depends primarily on what total cumulative emissions turn out to be – not the rate at which these emissions occur. Greaves’ observation is important because it showcases why population reduction in isolation cannot serve as an adequate strategy for climate mitigation no matter how effectively it is pursued. If the population decreases but emissions continue otherwise unaffected, then the only tangible accomplishment will be hitting peak warming at a slightly later date.

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Even with the caveat that lowering the emissions rate will not suffice as a response to climate change on its own, there are some reasons why slowing the temperature rise might be beneficial. First, having more time to develop carbon capture technology and decarbonize economies would make the transition more feasible (Greaves, 2019, p. 54). In this manner, population reduction this century could be beneficial, though this benefit would have to be weighed against the potential costs of having fewer people who could potentially contribute to research and development during the relevant time period. Given the relatively short timeframe in which humanity must make these transitions to avoid devastating impacts, however, it may well be the case that all the relevant scientists, policymakers, and political leaders who will play a big role in addressing the problem have already been born. Thus, slowing the rate of emissions via population reduction looks like it would be beneficial overall. A second reason why lowering emissions rates could be beneficial is that it would provide a longer amount of time to adapt vulnerable populations to the change. Greaves (2019, p. 56) offers the examples of species migration and agricultural output. A longer time interval to migrate to colder climates would aid many species’ survival, and having more time to genetically modify crops to be heat-resistant or have a higher yield could help avoid regional food shortages. Part of the threat posed by climate change originates from the rapid nature of the change rather than from the notion that a warmer future will remain forever worse than a cooler one. Thus, having a bit more time to adapt to the warming would be valuable. The important takeaway from Greaves’ observations is that population reduction should not be the primary or only measure of climate mitigation that is pursued. Efforts to reduce cumulative emissions must take priority with regard to climate mitigation. This conclusion should not be surprising since other authors have independently argued for it (e.g., Budolfson & Spears, 2021) and since defenders of near-term population reduction readily acknowledge that other measures beyond lowering fertility are necessary for responding to climate change. (This may also explain why advocates for population reduction usually also mention issues beyond climate change, such as resource depletion or biodiversity loss, when defending the moral imperative to slow population growth.) Ultimately, population stabilization and reduction may indeed have a role to play in humanity’s response to climate change, but it will never be a sufficient response to the problem on its own.

Conclusion This chapter has surveyed a range of interconnected issues tied to population ethics and climate change. This chapter began with a worry from John Broome about the inability to make informed decisions about climate policy. His concern is that too many issues in population ethics are unresolved for anyone to be confident in the moral justification of choices made in response to climate change. Not all philosophers are as concerned as Broome, though (Arrhenius et al., 2021). Cafaro (2022) even suggests that the current theory-laden approach to population ethics may well

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be a “dead end” with regard to climate ethics because of its failure to provide insight into actual policy choices (p. 12). As the survey provided in this chapter demonstrates, a lot of progress has been made in discourse concerning population policy and climate change despite the lack of consensus in theoretical population ethics. The nonidentity problem is largely irrelevant to climate change, there is an emerging consensus favoring procreative limitarianism in the environmental ethics literature, and it is clear that lowering fertility will not be a sufficient response to climate change on its own. Additional progress on the theoretical disputes in population ethics may provide some further insight to long-term climate policy, but given the urgency with which a response to climate change is needed, it is doubtful those debates will resolve in time to be of great use in implementing mitigation, adaptation, and compensation measures. Before closing, it is worth highlighting an important limitation in the current discussions about population and climate change. The discourse is overwhelmingly anthropocentric: the discussion focuses almost exclusively on human interests and values. But climate change will impact nonhuman life – and their population sizes and compositions – a great deal as well. Climate change will result in significant reductions in animal welfare and dramatically alter the size and composition of animal populations – including the complete extinction of species’ populations in some cases. To accurately assess the moral gravity of climate change, these effects on nonhuman life must be evaluated. Some authors have attempted to approach climate ethics and population ethics through a non-anthropocentric lens (Nolt, 2011; Sebo, 2022; Gosseries & Meijers, 2022), but as a whole, this literature remains at a very early stage of development. Since the moral picture will be complicated considerably by the incorporation of animals and (potentially) other forms of nonhuman life, further work in this area is desperately needed.

Cross-References ▶ Climate Change and Intergenerational Justice ▶ Climate Change and Overpopulation

References Allen, M. R., Frame, D., Huntingford, C., Jones, C. D., Lowe, J., Meinshausen, M., & Meinhausen, N. (2009). Warming caused by cumulative carbon emissions towards the trillionth ton. Nature, 458(7242), 1163–1166. Archer, D., Eby, M., Brovkin, B., Ridgwell, A., Cao, L., Mikolajewicz, U., Caldeira, K., Matsumoto, K., Munhoven, G., Montenegro, A., & Tokos, K. (2009). Atmospheric lifetime of fossil fuel carbon dioxide. Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, 37, 117–134. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.earth.031208.100206 Arrhenius, G., Budolfson, M., & Spears, D. (2021). Does climate policy depend importantly on population ethics? Deflationary responses to the challenges of population ethics for public policy. In M. Budolfson, T. McPherson, & D. Plunkett (Eds.), Philosophy and climate change (pp. 111–136). Oxford University Press.

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Climate Change, the Non-identity Problem, and the Metaphysics of Transgenerational Actions Tiziana Andina and Fausto Corvino

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Structure of the Non-identity Paradox . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Challenging the Moral Argument of the Non-identity Paradox . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Non-consequentialist and Threshold-based Accounts of Harm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Impersonal Alternative to the Worse-off Argument . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Non-identity Problem From the Individualist to the Collectivist Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . Challenging the Metaphysical Premise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Argument . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Non-identity Problem Doesn’t Matter in the Transgenerational Sphere . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Transgenerational Actions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . From the Non-identity Problem to the Principle of Transgenerational Responsibility . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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“Although the chapter was jointly conceived, the authors wrote different sections. Tiziana Andina wrote the following sections: “Challenging the Metaphysical Premise” (and relative sub-sections), and “From the Non-identity Problem to the Principle of Transgenerational Responsibility”. Fausto Corvino wrote the following sections: “The Structure of the Non-identity Paradox”, “Challenging the Moral Argument of the Non-identity Paradox” (and relative sub-sections), and “The Non-identity Problem From the Individualist to the Collectivist Perspective”. T. Andina (*) Department of Philosophy and Educational Sciences, University of Turin, Turin, Italy e-mail: [email protected] F. Corvino Department of Philosophy, Linguistics and Theory of Science, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_110

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Abstract

Why should one take action to move toward a greener world if doing so will cause the birth of a totally different group of future people? This chapter starts from the metaphysical evidence that many collective climate actions imply a change in the identity of future generations, as opposed to a counterfactual laissez-faire attitude. The climatic fallout from the non-identity paradox introduced by Derek Parfit is examined to determine if and how a principle of transgenerational responsibility can be defended against this metaphysical complexity. The paradox is divided into a moral argument, based on the person-affecting view of harm, and a metaphysical premise, treating non-identity as a result of variations in timing and pair combination of a person’s conception. Three strategies to circumvent the moral argument are explored: non-consequentialist accounts of harm, moral thresholds, and impersonal ethics. However, it is argued that all three strategies fall short or come with too high a cost. The metaphysical premise is then examined through the introduction of transgenerational actions in relation to the climate crisis. A principle of transgenerational responsibility applicable to climate change mitigation is inferred from the hypothetical consent to be obtained from those who will continue transgenerational actions in the future. Keywords

Future generations · Metaphysics · Non-consequentialist harm · Non-identity · Person-affecting · Transgenerational equity · Transgenerational actions · Transgenerational responsibility · Utilitarianism · Well-being thresholds

Introduction Climate change and the demand for drastic mitigation actions to protect future generations raises a number of metaphysical issues, some of which are easy to resolve, while others require complex theoretical elaboration and, in some cases, may even lead to reconsider theories and principles that one believed to be unequivocal at an intra-generational level. A case of the first type is one in which an individual A performs at time t an action that at time t2 will cause harm to an individual B who is born at time t1. Consider the following example: individual A forgets a bear trap in a forest and many years later, when A is no longer living, young individual B steps on the trap and injures their foot. Here one may wonder whether it is correct to maintain that an action performed at t can be said to violate the rights of a person who does not yet exist. Obviously, one cannot condemn A’s carelessness as harmful on the basis of B’s rights at t, because if at t B does not exist, they cannot be said to have rights. Yet, B will exist and will have rights later, so there is nothing metaphysically troubling in holding that A’s action, carried out at t, violates the rights of B at t2 (see also Parfit, 1987, pp. 356–7; Meyer, 1997).

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It might be objected that, at t, A cannot know that some decades later, B will walk in the forest where A was hunting bears, so A’s carelessness is simply part of the chain of events that will lead to B’s injury, but it can neither be considered harmful nor blameworthy. This objection is correct in its premise but wrong in its conclusion. Even though A cannot be expected to know the identity or even simply the number of people who will walk in the forest in the future, it is reasonable for A to expect that some people will, so A must take some minimum precautions when handling their dangerous equipment – in the same way that if I throw a chair out of the window, I could either hit someone or hit the sidewalk, but the fact that I do not know what the chances of hitting someone are does not reduce my duty to refrain from putting other people at potential risk (see also Honoré, 1999). Things, however, become much more complex if one shifts one’s attention from harmful actions that have no effect on the victim’s identity, such as the trap left in the woods, to actions that not only damage the victim but also influence the time and the way they are conceived, thus altering their identity. Accordingly, let’s further qualify our model of intertemporal harm with the assumption that the action performed by A at t and that damages B a t2 is a necessary but not sufficient precondition of the conception of B a t1. In this case, any attempt to argue that A’s action harms B can be resisted on the grounds of the non-identity objection: if without A’s action B would not have existed, but there would have been C instead, and if the loss of wellbeing that A’s action causes to B is not so great as to make B’s life not worth living, then it is logically inconsistent to hold that A’s action harms B. The non-identity objection to intergenerational harm is a direct derivation of the ‘Non-Identity Problem’, a famous paradox formulated independently by the philosophers Derek Parfit (1976, 1987), Thomas Schwartz (1978), and Robert M. Adams (1979), and which is generally discussed in the version proposed by Parfit in the paper ‘On Doing Best for our Children’ (1976), then refined in the book entitled Reasons and Persons (1987) (see Boonin 2008, p. 129). Consider the following example. A couple of future parents asks a doctor for a pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, because they do not want to run the risk that their first child might have some genetic disease; if this were the case, the couple would not hesitate to terminate the pregnancy and conceive again in the future, with a preventive treatment if necessary. The doctor makes a wrong preimplantation diagnosis, the fetus actually does have some genetic alterations, but they fail to notice it. Can one say that the doctor’s mistake has harmed the newborn child? If one accepts the premises of the non-identity argument and consider that (i) had the couple interrupted the pregnancy and attempted a new conception, a different spermatozoon would have fecundated a different ovulum, (ii) a new match of gametes would have brought to light a different individual, (iii) a life with a genetic disease is preferable to non-existence, then it follows that the child actually brought into the world was not harmed by the doctor’s missed diagnosis; on the contrary, it could be said that the child benefited from it (see also Boonin, 2014, pp. 1–13). It is important to stress that the non-identity objection does not need to rely on the implausible additional assumption that the doctor’s mistake is the only or, even simply, the determinant factor in the child’s identity. Indeed, the way gametes

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combine together is the result of a myriad of facts that are beyond anyone’s control. To be clear, if on the day of the child’s conception one of the two parents had come home late from work or had not been able to catch the bus on time, it is possible that the moment of conception would have been delayed just enough to determine a different mix of gametes. Yet, the stringency of the non-identity objection consists in working retroactively on the doctor’s single action: given all the casual and uncontrollable events that have been adding up until when the doctor began the pre-implantation diagnosis, can one say that the doctor’s action harmed the child? The non-identity objection can be raised against theories that postulate intergenerational harm, and therefore defend duties of self-restraint or compensation in various fields, from procreative choices to macroeconomic maneuvers, passing through colonialism and climate change (see Roberts, 2019). The aim of this chapter is to analyze this last case. More specifically, the goal is to explain how one can defend climate action, and the various accounts of intergenerational justice that underlie it, from the objection that if one fails to prevent irreversible climate change, no future individual would be harmed as a result, because if one carried out the radical reforms that scientists recommend, a completely different set of individuals would come into existence. Before getting to the heart of the matter, it is important to stress that not all climate actions are susceptible to the non-identity objection, and those that are subject to it are not equally so. In very broad terms, one might say that the more an action tends to have individual scope and the less impact it has on people’s habits and behavior, the less the action is exposed to the non-identity objection. There are two possible ways in which an action can be subject to the non-identity objection (see also Parfit, 1987, pp. 351–5). The first one can be called the probable variation of the match of gametes (PVMG), and it occurs when an action determines a small shift (even just a few seconds) in the conception of a determined individual, therefore enabling a different mix of gametes – it is indeed very likely that there will be a different mix, but one cannot have the incontrovertible certainty that this will happen. The second one can be called, instead, the certain variation of the match of gametes (CVMG), and it occurs whenever the reproductive act is postponed by at least one month, thus surely altering the gamete pair. Some individual climate actions are immune from both versions of the non-identity objection. For example, deciding to buy ‘zero kilometer’ fruit instead of imported one, in order to reduce one’s carbon footprint, has very little (if any) effect on the procreative choices of the virtuous consumer (and of their partner). Instead, other individual climate actions could be vulnerable to the PVMG version of the objection. For instance, the decision to use a less polluting means of transport to go to work (e.g., train instead of the car, for example) could have a PVMG impact on the procreative decisions of a couple because it modifies the space-time combinations (who is where and when) of the individuals that compose it. It might be said that every little action influences the space-time combinations of potential parents and has a PVMG impact, such as deciding to have breakfast at home instead of at the bar, stopping to buy a sweater instead of going home, going to the movies instead of the pub; so it does not really make sense to focus on a single

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action, in our case climate action, and argue that this is the determining element of the identity of one or more future individuals (Tremmel, 2009, pp. 40–2). Yet the key element of the non-identity objection is not only the single action itself but also the motivation behind it and, if the motivation is intergenerational, the possible congruence between the motivation and the intergenerational objective. Thus, the fact that by choosing to have a beer, I could, at least in theory, find myself giving birth to a child different from the one I would give birth to if I went to watch a movie, is irrelevant from the moral and therefore also from the metaphysical point of view. In fact, my reasons for having a beer have nothing to do with the welfare of one or more possible future individuals, so I can accept the idea of the ungovernability of future identities without too much trouble. Conversely, if the reason for changing means of transportation is to help ensure that an unborn child can live in a less polluted world, but this choice leads me to bring into the world a different child than I would if I kept using the car, then there is a problem of logical coherence: I would be claiming to be carrying out action Z in the interest of individual B, whereas my action has the indirect effect of leading to the existence of C instead of B (Corvino, 2019, pp. 175–6). Now, although some individual climate actions are vulnerable to the non-identity objection, these actions could be easily defended on the grounds of moral reasons for aggregative trade-offs. For instance, even though it is true that by reducing their emissions, A will very likely give birth to a different individual than if they stuck to the status quo, there are many more individuals whose identity is disentangled from A’s action and who would benefit from living in a greener environment; hence, one could say that a possible greener world stemming from A’s action would be worse for B (who would not exist), but better for individuals D, E, F, . . . n, and this is enough to justify A’s green action. Things, however, become more complex with regard to collective climate actions. Consider, for example, the European Union’s goal of achieving net zero CO2 emissions by 2050, i.e., to lower EU production-based CO2 emissions to a level where they can either be reabsorbed by natural carbon sinks (vegetation, oceans, and so on) or offset by negative emissions (e.g., carbon dioxide removal). In order to achieve this objective, all actors involved must cooperate, coordinated by public institutions, in changing the way energy is produced (progressively reducing the use of fossil fuels and moving toward renewable energy), how people travel and transport commodities, what goods and services they consume and how they spend their free time (Bäckstrand, 2022). It is also necessary to shift the workforce from certain productive activities to others and to review school and training systems. In essence, implementing the radical reforms needed to achieve net-zero emissions, and thus mitigate the long-term negative consequences of climate change, means drastically changing a vast array of space-time combinations compared to the status quo (see Turner, 2019; Parfit, 2000). This exposes net-zero policies to the nonidentity objection, in both the PVMG and the CVMG versions: why should today’s people take action to move toward a greener world if doing so causes the birth of a totally different group of future people? The same objection could be raised retroactively: assume that today’s people choose to preserve the status quo, could future

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people living in a world irremediably damaged by climate change claim to have been harmed by their parents’ laissez-faire attitude?

The Structure of the Non-identity Paradox The claim that it is wrong for today’s people to adopt a laissez-faire attitude can be defended from the non-identity objection: this chapter aims to explain how. For the purpose of this analysis, the non-identity objection can be broken down into: (i) A metaphysical premise: two individuals born from different combinations of gametes, although from the same parents, are two different people. (ii) A moral premise: a life that is not seriously restrained by serious diseases is always better than non-existence. (iii) A moral argument: for it to be possible to maintain that A’s action Z harms B, it is necessary for Z to make B worse off than they were before. (iv) A moral conclusion: B cannot be said to be harmed by Z, if Z is a necessary (although not sufficient) condition for their existence. The non-identity argument is usually described as a ‘paradox’ because (i), (ii), and (iii) seem quite reasonable if taken singularly, but when put in sequence, they yield an apparently absurd and unacceptable conclusion, (iv). Accordingly, in order to avoid (iv) and, in this case, to defend climate action, there is no alternative but to challenge at least one out of (i), (ii), and (iii). It shall be taken for granted, without further discussion, that the moral premise (ii) is valid. Now, for some, it is better never to come into the world (Benatar, 2006; see also Boonin, 2014, pp. 46–51). Yet, it is a common belief that, in the absence of continuous pain or suffering, life is worth living, and this assertion could be justified on welfarist grounds, through human development theories, etc. Moreover, and more importantly, climate change is a process of gradual, though sometimes rapid, degeneration; so, it is difficult to imagine that the climate will have worsened to such an extent that most people would wish they had never been born – at least in the near future (A new and interesting perspective on the topic is proposed by L. Tank (2022), according to whom the non-identity problem would have little practical relevance for climate duties since the identity of many individuals whose well-being is seriously threatened by climate change is already fixed. Thus, present people can implement radical mitigation policies that will decisively improve the lives of a substantial number of already conceived human beings without altering their identity. This would be reason enough to justify ambitious climate policies, despite the non-identity problem.). The intuitively simplest way to refute the non-identity objection, which is also the most explored in the literature, is to challenge the moral argument (iii). The next section will explain how this can be done, emphasizing the other paradoxes and contradictions involved by either detaching ourselves from the ‘person-affecting view of harm’ implicit in (iii), or by bypassing it through an impersonal theory of the good. This will therefore lead us to consider a second counter-argumentative

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strategy to the non-identity objection, which consists in questioning the metaphysical premise (i).

Challenging the Moral Argument of the Non-identity Paradox The non-identity objection cannot prescind from the moral argument (ii), which in turn cannot prescind from the person-affecting view of harm: causing a decrease in welfare is a necessary condition for harm (Parfit, 1987, pp. 369–71). Accordingly, if one could maintain that the person-affecting view is wrong, or at least incomplete, the whole non-identity objection would fall apart. There are three possible ways to do this: advocating either a non-consequentialist or a threshold-based account of harm, embracing an impersonal alternative to the worse-off argument.

Non-consequentialist and Threshold-based Accounts of Harm The first way to challenge the person-effecting view is to hold that one can harm someone also without making them worse off. If this were true, one could argue that even though by choosing a laissez-faire attitude we are not making future individuals worse off, there might be other reasons why we are wronging them. James Woodward (1986, p. 811) argues that one of these reasons is the violation of a ‘relevant specific interest’ of the counterpart, such as seeing a promise kept, or being treated fairly and in a non-discriminatory manner. Anytime a relevant specific interest is violated, the victim of the violation can be said to be harmed, even though the victim of this violation is made, all things considered, better off. Woodward (1986, pp. 810–811) makes the following illustrative example. Imagine that a person wants to buy a flight ticket, but the airline employee refuses to sell him the ticket because of his racial origin. The plane then departs without the passenger and crashes shortly thereafter. According to Woodward, the employee’s refusal harms the passenger, despite inadvertently saving his life, because it violates his legitimate interest not to be racially discriminated against. More specifically, Woodward (1986, pp. 812–814) maintains that we can, and should, judge the rightness of an action by looking at how this action affects each relevant interest of the counterpart, without relying on an aggregative evaluation of all the interests involved. A similar argument is also made by Rahul Kumar (2003, p. 105), who holds that A can harm B also for the mere reason of failing ‘to respect the status of the wronged as a being worthy of respect’. Although these non-consequentialist accounts of harm seem promising in defusing the non-identity argument, they raise two theoretical problems that are worth highlighting: one is general and the other pertains to the specific climate problem at stake here. The general problem is that both Woodward and Kumar are not simply asking us to take into consideration also the negative sides of an action that violates a relevant individual interest; rather, they claim that one should consider only the negative sides of this action, completely forgetting its positive

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consequences. In so doing, these authors avoid an inter-domain cost-benefit analysis, which compares, on the one hand, the costs of a violation of a relevent interest, and on the other hand, any marginal increase in well-being that this violation entails. This inter-domain analysis is what most people would use to promote their overall interests. In short, if one asked the passenger if he wishes he had been sold the ticket, he is very likely to say no, because the interest in not crashing to the ground is stronger than that of not being discriminated against. The specific problem of the non-consequentialist accounts of harm with respect to climate action is that, unlike the aeroplane example, it is not so evident that an action that generates emissions is contemptuous of future individuals. Those who take the car instead of the bus, or fail to act as green consumers, are not moved by disrespect of future beings, they simply want to maximize their comfort or reduce their expenses (Sinnott-Armstrong, 2005, pp. 294–5). It is still possible to hold, as Woodward (1986, p. 914) does, that those who adopt a ‘risky policy’ threaten the interests of future people to live in a hospitable environment and not be exposed to avoidable danger. But if this is the case, then it is quite difficult to resist the argument that you can benefit someone also by violating their relevant interests, when this is the only way to guarantee them existence. The second strategy to challenge the person-affecting view of harm, and hence moral argument (iii), is to recur to a threshold-based evaluation of harm, according to which an action by A harms B whenever this action causes B to be below a certain well-being threshold, even though this action makes B better off than they were before. This argument has been proposed, for example, by Gregory Kavka (1982, p. 105), who maintained that the threshold corresponds to the condition of a ‘restricted life’, meaning ‘a life that is significantly deficient in one or more of the major respects that generally make human lives valuable and worth living’. Accordingly, even an action by A that causes B to exist can be said to harm B if the latter’s existence is restricted as a result. Like the previous strategy, the threshold account of harm creates both general and specific problems. The first general problem concerns the identification of the threshold of a restricted life. There are so many subjective elements at stake that it becomes very difficult to elaborate a theory that has universal value and is easily measurable, like the personaffecting view (see also Arneson, 2006; Huseby, 2020). The second problem consists in justifying why it is A’s responsibility to guarantee B a more-than-restricted life. And this problem becomes more evident if one thinks for a moment about voluntary choices. Imagine that A and B are playing poker; B needs money to pay off debts, so B makes a reckless move and gambles everything they own; B loses the game. Is it reasonable to say that A has wronged B by winning the game? Or, put differently, A has an obligation to accept money from B only up to the point where it doesn’t cause B to fall into the condition of a restricted life? It is obviously possible to defend this claim, but in order to do so one would have to rely on a broader theory of the good, or more simply, of social justice (e.g., sufficientarianism, the capability approach, etc.), and this would lead us to overly moralize the notion of harm. Lastly, a more specific problem with the threshold account of harm is that climate change will not cause all future individuals to fall below the restricted-life threshold

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at once. Actually, chances are that climate change will also increase the well-being of some people instead of reducing it, at least in the short run. Think about how sea ice melting will allow people to travel the Arctic route during some months of the year, turning some cities in Iceland into big commercial hubs with obvious economic advantages for those who live in those areas (see Sigurdardottir, 2019; LePan, 2020). Accordingly, the threshold account of harm risks not taking into account the progressive nature of the climate problem, which, although beneficial for some in the immediate future, could put everyone’s life at risk in the long term.

The Impersonal Alternative to the Worse-off Argument A committed utilitarian might say that everything that was discussed up to this point is a useless analytical dispute. The solution to the non-identity paradox is extremely simple: a world lashed by irreversible climate change is morally worse than the world we will have if we choose climate action because, in the former, there would be less aggregate utility than in the latter. In other words, an utilitarian would say that we would only waste time looking for an alternative to the person-affecting view. In fact, we should not ask ourselves what individuals will live in future possible worlds, but rather what possible world will allow individuals to be better off and choose this world. This impersonal approach sweeps away the non-identity objection, but at the cost of further complications, both general and intergenerational. The general problem is that a person who rejects the aggregative and consequentialist logic of utilitarianism at the intragenerational level, because they believe, for example, that the rights of individuals are important and it is not acceptable to sacrifice an individual to improve the condition of many (see Sen, 1999, pp. 58–63), has to accept this theory in its entirety to justify the protection of future people – it would not really make sense, for example, to be both an intragenerational contractualist and an intergenerational utilitarian. One of the two purely intergenerational problems of the impersonal approach is that it leads to what Parfit himself (1987, pp. 381–90) defined as the ‘repugnant conclusion’: for any possible future world in which everyone is very well off, it is possible to imagine an alternative future world in which everyone is very bad off but there are so many more people, numerically speaking, that they produce a higher aggregate utility; so, a world in which everyone is very bad off could be preferred to a world in which everyone is very well off. Since its first formulation, the repugnant conclusion has been widely discussed in the literature. Various solutions have been proposed to save the impersonal response to the non-identity problem from this fatal obstacle (see Arrhenius et al., 2017). The most obvious and immediate one is to look at average well-being instead of total well-being; accordingly, no matter the numbers, a possible future world in which everyone is worse off can never be preferable to a world where everyone is well off. Yet, so-called averagism might lead to two further paradoxes, which are the opposite of the repugnant conclusion but no less repulsive. The first one is that a

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world in which there is only one individual leading a wonderful life would always be preferable to a world in which there are millions of people leading good lives but not as wonderful as the hermit of the first world (see Parfit, 1987, pp. 419–42). The second one is that in a world in which everyone is very well off, it would be wrong to add a further individual who is also well off but slightly less than all the others – because the existence of the additional individual would lower average welfare (see Mulgan, 2020, pp. 42–3). It might be argued that the arguments raised respectively against totalism and averagism rely on hypothetical cases that should not affect the validity of a moral theory. Parfit (1987, pp. 387–90) answered that these scenarios are neither technically impossible nor difficult to imagine (unlike time travel or resurrection, for example), so it is right to take them into consideration in a serious moral analysis. The present chapter will not go into this issue here; it will only underline a second problem raised by both totalism and averagism on the intergenerational level, which is absolutely pertinent to the case of climate change: a strong tendency to the continuous sacrifice of the present generation. If, in fact, we imagine that there will be an indefinite number of generations, and therefore of people, after us, then before making any choice we should ask ourselves how we could invest the resources at our disposal to create goods that will benefit the many individuals who will follow us (Gosseries, 2008, pp. 65–66). And this would create an enormous burden for the present generation, which should constantly sacrifice its own consumption in order to invest in future consumption – assuming that we will never know if and when humanity comes to an end. There is a way, however, to amend utilitarianism so as to avoid both the respective paradoxes of totalism and averagism, and the tendency to continuous sacrifice: a sufficientarian conception of value. In this view, any increase in welfare has value only up to a minimum individual threshold; any increase above this threshold is axiologically irrelevant, so on the one hand it is supererogatory to offer marginal welfare above the threshold, and on the other hand, a scenario in which everyone is just above the threshold is axiologically equivalent to a scenario in which some are just above the threshold and others very much above it. This chapter will leave aside the question of the normative foundations of sufficientarianism (see Shields, 2016), and also of a possible hybrid vision that is sufficientarian on the intergenerational level but not on the intragenerational one. However, it is worth emphasizing that sufficientarianism would hold that the present generation must ensure that future generations have enough resources (financial, environmental, infrastructural, and so on) to meet their basic needs (see also Meyer & Roser, 2009; Rendall, 2011). However, even this solution is not free of complications. The first one, mentioned above with respect to a threshold conception of harm, is how to reach a universally and intertemporally shared conception of what and how much is enough. For example, it needs to be clarified whether and to what extent natural capital is substitutable for economic capital (Neumayer, 2010), and whether and to what extent the loss of non-human living beings can be compensated for by technological alternatives with respect to the wellbeing of future individuals (Zwarthoed, 2016). In addition, any hypothesis about what may or may not have value for future generations could be displaced by new

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technological discoveries. The second complication has got to do, instead, with the so-called negative thesis of sufficientarianism: inequalities above the threshold are irrelevant from the point of view of justice (see Casal, 2007). On the intergenerational level, this thesis implies a counterintuitive conclusion. A possible future world in which there are N people whose welfare is slightly above the threshold would be axiologically equivalent to a world in which N people could be much above the threshold – and this is quite difficult to accept also in the light of the fact that, as said above, our predictions about the minimum threshold may be falsified over time. (It is important, as well as interesting, to consider the solution that Parfit himself proposes to the non-identity paradox in an article that he unfortunately did not have time to finish himself. Parfit (2017, pp. 149–157) invokes a ‘Wide Dual Person-Affecting Principle’, according to which a first outcome is preferable in one way to a second outcome if it maximises collective well-being, and in another way if it maximizes the individual well-being of those who make up the community. However, beyond the challenge of demonstrating that this principle is not a simple ad-hoc solution, what remains little defined is the priority mechanism between the impersonal component and the personaffecting component of the principle (Parfit, 2017, pp. 155–157; see also Corvino, 2019, pp. 71–72).)

The Non-identity Problem From the Individualist to the Collectivist Perspective As discussed, how we choose to act or not to act can have a significant impact on the lives of future generations. This is because we often deal with choices that will affect the quality of life of those who will come after us, or that may even determine who will be born after us. In both cases, relevant problems arise of a metaphysical and ethical nature which cannot fail to engage philosophical reflection. Accordingly, so far, the present chapter has analyzed how to defuse the non-identity paradox by challenging its underlying moral argument (iii), namely the personaffecting view of harm. It explained why each of these solutions, while resolving or avoiding the non-identity paradox, leads to other paradoxes or conclusions that are no less counterintuitive. From now on, it will focus instead on the normative relevance of the metaphysical premise (i) of the non-identity argument. More specifically, it shall investigate what response can be given to the non-identity problem if one looks at future generations as entities that are given independently of the individuals that constitute them (see de Shalit, 1995). Let us start, therefore, from the beginning, i.e., by re-examining the paradox from this alternative angle of analysis.

Challenging the Metaphysical Premise Parfit discusses the topics that make up the paradox by focusing on personal identity: by varying some of the given circumstances (e.g., the environmental or climatic conditions in which we were conceived), it seems plausible to argue that each of us

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might not have been born at all (Parfit, 1987, p. 351–55). This circumstance should have some weight whenever we make decisions that do or can affect future generations. Decisions that we make at a time t will have significant consequences in a future t1 or at a time that will be ‘inhabited’ by future generations. Some of these decisions may interfere with the identity of individuals who will be born in the future. This fact means – concretely – that some of our decisions could give birth to given individuals or others. This circumstance creates an ethical problem and is at the basis of the non-identity problem. In discussing this topic, Parfit takes a reductionist approach: he decides not to deal with future generations, but to reduce the ontological problem of future generations – i.e., what kind of entities future generations are – to the problem of future individuals, particularly to the question of their identity. This consideration means that when we refer to issues that affect future generations, we are dealing with individuals who will live in a specific time t1 and that, for convenience, we group in the collective concept of future generation. The reductionist move has a twofold objective. The first is to reduce the collective concept to its components; justifying the existence of things like future generations has a cost in argumentative terms, while referring to the constituent parts of that collective has no cost at all. The second is that, intuitively, it seems more natural to speak of an individual’s rights and duties compared to the rights and duties of an entity that does not exist, at least not in the same way as individuals. So, in Parfit’s view, when we ask if an action affects the interests of future generations, we are asking if an action affects the interests of one or more individuals who will exist in the future. Notoriously, ontological parsimony is a long-standing principle in philosophy, and generally, it is better to adopt it so as not to transform ontology into an ungovernable jungle. However, not all circumstances are equivalent. In our view, for reasons that will be discussed in what follows, Parfit’s reductionist choice is not the right move to deal with issues related to transgenerationality. The following section will argue that shifting the focus from generations to individuals has significant implications. Indeed, even if Parfit gains in simplicity – he must not carry the burden of arguing in favor of the existence of future generations – he is then forced to concentrate his reflection on the identity of the individuals who will be born in the future, or on whether they will be born.

The Argument Let us now go into the details of the topic. “What would have made it true that some particular person would never have existed? With one qualification, I believe the Time-Dependence claim: if any particular person had not been conceived when he was in fact conceived, it is in fact true that he would never have existed” (Parfit, 1987, pp. 351–2). Parfit’s observation is simple: the fertilization of an egg by a spermatozoon propitiates the birth of every one of us. We are what we are precisely because this fertilization took place through a selection: at a particular moment, and not another, a certain spermatozoon fertilized a particular egg. This fact means that

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by varying some of the conditions that determined the fertilization process, the outcome could have been different, and another individual could have been born. To clarify things, Parfit quantifies the time variable: “If any particular person had not been conceived within a month of the time when he was in fact conceived, he would in fact never have existed” (Parfit, 1987, p. 352). In order for a living being to be classified as a person, it must exhibit specific properties, that is, the properties that identify the concept of person. However, these properties are not always the same. Some properties may vary, that is, they may or may not be present: they may or may not be owned by a specific individual. It is these properties that identify each individual in her singularity. Suppose, for example, that the philosopher Immanuel Kant is identified by the property P: that is, suppose that P is one of the properties necessary to identify Kant. This means that Kant, in order to be the philosopher he was, could not fail to exhibit P and, on the other hand, it also means that P could only derive from the fertilization of a particular egg by a specific spermatozoon, at a precise moment, or, to put it with Parfit, within a month of Kant’s conception. If this had not been the case, Kant – Parfit (1987, pp. 352–5) concludes – would never have existed; this is true because the identity of a person depends in part on the genetic patrimony that constitutes it, which changes with the month of conception. In this context, Parfit notes that numerous actions can significantly affect the possibility of future individuals’ existence, which is why it seems natural to pay particular attention to what actions are taken. Parfit distinguishes between three types of choices: the same people choice does not affect future individuals in any way since it does not alter their identity or their number; the same member choice conditions their identity but does not condition their number. Finally, the different member choice affects both identity and number. The choices belonging to the first group do not change the number or identity of those who will be born: therefore, it is quite simple to predict if they will negatively affect future generations’ lives. However, the issue at hand does not concern same people choices, at least in relation to transgenerationality. Instead, it concerns different member choices, specifically those choices that could significantly impact the identities of the people that ought to be protected Parfit uses the example of a very young pregnant woman who has to decide whether or not to continue the pregnancy and give birth to her child. Friends and relatives advise against having the baby: the opinion of most is that due to her young age, the baby will have a difficult childhood, which will probably affect the quality of her adult life. According to the mother’s friends, it’s better to end the pregnancy and have a baby when the time is ripe. The problem, Parfit says, is that if the mother terminated that pregnancy, that baby could never be born (For a discussion of a variation of this example, cf. (Boonin, 2014, p. 2 ff.). Therefore, the mother would seriously harm that child, depriving her of the possibility of coming into the world forever. This is the central theoretical node of the non-identity problem: “It may be said: in one sense, this girl’s decision was worse for her child. I’m trying to persuade this girl not to have a child now, we can use the phrase ‘her child’ and the pronoun ‘he’ to cover any child she might have. [. . .] We can truly claim: ‘if this girl does not have her child now, but waits and has him later, he will not be the same particular

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child’” (Parfit, 1987, p. 359). If the girl chooses not to have that child, she will never have it again; so, in fact, one has to admit that her choice would not allow that child to have a life that – as far as we know – could be worth it. Parfit discusses the reasons why the non-identity problem is not really relevant to his argument, yet it, as formulated by the British philosopher, continues to be central to philosophers dealing with sustainability issues over time; therefore, it is worth examining some of the implications it poses. Similar examples can be made in the sphere of transgenerationality. Think of the case in which a government, aware of the anthropogenic impact on climate change, decides to limit CO2 emissions, giving impetus to a transport policy that strongly incentivizes sustainable mobility and public transport at the expense of vehicles with high emission rates and, more generally, private transport. Well, choices of this type would be different people choice since any modification, even if not too significant, of the environment would lead to changes in future births. In other words, by changing the socio-economic conditions, we would have a significant impact on the fertilization process, and we would give birth to some instead of others. In other words, these variances could lead to the birth of different individuals and this could be considered a harmful consequence for the very individuals that are not born. This is, precisely, the non-identity problem. If one takes seriously the conclusions that can be drawn from the non-identity problem argument, one must deduce that it would be better to avoid any climate mitigation policy if one wants to avoid harming future unborn children.

The Non-identity Problem Doesn’t Matter in the Transgenerational Sphere The question at the center of the metaphysical premise of the non-identity problem, therefore, is structured on two levels. The first consists of the reductionist approach adopted by supporters of the argument: if one talks about future individuals, rather than future generations, the main concern will be to avoid actions that could harm even one of those individuals. It is not difficult to understand the reasons behind this: from a reductionist and individualistic perspective, morally unjust decisions are those that harm someone in particular. From this observation, it follows that if decisions are taken that jeopardize a specific individual’s possibility of being born, those decisions are unfair, and there are no reasons that can support them. This type of decision includes many actions aimed – for example – at mitigating the anthropogenic effects of climate change: if we intervened to substantially modify the environmental conditions, we would introduce elements of disturbance in the environment which, changing the giving conditions, would affect births. The non-identity problem is built around a number of premises: the first is that if one changes the time of conception – Parfit points to one month – the conceived individual will change; the second is that if the environmental conditions in which conception takes place are altered, different outcomes will be possible from those that would have resulted from the initial conditions. Now, it is useful to note a fundamental point: the reasoning of those who argue the plausibility of the

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non-identity issue implicitly assumes that human, in most situations, maintain a relationship with the environment free of manipulation. This can be called the ‘good savage prejudice’. Now, establishing that the relationship between variation in environmental conditions, or technological innovations, and the determination of personal identity is a relevant one, leads to the consequence that one should pay special attention to environmental variations, e.g., in terms of resource protection, as a function of variation in personal identity. In other words, in this context what would seem to be central is not so much the environmental resources that should be protected, but a certain personal identity that should be preserved. However, in the words of Parfit: It may help to think about this question: how many of us could truly claim, “Even if railways and motors cars had never been invented, I would still have been born?” (Parfit, 1987, 361). (For details of Parfit’s position see Parfit, 1987: § 124.) Probably none of us: but this is not a transgenerational issue. Those who support the prejudice of the good savage believe that specific actions would alter a situation in which nature chooses whom to bring into the world through an entirely internal game of balance. In reality, it does not quite work like that. Human interventions on the environment date back to the dawn of human history and became highly impactful, at least since the first industrial revolution and the massive introduction of chemicals in industrial processes. We have to ask ourselves which births we should protect, since what we usually do is change the environment, continually altering the natural conditions. If this is the case, the non-identity problem captures an issue in which humanity has no way of intervening since the climatic, environmental, and food conditions are already continuously altered due to the human disposition to manipulate the world. Conversely, anthropogenic alterations relevant to climate change have not existed for millions of years, but for about four hundred years: these are alterations that risk not only not giving birth to a particular individual – a process on which human beings mistakenly believe they have some power, at least within the processes of natural fertilization – but to modify the conditions in which human life can occur in general. This seems to be the central point that eludes the paradox of the non-identity problem. Therefore, for problems that have a transgenerational nature and structure, i.e., that concern several generations, the most promising strategy – despite the higher ontological cost – seems to be the holistic one: that is, a strategy that does not shift the focus from generations to individuals and that does not reduce the whole (generations) to its components (individuals).

Transgenerational Actions So, let’s go back to future generations and assume that they will exist. What are future generations, and why should we work to ensure that climate change does not make life impossible for them? These are – roughly – the questions that need to be asked at this point. Therefore, this section will provide a minimum vocabulary to draw a metaphysics of future generations capable of responding to complex problems such as those raised by climate change. Two questions will be addressed: the

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first concerns the ontological status of future generations; the second concerns instead a particular type of social actions, i.e., transgenerational social actions, which affect the transgenerational aspects of social reality. To develop the arguments that follow, this section will adopt two premises that have been articulated in more detail elsewhere (Andina, 2022): first, that being, in most circumstances is preferable to non-being; second, that transgenerationality is a constraint that manifests itself in various forms in both the natural and social spheres and that emerges in a particular type of action, namely transgenerational social action. This brings us to future generations. Future generations can be considered as fictional subjects and, more precisely, as abstract artifacts. Unlike traditional abstract artifacts – for example, fictitious entities – they have the characteristic of passing from potentiality to actuality. In other words, while the Count of Monte Cristo will never exist independently of the novel written by Alexandre Dumas, future generations have the characteristic of passing from not being to being. In a word, they will sooner or later enjoy a space-time existence. Just as in the case of the Count of Monte Cristo, on the other hand, future generations exist because there is an interest in propitiating their existence. In other words, the social actors who work to facilitate the system’s stability have thought of introducing them into the list of social objects since, through future generations, it is possible to carry out actions whose considerable duration involves the collaboration of different generations. In this sense, future generations are entities created to respond to a purpose: to allow societies to last over time. In other words, one can certainly identify complex and articulated social actions that require basically two elements to be accomplished: firstly, a rather prolonged time that is necessary for their completion; secondly, the collaboration of different agents placed in an asymmetrical temporal relationship. Actions that follow this pattern involve recourse to the concept of future generation. In discussions regarding topics such as repaying public debt or implementing climate mitigation policies, for instance, it is often assumed that future generations will be responsible for collaborating in the repayment of the debt incurred or continuing with the climate mitigation strategies that are being implemented presently. Ontologies classify social actions following different criteria (see also Bratman, 2014; Gilbert, 2006); what interests us is to bring attention to a specific class of social actions: transgenerational social actions. “Transgenerational social actions” are those actions that result from the necessary cooperation of at least two different generations. These actions exhibit a long or rather long duration in time, such that the actors of transgenerational actions must necessarily vary in the course of the transgenerational action itself. The salient feature of these actions is that those who perform them are not all on the same level, because they enjoy different decision-making powers. In other words, while generation x has expressed its willingness to act in a certain way, subsequent generations will find themselves supporting those actions and perhaps completing them without ever having had the opportunity to express consent to that action (see also Andina, 2022). Typically, some of the actions that play a particularly central role in Western democracies have a transgenerational structure: a particular generation, let us call it G, makes a decision, say, on the subject of public finance. Several actions depend

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on this decision, which will have to be implemented over time in order for the decision to be actualized. Therefore, future generations are called to conclude what was started by G without having had the opportunity to express their consent on what has been decided. In most cases, they simply have to meet an expectation, that is, the idea that will contribute to actualizing the decisions made by G, taking the most appropriate actions to do so. Often, future generations take on the task of continuing what has already been decided or, at least, that’s what the system of social actors expects. This is the fiduciary bond that unites different generations and constitutes one of the necessary conditions for a society to last over time. If this constraint were weakened or, worse, disregarded, it would become complicated to carry out most transgenerational actions. Let us try to explain this with an example. Let us assume that the transgenerational action Y coincides with the massive exploitation of fossil fuels to start the electrification process of a country with a low development rate. The exploitation of those resources requires intricate operations and a rather lengthy process to be accomplished thoroughly. It is therefore evident that the political decision-makers who authorize the series of actions that can be classified as “belonging to Y” nourish the belief that future generations will continue Y, along with the actions required by and connected to Y, with a spirit and intentions similar to their own: that is, sharing their fundamental values and strategies. Thus, they implicitly assume that future generations will grant their consent to Y and to the actions required for the realization of Y. In this regard, it is useful to make two observations: the first is that future generations, being an abstract artifact, cannot express any consent. Therefore, to assume that they automatically would consent to Y is quite simply a stretch. It is, however, a useful stretch because it ultimately allows the decision-makers to start Y, with the certainty that the necessary actions will be carried out by either their own or by future generations. It is worth underlining how decisive the role of future generations is here: the social actors who decide to achieve Y not only need future generations (and bet on their existence) but also need them, once they have come into existence and have the power to make decisions, to behave in the way they predicted. Hence the second observation: if future generations are one of the necessary conditions of possibility for transgenerational actions, if transgenerational actions are a necessary condition for a society to last over time and if, finally, future generations are the social objects that were introduced into social ontologies so that social actors can perform actions with a considerable duration in time, engaging several generations, then one has to conclude that future generations have not only duties, but also a series of rights.

From the Non-identity Problem to the Principle of Transgenerational Responsibility Now, it is worth pointing out how complex the issue of climate change is. The climate issue intersects at least two levels, that of synchronic justice and that of diachronic justice, expressing not only the urgency to address both but also the need

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to establish their priority order. There are good arguments to show how the two plans are not exactly superimposable: a significant reduction of poverty in a particular country, for example, can be achieved through an intensification of the industrialization processes in that society. This choice, however, in most circumstances, has the side effect of increasing emissions by exacerbating the climate problem for new generations. So, in cases like this, synchronic justice and diachronic justice are not coextensive. The principle of shared but differentiated responsibilities, which was the cornerstone on which global dialogue was patiently built in relation to the climate issue, is based on four key points: historical responsibility, equity, capacity, and vulnerability. Equity, capacity, and vulnerability are oriented toward the synchronic dimension of justice. Historical responsibility, instead, is the only criterion aimed to grasp the diachronic dimension and is specifically focused on the past: it is, therefore, an essential but partial diachrony. The first three criteria mentioned bind and depend on the criterion of historical responsibility. The historical responsibility criterion might be expected to pay particular attention to what has been done – consciously or unconsciously – thus offering a reflection directed mostly at the past. However, diachrony means that time must be considered in its peculiar extension, without neglecting the future. In this case, the future is particularly relevant because it seems to represent the domain of the metaphysical criterion of the prevalence of being over non-being. Therefore, the criterion of historical responsibility can be integrated with a complementary criterion, which can be called “transgenerational responsibility.” This criterion serves a specific purpose, namely to account for the fact that in most cases one cannot determine who will come into the world, but one can commit oneself to ensuring the preservation of the conditions that make being possible. The criterion of transgenerational responsibility includes a series of premises: 1. Life, in most circumstances, is preferable to death. 2. Living well is preferable to simply living. 3. There is a bond between generations, the transgenerational bond, which unites them by determining rights and duties within the transgenerational chain. 4. Transgenerational actions have a particular structure which provides for collaboration between generations so that a specific action can be carried out. 5. Transgenerational social actions must respect transgenerational constraints and commit themselves to orient the future in ways that are not prejudicial to future generations. Climate change is caused by actions that, starting from a particular historical phase in which the anthropic nature of the climate’s negative variations became evident, made their transgenerational structure manifest. As discussed, transgenerational actions involve the (minimum) duty to orient the future so that the right of the new generations to come to being is not put at risk. With respect to the non-identity problem, the principle of transgenerational responsibility intends to preserve the principle according to which being can continue to be, regardless of the specific individuality in which it is incorporated. It does not matter who will

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exist, it matters that the conditions for which they will be able to come into being are preserved. In other words, in most circumstances we cannot commit ourselves to determining who will come into the world, but we can commit ourselves to ensure that we preserve the conditions that make being possible. A possible objection to the principle of transgenerational responsibility recalls that which is often raised against both the strategy of general containment of climate change, and the ethical principles suggesting the need for mediation between the interests of those who live here and now and future generations. Let us explain. The main argument, which reconciles reasonableness and humanity, maintains that the rights of populations facing severe poverty seem to prevail, in terms of urgency, over the rights of those who suffer nothing because they are still to come into being. Reducing the amount of pain then seems ethically preferable to preventing pain that is not yet there because its victim does not yet exist. However, as shown, the principle of transgenerational responsibility indicates a different perspective for dealing with the issue, focusing on two elements. First, the fact that future generations have the right to be: this is because of the moral principle that being is generally preferable to not being. Secondly, future generations are entitled to this because they are a necessary precondition for transgenerational social actions. Without future generations, transgenerational social actions, in most cases, could not be entirely performed. In other words, they would run the serious risk of looking like broken promises (see also Scheffler, 2018). Now, since the present generations have made future generations necessary for the maintenance of social reality as we know it, they must also commit themselves to favor the conditions under which being can continue to prevail over not being. In the minimal form presented here, the principle of transgenerational responsibility binds us to respect the possibility that future generations can access being on the basis of two arguments: (1) being is preferable to not being, and (2) future generations are abstract artifacts designed to enable the implementation of transgenerational social actions. Therefore, it can be argued that the principle of transgenerational responsibility weakly binds each generation to the future. That is, it does not commit the present generations to offer subsequent generations the same rights and quality of life as their own. However, it commits them to guarantee them the ability to come into being. It makes sense to ask whether a constraint of this type, which has a minimal character, is satisfactory and sufficient to define a broader idea of transgenerational justice. In general, the answer should be “no.” However, in the limited area of the climate issue, the principle of transgenerational equity, together with the other criteria that form the principle of shared responsibilities, would allow significant steps to be taken toward the primary objective of preserving the planet and its biodiversity.

Conclusions This chapter has discussed a metaphysical question involving the relations between generations: is it possible to argue that at time t an action committed by subject A will damage subject B at time t1, even if this action is a necessary (but not sufficient)

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condition for the identity of B? This question is of great importance for climate change. If the answer is no, any call for climate action in the interest of future generations risks being severely limited, because it cannot be based on any theory of individual rights. Therefore, this chapter tried to analyze several theoretical attempts that have been presented in the literature to respond positively to the question, in other words, to overcome the non-identity paradox, famously introduced by Derek Parfit. The chapter began by addressing the theories that question the moral argument of the non-identity paradox: in order to be able to harm someone, you must necessarily cause that person a loss of well-being. The first theories discussed were the non-consequentialist and threshold-based accounts of harm. According to the first, you can harm someone simply by violating one of their ‘relevant specific interests’, even when this violation has the effect of increasing rather than decreasing the wellbeing of the “victim”. According to the second, for it to be possible to say that you have harmed someone through your action it is sufficient that this action has the effect of leaving the “victim” below a minimum well-being threshold. It has been argued that both approaches result in unsatisfactory outcomes in regard to the issue at hand, as well as the climate case more broadly. As a result, an examination of the paradox was conducted from the perspective of an impersonal ethical system such as utilitarianism. It has been submitted that by shifting the focus away from the wellbeing of individual persons and solely considering overall or average well-being, it is possible to circumvent the non-identity paradox. But this comes at the cost of running into two equally serious theoretical problems, such as the repugnant conclusion and the hermit paradox. In light of all this, the second part of the chapter investigated whether it is possible to counter the non-identity paradox by focusing on its metaphysical rather than moral component. An alteration in the conception of timing and the combination of gametes causes a change in individual identity. Obviously, this evident empirical fact was not questioned here; rather, the focus was on the importance of the creation of responsibility bonds with future generations. It was shown why future generations are one of the necessary conditions of transgenerational actions, many of which are also at the root of the climate crisis, such as for example long-term industrial policies. Accordingly, if transgenerational actions are valuable per se, and future generations are indispensable for completing transgenerational actions, when we start a transgenerational action, we should rely on the hypothetical consent of those who will have to continue these actions. From the necessity and the empirical impossibility of this consent, it is possible to infer a duty on the part of the present generation to act responsibly toward the future. Therefore, this chapter examined the scope of this principle of responsibility, of metaphysical origin, with respect to the climate crisis.

Cross-References ▶ Climate Change Action as Collective Action ▶ Climate Change and Communitarianism ▶ Climate Change and Human Rights

Climate Change, the Non-identity Problem, and the Metaphysics. . .

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▶ Climate Change and Intergenerational Justice ▶ Climate Change and Population Ethics ▶ Consequentialism and Climate Change

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Climate Change and Overpopulation Raffaele Bifulco

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Overpopulation and Climate Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The International Debate on Overpopulation: From the Kissinger Report to Reproductive Rights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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The chapter focuses on the relationship between climate change and overpopulation, and it claims that such a thorny issue can be addressed only through a global agreement on limits to demographic growth. It draws on the assumption that overpopulation is a major cause of climate change. Indeed, the link between the growth of population and the increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions has been ascertained since long ago. Section “Introduction” explains that the planet is experiencing a “population momentum” due to the tendency of the population to grow. Section “Overpopulation and Climate Change” shows how such a tendency contributes to climate change as it affects the intensification of economic activities and the combustion of fossil fuels. Section “The International Debate on Overpopulation: From the Kissinger Report to Reproductive Rights” illustrates how the international community has addressed the issue of overpopulation in international conferences on reproductive rights and world population. Finally, section “Conclusions” examines possible regulatory policies on family planning, arguing that reproductive rights shall be reconciled with regulatory policies that focus on the responsibility and independent choice of individuals. R. Bifulco (*) Law Department, Luiss Guido Carli, Rome, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_137

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Keywords

Climate change · Overpopulation · Population momentum · Demographic transition

Introduction The following pages aim to examine the problem of overpopulation (henceforth also OP) in connection with the issue of climate change. We will not refer to climate change’s many social, ethical, and philosophical aspects, as these are dealt with extensively elsewhere in this volume. The World Population Prospects 2022 (Summary of Results), prepared by the United Nations, confirms that the world’s population continues to grow. In midNovember 2022, it reached 8.0 billion individuals. Since 2010, one billion individuals have been added and since 1998, two billion. The population is expected to reach 8.5 billion in 2030, rising to 9.7 billion in 2050 before “stopping” at 10.4 billion in 2100 (United Nations, 2022, 5 and 27). The projections indicate that of the 1.2 billion individuals to be added between 2019 and 2050, about 1 billion will come from sub-Saharan African countries, while another 25% will come from Central and Southern Asia (United Nations (2022) 5). Another important fact is that the planet is experiencing a “population momentum” due to the tendency of the population to grow, despite a falling fertility rate, because of the high concentration of young people (United Nations (2019) 8). In about half of the existing countries, and therefore for a total population of about 40% of the world figure, the birth rate is below the replacement rate (Balter, 2006). It should be borne in mind that the replacement rate, which ensures the balance of the world population, is set by demographers at 2 or 2.1 children per couple. Growth will be concentrated in nine countries, in particular: India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, United Republic of Tanzania, Indonesia, Egypt, and the Philippines (United Nations (2022) 5). However, the most interesting development is what happened in 2019. For the first time in history, the world’s population aged 65 and over surpassed the number of children under five. This means that by 2050, in 48 countries – mostly located in Europe, North America, and East and South-East Asia – the ratio of people of working age (between 25 and 64) to people over 65 will be less than 2 (in sub-Saharan Africa, in 2019, it was 11.7). This reversal, which can be regarded as one of the largest demographic transitions in history (Holodny, 2016, 1), will undoubtedly have consequences on the labor market and the generational distribution of the tax burden, with likely negative repercussions for older individuals related to public health, pensions, and social assistance (United Nations (2019) 19–20). The few figures cited above are a testament to a world population that is continually expanding, even if growth has come to a standstill in some parts of the planet and the population is declining. Yet, impressive as they are, these figures, taken in their absoluteness, fail to convey the historical dimension of growth, its

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projection over time and the enormous acceleration it has undergone in recent decades. To this end, it is sufficient to consider that over a period of more than two millennia, taking into account the period from 400 BC to 1800 AD, the world’s population grew from 153 to 954 million, while in the space of two centuries alone, it rose from 954 million to 6.127 billion (Data from Livi Bacci, 2016, 42). In light of these data, section “Overpopulation and Climate Change” will examine the relationship between OP and climate change, while section “The International Debate on Overpopulation: From the Kissinger Report to Reproductive Rights” will briefly review international conferences on world population. In the conclusions, assuming the existence of broad worldwide recognition of the right to procreation, possible regulatory policies on family planning will be examined. The hope is that reproductive rights will be increasingly reconciled with regulatory policies that focus on the responsibility and independent choice of individuals.

Overpopulation and Climate Change Although the trend toward population growth is indisputable, it is very controversial when it comes to broaching the subject of OP. The term has a negative connotation, alluding to an excess of people. Consequently, some authors believe that we cannot speak of OP until we reach a Malthusian scenario in which people die of starvation because of overpopulation (Ryberg, 1998, 413). For others, by contrast, a state of OP can be considered to have been reached much earlier, i.e., when poverty, conflicts, lack of medical care, global warming, deforestation, etc., occur (Conly, 2005, 111). According to the former approach, it would not be possible to speak about OP today, whereas if we subscribe to the latter approach, we would already be in a state of OP (For a review of the various positions, see Radavoi, 2017, 130–2). Those who criticize the use of the concept of OP have a point, since to be able to speak of under- or over-population, one must refer to a parameter that states how many people a given place (in this case, planet Earth) can support. This is the issue of ideal population size, which however inevitably becomes tangled up in moral issues, since what is at stake is not mere survival but some idea of good life (See also Robinson, 2015, 356–7. In relation to the USA, see Pimentel et al., 1994, 363). The fact that the Earth can support a population of around 11 billion can certainly be accepted, although G. Hardin had already observed that “the optimum population is, then, less than maximum. The difficulty of defining the optimum is enormous” (Hardin, 1968, 1244). The point is how people will live in such a context, how they will get there, and what new and further conflicts this may trigger (Brander, 2007, 16). In any case, the mindset of OP critics underestimates the role that overpopulation has played and is playing as a major or contributing cause of climate change (In this vein, see Pimentel, Harman, Pacenza, Pecarsky, Pimentel (n 13) 365; Sartori, in Sartori & Mazzoleni, 2003, 22; Cassils, 2004, 172; Kuo, 2012, 25; Golding & Hotzman Golding, 1971, 503). On the contrary, it can be said that T. Malthus’s analyses have regained new luster with the emergence of environmental issues, which have taken the place of the original Malthusian scenario of poverty and

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death. In this direction, authors such as G. Hardin and P. R. Ehrlich (Hardin (n 14) 1243 ff. and Ehrlich, 1968) have exerted a great influence. Among the stances adopted by science in favor of considering the weight of OP on the destiny of the planet, worth mentioning is the appeal contained in “Warning to Humanity” – a Declaration by Scientists on Global Issues, in which the stabilization of the population is included among the remedies to avoid the destruction of the environment: “We must stabilise population. This will be possible only if all nations recognise that it requires improved and social economic conditions, and the adaptation of effective, voluntary family planning” (In “Population and Development Review”, 18: 783. See also the manifesto Population-Environment Balance, 1992, 180). Thanks to the emergence of environmental awareness, the causal relationship between overpopulation and climate change has received renewed attention (Amongst many: Meyerson, 1998; O’Neill, 2000; O’Neil et al., 2001; Wire, 2009; Engelman, 2010; Cafaro & Crist, 2012). The relationship has now also been confirmed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has long since ascertained that the increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions is mainly due to economic activity and population growth: “Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have increased since the pre-industrial era, driven largely by economic and population growth, and are now higher than ever” (IPCC, 2014, 4, 44, 56, 67; but the first reports were already moving in this direction: Climate Change: The IPCC, 1990 and 1992 Assessments, “https://www.ipcc.ch/report/climate-change-the-ipcc-1990-and-1992assessments/”). In reconstructing trends in GHG emissions over recent decades, the IPCC notes that “globally, economic and population growth continued to be the most important drivers of increases in CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion. The contribution of population growth between 2000 and 2010 remained roughly identical to the previous three decades, while the contribution of economic growth has risen sharply” (IPCC (n 21) 5 and 46). In short, excessive consumption levels in developed countries and the growing population in developing countries have long been cited as the main causes of environmental degradation. It is worth noting that the environmental impact of climate change effects will be felt most acutely by poorer countries (Stern, 2006, 56). There are studies that have long highlighted the environmental externalities of fertility, meaning the costs and benefits to society (and future generations) of additional births not planned by parents, precisely in relation to climate change. Such research has investigated the link between population growth and GHG emissions. Since the life activities of each person (and their descendants) produce GHG emissions through direct or indirect energy use, it is easy to see that policies that limit fertility rates have positive effects on slowing climate change (Birdsall, 1994, 1 ff.). Although the close link between overpopulation and climate change is now clear, ideas about how to limit the disproportionate growth of the world’s population are more perplexing. In other words, climate change mitigation and adaptation actions all seem to focus on economic activity, neglecting demographic growth (Engelman R. (n 19) 5). Even the IPCC, while mentioning overpopulation as one of the causes of climate change, does not consider possible remedies on this front (Cafaro, 2012, 48, with reference to the IPCC 4th Assessment Report).

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This attitude seems to be more in line with recent dominant trends in the public debate on the environment. These trends focus more on the consequences (various forms of environmental pollution) and the depletion of environmental resources than on the causes and limits to growth (Meadows et al., 1972). One needs look no further than the central role that the concept of sustainable development has played globally. Even the famous Brundtland Report (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987, 1) – which, as is well known, is at the origin of this concept – keeps the causal factor of the population out of the definition of sustainable development, preferring to focus on the beneficial effects of economic development in the hope, borrowed from the theory of demographic transition, that greater wellbeing will also correspond to lower fertility (Cassils (n 16) 182 ff.). Even in the most recent views about sustainable development, the population factor is absent, the focus being, as mentioned just now, on environmental pollution and the depletion of environmental resources (An authoritative exception is the cited study by Pimentel, Harman, Pacenza, Pecarsky, Pimentel (n 13) 348 ff.). However appreciable this attention may be, it has completely left the harmful effects of population growth on environmental resources in the background. In the words of a prominent demographer: “Three points must be reaffirmed: the first is that population growth is not environmentally neutral; the second, which follows from the first, is that a slowdown in growth can facilitate the resolution of various problems; the third is that never in the past has the impact of human activity threatening the planetary ecosystem been as great as it is today. It is therefore prudent to moderate risks, and a slowdown in population growth contributes to this end” (Livi Bacci (n 9) 320). This silence is less surprising if one pays attention to the path trodden by international conferences on population. Here, too, the awareness, reached at the end of the last century, of the importance of family planning in curbing the excesses of population growth comes to a standstill at the beginning of the twenty-first century. An examination of this path may be useful in understanding the reasons for this silence on overpopulation.

The International Debate on Overpopulation: From the Kissinger Report to Reproductive Rights Conferences devoted to population began with the World Population Conference in Rome in 1954, followed by the one in Belgrade in 1965 (Rath, 1993, 7). These first two meetings were characterized by the absence of state representatives and no resolutions were adopted at the end of the proceedings. From the debate, which took place mainly among demographers and economists, it came to light that high fertility rates and strong demographic growth were a drag on the development of poor countries, and from these meetings sprang the idea of promoting family planning programs for them (See Menzer, 1954–56, 265). As early as 1968, in the context of the International Human Rights Conference held in Tehran, a non-binding proclamation was adopted. Paragraph 16 states that “[p]arents have a basic human right to determine freely and responsibly the number

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and the spacing of their children” (U.N. Doc. A/CONF. 32/41 at 3, 1968). The proclamation can be read as a stance by the international community to pressure less developed countries that resisted the widespread use of contraceptives (Freedman L.P., Isaacs S.L., Human Rights and Reproductive Choice, Studies in Family Planning, 24: 21). At the 1974 World Population Conference in Bucharest, convened under the auspices of the UN, delegates from various countries also participated. This led to adopting the first World Population Plan of Action, a 20-year program of research and action related to population and development. At the meeting in Bucharest, the US administration – strongly convinced of the need to curb global population growth – played a central role by calling on developing countries to implement population programs as a precondition for development. It is worth recalling that in 1974 the United States drew up a strategy with a strong focus on birth control (National Security Study Memorandum NSSM 200. Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests’ (The Kissinger Report)). This strategy met with resistance and was eventually not implemented due to criticisms from members of various religious denominations, human rights advocates, and those who did not want limits on immigration (On this, see Cassils (n 16) 181). In any case, it was opposed by developing countries themselves, who felt that population growth could not be considered an obstacle to development. That opposition was further linked to a desire to counteract the emergence of the so-called New International Economic Order (Bernstein, 2005, 127–130). The differences were on the verge of impeding any agreement when a compromise was reached, establishing that, while population growth was a factor in development, at the same time, development tended to reduce population growth rates (See paragraph 14(c) of the Declaration). During the 1980s, the United States completely changed tack. Indeed, at the World Conference in Mexico City in 1984, again held under the auspices of the UN, the US administration took a very conservative stance, further to which macroeconomic development would not be affected by demographic dynamics. However, the validity of the Plan of Action adopted in Bucharest ten years earlier was reaffirmed. The 1980s saw important developments in this area. First of all, an international movement for women’s rights gained strength and was consolidated, culminating in the 1991 Human Rights Conference in Vienna. Already in the Final Declaration of the First World Conference on the Status of Women held in Mexico City in 1975, Articles 11 and 12 had established a right to reproductive choice based on the concepts of integrity and women’s control over their own bodies. It must be said that this right to reproductive choice was asserted by part of the women’s rights movement not in agreement but in opposition to the population control movement (Freedman, Isaacs (n 34) 23). New and apparently contradictory trends developed in parallel: demographers who insisted on the interrelationships between population, economic growth, and national security; human rights advocates (with a focus on women’s health); and environmentalists who linked population growth and environmental pollution (Bernstein (n 37) 128). This led to a central turning point in the issue of overpopulation, the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), held in Cairo in 1994, again at

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the initiative of the UN. The three trends mentioned above coexisted, but the focus was on the role and needs of women, particularly on reproductive health. The Programme of Action, adopted in Cairo as part of the Conference, defines the notion of reproductive health as follows: “Reproductive health is a state of complete physical mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity, in all matters relating to the reproductive system and to its functions and processes. Reproductive health, therefore, implies that people are able to have a satisfying and safe sex life and that they have the capability to reproduce and the freedom to decide if, when and how often to do so” (p. 45). That approach was confirmed the following year in Beijing during the Fourth World Conference on Women, where the theme of gender equality found further support. The Cairo Conference, while representing the culmination of years of debate on the issue of OP, marked the beginning of that phase of decline referred to in the previous section. Subsequent steps adopted by the international community did not pay equal attention to the issue of OP. The Forum on Population and Reproductive Health in The Hague in February 1999 and the UN General Assembly special session on ICPD in June 1999 did not produce any new results. In essence, although the Programme of Action drawn up in Cairo in 1994 was an important landmark for the international community, its principles (expressed in Chap. II) did not provide the occasion for the crystallization of customary international norms or the consolidation of soft law on OP. Observing the succession of international conferences, what can be said with sufficient certainty is that the idea of planning and birth control, still present until the Cairo Conference in 1994, has been progressively supplanted by an emphasis on individual well-being and reproductive rights (universal access to family care services, reduction of infant and maternal mortality, and universal access to basic education with a strong emphasis on reducing the “gender gap” between men and women) (Brolan C.E., Hill P.S., Sexual and reproductive health and rights in the evolving post-2015 agenda: perspectives from key players from multilateral and related agencies in 2013, “Reproductive Health Matters”, 22: 66; O’Neill (n 19) 93). This led to the Millennium Summit held in New York in September 2000, which, ideally linked to the ICPD, continued along the path initiated in Cairo. In fact, the wellknown Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) do not directly consider OP and related issues (A detailed analysis of the impact of population growth on the achievement of the MDGs can be found in the UK Parliament’s Report of Hearings by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Population, Development and Reproductive Health 2007, Return of the population growth factor. Its impact upon the Millennium Development Goals, “https://mahb.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Return-ofthe-Population-Growth-Factor.pdf”). The 2005 World Summit also focused on reproductive health and gender equality. The final Outcome reiterates the commitment to achieve “universal access to reproductive health by 2015, as set out at the International Conference on Population and Development” (paragraph 57(g)). This clarification is important because that commitment was not included in the Millennium Development Goals. It was also noted that the reference to reproductive health in the Outcome could express the emergence of an international consensus on the need to protect

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reproductive health (Guruswamy, 2007, 141, and Brolan, Hill (n 35) 66). However, even the goals set by the World Summit have suffered from poor implementation due to a chronic lack of funding (O’Neill (n 19) 93). In conclusion, we can observe that by the beginning of the 1990s, the OP issue had essentially vanished from the international public agenda. There are several reasons for this (See Campbell, 2007, 237; Brander (n 15) 6; Sartori (n 16) 35): • Cultural attitudes, ideological and religious pressures, as anti-abortionists, religious leaders, and conservative politicians in various parts of the world have fiercely resisted birth control policies and, more broadly, policies aimed at strengthening the role of women in reproductive processes (On the role of the Holy See, see Sartori (n 16) 45–51. From a feminist perspective see the criticism of the Vatican’s positions by Pollack Petchesky, 1995; more generally, Cafaro (n 19) 49). • The emergence of environmental issues as the widespread and growing attention to environmental pollution issues has not been matched in recent decades by a parallel attention to the issue of OP. • The human rights discourse insofar as the traumatic birth control policies in China, India, and Peru have prompted human rights movements to brand such experiences in very negative terms, thus contributing to the false notion that talking of OP necessarily alludes to forms of public control that violate human rights (so-called demographic imperialism). • An excessive emphasis on women’s interests (Criticism has been voiced by Campbell (n 45) 241–2 and by Sartori (n 16) 45–5172 regarding the strange alliance between the Catholic Church, China and feminists against making overpopulation an issue), bearing in mind that at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio a proposal to pursue a fertility rate of 2.1 was not accepted because of the pugnacity of a small group of delegates opposed to planning as control over women’s bodies (Mazzoleni (n 16) 131–2). • An excessive faith in technological progress (Brander (n 15) 19). • The gradual strengthening of neo-liberal economic theory, which clashes head-on with the ideas developed at the world population conferences, which called for efficient and extensive health systems to protect women’s health (Bernstein (n 37) 127–8), and also, paradoxically, the opposing, i.e., anti-capitalist, redistributive justice theories which, while not denying the problems linked to environmental pollution, consider that they are linked to the unjust distribution of wealth between peoples and nations. • A certain idea of the relationship between demographic growth and economic development, which, focusing on the analysis of the last two centuries of the West, sees demographic growth as a driver of economic growth (Critically, Livi Bacci (n 9) 253). • Finally, an essentially positive assessment of the so-called demographic transition (This expression alludes to the process that has been going on in the West over the last two centuries, including as a result of the industrial revolution, characterised by the following elements indicated by Livi Bacci (n 9) 148: multiplication by

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four of the population; increase in life expectancy from 25/35 to 80 years; reduction in the number of children per woman from 5 to 2; reduction in the birth rate and mortality rate from figures that fluctuated around 30–40% to figures close to 10%). It is possible that this set of cultural factors has contributed to side-lining the OP issue (Brander (n 15) 5–6).

Conclusions It is not for this writer to imagine what kind of regulatory policies to suggest to countries with excessive population growth. Certainly, it is inconceivable to maintain a hypocritical silence on the need to adopt non-coercive policies that are capable of limiting the growth of the world’s population, consistently with the urge of limiting the environmental externalities of fertility recalled in section “Overpopulation and Climate Change”. The starting point is in those reproductive rights that are firmly rooted in international law. Although not provided for in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, Article 23(2) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights recognizes the right to free procreation without any limitation (“The right of men and women of marriageable age to marry and to found a family shall be recognized”). Likewise, Article 10(1) of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights provides for the widest possible protection and assistance for the family, considered the “fundamental group unit of society” (Robb, 1998, 289). Again in the context of the UN, Article 16(1)(e) of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), adopted by the General Assembly in 1979, grants, in an extremely broad manner, “[t]he same rights of men and women to decide freely and responsibly on the number and spacing of their children and to have access to the information, education and means to enable them to exercise these rights”. In the sphere of international soft law, the right to procreate is recognized even more widely. Reference has already been made to the Tehran Proclamation of 1968, where the right of parents “to determine freely and responsibly the number and the spacing of their children” was affirmed. In the same vein are the conferences held in Mexico City in 1984 and Cairo in 1994 (ICPD) and the documents that they produced. From what has been said so far and in the light of the reconstruction of the OP debate, it is arguable that at the international level, there is a right of couples and individuals to control their own reproduction in a free and responsible manner (Freedman, Isaacs (n 34) 23), even if there are voices to the contrary (Dillard, 2007, 28–31). This right to procreation has a particular nature. If one looks at the procreative act, it is certainly interpersonal in nature. If, on the other hand, one looks at the inescapable link that exists between a woman’s body and procreation (as a process

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leading to the formation of a new living being), the right to procreation in its procedural dimension thus becomes a woman’s right to procreative freedom, based on the principle of autonomy and the right to health (Freedman, Isaacs (n 34) 19). Understood in this way, the right to procreative freedom contains a claim that is both positive (freedom to procreate) and negative (freedom not to procreate). The greater the freedom of women to fully control their own bodies, the greater the decline in fertility and the possibility of reversing OP. So, it is authoritatively believed (Sen, 1996, 1052; see also Campbell (n 38) 245). However, the right to procreation must not be thought of as a right that cannot be balanced against other interests (Kates, 2004, 61; Bognar, 2019, 324). As illustrated in section “Overpopulation and Climate Change”, the urge of hindering climate change is strictly linked to the need of containing the ongoing population’s growth. Indeed, the more the people on the planet, the more the consumptions and the emissions. Accordingly, procreative rights ought to be balanced with the opposing interest of limiting environmental degradation. Slowing or ending population growth could play a big role in mitigating the problem of climate change and the survival of the planet (Cafaro, 2012, 46). Hardin was in no doubt that when survival is at stake, the acceptance of responsibility is a precondition for entitlement to rights (Hardin, 1974, 36). There are various positions in this regard: from the most radical, arguing that the right to procreate cannot include the claim to have an unlimited number of children as this would interfere with the freedoms of others; to those who point out that excessive child bearing would affect various rights ranging from the right to the environment to the right to be left alone; to others that have emphasized the reference not only to a free but also responsible decision to reproduce, contained in the above mentioned paragraph 16 of the Tehran proclamation (and substantially replicated in Article 16(1)(e) CEDAW), in order to emphasize that the freedom to procreate must take account of an overpopulated world (See Lee, 1972, 317; Conly (n 11) 109; Dillard (n 56) 62); to others who, very authoritatively, have also included security interests as a reason for limiting the freedom to procreate without limits (Chap. IV of Mill, 1999); to others who also give weight to the interests of the person to be born since the broader the right to procreation recognized today, the more restricted the same right will be for generations to come (Dillard (n 56) 58). Thus, the right to procreation may be restricted by public regulatory policies. The introduction and implementation of regulatory policies on procreation seems coherent with conditional antinatalism, which views procreation as morally bad due to the world’s ongoing environmental crises. According to conditional antinatalists, procreation should be limited and regulated through governmental policies (see Trevor Hedberg, chapter ▶ “Climate Change and Population Ethics,” this volume)). The conflict between the underlying interests of procreation and those opposed to it can be greatest where policies are directly coercive, directly restricting couples or individuals in their choice to have children (from abortion to sterilization, from infanticide to the prohibition of unprotected sex). The one-child-per-couple policy introduced in China in 1979 can be traced back to this typology. Since 2001, the strictness of this strong birth control policy has been softened, and the more coercive forms of control

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have disappeared. However, thanks to the one-child policy, the fertility rate fell from 2.8 to 2.0 between 1979 and 1991 (Livi Bacci (n 9) 239–46 and Robinson (n 10) 354–6). Such solutions echo Hardin’s ruthless but lucid conclusion, expressed in his famous 1968 essay, that we must abandon the logic of the commons in breeding because the freedom to procreate leads to the ruin of all (Hardin (n 14) 1248). This scenario, based on coercion and, for this very reason, authoritatively criticized (See in particular Sen (n 58) 1051), can be contrasted with other suggestions more respectful of reproductive rights (Alternative ways in which governments can influence fertility levels are pointed out also by Tim Meijers, chapter ▶ “Climate Change and Intergenerational Justice,” this volume). In this regard, mention should be made of policies that offer couples and individuals opportunities for choice, such as contraception and adequate reproductive education, especially for women (choice-providing measures), as well as policies that encourage changes in reproductive practices (here the tools can vary greatly: from educational campaigns to economic incentives, such as grants or advantages for couples with one or two children, to negative incentives, such as the withdrawal of benefits or advantages, and these are incentive-changing policies) (Cripps, 2015, 4–5; Engelman (n 15) 24; Freedman, Isaacs (n 34) 24; Kuo (n 13) 26. Critically, Golding, Hotzman Golding (n 13) 509 ff.). By realizing human rights, such as reproductive choice, education, and employment opportunities for women, we would, as a side effect, “reduce population growth and thus contribute to combating dangerous climate change” (In this regard, building on Sen’s theory, Caney, 2020, 350. Nonetheless, the author partially criticizes this argument (361 ff.)). Recently, the idea of K. Boulding has also been revived, who, back in the 1960s, envisaged a system of tradeable procreation licenses as a means of curbing overpopulation (Boulding, 1964; see De La Croix & Gosseries, 2009, 507; Bognar (n 59) 324). The reality is that in order to implement demographic policies that do not conflict with the basic needs of the individual and that therefore focus on responsibility (Sen (n 58) 1061 and Livi Bacci (n 9) 162), political and economic conditions are needed that above all are capable of incentivizing parental responsibility in raising children, strengthening the rights of women and facilitating their entry into the labor market (On this in depth, see Engelman (n 19) 29–35), boosting compulsory schooling for children and developing schemes to protect old age (Livi Bacci (n 9) 233 and 272). One wonders whether there is still time for such medium- and long-term policies (Kates (n 59) 66–8. As highlighted by Tim Meijers, chapter ▶ “Climate Change and Intergenerational Justice,” this volume, the next few decades are key for climate change: lowering fertility, even if morally permissible, only has an effect over a much longer timespan). A renewed focus on family planning could be a key contribution, alongside the main route of reducing emissions per capita, in combating climate change (Wire (n 19) 1 ff; Meyerson (n 19)).

Cross-References ▶ Climate Change and Intergenerational Justice ▶ Climate Change and Population Ethics

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Livi Bacci, M. (2016). Storia minima della popolazione del mondo (5th ed.). il Mulino. Meadows, D. H., Meadows, D. L., Randers, J., & Behrens, W. W., III. (1972). The limits to growth. Universe Books. Menzer, F. A. A. (1954–56). The world population conference, Rome 1954. Transactions of the Faculty of Actuaries, 23, 262. Meyerson, F. (1998). Population, development and global warming: advertising the tragedy of the climate commons. Population and Environment, 443–463. Mill, J. S. (1999). Essay on liberty [1859]. London: Penguin, 2007. O’Neil, B. C., Landis, M. K. F., & Lutz, W. (2001). Population and climate change. Cambridge University Press. O’Neill, B. C. (2000). Cairo and climate change: A win/opportunity. Global Environmental Change, 93–96. Pimentel, D., Harman, R., Pacenza, M., Pecarsky, J., & Pimentel, M. (1994). Natural resources and an optimum human population. Population and Environment, 15, 347–369. Pollack Petchesky, R. (1995). From population control to reproductive rights: Feminist fault lines. Reproductive Health Matters, 6, 152. Population-Environment Balance. (1992). Why excess immigration damages the environment. Population and Environment: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, 13(4), 303. Radavoi, C. N. (2017). Thoughts on the U.N. 2017 population prospects: Procreation-related internationally wrongful acts, and overpopulation ad global risk. Pace International Law Review, 20, 119–145. Rath, F. J. C. M. (1993). Population problems: A constituent of general culture in the 21st century. International Review of Education, 39, 5–13. Report of Hearings by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Population, Development and Reproductive Health 2007. Return of the population growth factor. Its impact upon the Millennium Development Goals. https://mahb.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Return-ofthe-Population-Growth-Factor.pdf Robb, C. S. (1998). Liberties, entitlements, and trumps: Reproductive rights and ecological responsibilities. The Journal of Religious Ethics, 26, 283–294. Robinson, J. A. (2015). Provisional thoughts on limitations to the right to procreate. Potchefstroom Electronic Law Journal, 18, 332–361. Ryberg, J. (1998). The argument from overpopulation – Logical and ethical considerations. Population and Environment, 5, 411–425. Sartori, G., & Mazzoleni, G. (2003). La terra scoppia. Sovrappopolazione e sviluppo. Rizzoli. Sen, A. (1996). Fertility and coercion. University of Chicago Law Review, 63, 1035–1062. Stern, N. (2006). The economics of climate change. Cambridge University Press. United Nations, Doc. A/CONF. 32/41 at 3 (1968). United Nations 2019, World Population Prospects 2019 (Highlights). United Nations 2022, World Population Prospects 2022 (Summary of Results). “Warning to Humanity” – A declaration by scientist on global issues. Population and Development Review, 18, 782–784. Wire, T. (2009). Fewer emitters, lower emissions, less cost: Reducing future carbon emissions by investing in family planning: A cost/benefit analysis. London School of Economics. World Commission on Environment and Development. (1987). Our common future. Oxford University Press.

Climate Change and the Motivational Gap Alberto Pirni

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Obstacles to an Intergenerational Climate-Change-Sensitive Motivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Misalignment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Uncertainty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Individual Causal Inefficiency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Link Among Risk Perception, Preference Management, and Taking Action . . . . . . . . . Moral Corruption, Reciprocity, and Procrastination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Motivational Impasse and Three Ideal-Typic Reactions: Eco-anxiety, Indifference, and Solidarity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Subtler Obstacle: Intergenerational Indifference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Contrastive Motivations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reconsidering Solidarity Versus Indifference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Overcoming the Motivational Gap: A Twofold Path . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Grounding the Diachronic Solidarity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Kantian Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

The chapter proposes first a definition of motivation and its intrinsic challenges, e.g., the expression and maintenance of motivation in a consistent form. Specific attention is devoted to the main obstacles toward the establishment of an intergenerational climate-change-sensitive motivation. The chapter explores then what could be considered the most relevant conceptual contraposition with respect to the adoption of climate-change-sensitive behaviors, both from an individual and institutional perspective: the dialectic between indifference and solidarity. We will examine how these concepts lead to different motivational perspectives that, in turn, ground and A. Pirni (*) Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_150

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direct diametrically opposed behaviors. Subsequently, we will explore the main implications of these motivational perspectives, in terms of moral and institutional effects and within an intergenerational framework. Finally, the chapter proposes a normative path for overcoming the motivational gap that the simple contraposition between indifference and solidarity could do nothing but perpetuate. Keywords

Motivation · Indifference · Solidarity · Intergenerational justice

Introduction Even though motivation plays a prominent role in the moral domain, a specific philosophical attention to this concept and its correlative challenges is pretty recent. If we should find a mature definition of the concept of motivation devoted to our reference domain – the practical philosophy and the moral agency – we must refer first to the work by Thomas Wolff, Phsychologia Empirica, that the German philosopher published in 1740. In that work (and precisely in the § 877), we can read the paradigmatic statement according to which “the motive is the sufficient reason for volition and nolition.” From this effective definition, we can derive a few useful implications for the present context. First, motivation is by definition and from its conceptual origin a bridging concept between philosophy and psychology (at that point, namely, at Wolff’s time, surely not yet emerged as autonomous discipline, being rather addressed as a fundamental chapter of metaphysics). Second, properly speaking, motivation concerns the practical domain, not the epistemological and cognitive one. Third, starting from that first framing, it is possible to articulate a well-grounded distinction between motive and motivation: While motive can be understood as the cause or the condition of any single specific action, motivation is a dynamic factor able to activate and guide an organism toward a selected goal or achievement within a (mostly) expected time frame. Accordingly, if motive chairs the determination of a single action, motivation chairs the determination and stabilization of a series of motives in turn determining a series of action. Consequently, motivation gives shape to an agent’s conduct that can be extended and experienced in a short-medium term. In what follows, we will focus on the concept of motivation and not on motive. We will set apart the elaboration of the concept within the psychological domain, in order to concentrate on the philosophical accounts elaborated in the most recent debate. More specifically, we will focus on philosophical accounts related to climate change by concentrating on the obstacles that a philosophical theory of motivation has to address in this field. In order to frame those obstacles, we must primarily precise the main factors constituting the very idea of motivation from a moral-philosophical point of view. There is a quite shared agreement on a four-step track, describing the motivational path from the first acceptance of a practical rule to the action.

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The first moment is the acceptance of a rule, meaning the judgment about its rightness or justification. The second moment is the adoption of that rule, meaning that endorsement of the rule as a motive for action. The third moment is the application of that rule, meaning the selection of one or more specific situations in which applying the rule can be appropriate. Finally, the fourth moment focuses on the very action, meaning the translation into a concrete act – or in a series of acts – of what is required by that principle and is in line with its acceptance, adoption, and application (Birnbacher, 2009). A series of questions might arise from this preliminary framing. The first point is related to the possibility of achieving a sharp distinction among the four factors. Second, even if there is a general agreement about the constitutive interdependence of all factors we mentioned, it is questioned if there exists or not a sort of ranking among them. But there are further obstacles to be inserted in the picture, if we consider two specific points related to our discourse: (a) the motivation to act in favor of distant future recipients of our action and (b) the need to consider motivation within the climate change perspective.

Obstacles to an Intergenerational Climate-Change-Sensitive Motivation In considering the link among the motivation to act, the systemic challenge set by climate change, and the profile of a subject able to act considering (temporally) distant recipients, there are at least five main difficulties we must deal with.

Misalignment First, we should consider the misalignment between the acceptance and the adoption of a rule in the form of a principle for acting. It may be not so difficult to isolate a series of claims, which can be translated into rules, that may reach a kind of overlapping or even universal consensus. In other terms, who is in favor of such a statement is implicitly sustaining to be able to determine a core of principles that are of universal evidence, rationality, and validity and that, in force of this distinctive status, could not be put into question by no rational being. However, even if these principles exist, their acknowledgment does not imply their immediate adoption as a motive of action. There might be a number of conflicting and opposite motivations that could block the only apparently obvious move from the first moment (acceptance) to the second one (adoption). This is a difficulty pertaining to the universe of motivation as a whole. Nonetheless, it becomes surely more acute when considered within the intergenerational domain, in which the acceptance and the adoption might be part of two distant moments in the life of a subject or even, by extremizing, in the lives of different subjects or groups that do not experience any form of shared temporal continuity.

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Uncertainty The second difficulty has to do with differentiated forms of uncertainty. The first form of uncertainty is individual. Let us consider anyone of us as a free person with several interests, aims, and life plans, and trying to establish a kind of overall ranking and order among them in our daily life. We must face our personal difficulty and ambivalence in constructing and keeping a unique motivational path – and the specific motivation for acting in favor of distant others in climate change scenarios is just one among several others. Additionally, we are aware that our personal hesitation and insecurity might generate a nonstable series of motives and corresponding actions. Furthermore, we acknowledge that, to get some significant effects related to such big challenges, we should keep ongoing a strong motivational effort for a long time. Being unsure about the quality and the strength of my climate change-sensitive motivation in the medium-long term, I could be tempted to give up from the very beginning. If we are not sure about our level of commitment vis à vis future recipients, we could realize that our initial commitment would be pointless: It might be safer to pursue other goals. A different level of uncertainty is group uncertainty. Even if I would adopt that rule converting it in a principle for my own agency, who could reassure me that others would follow the same rule? As climate change is systemic challenge, we could hope to get some results in facing it only if we could reach a systemic triggering of an adequate motivational path. Otherwise, my personal commitment would be useless. Consequently, the impossibility to reach a high level of certainty about the group or societal commitment might prevent me from adopting any motivation of this kind. A further form of the same difficulty can be called effectivity uncertainty. This is a comprehensive form of uncertainty including both individual and collective uncertainty. We are used to think that, in front of already present tragedies or of already present and experienced damages, we can mobilize our best motivational resources (from the individual and collective, as well as from the economic and institutional point of view) and try to realize the best and most efficient management of the consequences experienced now (Pirni & Buizza, 2022). Shall we hope to experience the same conduct vis à vis future – and so far, just possible – damages and at present not completely realized effects deriving from modeling and forecasts that, by definition, are open to failure? Not surprisingly, the answer is uncertain.

Individual Causal Inefficiency The third difficulty, the individual causal inefficiency, refers to a famous claim raised by Hiller (2011). Let us take into consideration a common action like the individual daily commuting from A to B with a highly emitting CO2 car for the simple pleasure to drive. My individual action is neither sufficient, nor necessary for causing climate change. Additionally, imagine that driving is for me a very pleasant activity and if I would decide to renounce it, I would experience a reduction of my personal wellbeing (Sinnott-Armstrong, 2005).

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If so, I can conclude that I have no duty to reduce my individual CO2 emission, simply because even if I would renounce commuting, climate change would follow its internal dynamic. If I decide to abandon or strongly reduce that activity, I give up a source of good for me, without benefit for others. From an overall perspective, anyone of us would agree on the assumption that climate change is a massive problem that deserves attention by the most powerful (political and economic) actors all over the word. Therefore: Which is my possible role in that challenge? What can I do, concretely? Apparently, nothing. From this point comes one of the most dangerous consequences in the moral domain: If I cannot do anything concrete, no one of my actions is morally wrong toward climate change, and I have no kind of responsibility toward that phenomenon (if I cannot cause anything relevant from a systemic point of view, I am not morally responsible at that level of what I did, I am doing, or I will do). This objection to moral individual responsibility has been widely discussed (Baatz, 2014; Pellegrino, 2018; Broome, 2012; Kagan, 2011; Corvino & Pirni, 2022). One of the most explored responses makes appeal to the political sphere. In my opinion, the invitation to promote political parties and options in favor of policies explicitly devoted to counter climate change is not enough, though. This at least for two main reasons. The first is a kind of performative contradiction: There is a substantially universal agreement about the fact that climate change is the massive result of a systemic individual behavior over the last three centuries and that, unfortunately, it is still dangerously accelerating during the last decades. Assuming that individuals could not do anything else means that they would never have been able to originate what now exists and what we are experiencing. Second – and this is an objection for both the political and moral sphere –, many empirical researches have demonstrated the costant decreasing trend of trust vis à vis the political actors all over the world. Completely trusting the politicians in the domain of climate change would imply either a surprising new countertendency that should be deeply analyzed or a new and subtle typology of self-deception from the individual point of view.

The Link Among Risk Perception, Preference Management, and Taking Action While the difficulties above have to do with the first two moments of the motivational path (acceptance and adoption of a rule), the next two will be dealing with the other two moments, related to the application of the rule in form of a principle for action and to the very action. The fourth difficulty revolves around the difficulty of tracing the most effective link among risk perception, preference management, and taking action. Such a difficulty is related to a very strong and multifaceted motivational gap, expressed by several “dragons of inaction” (Gifford, 2011), namely, psychological barriers that limit up to blocking the taking-actions moment. This has to do with two kinds of perception of risks: the experience-based and the description-based perception. While the perception of direct – or at least directly referred – experience can

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trigger a strong and pretty stable motivation in taking action in conformity of the perceived risk, any account based on a just outlined or framed description of possible future risk is tremendously less effective in pursuing the same goal (Gardiner, 2011; Jamieson, 2014; Weber, 2006). In other words, if the – to now, just minimally experienced – direct perception of climate change as a risk is not able to directly trigger the most robust, shared, and stable motivation to act to prevent it and if taking action when such a risk will be widely and massively experienced will be almost totally useless in order to limit the damage (and perhaps even to sufficiently manage it), we have to admit that we are facing a kind of strong and resilient moral issue. Starting from the intention of solving that issue, we should be aware of not entering in another and (only apparently less) pernicious moral risk: that one related to paternalism, i.e., to the more or less conscious attempt to foresee the collective preferences and foremost those coming by future people, trying to “normalize” and insert them within formerly established strategic lines and top-down paths. This risk would limit up to implicitly excluding the possibility to integrate new preferences, needs, and plans of life coming from the future generations (Meyer & Roser, 2009). The linear implication is that this risk, when consolidated as a strategic line orienting policy, would strongly limit the legitimate possibility of the future agents to reshape the allocation of resources and budgets. Notwithstanding, a possible way for addressing that issue seems to be related to the possible managing of individual and collective preferences and preventing or limiting the consolidation of those preferences able to block climate-change-sensitive actions-plans (Bykvist, 2009; Markowitz & Monroe, 2021). This has to do with a comprehensive framing of the issue of feasibility, meaning a substantial positive orientation by individuals toward (patterns of) action that are presented with details and proofs of evidence (or by referring to surely negative results if not addressed) and good possibility and percentage of positive outcome. We could conclude on this point by affirming that, if the problem related to how to manage and organize individual and collective preference is surely a challenge, we could easily agree on the fact that such a challenge is strengthened when we refer to present and future agents, trying to combine the possibility to capture the preferences of both already-present-agents and not-yet-present ones and to turn those preferences toward an unique coherent motivational plan action-oriented (Corvino, 2021; Markowitz & Monroe, 2021).

Moral Corruption, Reciprocity, and Procrastination The fifth difficulty has to do with moral corruption, forms of (direct or indirect) reciprocity among subjects acting on different time frames, and procrastination of taking action.

Moral Corruption In climate change scenarios, “moral corruption” (Gardiner, 2011, pp. 6–8, 45–48, 301–396) is the result of three distinct but not divergent factors (or “storms”) that

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concur in generating and shaping “the perfect moral storm”: The first two storms have to do with serious asymmetries of power. Specifically, the first, the global storm, focuses on what the world’s affluent nations do, i.e., orient, shape, and strongly determine the world’s agenda, by considering primarily their own interests and only residually the poorest nations’ ones. The second storm is intergenerational. Its key feature is that the current generation possesses a greater power than the later ones: Present generations can seriously affect the possibility and prospects of the future ones, up to putting in place the very condition of human extinction, while any reversing of the situation is logically and pragmatically impossible. Finally, the third storm is theoretical and deals with massive inadequacy of the theories in countering the first two storms. Moral corruption constitutes the cross-point and the final product of those storms and occurs when those involved in a complex moral problem – like realizing concrete actions against climate change as a whole – profit from the existence of an intricate web of responsibilities to justify evasion from any form of responsibility and, by avoiding acting, for acting in favor of the preservation of the status quo (Harris, 2019, Heilinger, 2019). This series of considerations lead to a further specification of moral corruption: what we could qualify as a weak satisfaction. This difficulty must deal with the linkage above outlined among the (unstable) motivation to act, the (fluctuant) perception of climate change as a challenge related to the present generation, and the need of considering (temporally) distant recipients of my action. The framing of this challenge can be referred to both the individual and collective perspectives through a unique issue: What do we owe to the future generation and why? Or, put in another way: Why should I renounce something now, in order to allow distant people to profit off my renounces, having in mind that my “net renounce” here and now might not produce a “net benefit” in this or other places and in other times?

Reciprocity A source of the weak satisfaction – and of the corresponding weak or unstable motivation – is a difficulty in reciprocating. In the moral domain, we are used to reciprocal motivation, by reproducing a very basic mental schema: I do something for you, in force of pretty well-grounded expectation that you will do something for me. In other words, my motivational effort in starting to do something “for you” – namely, by imagining taking action in your favor – is from the very beginning ideally (even if just partially) “compensated” by the foreseeing of your (future) taking action in my favor. This pattern potentially inaugurates a virtuous chain of reciprocity that continuously triggers and strengthens my – and the other’s – motivational path. Nonetheless, there are some relevant difficulties related to this point. Among others, Barry (1977) questioned the robustness of the obligation lying on the recipients of an action to give something back to the agent, just from the fact of being (perhaps by chance) the recipient of her action. In sum, the simple or not requested “receiving” does not ground the duty to “give back.” Other objections come if we consider not just the horizontal perspective (the most typical situation contemplated in questions of distributive justice) but the vertical, meaning diachronic or intertemporal one (Hubin,

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1976; Gosseries & Meyer, 2009, Sikora & Barry, 2012; Fritsch, 2018; see below, section “The Subtler Obstacle: Intergenerational Indifference”). This difficulty can be addressed by articulating the very meaning of reciprocity and introducing different models for framing it (Menga, 2021, pp. 137–169). Gosseries (2001, 2009, 2023) introduced three different models of reciprocity (ascending, descending, and double). By reconsidering the point from the motivational side, there are at least three challenges on this point. First, the distinction between direct or indirect reciprocity. If we can agree on the existence of a certain level of obligation toward the future generation or the previous one that entered or might enter in our direct possibility of experience and reciprocate, we remain skeptical about the possibility of maintaining the same level of motivation to act vis à vis people belonging to a temporal domain which is not directly entering in our possibility to act. Second, the perceived equivalence. What can we hope can be exchanged between generations that will maintain the same value perception in the transition between giver and recipient? That is, how can we be sure that what we decide to save and transfer, as having an objective value for us, will be understood as having the same (or an equivalent) objective value for those who receive it? (Kaplan et al., 2017). Third, the perspective of procrastination. This is a sort of more or less implicit consequence or side effect of the reciprocity’s issue. Because of the relevant difficulties in reciprocating agency, we can be tempted to postpone, meaning to analyze better and indefinitely extend the evaluation moment on what to do, consequently avoiding any concrete action.

Procrastination There exists a quite wide debate on procrastination. Primarily, we should distinguish between first- and second-order procrastination (Andreou, 2007a, b; Andreou & White, 2010). The first order of procrastination occurs when an individual agent postpones the actions that could help her in realizing what she perceives to be morally compelling (e.g., postponing the day to quit smoking). The second order of procrastination occurs when she postpones the implementation of any willing “coercive solutions” coming from her own will that might prevent postponing those same actions (e.g., postponing the day when a smoker asks her partner to adopt “coercive measures” against her, such as hiding her cigarettes or preventing her to smoke with any means, in case she is unable to quit smoking alone). Bringing the discussion back to our theme, we do acknowledge to have specific duties to reduce climate change (Baatz, 2014; Grasso, 2015), but nonetheless we continue postponing action that we consider in favor of that reduction. Any attempt for overcoming the procrastinating behavior starts from a twofold preliminary point: (a) the self-perception of being a procrastinator by the single agent and (b) the comprehensive awareness of the pernicious effects she tackles by recursively reproducing the procrastination loop. Then, such an attempt should produce individual mechanisms for significatively raising the “moral costs” deriving from procrastinating behaviors in order to make these less convenient and profitable from the first-person point of view (Corvino, 2021). The subsequent consequence of this is

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the rediscovery and strengthening of the preliminary motivation to adopting climatechange-sensitive behaviors without finding moral excuses for postponing no one of the last two moments of the motivational path, i.e., the application of and the action in accordance with a principle we previously decided to accept and adopt.

The Motivational Impasse and Three Ideal-Typic Reactions: Eco-anxiety, Indifference, and Solidarity The conclusion we can derive from the above is the following: motivating agents to effectively take care of the future appear to be an undoable task. More specifically, prospecting patterns of action in favor of future recipients might appear too general, broad, and “motivationally cold.” Additionally, as a contribution to the strategy for containing climate change and its effects, the prospected achievements are too distant and uncertain. Therefore, activating climate change-sensitive behavior might appear pointless. In front of such a conclusion, which might be depicted as a motivational impasse, we may acknowledge different forms of reactions. In what follows, we shall try to articulate three forms, or three ideal types of reaction. The first ideal type has been called eco-anxiety. Eco-anxiety primarily refers to the observation of ecological and climate problems by a single subject and her consequent evaluation about the intrinsic uncertainty of a solution. It may include many kinds of manifestations, and they can change over time. Most of them are framed as healthy reactions vis à vis threats and loss, and only the strongest forms of them are to be considered from a pathological point of view. A general overview may address this ideal type as a complex system of “coping and changing” (Pihkala, 2022), including at least three major dimensions – “action,” “grieving” (or “emotional engagement”), and “distancing” (Reser & Swim, 2011, p. 112; Mosquera & Jylhä, 2022). The action dimension has to do with the so-called “practical anxiety” (Kurth, 2018), meaning proenvironmental behaviors and community building of many kinds, i.e., thinking about what the best course of action would be, as well as concrete attempt for “doing something” on my behalf, also by underestimating (consciously or not) any kind of obstacles against the achievement of individuals and group’s aim. Grieving (and other emotional engagements gathered under this label) refers to the need to tackle changes and losses by experiencing individual emotional reactions or by putting in place practices of sharing feelings not only of sadness, but also of eco-guilt, gratitude or/and anger, meeting with people in specific or symbolic date or place of remembrance, writing and sharing notes about one’s feelings, and so on (Norgaard, 2011; Pihkala, 2021). Grieving may also give shape to ethical tasks, by encouraging the sharing of positive engaging emotions (Mosquera & Jylhä, 2022; Solomon, 2004). Problems may raise when this behavioral domain becomes too intense or overwhelming in an individual everyday life, up to strongly marginalizing the other two dimensions within the schema above proposed. Finally, distancing has to do with the need to rest from the entire process that the individual obtains by self-care or avoidance behavior. This kind of practice is not to

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be seen as a signal of a maladaptive stand vis à vis what is happening, though this interpretation underestimates the healthy dose of distancing, mostly as a first reaction toward a state of affairs just happened. Nonetheless, if distancing behavior becomes the prominent way for reacting toward the external world, if it becomes a stable behavior instead of being temporally relativized and pragmatically incapsulated among the other two dimensions of the coping and changing scheme, it becomes pathological (Stoknes, 2015). The second ideal type is indifference. As a first approximation, indifference is a kind of side-product of eco-anxiety. In a more schematic way, by imagining an ideal triangle among action, grieving, and distancing, we might affirm that indifference lies in an ideal intermediate point between grieving and distancing. This preliminary positioning evocates some implications. First, we are implicitly affirming that indifference is an ideal type (whose intrinsic strength we will explore in the next paragraph) that can also be explained within the constitutive schema of eco-anxiety or can be understood as a strengthened form of the same eco-anxiety. Second, even if, at a first glance, indifference seems to be a linear and “natural” evolution of the distancing domain, its specific concretization also implies some form of emotional engagement and attempt to raising proactive arguments about its own legitimacy. Third, by considering indifference as bordering on the grieving (or the emotional engagement) domain, we acknowledge a constitutive emotional side of that typology of reaction that however connotes it as a negative emotion: an emotion that systematically downsizes – up to canceling – any action aimed at the other person. Being indifferent means something different from a healthy “self-care,” but also from the “simple” willingness to give expression and to share an emotional awareness. In short and as a first approximation, indifference deserves and covers a specific place between individualism inclining to selfish behavior and collectivism inclining to the need of expressing one’s thoughts in common. Finally, the third ideal type is solidarity, which lies between action and grieving. Solidarity always implies an emotional engagement. It is pretty unplausible to imagine a concretization of an action that has been considered by all involved subjects as a solidaristic one but is not accompanied (anticipated, flanked, or followed) by several emotional reactions. This is true also if such an accompaniment expresses through “subtle languages” made up of simple glances or minimal gestures between the subjects involved, regardless of the role they played in that specific action. But solidarity is not only a mental fact, or a simple belief that does not give place to action with an even minimal impact in a specific context. Rather, the behaviors inspired by solidarity seek for the more effective impact in and for the reference context. After this preliminary outline, we should not forget that these three ideal types were intended to give shape to corresponding typologies of reaction vis à vis the comprehensive motivational impasse above outlined. Now, by considering the eco-anxiety ideal type only as part of the background framework of our discourse, in what follows we will be addressing the indifference ideal type, trying subsequently to counter it by introducing a reshaped account of the solidarity ideal type, understood as the most

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effective – and not ingenuous – mode for overcoming indifference. In doing that, we intend to articulate an argumentative pattern flexible but strong enough to countering the motivational impasse and all preliminary obstacles, outlined at the beginning, by finally linking our discourse to the climate change domain.

The Subtler Obstacle: Intergenerational Indifference In order to enter in the specific domain of indifference, let me present some stipulative clarifications which shall orient our understanding toward a unique comprehensive meaning. Prima facie, a human being who is described as “indifferent” is an agent who does not care about differences, a person who is acquainted with a sole parameter of judgment, an irreplaceable set of values that her agency path is to be harmonized with. An indifferent agent is a person who does not care about “others” – and, fundamentally, about the multifaceted contribution that might come from them. Seen in this way, i.e., as selfishness, indifference is obviously morally wrong. Nonetheless, indifference seems to receive a sort of “moral discount” when it amounts to indifference directed toward future people. We are referring to an indifference focused on future human beings, that is, individuals or groups that we will not have the chance to meet in person, individuals who will be not able to share their knowledge, judgment, or presence with us. This is what we call diachronic indifference. This kind of indifference might receive a moral excuse. On the one hand, we could raise good normative arguments to maintain the need of abandoning the indifferentist behavior toward contemporaries. On the other, avoiding indifference toward future people may be too demanding and implicitly implying too higher moral standards. How would it be possible for anyone to feel guilty for being indifferent toward persons who are unknown to them? Unfortunately, this kind of indifference represents one of the most relevant challenges of our time. By eschewing consideration of future individuals and groups, we run the risk of seriously damaging future generations – just to mention some crucial domains: environmental sustainability, which includes climate change as a global, inescapable issue, and the sustainability of welfare systems, like healthcare and the pension systems, first (Pirni & Corvino, 2019). Hence, intergenerational and diachronic indifference must cease to receive moral discounts.

Contrastive Motivations Let us consider a basic situation in which an agent deals with a clear claim of justice. In order to introduce a situation that is closer to the abovementioned rationale, let us consider an intergenerational variant of the same claim, following a quasi-syllogistic reasoning.

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Prima facie and as first major premise, we know that the duties of justice constitute a relevant part of one of the most largely shared and accepted ideas of public good. As second major premise, we know that justice has to be demanded for everyone; still, a particular attention is to be given to the weakest, the most vulnerable individuals and groups, to those who have been damaged or will (might) be damaged by our (individual or collective) acts or omissions – and this with specific reference to the climate change. Also, as minor premise, we know that future generations appropriately correspond to the idea of weakness, vulnerability, and damageability above alluded to. Finally, as syllogistic consequence and conclusion, we know that we have duties of justice toward future generations, and we have to consider these ones as a part pleno jure of our individual and public duty (Pirni, 2021). Yet, such very common awareness and knowledge is not enough per se; it does not sufficiently motivate us to systematically orient our action in favor of future generations, nor it does introduce such subjects within the range of recipients of duties of justice that have to be respected and fulfilled without exceptions. In other terms, we know that we should be motivated to act to accomplish this kind of duties too, yet we are extremely good at finding good motivations to skip them, or at least to postpone them in favor of other and “more inescapable” duties that occupy and completely fill our individual and collective ability to act. We might wonder why this happens so commonly. A tentative answer should consider how we are constructed as moral subjects, that is, to take an action that is endowed with moral relevance. Accordingly, we should understand why objective “good reasons” – or rational arguments constructed following an accurate logical interdependence among single premises and passages – very frequently are not enough to become “one’s own reasons”: sources of motivation of one’s own agency, namely, motivations to act (Mordacci, 2008, pp. 17–32). In turn, to understand such crucial issue implies a quick détour within the debate between internalism and externalism. Before dealing with such debate as much as it is relevant here, we should clarify a basic meaning of the concept of “reason” that we are using, in order to better enlighten the distinction between “good” reasons and “one’s own” reasons abovementioned. In this regard, the defining account given by Scanlon is still of particular relevance: “a reason is a consideration that counts in favour of something” (1998, p. 17). In other terms, “having a reason” means “having a motivation,” or having articulated and selected “a force,” a mental state which is able to move a single agent toward taking or avoiding a specific action. Still, in moral theory, we are used to distinguish between two kinds of reasons. On the one hand, there are reasons which are able to justify a choice or a practical judgment. These are reasons that sustain the adoption of certain behaviors that are able to show the validity of a specific choice and to offer a clear argument to adopt that choice as principle of the consequent action. On the other, there are reasons which are in charge of explaining why we favored that choice over another, and why, due to certain specific circumstances, we decided to act in a certain way in that specific moment.

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Several ways have been proposed to give shape to such a distinction: justificatory reason versus operative reasons (Scanlon, 1998), and external versus internal reasons (Williams, 1981). In the present context, we will adopt the distinction between justificatory reasons versus explanatory reasons introduced by Mordacci (2008, pp. 22–23). Naturally, each distinction is drawn accordingly to specific features. Yet, as a common ground for all those distinctions, three main elements are to be kept into account at the very least. First, we should consider the justificatory reasons as reasons that are valid in every time and space: We could say that such reasons are endowed with a universal validity (recalling our example: the duty of justice toward the most vulnerable people is valid independently from the specific place or time in which such claim is raised). Conversely, the explanatory reasons are inevitably contextual ones: An explanatory reason is related to a “here and now,” to a specific time frame and to a determined spatial context. Second, in line with that first framing, we should maintain that, while the justificatory reasons are basically reasons for and from the third-person point of view (they indicate a state of affairs whose validity is predicated as such for each rational agent), the explanatory reasons are grounded in the first-person point of view, namely, from my own point of view. Consequently – as third point of distinction – we are used to define the level devoted to the justification as the normative one, namely, the sphere where we are in search for the validity to the moral norms, while the level of explanation corresponds to the descriptive one, namely, the sphere in which we isolate the motivation according to which that specific agent did that specific action. Within this framework, we might recall the above-introduced distinction between internalism and externalism, which originated from the paradigmatic works by Falk (1986) and Frankena (1976). To put it in very synthetic terms, from an internalistic point of view we could maintain that the justificatory reason has an intrinsic motivational strength for each agent, or: The knowledge of a duty, together with its correlative mental states, is self-motivating. Conversely, from an externalistic point of view, the awareness about the moral norm is not sufficient to motivate the individual to act or not to act: The justificatory reasons are not per se motivating, and they do not immediately trigger the agency. Rather, they can play such role as soon as those reasons couple with motivations – such as emotional or psychological factors – which are basically independent from any form of moral validation. As it is well known, both points of view have to cope with strong objections. Against internalism, first: In case we give it for granted that the awareness about a duty is self-motivating for the moral agent, how can we explain the non-moral behavior? Namely, why do we not live in a world inhabited by moral agents in the fullest sense of the term? In turn, against externalism, let us imagine we have a moral awareness about the good which is grounded in strong arguments, but let us admit being motivated – and to act being moved – by something we cannot give a justificatory account thereof. That being the case, we would have to conclude that we are used to act

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accordingly to invalid motivations, namely, motivations that we are not able to justify by articulating rational arguments. We would experience a constant tension between what we must rationally sustain and want, and what we effectively do, in accordance with occasional mental states or random motives. The rational feature of any human agent would play a very limited role, up to become motivationally irrelevant: No moral perspective would accept such a consequence (Mordacci, 2008, pp. 29–32). By rephrasing the point in our terms, on the one hand, we have to deal with a pretty long list of possible internalistic, quasi-syllogistic ways to describe intergenerational commitments and duties toward future generations. On the other, in order to reaffirm such approaches and to realize the correlative actions, we have to fight against several externalistic approaches that regard negative emotions, like diachronic indifference, as the most effective ways to motivate an agent or a group to act or not to act. The pragmatic strength of an externalistic approach is pretty evident here, as the difficulties to adopt effective political decisions and individual/collective behaviors to counter climate change are not ceasing to demonstrate, just to give an example (Pellegrini-Masini et al., 2019). Nonetheless, we have to admit that the deliberative process which is internal to a rational agent is a more complex thing, and that a simple counterpositioning between two approaches – or two definitions of “reason” – might not grasp its multifaceted comprehensive structure. In other terms, the moral identity or the authenticity of each rational agent is the result of an irreducibly individual way to find a synthesis, which is lead by our practical reason, among different motivational sources (Koorsgard, 1996, pp. 100–101). Being an individual, that is, being a “self,” means to be able to grasp “the importance of what we care about” (Frankfurt, 1988) by deliberating and selecting among different motivational sources: This is the result of a rational individual process which mediates among divergent motivations and that selects and joins the ones which are considered along a line of coherence from the first-person point of view. Now, our argument can be reshaped as a contrast, or a struggle among moral motivations to be addressed within a line of individual rational coherence. In order to let this deliberative process function at its best, offering different options to the same faculty of will is more than welcomed, as well as enriching the overall picture by inserting alternative opportunities within the deliberative process which is always on the move.

Reconsidering Solidarity Versus Indifference As we noticed, the indifference ideal type can play a relevant role within the (de-) motivational sphere. But this driver for orienting – or blocking – the individual motivational path is not the sole one operating in a specific moment. Rather, as any other driver, it is part of a complex net of drivers and reasons enabling, focalizing, or deflecting the individual effort toward a certain outcome. Let us then enrich the list of possible “reasons” (motivations), to be evaluated from the first-person point of view. Such an attempt will overcome the dualistic logic which distinguishes between

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explicative reasons and justificative reasons presented above, to try and verify the conceptual strength of a mental status which we would tend to evaluate as a positive emotion: solidarity. We cannot enter here in a wider account related to solidarity, with specific reference to its ontological, phenomenological, and historical points of view (Pirni, 2021). We must here limit our attention to the effects that the emotion of solidarity may play as compared with indifference. In order to do that, let us start from a minimalistic take of solidarity as a whole. Solidarity is a movement toward the other, as a push to be of help to the other in need, or the willingness to share the same goal with someone else (Sangiovanni, 2015). Prima facie, that movement is not thought to bring about any enduring consequence: It is an emotion, a mental state which is destined to be replaced by – or to stay in struggle with – other mental states, like the senses of inadequacies toward other people, self-confinement, self-interest, and so on. To exercise solidarity means to live one’s own life with the awareness that we share a destiny with the entire community of living beings: It means being aware of the radical vulnerability of the human. It means, in other words, to consider solidarity as an authentic passion for that community which decides to build up a different pathway to that of egotism (Pirni, 2018). Yet, the problem we need to face, once we decide to embark on the pathway that takes solidarity as an emotion seriously instead of that of indifference, is to oppose indifference in its diachronic declination, as the one we are considering here. To frame this point, it could be useful recall a relevant etymological root of the word “solidarity” and its ethical implications. The history of the concept “solidarity” is rooted in the legal neo-Latin term solidarius, which comes from the Law of Obligations. Such concept, in case of a debt incurred by a plurality of subjects, indicates the debtors in solido, that is, those that are responsible each for the entire sum that is owed. This same definition appears as one of the possible meanings of the term Solidarité under the relative item of the Encyclopédie, which in turn takes it entirely from the item Solidité of the Dictionnaire universel du commerce (Cunico, 2017, pp. 183–189). In this way, thanks to the pervasive influence that the Encyclopédie will have in the entire European culture, the first term absorbs the significance of the second too, even if such constitutive cobelonging between solidarity and solidity is not that wellknown. But what matters the most here is a sort of exclusive and special relationship of reciprocal obligation that holds together the members of a same group of debtors, so that each of them is coresponsible vis à vis each other, to the point that they could be responsible for the entire debt. Solidarity, then, expresses an obligation, a bond, though a limited one. I accept to be responsible for a debt contracted together with other individuals – but just if I feel a particular connection, if I feel close to such other individuals, which means: Solidarity seems to describe both a motivational source and a limited normative obligation, based on a preliminary knowledge and on preliminary bonds which from the outset appear hardly to be enlarged and reproduced. Also, such aspect of solidarity proves itself as totally synchronic and horizontal: I am sympathetic with those who belong to a certain group I identified, who share a

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certain time (the moment when the debt was contracted) and a certain space (the place where such agreement took place and where it applies), while I might be equally totally indifferent vis à vis many others. In order to efficiently counter the diachronic indifference, let us then explore the possibility to ground a diachronic and vertical dimension of solidarity.

Overcoming the Motivational Gap: A Twofold Path Grounding the Diachronic Solidarity The basic awareness related to the scope and content of any form of solidarity is a reciprocal obligation that consists in being open to help anyone in actual or potential (namely, future) need. We are not assuming here that the duties toward future generations should have a priority over the duties toward the present ones. However, the former cannot be excluded. Rather, both should be included within a unique (morally binding) frame – and this assumption is exactly the starting point for a possible justificatory path for diachronic solidarity. Recalling the previous point, the reciprocity of the obligation of solidarity stems from the legal dimension. In turn, the legal reciprocity reproduces the structure and paves the way to an ethical dimension, articulated in a diachronic and intergenerational sense. If we accept the coresponsibility of the joint payment, expressed by the term solidarius and if we declare ourselves available to “pay for everyone,” then each generation will have a strong interest in leaving to the upcoming ones the least possible debt. Moreover, it will in principle prove to be able to pay even for those debts contracted by the members of the “future” humanity. Prima facie, it may indeed seem counterfactual (or even absurd) to be asked to pay for debts which have not been contracted yet. The point here is to leave the widest possible set of opportunities to future generations (that is, neither depriving, nor reducing their individual and collective goals). If we keep such regulative ideal in mind, we place future generations in the position of taking up the least possible amount of further debts, to be added to those we will not be able to honor and that will therefore necessarily need to be paid up by them (Palombella, 2007; Casadei, 2012; Brännmark, 2016). If we frame the issue in these terms, then the question over the presence of solidarity obligations in a diachronic sense relates to such theoretical paradigms which are based on the idea of an “indirect reciprocity” (Gosseries, 2001). These positions share a fundamental assumption: Each generation takes up the obligation to pass on to the future generations what it received from past generations, in terms of goods, opportunities, and achievements in the largest sense of the terms. Thus, a chain of obligations is consequentially created. However, such theories is subjected to a series of objections from an externalist perspective, as far as it proves unable to coherently justify the creation of an obligation in the future, if not appealing to a source of motivation which is external – i.e., justified

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through other (historical, cultural, religious, and juridical) means – to that framework. Such objections seriously undermine the possibility to carry on with such a normative commitment and with the correlative duty of justice with respect to future generations. The most relevant objection to this view regards the causal implication linking the concepts of heritage as a “gift” received from the previous generation to the “duty” vis à vis the next generation. It looks counterintuitive that those who received a gift (the current generation) do not need to envisage any form of reciprocity vis à vis the giver (the past generation) but do feel obliged to an entity (the next generation) from which, potentially, they may not be able to receive anything from (Barry, 1991; Gardiner, 2011; Meyer & Roser, 2009). The foundation of such a duty is therefore to be found in an external motivational source, namely, in a collective preexisting practice that prescribes to deal with the interests of future subjects. Yet, the existence of such a practice is necessarily subjected to occasionalism and contextualism: It does not guarantee a stable and constant motivational foundation, and it would risk to occasionally reignite diachronic indifference. Moreover, the above-examined dialectic would reproduce itself even with respect to internalism: The reasons for the intergenerational obligation are not sufficient to constitute a motivation for action. Once again, they are “good reasons” yet hardly become “my reasons.”

A Kantian Approach In what follows, we would like to try a different path, for which the contribution that the moral Kantian theory may offer to the integration of an internalist perspective – with respect to the motivational foundation of the intergenerational duties of justice – deserves to be recalled. An effective point of departure, from this perspective, can be offered by a selected reading of the Metaphysics of Morals. The title of paragraph VI of Kant’s Introduction to the Doctrine of Virtue claims that “Ethics Does Not Give Laws for Actions (Ius does that), But Only for Maxims of Actions” (Kant, 2012, p. 152). Paragraph VII specifies that “Ethical Duties are of Wide Obligation, Whereas Duties of Right Are of Narrow Obligation.” Nonetheless, this does not mean that, being of wide obligation, the ethical duties may be considered as nonduties. This point is immediately made clear by Kant (2012): But a wide duty is not to be taken as permission to make exceptions to the maxim of actions but only as permission to limit one maxim of duty by another (e.g. love of one’s neighbour in general by love of one’s parents), by which in fact the field for the practice of virtue is widened. (p. 153, emphasis added)

Kant suggests that we have a unique normative tie to evaluate and weigh all the alternatives even if, in the end, all the duties have to be undertaken with no exceptions: We can methodologically limit the pursuit of a duty by referring to the urgency of pursuing another one, but we cannot simply eliminate a duty, nor can we postpone fulfillment of it sine die.

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Legal obligations always have a “strict” implication, namely, the duty to pay taxes belongs to such category and it is not subjected to any interpretation or exception – the same applies to the duty of the State to aid those who need such aid. Furthermore, legal obligations belong to the set of horizontal and synchronic, and thus intragenerational, duties: They are duties managed within a State which exists in the here and now and executed by or for the benefit of those who exist here and now. On the other hand, ethical duties are of a different kind and lead to a different destination: They are subjected to the same normative bond, yet they allow for a certain temporal latitudo: They cannot be fulfilled, yet an ideal ranking can be produced. As a first approximation, from the perspective of the self, it looks reasonable to expect that the duties vis à vis those who are closer to the agent will be honored first, and only then those vis à vis all the other subjects. This allows for what we have qualified as an obligation ranking (Pirni, 2019), though without weakening the normative bond to be respected. Such duties, however, seem to permit a determination in an inter-temporal facet that is, we would say, diachronic and intergenerational. In order to clarify such point, let us consider again the claim summed up by the title of the paragraph VI above mentioned: “Ethics Does Not Give Laws for Actions (Ius does that), But Only for Maxims of Actions.” Ethics does not compel in the same sense that law does, but it provides will with a maxim that is a subjective principle of action; that will itself is called to adjudicate whether to adopt or not. The bond between individual freedom and universal moral law this way is forged – that same bond that the critique of practical reason had represented in a paradigmatic form. Nonetheless, ethics does not end up here. It indeed proposes to the individual will a principle on the basis of which to evaluate the opportunity of pursuing such subjective principle itself. We are here referring to what is commonly understood as a “universalization test,” whose formula corresponds to the first formulation of the categorical imperative in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Kant, 2010, p. 31; see also Kant, 2012, pp. 152–153). Only the maxim which successfully meets the universalization test can become a categorical imperative. Still, what does it mean “to meet the test” in this case? It means, first, to perform an exercise that looks toward the future. The necessity for a temporal offset is indeed implicit in the test. At the moment 1, the operative possibility, a maxim in fact, which I decide to choose, faces me. That maxim I decide to turn into a motivational principle to guide my action only in force of the result of an exercise in imagination: Imagining that, in the moment 2, any being capable of reason could choose that as a principle of their action. In this sense, the test could be put this way: “do select here and now only that maxim that, in any possible time and place, could be chosen by any being capable of reason.” Such a structure – which we would call justificative reason – implies, on the one hand, the creation of a duty, that is a normative bond endowed with a ground which is exclusively internal to individual will and, on the other, a necessarily intersubjective validity that is diachronic and overcontextual: It must be valid for any “here” and “now” and for any agent capable of reason. The idea of diachronic solidarity can be detached from the assimilation to indirect reciprocity – and its relevant objections – and it can become a maxim of diachronic and intergenerational solidarity that is a normative principle of action grounded in the

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practical reason of any human being, which completes the motivational structure of individual action. It is now clear that the entire discourse hereby investigated can be traced back to this maxim, particularly with reference to the overcoming of a diachronic indifference, which results counterpointed both with respect to a motivational emotional matrix diametrically opposite to that (that is diachronic solidarity) and through the opening up of a normative internalistic order that justifies the validity and motivational reach of its own principles of action thanks to the diachronic, intergenerational, and universal perspective on these very same principles.

Conclusion The chapter presents a normative framework to overcome the motivational gap, facing the attempt to consider future people in the context of increasing climate change. The chapter proposes first a preliminary framing of the concept of motivation and the motivational path from the first-person point of view. It offers then a detailed analysis of the most important obstacles to the deployment of the motivational path. Furthermore, the argumentative path proposes a triple ideal-typic reactions vis-à-vis the motivational impasse. Finally, it focuses on the subtler obstacle to climate-change-sensitive motivation: the intergenerational indifference. Two arguments against this specific form of indifference are provided. The first is an account of the emotion of solidarity and the framing of the idea of diachronic solidarity as a (ethically and legally) grounded path for countering indifference. The second is a normative argument derived from a Kantian framework: the idea of a diachronic solidarity as a maxim and justificative reason, which plays a direct motivational role on the single subject toward future generations.

Cross-References ▶ Climate Change Action as Collective Action ▶ Climate Change and Decision Theory ▶ Climate Change and Psychology ▶ Climate Change, the Non-identity Problem, and the Metaphysics of Transgenerational Actions ▶ Philosophical Perspectives on Climate Anxiety

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Mitigation Duties Michel Bourban

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Definitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Two Mitigation Measures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Five Kinds of Agents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Responsibility and Duty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Individual Climate Duties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Two Individual Duties of Climate Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Options to Fulfill Individual Climate Duties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Are Mitigation Duties Too Demanding? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Mitigation Duties of States . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . PPP, APP, and BPP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . CBDR-RC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . IPAT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Subnational Jurisdictions, Supranational Organizations, and Corporations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reforming the WTO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Carbon Majors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

To avoid dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system, drastic mitigation measures have become necessary. But who should do what and how much of it should they do to help the global effort to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions? This chapter addresses this question by specifying the identity of duty-bearers, the content of their mitigation duties, and how demanding these duties are. It identifies five families of agents and explains that each individual M. Bourban (*) Department of Philosophy, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_52

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and collective agent has specific duties to contribute to mitigation measures: individual agents, nation-states, subnational jurisdictions, supranational formations, and economic corporations. For each family of agents, arguments for and against mitigation duties are scrutinized, with the objective of presenting a detailed account of burden-sharing climate justice. In addition to investigating the duties held by individual agents and nation-states, the two families of agents that have attracted most attention from climate justice scholars so far, this chapter also proposes to focus on three new agents in order to turn philosophical discussions on climate change in new directions: cities, the World Trade Organization, and carbon majors. The polycentric approach to climate change governance and the related normative framework of multiscalar justice seem particularly promising in terms of finding new ways to promote climate justice in a context of failure to bring climate change under political control at the national and international levels. Keywords

Climate justice · Ethics · Mitigation · Duties · Responsibility · Nation-states · Corporations · Cities · Trade

Introduction The topic of climate change mitigation has been discussed in academic and political circles for more than three decades. At least since the publication of the first IPCC Assessment Report in 1990, it has become clear that substantial and rapid mitigation measures are necessary to avoid dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. However, over the last few decades, global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have not only continued to grow, but have also done so at an increased rate. As a result, what is left of the global carbon budget is now very meager. If we are to comply with the overall goal of the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to “well below 2
C” while “pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5
C” (UNFCCC, 2015, p. art. 2.1), the remaining budget is indeed small and rapidly shrinking. For instance, the IPCC (2022, p. 10) warns that the remaining carbon budget is no more than 500 GtCO2 for a 50% probability of limiting global warming to 1.5
C, and no more than 1150 GtCO2 for a 67% probability of limiting global warming to 2
C. To get an estimate of how little this represents, cumulative net CO2 emissions for the 2010–2019 decade would exhaust about four-fifths of the totality of the remaining carbon budget for a 50% probability of limiting global warming to 1.5
C, and about one-third of the remaining budget for a 67% probability of limiting global warming to 2
C (IPCC, 2022, p. 10). What mitigation measures should be implemented in the coming years and decades to avoid overshooting the global carbon budget? This chapter specifies what kind of agents (the identity of duty-bearers) owe what kind of mitigation duties (the content of duties of climate justice) and to what extent (the demandingness of

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duties of climate justice). It starts with a distinction between two mitigation measures and then explains the context in which the idea of mitigation duties emerged, who talked about it first, and how the topic evolved in the literature over time. Next, the chapter explores the different kinds of mitigation duties owed by five different families of agents. In each case, it also presents major objections that have been voiced against mitigation duties and proposes possible responses to these challenges. Since the lion’s share of the literature on climate justice addresses the mitigation duties of individuals and nation-states, this chapter focuses most heavily on these two families of agents. However, it also highlights three other duty-bearers that have been relatively neglected so far: subnational jurisdictions, supranational formations, and economic corporations. Outlining the responsibilities of these collective agents leads to exploring new avenues in research on climate justice, which so far remains essentially state-centric. The point is not to question the responsibilities of states or individuals, who do owe major mitigation duties, but rather to highlight that other families of agents also have significant responsibilities when it comes to addressing climate change.

Definitions Two Mitigation Measures According to the IPCC (2014b, p. 4), mitigation is “a human intervention to reduce the sources or enhance the sinks of greenhouse gases.” In other words, there are two possible options to mitigate climate change: reducing GHG emissions and enhancing the sinks in which GHGs are stored. The first option directly cuts GHG emissions at their source. Replacing fossil fuels with renewable energies fits into this category. The second option relies on carbon dioxide removal (CDR), that is, the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere to store it in geological, terrestrial, or ocean reservoirs, or in products. Negative emissions technologies (NETs), such as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), fit into this second category. Both emissions reductions and CDR have the same objective: to avoid a dangerous level of atmospheric GHG concentration. They do so, however, by pursuing two different strategies with different levels of effectiveness. While emissions reductions ensure that GHGs remain sequestered in stable geological formations, enhancing sinks takes place after those GHGs have already been emitted. Due to reversal risks (human actions and natural forces disturbing reservoirs of carbon) and/or irreversible climate impacts that would cause additional warming during the carbon budget overshoot period (such as permafrost thawing, weakening of land and ocean carbon sinks, and Amazon forest dieback), sink enhancement might well prove less effective than it would otherwise have been (Dooley & Kartha, 2018, pp. 82–83). When climate justice scholars discuss mitigation duties, most of them have in mind duties to reduce GHG emissions. There are however two exceptions. The first can be found in discussions on the ethics of geoengineering (See Callies, “The Ethics of Geoengineering,” this volume). John Shepherd et al. (2009, p. 1) define

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geoengineering as “the deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment to counteract anthropogenic climate change.” Geoengineering methods include both solar radiation management (SRM) and CDR techniques. According to Peter Singer (2016, p. 66), “Despite the very significant known and unknown risks of geoengineering, there is some plausibility to the idea that we ought to have it in our back pocket as a Plan B in case we fail to reduce greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently to prevent catastrophic climate change.” To make this “Plan B” plausible, “we would need to start doing research directed at finding out what might work and how to reduce the risks” (Singer, 2016, p. 66). How would this research be financed? Singer (2015, p. 199 n113) points out that the metacharity GiveWell “has reviewed geoengineering as an opportunity for effective altruism.” This suggests that individuals could (at least partially) discharge their mitigation duties by giving money to CDR projects. Singer stresses that climate engineering technologies are risky and only represent a “Plan B” in case we fail to avoid catastrophic climate change. That being said, he believes that geoengineering represents a solution to climate change and that individuals could financially support research into CDR and/or SRM projects if they wish to fulfill their individual climate duties. The second exception can be found in debates on the ethics of offsetting. Carbon offsetting allows individuals to pay for projects that either remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or support mitigation measures elsewhere: Forestry projects, wind farms, and the distribution of efficient cooking stoves in the developing world all represent offsetting schemes (Hyams & Fawcett, 2013). William MacAskill is a supporter of this option: “rather than reducing your own greenhouse gas emissions, you pay for projects that reduce or avoid greenhouse gas emissions elsewhere” (MacAskill, 2015, p. 137). Thanks to metacharities that have compared numerous offsetting companies, according to MacAskill, it is possible to find effective ways of offsetting personal emissions. People can, for instance, give money to Cool Earth, a charity that protects rainforests, a major carbon sink. According to MacAskill’s calculations, $105 per year would be enough for the average American to fully offset their carbon emissions (MacAskill, 2015, p. 140). He concludes, “offsetting might be an easier and more effective way of reducing your carbon footprint than making large lifestyle changes” (MacAskill, 2015, pp. 142–143). Since most philosophers are not advocating duties to support CDR and/or offsetting, and since they tend to consider “mitigation” and “emissions reductions” as synonymous, the rest of the chapter focuses on this kind of mitigation (for a critical analysis of the approaches to individual climate ethics supported by Singer and MacAskill, see Bourban and Broussois (2020a)). For the sake of simplicity, it will also use “emissions reductions” as being synonymous with “mitigation.”

Five Kinds of Agents Dale Jamieson and Henry Shue were among the first to stress the new philosophical challenges posed by climate change. Adopting an ethical approach focused on the individual level, Jamieson stressed that to reach the desired level of mitigation

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(based on the First IPCC Assessment Report, “60% reductions in net emissions in order to stabilize at a carbon dioxide doubling by the end of the next century” (Jamieson, 1992, p. 140)), management approaches based on cost-benefit analyses prove to be unhelpful. What is instead required are “radical revisions in lifestyles” (Jamieson, 1992, p. 141), based on a transformation of our value system away from the calculation of probable outcomes and toward the promotion of character traits, such as humility, courage, and moderation (Jamieson, 1992, pp. 150–151). From a political theory perspective focused on the national and international levels, Shue (1993, p. 43) stressed that “the CO2 emissions of the wealthy nations must be reduced by more than the amount by which the emissions of the poor nations increase.” He explained that common-sense principles of justice – greater contribution to the problem, greater ability to pay, and guaranteed minimum – all lead to the same conclusion: The allocation of the costs of addressing climate change “should initially be borne by the wealthy industrialized states” (Shue, 1999, p. 545). Jamieson and Shue’s early contributions have largely shaped the development of the philosophical literature on climate change. In a critical discussion of Shue’s approach to climate justice, especially his principle of justice based on contribution to the problem, Simon Caney (2005, p. 751) explains that in addition to states, other ethically relevant units could bear “mitigation burdens,” understood as the costs of avoiding activities that contribute to global climate change (in addition to mitigation burdens, individual and collective agents could also bear adaptation and compensation burdens: see Grasso, “Adaptation Duties,” this volume; Mintz-Woo, “Compensation Duties,” this volume). Caney agrees with Jamieson that individuals could also be considered responsible to a certain extent, since they also emit GHGs when they consume fossil fuels and can reduce those emissions by changing their “energyintensive lifestyles” (Caney, 2005, p. 754). He adds two possible duty-bearers: economic corporations, which “consume vast amounts of fossil fuels and/or bring about deforestation” and international regimes and institutions, such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which “encourage countries to engage in deforestation and the high use of fossil fuels” by promoting economic growth (Caney, 2005, p. 755). We can adapt this taxonomy and identify five main families of agents that owe mitigation duties (see also Caney, 2010, p. 219; Jamieson, 2015, pp. 38–41): 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Individual agents Nation-states Subnational jurisdictions Supranational formations Economic corporations

This typology raises the following questions: What kinds and degrees of mitigation responsibilities can be attributed to these different agents? And what is the relation between these different mitigation responsibilities: Are they independent, mutually exclusive, or complementary?

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Responsibility and Duty Before we turn to these points, a couple of preliminary remarks on the two related notions of “responsibility” and “duty” are in order. The use of the notion of responsibility in the case of climate change poses serious challenges (Gardiner, 2011; Jamieson, 2015; Jamieson & Di Paola, 2016). To identify and properly define mitigation duties, it is necessary to rely on both outcome responsibility, which attributes responsibility based on previous actions and behaviors, and remedial responsibility, which attributes responsibility based on what difference an agent can make in addressing climate change. Both concepts are normatively connected. As David Miller (2007, p. 108) points out, “outcome responsibility provides us with one important way of identifying remedial responsibility.” However, as we will see in the case of individual agents with the problem of inconsequentialism and in the case of collective agents with the ability to pay principle, remedial responsibility can also be based on other relevant considerations, such as agents’ financial and/or technological capacity to address climate change or agents’ ability to successfully influence other people to reduce their carbon footprint. This chapter refers mostly to remedial responsibility, except when speaking in terms of “causal responsibility.” Another important distinction is that between individual and collective responsibility. Here again, climate change poses important challenges. A major reason for this is “fragmentation of agency” (Gardiner, 2011, p. 24 – emphasis original), or “causal fragmentation” (Jamieson & Di Paola, 2016, p. 264), that is, the fact that climate change is caused by multiple individual and collective agents that often act in isolation by pursuing different purposes, but whose GHG emissions, taken together, contribute to the rise in global temperatures, which in turn contribute to harmful climate impacts. Climate change represents a “new harm” (Lichtenberg, 2010), an aggregative harm generated by a complex causal chain of a vast plurality of agents’ actions. Aggregative harms are “structural injustices” (Young, 2006) resulting from structural processes participated in by many people all pursuing individual goals, often without intending to contribute to harming others. How should responsibility be assigned in such circumstances (see Obst, “Responsibility for Climate Harms,” this volume)? First, despite these difficulties, it still makes sense to speak in terms of individual responsibility. It is true that the classical conception of the harm principle – discrete, individual actions with observable and measurable harmful impacts on particular persons – no longer suffices to explain how our individual conduct may harm other people. It remains possible however to assign responsibility by avoiding the use of the harm principle, just as it is possible to revise the harm principle so as to include responsibility for new harms and structural injustices. Those who participate in the social structures that systematically produce harm bear some responsibility for challenging, debating, and transforming those structures to reduce their harmful impacts. Second, it is also possible to assign collective responsibility to groups of individuals, especially because collective agents such as states, subnational entities, and supranational entries control the background conditions that will greatly influence individuals’ opportunities to reduce their carbon footprint. Collective agents can promote climate justice in municipal, national, and international policies.

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Both individual and collective responsibility for addressing climate change lead to mitigation duties. Duties of justice are a special kind of moral duties. Unlike duties of friendship or duties of charity, they establish “rightfully enforceable entitlements” (Valentini, 2013, p. 94 – emphasis original). This means that if an agent fails to fulfill their duties of justice, their autonomy can be rightfully limited by obliging them to comply with such duties. Negative duties, that is, duties to refrain from acting in a certain way (mostly to refrain from harming other people), are intuitively more stringent than positive duties, that is, duties to act in a specific way (mostly to aid those in need). Agents have a special responsibility for what they themselves do, as opposed to what they merely fail to prevent: “[h]owever strong the reasons to alleviate a person’s suffering, a person has an additional reason to do so if she has had some role in bringing that suffering about” (Lichtenberg, 2010, p. 563). However, in the context of new harms, positive duties can sometimes take priority. While the effects of an individual alone refraining from contributing to new harms can be negligible, actively providing aid can make a significant difference to other people’s well-being: “it seems likely that, per unit of human effort (measured in dollars, or some other way), we are more likely to make a difference by giving aid than we are by refraining from contributing to harm” (Lichtenberg, 2010, p. 567). Negative duties have also become more demanding, as refraining from contributing to aggregative harms implies radical changes in lifestyle for individuals and substantial reforms for institutions. In this respect, negative duties increasingly resemble positive duties: To refrain from causing harm, for instance, by refraining from emitting a certain amount of GHGs, it is often necessary to take positive action, for instance, by replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy. For the sake of analytical clarity, we will sometimes refer to “negative duties” and to “positive duties,” but it is important to keep in mind that this distinction has its limits in practice, where the two kinds of duty tend to overlap. Duties of justice are most commonly defined as duties owed by human beings to other human beings. According to Rawls (1999, p. 446), for instance, justice is owed only to those who have the cognitive and moral capacities to consider, accept, and abide by principles of justice. He wrote very little on nonhuman animals and other species, but enough to stress that although “it is wrong to be cruel to animals and the destruction of a whole species can be a great evil,” such wrongs are beyond “the limits of a theory of justice,” and we do not have duties of justice toward creatures lacking the capacity for a sense of justice (Rawls, 1999, p. 448). Even with such a restrictive view, many duties of climate justice can be justified, for instance, on the grounds of the human rights threatened by climate change (Caney, 2009). Although most of the literature on climate justice has been influenced by this Rawlsian account of duties of justice, there is a growing literature that aims at expanding the scope of climate justice beyond anthropocentrism (Bourban & Broussois, 2020b; Cripps, 2013, pp. 85–111; McShane, 2016; Palmer, 2011). As Clare Palmer (2011, pp. 288–289) explains, “[i]f climate change seriously harms animals – as it plausibly does – and humans are responsible for it, then those chiefly responsible are wronging animals.” She mentions the rights view, according to which animals are rightsholders, and highlights that climate change can infringe animals’ basic rights.

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Although Palmer does not speak in terms of (in)justice, Katie McShane (2016, p. 201) point outs that “[i]f animals should be counted as bearers of rights or objects of direct duties, then claims about justice straightforwardly apply to them.” Even without taking a position in the debate between anthropocentric and nonanthropocentric approaches to climate justice, there are in any case multiple ways to ground mitigation duties.

Individual Climate Duties Two Individual Duties of Climate Justice We can distinguish between two main types of mitigation duties in the literature on individual climate ethics (Fragnière, 2016, p. 799): the duty to reduce one’s carbon footprint, and the duty to promote and support collective action against climate change. When Jamieson (1992, p. 141) and Caney (2005, p. 754) stress that individuals have a responsibility to change their lifestyle to reduce their emissions, they support the first kind of duty. Baylor Johnson (2003) and Walter SinnottArmstrong (2005) were among the first to support the second kind of duty. Interestingly, their argumentative strategy is to reject the duty to reduce one’s carbon footprint in order to stress the duty to contribute to climate action at the collective level. Supporting what has become known in the literature as “the problem of inconsequentialism” (Sandler, 2009), they argue that since individual emissions do not cause harm in any relevant sense, especially because they are too small to be morally significant, fighting climate change is not the responsibility of individuals, but of collective agents, especially governments. Climate change is a collective action problem, and individuals have no obligation to unilaterally reduce their personal emissions. However, they have an obligation to work toward collective agreements and policies that would contribute to mitigation at the national and international levels. Sinnott-Armstrong (2005, p. 344) illustrates this position with his (in)famous example of driving for pleasure in a gas-guzzling SUV: “[i]t is better to enjoy your Sunday driving while working to change the law so as to make it illegal for you to enjoy your Sunday driving.” This would seem to suggest that the two kinds of duties are independent, or even mutually exclusive. But this would be too hasty a conclusion. Climate justice scholars have developed two main lines of argument to reply to the problem of inconsequentialism. A first argumentative strategy is to remain on consequentialist ground. Some authors have challenged the empirical claim that individual emissions only cause indiscernibly small effects. For instance, John Broome (2012, p. 224) calculates that the lifetime emissions of a westerner would cause the loss of 6 months of healthy life, or cost between $19,000 and $65,000. The problem with this line of argument is that these figures are rough estimates and, more seriously, there is a debate on the very relevance of such calculations, which are based on controversial cost–benefit analyses (Fragnière, 2016, p. 801).

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Elizabeth Cripps (2013, pp. 140–166) proposes an alternative consequentialist approach to Broome’s. In reply to Sinnott-Armstrong, she stresses the distinction between individuals taken in isolation and individuals taken in combination, and she argues that, as members of a group contributing to an aggregative harm, citizens have first and foremost a duty to promote collective action in cases where collective responsibility remains unfulfilled. Promotional duties to help bring about collective action through active citizenship or advocacy work take precedence, but direct duties to reduce one’s emissions are still relevant, provided that reducing one’s carbon footprint can promote collective action, and that alternative promotional options are exhausted. In other words, actions to mitigate one’s own emissions represent “second-best responses” in cases where individuals cannot bring about collective action (Cripps, 2013, p. 150). However, given the large range of available promotional actions, in most cases there is actually no duty to reduce one’s carbon footprint (Cripps, 2013, p. 151). Even though Cripps develops a more nuanced consequentialist approach, her conclusion remains therefore similar to that of SinnottArmstrong and Johnson: The duty to contribute to collective action against climate change (mostly) works as a substitute for the duty to reduce one’s carbon footprint. A second, more promising strategy to address the problem of inconsequentialism is to develop noncausation-based arguments. We can distinguish here between virtue ethics approaches and deontological approaches. In what is perhaps the most systematic reply to Sinnott-Armstrong and Johnson, Marion Hourdequin (2010) stresses that the virtue of integrity requires moral agents to harmonize their values and actions at the collective and the individual levels. A person who is ethically committed to combatting climate change at the collective level should also commit themselves to act on a personal level: “even if it is sometimes the case that one’s personal actions to reduce climate change have little to no effect on the course of climate change, integrity nevertheless requires a kind of synchrony between personal and political action that Johnson and Sinnott-Armstrong fail to acknowledge” (Hourdequin, 2010, p. 449). Lichtenberg (2010, pp. 567–571) also uses an argument from integrity to bypass questions of efficacy: A person should do the right thing even if it has no discernible effect in the world because they are especially responsible for what they do, no matter what others do, and they have a duty to refrain from acts complicit in aggregative harms such as climate change by reducing their carbon footprint, even if others choose to keep their high-emitting lifestyles. Hourdequin also stresses in her analysis that thanks to the communicative power of individual actions, efforts to reduce personal emissions can have an amplifying effect and lead other individuals to do the same, thereby contributing to more substantial emission reductions. The decision to change one’s lifestyle might inspire others to make similar changes and contribute to a collective shift: “individual consumer decision, personal communication about such decisions, and similar small-scale, local actions may turn out to be important catalysts for emerging collective agreements” (Hourdequin, 2010, p. 457). Other virtues have been stressed in the literature to develop this kind of noncausation-based argument. Defining virtues as “non-calculative generators of behaviors,” Jamieson (2007, p. 167) proposes a list of green virtues, such as

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humility, that should lead people to a love of nature, temperance, which promotes self-restraint and moderation, and mindfulness, an awareness of our environmentally destructive activities and a willingness to improve our behavior (Jamieson, 2007, pp. 181–182). Defining virtues as character traits that help promote human and nonhuman flourishing, both individually and collectively, Gambrel and Cafaro (2009) have put forward simplicity, understood as an attitude toward material goods that typically includes decreased consumption. To this list, we can add energy sobriety, understood as a self-imposed behavior to reduce one’s overall energy use in order to reduce one’s carbon footprint as much as possible (Bourban, 2022). Integrity, humility, temperance, mindfulness, simplicity, and energy sobriety are all based on an ethical principle of self-limitation that guides individuals’ everyday choices. They are not a matter of sacrifice, or heroic morality, or asceticism, but rather an acquired and stable set of dispositions that leads to a fulfilled life through enjoying a new relationship with oneself, with others, and with the natural world. Developing a more deontological noncausation-based argument, Christian Baatz argues that regardless of whether individual emissions are harmful or not, we all have a duty to do our fair share in the fight against climate change (Baatz, 2014). Baatz defines an agent’s fair share as the entitlement to a certain share of the overall remaining carbon budget. Individuals emitting more than their entitlement are illegitimately depriving others of part of their fair share. To do their part, most affluent citizens in developed countries should reduce their carbon footprints, especially by stopping easily avoidable high-emitting activities such as driving for pleasure. Even if controversy surrounds the calculation of what a sustainable carbon footprint would look like, average per capita emissions in developed countries are too high according to any reasonable standard, especially in light of the small and rapidly decreasing remaining global carbon budget. Since most affluent and rich people are plausibly overshooting their fair share by a large margin, such empirical worries are no excuse to avoid reducing one’s carbon footprint.

Options to Fulfill Individual Climate Duties In response to the problem of inconsequentialism, the virtue ethics and the deontological approaches show that the duty to reduce one’s carbon footprint and the duty to promote and support collective action against climate change are both relevant. As the argument from integrity stresses, they are not mutually exclusive, but rather complementary, and even mutually require each other. Responsible individuals should both reduce their carbon footprint and contribute to collective action against climate change. But how might individuals fulfill such duties? Regarding the duty to promote and support collective action against climate change, a further distinction can be drawn between two subcategories of duties: a duty to change and create institutions, and a duty to change and create social norms. To realize their institutional duty, individuals have at their disposal a large range of possibilities, from voting green (Maltais, 2013) to civil disobedience as a way of responding to government failure and pushing for more ambitious climate policies

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(Caney, 2014, p. 138). To change policies and reform institutions, people can write blogs and articles, petition their local government, email their representatives or executives, organize and/or attend demonstrations, and donate to organizations (Cripps, 2013, p. 143). To fulfill their duty to change and create social norms, they can, for instance, adapt their lifestyles and develop communication strategies to amplify the effects of their green behaviors (Fragnière, 2016, p. 808). They can also frame greener lifestyles as appealing so as to influence other people to reduce their own carbon footprint. Abandoning the rhetoric of self-sacrifice and explaining the different ways in which more virtuous lifestyles can be self-rewarding and contribute to happiness and well-being is a powerful tool to push other people to go green (Prinzing, 2020). Importantly, different actors bear different responsibilities (Caney, 2014, pp. 139–140). While politicians are more likely to successfully influence other people’s behaviors and to change institutions, journalists, poets, novelists, researchers, and gifted communicators are more likely to successfully promote green lifestyles. Lawyers can contribute to climate litigation and help those who engage in lawsuits against states, corporations, and other entities by providing legal expertise. Climate scientists can play a part in undermining resistance to effective climate policies by rebutting factual errors and misleading statements by climate deniers. Engineers can design more sustainable power plants, buildings, and infrastructures. A wide range of actions is available to different kinds of actors, but it is possible for most individuals to contribute, in their own way, to collective efforts to mitigate climate change. Regarding the duty to reduce one’s carbon footprint, the most relevant course of action is to adopt so-called “high-impact actions,” that is, actions that reduce one’s GHG emissions by at least 0.8 tons CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) per year (Wynes & Nicholas, 2017), for instance, by adopting a plant-based diet (0.8 tCO2e saved per year on average), buying green energy (1.5 tCO2e) avoiding one transatlantic flight (1.6 tCO2e), living car free (2.4 tCO2e), and having one less child (58 tCO2e). Although here again controversy surrounds the empirical calculations on which these estimates are based, these actions remain on average the most effective. There is one particular category of people who are in a privileged position to reduce their ecological footprint: affluent people, especially very rich people. The reason for this is that economic and environmental inequalities are strongly correlated. According to Oxfam (2015), while the richest 10% of the world’s population are responsible for around 50% of global emissions, the poorest 50% are responsible for only around 10% of global emissions. Someone in the richest 10% emits on average 60 times more than someone in the poorest 10%, and the richest 1% emits 175 times more than the poorest 10%. These findings indicate that the richer people are, the greater their overall carbon footprint. At the same time, since the lifestyles of wealthy citizens are characterized by an abundance of choice, they are in the best position to reduce or avoid consuming the goods and services that contribute the most to environmental degradation (Wiedmann et al., 2020). This is why, as Baatz (2014, p. 12) stresses, “the duty of the very wealthy is much greater than the duty of an ordinary worker or middle-class person.” Each person trying to reduce their carbon footprint must assess where their efforts can be best spent, but surely many

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opportunities are available to many people, especially affluent people in developed countries (Bourban, 2022).

Are Mitigation Duties Too Demanding? A possible challenge to both kinds of individual climate duties is that they can potentially be too demanding. According to the objection that mitigations are overly demanding, morality cannot require individuals to make very large sacrifices to their well-being, since such requirements infringe on their autonomy and their ability to pursue their life plans (Lichtenberg, 2010, p. 558). At what point do mitigation duties become too demanding to be expected of individuals? Regarding the duty to promote and support collective action against climate change, this objection has little relevance. It is true that it is difficult to measure the extent to which this duty of climate justice is fulfilled, since there is no way to calculate the impact of participating in demonstrations, of voting for a green political party, or of publishing an article to promote greener lifestyles. However, with the exception of some extreme cases, such as citizens living in authoritarian regimes that severely sanction criticism of government policy, most individuals can do a lot at relatively little cost to themselves (Cripps, 2013, p. 151). Since affluent citizens living in developed countries take precedence among those who should fulfill promotional duties, in most cases contributing to collective action against climate change is not overly demanding. It is however important to stress that how demanding this duty is varies from individual to individual: Those who have more power to influence other people to change their lifestyles and to push for more ambitious climate policies have a higher degree of responsibility to do so. Caney (2014, p. 141) stresses this point through the “Power/ Responsibility Principle,” according to which “those with the power to compel or induce or enable others to act in climate-friendly ways have a responsibility to do so.” The objection that mitigation duties are too demanding has more relevance when applied to the duty to reduce one’s carbon footprint. Since there are many carbondependent structures in industrialized countries, living a low-carbon lifestyle can be quite demanding, and in some cases indeed overly demanding. To ensure that this mitigation duty is not economically, psychologically, or socially too burdensome for individuals, its scope should be limited. A general ethical principle here is the Kantian rule “ought implies can”: People should not be required to do things that are not in their power (Baatz, 2014, pp. 9–10; Fragnière, 2016, pp. 806–807). The options and possibilities open to particular agents differ considerably, depending on their respective geographical, economic, and social situation. This means that individuals are morally required to reduce their emissions only as far as can reasonably be demanded of them. That being said, it is important not to concede too much to this objection. As Ann Schwenkenbecher (2014, p. 180) argues, “being demanding is by itself no reason against a particular moral theory or a particular moral duty.” After all, the whole point of ethics is to push us to question what we take for granted in our everyday behavior, and to change our lifestyles according to the demands of what is just, right,

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or good. Such changes are usually demanding and can be uncomfortable in that they require us to question ourselves, but that is not an objection against ethics or morality, especially when what is at stake are urgent and severe climate injustices. Another important point is that reductions in one’s carbon footprint are not always very demanding: “[m]any actions we can take would merely require us to change our habits, to make a bigger effort and to accept a little more inconvenience” (Schwenkenbecher, 2014, p. 180). Put in perspective with the severe climate impacts vulnerable people have to face when GHG emissions are not mitigated, most moderate- and high-impact actions are actually quite reasonable. In contrast with promotional duties, the degree of fulfillment of the duty to reduce one’s carbon footprint can more easily be measured. In the climate change literature, the sustainable carbon footprint is set at approximately 2 tons of CO2 per person and per year (Fragnière, 2016, p. 806; Wynes & Nicholas, 2017, p. 1). Most affluent people have a carbon footprint that is several times higher than that. It is true that in most developed countries, it would be overly demanding to require individuals to reach a sustainable carbon footprint overnight, since the possibility of implementing high-impact actions partially relies on the infrastructures provided by local and national governments. For instance, for individuals to have the opportunity to buy green energy, to avoid air travel, and to live car-free governments should guarantee an efficient and effective public transportation network and ensure that renewable energies are available and affordable. However, if the 2 tons of CO2 per person and per year limit is taken as an aspirational goal (very much like the 1.5
C limit at the global level), and if the duty to reduce one’s carbon footprint is interpreted as a duty to get as close as reasonably possible to this limit, the objection that mitigation duties are overly demanding has much less bite. In virtually all developed countries, most individuals still have a wide range of high-impact actions available, such as adopting a plant-based diet, avoiding long-distance flights for their holidays, and having smaller families, even if they do not have full control over their carbon footprint.

The Mitigation Duties of States How can the background conditions on which a substantial part of individuals’ carbon footprints depend be changed? This is where considerations on the duties of collective agents become relevant, especially nation-states, which design and control many of the policies in the sectors of energy and of agriculture, forestry, and other land use. In contrast with individual climate duties, collective climate duties are not affected by the problem of inconsequentialism. Most nation-states’ emissions contribute to climate harms in a non-negligible way, and nation-states can mitigate their emissions so as to reduce their contribution to such harms. States are the primary agents responsible for developing the adequate legislative and political framework that would enable individual and other collective agents, such as cities and corporations, to substantially reduce their carbon footprint. They can make it easier for other agents to fulfill their mitigation duties, just as they can make it much harder and

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sometimes impossible. This is why the bulk of the literature on climate justice has focused on this particular agent.

PPP, APP, and BPP How can the burdens of climate change be fairly allocated, particularly mitigation burdens? This question has led to the search for the most relevant principle of distributive justice or for some combination of such principles, for instance, to create a “hybrid model” (Caney, 2010). The three most important principles of climate justice that have emerged from these discussions are the following (Bourban, 2018, pp. 101–118): • The polluter pays principle (PPP): The burdens of climate change should be borne by those agents that have the most important historical and current levels of GHG emissions. The more an agent has contributed to climate change, the more that agent should pay to address climate change. • The ability to pay principle (APP): The burdens of climate change should be borne by those agents that have the greatest financial and technological capacities, regardless of their historical and present contribution to climate change. • The beneficiary pays principle (BPP): The burdens of climate change should be borne by those agents that have benefitted most from past and present GHG emitting activities. These principles make it possible to differentiate the degree of responsibilities that can be attributed to different states in the fight against climate change. Despite historical and ongoing disputes on the best (set of) principles to determine how best to allocate mitigation burdens, there is, as Stephen Gardiner (2004, p. 579) highlighted in an early review of the literature, “a surprising convergence of philosophical writers on the subject: they are virtually unanimous in their conclusion that the developed countries should take the lead role in bearing the costs of climate change.” In a more recent contribution, Shue (2015, p. 8) confirmed this by explaining that “even though some may diverge at the theoretical periphery,” key principles of climate justice “converge at the practical core”: As the main historical and often the main current emitters, as the most capable of addressing climate change, and as the main beneficiaries of past emitting activities, developed countries have the greatest responsibility to act to slow climate change. Shue (1999, p. 545) had already reached this conclusion in the late 1990s when he wrote: [I]n spite of the different content of these three principles of equity [greater contribution to the problem, greater ability to pay, guaranteed minimum], and in spite of the different kinds of grounds upon which they rest, they all converge upon the same practical conclusion: whatever needs to be done by wealthy industrialized states or by poor non-industrialized states about global environmental problems like ozone destruction and global warming, the costs should initially be borne by the wealthy industrialized states.

In general terms, these principles therefore point in the same direction: Affluent countries should bear most of the burden and play a leadership role. However, if we

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apply the principles in detail, they can start to diverge. For instance, in the case of high emitting but poor countries, just as in the case of low emitting but rich countries, the polluter pays principle and the ability to pay principle lead to different results. It all depends on the level of specificity: The principles tend to converge at the general level, but the more we compare specific cases, the more divergences will appear. Here again, objections were voiced against mitigation duties. Eric Posner and David Weisbach have launched a radical attack against principles of climate justice and their use in international law. On the grounds that philosophers lack understanding of the realities of international relations, they “reject the claim that certain intuitive ideas about justice should play a major role in the design of a climate agreement” (Posner & Weisbach, 2010, p. 5). Such ideas are problematic because “they fail to consider basic pragmatic or feasibility constraints” (Posner & Weisbach, 2010, p. 4). Posner and Weisbach argue that the only feasible climate treaty is one that is in the short-term domestic self-interest of developed countries, particularly the USA. In doing so, they dismiss most mitigation duties as unfeasible because they would be too costly for rich countries, among other reasons. The key feasibility constraint isolated by Posner and Weisbach (2010, p. 6) is International Paretianism, according to which “treaties are not possible unless they have the consent of all states, and states only enter treaties that serve their interests.” Caney (2014, p. 128) breaks down their argument the following way: (P1) It is necessary to have a climate treaty with which major emitters comply. (P2) To be feasible, an effective climate treaty must serve the interests of high emitting states (from “Feasibility” to “Pareto Superiority”). (C) Therefore, a climate treaty must serve the interests of high-emitting states. Three main responses can be made to this attack on climate justice. First, it can be argued that principles of justice and feasibility operate on two different levels (Bell, 2013; Roser, 2015). While normative considerations determine the goals of climate policy, feasibility considerations merely delineate the space within which these goals can be pursued. Feasibility considerations do not impose limits on moral and political theorizing; they simply highlight the degree of (political, cultural, and social) feasibility of institutional reform proposals. This reply is similar to the counterobjection to the problem of mitigation being overly demanding: There is nothing intrinsically problematic with demanding ethical duties. Individual and collective agents should comply with the demands of ethics or justice, even if they are demanding, as long as they are reasonable. The human rights approach to climate justice illustrates this point very well: “[i]f emitting greenhouse gases (GHGs) results in rights violations it should stop, and the fact that it is expensive does not tell against that claim” (Caney, 2009, p. 87). Claiming that principles of distributive climate justice are unfeasible just because some states are not willing to implement them due to their cost is not an objection against such principles. It is just a reminder of the importance of discussing how ideal theory can be slotted into the nonideal circumstance of the real world (see Heyward and Roser (2016)).

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Second, with its overly narrow assumption that to be feasible, any climate treaty must necessarily be in the short-term, self-perceived economic interest of developed states, Posner and Weisbach support an inaccurate picture of the feasible set. Based on this overly restrictive conception of the feasible set, not only do they exclude just and feasible solutions, but they also support unjust solutions by claiming that “an optimal climate treaty would probably not require side payments to poor countries. It could well require side payments to rich countries like the United States and rising countries like China, and indeed possibly from very poor countries which are extremely vulnerable to climate change – such as Bangladesh” (Posner & Weisbach, 2010, p. 86). This statement, which strikes many as intuitively unfair, shows that there is something wrong with their definition of feasibility, as well as the priority they give to their problematic feasibility considerations over normative considerations. A third possible response is that philosophers do not bring in normative considerations from outside the framework of climate negotiations in a top-down or ad hoc fashion: Considerations of equity, responsibility, capacity, justice, and other normative notions play an important role in international law. From the start of climate negotiations, the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC, 1992, p. art. 3.1) agreed that their core objective is to “protect the climate system for the benefit of present and future generations of humankind, on the basis of equity and in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities [CBDR-RC].” This norm of CBDR-RC plays a major role in all the main outcomes of climate negotiations, including in the Paris Agreement, the most recent and perhaps most significant outcome of the climate regime, which also mentions the notions of “climate justice,” “intergenerational equity,” and “human rights” (UNFCCC, 2015). This shows that, contra Posner and Weisbach, ethical arguments and normative beliefs are not irrelevant in international relations.

CBDR-RC Some climate justice scholars have proposed operationalizing the norm of CBDRRC to measure each country’s degree of responsibility and capacity more precisely (for a synthesis of burden-sharing frameworks in the literature, see IPCC, 2014a, pp. 315–321). This branch of burden-sharing climate justice can be seen as a way to interpret the implications of the PPP, the APP, and the BPP in more concrete terms. Arguably, CBDR-RC does not perfectly align with these principles, but for several authors, the notion of “common but differentiated responsibilities” is a possible interpretation of the PPP, while the idea of “respective capabilities” can be captured by the APP and the BPP (Baer, 2013, p. 62; Bourban, 2018, pp. 101–127; Moellendorf, 2009, p. 255; Page, 2008, p. 557). One proposal to translate CBDR-RC into a burden-sharing formula that is among the most influential is the Greenhouse Development Rights Framework (GDR), a climate justice index composed of a responsibility indicator (cumulative national emissions since 1990) and a capacity indicator (per capita annual income above a

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development threshold of $8500). This responsibility–capacity index determines the percentage of total global obligation for each country by giving each indicator the same weight. As a result, in 2010, the USA held 29.4% of global obligation, the EU 26%, Japan 7.6%, Russia 5.8%, China 5.1%, Brazil 2.8%, South Africa 0.9%, and India 0.3%. In total, high-income countries held 73.7% of global obligation, the least developed countries (LDCs) 0.3%, and the remaining 26% fell to new emitting countries, such as countries from the Brazil, South Africa, India, and China (BASIC) group (Baer, 2013) (see Table 1). This climate justice index makes three important contributions to the literature on burden-sharing justice. First, it confirms the outcome of the more abstract debates on distributive principles of climate justice, which converge, at the practical level, to identify developed countries as being most responsible for addressing climate change. Second, it makes it possible to precisely differentiate each country’s degree of responsibility and to establish a list to compare them. Third, it stresses that, in addition to developed countries, there are a growing number of new countries that have increasingly contributed to global GHG emissions over the last few years and will in all likelihood continue to do so in the coming decades. This list of new emitting countries is constantly evolving, but it includes BASIC countries, Russia, Indonesia, South Korea, and Mexico. Recognizing that their choice of indicators is debatable according to different countries’ interpretation of CBDR-RC, advocates of the GDR framework have recently created the Climate Equity Reference Framework (CERF), which offers a climate equity reference calculator to assign each country and region its fair share of mitigation efforts (Holz, Kartha, & Athanasiou, 2018). In contrast to the GDR, the CERF includes an equity band that allows more or less demanding effort-sharing parameters to be chosen, giving countries more flexibility in calculating their respective level of responsibility and capacity. Three key parameters are flexible: the level of global ambition, with three possible mitigation pathways (66% chance of remaining below 1.5
C in 2100; greater than or equal to 50% chance of staying within 1.5
C; or greater than 66% chance of staying within 2
C); the historical responsibility parameter (with possible start dates ranging from 1850 to 2010); and the capacity parameter (with the option to set the development threshold between $0 and $20,000). For a 1.5
C-compliant global mitigation effort (>66% chance of remaining below 1.5
C), a responsibility indicator with a start date ranging from 1850 to 1990 (the equity band for the responsibility parameter), and a development threshold ranging from $2500 to $7500 (the equity band for the capacity parameter), the CERF authors made the following findings. The nationally determined contributions (NDCs) of most high-capacity and high-responsibility countries, such as the USA, EU members, and Japan, “fall far short of the fair-share contributions as bounded by the equity band” (Holz et al., 2018, p. 127). This means, whatever the choice of parameters, these countries fail to assume their global responsibilities. The USA pledged only 16–24% of its fair-share contributions, the EU 21–23%, and Japan about 10% (see Fig. 1). In addition, fair shares of the global effort to mitigate emissions are higher than plausible domestic reductions in developed countries (Holz et al., 2018, p. 128). This

United States EU 27 EU 15 EU 12+ Japan Russia China India Brazil South Africa High income LDCs World

Per capital income (SUS 2010, MER) 2010 45,922

33,040 38,419 12,122 42,985 10,543 4542 1422 10,684 7203 40,317 767 9088

Percentage of global population 2010 4.6%

7.3% 5.8% 1.5% 1.8% 2.05 19.6% 17.6% 2.8% 0.7% 15.1% 11.4% 100.0%

32,101 35,407 19,243 33,874 20,036 7794 3454 11,183 10,465 38,970 1585 11,086

Per capital income (SUS 2010, PPP) 2010 45,922 30.9% 29.1% 1.8% 10.2% 2.3% 4.8% 0.2% 2.6% 0.4% 81.9% 0.1% 100.0%

Percentage of global capacity 2010 29.7% 21.2% 17.8% 3.4% 5.0% 9.4% 5.4% 0.3% 3.1% 1.3% 65.5% 0.5% 100.0%

Percentage of global responsibility 2010 29.2% 26.0% 23.4% 2.6% 7.6% 5.8% 5.1% 0.3% 2.8% 0.9% 73.7% 0.3% 100.0%

RCI (percentage of global obligation) 2010 29.4% 22.3% 19.9% 2.3% 6.3% 5.4% 12.2% 0.9% 2.8% 0.9% 65.6% 0.3% 100.0%

RCI (percentage of global obligation) 2020 26.4%

17.4% 15.4% 2.1% 4.7% 5.1% 21.8% 2.9% 2.7% 0.9% 53.4% 0.3% 100.0%

RCI (percentage of global obligation) 2030 21.6%

Table 1 The GDR Climate Justice Index. Demographics (share of population and per capita income, market exchange rates (MER) and purchasing power parity (PPP) adjusted) in 2010, along with share of capacity for 2010, share of responsibility for 2010, and Responsibility and Capacity Indicator (RCI) for selected countries and regions for 2010, 2020, and 2030. (With permission of John Wiley and Sons (Baer, 2013, p. 66))

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Fig. 1 Fair Shares of the Global Mitigation Effort in 2013. Expressed in tons of CO2e per capita of mitigation in 2030 for selected countries, showing the amount that would be required for each equity benchmark (green bars) and the additional reference benchmarks (gray bars), as well as the actual mitigation pledged in the country’s NDC (unconditional in black, conditional in brown). (With permission of Springer Nature (Holz et al., 2018, p. 126))

means that, to fulfill their mitigation efforts, developed countries must contribute, through climate finance, to mitigation opportunities in other countries where mitigation potential exceeds domestic obligations. Developed countries therefore have a dual mitigation duty. In addition to domestic emission reductions, they are also obligated to engage in international mitigation cooperation. Since CBDR-RC represents the cornerstone of the climate regime, working as “the pivot of most equity debates within the climate negotiations” (Holz et al., 2018, p. 119), this kind of proposal to operationalize CBDR-RC can be seen as a promising and feasible way to move forward in climate negotiations. Mitigation pledges are currently provided by countries as part of their NDC. While no country is legally required by the Paris Agreement to follow its mitigation commitments, each party is legally required to provide a new, more ambitious commitment every 5 years, based on CBDR-RC (UNFCCC, 2015, p. art. 4.3). This 5-year cycle of reevaluating NDC could be used as an opportunity to include a normative framework such as the one provided by the CERF within the international climate regime (Bourban, 2021).

IPAT The PPP, the APP, and the BPP, each on its own and especially in combination, provide a strong justification for attributing more demanding mitigation duties to developed states and new emitting countries. Operationalizing CBDR-RC is a relevant way to measure and compare the different degrees of responsibility of the

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states. But how might those states fulfill their responsibilities? Introducing the IPAT equation to discussions on climate justice, as Clare Heyward (2012, p. 706) and Simon Caney (2020, pp. 355–356) have proposed, is a helpful way to reply to this more practical question. According to this equation, environmental impact (I) equals population (P), multiplied by affluence (A), multiplied in turn by technology (T): Impact ¼ Population  Affluence  Technology In their discussion of the IPAT equation, both Heyward and Caney tend to focus on the potential of technology to mitigate global GHG emissions. They especially stress two key measures that states could implement to fulfill their mitigation responsibilities: energy efficiency and the expansion of renewables in their energy mix (Caney, 2020, p. 357; Heyward, 2012, p. 721). These two measures are two major pillars of the energy transition, which relies on progressively replacing fossil fuels with renewables (Bourban, 2022). Rapidly phasing fossil fuels out of the global energy mix can only be achieved through massive public investment in renewables to make this alternative source of energy both available and affordable for most consumers and producers, in developed and developing countries alike. Fossil fuels should be subject to incremental price increases through carbon taxes and carbon markets to ensure that they lose their competitive advantage, but to avoid a trade-off between climate justice and social justice by driving additional people into energy poverty, two complementary measures are necessary. First, public subsidies in renewables and technology transfers should make energy affordable for poor people, wherever they live. Second, measures ought to be implemented to compensate for the temporary increase in the cost of fossil fuels, such as subsidies to improve energy efficiency in poor households, subsidies to extend networks, improve efficiency and reduce the price of public transportation, or redistribute part of the revenue collected through carbon pricing schemes in the form of an energy dividend. Developed states therefore have two negative duties: a duty not to continue to undermine the climate by burning excessive amounts of fossil fuels and a duty not to increase the obstacles to development for the global poor. Shue (2013, p. 400) adds, “[t]he two duties are additive, but the beauty of fulfilling them by developing affordable, renewable energy is that such measures would fulfill both at once.” But technological innovation to implement the energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables is not sufficient on its own. There are too many economic, political, and infrastructural obstacles in the way, especially the scale and influence of the fossil fuel industry, the problem of technological and infrastructural lock-in, and the high metal requirements of low-carbon power generations (Bourban, 2022). This means that additional measures should be taken by states to reduce their emissions. This leads us to the two remaining elements in the IPAT equation. To reduce levels of affluence, states can target “luxury emissions” (Shue, 1993), or “unnecessary carbon emissions” (Cafaro, 2011), through two political measures: taxation and prohibition. Through carbon price policies such as taxes on flights, vehicles, electricity consumption, and meat consumption, governments can incentivize consumers and producers to reduce their carbon footprint. To avoid regressive

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effects on the poorer, for whom the increase in prices is more difficult or impossible to afford, these taxes should be progressive: They should start relatively low and then increase for each new flight ticket, for bigger cars, for bigger houses, and so on. It is also possible for states to prohibit consumption goods that are causing the highest levels of luxury emissions, for instance, by banning the use of private jets, yachts, SUVs, and the construction of ridiculously large houses. This measure is of course more controversial, but it has the merit of helping wealthy citizens to do their fair share, instead of just giving them the option of buying their way out of doing so by paying more taxes. As Philip Cafaro (2011, p. 206) highlights, “from a fairness perspective, from a wide buy-in perspective, and from a maximal emissions reductions perspective, it makes sense to consider the absolute prohibition of some highenergy, luxury consumption.” The last component of the IPAT equation is also relevant in terms of outlining the content of states’ mitigation duties. Population growth is indeed more substantial in developing countries than in developed ones, but the contribution of the demographic factor to climate change does not depend only on the number of people: Income, wealth, diets, education, household size, and geographical location all lead to substantial variations in individual GHG emissions (Jiang & Hardee, 2011). A child born in a developed country will have a much larger carbon footprint than a child born in a developing country. For instance, the total carbon footprint of a child born in the USA is more than 160 times greater than the footprint of a child born in Bangladesh (Murtaugh & Schlax, 2009, p. 18). This is why population control policies represent an effective measure for many developed countries to mitigate their emissions. Three public policies are possible in this context: education, coercion, and incentivization. Philip Cafaro (2011, 2012) supports mainly choice-enhancing measures. There are numerous possible options here: improving education; promoting female literacy; improving women’s economic opportunities; providing cheap, reliable contraception; and helping individuals to become aware of the environmental impacts of their reproductive choices. These measures are “win/win:” They not only reduce global GHG emissions, but also contribute to other sustainable development goals (SDGs), such as improving maternal health and increasing the percentage of children receiving a full primary school education (Cafaro, 2011, p. 209). The limitation of this type of measure is that it has more impact in developing countries than in developed countries: Fertility rate and family planning needs are higher in Asia and Africa than in the EU and the USA (Hickey et al., 2016, p. 855). At the other end of the population growth reduction policy spectrum, we find coercive measures. Based on the idea that it is justifiable to reduce the autonomy of individuals in situations where they significantly harm others, Sarah Conly (2016) argues that in a context of global overpopulation and climate emergency, the state can legitimately restrict individual reproductive choices. A system of legal sanctions for couples who have more than one child would reduce this problem of motivation not only by changing individual behaviors, but also by changing attitudes, since legal sanctions communicate communal moral judgments. A progressive system of fines, based on household income, could bring about cultural change by making

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small families the norm and large families the exception. The limitation of this kind of policy is that it raises substantial ethical and political issues. A one-child policy carries enormous potential moral costs, particularly in terms of possible human rights violations, such as sterilizations and forced abortions. Conly obviously does not advocate such measures, but they are much more likely to occur in the context of coercive policies than in the context of educational and empowerment policies. Other policies with much lower potential moral costs and more effectiveness in developed countries are available and probably more feasible, using positive and negative incentives. While education allows parents to make voluntary reproductive choices and coercion deters parents from having more than a fixed number of children by legally sanctioning those who have too many, incentives encourage those who have few children and discourage those who would like to have many. A possible positive incentive would be to reduce taxes for households with small families. The idea is to reverse the incentive structure set by the pronatalist culture in many countries by encouraging couples to have fewer, rather than more, children. Making sterilization free for both men and women is also among the options to be considered. Giving a financial reward for sterilization would also be a possibility, but it is important not to set the amount of the reward too high, in order to avoid disadvantaged people reluctantly using it as an opportunity to obtain money. A possible negative incentive would be a tax increase for families with too many children – although this would have to be carefully handled to ensure taxes remained fair across income brackets. These different measures to fulfill states’ mitigation duties are articulated in the literature on deep decarbonization pathways. Such pathways rely on three main scenarios, each reflecting a component of the IPAT equation (van Vuuren et al., 2018): A lifestyle change scenario, with radical shifts toward more environmentally friendly behaviors such as plant-based diets, changes in transport habits, and reductions of heating and cooling levels; a renewable electricity scenario, with the substantial expansion of solar and wind technologies, based on the encouraging progress over the last few years; and a low-population scenario, based on population control policies that would decrease birth rates around the world, with the objective of reducing the global population to 6.9 billion by 2100. None of these alternative scenarios is, on its own, sufficient, but implemented together, they are probably our best hope of avoiding dangerous climate change.

Subnational Jurisdictions, Supranational Organizations, and Corporations Given the failure of international climate policies to bring climate change under effective political control, there is a growing momentum in the literature to develop climate justice approaches that go beyond state-centrism. The development of individual climate ethics investigated above is a good illustration of this. Another branch of climate justice, which is still minor but rapidly growing, is exploring the responsibilities of other collective agents at the subnational and supranational levels.

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A relevant framework to bring together these recent contributions is the polycentric approach to climate change (André, 2020; Ostrom, 2010). This approach stresses that in the absence of an international treaty that would effectively reduce global GHG emissions, many mitigation measures can be undertaken by multiple entities at diverse scales that, cumulatively, can make a difference. In a polycentric system, each unit enjoys sufficient independence to make norms and rules to mitigate GHG emissions at the local, regional, and subnational levels. Local governments, firms, and international regimes can all encourage polycentric efforts to reduce the risks associated with climate change, even in the absence of an effective concerted framework at the global level.

Cities More than half of humanity and more than three quarters of Europeans live in cities (EEA, 2015). Cities represent concentrations of economic and industrial activity and contribute to approximately 70% of energy-related CO2 emissions (IEA, 2016). At the same time, in most developed nations, there is already far more climate action at the municipal level than at the national level (Forman et al., 2016). Cities are increasingly important actors in global climate governance (see De Nictolis, chapter ▶ “Climate Change and Urban Studies,” this volume). They are adopting mitigation plans, experimenting with climate policy solutions that could be transferred to other local governments or scaled nationally, and building local capacity to address climate change (Hsu et al., 2020). They often participate in transnational municipal networks, such as Cities for Climate Protection, Climate Alliance, Energy Cities, the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, and the Rockefeller Foundation Climate Change Initiative (Kern & Bulkeley, 2009). All these polycentric systems tend to enhance innovation, cooperation, learning, and trustworthiness and also tend to lead to the achievement of more effective, equitable, and sustainable outcomes (Ostrom, 2010, p. 552). Cities are taking part in transnational climate change governance by promoting mitigation and adaptation policies, setting standards, and calling for action, both with and without the cooperation of states (Dietzel, 2018, pp. 95–97). Transnational networks of cities are not focused on the single outcome of reaching a climate treaty but are rather based on individual, decentralized, and self-organized initiatives, such as information sharing, voluntary goal-setting, and experimental policies. Municipal networks such as the C40 motivate cities to take climate action they likely otherwise would not have implemented and create a context within which GHG emissions can be reduced (Dietzel, 2018, pp. 171–172). Although it is not possible to measure the impact of these networks on global emissions precisely, they include a broad range of the global population and encompass thousands of projects. Given the increased initiatives to contribute to mitigation efforts at municipal level over the past two decades, as well as the influence of the cosmopolitan framework in the literature on global justice which aims at moving beyond statecentrism, it is surprising that there has been little investigation into the role that cities

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can play as actors of climate justice. Major cities such as Philadelphia, Toronto, or Quito have already integrated distributive and procedural justice considerations into their mitigation plans (Bulkeley et al., 2013, pp. 923–924). Chicago, Birmingham (England), and Vancouver have made notable attempts to reduce GHG emissions by integrating climate justice and social justice considerations (McKendry, 2016). Bristol was the first city in the UK to declare a climate emergency in April 2019 (1 month ahead of the UK government) and adopted the ambitious “One City Climate Change Plan” that pledged to make the city carbon neutral by 2030, which goes beyond what is required by the national government (the UK has committed to cutting emissions by 78%, compared to 1990 levels, by 2035) (Dietzel, 2022). A just urban response to climate change at the municipal level allocates mitigation duties not only according to the city’s proportionate responsibility for climate change in comparison with other cities, but also according to the degree of responsibility of individuals, communities, and corporations within the city, as well as their degree of capacity (Bulkeley et al., 2013, p. 918). The promising framework of a “multiscalar justice” (André, 2020; Barrett, 2013; McKendry, 2016) could contribute to reframing research on climate justice by integrating this new kind of actor into philosophical discussions on climate change. Just like states, municipal governments have a relatively high level of control over GHG emissions through their choices of energy supply and management, transport, land-use planning, and waste management. As the political level closest to people, they are also potentially more receptive to the climate justice demands of citizens. The major mitigation duty in this context is that of developing an urban design that contributes as much as possible, and in a fair way, to the reduction of emissions at the municipal level. The “in a fair way” proviso is especially important to avoid trade-offs between climate justice and social justice. Just as mitigation measures at the international level should avoid contributing to energy poverty in developing countries, and just as mitigation measures at the national level should avoid putting additional burdens onto poorer people at the domestic level, mitigation measures at the municipal level should avoid regressive effects on the most vulnerable members of the community. Three examples can serve to illustrate the possible relations between social and climate justice (McKendry, 2016). While the closure of two coal-fired plants in Chicago clearly represented a victory both from climate justice (reduction of GHG emissions) and social justice (reduction of air pollution), in Vancouver, the development of hydroelectric power and a dense and transit-oriented downtown reached its climate justice goal (a decrease in GHG emissions, despite a 27% increase in population) but missed its social justice objective (housing prices skyrocketed and urban density increased). Finally, Birmingham’s efforts to increase local energy efficiency missed both its climate justice goals (GHG emission reductions were much smaller than anticipated) and its social justice goals (the average energy bill increased by 75% between 2004 and 2014). Through a polycentric approach, cities can learn from others that are also engaged in trial-and-error learning processes, experiment, develop methods for assessing the costs and benefits of particular strategies, and build settings in which trust and reciprocity can emerge, grow, and be sustained over time. As Elinor Ostrom

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(2010, p. 556) stresses, “[a] strong commitment to finding ways of reducing individual emissions is an important element for coping with climate change. Building such a commitment, and trusting that others are also taking responsibility, can be more effectively undertaken in small- to medium-scale units that are linked together through diverse information networks.”

Reforming the WTO Without an institutional framework to promote technological innovation, consumption reduction, and population control, avoiding dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system will become very difficult, if not impossible. While states are the most relevant collective agents to implement such a framework, international organizations such as the UN, the WTO, and the IMF also play an important role, not only in making it possible, but also in promoting it. In other words, international institutions have a negative duty not to interfere with the mitigation duties of states, cities, corporations, and individuals, as well as a positive duty to bring about a framework that encourages these agents to comply with their mitigation duties. The WTO can be considered as an agent of justice. Trade laws can bring about justice but are, in their current form, one of the major causes of global injustices such as world poverty – take, for instance, tariffs on agricultural, textile, and footwear imports faced by poor countries, or intellectual property rights denying millions of patients access to generic versions of medicines. In a similar way, it is also possible to conceive the WTO as an agent of climate (in)justice, and, as such, a duty-bearer that ought to provide an adequate setting within which states can fulfill their mitigation duties. The international climate regime and the international trade regime are directly linked. The UNFCCC (1992, p. art. 3.5) holds a compliance clause regarding international trade: “[m]easures taken to combat climate change, including unilateral ones, should not constitute a means of arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination or a disguised restriction on international trade.” In other words, in their current form, both regimes are encouraging the overexploitation of fossil fuels by mentioning no specific limitation to their use. The EU–Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) and the EU–US Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) are two of the most recent outcomes of this international framework. In both cases, trade rules guarantee unrestricted access to fossil energy sources and even restrict the possibilities to develop renewables and low-carbon economies (GRAIN, 2015). Current trade rules are therefore not only inadequate, but also unjust, and should thus be reformed to make possible and promote states’ mitigation opportunities. The current “trade compliance” clause should be removed from the climate regime, and a “climate compliance” clause should be added to the trade regime, demanding that any trade agreement should include environmental conditions, such as limitations on the use and exchange of fossil fuels, and encouragements for the development and exchange of low-carbon energy technology. Such institutional reforms could not only lead the WTO to refrain from contributing to global injustices, as it currently does, but also make it an agent that can bring

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about justice. Instead of encouraging countries to relentlessly burn and trade their remaining reserves of fossil fuels, it can encourage them to refrain from overexploiting these resources by keeping a substantial part of oil, gas, and coal reserves in the ground. A new climate code within the WTO could, for instance, allow border adjustment measures in the form of carbon tariff imports to raise the price of imports from countries with low or nonexistent carbon price measures. Border adjustment measures would send a signal to exporting countries to reduce the embodied carbon in their products to avoid the impost and generate a revenue that could be invested in the development of low-carbon technologies. Another possible institutional reform takes the form of a Clean Trade Act that would make it illegal for any corporation or country to buy oil, gas, and coal from authoritarian countries that violate the right of peoples to control their resources, with legal penalties for those who make purchases or facilitate imports from a disqualified country (Wenar, 2016, pp. 283–312). While the first objective of this clean trade policy is to promote global justice by protecting the human rights of peoples suffering from the resource curse and its associated political pathologies (authoritarianism, corruption, and violence), it would also promote climate justice by contributing to the decarbonization of energy supplies. Today, over half of the global oil production and reserves cannot be exported without violating popular sovereignty over resources. For instance, to comply with the Clean Trade Act, the EU would have to reduce its importation of oil by half, of gas by one-third, and of coal by one-quarter, which would significantly increase its mitigation targets (Wenar, 2016, p. 305). A first challenge here is that there are concerns over whether this kind of measure to promote global justice and climate justice is compatible with WTO rules. According to Joseph Stiglitz (2007, pp. 176–178), such border measures are actually WTO compatible, since this regime established the principle that maintaining the global environment is important enough for normal access to markets to be suspended when a country’s export industries endanger it. As long as countries like the USA do not implement serious mitigation policies, European and other countries could levy a tax on energy-intensive products like steel and aluminum, which would provide a strong incentive for the USA to implement mitigation policies: “[e]ven widespread discussion of the possibility of imposing these tariffs might induce the United States to act” (Stiglitz, 2007, p. 177). Robyn Eckersley (2010, p. 377) confirms this by observing that “the balance of legal opinion suggests that appropriately designed, nondiscriminatory unilateral border measures are most likely to be WTO compatible as an environmental exemption under Article 20 of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).” Clean trade policies are also compatible with WTO rules: “WTO rules apply to trade, not to stolen goods, Clean Trade does not restrict free trade – rather, it enables free trade by enforcing property rights” (Wenar, 2016, p. 297). To rule against clean trade, the WTO would have to state that seizing a country’s natural resources by force and violence creates property rights and thus allows democratic countries to trade in violation of their own principle of popular sovereignty. A second challenge is that international organizations cannot be much more effective than their member parties want them to be (Jamieson, 2015, p. 39). The UNFCCC cannot impose binding emission limits on countries that do not accept being

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bound. Likewise, the WTO would have difficulty imposing sanctions on countries that do not agree to be sanctioned. In response to this, it is worth stressing that international organizations are major actors in the international legal process (Ratner, 2020, pp. 364–366). They reflect the interests of their member states in many ways, but they also make claims generated by their own secretariat officials that need not be in accordance with the views of all of their members. For instance, the UN can advance the claims of individuals and peoples, if necessary, against the claim of states, based on international human rights law. Likewise, the WTO can sanction some states by authorizing border adjustments, even if not all countries consent to such sanctions. International organizations contribute to the creation of legal norms in the form of international rules, and as such they can push states to comply with their own mitigation duties. One core international norm is that states must avoid environmental harms that extend beyond their jurisdiction and take precautionary actions regarding measures whose environmental impact is uncertain (Ratner, 2020, p. 369). In contrast with domestic law, international law does not rely primarily on vertical enforcement, but on noncoercive means, such as dialogue, capacity-building, diplomatic protest, incentives, and sanctions. Through such means, the WTO and the UNFCCC can help to ensure states’ compliance with international environmental law. One reason why so little has been written by climate justice scholars on international organizations is the domination of ideal theory in contemporary analytical political philosophy. Under the influence of John Rawls (1999), many philosophers have engaged with climate change by avoiding practical questions, such as feasible institutional reforms in the international climate and trade regimes. Many climate justice scholars have so far avoided engaging with legal rules and institutions, and the result is a failure to engage in institutional moral reasoning, that is, “reasoning that takes into account existing international institutions (including the lack thereof) in justifying, criticizing, or theorizing about the international political order” (Ratner, 2020, p. 380). Steven Ratner (2020, p. 370) explains that international law scholars are also partially responsible for this, since “most international law scholarship is empty or thin on questions of moral reasoning or ethical theory” (interestingly, he identifies the “environmental law concept of common but differentiated responsibilities” (Ratner, 2020, p. 384) as a potential ground on which normative political theorists and international law scholars could work together to get a more accurate account of the allocation of global responsibilities). To promote climate justice in the nonideal circumstances of the real world, it is crucial to move from ideal theories of climate justice to more interdisciplinary approaches on how to concretely change and improve the world by reforming existing institutions in the international climate and trade regimes.

Carbon Majors One last family of agents that owes mitigation duties are corporations, among which carbon majors, such as Chevron, Saudi Aramco, and BP stand out as significant actors (to these fossil fuel corporations, we can add meat and dairy corporations, such as JBS, Tyson Foods, and Cargill: Together, the top 5 meat and dairy companies

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emit more GHGs than ExxonMobil, Shell, or BP; the top 20 emit more than whole countries, such as Germany, Canada, Australia, the UK, or France (GRAIN & ITAP, 2018)). Carbon majors are the world’s largest public and private investor-owned, stateowned, and government-run oil, gas, coal, and cement producers. According to Richard Heede’s calculations, 90 carbon majors were responsible for 63% of cumulative worldwide emissions of industrial CO2 and methane from 1751 to 2010 (Heede, 2014, p. 234). Of these emissions, half has been emitted since 1986. Just like the operationalization of CBRD-RC explored above, this approach also leads to a very informative table which allows us to compare how much causal responsibility is borne by different firms in terms of their contribution to climate change (see Table 2). This empirical picture has important normative implications. It provides a different way to consider collective responsibility for climate change by moving beyond the state-centric perspective that dominates the literature on burden-sharing justice. Just like subnational and supranational entities can be considered as possible agents of justice, carbon majors can be seen as moral agents – a shift in perspective that can also represent a way forward in political and philosophical debates on the attribution of responsibility to address climate change (Grasso & Vladimirova, 2020; Heede, 2014, pp. 235–236). The climate ethics literature has indeed focused predominantly on the emissions side, with little research on the “extraction side” or the “supply side” (Grasso & Vladimirova, 2020; Kartha et al., 2018). Under any principle of distributive climate justice – the PPP, the APP, and/or the BPP – carbon majors have a special responsibility to address climate change. They have historically contributed to destabilizing the climate system, and they continue to do so today on a massive scale, even though the harms and dangers of doing so have been clear for at least three decades (Shue, 2017). They have the financial and technological capacity to develop substantial mitigation measures. They have benefitted considerably from past emitting activities, since most of their capital is based on the exploitation of fossil fuels. Although they could have invested massively in alternative sources of energy such as renewables, so far none of the major corporations, such as Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, and BP, have changed their business plans. Quite the contrary: They all argue that the world needs more fossil fuels rather than less (Frumhoff et al., 2015, p. 166). One additional reason why carbon majors have a special kind of responsibility is that they have systematically worked to prevent political action to reduce global emissions, especially through lobbying activities to ensure fossil fuels were favored over other sources of energy and through disinformation campaigns (Oreskes & Conway, 2010). For instance, between 1988 and 2005, ExxonMobil spent over $16 million to spread misleading claims about climate science and worked with the Bush administration to try to remove top scientists from leadership roles in the IPCC and the US National Climate Assessment (Frumhoff et al., 2015, p. 164). The most obvious responsibility of carbon majors is a negative duty to stop financing misinformation campaigns about climate change and lobbying campaigns to slow down or stop political progress in the fight against climate change. But they also have a more positive duty of decarbonization: They ought to implement largescale transformation in order to reduce and, eventually, eliminate GHG emissions

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Table 2 Carbon Majors’ Cumulative Emissions. Top 20 investor-owned companies (IOCs) and state-owned entities (SOEs). Attributed GHG emissions in million tons of CO2-equivalent (MtCO2e) in 2010 (left column), between 1854 and 2010 in absolute terms (middle column), and between 1751 and 2010 in relative terms. (With permission of Springer Nature (Heede, 2014, p. 237)) Entity 1. Chevron, USA 2. ExxonMobil, USA 3. Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia 4. BP, UK 5. Gazprom, Russian Federation 6. Royal Dutch/Shell, The Netherlands 7. National Iranian Oil Company 8. Pemex, Mexico 9. ConocoPhillips, The USA 10. Petroleos de Venezuela 11. Coal India 12. Peabody Energy, USA 13. Total, France 14. PetroChina, China 15. Kuwait Petroleum Corp. 16. Abu Dhabi NOC, UAE 17. Sonatrach, Algeria 18. Consol Energy, Inc., The USA 19. BHP-Billiton, Australia 20. Anglo American, United Kingdom Top 20 IOCs and SOEs Top 40 IOCs and SOEs All 81 IOCs and SOEs Total 90 carbon majors Total global emissions

2010 emissions MtCO2e 423 655 1550

Cumulative 1854–2010 MtCO2e 51,096 46,672 46,033

554 1371

35,837 32,136

2.47% 2.22%

478

30,751

2.12%

867

29,084

2.01%

602 359

20,025 16,866

1.38% 1.16%

485 830 519 398 614 323

16,157 15,493 12,432 11,911 10,564 10,503

1.11% 1.07% 0.86% 0.82% 0.73% 0.73%

387 386 160

9672 9263 9096

0.67% 0.64% 0.63%

320

7606

0.52%

242

7242

0.50%

11,523

428,439 546,767 602,491 914,251 1,450,332

18,524 27,946 36,026

Percent of global 1751–2010 3.52% 3.22% 3.17%

29.54% 37.70% 41.54% 63.04% 100.00%

from their business model (Grasso & Vladimirova, 2020; Shue, 2017). The contribution of carbon majors is also significant enough to avoid the problem of inconsequentialism: “By continuing major contributions to harm, the major carbon producers have for decades knowingly and flagrantly persisted in violating the bedrock principle: do no harm” (Shue, 2017, p. 593). If they have been able to

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impose a harmful carbon-intensive model of development at the global level by providing fossil fuels to the global socioeconomic system, carbon majors have the economic and political power to promote low-carbon sources of energy. They can invest massively in the research, development, and deployment of renewables. To fulfill their duty to decarbonize, they have to progressively phase out fossil fuels from their businesses by transitioning to a distribution of low-carbon sources of energy. The financial burden of this energy transition should be differentiated according to the PPP, the APP, and the BPP, but on any reasonable interpretation of these principles, big oil, gas, and/or coal companies such as Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, and BP have to bear most of the burden. The obvious challenge to mitigation duties in this context is that the fossil fuel industry has tremendous economic power and a strong interest in fossil energy continuing to be exploited. Individual corporations will probably not drastically change their business models on their own. But other agents can push them to do so. Governments can “level the playing field” by changing the incentive structure (Jamieson & Di Paola, 2016, p. 268). Political measures that increase the prices of fossil fuels, such as carbon taxes and carbon markets, as well as measures that decrease the prices of renewables, such as public subsidies, would create the background conditions that would push carbon majors to comply with their mitigation duties. Likewise, offering carbon majors reductions in royalty rates relative to how much low-carbon energy they provide would produce a strong positive incentive for engaging in the development and deployment of alternative technology (Maltais, 2016, p. 57). Another possible response to this challenge is for institutions to divest from owning shares in publicly traded fossil fuel companies. The fossil fuel divestment movement aims to reduce the flow of investment into the companies that own the highest amount of reported carbon reserves and increase the flow of investment in companies promoting low-carbon sources of energy. Taking part in this movement could even represent an opportunity for individuals to discharge their duty to help promote climate action at the collective level by contributing to changing moral, political, cultural norms, and shifting capital out of the fossil fuel industry and into low-carbon energy (Lenferna, 2019, pp. 148–150). Here again, it is possible to incentivize carbon majors to comply with their mitigation duties. One last response is that the renewable energy market is now a profitable option for multiple investors and industrialists. In many parts of the world, wind and solar energy have become competitive with fossil fuels in terms of cost. Today, choosing to divest from fossil fuels to invest in renewables instead has no influence on the total financial risk for the investor: divesting from fossil fuel stocks has no negative impact on investment returns (Plantinga & Scholtens, 2021). Shifting from fossil fuels to renewables also brings a range of cobenefits, for instance, providing 139 countries with electricity generated using 100% wind, water, and solar power by 2050 would avoid millions of deaths from air pollution annually, create 24.3 million net new long-term, full-time jobs, reduce energy costs, reduce power requirements by 42.5%, reduce power disruption, and increase worldwide access to energy (Jacobson et al., 2017). A final challenge here is that many communities and workers are economically dependent on fossil fuel extraction (Kartha et al., 2018). Renewable energy delivers

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more jobs per unit of energy delivered than fossil fuels, but the transition from fossil fuels to renewables will unavoidably lead to job losses in the sector of fossil fuel extraction. People who lose their jobs because of the energy transition will need to find a new foundation for livelihoods and revenue. Once again, to avoid a possible clash between climate justice and social justice, compensatory measures are necessary here as well, such as making alternative jobs available, securing access to the necessary skills building to shift into these alternative positions, and ensuring social protection. According to Sivan Kartha et al. (2018, p. 127), this challenge is important, but not insurmountable: “[i]n principle, societies could undertake a decarbonization transition in which they anticipate, prepare, cooperate, and contribute fairly to minimize and alleviate the transitional disruption.”

Conclusion The remaining global carbon budget to avoid dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system is scarce and rapidly decreasing. Transgressing the planetary boundary of the climate system by greatly overshooting the global carbon budget will probably result in other planetary boundaries being crossed, which would lead the whole Earth system toward a new state that would be much less hospitable. Crossing the 2
C threshold is likely to trigger a “hothouse Earth” pathway characterized by a cascade of tipping points in the climate system, with no possibility of coming back to stringent warming targets, even with substantial amounts of negative emissions (Steffen et al., 2018). According to Timothy Lenton et al. (2019, p. 595), “the evidence from tipping points alone suggests that we are in a state of planetary emergency: both the risk and urgency of the situation are acute.” In such a context of climate emergency, each actor at each level has a compelling responsibility to implement ambitious mitigation measures. Different actors have different responsibilities with variations in how demanding those responsibilities are and different options available to fulfill them, but most individual and collective agents can and should contribute to mitigation efforts (see Table 3). These various mitigation duties have been identified by drawing on the literature on climate justice, global ethics, and global justice. Climate justice scholars have so far focused most heavily on nation-states, but other families of agents are starting to emerge in the philosophical literature, especially individuals. A further inclusion of other collective agents, such as cities, the WTO, and carbon majors, could move the discussion forward by investigating new mitigation duties. If climate justice scholarship moves away from its predominantly state-centric perspective, additional agents and mitigation duties will probably be identified; if it moves away from its predominantly anthropocentric perspective, new grounds for justifying mitigation duties will probably be found. Moving toward a more polycentric approach and less anthropocentric ethics through the use of new ideas such as multiscalar justice and interspecies justice would allow the philosophical literature on climate change to explore new avenues and could contribute to further promoting climate justice in climate action at all levels.

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Table 3 Summary of mitigation duties Agents Individuals

Duties 1. A duty to reduce one’s carbon footprint; 2. a duty to promote and support collective action against climate change

Nation-states

1. A duty to mitigate domestic GHG emissions; 2. a duty to engage in international mitigation cooperation to help other states to mitigate their own emissions

Options (examples) 1. Consumption choices and lifestyle changes (reducing consumption of animalbased products, reducing car and air travel, and having fewer children); 2. contributing to changing policies and reforming institutions (voting green, organizing and attending demonstrations, and participating in civil disobedience) and/or contributing to changing or creating social norms (influencing other people to reduce their carbon footprints, making greener lifestyles more appealing, and taking part in the fossil fuel divestment movement) 1. Technological innovation (energy efficiency and the expansion of renewables); progressive carbon pricing policies (taxes on flights, vehicles, electricity consumption, and meat consumption); prohibition (private jets, yachts, SUVs, and very large houses); and population control policies (tax reduction for households with small families and tax increases (where affordable) for families with too many children); 2. clean technology and financial transfers

Major duty-bearers 1. Rich and affluent people; 2. those who can influence other people to change their lifestyles and to push for more ambitious climate policies (politicians, lawyers, researchers, journalists, poets, and novelists)

Developed states and new emitting countries (BASIC, Russia, Indonesia, South Korea, and Mexico). Each state’s degree of responsibility can be measured through the operationalizing of CBDR-RC offered by the climate equity calculator

(continued)

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Table 3 (continued) Agents Subnational jurisdictions

Duties A duty to develop an urban design that mitigates emissions at the municipal, local, and regional levels in a fair way

Supranational formations

1. A duty not to interfere with states, corporations, and individuals’ mitigation duties; 2. a duty to bring about a framework that promotes compliance with these entities’ mitigation duties

Economic corporations

1. A duty not to interfere with domestic and international mitigation measures; 2. a duty of decarbonization

Options (examples) Design and apply mitigation policies in the most polluting sectors by conciliating climate justice goals with social justice goals (energy supply and management, transport, land-use planning, and waste management) 1. Remove the trade compliance clause from the climate regime; 2. create a climate compliance clause in the trade regime, a new climate code to allow border adjustment measures, and a Clean Trade Act to promote global justice and climate justice goals 1. Stop financing misinformation campaigns about climate change and lobbying campaigns against mitigation policies; 2. redesign business plans to replace fossil fuels with renewables, stop contributing to deforestation, and stop intensive animal livestock farming

Major duty-bearers Cities, counties, provinces, and individual states

UNFCCC, WTO, and IMF

Carbon majors, meat and dairy corporations

Cross-References ▶ Adaptation Duties ▶ Climate Change and Urban Studies ▶ Compensation Duties ▶ Responsibility for Climate Harms ▶ The Ethics of Geoengineering Acknowledgments I am grateful to Lisa Broussois, Simon Caney, Kian Mintz-Woo, and Gianfranco Pellegrino for their helpful feedback on this chapter.

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Adaptation Duties Marco Grasso

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Climate Change and Harm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Moral Features of the Duty of Adaptation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Duty Bearers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Forms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Scope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Duty Recipients . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Empirical Features of the Duty of Adaptation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Currency and the Magnitude . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Second-Order Agents and Duty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

This chapter addresses an under investigated issue of climate ethics: the duty of adaptation, i.e., a standard of moral behavior required of duty bearers due to their violation of the no harm principle which involves a practical commitment to rectify consequent harmful impacts. This chapter, after framing the duty of adaptation within a harm-centered perspective, first identifies its constitutive moral features: the duty bearers, i.e., the agent who should bear the burdens required of the duty of adaptation; the forms in which the duty of adaptation abides by its moral mandate; the scope, i.e., the morally-pertinent harm that the duty of adaptation should financially rectify; and the duty-recipients, i.e., the agents entitled to rectification and the modality of the allocation of the rectificatory actions among them. It goes on to examine the empirical features M. Grasso (*) University of Milan-Bicocca, Milan, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_53

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of the duty of adaptation dictated by its moral articulation: the structure through which the duty of adaptation should be attained; and the currency and magnitude of its required rectification actions. Finally, the chapter provides an overview of why and how other agents have a second-order duty to ensure the bearers of the duty of adaptation meet their commitments. Keywords

Adaptation · Adaptation funding · Climate change · Compensation · Disgorgement · Duty of adaptation · Financial rectification – Harm · Secondorder duty · Social vulnerability

Introduction It is almost unanimously acknowledged that to comprehensively address anthropogenic climate change, both adaptation – measures that prevent and/or lessen its harmful impacts – and mitigation – the reduction of emissions of human-generated greenhouse gases and/or the enhancement of the capacity to variously sequester them – are unavoidable. Adaptation and mitigation entail two moral duties: the first demands efforts aimed at preventing climate impacts or adapting to them; the second requires managing carbon to avert dangerous interference with the climate system. This chapter explores the duty of adaptation: however, before scrutinizing it, clarification about the definition of adaptation is required. By and large, adaptation has long been marginalized in the climate debate, which has so far tended to privilege mitigation issues. This was largely due to the fact that climate orthodoxy attributed a pivotal role to a strong reduction of emissions in order to avert the impacts of climate change. In this discourse, adaptation weakened any willingness to control emissions and thus ultimately crowded out mitigation initiatives. In short, adaptation was considered an antienvironmental and fatalistic approach, whereas only mitigation was fundamental in light of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s (UNFCCC) ultimate goal of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations at a safe level (Grasso, 2010). The impending climate crisis changed everything, and nowadays adaptation is considered, along with mitigation – and sometimes with negative emissions technologies and solar geoengineering approaches – essential to tackling the harmful impacts of the changed climate. The various climate change literatures put forward many definitions of adaptation: common to all of them is a focus on the adjustment of systems triggered by climate impacts; they do, however, differ in breadth, interpretation, and scope (Sietsma et al., 2021). Any systematic scrutiny of adaptation first demands definition of the subject or object involved, variously called system of interest, unit of analysis, exposure unit, or sensitive system (Grasso, 2010). The characterization of the system involved relates mainly to scale: adaptation at the household level may involve, say, installing air conditioning, at the local level perhaps the development of new green areas, and at the national or supranational level a switch to less water intensive agricultural production.

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The potential success of adaptation initiatives and the evaluation of their merits, especially in moral terms, as well as the priority of adaptation options, depend on properly defined characteristics of systems called determinants of adaptation. The most significant of these – and which suffice to synthesize the entire range – are sensitivity, vulnerability, and adaptive capacity. Sensitivity is a system’s biophysical negative and positive responsiveness to climate impacts. The notion of vulnerability is more controversial because it entails at least two definitions: one biophysical, where the vulnerability of a given system or society is a function of its physical exposure to climate change effects and its ability to adapt to these conditions; and the other social, where what matters is the ability of individuals and of groups to deal with climate hazards. The latter is the most opportune when referring to the duty of adaptation, as clarified later. Adaptive capacity can instead be generally understood as the potential of a system, region, or community to adapt to the effects or impacts of climate change. Given this scope of the notion of adaptation, it is quite obvious that adapting to climate change imposes a burden on individuals and communities, especially the more vulnerable (Duus-Otterström & Jagers, 2012). In moral terms, such burdens imply that some agents have a positive – requiring agents to act in certain ways – duty of adaptation, which by and large involves the provisions of the means to sustain activities that protect other agents from being harmed by climate impacts, e.g., building sea-walls; subsidizing people to relocate from threatened areas; implementing irrigation systems in drier areas; planting trees to cool cities; etc. (Caney, 2010). Accordingly, this chapter, after framing the duty of adaptation within a harm-centered perspective, first identifies its constitutive moral features: the duty bearers; the forms in which the duty of adaptation abides by its moral mandate; the scope, i.e., the morally pertinent harm that the duty of adaptation should financially rectify; and the duty-recipients. Subsequently, it looks into the empirical features of the duty of adaptation dictated by its moral articulation: the structure through which the duty of adaptation should be attained; and the currency and magnitude of its required rectification actions. Finally, the chapter provides an overview of why and how other agents – christened second-order agents – have a second-order duty to put pressure and/or ensure the bearers of the duty of adaptation meet it.

Climate Change and Harm Climate change has an array of negative impacts on the planet’s natural and socioeconomic systems, directly or indirectly harmful to all forms of life, that are potentially catastrophic for many of the most vulnerable people in the world. The most manifest of these impacts include increased water stress and reduced crop yields; rising sea levels; more widespread and diffuse inland floods and coastal flooding and erosion; reductions in the thickness and extent of glaciers, ice sheets, and sea ice; exposure to new health risks; rises in the frequency and severity of extreme climatic events; and increased conflicts over the control of scarcer resources, migrations, state failures and the resulting risks (Field et al., 2014).

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Given the ultimately harmful nature of climate change, and consistent with the only fundamental requirement shared by all the different accounts of morality, avoidance and prevention of harm to others (Gert & Gert, 2020), it is possible to claim that the moral foundation of climate change relates to avoiding/preventing harm, as the objective of the UNFCCC – that is, prevention of dangerous climate change (art. 2) – implicitly acknowledges, while critically depending on actions people take now that harm and will harm other people living now and in the future. In particular, greenhouse gases emissions (i.e., the harmful actions related to the use of fossil fuels, long-term deforestation and agricultural practices) by a diverse group of people around the globe, which by consuming a common resource such as the atmospheric absorptive capacity, threaten the stability of climate systems and consequently alter climatic dynamics, harm a diverse group of present and future people even in remote parts of the globe. In the same vein, Shue considers the requirement to do no harm as the fundamental component of climate ethics (Shue, 2011); Vanderheiden maintains that any plausible approach to climate justice should uphold a strong imperative to prevent people from suffering climate-related harm (Vanderheiden, 2011). It is also worth recalling that this notion of harm is akin to that of injustice, i.e., something wrong that exists per se, independently from, and prior to, considerations of justice (Wolgast, 1987). Additionally, it should be noted that the development of harm-related approaches to morally address climate change can be usefully grounded in the Western philosophical tradition. Such a broad strand of theories and principles is not of course monolithic or exclusive and has developed a common basis for raising universal moral claims and arguments. In this philosophical and cultural milieu, a convenient starting point for the construction of a harm-centered duty of adaptation is the consideration of the liberal account of justice. The reference is to modern liberalism and, by and large, to the body of literature that has flourished since the 1970s and Rawls’s path-breaking contribution from 1971, A Theory of Justice (republished in: (Rawls, 1999)). Liberal justice is, in fact, based on equality, freedom, redistribution, inclusion, and care. It gives equal or impartial consideration to the interests of all and displays a general concern for the least well-off subjects, who should be given the opportunities, means, and choices to live a dignified life, the improvement of which is the most ethically important objective. This concept is the nerve center of liberalism; liberal justice can be employed to support the governance of climate change because the elements affected by it “fit naturally into standard liberal accounts of justice such as those of Rawls” (Miller, 1999, p. 171). In this view, liberal justice can play a major role as a unifying basis to facilitate sustainable collective action in climate change. It should be stressed that the choice of developing the duty of adaptation within the Western moral tradition does not imply its superiority, but it is determined by the fact that its theoretical constructs are widely acknowledged around the globe (Jamieson, 1996) and have largely contributed to the formation of existing, albeit weak, global governance institutions. Western ethics may thus prove useful for initially addressing the moral requirements of action in adaptation, since it would not be disruptive for the dominant values and views of world politics, whose likely resistance against inclusion of different ethical traditions

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can be weakened only gradually. Moreover, moral traditions are open-ended and non-exhaustive systems, so any difference with other moral traditions can be included within them. A further, more ambitious, duty of adaptation could, and indeed should, include non-Western ethical traditions, as well as other more radical ethical considerations for effectively protecting all forms of life from climate change. The starting point to address the duty of adaptation within a harm-centered perspective is the acknowledgment that climate change poses severe existential threats to people’s fundamental rights and interests, and to the planet they inhabit. Given this, it is useful to first clarify the moral status of the harm the duty of adaptation refers to. As said, the requirement to do no harm is a central tenet of ethics and has shaped and guided societies for generations. The do no harm principle, first proposed by John Stuart Mill (Mill 1859, republished 2015) states that agents have negative duties, i.e., they must refrain from action, and more specifically they should eschew certain behaviors in order to prevent and/or avoid doing harm to others. At the same time, harm arising from climate change is difficult to specifically identify, it is viewed as distant, abstract, so “[w]e tend not to see climate change as a moral problem, it does not motivate us to act with the urgency characteristic of our responses to moral challenges” (Jamieson, 2007, p. 546). The human brain too is unprepared to respond to the challenges raised by the climate crisis since it has evolved to cope with more immediate threats that violate individuals’ moral sensibilities. In short, climate related harm does not have the characteristics of an archetypal moral problem: (i) intentionality on the part of harming subjects; (ii) the possibility of identifying the harm and the harming and harmed subjects; and (iii) proximity in time and space of the harm and the harming and harmed subjects. In fact, in the context of climate change, there is no clearly identifiable subject (agent) that acts intentionally in order to harm another clearly identifiable subject (victim), who is near in time and space. Rather, there are numerous agents who, through their ordinary everyday actions (driving a car, working at a computer, eating meat, turning on a light), inadvertently and/or inevitably and/or unwittingly set in motion forces that will harm numerous victims distant in time and space (Grasso, 2013; see the chapter ▶ “Responsibility for Climate Harms” by Obst, this volume). In light of these difficulties, what are the relevant moral traits of the notion of harm pertinent to the duty of adaptation? The overall moral cogency of climaterelated harm originates from and can be dealt within the doctrine of doing/allowing and enabling harm. Reasons against doing harm, i.e., starting or sustaining a causal sequence that leads to foreseen harm, as defined by Foot (2002) must be more stringent constraints, demanding more of perpetrators after the harm has been done, compared to reasons against merely allowing harm. The moral status of enabling harm – actions involving the removal of obstacles that prevent harm, or the creation of obstacles to harm prevention – is another matter altogether, and a contentious one at that. This is not the place to enter into this thorny and still unresolved philosophical dispute. Suffice it to say that some hold views that enabling harm is morally equivalent to doing it (Barry & Øverland, 2016; Foot, 2002). Various explanations justify this view. One very pertinent to the case of the duty of adaptation seems to be

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Barry and Øverland’s (Barry & Øverland, 2016, pp. 96–121). This school of thought first notes that where an agent thwarts harm prevention in any way, this is tantamount to enabling harm. Doing and enabling harm share the important moral feature of giving rise to costs, while allowing harm – being a so-called innocent bystander – generally, does not. In their understanding, giving rise to costs means that an agent’s location, movements, or (in)actions have as a consequence that another agent be harmed. As giving rise to cost is morally significant, they then posit that this is the reason why doing/enabling harm is morally different from allowing harm. Finally, this perspective holds that agents who give rise to costs by doing and enabling harm have more stringent duties to address such harm than those who merely allow it. Barry and Øverland (2016) suggest that harm-doing and harm-enabling need to be addressed through an overarching methodology of contribution-based responsibility, which is part of a broader approach of corrective, or rectificatory, justice. Corrective justice originates from harm doing and harm enabling and helps focus on past and present harm generated, elaborating on the resulting duties required to rectify the injustice thus produced. This view seems also consistent with Caney’s harm avoidance justice, which demands harm be avoided/minimized, specifies the agents involved and their duties, as well as the potential victims (Caney, 2014, p. 126). In light of this contextualization of harm-doing/enabling in climate change, it seems sensible to argue that both the duty of adaptation and the duty of mitigation are instrumental. In other words, they are means for dealing comprehensively with the harm resulting from climate impacts, the ultimate end of the struggle against climate change. In fact, the only way to avoid/prevent harm associated with climate change requires both protecting society from nature (adaptation, i.e., prevention of harm) and nature from society (mitigation, i.e., avoidance of harm) (Stehr & Storch, 2005). In particular, mid- and short-term harm prevention largely depends on adaptation measures, whereas both harm avoidance and long-term harm prevention depend almost exclusively on mitigation efforts. The duty of adaptation, therefore, addresses mid- and short-term harm prevention: given this focus, it is now possible to specify the moral features that flesh out this duty. But before developing such framework of analysis, a brief clarification of the differences between the similar yet different – and hence the necessity of this clarification – duties of compensation (for a thorough analysis of this duty see the chapter ▶ “Compensation Duties” by Mintz-Woo, this volume) and of the moral superiority of the duty of adaptation is unavoidable. When financial means are provided to maintain or restore people’s ability to protect themselves from harm, this should be considered as adaptation; the duty of compensation – be its operationalization based on approaches that connect it to emissions or on those that are independent of them (see the chapter ▶ “Compensation Duties” by Mintz-Woo, this volume) – implies instead a justificatory level prerogative of people to live in a world where they are not harmed by anthropogenic climate change. When this entitlement is not met, compensation is owed to remedy an unjust situation. From a moral perspective, it is better to avoid harm in the first place than to compensate it – financially or not – in retrospect (Baatz, 2018). In this regard, Goodin’s argument

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seems very useful (Goodin, 1989, p. 60): in the event of irreplaceable loss, he distinguishes between end-displacing compensations that help people in pursuing other ends that would leave them as well off as they would have been if the loss had not occurred; and means-replacing compensation that provides people equivalent means for pursuing the same ends. The former is inferior, because it obliges people to pursue other goals with other means. Therefore, the duty of adaptation corresponds to means-replacing compensation and is morally superior to the duty of compensation since this corresponds to ends-displacing compensation. It must be stressed that, as thoroughly clarified at point (ii) of the ensuing section, while part of the relevant literature (e.g., Goodin above) uses the term compensation, as synonymous for what is meant here as financial rectification, this chapter considers compensation to be a specific form of financial rectification that requires the identification of the recipient of the funds. Financial rectification of the harm done is instead generally understood as a cash-based form of rectification. Rectification signifies a broader term that includes not only material forms (financial and non-financial) but also non-material ones, such as recognition of blameworthiness and apologizing, etc. In view of this taxonomy, the duty of adaptation entails the financial rectification of the harmful impacts of climate change, as the section “Empirical Features of the Duty of Adaptation” elucidates.

The Moral Features of the Duty of Adaptation In light of this harm-based contextualization of the duty of adaptation and of its moral superiority to the duty of compensation, its main moral features include defining the following (Caney, 2006; Grasso, 2019): (i) The duty bearers (i.e., the agents who should bear the burdens required of the duty of adaptation); (ii) The forms (i.e., the ways in which the duty of adaptation abides by its moral mandate); (iii) The scope (i.e., the morally-pertinent harm that the duty of adaptation should rectify); (iv) The duty-recipients (i.e., the agents entitled to rectification and the modality of the allocation of the rectificatory actions among them envisaged by the duty of adaptation). The rest of this section will investigate these four moral features of the duty of adaptation. Before proceeding, a clarification of the controversial notion of duty is in order: in this work, a duty is understood as a standard of moral behavior resulting from a violation and involves a practical commitment to either undertake or refrain from undertaking specific courses of action. It should not therefore be confused with the broader notion of responsibility, which entails the condition of being responsible according to principles of justice and the obligation to take action, which in this context can be understood as a pre-condition – not investigated – of the duty of adaptation.

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The Duty Bearers Some scholars maintain that the bearers of the duty of adaptation are to be identified through the application of a polluter pays principle (PPP) and a beneficiary pays principle (BPP) (Baatz, 2018). The PPP distributes the financial burdens associated with the rectificatory action in proportion to past contributions that agents have made to the overall level of emissions. The BPP holds instead that such proportionality should be calculated on the basis of the benefits that agents have derived from activities generating emissions. However, this account may be considered narrow (Grasso, 2019; Shue, 2015): while the rectificatory action required to the bearers of the duty of adaptation is certainly justified by the two backward-looking principles outlined (the PPP and the BPP), to enlarge and strengthen the moral justifications of the duty of adaptation finance, it might be opportune to add the forward-looking cogency of the ability to pay principle (APP), which posits that the quota of burdens should be proportional to the agents’ relative capacity to bear such burdens (Caney, 2006). Given the urgency of adequately addressing adaptations, the stronger and the more inclusive the duty of adaptation is, the more cogent it is and the greater its potential to meet the challanges of adaptation. The three principles – the PPP, the BPP, and the APP – that would make up this triply hybrid moral basis of the duty of adaptation might be somewhat controversial at their theoretical periphery, but nonetheless they all converge at the practical core (Shue, 2015, p. 8) of reinforcing one each other. In fact “those who contributed heavily to creating the problem of excessive emissions thereby both benefitted more than others and became better able to pay than most others” (Shue, 2015, p. 16). In other words, all three principles are inevitably closely intertwined, and forgetting one makes the moral stringency of the duty of adaptation for the duty-bearer falter, or at least narrows its scope. In particular, the inclusion of the APP considerably strengthens such an account as it makes it possible to better capture the wealth component, which in this case is very important, given that the rectificatory action envisaged by the duty of adaptation in most cases is carried out through disbursement of funds, as shown later. All in all, the duty bearer is the agent who has contributed to climate harm (PPP), has benefitted from the action producing it (BPP), and is able to shoulder the financial rectification required by it (APP). The actual overall accountability of the duty bearer is the combination of their accountabilities to the single principle: therefore, their commitment to the duty of adaptation should be proportional to this combined level of accountability.

The Forms In the harm-centered moral milieu delineated, the objective of the duty of adaptation is to address the harm caused by anthropogenic climate change by supporting affected agents. There are different ways to support them, from immaterial

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approaches, like public acknowledgment and apologies, naming and shaming, or providing a genuine account of climate change and its implications through, for instance, the establishment of a truth commission, to material rectification of historical wrongdoing (Goodin, 2013; Goodin & Pasternak, 2016). In the context of climate change, many practical matters to address its harmful impacts are necessary. The duty of adaptation, therefore, must be mainly material and aim at preventing/ avoiding/lessening climate impacts through practical actions. There are different forms to materially address harmful impacts, too. For example, restitution implies returning misappropriated things to the rightful owners or their successors; compensation means compensating the rightful owners or their successors for the harmful impacts; disgorgement requires the relinquishment of the fruits of historical wrongdoing (Goodin, 2013). Restitution squarely applies to the duty of compensation, whereas given its very nature – returning the misappropriated thing, despite the difficulty of pinpointing it, apart from a rather abstract notion of atmospheric absorptive capacity which was wrongfully overconsumed – this form of rectification is not pertinent to the duty of adaptation: only compensation and disgorgement are. The fundamental distinction between the two is that the former requires the identification of both the duty-bearer and the duty-recipient, while disgorgement focuses only on duty-bearers relinquishing current assets related to historical wrongdoing. Unfortunately, compensation too is problematic considering the complex nature of climate change. Given substantial temporal and spatial lags between carbon emissions and their impacts, it is difficult to identify the actual duty bearer and the rightful duty-recipient, apart from very circumstantiated cases. So, it seems safe to claim that compensation applies only to what can be defined as localized adaptation in terms of spatial scope and/or institutional context. This is limited to, for example, an institution – a municipality or a road construction business – that by cutting trees for its institutional/business purpose – building a new residential area or a new road – contributes to generate more severe heat waves for local communities. There are myriad possible examples of localized adaptation, but it is nonetheless undisputable that they remain a limited portion of the more general extent of adaptation. In all the remaining circumstances that can be defined as generalized adaption, compensation fails. In fact, in the case of generalized adaptation, disgorgement appears to be more appropriate. Disgorgement, as said, requires only the relinquishment of the fruits of historical wrongdoing, in the case of the duty of adaptation of the climate-related harm-doing and harm-enabling actions. Generalized adaptation circumscribes duty bearers and duty recipients only in terms of moral categories, without specifically identifying them: the former, therefore, are required to disgorge their tainted assets and benefits in favor of the latter. Not all assets and benefits that are attributable to duty bearers’ climate-related harmful actions should be viewed as tainted. For example, assets used for decarbonizing their activities/behaviors should not be seen as tainted, nor charity donations or benefits to communities. On the other hand, all those assets and benefits not employed in climate-productive ways would be tainted. Furthermore, it should be specified that the notion of wrongdoing reasonably applies to duty bearers’ climate-related harmful

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actions since 1992 (presentation of the first IPCC Assessment Report at the Rio Conference). After this point in time, ignorance about the consequences of certain actions (e.g., emissions, deforestation) and any alleged impotence to reduce them became inexcusable, and hence the duty of adaptation squarely applies.

The Scope The scope of the duty of adaptation consists of the morally pertinent harm the duty bearers should rectify. Rectifications – in the form of compensation and disgorgement – required by the duty of adaptation first involve clarification of which impacts would have naturally occurred versus those attributable to anthropogenic climate change; obviously, duty bearers cannot be held morally responsible for any harm falling into the former category. The first point is then to distinguish between anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic climate change. To this end, the causal chain that goes from human influence on climate change to distinct impacts on human, socio-economic, and natural systems can be clarified through different kinds of approaches of attribution science (Marjanac et al., 2017), usually through a risk-based one which addresses this point probabilistically, or a story-telling approach which inspects the role of the various factors contributing to the event and decides its attributability deterministically. A first step – known as detection of change – requires proving that a particular variable has changed in a statistically significant way. The second step – named factor attribution – involves identifying the possible causative factors to determine the role of one or more drivers with respect to the detected change and the consequent harm. Eventually, source attribution seeks to ascribe any change to specific agents (Burger et al., 2020). Source attribution goes even further, in trying to identify and attribute climate impacts to specific sources; a source could be a particular agent (e.g., a country or a company), a sector, or an activity (Burger et al., 2020). Source attribution makes it possible to allocate a pertinent part of anthropogenic climate harm to individual duty bearers. This attribution is based on their proportional contribution to changes in global atmospheric composition, on the extrapolation of the proportional contribution to localized events, and on the identification of the actual harm caused by those impacts (Burger & Wentz, 2018). In other words, it seems that a sound causative chain going from anthropogenic climate change to harm and the consequent monetary costs, to duty bearers is increasingly possible. Given this scientific background, attribution science certainly has important moral implications (Mechler & Schinko, 2016), which are complex and often difficult to unravel (Burger & Wentz, 2018). Attributing specific harm to carbon emissions can imply responsibility and duties for emitters, including countries, regions, sectors, companies, and individuals. Of course, attribution science is not sufficient, and does not aim to establish emitters’ moral responsibility or duties – which is a multifaceted issue that extends far beyond climate science (WallimannHelmer et al., 2019). In other words, determining who should bear the duty of adaptation remains largely a moral, social, and political question.

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The Duty Recipients Finally, to morally articulate the duty of adaptation, it is necessary to identify who should be entitled to the rectification of climate’s harmful impacts: agents most vulnerable to them should be the rightful duty-recipients. Vulnerability to climate change impacts is not simply about the risks of certain harmful events occurring; it is about the preparedness and capacity of different groups to cope with these effects. In this light, it is useful to clarify the notion of vulnerability, which, applied to social systems, is also termed social vulnerability (Brooks et al., 2005). Social vulnerability could be broadly understood as a state of well-being pertaining directly to individuals and social groups. Its causes are related not only to climate impacts but also to social, institutional, and economic factors, such as poverty, class, race, ethnicity, gender, etc. (Paavola & Adger, 2006). Social vulnerability produced by climate impacts endangers a number of critical aspects of well-being, such as life, health, livelihood, etc. The degree of social vulnerability can be used to define duty recipients’ level of entitlement to the funds: the greater their social vulnerability, the larger the financial rectification. Shue’s third general principle of equity clearly endorses a stringent normative imperative of putting the most socially vulnerable first (Shue, 1999). This principle of guaranteed minimum states that those who have less than enough for an adequate human life should be given enough. To this end, being socially vulnerable means being deprived and having far less than enough. More socially vulnerable agents, therefore, should be given the rectification means (the funds, in this case) necessary to attain a level sufficient for them to cope with adaptable climate impacts.

Empirical Features of the Duty of Adaptation To fully specify the duty of adaptation, two empirical features springing from its moral articulation outlined in the previous section need to be addressed: (i) The structure (i.e., the concrete means through which the duty of adaptation should be attained) (ii) The currency and the magnitude (the kind and the amount of rectification duty recipients are entitled to) This section deals with them.

The Structure In practical terms, the duty of adaptation can be structured depending on the kind of adaptation it targets. In the case of localized adaptation, the question is straightforward: it is the specific duty bearer that should provide adaptation funding to the

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specific duty recipient based on some agreed estimates of the harmful impacts that the latter has to adapt to. More complex is the case of generalized adaptation – the large majority of adaptations – where duty bearers and duty recipients are defined only in terms of moral categories (i.e., respectively those accountable to the triply hybrid principle and those more socially vulnerable, as explained in the previous section) and where the specific harm to be adapted is not specified. In this context, a funding mechanism similar in its objectives to the Earth Atmospheric Trust (Barnes et al., 2008) to financially support duty recipients should be implemented. This fund should be gradually replenished through the tainted assets and benefits of duty bearers, as illustrated below (the amount of the financial rectification required by the duty of adaptation is instead expounded in the next sub-section). To achieve its moral mandate and meet the requirement of the duty of adaptation, this fund should include a number of elements. Ideally, the fund should be administered by trustees selected among members of civil society, governmental and non-governmental organizations working on climate change, science and education, environmental issues, justice, peace and security, development, international law, financial matters, and scientific communities; they will be subject to a mechanism – examined later in this section – to monitor the fund’s activities to ensure efficiency and to avoid the possibility of corruption or malfeasance. As an institution through which staggering sums of money will pass, it must be prepared to be subject to rigorous public and media scrutiny to ensure it is above suspicion in the assignation of funding – it must, therefore, have financial disclosure policies, protocols to ensure third-party accountability, whistleblower protection, and any other process necessary to maintain institutional integrity and safeguard it from charges of corruption. A financial mechanism of this kind would facilitate strategic focus, rigorous project management, solid monitoring and evaluation, and high levels of transparency. Its structure should be similar to that of a sinking fund, whose entire principal and investment income is disbursed over a fairly long period – a starting point could be to set the terms over a 30-year period – until it is exhausted and thus reduced to zero. Its capitalization and resource mobilization strategy is exclusively dependent on money disgorged by duty bearers. Any local source of emissions concurs to the global increase of the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, so given the undifferentiated global origin of duty bearers’ contribution to climate change, the fund should be truly global in its scope. It should not take into account any regional/national/local/sectoral distinctions in terms of financial replenishment or the disbursement of its funding. The fund’s operational facets of the replenishing and disbursing procedures should be established in socially agreed ways decided upon by all the relevant stakeholders. Given the centrality and sensitivity of the entire reparation process, it is vital that the functioning and effectiveness of the fund be subject to regular checks and a thorough critical review. To facilitate this monitoring process, the fund should include some overarching and cross-cutting calibration and adjustment mechanisms, involving epistemic qualities, which provide the evidence required to achieve its ultimate goal that of supporting the most vulnerable subjects in dealing with climate-related harm.

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Among these epistemic qualities, two of the most prominent in relation to the nature and objectives of the fund are accountability, i.e., the demand that the fund abide by certain codes of conduct, and the prospect of judging whether it actually conforms to that conduct; and transparency, i.e., the possibility of monitoring the running of the fund, so as to avoid malfeasance. These qualities would allow the consistency of the fund’s conduct and mission to be understood and evaluated (Grasso & Tàbara, 2019).

The Currency and the Magnitude As referred to and implicitly held throughout the chapter, the currency of the duty of adaptation is money: the disparate ways in which adaptations are carried out make it virtually impossible to account for any other currency besides a financial one. This view, consistent with the one generally held by economics (Thurow, 1974) responds to the logic that cash transfers do not constrain the duty of adaptation, but rather allows it to take full account of the actual needs of duty recipients. With regard to the duty of adaptation’s magnitude, the moral ideal that would make it possible to meet the requirements of the duty of adaptation is sufficiency. Sufficientarianism holds that every subject must have a sufficient, yet not equal, share of the specific unit of justice: “what is important from the point of view of morality is not that everyone should have the same but that each should have enough” (Frankfurt, 1987, p. 17). The very point of sufficientarianism is therefore that all agents should have enough to be above a certain threshold, below which it is impossible to have adequate opportunities in life, i.e., to have access to the basic environmental, social, and economic conditions to live a decent life. Sufficientarianism has gained a privileged role in the literature on environmental-related justice (Kanschik, 2016) by virtue of its strong acknowledgment of, and accordance with, the stipulations of sustainability. Based on the sufficiency ideal, every duty recipient should be provided with the financial means to cope effectively with the impacts of climate change. Obviously, any meaningful estimate of the adequateness of the portion of adaption funding pertinent to any duty recipient is impossible; therefore, a necessary simplification is to look at the aggregate level through an index of social vulnerability to climate change (Grasso et al., 2014; UNDP, 2017). Those communities/peoples below the median level of an agreed upon social vulnerability index should be brought above it through adaptation funding; the funds required by the duty of adaptation should be proportional to the distance to the median level of the index and parametrized to the relevant population.

Second-Order Agents and Duty The duty of adaptation imposes obligations on duty bearers, which, in turn, must be pursued through concrete actions in the form of financial rectifications. Consequently, to meet their obligations the bearers of the duty of adaptation incur

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substantial costs, understood in broad terms to include non-monetary ones, such as opportunity costs. Therefore, even if they were able to pass on some of these costs to other parties, it is unlikely that they would meet their duty of adaptation voluntarily. In fact, this would require that the moral urgency of the duty of adaptation directly, almost automatically, motivate their action. Gardiner and Jamieson, with reference to the overall responsibility for climate change, believe that this is possible and argue that justificatory reasons reinforce agents’ motivation to modify their behavior. If this is not the case, they argue, it is because the justification of their responsibility is inadequate (Gardiner, 2011; Jamieson, 2014). Alternatively, and possibly more realistically, it is necessary to resort to the notion of second-order duty, i.e., the duty of other agents to ensure that first-order agents fulfil their (first-order) duty of adaptation (Caney, 2014; O’Neill, 2001, 2005). A first possibility, in the face of duty bearers’ failure to meet the obligations that stem from their duty of adaptation, would be for other agents to fulfil them (Caney, 2005; Shue, 1996, pp. 71–73). This circumstance, however plausible, seems unsatisfactory, as it would be a purely reactive response, where proactive action is needed. A more articulated option, and in this context much more satisfactory, comes from Caney, who argues that when some agents do not fulfil their (first-order) obligations, four alternative strategies can be adopted (Caney, 2016a, b): (i) Set less ambitious targets (ii) Include considerations in addition to moral ones for strengthening the justificatory rationale (iii) Share some of the burden of actions required by first-order obligations with other agents (iv) Change the incentive structure of the context in which first-order agents operate In the current context, however, strategies (i) and (ii) still seem to be mostly reactive, while strategy (iii) seems only moderately proactive, as it aspires, at best, to change agents’ behavior by inducing them only to perform actions that they would otherwise have avoided. In general, therefore, strategies (i) to (iii) do not seem adequate to induce first-order agents – the bearers of the duty of adaptation in this case – to meet the obligations required by the duty of adaptation. The strategy outlined in (iv), in which (first-order) agents are induced to fulfil their (first-order) obligations by modifications of the social, political, economic, and legal contexts they operate in seems more useful with regards to the duty of adaptation. This strategy, in fact, favors its fulfilment by influencing the opportunities, limits, and incentives duty bearers face. The key elements to articulate this notion of second-order obligations are tasks – i.e., what needs to be done to favor the achievement of the duty of adaptation – and (second-order) agents (Caney, 2005, p. 769, 2014, pp. 134–146, 2016a, pp. 9–10). By matching them, it is possible to develop a coherent and inclusive system of (second-order) obligations for (secondorder) agents in relation to the duty of adaptation. In a broad sense, the normative justification for second-order obligations, i.e., the reason why second-order agents have a duty to undertake certain tasks, is that, in

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doing so, they can make a substantial difference. That is, based on Spiderman’s Uncle Ben principle “with power comes responsibility,” it is possible to argue that second-order agents who have the power to induce and/or force first-order agents to fulfil their (first-order) obligation, have the second-order duty to do so. There are four main tasks that second-order agents can undertake to favor (firstorder) agents to meet their duty of adaptation: 1. Establish the legal and political framework to enable the duty of adaptation. 2. Establish enforcement mechanisms, including transparency and accountability tools to achieve the duty of adaptation. 3. Disseminate social norms and good practices that support the recognition of the importance of adaptation and its funding and more generally seek to modify the behavior of the agents involved in them. 4. Overcome the resistance of duty bearers against their commitment to the duty of adaptation. Which are the most appropriate second-order agents to carry out the tasks listed above? Or, more specifically, which (second-order) agents have the (second-order) duty to induce the first-order agents to orient their action toward the achievement of the duty of adaptation? The answer, of course, varies depending on the task. Some traditional second-order agents – states (governments) and international organizations – certainly play a central role. However, other less obvious agents play important roles too. For tasks 1 and 2 – legal and policy framework and enforcement – in the current Westphalian international order of state sovereignty, it would seem that only states have the power to establish and implement the legal and policy framework for compelling duty bearers to abide to their duty of adaptation. In a different perspective, however, citizens, and more broadly, civil society can also play an important role in undermining the consensus to governments that do not show sufficient commitment to climate related priorities. Additionally, given that the duty of adaptation is likely to involve internationally collaborative actions and that national initiative might be consequently coordinated and integrated, it can be assumed that international organizations are also second-order agents in this regard, as in fact is the case with the Green Climate Fund and the previous adaption funds (Grasso, 2010) under the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The other tasks suggest instead less conventional second-order agents. In the case of social norms and best practices – task 3 – the main agents are, so to speak, unexpected, as for the dissemination of such norms and practices “. . . a significant role can be played by figures as diverse as church leaders, poets, novelists, charismatic individuals, and gifted communicators.” (Caney, 2014, p. 1). Similarly, in the case of the last task – overcoming resistance from duty bearers – the most effective second-order agents turn out to be those who are able to communicate most effectively – yet objectively and reliably – the need for funding adaptation to climate change, how it can be achieved and the benefits it can bring. For example, scientists

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who can speak in layman’s terms, science journalists and other types of investigative journalism, environmental disclosure organizations, and so on. This framework of the second-order duty has important normative and practical implications for the achievement of the (first-order) duty of adaptation. In normative terms, the concept of second-order duty can indicate actions and strategies other than those usually considered necessary to achieve the duty of adaptation. Moreover, it identifies a broader group of (second-order) agents who refer to different and more cogent moral grounds to justify their actions in support of the duty of adaptation. In practical terms, by matching tasks with agents, it becomes evident that numerous second-order agents – not only states and international organizations, but also scientists, journalists, communities, charismatic individuals – can in different ways favor the achievement of a duty of adaptation. The precise identification of these second-order agents is only possible with reference to specific contexts and, therefore, with reference to empirical analyses. It is useful, however, to identify the broad framework within which these secondorder agents are activated to help overcome the resistance of the bearers of the duty of adaptation. In this vein, particular attention should be paid to the analysis of primary and operational second-order agents: the main role of the first group is to spread norms and raise awareness on the necessity for adaptation and its funding to effectively and justly address climate change; the second group is expected to promote political action and legal initiatives and explore approaches finalized at modifying the behavior/steering, duty bearers in view of their achievement of the duty of adaptation (Grasso, 2022).

Conclusion That centrality of adaptation in the current climate crisis is undisputable: what is missing is a fully-fledged moral account of the duty of adaptation, given that the inclusion of ethical considerations implies greater feasibility and can persuade parties with conflicting interests to collaborate more closely on collective actions such as those required by adaptations. This chapter aspires to be a first step of the path toward filling this manifest gap. It presents a harm-centered account of the duty of adaptation that specifies its moral basis, i.e., those features that by highlighting the moral building blocks of such a duty and the agents involved in it, should favor its establishment. So in this spirit, it is worth emphasizing by way of conclusion the sore need for further work on the moral issues entailed by adaptation. In this regard a possible useful starting point is the analysis carried out in this chapter: it can be usefully contextualized and operationalized to the different kind of situations to which adaptations apply, since analysis of this kind can provide the groundwork for, say, the emergence of social forces backing and favoring the duty of adaptation, or for developing a version of it that can justly prioritize adaptations.

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Cross-References ▶ Compensation Duties ▶ Responsibility for Climate Harms

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Compensation Duties Kian Mintz-Woo

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Four Justifications of Compensation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Polluter Pays Principle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Beneficiary Pays Principle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ability to Pay Principle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Polluter Pays, Then Receives Principle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Methods and Institutions of Compensation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Forward-Looking Compensation Methods and Institutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Backward-Looking Compensation Methods and Institutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

While mitigation and adaptation will help to protect us from climate change, there are harms that are beyond our ability to adapt. Some of these harms, which may have been instigated from historical emissions, plausibly give rise to duties of compensation. This chapter discusses several principles that have been discussed about how to divide climate duties – the polluter pays principle, the beneficiary pays principle, the ability to pay principle, and a new one, the polluter pays, then receives principle. The chapter introduces several challenges to these principles from the literature, before discussing which policies and institutions might be relevant to compensation, whether internationally (e.g., the Green Climate Fund) or intergenerationally (e.g., Broome and Foley’s World Climate Bank). It also K. Mintz-Woo (*) Department of Philosophy and Environmental Research Institute, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland Equity and Justice Group, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_54

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describes some recent successful climate cases that require both the Dutch government and a private firm to act in accordance with climate targets to avoid potential rights violations. Finally, it discusses one of the most important international concepts with respect to compensation: the Loss & Damage pillar of climate policy. Keywords

Beneficiary pays principle · Burden-sharing · Climate change · Climate justice · Compensation duties · Distributive justice · Ethics · Global justice · Loss and Damage · Polluter pays principle

Introduction One fundamental issue in climate ethics involves the question of how to share the climate burden. Philosophers and economists often use the term “burden” to include the costs of a variety of duties ranging over mitigation, adaptation, and compensation. In this chapter, I discuss different theories of burden-sharing as well as their relationship to theories and practices of compensation. When discussing compensation duties, we might be interested both in theoretical principles and in practical policies. The questions that I focus on in this chapter are therefore twofold. First, what grounds or principles give rise to duties of compensation? Second, what policies or mechanisms can be used to facilitate the relevant compensation? Such mechanisms could, for instance, allow for international or intergenerational transfers. The first question, what gives rise to these duties, also helps inform who the rights- and duty-holders are. Following previous chapters that address mitigation [Bourban] and adaptation duties [Grasso], this chapter begins by discussing three influential burden-sharing principles that distribute duties, along with the dialectical pressures that led to them being adopted (“Four Justifications of Compensation”). While these principles have various strengths and weaknesses, one especially relevant consideration for the purposes of determining compensation is that these three principles do not directly distinguish between mitigation, adaptation, and compensation duties. This concern helps to motivate a distinct, fourth principle that takes compensation payments to be a way of internalizing externalities. This principle justifies transfers both to and from emitters, separates compensation duties from mitigation and adaptation duties, and generates the right incentives. This leads to a discussion of the next question, about the policies and institutions that could be used for compensation (“Methods and Institutions of Compensation”). This section illustrates some of the policies and institutions that are relevant for compensation, including the complex relationship between Loss & Damage and compensation. The chapter concludes with thoughts about why we would want a principle that determines the level of compensation (“Conclusions”).

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Four Justifications of Compensation The usual way that burden-sharing has been discussed in the literature implicitly makes two key assumptions: first, it assumes that we think of the impacts of climate change as a global net negative burden or overall cost; and second, it assumes that all emitting is unjust – meaning, for instance, that all benefits accruing from it constitute unjust enrichment. The burden may well involve elements associated with a mix of mitigation, adaptation, and compensation measures, but these elements are not always disaggregated. In short, the principles in this debate all aim to answer the question: What gives rise to duties to pay or compensate? This section begins by discussing three influential principles of burden-sharing, all of which build on these assumptions: the polluter pays principle (PPP), the beneficiary pays principle (BPP), and the ability to pay principle (APP). The section then goes on to argue for a new principle that rejects the implicit framing assumptions. The principle, firstly, takes climate change to be a heterogeneous constellation of externalities aimed at different groups and individuals at a variety of scales; secondly, it takes compensation to be a forward-looking way of generating the right incentives for mitigation and adaptation; and, thirdly, does not treat emitting as in itself morally wrong or unjust, it only considers emitting without engaging in transfers that address the harms and benefits of emissions as wrong. Note that, while all principles may apply at any level (e.g., the level of individuals, regions, firms, and states), others, including others in this handbook [Bourban and Grasso], discuss the identity of the duty-holders. Also note that, while I discuss these principles in isolation, several theorists (Caney, 2012; Dietzel, 2019) endorse combinations of these principles where satisfying one principle might be necessary, but not sufficient, to be a burden-sharer. While that might help address some objections, it opens up new ones regarding whether there are sufficient numbers of duty-bearers to cover much or all of the climate burden, given more stringent criteria. However, such combinations are beyond the scope of this chapter. The section discusses the polluter pays principle in “Polluter Pays Principle”, the beneficiary pays principle in “Beneficiary Pays Principle”, the ability to pay principle in “Ability to Pay Principle”, and finishes with a new principle, the polluter pays, then receives principle, in “Polluter Pays, Then Receives Principle”.

Polluter Pays Principle The first principle, the polluter pays principle, holds that the polluter (in the climate context, the emitter) should pay for the costs of climate change. Intuitively, we could say “you break it, you bought it.” This principle is not only intuitive but also has relevance in international law since it was originally introduced in November 1974 by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. They proposed this principle for the costs of preventing, controlling, or compensating for pollution. Many philosophers have endorsed versions of this principle, especially early on in climate ethics discussions (Gardiner, 2011; Caney, 2005; Baer et al., 2009;

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Shue, 1999). However, subsequent philosophical work has raised several issues with polluter pays. The first issue is the dead polluters objection (Frisch, 2012; García-Portela, 2019; Meyer & Roser, 2010; Caney, 2006; Page, 2008). This objection is that, given the timelags involved in the effects of climate change, some nontrivial percentage of historical emissions came from those who are now dead. If the duty-bearer is dead, it is unclear whether the duty (or the corresponding right) remains; it is unclear whether descendants should compensate those harmed by their ancestors’ emissions (Gosseries, 2004). One response is to change the level at which the principle applies, specifically by taking the duty-bearer to be a larger entity such as a firm or a state, neither of which die alongside even key members of their previous body (Page, 2012). It seems plausible that states are the appropriate bearers of duties even when their composition has substantially changed such that current membership is very, or even fully, distinct from the emitters in question. Defenders of the objection respond that, if we consider responsibility to be actually or ultimately grounded in individual duties, this level-changing response may be unsatisfactory because duties do not appear to survive the individuals. The second issue is the polluters may be blamelessly or excusable ignorant of the effects of their emissions (Roser & Seidel, 2017; Zellentin, 2015). While there is reasonable debate about when agents are culpable with respect to ignorance of the climate effects stemming from emissions, many philosophers think that, at least starting in the last decade of the twentieth century, it is no longer plausible to claim ignorance (Bell, 2011). Since responsibility is traditionally meant to satisfy both control and epistemic conditions, nonculpable ignorance appears to imply lack of responsibility. Plausibly, we can conclude that nonresponsible parties are not liable (Wündisch, 2017a, 2017b). One response is that the climate change associated with even post-1990 emissions may be very significant. Indeed, Heede (2014), together with Ekwurzel et al. (2017), has shown that we can trace a majority of historical anthropocentric (non-land use change) emissions to a surprisingly small number of private and public entities (also cf. Shue, 2017). Some scholars are concerned that this response is insufficient since pre-1990 emissions and climate threats arising from natural variability (WallimannHelmer et al., 2019) may not be thereby addressed. Another response is that nonculpable ignorance is not the relevant concern since the question for moral responsibility is whether knowledge would have counterfactually changed what was done (Butt, 2017). In other words, ignorance is no excuse if it would not have changed behavior. Given that post-1990 emissions are continuous with – indeed, greater than – pre-1990 emissions, even nonculpable ignorance is no excuse. A rebuttal to this concern is that, while actual behavior has not changed, actual later behavior is not the relevant comparison class. While actual later behavior is indicative, it need not be equivalent to the historical counterfactual. The third issue is that, due to the nonidentity problem, there may be no fact of the matter about who was harmed by the emissions (Page, 2012). This issue begins by supposing that the metaphysical identities of individuals are sensitive to the precise

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gametes and timing of conception. If so, then large-scale policy changes, which are likely to have effects on many contingencies, including when and who conceives, are likely to change the metaphysical identities of those within outcome populations. Parfit’s (1986b) original nonidentity problem is meant to be an axiological or evaluative challenge or concern, and was meant not to have deontic implications (Parfit, 1986a) but many have averred and taken it to have them (e.g., Broome, 2012). For instance, if duty-bearers and rights-bearers are fixed by metaphysical identity and metaphysical identity is fixed by biological facts, then there may be no determinate future individuals that we have duties to since some choices may lead to some contingent future individuals and other choices may lead to others. Furthermore, it may be that individuals whose identities depend on the initial choices made would have no complaint against current people who make choices that lead to them, when the alternative would not include them (even if the circumstances make their lives worse than others that would have existed in alternatives) (Boonin, 2014). These and other issues have led philosophers to endorse a principle that seemingly does not require that individuals, who may no longer be alive or may not have acted differently, are considered to be duty-bearers. Instead, the issue is that resources were unjustly acquired and whichever beneficiary controls them should pay.

Beneficiary Pays Principle The second principle, the beneficiary pays principle, holds that those who are subject to enrichment from unjust climate contributions are liable for paying for the climate harms (Atkins, 2018; Barry & Kirby, 2017; Butt, 2007, 2014; Lawford-Smith, 2014; Neumayer, 2000). If this principle is correct, then we can follow the money instead of the emitters. This avoids the objections that the emitters may be dead or excusably ignorant and appears to address the nonidentity problem (Das, 2014, but cf. GarcíaPortela, 2023). However, there are several objections to this principle. The first issue is whether the beneficiaries have to give up their benefits because they (knowingly or unknowingly) accept them (Gosseries, 2004) or because they fail to give them up (Butt, 2014). Meyer and Roser (2010) point out that those who benefit from past emissions have no choice with respect to whether they are provided these benefits. Adding to this, García-Portela (2019) argues that both accepting and failing to give up these benefits could be unreasonably demanding and that it would be unfair to count them as voluntarily retaining these benefits, when these benefits are sizeable or inextricably infused into their lives. A second issue is that, if the benefits from climate change are to be relinquished, this generates the wrong incentives when different beneficiaries are not sufficiently distinguished (Mintz-Woo & Leroux, 2021). For instance, as climate change advances, we should expect there to be greater demand for climate goods and services. We would want there to be a market signal to firms and businesses to provide those climate goods and services; if there are expectations that, legally or

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morally, these firms and businesses should relinquish their climate gains (after all, these are benefits generated from enrichment from an unjust process – climate change), then there would be no such market signal. In short, there would be no profit motives for firms and businesses to contribute to climate responses. Part of the issue may be that climate beneficiaries have not been sufficiently distinguished in the beneficiary pays principle literature. A third issue parallels one with the polluter pays principle: just as the polluter pays principle wrestled with dead polluters, the beneficiary pays principle may have to consider dead beneficiaries (Caney, 2006). If the burden falls upon beneficiaries but some of them die, do the other beneficiaries have to make up the shortfall? Atkins (2018), defending the beneficiary pays principle, suggests that they do not and that only the living beneficiaries have to pay the proportion of the compensation costs that would be required if all of the beneficiaries were alive. However, I believe that the beneficiary pays principle theorist has a stronger response than for the polluter pays principle theorist. If, as the beneficiary pays principle theorist suggests, we are able to determine where the benefits come from, we can track the benefits that the dead beneficiaries would have been obliged to pay to others. If we follow these resources far enough, we should be left with all living beneficiaries. After all, beneficiary pays principles do not imply that only direct beneficiaries should reject or give up their resources, but beneficiaries in general. However, this leads to the fourth, and most fundamental, challenge to the beneficiary pays principle. Tracing the beneficiaries of past emissions is extremely difficult (Page, 2012). While Heede’s (2014) work can give us some rough idea of how much historical emissions can be traced to firms, the question of how the proceeds or profits of those emissions were distributed is considerably less tractable. Consider, for instance, that the immediate beneficiaries are not the executive management of those firms, but shareholders. Furthermore, not only are the shareholders diffuse, but also many of them benefitted via small proportions of their investments within larger portfolios or indexes that the shareholders did not track themselves. In other words, not only would the beneficiaries not be traceable in practice, but also many of them might have been unaware in which companies they invested in the first place. This issue is that determining the benefits and the beneficiaries is extremely challenging, even if (counterfactually!) everyone involved was morally motivated to give up or not accept these benefits. No one denotes a certain bank account “oil profits” and proceeds to bequeath that named account to their descendants. Instead, various uses of resources, whether ill- or fairly-gained, contribute to various purchases that can be challenging to disentangle. Furthermore, in the process of profiting, the beneficiaries multiply: not only is the decision-making CEO a recipient of profits and, thus, a beneficiary, but also so are shareholders and janitors. And not only these, when any of them use these profits to purchase goods and services, the shopkeepers are also beneficiaries. Immediately, these resources proliferate throughout the economic system in ways unrecognizable to the various beneficiaries. Not only are they unrecognizable, they are not recorded so it is difficult to subsequently try to trace these transfers. Page’s (2012) strong claim that “all existing wealth is to

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some extent tainted by the activities in the past and present that produce climate change” is plausibly thus an implication of the beneficiary pays principle, but could be seen as an implausibly strong reductio of that same principle. Atkins (2018) takes this potential reductio head-on. He argues that, practically speaking, we should treat everyone in developed industrialized countries as direct or indirect beneficiaries. Beyond the concern that this is a very strong claim, it also might lose dialectical advantages over polluter pays principles since it seems reasonable to say developed industrialized countries are also direct or indirect polluters. In short, if compensation is meant to track the particular benefits of the emissions, this looks very difficult to spell out. If it is meant to track general benefits, then concerns such as the dead polluters objections or the nonidentity problem seem to be, relatively speaking, less concerning to the polluter pays principle theorist (GarcíaPortela, 2023). However, some believe that both polluter and beneficiary pays are insufficient given the advancing threats of climate change, so compensation should be provided by whomever is most capable of doing so. I discuss this in the next section.

Ability to Pay Principle The third principle, the ability to pay principle, acts as a backstop to the polluter pays principle and the beneficiary pays principle. Often, it is distinguished from the latter two by saying that it is “forward-looking” since it does not rely on historical fault or cause whereas both the polluter pays and beneficiary pays principles are concerned with the initial emissions and the identity of the emitters or their proceeds, respectively. This makes the polluter and beneficiary pays principles “‘backward-looking.” The ability to pay principle acts as a backstop in the sense that, should the objections to the other two principles be sufficiently morally or practically dispositive, we can still address the climate burdens by assigning remedial responsibilities (Miller, 2008). The ability to pay principle assigns duties to pay for addressing climate burdens by considering the capacity of different countries to pay. In other words, the question is who is best placed to cover the costs (looking forward) as opposed to who had the appropriate historical connection to the emissions (looking backward). Once again, there are several objections that could be raised. A first objection is that, while many agree that “ought” implies “can” (meaning that your duties have to track your capacities), it is not generally the case that “can” implies “ought” (which seems to be the basis for capacities to cover the cost of climate burdens justifying duties) (Roser & Seidel, 2017). It is true that there is the capacity for countries that are wealthier to cover climate burdens, but this is not sufficient for the claim that they have these duties. The ability to pay principle becomes more plausible when put in the dialectical context where other principles have failed, but, according to this objection, it is still unjustified. A stronger version of this objection is that, even if we grant that remedial responsibilities are a normatively justifiable concept, this does not imply that these countries should cover the cost of climate burdens – it just

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implies that they should cover the cost of the most egregious unremediated threats. There is no guarantee that these threats are climate-related. Perhaps global poverty or easily scalable medical interventions are more egregious or tractable – indeed, a lot of research suggests that this is the case (MacAskill, 2015; Singer, 2009). Even if we accept that there are remedial responsibilities, there is no guarantee that this will license covering the costs of climate burdens in the world as it contingently is. A second objection is that this principle takes too narrowly an economic point of view: if we are concerned merely with economic capacity, this neglects potentially mitigating factors. For instance, some wealthy countries have acted more ambitiously to curb climate change and some poorer countries have pursued policies that exacerbate climate change. Intuitively, the polluter pays and beneficiary pays principles account for the origin of the climate problem but, since the ability to pay principle is explicitly forward-looking, it does not incorporate or account for these factors. The intuition here is that backward-looking considerations are morally important, so an exclusively forward-looking principle misses the mark. Another version of this second objection is that the ability to pay principle addresses the capacity, but not where that capacity came from (Atkins, 2018; Moellendorf, 2012). In short, we might be concerned that this principle is too simplistic. For instance, if the source of the wealth is in developing technology for mitigation (e.g., renewable energy innovation), we would not want that wealth to be redistributed because it might generate perverse incentives or undermine profitable activities that are needed for addressing climate challenges (Mintz-Woo & Leroux, 2021). This concern with generating the right incentives motivates an alternative to the preceding three principles; the goal of this principle is to generate transfers that properly respond to all the effects (more specifically, the unpriced effects or externalities) of emissions. I discuss this in the next section.

Polluter Pays, Then Receives Principle The three principles enumerated above (polluter pays principle, beneficiary pays principle, and ability to pay principle) rely on the framing assumptions that we are considering some global net negative cost (i.e., the burden) and that emissions constitute an injustice. A new, alternative principle – the polluter pays, then receives (PPTR, pronounced “Peter”) principle – denies both of these assumptions (Mintz-Woo & Leroux, 2021; Leroux & Mintz-Woo, 2023). This principle is built on the idea that compensation should be tied to the effects of an action (so is directed toward those affected by emissions and so is backward-looking) but that this compensation has a specific purpose (so sets the right incentives by being commensurate with the effects of the emissions and so is forward-looking). The intuition is that the polluter (the emitter), through every unit of emissions, generates a complex set of effects at different spatiotemporal scales. We can think of this as the constellation of externalities, with arrows starting at the emitter but ending at different affected parties. Most of these externalities are (net) harms because the

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climate effects are negative, with some of these impacts being very harmful and some less so, some of the impacts being (or close to) neutral because the climate effects are minimal or not morally relevant, and a few of the impacts being (net) positive, because there are some groups that benefit from climate change (whether at a regional level, sectoral, or individual level). In the next few paragraphs, I discuss some evidence for this claim. Here, the externalities we are concerned with are externalities in the technical economic sense where the actor (the emitter) has effects on third parties (those affected by climate impacts) who cannot prevent the action, where those effects are unpriced for the actor (meaning, for instance, that the emitter does not pay for the climate harms that they cause). In circumstances with externalities, we should expect that there will be overemitting relative to the social optimum (Mintz-Woo, 2022). Why should we expect that some have net positive effects from climate change? To begin, we should recognize that the vast majority of effects of climate change are harmful, and even those that have positive effects from climate change may only have these positive effects over medium timescales and under moderate warming (Mintz-Woo & Leroux, 2021). However, especially if we consider regional and sectoral scales, we are likely to see some net beneficiaries. For instance, we should expect that, with increasing climate change, demand for tourism will decrease in already warm parts of the world (e.g., Spain and Italy) and will increase in cooler parts of the world (e.g., Norway and Sweden). So from the point of view of the Swedish tourism sector, climate change effects may be net positives. This is not to say that the overall national or international effects are positive (although they may be) because perhaps this increased demand in some regions (e.g., Sweden) is at least offset by decreased demand in others (e.g., Italy). Similarly, we should expect that, with increasing climate change, the terroir associated with California would shift north, perhaps to Oregon or British Columbia, producing net productivity increases in vineyards in these northern regions. In general, climate change may benefit either the quantity or quality of products (the wine or tourism experience). While those benefits are much smaller than the costs of climate change in aggregate, some of them will be significant enough at smaller scales that groups will have net positive benefits. Having suggested that at least a few will benefit, it is now possible to explain the idea that the polluter pays, then receives: for the negative externalities, the polluter pays in proportion to the negative climate impacts; for the (more limited) positive externalities, the polluter receives in proportion to the benefits from the climate windfall, that is, the quantity or quality of products. Only once the payments from the emitter are made should transfers to the emitter be enacted. There is an important complexity that this involves: not all benefits from climate change justify payments to polluters. Note that this principle is also correct in the limit case where there are no positive net regional or sectoral winners (in this case, it roughly correlates with the polluter pays principle, albeit for different reasons). Mintz-Woo and Leroux (2021) distinguish between passive and active winners, where passive winners gain from climate change without making changes in production (i.e., because the quantity or quality is improved), and active winners gain

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from climate change due to changes in production (i.e., because they are new market entrants or because they change their production methods to take advantage of new climatic conditions). For instance, if a farmer’s grapes are better due merely to the changed climate, payments are justified to the emitters in line with those improvements. In contrast, if a farmer changes their farming practices (e.g., changes seeding times, or moves to a new plot of land, or starts a new farm to reap climate benefits), then this would not justify such payments. While this is a principled distinction in theory, it may be difficult to measure in practice, although comparison with hypothetical baselines is far from unfamiliar in economics (a common example is opportunity costs, which are defined in terms of the best unchosen – and therefore counterfactual – alternatives). What justifies this distinction between active and passive winners? Morally, we might say that those who change their practices have earned, or deserve, their gains, following familiar desert-based theories of justice. On these theories, the relevant issue is that the agents have a “desert-basis” that is under the control of the agent and is appropriately related to the reward (Brouwer & Mulligan, 2019; Olsaretti, 2008). Practically, there is an important issue with incentives: if we believe that all those who benefit from climate change should relinquish their gains from climate change, then morally speaking we do not think those who make a profit in responding to climate change should keep those gains. But this has major practical costs. For instance, as the climate is warming, we need both new workers and new firms to respond to climate change (e.g., providing the workforce to install green energy sources or the capital to invest in climate adaptation research and development). If we thought that all climate gains should be relinquished, then morally speaking there should be no profits associated with these climate responses, meaning that morally speaking no one should earn profits from these responses – meaning that there is no incentive to engage in these kinds of responses. Climate responses need a profit motive, so this is practically unworkable. This leads to two practical reasons to adopt this principle over the other three. First, there might be practical value in using polluter pays, then receives in discussing with emitters over the other three because it treats all effects of emissions similarly, instead of ignoring positive externalities. This could practically matter because, in determining how to address emitters, a big stick plus a small carrot is a much better motivators than just a big stick. Second, the view that we transfer from emitters (or the beneficiaries or the wealthy) to those harmed is not the appropriate response to externalities in general. Consider, for instance, a case of large positive social externalities. For instance, suppose some innovator develops some very efficient way of transmitting information or training lots of people in some complicated procedure and makes a lot of money. Suppose that the innovation also generates a lot of positive externalities (e.g., we now have a much larger supply of medical experts and some diseases become easier to treat). It is not the case that we want all the gains from the innovation to be transferred to the poorest; indeed, we could justify extra transfers from society to try to compensate the innovator for the positive social externalities of their innovation. Note that we might wish to do this regardless of whether the innovator made a lot of profits on their initial innovation; it is merely in light of the positive social

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externalities that we would want to incentivize. To illustrate, many university educators are in the public sector and generate extra value for society by their research and teaching activities. We could incentivize more or better education by making transfers to account for those positive externalities. We should use similar reasoning even in cases with very different combinations of externalities, like climate change, because that generates a more socially consistent approach to externalities. This section has argued that instead of thinking of compensation as a function of a global net cost, we should think of it as connected to the various effects (more particularly externalities) of emissions. Once we do that, we see that most of these effects are harmful (negative externalities) but a few are beneficial (positive externalities) and we see that transfers from the emitters to those harmed as well as transfers from those who benefit to the emitters can be justified. Mintz-Woo and Leroux (2021) call this the polluter pays, then receives principle. This principle helps to highlight some unintended problematic consequences of the beneficiary pays principle.

Methods and Institutions of Compensation When introducing compensation mechanisms, it is worth distinguishing between methods and institutions of compensation that tie compensation to existing or historical emissions and those that are independent of such emissions. Adapting familiar terminology used above, I propose we call the former “backward-looking compensation methods and institutions” and “forward-looking compensation methods and institutions.” This section surveys a selection of such methods. In the first section, we discuss carbon pricing (carbon taxes and cap and trade), the Green Climate Fund (GCF), and John Broome’s World Climate Bank. In the second section, we discuss compensation that is based on historical emissions including legal (tort law) and policy (Loss & Damage) mechanisms.

Forward-Looking Compensation Methods and Institutions This section discusses methods and institutions for payments having to do with current and future emissions, or forward-looking compensation methods and institutions. We can think of policies that are generally used to change incentives within countries (carbon pricing policies) and we can also think of institutions that are generally intended to distribute climate funds between countries and generations to those who need or deserve it (represented here by the Green Climate Fund and John Broome’s suggestion of a World Climate Bank). Within countries, we need to change incentives so that it is easier to make green (sustainable) choices and harder to make brown (unsustainable) choices. Economists tend to favor carbon pricing policies. These can be separated into carbon taxes

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(sometimes called “price instruments”) and cap and trade (sometimes called “quantity instruments”) (for a survey of these methods, cf. Mintz-Woo, 2022). Carbon taxes add a fixed cost to each unit of emissions (e.g., $50 for each ton of carbon dioxide), whereas cap and trade lets the price vary but sets a specific number of permits to emit (i.e., subject to a “cap”) and allows those permits to be traded, generating a market price for the permits. Carbon taxes have the advantage of being predictable in terms of price; cap and trade has the advantage of being predictable in terms of amount of carbon allowed. While there is some debate about which is superior, with economists tending to favor carbon taxes (High Level Commission, 2017) and others, especially political scientists, tending to favor regulation instead of carbon pricing (e.g., Green, 2021; Stokes, 2020), I have argued that pricing carbon in one of these forms is more important than which type of carbon pricing is ultimately adopted (Mintz-Woo, 2022). Both kinds of carbon pricing policies can produce revenue for the government – carbon taxes produce tax revenue and cap and trade can generate funds if the permits are put up for auction. That revenue can be distributed either nationally or internationally to compensate for climate harms (it can also be used for other purposes, such as addressing (or as Mintz-Woo, 2021 argues in response to Tank, 2020, even reversing) potentially regressive impacts of these costs). They can also be used to respond to shocks where there is need to green or on-shore supply chains and churn is inevitable; they help incentivize green recoveries (e.g., to COVID-19, Mintz-Woo et al., 2021). There are several mechanisms and institutions that can assist with this kind of international and intertemporal distribution, but I will bring attention to two that I think are especially notable and relevant for moral philosophers. First, one of the most ambitious attempts to deal with international equity in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change context is the Green Climate Fund (GCF). While the GCF has received limited attention in the philosophical literature, it is intended to be a major international compensation and financing instrument, supporting mitigation and adaptation measures in the developing world (Govind, 2012; Park, 2012). It is forward-looking, in that pledges have no necessary connection to either current or previous emissions. However, it is severely underfinanced relative to pledges, exacerbated by former President Donald Trump’s decision to leave the Paris Agreement (Bowman & Minas, 2019). If properly funded, the GCF could be a major contribution to climate responses in the developing world, and an indication that the developed world recognizes the importance of its financial capacities in helping address climate change. Unfortunately, despite some contributions [very notably, one of former President Barack Obama’s last actions in office – three days before leaving – was transferring $500 million USD to the GCF (Slezak, 2017)], its underfunded status sends a considerably different signal to developing countries (Sprinz & von Bünau, 2012 point out that this reasoning links compensation with the policy pillar that was subsequently called Loss & Damage, discussed in the next section). While the GCF is aimed at international distribution of funds for compensation and assistance, a more philosophically interesting institution tries to address the question of intertemporal distribution. In a series of articles, John Broome, both

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alone (2013, 2016) and with Duncan Foley (2016), has argued that the most important thing about climate change is that, if we are not able to address it at some cost to ourselves, perhaps we can address it at some cost to future people. If both of these are options, then that presumes that there must be some ways of making future people pay. In other words, the proposal is that future people compensate us for mitigating climate change. (It is a second-best proposal according to Broome; he believes that the first best proposal would be that we mitigate now and pay for it ourselves. But in the absence of sufficient ambition, he believes that this is a good second-best proposal.) His proposal raises two main questions: are there sufficient benefits to mitigating climate change to make this possible and, if so, what kind of institutions could result in something like future people paying? The first question this proposal raises is whether it is feasible, i.e., whether we could be sufficiently compensated that we would be as well off, even given the costs of mitigation, and that the climate benefits to future people would be worth at least as much as their compensation to us. Broome’s answer is straightforward: climate change is a large-scale externality, meaning that it is a harm that is not priced for the emitter. If emitters are rational, that implies that they would create much more climate change than would be socially optimal. In other words, if rational, the social costs are greater than the private benefits. So that means that reducing those extra emissions will generate more social gains than the cost to the emitters. In other words, there is a scope for overall gains by reducing emissions. At present, those gains are mostly felt in the future (and some by people who do not yet exist) and the costs of mitigation are mostly felt in the present. Broome proposes we can compensate the present for the costs of mitigation and, in theory, those costs are less than the social benefits (reduced climate change) so compensation from the future to the present could make everyone better off. That leads to the second question: how could we do it? Obviously, such compensation is not causal: future people cannot affect the present (in particular, they cannot transfer funds to us!) Broome’s mechanism is more subtle. He suggests that we can effectively have transfers from them to us by reducing what we give to them. What do we give to the future? On the one hand, we give all kinds of built and conventional capital (like roads, bridges, and hospitals) as well as natural capital (like forests and biodiversity). Reductions in what we leave for the future are effectively a transfer from the future to ourselves. For instance, at a macroeconomic level, we can spend less maintaining built infrastructure and use the money saved to invest in green products and services. That effectively transfers from the future to the present (cf. Broome & Foley, 2016 for more details). There are many other complexities to the proposal. For instance, in order to cover the costs of behavioral changes, we might need funds that also (metaphorically) borrow from the future. Broome suggests that we would need long-term bonds that governments can credibly cover. Bond buyers will produce the funds now (and have to be promised a handsome payment later in a capitalist system to do so) and they have to be confident that their contracts will be honored. Broome and Foley (2016) suggest that we should have a large, trustworthy institution that they call a World

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Climate Bank that can ensure that the bondholders do not have to worry. But the purpose of this chapter is not to cover all of these details; it is to indicate that, at least in principle, an institution and set of policies have been proposed that would jointly generate compensation for current people to mitigate and make those in the future pay for it (by receiving less of other things than they would have otherwise). While this is not an exhaustive list, it is indicative of the ways that compensation can be arranged in a forward-looking manner, generating incentives for current and future behaviors to be green and climate-friendly.

Backward-Looking Compensation Methods and Institutions Beyond such forward-looking compensation methods, we might be interested in backward-looking compensation. In other words, we might be interested in compensation for climate harms that were caused by previous emissions. In this context, I will briefly draw on two theoretically important areas of discussion: climate litigation and the closely related policy pillar of Loss & Damage because these areas are particularly interesting for environmental philosophers. While some early optimistic accounts of the potential for climate litigation (Ganguly et al., 2018) may not have panned out, the new field of climate litigation is quickly growing. Although many closely followed cases have been dismissed due to lack of standing (e.g., the Ninth Circuit’s decision in Juliana v. United States), two cases in the Netherlands have yielded relevant and important decisions. These are cases where defendants were found to have breached a duty of care; this conclusion implied that they had to act more aggressively in terms of mitigation. On the one hand, these are not directly about compensation at this point. On the other hand, several authors in applied and political philosophy have expanded similar lines of reasoning to argue that compensation is due (cf. Grasso & Vladimirova, 2019 and entries in Moss & Umbers, 2020, especially Moss, 2020). First, in State of the Netherlands v. Urgenda, the Supreme Court of the Netherlands found that the Dutch government had failed to sufficiently act in accordance with the threat of dangerous climate change. The Urgenda Foundation had argued that, partially because the Netherlands had committed to a carbon reduction target and partially because of the threats to human rights that dangerous climate change posed, the government had commitments to reductions which were beyond the reductions that had been achieved. The decision found that the limited actions violated a duty of care to Dutch citizens (van Zeben, 2015). Second, in Milieudefensie et al. v. Royal Dutch Shell, The Hague’s District Court found that a private company (in this case, Royal Dutch Shell) could have obligations to reduce its emissions because they have an unwritten standard of care in Dutch civil law to help address climate change (Macchi & van Zeben, 2021). This case also depended on the Urgenda decision by linking dangerous climate change to potential human rights violations (even limited to Dutch citizens). While these cases are bound up in specifically Dutch law, where international soft law plays a larger role than in many countries, it is very interesting that courts have

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found that both the government and private entities can be required to mitigate their emissions. While it is still contested whether or how these kinds of cases can apply in other jurisdictions and contexts, they give us some ideas about how the rapidly growing field of climate litigation could evolve. The next set of policies that are of special moral relevance revolve around what the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change process calls “Loss & Damage” (L&D). This term harkens back to legal theory, where damages are harms (usually of physical objects) that can be remedied or replaced, whereas losses are absences (again, usually of physical objects) that cannot be replaced. For instance, the climate impact of a storm could be damage to a dwelling; that would be a harm; destruction of an artistic or historical artifact, in contrast, could constitute a loss. While L&D is a contested term (Boyd et al., 2017), in this context, the relevant issue is that these are often taken to be impacts of climate beyond adaptive capacity (Burkett, 2014). In other words, we can see the effects of climate change beyond both our ability to mitigate (i.e., prevent climate change by reducing the greenhouse gases in the system) and our ability to adapt (i.e., protect ourselves from extreme weather events associated with climate change) (Dow et al., 2013; Wallimann-Helmer et al., 2019). Intuitively, we can think of L&D as the effects of climate change that it is now too late to address. It does not require a great argumentative leap to suggest that L&D should be addressed by support and compensation. Indeed, that is what many developing and small-island states have argued (Schinko et al., 2019; Sprinz & von Bünau, 2012). Developed countries have responded that potential climate impacts beyond the ability to adapt should not be considered subject to liability or compensation. The result in the Paris Agreement was both inclusion of an article (article 8) for L&D (thus differentiating it procedurally and practically from existing mitigation and adaptation processes) and an explicit denial that this article constituted a basis for legal liability or compensation. Normatively speaking, Lees (2017) has pointed out that even if this article does not serve as a basis for legal liability, it could serve as a basis for (moral) responsibility. The moral importance and interpretation of this negotiated outcome is open to question. On the one hand, many, especially the developing and small-island states, took L&D to be a basis for – if not synonymous with – financial compensation for harms beyond the capacity to adapt. On the other hand, we might think that some of the areas of coordination mentioned in the Paris Agreement (like emergency preparedness and risk insurance) could serve as indirect methods of compensation. This practically important policy issue has received disappointingly little attention from moral philosophers [some exceptions include Boran, 2017, García-Portela, 2018, García-Portela, 2020, McShane, 2017, Roberts et al., 2017, Shockley & Hourdequin, 2017 (and others in that special issue they discuss) and Wallimann-Helmer, 2015]. The most morally important issues here revolve around how L&D could conceptually be distinguished from mitigation and adaptation, whether there is different responsibility for funding along these different dimensions (and, if so, on what basis), and what epistemic standards are appropriate or required to attribute L&D to different emitters. This is doubly important if we believe that there are distributive

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justice (as well as compensatory justice) reasons to compensate for L&D, given that these will occur disproportionately to countries that are already poorer and vulnerable.

Conclusions The purposes of this chapter were to introduce two major questions in the context of climate compensation and to canvass some indicative answers to these two questions. First, on which grounds might compensation duties be justified? Common answers include the polluter pays principle, the beneficiary pays principle, and the ability to pay principle. A newer principle gives more guidance about compensation and justifies it in a different way; this principle is called the polluter pays, then receives principle. Second, the chapter discusses examples of policies or institutions that could be used to make (compensatory) transfers. In terms of predominantly forward-looking policies or institutions, we might be interested in both international and intergenerational transfers. In this chapter, the example of an international transfer institution is the Green Climate Fund, which is meant to provide resources to countries that need support for mitigation and adaptation. The example of an intergenerational transfer institution is Broome and Foley’s (2016) World Climate Bank. In terms of predominantly backward-looking policies or institutions, this chapter introduces the burgeoning discussions of climate litigation and the policy pillar of Loss & Damage. Both of these are only currently being tested and refined; more moral interventions could be impactful in current policy discussions. As climate change advances, we have to move beyond the issues of mitigation and adaptation; unfortunately, with the limited action so far, we can expect to see major climate impacts and harms being visited on many. In disproportionately many cases, this will exacerbate existing international inequalities. The moral, legal, and political importance of climate compensation – and the associated questions of the content and character of compensation duties – can only increase.

Cross-References ▶ Adaptation Duties ▶ Climate Change and Legal Theory ▶ Mitigation Duties ▶ Responsibility for Climate Harms

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Climate Change, Global Health, and Planetary Health Stephen M. Gardiner and Paul Tubig

Contents Health Effects of Climate Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Infectious Diseases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Heat-Related Illnesses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Air Pollution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Strain on Vital Infrastructure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Global Health Inequalities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Ethical Importance of Health . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Normal Functioning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Well-Being . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Autonomy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dignity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Injustice and Global Health Inequalities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Direct Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Indirect Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Health Equity and Climate Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Case Study: Planetary Health . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Maximizing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Triumvirate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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S. M. Gardiner (*) Department of Philosophy, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA e-mail: [email protected] P. Tubig Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, GA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_76

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Abstract

Climate change has been called “the biggest global health threat of the 21st century.” This chapter outlines some central ethical dimensions of the challenge. It begins by reviewing a few of the major health impacts expected from climate change. It then summarizes some key issues surrounding the ethical importance of health, and of injustices connected to global health inequalities. Finally, the chapter explores a recent concept – planetary health – that aims to environmentalize public health in order to confront climate change more successfully. The basic conclusion is that issues of ethics and justice are central to the public health challenge moving forward. One aspect of this challenge is the need for a more philosophically robust account of the ethics of public health in general, perhaps pursued through a deeper exploration and development of the concept of planetary health. Keywords

Planetary health · Global health · Health justice · Health equity · Environmental determinants of health · Climate change

Climate change is, among other things, a public health problem. Indeed, the joint commission between The Lancet and the University College London Institute for Global Health opened its final report by calling climate change “the biggest global health threat of the 21st century” (Costello et al., 2009). This chapter outlines some central ethical dimensions of this challenge. Section “Health Effects of Climate Change”, reviews several of the health impacts expected from climate change. Sections “The Ethical Importance of Health” and “Injustice and Global Health Inequalities”, summarize some key issues surrounding the ethical importance of health and of injustices connected to global health inequalities. Section “Case Study: Planetary Health” explores a recent concept – planetary health – that aims to environmentalize public health in order to confront the challenge more successfully. The basic conclusion is that issues of ethics and justice are central to the public health challenge moving forward. One aspect of this challenge is the need for a more philosophically robust account of the ethics of public health in general, perhaps pursued through a deeper exploration and development of the concept of planetary health.

Health Effects of Climate Change The global climate, like other fundamental components of the planetary system, is a major determinant of human health. While human health thrives within a certain set of environmental conditions, severe climate change alters these conditions in ways that are likely to be detrimental to health. To illustrate this, in this section, we

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describe some of the specific pathways through which climate change heightens the risks of morbidity and mortality of people.

Background The IPCC summarizes scientific projections for the global surface temperature late in this century. Averaged over 2081–2100, the estimated temperature rise for a very low emission scenario is 1.0
–1.8
C; for intermediate scenarios, it is 2.1
–3.5
C; and for a very high emission scenario, it is 3.3–5.7
C; for the end of the next century, projections trend higher still: the IPCC’s intermediate scenario increases to an estimated 2.3–4.6
C rise, while a very high emission scenario goes to 6.6–14.1
C (IPCC, 2021b, p. 17). To give some context for these numbers, consider that during the last ice age, the planet was on average 4.5
C colder than the twentieth-century norm and in general that ice ages are 5–7
C colder on average than the warmer interglacial periods. These kinds of shifts in the global average make a major difference on the ground. So, for example, during previous colder periods, there was often a kilometer or more of ice over the areas we now know as New York City and Boston. This suggests that, if climate change produces a shift in the average global temperature of 4
or more in the warmer direction, major change should also be expected. Even a 2.5–3.0
C increase would be half-way to an ice age shift, and so cannot be expected to have only minor effects. Notably, some believe that an increase of 4
C or more may cause the global agricultural system to unravel. There are numerous pathways through which anthropogenic climate change can lead to impacts on human health. This chapter highlights just a few: infectious diseases, heat-related illnesses, air pollution, strains on vital infrastructure (such as food and healthcare), and the persistence of background health inequalities.

Infectious Diseases Climate change, including the human practices that contribute to it, exacerbates the risks associated with infectious diseases. Consider three examples. First, losses in biodiversity, both as a contributing factor and as a consequence of climate change, increase human exposure to zoonotic diseases, that is, the type of disease originating in nonhuman animals and transmitted to human beings. For instance, as humans encroach on wildlands through deforestation and the conversion of land into farmlands and cities, this increases contact between humans and wild animals carrying pathogens. One example is that the emergence of COVID-19 sparked heated debates about its causal link to factory farming (Spinney, 2020). Similarly, the decline of natural predators due to hunting, logging, or changing climate patterns increases the prospects of humans contracting and spreading disease. For instance, their reduction allows smaller animals that are most adaptable to human interference, like bats and rodents, to thrive and spread diseases in expanding

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human communities (Lustgarten, 2020). Thus, preserving biodiversity and the sanctity of forests keeps diseases from spreading to human communities. Their disturbance leads to risks of “spillover,” where a virus is no longer contained but jumps from nonhuman animals to human beings and the wider world. Second, the risks of exposure to vector-borne diseases – that is, diseases transmitted by “vectors” like mosquitoes, ticks, and mites – increase in relation to the increases in temperature and changes in precipitation. Warmer climates, especially in areas that were previously too cold for vectors, expand the geographical range in which vectors could pass the disease to humans. “Current knowledge,” according to a report in the journal PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, “suggests that the range of mosquito-borne diseases could expand dramatically in response to climate change” (Ryan et al., 2019). The report estimates that by 2050, half a billion more people will be at risk of mosquito-borne virus exposure if the projected change in climate holds. Third, climate change has implications for water-borne diseases. Water-borne pathogens can cause a range of health problems, including diarrheal diseases, vomiting, respiratory issues, and neurological disorders, among others (MaganaArachchi & Wanigatunge, 2020). Water-borne disease is a major global disease burden. For instance, diarrheal disease is determined to be “the second leading cause of death in children under five worldwide, and the second greatest source of death and disability in low and middle income countries” (Levy et al., 2019). Changes in climate may exacerbate human vulnerability to these types of diseases. For instance, climate change-driven events, such as floods, droughts, heavy storms, changes in rain pattern, and increase of temperature and sea level, enhance the risk of exposure to water-related pathogens in a variety of ways, which, in turn, can profoundly impact global health (Funari et al., 2012).

Heat-Related Illnesses Climate change is also associated with a higher frequency and intensity of extreme heat events (Luber & McGeehin, 2008). This, in effect, increases the risk of heatrelated death and illnesses, such as heat exhaustion and heat stroke. Heatwave exposure is especially dangerous for vulnerable populations, like elderly people. According to the 2020 report of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change, heat-related deaths in older people have increased by 54% over the last two decades, with a record 2.9 billion additional days of heatwave exposure affecting people over the age of 65 in 2019, almost twice as much as the previous high. Heatwaves are especially dangerous in the northern hemisphere. One dramatic example is the powerful heatwave in Siberia in the first half of 2020. A study led by the UK Met Office stated that the kind of extreme, prolonged heat that affected Siberia is “effectively impossible without human influence” (Ciavarella et al., 2021). Such temperature shifts increase the vulnerability of populations to heat-related health impacts in the present and future. As the study noted, “Hot days in Siberia are not uncommon, however the population is not used to extreme heat and may be more likely to suffer from common heat-induced problems such as headaches and

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skin-conditions. Combined with other risk factors such as age, respiratory illnesses, cardiovascular disease, other pre-existing health conditions and socio-economic disadvantages, extreme heat impacts become even more acute” (Ciavarella et al., 2021).

Air Pollution Climate change and air pollution are also closely interlinked. The release of pollutants in the air that contributes to air pollution is also a major cause of climate change. The burning of fossil fuels from our methods of transportation, energy production, and food production generates the majority of global greenhouse gas emissions, as well as the vast majority of air pollutants that are detrimental to our health, including particulate matter (or “soot”) and nitrogen oxides (when combined with sunlight form “smog”). The health issues that arise from air pollution include childhood asthma, heart disease, respiratory illness, cancers, and early death. According to the World Health Organization, air pollution is the biggest environmental risk to health, accounting for about one in every nine deaths annually, mainly from noncommunicable diseases (World Health Organization, 2018). Wildfires also contribute to air pollution, and these devastating events are more frequent and intense in large part to climate change, as evidenced in the large-scale wildfires in Australia in 2019 to 2020, the Amazon rainforest in Brazil in 2019 and 2020, and the Western United States in 2018 and 2020. Fire itself is often harmful (and sometimes lethal) due to its flames and radiant heat. Wildfire smoke, in its wide dispersal of particulate matter and nitrogen oxide, also poses serious health risks to a wider radius of people (Xu et al., 2020).

Strain on Vital Infrastructure Climate change also endangers global health through its effects on vital social infrastructure. Two central examples are the adverse impacts on food production and healthcare systems that sustain the welfare of populations. In a 2018 report, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization stated that climate change is among the leading causes of rising global hunger (United Nations, 2018). Extreme or erratic weather patterns, land degradation and desertification, water scarcity, and rising sea levels compromise agricultural productivity, reducing people’s access to food. Food insecurity induced by climate change elevates the risks of malnutrition and chronic hunger. For this reason, climate change is often framed as a hunger issue. Climate change also puts extreme stress on other critical infrastructures that promote public health. The Lancet reports that more than half of global cities surveyed expect climate change to seriously compromise their public health infrastructure (Watt et al., 2018). Blackouts, like the ones in California as a response to uncontrollable wildfires, affected hundreds of hospitals and medical equipment that

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people rely on for survival. Furthermore, climate change increases the rate of illnesses and injuries, like the kinds mentioned above, which then threatens to put extreme strain on hospitals. This implication was made vivid by the COVID-19 crisis. At its peak, alarming rates of COVID infections raised deep concerns about the limited capacity of hospitals – such as the availability of ICU beds, the number of ventilator pumps, the number of medical staff, and the amount of personal protective equipment – to meet the critical medical needs of people. The COVID-19 pandemic also disrupted healthcare for other serious conditions. Shifting resources and attention to address the large number of cases of COVID-19 patients has led to the lack of care and treatment of patients with other conditions, like cancer and heart disease (Balch, 2020). These instances reveal the global-scale health challenges arising from climate change and the limited ability of states’ healthcare systems to handle the disease burdens.

Global Health Inequalities Climate change occurs in a radically unequal world. Although climate change affects us all, the distribution and degree of harm to diversely situated people are unequal. The poor and disempowered are disproportionately susceptible to the adverse effects of climate change since they are deprived of resources and institutional support to adapt to changing climate events. Conditions like malnutrition, dirty water, dilapidated or crowded living conditions, and lack of decent healthcare all increase the chances that poor communities who are enduring these conditions will also suffer from diseases and injuries brought on by climate change. The disparities in climaterelated health risks are shaped significantly by interconnected social processes and historical injustices that have increased the imbalance of vulnerability between rich and poor communities (Blomfield, 2015). In short, global health is marked by serious inequalities, and climate change tends to worsen this effect. As The Lancet-UCL commission pointed out, “Climate change will have its greatest impact on those who are already the poorest in the world: it will deepen inequities and the effects of global warming will shape the future of health among all peoples” (Costello et al., 2009).

The Ethical Importance of Health Few would dispute the claim that human health is profoundly important. One sign of this is that a basic moral commitment to health is enshrined in international law, which proclaims the attainment of a decent level of health to be a fundamental human right (United Nations, 1999). It is also reflected in the common moral outlook that dramatic inequalities in health outcomes are seriously unjust. Still, it is worth asking deeper questions about the meaning and value of health. Most generally, we might ask “what kind of good does the notion of health represent that makes it an important ethical value and a matter of justice?” If global health is going to be

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regarded as a moral value that generates entitlements and obligations, this is a crucial question to interrogate. Hence, it is worth reviewing some major accounts of the meaning and moral significance of health.

Normal Functioning The first account appeals to the concept of normal human functioning. The prevailing account of health judges the value of certain physiological and psychological conditions in accordance with normal, species-typical functioning. This formulation is first advanced by Christopher Boorse (1977). The idea is that there is a specific biological design that is typical in human beings and health is achieved when the human body aligns with this biological ideal. If certain physiological conditions are regarded as deviations from normal functioning, then they are recognized as pathologies and biomedical conditions worthy of medical attention. This naturalized account of health is influential and maps onto our folk understandings of health. Nevertheless, there are well-known shortcomings to this approach to defining health. First, there is an empirical question of whether there exists a specific set of natural traits that defines what it means to be human. For instance, Marc Ereshefsky summarizes how this idea is not obviously backed by the biological sciences (Ereshefsky, 2009). Second, there are moral questions. In general, if a notion of health is going to be used as a moral or political value to derive entitlements and responsibilities, then the definition of health cannot simply be regarded as a matter for empirical science, but instead is clearly at least in part a moral question about what forms of embodiment and functioning we value and why. Thus, an adequate account of health for informing public policy will inevitably be value laden. One consequence is that the attempt to derive moral prescriptions from what is allegedly a purely descriptive conception of health seems vulnerable to committing the is-ought fallacy. There are also more specific moral concerns. For one thing, there is the worry that allegedly empirical or purely descriptive accounts of health may easily become expressions of undue bias in favor of non-disabled embodiments, and so ethically unacceptable. Philosophers of disability, such as Anita Silvers, argue that defining health as normal functioning is morally objectionable because it is unduly biased against disabled people (Silvers, 1998). Similarly, Sean Aas and David Wasserman argue that one of the conceptual problems with the natural or biostatistical model of health is that it characterizes disabled people as unhealthy, which is incorrect (Aas & Wasserman, 2017). For another thing, even if an uncontroversial scientifically grounded ideal of human embodiment could be found, there would still be the issue of why normal, species-typical functioning should be regarded as critically important to understanding the moral value of human life. Why not think that the abnormal or atypical is at least as good or better? Political philosophers, such as Norman Daniels (2008, 2010) and Daniel Weinstock (2011), have defended normal functioning as the ideal that health ought

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to represent, but their commitment seems to be due to more pragmatic reasons. One of Daniels’ worries is that other standards, like equality of opportunity, would just be too demanding to our healthcare institutions (Daniels, 2010). But from the perspective of many political philosophers of disability, normal functioning is already unreasonably demanding in that it would wrongly position disabled people as being sick, which they find to be seriously disrespectful (Silvers, 1998; Aas & Wasserman, 2017). For Weinstock, normal functioning ought to be our understanding of health not because that is what health really is, but that it meets an overlapping consensus between various conceptions of the good (Weinstock, 2011, 433–434). Weinstock tries to consider the value pluralism of citizens, but his claim that normal functioning is supported by an overlapping consensus among various conceptions of the good is immediately questionable when we consider the perspectives of many members of disability communities. One may respond that such views stand at the margins, but since the notion of health carries serious normative implications in not only how resources are distributed but also how certain people are regarded in society through our institutional practices, it is important to integrate the perspectives of those who will be most affected by such classifications and practices.

Well-Being A second prominent account of the meaning and value of health is that it is connected to well-being. Health is widely understood as a prerequisite for living a good or flourishing life. The conceptual linkage between health and well-being is most emblematic in the work of health economists and public health ethicists who develop and use tools like quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) or disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) to evaluate health states (Silvers, 1995). Framing health in welfare-facilitating terms fits neatly with people’s pre-theoretical judgments. In general, one’s level of well-being seems to depend significantly on one’s state of health. Illnesses and injuries are detriments to wellbeing, since they are biomedical states that dramatically shorten life, can involve extreme pain and suffering, and create impairments to valuable activities and experiences. Thus, health has at least instrumental value. Many also hold that health includes not only the absence of adverse conditions but also physical and mental states that themselves contribute to happiness. Indeed, the positive value of health as an ingredient or constituent to well-being is accepted across different philosophical accounts of well-being. Notably, the idea that health not merely contributes to, but is constitutive of, well-being is exemplified in the World Health Organization’s definition of health as “a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease and infirmity” (World Health Organization, 1948) . Some may resist the WHO’s understanding of health on the grounds that it seems overly inflated. For instance, the definition appears to incorporate aspects of wellbeing that do not seem clearly health-related. Still, the WHO’s approach does capture the idea that health is a form of embodiment that is necessary for a qualitatively good

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life. This understanding of the value of health is appealing to many, especially those who see well-being in terms of maximizing pleasure (such as do many utilitarians) or realizing basic goods that make human life worthwhile (such as the capability approach, e.g., Robeyns & Byskov, 2020).

Autonomy A third account of the meaning and value of health associates it with autonomy. The link between health and autonomy arises from the recognition that we are embodied agents and depend on our body to move through the world. The capacity for autonomous agency requires a level of physical and mental fitness to be able to act intentionally and effectively in the world. This makes autonomy precarious due to our vulnerabilities to premature death and disease. Thus, the value of autonomy generates the moral imperative to set up conditions that support health as a prerequisite for autonomy, like the implementation of public health initiatives and the provision of healthcare. The relation between autonomy and health is aptly captured in descriptions of disease and disability as embodied forms of “unfreedom.” Liberal theorists, like Norman Daniels, argue that access to healthcare is important because it protects fair equality of opportunity. For Daniels, health is related to autonomy and opportunity in that embodied states can affect a person’s ability to take advantage of a wide range of opportunities (Daniels, 2008). The set of opportunities of someone who is sick or injured is more truncated than someone who is healthy. Thus, the value of autonomy may generate obligations to promote the health of people, which may include the provision of clean drinking water and universal access to healthcare.

Dignity Finally, the value of health has been closely tied to human dignity. The notion of dignity is a powerful, alluring notion since it speaks to our moral commitments that human beings have an inviolable worth and, as such, ought to be treated in ways that reflect that. People having to suffer from disease and debilities are often felt as indignities. One notable example is UNICEF’s 2000 campaign for universal access to sanitation facilities. It was organized around the idea that the lack of access to sanitation facilities for many people, including the marginalized poor, children, and the elderly, is not only a public health disaster but also, in light of that fact, a serious affront to human dignity. The title of their campaign was “Sanitation for All: Promoting Dignity and Human Rights” (UNICEF, 2000). Although attractive to many and widely used in bioethics discourse, dignity can be an unsettling notion to some partly due to its vagueness and religious overtones. Ruth Macklin, for example, has said that the notion of dignity is a useless concept, arguing that it is derivative of more precise normative concepts, like respect for persons and their autonomy, and should be dispensed with (Macklin, 2003). Whether

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or not Macklin is correct, she does call to attention the ambiguity of the term and if one wants to utilize dignity to ground the value of health and derive entitlements from it, then one must make clear of the meaning of dignity. Many philosophers seek to provide a more precise formulation of dignity. Martha Nussbaum, for example, connects health and dignity to her broader political conception of justice as securing for all citizens a threshold level of capabilities required for a worthwhile life (Nussbaum, 2008). Susan Shell looks to Kant’s conception of persons to derive a workable understanding of dignity that could be used as a normative resource in bioethics discourse (Shell, 2008). The aim of this section was to map out some of the ways in which the meaning and value of health have been conceptualized. Health is a concept that carries significant normative weight and could play an influential role in the ethical discourse around climate change. Yet parsing out what kinds of ethical demands that follow from the value of health may require figuring out what makes health morally important and where it belongs in the hierarchy and plurality of moral values.

Injustice and Global Health Inequalities A further question that is important to explore in developing a climate ethics that is properly responsive to the concerns of global health is the meaning of health equity. As noted earlier, one of the negative human impacts of climate change is that it exacerbates global health inequalities. Although such climate change-induced inequalities immediately offend our moral sensibilities, more needs to be said about whether these global health inequalities translate to health inequities. A health equity approach specifies how health inequalities ought to be evaluated, which then informs us on how to properly respond to the kinds of inequalities that are determined to be unjust. Here, we will outline two broad approaches to defining health equity, which we derive from Fabienne Peter (2001). Peter outlines two types of health equity approaches: the direct approach and the indirect approach.

Direct Approach The direct approach evaluates the moral status of health inequalities by looking at the pattern or distribution of health outcomes themselves. According to this approach, there is a specific pattern of health outcomes that ought to be achieved from the standpoint of justice. Hence, the direct approach is interested in alleviating any health inequalities that do not fit with its determined morally ideal pattern. The ideal pattern of health outcomes depends on the conception of justice. For the classical utilitarian, the ideal pattern might be one that reflects the maximization of health of the whole population on the condition that health is related to utility or well-being. The health prioritarian might pursue, as an end of justice, maximizing the health status of the worst off in society (cf. Brock, 2004). The health egalitarian might deem equal levels of health to be the only morally acceptable pattern of health outcomes.

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For the health sufficientarian, the ideal pattern might be the whole population achieving, or having the means to achieve, a certain threshold of health. What unify these various conceptions of health equity under the umbrella of the direct approach are the commitments that achieving a particular outcome of health – whether that desirable outcome is maximizing aggregate health of a population, or maximizing the health status of the least well-off, or attaining equality in health – is a priority of justice and any circumstance of health inequalities that does not align with the ideal pattern in health outcomes is unjust and something that the state ought to rectify. Another unifying trait is that these accounts of health justice regard health itself as having direct moral and political value. Thus, adopting a direct approach requires some account of what health is and why it matters to justice. The direct approach makes the major point that certain health inequalities can in themselves be unjust, irrespective of the underlying social and political processes that may have produced them. This understanding of unjust health inequality mirrors what Thomas Nagel calls “radical inequality” (Nagel, 2008). Radical inequality refers to the unequal circumstance of people whose basic needs are unmet while there are people with exorbitant affluence, and it is possible to alleviate the suffering of the former by redistributing some of the wealth of the latter without diminishing their quality of life to a morally troubling degree. For the direct view, the mere existence of radical inequality in the world is a mark of enduring injustice. Even if these outcomes resulted from a procedurally just transnational order and where all states, including affluent ones, fully comply with the established norms, a global and economic system that allows radical inequality to emerge and endure is morally objectionable. In John Rawls’ words, the invisible hand can guide things in the wrong direction (Rawls, 1993, 267), and health inequalities that deviate from morally ideal health patterns are one of them. One general burden of the direct approach, as noted earlier, is that it needs to provide an account of the meaning and value of health. There will also be additional burdens that are specific to the type of direct views. For example, the health sufficientarian must state what makes someone healthy enough for the purposes of justice (Aas & Wasserman, 2017). Yet the advantage of the direct approach is that it seems to properly recognize the moral importance of health, even though developing a defensible account of it may be a challenging prospect. It also seems to capture the intuition that certain health inequalities are in themselves unjust because they are characterized by people in extreme need.

Indirect Approach The indirect approach identifies the justness of health inequalities not in the observable patterns of health outcomes, but in the structural arrangements that contributed to the production of these patterns. That is, the moral status of a health inequality is determined by the moral status of the political and economic systems that originate it. For instance, a health inequality is unjust to the extent that it is produced by institutional practices and social mechanisms that are themselves unjust. So, an

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indirect approach to health equity only determines health inequalities as unjust that result from an unjust basic structure, and the target of rectification to alleviate these inequalities is in repairing the morally flawed basic institutions that originate them rather than achieving a particular pattern of health outcomes. This approach is indirect in two ways. First, it is indirect in how health is valued. Health does not have a direct moral or political value. Rather, its value is indirect as an informative space about social arrangements. Health inequalities are the epiphenomena of the underlying social arrangements, and dramatic health inequalities are often a signal of social arrangements that are unjust. Second, it is indirect in how health inequalities are primarily addressed. The alleviation of unjust health inequalities involves interventions that are not necessarily directed toward health promotion, but in improving institutional structures that happen to be impactful to health. The indirect approach is often found compelling for two reasons. The first reason is that it acknowledges the “pathogenic role of inequity” (Farmer, 2003, 20), such that health inequality is more so the consequence of unjust social conditions rather than patterns of poor lifestyle choices and arbitrary misfortunes of individual agents. The indirect approach appreciates the social determinants of health, which are, roughly speaking, all those factors which affect health and have a social and systemic cause as opposed to a natural or episodic cause. For instance, people living in communities characterized by deep income inequalities are more likely to die before the age of 75 than people in communities with less economic stratifications (Sanger-Katz, 2015). The World Health Organization accumulated thousands of research reports of how political, social, and economic circumstances influence people’s health conditions in very dramatic ways (World Health Organization, 2003). Their findings show that steeper social gradients, stressful circumstances, social exclusion and discrimination, poor job security, lack of strong social supportive networks, and lack of access to healthy food lead to greater mortality and morbidity rates for aggrieved social groups experiencing the brunt of material deprivations and psychosocial assaults. Such results suggest that the focus of ethical inquiry should be the social determinants of health and not necessarily health outcomes themselves. On the one hand, there may be some health inequalities that are permissible and which emerge from underlying institutions that are themselves just. On the other hand, when a health inequality is morally impermissible, the target of rectification is the social determinants of health, not necessarily for the end of improving or equalizing health outcomes, but to rectify the underlying social and economic processes that are basically unjust. The second reason the indirect approach often seems compelling is that it avoids the complicated work of explaining the ethical importance of health, since it focuses on the morality of the principal institutions that generate health inequalities instead of the morality of the actual health inequalities per se. What matters directly to health equity is the justice of basic institutions and not necessarily public health as an end of justice. Thus, there is not a pressing need to figure out the value of health within a broader general theory of justice. That said, these aspects of the indirect approach that explain its advantages are also the source of its disadvantages. The most obvious disadvantage concerns the

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moral implications of displacing the value of health from the purview of justice. For one thing, it seems to remove the moral foundations for public health and healthcare institutions. There could be other explanations for why these institutions are critically important, but it may be difficult to account for if one is thinking about health equity from the indirect view. Another consequence is that certain health inequalities that seem deeply unjust to many people, like the health inequalities marked by extreme health needs, cannot be censured as unjust if they emerged from a procedurally just system. This, too, does not align with many people’s senses of justice.

Health Equity and Climate Change These two approaches to health equity can be applied to the global health inequalities driven by climate change. Though climate change is already widely understood as a problem of global justice, examining climate change from a health equity perspective may provide more normative resources in figuring out what kinds of responsibilities are triggered by the emergence of climate change. From the direct approach to health equity, climate change would be evaluated from the kinds of health inequalities it causes and whether such circumstances stray ever further away from the kinds of health patterns that justice demands. Although, again, this depends on what global patterns of health represent the moral ideal, it seems hard to deny that, whatever that ideal is, the current global health situation is deeply troubling. Moreover, that situation would still be troubling even if the emergence of climate change were not the result of (say) states and transnational corporations acting badly. For the proponent of the direct approach, the radical inequalities per se shaped by climate change implicate the transnational political and economic order that allowed climate change to happen and worsen the global health crisis. Under the indirect approach to health equity, climate change-produced health inequalities would be judged based on the transnational political and economic order that contributed to the progression of climate change. What is to be examined is the organization of the global legal, economic, and political order itself. Many philosophers argue that the dramatically unequal health risks are the result of historical and enduring injustices. For example, Megan Blomfield makes the compelling case that many communities that are more vulnerable to climate change events are so due to historical injustices, such as colonialism, that have plundered these communities of the resources and development to adapt to climatic change (Blomfield, 2015). To sum up, so far, we have presented two important considerations in examining the ethical importance of climate change from the normative lens of global health. The first consideration is figuring the ethical importance of health, especially when it is recognized as an ethical ideal to derive entitlements and social responsibilities. The value of health may generate legitimate moral claims against states to address climate change or mitigate its adverse impacts on vulnerable communities. The second consideration is figuring when global health inequalities are, in turn, health inequities. Climate change not only increases the global disease burden across the world, but the threat to health is especially acute to poor and disempowered

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communities since the bulk of climate change-related morbidity and mortality fall on them. If these gross inequalities in health vulnerabilities are deemed unjust, then it becomes a matter of justice in rectifying these undeserved inequalities.

Case Study: Planetary Health In recent times, there have been numerous attempts to environmentalize public health in response to global environmental change in general and the climate crisis in particular. This movement has produced new concepts of public health, such as One Health, EcoHealth, Conservation Medicine, and most recently Planetary Health (Hill-Cawthorne, 2019). This section focuses on planetary health and in particular the foundational document of the planetary health movement, the Rockefeller Foundation-Lancet Commission report on planetary health (RLC). It explores how the RLC conceives of the ethical dimensions of planetary health as a way of illustrating how foundational ethical questions arise in practice (see Gardiner, 2022; Gardiner & Tubig, In preparation). The RLC’s canonical definition of planetary health (PH) states: “PH is the achievement of the highest attainable standard of health, wellbeing, and equity worldwide through judicious attention to the human systems—political, economic, and social—that shape the future of humanity and the Earth’s natural systems that define the safe environmental limits within which humanity can flourish. Put simply, planetary health is the health of human civilisation and the state of the natural systems on which it depends.” (Whitmee et al., 2015, 1978, emphasis added)

Notice three key features of this definition. The first is that the RLC selects and prioritizes three specific values: “health, wellbeing, and equity worldwide.” Let us call these values “the triumvirate” – literally, “the three rulers” – of the PH agenda. The second key feature of the definition is that the Commission adopts a maximizing approach: the aim of PH is “the achievement of the highest attainable standard” of health, well-being, and equity. The third key feature is that the RLC asserts that the health of human communities and natural systems are the primary objects of concern: “planetary health is the health of human civilisation and the state of the natural systems on which it depends.”

Maximizing These features of the definition of planetary health raise interesting issues for the attempt to environmentalize public health. Consider maximizing. The decision to target the highest attainable standard of the movement’s three central values raises at least two questions. The first question is as follows: why should such a demanding standard be adopted? Here it is notable that in other settings we often set more modest goals, such as

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achieving minimum, adequate, generous, or reasonably high standards. For instance, even in conventional medical care, we typically do not think that society is obliged to provide scarce medical resources to its citizens to the extent that they reach a maximal level of well-being. Rather, the extent of the obligation is to achieve a particular threshold, such as “normal” (e.g., species-typical) health, or a level of health sufficient to make it possible for a person to construct a decent, meaningful life. Given this, when the RLC insists on the “highest attainable” standard of planetary health, its stance requires further explanation and defense. For example, perhaps the assumption is that there something about the three values picked out by the definition that makes maximizing appropriate. If so, the rationale should be made explicit. The second question raised by the priority given to the triumvirate concerns what happens to other values. There are many values beyond health, well-being, and equity, as typically understood. These include some that are explicitly espoused by some parts of the planetary health community, such as human rights, distributive justice, environmental sustainability, intergenerational justice, social progress, the flourishing of humanity, and respect for nonhuman life. Yet they may also go beyond such values to include others, such as freedom, autonomy, community, cultural identity, beauty, aesthetic appreciation of nature, and so on. Notably, by itself, the RLC definition does not yet reveal how values outside the triumvirate stand in relation to planetary health. Nevertheless, both the maximizing rhetoric and the claim that planetary health is “health of human civilisation and the state of the natural systems on which it depends” encourage the view that planetary health ought to be humanity’s overriding objective, in the sense that the triumvirate has absolute priority over all other values. Still, claiming absolute priority is a bold move philosophically and one that should not be taken lightly. Do we really believe that achieving the highest attainable standard of health, well-being, and equity should always take precedence over other values? Do we think that other values (e.g., rights, autonomy) ought to be sacrificed, in each and every case of conflict between them and planetary health? In particular, do we believe this even if we get to the point where the achieved standard of health, well-being, and equity is already (reasonably) high? Must all other values (including freedom, beauty, love of nature, and the rest) always give way to promoting ever higher standards of PH? It seems likely that most people will be skeptical and find attaching absolute priority to planetary health implausible. If this is correct, the RLC definition appears to overreach. At a minimum, it requires further explanation and defense. Notably, this worry echoes standard philosophical concerns about maximizing approaches. Maximizing consequentialist theories, such as traditional act-utilitarianism, are often accused of demanding excessive sacrifices of other values, such as of rights and individual integrity. Although the RLC definition of PH prioritizes more values than traditional utilitarianism (health and equity, as well as well-being), it still opens itself up to the complaint that it is insensitive to other things that matter. In giving precedence to the triumvirate, the definition deprioritizes, and perhaps displaces, other important values. This includes both anthropocentric values (such as rights and cultural identity) and non-anthropocentric values (such as respect for nature). However, many would not want an environmentalization of public health to downgrade

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or exclude such values, especially surreptitiously. Indeed, some might expect individual rights, cultural identity, and respect for nature to be front and center in any responsible new ethics of public health. Consider now a related concern. In the context of planetary health, it is reasonable to worry that the demand to maximize the triumvirate might effectively crowd out all other values. In particular, perhaps the possibilities for improving health, well-being, and equity on a global, intergenerational, and ecological scale are more or less inexhaustible. This may be for theoretical reasons. Perhaps there are no upper limits on health, well-being, and equity, so that their demands are never-ending or infinite. It might also arise for practical reasons. Perhaps the poor state of the world, or the massive global, intergenerational, and ecological scope of planetary health, or both imply that any limits to the demands of health, well-being, and equity are currently so far off as to not be relevant to what to do now. If so, the triumvirate will, in fact if not in principle, rule all. Thus, in endorsing a maximizing approach to its three core values, PH threatens to overwhelm all other human endeavors.

The Triumvirate What about the values of the triumvirate themselves? One question is: why these three? Given the broad range of relevant values, why should health, well-being, and equity (and only these) be selected as the ethical core of planetary health? The RLC does not say. Still, one tempting explanation is that it assumes that the triumvirate effectively absorbs or subsumes all other values that we should care about. For example, perhaps the RLC thinks of well-being and equity as “thinner,” more generic terms that already implicitly cover more specific concepts, such as distributive justice and sustainability. If so, perhaps there is no displacement of other values, since the concept of PH effectively incorporates all other values (or at least all the important ones). Worries about crowding out and inexhaustibility are defused by saying that the canonical definition implicitly covers everything that really matters. The absorption strategy has some promise. For example, perhaps it is plausible to subsume human rights and autonomy under “equity,” and this is likely what the RLC intends. Still, the absorption strategy risks obscuring more than it illuminates. For one thing, subsuming important values under the triumvirate merely postpones many of the central questions about the values of PH and how they relate to one another. If “health,” “well-being,” and “equity” are thin concepts, much of the work remains to be done. For another thing, one might doubt that the absorption strategy will work for all values, at least without stretching the terms “health,” “well-being,” and “equity” beyond recognition or descending into vacuousness. Again, this includes values that are important to some PH advocates, such as justice or respect for nonhuman life. Both worries indicate a lacuna for further work and the centrality of ethics to that work. A second question about the triumvirate concerns how to integrate the three core values. Most people would agree that health, well-being, and equity are important ends that ought to be promoted, including by doing research that is overall beneficial

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and considerate to everyone. However, when an ethical project is accountable to a set of heterogeneous values, it raises the concern of how to balance or prioritize these values when they are in tension. On the positive side, in general, it seems likely that the values of the triumvirate often make complementary moral claims: for example, that increasing people’s wellbeing coincides with promoting their health and that the promotion of health also advances social and environmental justice. Nevertheless, in particular contexts, health, well-being, and equity might make competing demands, where fulfilling one involves compromising another. For instance, those embracing a PH agenda may face situations where measures that protect health also result in significantly reduced quality of life, such as when countries go into lockdown during a pandemic or when there are economic costs to reducing air pollution. The presence of tensions need not imply that PH must specify a strict hierarchy within the triumvirate. Prioritizing may be context-bound, and which values are most important in a given situation may depend on the particular circumstances and the possible consequences. A value-pluralistic conception of PH can be sensitive to this, since it implies that advancing one value should not be done without considering other values. For example, it can hold that health and well-being should not necessarily be advanced if the means are unjust and that any serious endeavor for social equity would be myopic if it did not seriously account for health and wellbeing. Still, these are matters that deserve exploration. Again, there is a need for a deeper research agenda where ethics is central. A third question about the triumvirate concerns the meaning of the core values. How we understand a moral concept will shape how we evaluate the current state of affairs and generate prescriptions on how to proceed, as researchers or citizens. Yet well-being, equity, and even health are complicated and contentious moral concepts. An adequate account requires sensitivity to varying intuitions and considered judgments. One obvious example is “equity” or “justice,” whose meaning is a persistent question in philosophy and in society, giving rise to a plurality of rich theories and approaches, across diverse intellectual and cultural traditions. However, to illustrate the general issue, let us focus on health and in particular its usage by the RLC. Strikingly, the RLC deploys two different understandings of “health” simultaneously and within the very definition of PH: a restricted sense that is contrasted with well-being and equity and a more expansive sense that includes all three. Specifically, early in its canonical definition, health is just one of the triumvirate of core values (“PH is the achievement of the highest attainable standard of health, wellbeing, and equity worldwide”). Here, the word probably refers to a conventional sense of “health”: the proper or species-typical functioning of the body. Yet later in the definition, “health” is used expansively to envelope all three values of the triumvirate – well-being, equity, as well as health conventionally defined. Here, “health” is applied not (or not only) to human bodies, but to communities and natural ecosystems (“planetary health is the health of human civilisation and the state of the natural systems on which it depends”). The double usage of such a central concept raises numerous concerns. One is that it undermines effective communication. For one thing, the double usage creates

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ambiguity, making it difficult to keep track of which understanding of health is under discussion. For another thing, it is unclear whether “health” means the same thing in different contexts. For instance, when used to describe the proper functioning of societies and ecosystems as opposed to bodies, is “health” being deployed literally, analogically, or metaphorically? A second concern is that the double usage makes the concept of planetary health look more attractive, and more rooted in public health, than it really is. In particular, “health” as expansively defined includes health restrictively defined, but also equity and human well-being; hence, why see the relevant overarching (expansive) concept as planetary health, rather than planetary well-being or planetary equity? Since equity and well-being are also constituents, each appears to have a claim and an equal claim at that. Thus, there is a need to defend planetary health as the most appropriate overarching concept for ethics and governance. A third concern, related to the other two, is that a better approach may be to find some broader, more inclusive concept under which to organize. For example, perhaps planetary flourishing or planetary eudaimonia (the Aristotelian notion of eudaimonia, often imperfectly translated as “flourishing”) would be better than “planetary health,” “planetary well-being,” or “planetary equity.” For one thing, the concept of flourishing is already associated with the incorporation of a wide range of social values (e.g., those connected with virtues such as temperance, justice, generosity, and courage) and with the idea that good social arrangements are essential to such flourishing. For another thing, the RLC might be accused already of implicitly free riding on the appeal of “flourishing” (first) by deploying the concept within its definition of planetary health (“the safe environmental limits within which humanity can flourish”), but then effectively rebranding flourishing as “health” in the expansive sense (“Put simply, planetary health is the health of human civilization”), and (second) by taking advantage of the normative force that comes with the term “health” without employing it in the conventional ways that originally give rise to that normative force. A third set of questions about the RLC definition of “planetary health” involves the ownership of the concept and agenda of the movement going forward. For instance, if we are to go with “planetary health” grounded in the public health community (e.g., rather than “planetary equity” of “planetary flourishing,” perhaps grounded in wider communities), then the public health community will have to confront a challenge familiar from other areas, including ancient discussions of eudaimonism. Plato infamously argued that good politics may require experts in philosophy – “Philosopher Kings (or Queens).” However, many have argued since that expert rule of this kind is inappropriate because it violates key values (e.g., autonomy, itself a critical part of many conceptions of human well-being). Notably, this objection applies just as strongly to experts in areas other than philosophy – would-be Economist Kings, Natural Science Kings, Engineering Kings, Public Policy (e.g., Cost-Benefit) Kings, and so on. Thus, if “planetary health” were to carry us in the direction of “Physician Kings or Public Health Kings,” the PH community would also have to answer important questions about what would justify giving its own kind of expertise pre-eminence and (possibly) political power.

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In light of such issues, a middle path seems appealing (Gardiner & Tubig, In preparation). Specifically, the best approach to “planetary health” is to see it as a nested concept. On the one hand, “planetary flourishing” should replace “planetary health” as the term for the overarching wide vision that includes the triumvirate of health well-being and equity. On the other hand, the term “planetary health” should be reserved for the health component of the triumvirate, where public health professionals can expect to play a distinctive and crucial role. In this way, planetary health is part of a wide agenda, but does not define that agenda. Thus, public health professionals can be seen as important contributors to a broader movement, but not necessarily as the essential core of that movement, and not as making any sort of claim to be its self-anointed leaders. In particular, they can emphasize that planetary well-being and planetary equity are also important and the overall concept of planetary flourishing needs to incorporate all three.

Conclusion This chapter provides an overview of some central ethical dimensions of global public health as it pertains to climate change. It also examines a concrete case – the concept of planetary health – where such issues arise. The basic conclusion is that issues of ethics and justice are central to the public health challenge moving forward. One aspect of this challenge is the need for a more philosophically robust account of the ethics of public health in general, perhaps pursued through a deeper exploration and refinement of the concept of planetary health.

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Climate Change and Nature Conservation Elena Casetta

Contents Introduction. The Discovery of Climate Change and the Beginning of Nature Conservation . . . Old and New Conservationism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Motives for Conservation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Targets of Conservation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nature-Based Solutions to Climate Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The End of Nature as We Know It . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion. What Remains of Preservationism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

After briefly reconstructing how and when anthropogenic climate change awareness and nature conservation emerged in Western societies (section “Introduction. The Discovery of Climate Change and the Beginning of Nature Conservation”), a comparison between “old” and today’s conservationism is offered (section “Old and New Conservationism”), and two cases of nature conservation motivated by climate change are presented: nature-based solutions, and the “Global Deal for Nature” (section “Nature-Based Solutions to Climate Change”). Then, the End of Nature claim is discussed, and the main features of nature – and nature conservation – in the Anthropocene are sketched (section “The End of Nature as We Know It”). Finally, some remarks concerning what remains of pristine nature and preservationism are offered (section “Conclusion. What Remains of Preservationism”).

E. Casetta (*) University of Turin, Turin, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_151

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Keywords

Conservationism · Preservationism · Nature-based solutions · Global deal for nature · End of nature · 30 by 30

Introduction. The Discovery of Climate Change and the Beginning of Nature Conservation German naturalist, explorer, and philosopher Alexander von Humboldt played a pioneering role in theorizing the existence of a connection between human activities and changes in the Earth’s climate. His awareness stemmed from intertwined empirical and theoretical circumstances. The empirical circumstances lie in his tireless exploration of different regions of the Planet that allowed him to compare similar phenomena in distant places. It was during his five-year journey across the Americas, for instance, that Humboldt witnessed the destruction of native ecosystems by colonialist overexploitation, and it was while visiting Lake Valencia in 1800 that he noted that “by falling the trees, that cover the tops and the sides of mountains, men in every climate prepare at once two calamities for future generations; the want of fuel, and a scarcity of water”. Indeed, trees “affect the copiousness of springs . . . because, by sheltering the soil from the direct action of the Sun, they diminish the evaporation of the water produced by rain” (von Humboldt & Bonpland, 1819, p. 143). And it was his travel across Russia in 1829 that allowed him to compare the consequences of deforestation and intense husbandry in the American colonies with those in the mining centers in Siberia, and to conclude that human activities such as deforestation, irrigation, and “the masses of steam and gas” produced in the industrial centers affect the Earth’s climate (cit. in Wulf, 2015, p. 326). This latest intuition was proven experimentally by American scientist Eunice Foote, who showed that changes in the types and quantities of atmospheric gases – including carbon dioxide (CO2) – have an impact on Earth’s temperature, concluding that “an atmosphere of that gas [CO2] would give our Earth a high temperature” (Foote, 1856, p. 383). What is called today’s the “greenhouse effect” was further confirmed by Irish physicist John Tyndall in 1859 and by Swedish physicist and chemist Svante Arrhenius in 1895 (Ellis, 2018, p. 12). Humboldt’s observations went hand in hand with his theoretical stance, namely a holistic or systemic view of nature, according to which all of nature is interconnected, and therefore what happens to a part of the whole has repercussions on other parts and on the whole itself. Human beings are part and parcel of this whole, which they can grasp through scientific observation and study as well as through aesthetic and artistic appreciation. Sporadic examples of nature conservation can be found in the earliest times. For instance, King Artaxerxes I tried to limit the cut of Lebanese cedar in 450 B.C. (Grove, 1992), and Ashoka, the Indian Emperor who lived between 304 and 232 B. C., established forms of forest and wildlife protection by banning the use of fire in agriculture and hunting (Fisher, 2018, Chap. 4). However, it is the environmental

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exploitation of colonialism denounced by Humboldt that was at the origin of the first systematic instances of nature conservation in the Western world. According to the reconstruction offered by the British environmental historian and activist Richard Grove (1992, 1995), the roots of European conservationism grew in the context of the colonial exploitation of tropical lands around the middle of the eighteenth century. On Grove’s account, the requests to colonial governments for the conservation of nature emerged when the “colonial enterprise began to clash with Romantic idealism and with scientific findings” (Grove, 1992, p. 42). In other words – and simplifying an extremely complex scenario – the demand for nature conservation stemmed from the conflict between the perspectives of different social actors on the same object, namely tropical lands and islands. For the Dutch, British, and French governments, tropical lands were an inexhaustible stock of free resources (mainly timber, minerals, game, and soil for agriculture) to be exploited for their economic value. For many European intellectuals and artists, tropical lands represented the concrete counterpart of idealized landscapes imbued with both symbolic and aesthetic value. They were viewed as the Eden on Earth, Arcadian utopias in which humans and nature were supposed to live in harmony and simplicity. For scientists, they were also endowed with priceless scientific value, as a myriad of new species and ecosystems were there, expecting to be described and understood. Together with colonial settlers, a vibrant community of professional natural scientists had established itself in the colonies – mainly taxonomists and medical doctors. For them, tropical lands and the large-scale ecological changes brought about by the colonial enterprise were both an example of pristine nature and an exciting, new field of study to be conserved. To give but one example, when the first Dutch settlers left Mauritius, at the beginning of 1700, the forests in the area accessible from the coast were largely depleted. It was the scientific community that settled there, when French colonialism replaced the Dutch one, that – inspired by the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau – fought to forestall deforestation and put in place some of the earliest nature conservation measures. These included the 1769 governmental ordinance that dictated the reforestation of the denuded areas, obliged the land owners to maintain 25% of the land as forest to prevent soil erosion, and protected all forests close to water. As Grove (1992, p. 44) notes, “the central, innovative aspect of French conservationism on Mauritius was the perceived relation between deforestation and local climatic change”. While the European demand for nature conservation originated from the awareness of the consequences of the tropical natural resources’ overexploitation, it was the progressive urbanization, expansion, and mechanization of agriculture and the rapid growth of the manufacturing activity that led to the emergence of nature conservation demands in the United States. As with European environmentalism, forests played a central role in the early phase of environmentalism in the United States. The pivotal event in the transformation of the modern American landscape was indeed the massive deforestation aimed at leaving space for agriculture, collecting fuel for heating and manufacturing, and harvesting timber to build railroads and cities (more generally, deforestation is one of the great environmental transformations of modern history, see McNeil & Engelke, 2016).

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Both the discovery that human activities like deforestation can impact Earth’s climate and the demand for nature conservation have hence a long history. However, it was only in the early 1960s that the science of global warming was fully accepted and in place, and it was not before the late 1980s that the awareness of the extent of the threat of climate change spread outside the scientific community (Maslin, 2014, Chap. 2). This delay in recognizing the menace posed by climate change, and especially the crucial role of human activities in affecting the concentration of atmospheric CO2, can be ascribed, at least in part, to the fact that no one took up the baton after the pioneering research by scientists like Foote, Tyndall, and Arrhenius. The topic was probably not considered worthy of pursuing mainly because scientists at that time believed that human influence on climate was insignificant compared to astronomic and geological forces such as changes in the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, volcanic eruptions, and ocean currents. Today, there is no doubt that humans have become a biogeophysical force (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000; Boggs, 2016), that climate change is “one of the biggest scientific and political problems facing humanity” (Maslin, 2014, p. 12), and that nature conservation plays a key role in facing that problem – as it will be seen. The next section will focus on two differences between old and today’s conservationism that will make clear how facing climate change has become a motive for nature conservation and therefore how climate change is reshaping nature conservation.

Old and New Conservationism At least two main prima facie differences between the first instances of nature conservation mentioned in the introduction and today’s conservationism can be underlined. They concern, respectively, the motives for conservation and the targets of conservation.

Motives for Conservation The first Western environmentalists aimed at conserving nature either for spiritual, moral, and aesthetic reasons (the three were often intertwined), or for economic reasons (Norton, 1991; Cohen, 1984; Nash, 1990; Callicott, 1994). The different motives originated the two main traditional models of Western conservationism, namely preservationism and resourcism. The paradigmatic model of nature conservation motivated by spiritual, moral, and aesthetic reasons is the so-called preservationism, founded by Scottish-American engineer and naturalist John Muir and inspired both by Humboldt and the philosophical movement of transcendentalism. Transcendentalism – to put in a nutshell – can be seen as a US version of European Romanticism – loosely inspired by Kantian transcendental idealism (hence the name, as explained in Emerson (1842/1990)) against Locke’s empiricism – which developed around the mid-nineteenth century in New England and whose most popular representatives are Ralph Waldo Emerson

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and David Henry Thoreau. According to transcendentalists, nature was first and foremost a “conduit” for the human spirit in its quest for moral perfection (Coates, 1988/2004, p. 135 ff.). For the preservationists, North American “wild” land played that role, representing a hypostatized Eden, just like tropical lands represented the Eden on Earth for the first European environmentalists. Indeed, when North America began its urban revolution, people’s perception of the wildland started to change, “from that of a desolate and God-less place . . . to one that idealised and appreciated Wilderness as a sanctuary from modern urban life. Wilderness . . . became Eden on Earth” (Ward, 2019, p. 37). Since nature had to be protected from development and exploitation, and conserved so that it could be a source of spiritual enjoyment and moral improvement, preservationism aimed at conserving that nature that could “do the job”, such as the majestic landscapes of the Sierra Nevada. Nature had to be kept separated from humans, and therefore set aside by means of natural reserves and national parks. In 1892 John Muir founded the Sierra Club, one of the first conservationist organizations, originally aimed at preserving the Sierras, especially the Yosemite Valley. Still active today, the Sierra Club is one of the most influential environmental organizations in the United States. Its mission – as stated in its website (https://www. sierraclub.org/) – is: “To explore, enjoy, and protect the wild places of the Earth; To practice and promote the responsible use of the Earth’s ecosystems and resources; To educate and enlist humanity to protect and restore the quality of the natural and human environment; and to use all lawful means to carry out these objectives”. Muir’s and the Sierra Club’s campaign played a pivotal role in convincing the federal government to make the area of Yosemite into a national park in 1890 and, more generally, in promoting the so-called “fortress conservation” (Wilshusen et al., 2002), also named “Yellowstone Model” (Wuerthner, 2015), or “nature for itself” conservation (Mace, 2014). Preservationism and the idea of nature that it promotes obtained their main institutional recognition with the 1964 Wilderness Act, the law that provides the legal definition of wilderness in the United States, characterizing it as an area where “the Earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain”. Although preservationism has been, and still is, an influential conservation model in the Western world, helping to conserve so-called “intact” natural habitat as well as endemic species, the idea of nature it promotes has been severely criticized (see, for instance, Merchant (2003); for a debate on the notion of wilderness, see Callicott & Nelson, 1998). The paradigmatic model of nature conservation motivated by economic reasons is the so-called resourcism (also called, misleadingly, “conservationism” – see Callicott, 1994), the most important forerunner of the concept of “sustainable development” (Blandin, 2007, p. 15). Founded by forest scientist Gifford Pinchot and supported by American President Theodore Roosevelt, resourcism recognized the negative effects of human activities – especially deforestation – on the natural environment. However, Pinchot, influenced by the German school of forestry (Van Dyke & Lamb, 2020, p. 14 ff.), championed an approach radically different from the preservationist one: he advocated scientific management of land in order to provide,

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as his utilitarian motto sounded, “the greatest good for the greatest number for the longest time” (Callicott, 1990). Nature, especially timber, was for Pinchot an exploitable resource that human beings had to learn to manage in an efficient way, informed by scientific study, in order to produce enough resources to meet the needs of present and future human generations. In today’s conservation, resourcism comes in different forms. For instance, according to British ecologist and conservation scientist Georgina Mace (2014), one can distinguish a conservation framing based on the “nature in spite of people” view, and one based on the “nature for people” view. Both share the basic idea of the sustainable use of natural resources, but “nature in spite of people” conservation emphasizes the necessity of implementing strategies to reduce human overexploitation of natural resources, and its main targets are species and natural habitats. “Nature for people” conservation emphasizes instead the fundamental importance of the services that ecosystems provide to human beings’ survival and well-being, and mainly targets ecosystems and ecosystem functions. Through time, the divide between preservationism and resourcism has tended to fade, mainly because the existence of that nature “untrammeled by man” advocated in the Wilderness Act has proven strongly questionable, both historically and presently. Historically, wilderness promoters tended to forget that the so-called wilderness had in fact been the land of Indigenous Americans, for whom the wilderness was their home to inhabit. As Lakota Chief Standing Bear wrote (1933/ 2006, p. 38): “We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, and winding streams with tangled growth, as ‘wild’. Only to the white man was nature a ‘wilderness’ . . . To us it was tame”. Presently, the very existence of a pristine nature is questioned because of the pervasiveness of our species’ activities and, above all, the global extent of anthropogenic climate change (more on this in section “The End of Nature as We Know It”). Aesthetic, spiritual, moral, and economic motives for nature conservation coexist in today’s conservationism, which is characterized by a plurality of views, models, and motives (Mace, 2014). Yet, a new, pressing motive has emerged. In fact, while putting into question the existence of pristine nature, anthropogenic climate change – almost paradoxically – provided pristine nature with a new role, and conservationism with a novel, urgent and global motive: adapting to, and mitigating climate change. Today’s climate science confirms the intuitions by both Humboldt and the first conservationists concerning the relationship between human activities and climate. They also confirm Foote’s, Tyndall’s, and Arrhenius’ findings on the relation between atmospheric CO2 and the Earth’s climate. Moreover, the latest IPCC Assessment Report clearly states the link between nature conservation and the urge to adequately deal with the threats deriving from climate change: Nature offers a lot of untapped potential, not only to reduce climate risks, and deal with the causes of climate change, but also to improve people’s lives. By restoring and safeguarding ecosystems on land and in the ocean, we help plants and animals to build climate resilience. Nature, in turn, can help us regulate the climate, give us clean, safe water, control pests and

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diseases and pollinate our crops . . . An increasing body of evidence demonstrates that climatic risks to people can be lowered by strengthening nature, meaning that we invest in protecting nature and rebuilding ecosystems to benefit both people and biodiversity. (IPCC, 2022, WG2 AR6 FAQ 2.5)

For instance – the IPCC report reads – restoring wetlands and the natural course of rivers, together with planting more trees to create shade, can reduce flood risk; parks, ponds, and greened rooftops and walls help in cooling cities (whose surface temperatures are generally higher than those of rural surroundings, a phenomenon called SUHI, surface urban heat island, see Mentaschi et al., 2022); diversifying crops and planting trees increase soil health and the “climate resilience” (i.e., the capability of a system to withstand, adapt to, and recover from the impacts of climate change) of cultivated land.

Targets of Conservation The second blatant difference between old and today’s conservationism concerns the targets of conservation. While Humboldt and the first conservationists had nature, habitats, species, and animal and plant communities as their main objects of interest, the language of today’s conservationism has been enriched with new terms, such as “ecosystem” and “biodiversity”, as can be seen in the passage of the IPCC report quoted in section “Motives for Conservation.” Since such terms designate conservation targets, it may be said that the targets of nature conservation have changed through time. Contemporarily, specialized conservation sciences – having the “new” entities as their object of focus – have been established. The term “ecosystem” was introduced by botanist and ecologist Arthur Tansley in the 1930s to express the holistic view that, from the ecologists’ standpoint, the basic unit of nature is “the whole system (in the sense of physics) . . . including not only the organism-complex, but also the whole complex of physical factors” (Tansley, 1935, p. 299). In spite of being “about the worst-defined [term] in the ecological literature” (Sarkar, 2002), ecosystems are both the main object – together with populations and communities – of ecology, and one of the main (if not the main) targets of conservation sciences, policies, and practices. Ecosystems are the focus of “nature for people” conservation mentioned above, in virtue of the services that they provide to human beings (the so-called “ecosystem services”, see Costanza et al., 1997). In particular, as it will be seen, natural ecosystems are sources and sinks for greenhouse gases (they both release and remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere). Therefore, their importance for climate change mitigation cannot be underestimated. Ecosystem management is the task of special branches of ecology like, for instance, applied ecology, which “focuses on the application of ecological knowledge to address environmental challenges” (Skelly & Freidenburg, 2012; see also Slobodkin, 1988) with a particular interest in how ecosystems are influenced by human activities; and restoration ecology, defined by the Society for Ecological Restoration International Science and Policy Working Group as “the process of

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assisting the recovery of an ecosystem that has been degraded, damaged, or destroyed” (cit. in Baer, 2013). Typically – as will be discussed in section “The End of Nature as We Know It” – restoration ecology is driven by the historical fidelity principle, defined by Garson (2014) as “the idea that the practice of restoration should attempt to approximate, within reasonable bounds, some past state of the damaged ecosystem”. A further discipline worth mentioning because of its explicit focus on ecosystem services is ecological engineering (Odum, 1962; Huneman, 2011), defined as “the process of designing systems that preserve, restore, and create ecosystem services . . . that is, the goods and services that humans extract from the ecosystem” (Matlock & Morgan, 2011, p. 1). Ecological engineering aims at ensuring that ecosystems continue to provide their “services”, from food to water, from disease control to the spiritual benefits of a walk in the woods. To do so, ecological engineering relies on human techniques to restore ecosystems damaged by human activities, or to design and build ecosystems that can become reliable providers of a desired service. Somehow surprisingly in view of its popularity and pervasiveness, the term “biodiversity” is more recent than “ecosystem”. It was coined by biologist Walter Rosen in 1985–86 as a convenient shortening of “biological diversity” within the context of the preparation of the National Forum on BioDiversity that took place in Washington D.C. in 1986 (Takacs, 1996). According to some, the term conveyed something different compared to the ecological concept of species diversity, i.e., the number of different species present in a given area and their relative abundance (the number of individual organisms in a specie relative to the total number of individual organisms of the species under consideration). In fact, on the one hand, its reference was more comprehensive – and vague; on the other hand, it expressed the scientists’ cry of alarm for the massive loss of species due to human activities and, together with it, a plea for putting in place the necessary conservation actions (Takacs, 1996; Blandin, 2014). In 2007, French ecologist Patrick Blandin argued that, from the beginning of the 1980s and in a relatively short amount of time, the concept of biodiversity replaced those of nature and natural resources, and that the word “biodiversity” gradually marginalized the word “nature” until it entirely replaced it. Borrowing Blandin’s words (2007, p. 32), At the beginning of the 20th century, nature protection was conceived by a handful of visionaries as an international problem. At the beginning of the 21st century . . . it was no longer nature protection but biodiversity conservation that really became a global issue. The term “biodiversity” has thus completely replaced that of “nature”.

Sixteen years after Blandin’s words, it might be said that nature is hard to die. Today, the two terms co-exist, sometimes they are used interchangeably, sometimes they are used to refer to different, but intertwined, things. For instance, the recent proposal for the so-called “Nature restoration law” put forward by the European Commission in June 2022 seems to use them interchangeably. The title is indeed “Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council on Nature

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Restoration”, but the very first two lines of the proposal read: “Despite EU and international efforts, biodiversity loss and the degradation of ecosystems continue at an alarming rate” (Italics added). In the IPCC passage quoted in section “Motives for Conservation,” the two terms seem instead to be referring to different things: biodiversity is viewed, together with people, as the beneficiary of our protecting nature. While both in the common language and in conservation policies the two terms are often used interchangeably, it is clear that technically “nature” has a wider extension than “biodiversity”: for example, Mars is part of nature, but it is not part of biodiversity. It seems therefore reasonable to claim that “biodiversity” is a new, very popular term in conservation, although several authors are skeptical about the usefulness of the concept of biodiversity, for different reasons. Santana (2014) for instance suggested first that the concept should be eliminated from conservation biology because it is “an unnecessary placeholder for biological value of all sorts”; and then (Santana, 2019a) that it should be replaced by the older concept of natural diversity. In spite of the criticisms, in conservation policies biodiversity represents a new conservation target, that can be characterized as “the variability among living organisms from all sources including, inter alia, terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are part; this includes diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems.” This is the most popular characterization of biodiversity, included as a definition of “biological diversity” in the 1992 Convention for Biological Diversity. (It should be noted, however, that while “biodiversity” refers to the variety at different levels of the biological hierarchy, the most common biodiversity indicator is species diversity, and that sometimes biodiversity is just equated with species’ diversity.) Together with the identification of biodiversity as a conservation target came the establishment, in the United States, of the science specifically devoted to its conservation, namely conservation biology. Conservation biology has been defined as A new stage in the application of science to conservation problems, [that] addresses the biology of species, communities, and ecosystems that are perturbed, either directly or indirectly, by human activities or other agents. Its goal is to provide principles and tools for preserving biological diversity. (Soulé, 1985, p. 727)

As Michael Soulé (1985, 2014) – the author of the conservation biology manifesto quoted above – explains, conservation biology is a mission-oriented science: its goal is “to provide principles and tools for preserving biological diversity” (Soulé, 1985, p. 727). Insofar as it is a mission-oriented science, it includes not only “functional postulates” but also “normative postulates”. Functional postulates are based on insights coming from evolutionary biology, ecology, biogeography, and population genetics; they concern the structure and functioning of biological and ecological systems, and provide basic rules for action. Normative postulates, instead, “make up the basis of an ethic of appropriate attitudes toward other forms of life” (Soulé, 1985, p. 730) and provide the moral standard for conservation actions. For instance, the first (evolutionary) functional postulate reads as follows: “Many of the

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species that constitute natural communities are the products of coevolutionary processes” (Soulé, 1985, p. 729), which makes them different from synthetic or unnatural communities. Its corollaries are the following: Species are interdependent; Many species are highly specialized (hence more vulnerable to extinction); Extinctions of keystone species can have long-range consequences (e.g., cascade effects on the ecosystems); Introduction of generalist species may reduce biodiversity. The first normative postulate reads instead that the “diversity of organisms is good” (Soulé, 1985, p. 730). This statement, Soulé claims, is close to a universal norm, and one of its corollaries is that species extinction is bad, when untimely. While extinction per se (the so-called “background extinction”) is indeed part and parcel of the evolutionary process that does not reduce biodiversity because it is generally compensated by speciation, anthropogenic species extinctions are untimely in the sense relevant here. In fact, human activities can cause the extinction of species that, were it not for human intervention on them (e.g., overharvesting) or their environment (e.g., habitat destruction), would be well adapted. It may be useful to recall that the main anthropogenic causes of species extinction, and threats to biodiversity, have been summarized by E.O. Wilson (2002) through the acronym HIPPO, that lists them in order of descending importance: Habitat destruction, Invasive species, Pollution, Population increase, and Overharvesting. Besides the climate crisis, a biodiversity crisis is also underway, as testified by the substantial consensus reached within the relevant scientific community and as evidenced by the current extinction rate, which is estimated to be significantly higher than the background extinction rate (Barnosky et al., 2011; Ceballos et al., 2015; Pimm et al., 2014). The Global Assessment Reports on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services by the IPBES (the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services founded in 2012) records this consensus: The global rate of species extinction is already at least tens to hundreds of times higher than the average rate over the past 10 million years, and is accelerating . . .; the difficulties of estimating and comparing current and past extinction rates . . . preclude greater precision. (IPBES, 2019, p. 238)

Although collecting data and making a precise estimate of the extinction rate is difficult, as the above quote underlines, conservation biology is not only a missionoriented science, but – as Soulé argues – a crisis discipline as well. In a crisis situation, it is often necessary to act before knowing all the theoretical basis and the empirical facts (because waiting would end up, for instance, in a species extinction) and to make unpleasant decisions (like when, for instance, because of time and economic constraints, a certain species has to be sacrificed to save another one).

Nature-Based Solutions to Climate Change In the previous section, two among the main conservation targets of today’s conservationism have been introduced: ecosystems (and the related ecosystem services) and biodiversity. Moreover, the need to face the effects of climate change

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has been identified as a pressing motive for conservation. In this section, after briefly addressing the relationship between ecosystems and biodiversity, climate adaptation and climate mitigation are distinguished. Then, nature-based solutions are discussed as adaptation strategies, and the “Global Deal for Nature” is presented as quite radical a proposal of a nature-based measure for climate mitigation. Ecosystems with higher biodiversity are supposed to be both more stable or resilient (i.e., capable of persisting) and their production more constant. Both the claim that diversity improves the stability of a system and the claim that biodiversity and ecosystem services covary is debatable and in fact, debated (see respectively McCann, 2000; Ricketts et al., 2016); they nonetheless underlie the logic that normally drives ecosystem management (Holling, 1996; Costanza, 2012). According to this logic, conserving, restoring, and increasing biodiversity would benefit ecosystem resilience and guarantee the provision of ecosystem services, one of which is climate regulation. Facing the threats of climate change, as said, is a motive for nature conservation. In particular, nature – in the form of natural ecosystems with a high biodiversity – can help in adapting to and mitigating climate change. Climate change adaptation is, “simply put, providing protection for the population” (Maslin, 2014, p. 136). Since it is well known that climate change is occurring and will continue to occur for centuries even if the emissions of CO2 stopped altogether (both because some trends are already irreversible, and because of the climate inertia – Wolff et al., 2020), countries need to put in place solutions allowing citizens to face the consequences deriving from such change, from droughts to forest fires, sea level rise, and floods. Among such solutions, nature-based solutions (NbS) are those that “involve working with and enhancing nature to help address societal challenges” (Seddon et al., 2020). “NbS” is an umbrella term under which a vast array of practices can be found. All such practices revolve around the idea mentioned above, that “healthy” ecosystems provide a wide range of services that are needed for human survival and well-being, from controlling floods and stabilizing shorelines and slopes to providing goods such as foods and medicines, keeping the air and the water clean, the soil productive, and so on. The NbS specifically devoted to climate change adaptation include the “Ecosystem-based Adaptation” (EbA), defined by the International Union for Conservation of Nature as a nature-based solution that “integrates the use of biodiversity and ecosystem services into an overall strategy to help people adapt to the adverse impact of climate change” (Colls et al., 2009). Ecosystem-based adaptation involves activities like sustainable water management (that provides water storage and flood regulation); disaster risk reduction (for instance, restoring coastal habitats like mangroves helps in facing storm surges and coastal erosion); sustainable management of grasslands and rangelands (that increases resilience to drought and flooding); the establishment of diverse agricultural systems based on indigenous knowledge (that helps in conserving and improving genetic diversity and hence adaptability of crops and livestock); the creation and management of protected areas (that guarantee the delivery of ecosystem services). Ecosystem-based adaptation – at least prima facie – represents a win-win solution: biodiversity is conserved, ecosystems are restored and managed and, at the

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same time, people are helped in adapting to climate change. Moreover, compared to engineered solutions, EbA comes at a relatively low cost. Consider, for instance, the case of marshland (Gies, 2018). Marshlands work as a natural buffer to protect waterfronts from sea-level rise, by sapping energy from storm surges and blocking the highest tides. Once established or restored, they require less maintenance than artificial barriers like sea walls and levees: while these break rather than flex and are constantly eroded and worn out by salt and waves pressure, marshlands can grow higher as they trap more and more sediment and their vegetation decomposes and regrows. In general, restoring coastal ecosystems like marshlands or mangrove forests protects inland areas, provides habitats to endangered species, furnishes food and other ecosystem services to human populations, and helps mitigate climate change by storing carbon. NbS and EbA are clearly more than promising a path for both nature conservation and climate change adaptation and mitigation. However, some difficulties and possible side-effects can be pointed out. For instance, forestation and plantation often involve fast-growing non-native species; but these have the potential of becoming invasive species (thus menacing endemic biodiversity), can bring novel pests and diseases, and can worsen water scarcity in certain areas – especially in those areas where forests do not prosper spontaneously (Seddon et al., 2020). Climate change adaptation has to be distinguished from climate change mitigation. The latter’s goal is “reducing our carbon footprint and thus reversing the trend of ever-increasing GHG [greenhouse gases] emissions” (Maslin, 2014, p. 136) or, to put it in a nutshell, cutting global carbon emissions. To do so, fossil fuel energy needs to be abandoned in favor of carbon-neutral energy. However, a certain agreement has been reached that, in order to keep the increase of the global average temperature under 1.5  C above the preindustrial levels – as required by the 2015 Paris Agreement – reducing greenhouse emissions coming from human activities will not be enough, and that removal methods have to be implemented. Energy transition measures aiming at reducing emissions need to be supplemented by measures devoted to creating negative emissions, i.e., to remove carbon dioxide (Dinerstein et al., 2019; Griscom et al., 2017; Fuss et al., 2014). Also in this case, it is believed that nature can help. Ecosystems influence climate not only at the local scale (e.g., as Humboldt already discovered, changes in land cover can affect precipitation), but at the global scale as well. At the global scale, ecosystems both sequester and emit greenhouse gases, therefore playing an important role in climate regulation (MA, 2003, p. 58). And some do that more than others: there is indeed some evidence that natural ecosystems sequester more carbon than strongly anthropized ones. For instance, intact forests, especially tropical forests, sequester twice as much carbon as planted monocultures (Dinerstein et al., 2019 and references therein). In light of this insight, in 2017 a group of scientists proposed to pair the Paris Agreement with a “Global Deal for Nature” (GDN), claiming that “the most logical path to avoid the approaching crisis is maintaining and restoring at least 50% of the Earth’s land area as intact natural ecosystems, in combination with energy transition measures”. Such a path – as claimed by its advocates – is a cheap and fast strategy for addressing climate change, and is already available, unlike effective carbon removal technologies (Dinerstein et al., 2019).

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The GDN echoes E.O. Wilson’s Half-Earth (2016) and the “nature needs half” movement’s call for restricting the human use of lands and seas to half of the Planet, leaving the other half to the rest of life, and is based on two main claims. The first is that the climate crisis and the extinction crisis are “twin crises”, that can be addressed together. Such a view is sustained through an analogy: both of them are characterized by tipping points (points of no return), and for both of them a tipping point is approaching. Climate models suggest indeed that unless global emissions peak before 2025, and are then reduced by 43% by 2030, limiting global warming to 1.5  C will be impossible (and this tipping point could trigger multiple climate tipping points – see McKay et al., 2022). Similarly, “if current land conversion rates, poaching of large animals, and other threats are not markedly slowed or halted in the next 10 years, ‘points of no return’ will be reached for multiple ecosystems and species” (Dinerstein et al., 2019). The second claim is that remaining “intact” marine and terrestrial habitats have to be preserved and a certain amount of nature – in the form of ecosystems – has to be restored: that is the best way to create negative emissions that can supplement energy transition measures. The “inherent interconnection” between carbon sequestration (the long-term storage of carbon in plants, soils, and the ocean) and biodiversity is indeed supported by a growing number of studies, according to the GDN proponents. As already mentioned, studies suggest that some ecosystems – the so-called “carbon-rich ecosystems” like tropical forests, wetlands and peatlands, mangrove forests, salt marshes, and seagrass meadows – work as better carbon sinks than others (i.e., they sequester and store more carbon than others); and intact ecosystems seem to be more effective in sequestering and storing carbon than their anthropized or degraded counterparts. For the GDN proponents, it is “no coincidence that some of the most carbon-rich ecosystems on land – natural forests – also harbor high levels of biodiversity . . . Even in the world’s widespread savannas, carbon sequestration is enhanced by biodiversity” (Dinerstein et al., 2019). An analysis of the relevant literature, however, suggests that the link between biodiversity and ecosystem services is complex and not well known yet, and that “the relationship between them remains remarkably unclear” (Ricketts et al., 2016). To be a little more cautious than the GDN proponents, it may be affirmed – as some studies suggested – that a positive correlation between species diversity and ecosystem services, among which carbon storage, can be hypothesized. An experimental study showed for instance that species diversity (plant diversity, in the particular case under study) has a positive impact on ecosystem functioning and the provision of ecosystem services, and suggested that species diversity may promote ecosystem carbon storage (Xu et al., 2020). The idea of a global deal to protect nature was discussed during the UN Biodiversity Conference (COP15) that took place in Montreal between the 7 and the 19 December 2022, and the “30 by 30” target has been included within the 23 targets for achievement by 2030 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. With it, the global community commits itself to conserve 30% of terrestrial and marine habitats by 2030 (currently 17% of terrestrial areas and 10% of marine areas are under protection), ensuring the

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effective conservation and management of at least 30% of the world’s lands, inland waters, coastal areas and oceans, with emphasis on areas of particular importance for biodiversity and ecosystem functioning and services. The GBF [the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework] prioritizes ecologically-representative, well-connected and equitably-governed systems of protected areas and other effective area-based conservation, recognizing indigenous and traditional territories and practices.

Moreover, it commits to having “restoration completed or underway on at least 30% of degraded terrestrial, inland waters, and coastal and marine ecosystems” (CBD Press Release, 2022). It should be noted that, in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, “conserving” means both restoring degraded ecosystems (Target 2) and conserving and managing them (Target 3). Accordingly, it seems that the two models of conservation mentioned in section “Old and New Conservationism” are both present – in their updated and “faded” versions – in the GBF: ecosystems have to be restored and more protected areas have to be created (preservationism), and ecosystems have to be effectively managed in a sustainable way (resourcism). However, unlike the traditional preservationist model, the GBF includes a reference to indigenous people: the protected areas have to recognize indigenous and traditional territories, and any sustainable use permitted in those areas must be “fully consistent with conservation outcomes, recognizing and respecting the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities” (CBD Press Release, 2022). Although presented as a “landmark”, many political and economic concerns have been raised about the GBF by environmental experts and environmentalists, as reported by the Reuters Foundation (Graham, 2022). For instance, though the targets are to be understood at a global scale, the 30% could nonetheless be interpreted as applying at the national scale. In such a case, governments of countries like Brazil and Indonesia, which are covered with large forested areas, might use the 30% as a political cover to keep on with deforestation. A further issue that has been raised is the question of how to pay the cost associated with ecosystem restoration and conservation, especially considering that some of the most biodiversity-rich countries are also developing countries that may lack the economic resources needed to apply the GBF measures. Finally, the main concerns surround the possible application of the fortress conservation that the GBF might require, in spite of the mentioning of the rights of indigenous people and local communities included in the GBF text. Although the capability of indigenous people and local communities for highly effective management of biodiversity has been widely recognized, according to the fortress conservation model natural habitats have to be conserved through the creation of strictly protected areas, from which also indigenous people and local communities are excluded. The establishment and maintenance of protected areas can then justify, “for the greater good” of conserving biodiversity, the coerced displacement of the existing inhabitants and the curtailment of their rights to natural resource use, to be achieved even by force (Rai et al., 2021). A 2017 analysis found that from 1990 to 2014 more than 250,000 people in 15 countries were evicted because of protected areas and up to one billion suffered the consequences of conflicts in forest reserves (Kashwan, 2017).

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A 2018 document denounces indeed that, in spite of the appearances, little has changed since the approval of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007, and that the commitment by conservation organizations to respect the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities has not been followed by enough action. The critical point is that the overlap between the lands of indigenous peoples and local communities and protected areas is estimated at 50–80%. This creates “a near-constant state of confrontation and ongoing potential for conflict and violence”. Such a state of confrontation has sometimes escalated to the point that “the militarization of conservation has been documented in the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guatemala, India, and South Africa” (Tauli-Corpuz et al., 2018). In general, from Muir’s preservationism to the “nature needs half” movement, conservation based on some kind of “nature for itself” view of the relation between humans and the rest of nature – as Mace (2014) calls it – is subject to at least three main criticisms. First, as just said, in the name of nature conservation indigenous people and local communities can be displaced to make space for wildlife, or they can be deprived of the right to use natural resources in the territories they inhabit. Needless to say, what comes to mind here is the forced expulsion of the remnants of the First Nations from Yosemite (the Yosemite nation) and from Yellowstone (the Crow, the Shoshone, and the Bannok) and the creation of the Yosemite and the Yellowstone national parks (in 1864 and 1872, respectively – see Sarkar, 2005, Sect. 2.3). Second, the blame for biodiversity loss is put on all humanity indistinctly, and the higher price for biodiversity conservation is, once again, paid by indigenous people and local communities rather than by those responsible for the damage, i.e., industrialized countries (Fletcher & Büscher, 2016). Finally, just like preservationists’ wilderness, today’s intact nature could just be a myth, and fortress conservation would keep ignoring that humans have always been part and parcel of nature they inhabit and modify, reinforcing a questionable dichotomy between nature and culture.

The End of Nature as We Know It While providing nature conservation with a novel and pressing motive, at the same time climate change decreed its end – at least, if one takes literally the title of the first popular-science book on climate change, The End of Nature (1989), by journalist and environmentalist Bill McKibben. But it’s either one or the other: either nature has ended, or nature has to be conserved. Addressing this apparent paradox is the task of this section. The argument at the core of McKibben’s book is, in brief, that the global dimension of climate change and its anthropic origin have the consequence that every inch of the Planet is influenced by human activity, i.e., that nature has ended, if by “nature” we mean what is in no way influenced by humans, nature as “eternal and separate” (McKibben, 1989/2003, p. 7).

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The End of Nature claim (EN), following Gianfranco Pellegrino, can be summarized as follows: the Anthropocene “marks the end of wild or independent nature, i.e., nature untouched by humans” (Pellegrino, 2021, p. 213). Before analyzing the consequences of the EN, a remark on the term “Anthropocene” is in order. Starting from the 2000s, the term entered into common usage to indicate the present epoch, in which humans have become a biogeophysical force altering Earth’s climate. According to Paul Crutzen (2002), for the past three centuries, the effects of humans on the global environment have escalated. Because of these anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide, global climate may depart significantly from natural behaviour for many millennia to come. It seems appropriate to assign the term ‘Anthropocene’ to the present, in many ways human-dominated, geological epoch, supplementing the Holocene — the warm period of the past 10–12 millennia.

It should be noted, however, that at present the term has not been officially recognized as formally designating a geologic epoch; nonetheless, it spread rapidly through academia and the general public, and it is in this informal sense that it will be used in this chapter (see Crutzen & Stoermer (2000) for the first advocation for the recognition of the Anthropocene; and Santana (2019b) for arguments against the use – formal and informal – of the concept of Anthropocene). Accepting the EN has, at least prima facie, some nihilistic consequences. For instance, it seems to imply the end of environmental ethics. Indeed, environmental ethics starts from the assumption that an independent nature exists and is endowed with intrinsic value. But because of climate change, no nature remains which is separated from the sphere of human action. Therefore, if what made nature a valuable entity was its separateness from humans, “the value of nature cannot obtain in the Anthropocene and environmental ethics is doomed” (Pellegrino, 2021, p. 213). Accepting the EN seems to imply the end of nature conservation as well, because if nature has ended, nothing remains to be conserved. In the words of postnatural environmentalist Steven Vogel (2015, p. 3): “After the end of nature, it seems, there’s not much for environmental thinking to do except to mourn, and perhaps to think about what was lost and why. For nature once ended cannot be restored” (notice that Vogel makes this claim to argue that there is a role for environmental philosophy and environmentalism after the end of nature or, to put it differently, that there can be environmentalism without nature). If one agrees with the EN, not only would there be nothing more to be conserved, but also what is lost could not be regained, because nature restoration is nothing but “a big lie”, as environmental philosopher Eric Katz (1992) puts it. According to Katz, while nature restoration – especially afforestation and reforestation to fight climate change and desertification and preserve biodiversity – is playing an increasingly important role in environmental policy, a restored nature is nothing more than an artifact realized to meet human needs. Accordingly, not only nothing natural would exist anymore, but also any attempt to bring nature back would just increase the number of artifacts on the Planet.

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These nihilist outcomes are not without escape: nature is hard to die, both as a set of entities and processes and as a thought in people’s minds. Rather than ending, nature changes, and there are some possible constructive outcomes that can stem from the EN claim. Concerning the end of environmental ethics, Pellegrino’s way out, for instance, consists in recognizing that nature in the Anthropocene is “no longer pure, but it always comes as hybrid, in part natural, in part artificial, in part human, in part non-human, in part natural, in part social or cultural” (Pellegrino, 2021, p. 212) and in recognizing an intrinsic value not to nature conceived as pristine, but rather as hybrid. From the point of view of nature conservation sciences and practices, accepting the EN implies the recognition that climate change is a game changer in how nature has to be conceived and conserved. As McKibben clarified at the beginning of his book, the end of nature is not the end of the world but of “a certain set of human ideas about the world and our place on it” (McKibben 1989/2003, p. 7). In the remaining of this section, one of the main features of nature in the Anthropocene, namely ecological novelty, is presented, together with the related, required changes in nature conservation. Because of anthropogenic changes in environmental conditions (such as for instance climatic change, land use, and the introduction of non-native species), species that did not co-occur before in a certain area may form new, previously unknown, ecosystems. These are the so-called “hybrid systems”, that can in principle go back to their non-hybrid, “historical” conditions if human impacts would cease, or after restoration efforts. If they trespass certain thresholds, however, they are transformed irreversibly into novel ecosystems (Hobbes et al., 2009; Corlett, 2015; Heger et al., 2019). Among novel ecosystems, various human-made or modified systems are included: from urban ecosystems to newly afforested lands, from restored sites to green roofs. Most of the land surface is now covered with hybrid or novel ecosystems. Other terms have been used to describe similar systems, e.g., Milton (2003) speaks of “emerging ecosystems”, Tockner et al., (2011) of “domesticated ecosystems”. Ellis et al., (2010) use instead the label “anthromes”, arguing that in 1700 nearly half of the terrestrial biosphere was wild, while the opposite was true by 2000, with only a quarter left wild, and the remaining being made of predominantly anthropogenic biomes, or anthromes. According to some, attributing a positive value to, and therefore conserving, hybrid or novel ecosystems may legitimize human impacts that should rather be minimized and would put “traditional” nature conservation at risk. According to others, some novel ecosystems fit quite well the description of wild ecosystems (even though, probably, not that of natural ecosystems, in a traditional understanding of “natural”). Indeed, unlike actively managed ecosystems, they are often the result of self-assembly and do not need human intervention to persist. Accordingly, just like wild “historical” ecosystems, they should be valued and conserved. Most ecologists

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favor instead a middle way: if the occurrence of the novel ecosystems cannot be prevented, or if such ecosystems cannot be “brought back” to their alleged original state (e.g., if a hybrid ecosystem cannot be restored because the relevant threshold has been passed), then they can be targets of conservation and managing (Corlett, 2015). Novel ecosystems are but one of the manifestations of the ecological novelty that characterizes nature in the Anthropocene. Climate change and human activities such as pollution, overharvesting, and land use can have significant effects on the ecology and evolution of organisms, creating not only novel ecosystems, but also novel landscapes and communities, and novel situations for organisms to face. According to Tina Heger and her co-authors (Heger et al., 2019), ecological novelty – understood as a broad concept that covers studies from organisms to ecosystems and studies the ecological and evolutionary effects of human activities within socialecological systems – “encompasses the concepts of novel organisms, novel communities, novel ecosystems, as well as novel selection pressures such as novel interactions and novel abiotic conditions”. At this point, two things have to be noticed. First – as Heger and her colleagues underlie –, ecological novelty does not include per se an evaluation of whether the difference from the past situation is negative or positive; it just includes two descriptive components: a change-dependent one (“different”); and a timedependent one (“before”). Accordingly, whether to attribute a value to novel ecosystems – or landscapes, communities, etc. – and which kind of value, is independent of their novelty. Second, rather than just “ecosystems”, a more appropriate label to designate (at least some) novel ecosystems is that of “social-ecological systems” (Berkes & Folke, 1998). To sum up, the pervasiveness of novel ecosystems implies (i), that nature conservation in the Anthropocene can no longer focus on preservation and restoration, simply because this is not feasible in several cases and places; accordingly, some conservation sciences probably cannot be as they were before the Anthropocene. It also implies (ii), that treating natural systems as separate from human systems is no longer possible (Corlett, 2015). (i) An example of how restoration ecology needs to change in the Anthropocene is that restoring an ecosystem using a past state as a point of reference is controversial, not only from a theoretical point of view, but also from a practical one. Theoretically, the principle of historical fidelity is all but uncontroversial: how far back in history should we look? How can we be sure to know how historic ecosystems were? And how can we know whether an “old” ecosystem would function better than its contemporary counterpart? (See, for instance, Sarkar (2011) and Garson (2014)). From a practical point of view, climate change has made the restoration of an ecosystem using a past state as a point of reference more and more an impracticable target because of rapid environmental changes it induces (Corlett, 2015). Yet, preservation and restoration – as their names suggest – aim to reduce or prevent change. Accordingly, it may be expected that the maintenance of the systems in their hybrid state will become more and more

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important as a goal (Hobbs et al., 2009) and that the active management of ecosystems will probably increase, together with the use of ecological engineering (Corlett, 2015, 2016). More generally, it has been claimed that the traditional way of conceiving restoration is not well fitted to the Anthropocene and that a more “open and flexible approach” is required “in order to address responsible interventions in times of rapid change” (Higgs et al., 2018). (ii) The fact that in the Anthropocene it is no longer possible to treat natural systems as separate from human systems, elicits at least one final consideration: that – for Western conservationism – the European experience in nature conservation could be fitter to the Anthropocene than the US one. As Corlett (2015) notices, in the US conservation has traditionally focused on protecting wilderness from humans. Things go differently in Europe, whose environment has been strongly anthropized for centuries, so that conservation takes place in human-altered landscapes. In Europe, the establishment of parks and reserves is generally conceived less rigidly, and the conservation of nature is often placed side by side with that of cultural heritage. For instance, the very first Italian conservationist law declares “subject to special protection the immovable things whose conservation presents a considerable public interest because of their natural beauty or their particular relationship with the civil and literary history. The scenic beauties are also protected by this law” (art. 1 of the law n. 778 of 1922). The EU’s environmental history and policies can thus possibly be of inspiration when conservation must be pursued in an increasingly built environment.

Conclusion. What Remains of Preservationism If the above is true, what about the GDN and, more generally, pristine nature preservation? Should conservation – almost paradoxically – just embrace novelty, accepting that an entirely anthropized Planet is the present (and future) reality, and abandoning any attempt of retrieving a past that is inevitably lost? According to ecologist and conservationist Richard Corlett (2015), today we are witnessing a new version, equally acrimonious, of the old debate between preservationism and resourcism. In spite of the clear agreement among conservationists that nature – in the form of natural ecosystems and natural biodiversity – has to be protected and extinction prevented, contemporary resourcists emphasize the benefits that conservation has for humans, and want to work more closely with large corporations. Contemporary preservationists adopt a more biocentric view, denouncing the anthropocentric bias of resourcists (also called “new conservationists”). Helen Kopnina (2016), for instance, argues that all the criticisms leveled at the “nature needs half” movement hide an anthropocentric bias and that “protected area critics reliably demand fairness for human beings at the expense of nonhuman beings, who they treat as morally inconsequential”. Once the anthropocentric bias is abandoned, it becomes clear that Earth’s resources should be equally shared between humans and non-human beings, and hence that at least half of Earth’s

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lands and seas should be “set aside for nature” and left free from intensive economic activities. While Kopnina’s arguments are quite convincing – at least for those who think that belonging to the human species should not per se guarantee preferential treatment –, it is not clear whether the GDN – the institutional counterpart of the “nature needs half” movement – is actually moved by non-anthropocentric motives. GDN, promoting natural ecosystems and biodiversity preservation mainly as a way to mitigate climate change, seems rather be driven by an ecosystem services-based motive, namely by an anthropocentric motive. But the same has been said of traditional preservationism: as we have seen, for transcendentalists, nature was a “conduit” for the human spirit in its quest for moral perfection; in other words, an ecosystem service. This does not imply, of course, that “pristine nature” shall not be preserved or re-created, or that conservation efforts are meaningless in a severely anthropized world; rather, it means that, if we want conservation efforts to be effective, both the meaning of nature and the conservation of nature should be adapted to present times.

Cross-References ▶ Adaptation Duties ▶ Climate Change and the Ethics of Agriculture ▶ Climate Change, Environmental Philosophy, and Anthropocentrism ▶ Climate Change, Global Health, and Planetary Health ▶ Climate Change, Relational Philosophy, and Ecological Care ▶ Environmental Aesthetics and Global Climate Change ▶ Mitigation Duties Acknowledgments I would like to thank Lara Barbara and Luca Tambolo for their helpful comments on a previous version of this manuscript.

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Food and Climate Change in a Philosophical Perspective Andrea Borghini, Nicola Piras, and Beatrice Serini

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Climate Change and the Future of Food: Three Frameworks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Impact of Climate Change on Food: A Philosophical Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Geographical Indications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Global Hunger . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Food Biodiversity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Impact of Food on Climate Change: A Philosophical Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Food Waste . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sustainable Diets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Food Sovereignty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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This chapter surveys the most philosophically pressing issues associated with food and climate change. It highlights the main scholarly accomplishments and suggests avenues for further research, drawing from a cross-disciplinary body of literature as well as from recent scholarship in philosophy of food. The discussion follows two intertwined yet distinct directions of investigation: how climate change impacts food; and how the production, distribution, and consumption of food affect climate patterns. More specifically, section “Introduction” offers an introduction to the study of food and climate change in a philosophical perspective; section “Climate Change and the Future of Food: Three Frameworks” showcases three intuitive frameworks that form the backdrops of current discourses about the future of food in light of climate change; section “The Impact of Climate Change on Food: a Philosophical Analysis” discusses the influence of climate change on humans through three case studies: geographical indications, A. Borghini (*) · N. Piras · B. Serini University of Milan, Milan, Italy e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_71

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global hunger, and food biodiversity finally, section “The Impact of Food on Climate Change: a Philosophical Analysis” deals with the influence of our practices of food production and consumption on climate change by looking at three case studies: food waste, sustainable diets, and food sovereignty. Keywords

Food ethics · Food and climate change · Food epistemology · Food ontology · Conceptual amelioration · Environmental philosophy

Introduction Climate change is today a consolidated topic of research in philosophy, encompassing not only climate ethics and politics (e.g., Gardiner et al., 2010; Gardiner & Weisbach, 2016), but also climate science (e.g., Frigg et al., 2015a, 2015b; Parker, 2018; Winsberg, 2018). Despite this, philosophers have only sparsely studied climate change in connection with human foods – understood in a broad sense to include production, distribution, and consumption processes of all edible items (domesticated and not). Taking off from a cross-disciplinary literature as well as from recent scholarship in philosophy of food addressing ethical (Barnhill et al., 2018) and conceptual questions (see, inter alia, the papers in Borghini & Piras, 2020 and Borghini & Engisch, 2022), this chapter surveys and combines the most philosophically pressing issues associated with food and climate change, highlighting what philosophers have done so far and suggesting avenues for further research. Here, the analysis is developed along two intertwined yet distinct directions of investigation: 1. On the one hand, climate change threatens the stability, accessibility, and availability of many foods, thereby putting at risk the existence of specific edible items and related social, cultural, and economic structures. 2. On the other hand, food – with agricultural practices in the lead – contributes to climate change by producing an important amount of all global greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). These two directions of interaction raise complex and delicate questions. Jointly taken, though, they do not exhaust the topics that call for philosophical attention. In fact, for instance, a philosophical lens is needed for rethinking the future of human diets, the relation with endangered species, and the conservation of cultural diversity expressed through food. These are overarching problems that encompass and found debates within both (1) and (2) and which are highlighted throughout the chapter. In the sequel, section “Climate Change and the Future of Food: Three Frameworks” showcases three intuitive frameworks that form the backdrops of current discourses about the future of food in light of climate change. The chapter then surveys the philosophical issues emerging within (1) and (2), respectively: section

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“The Impact of Climate Change on Food: A Philosophical Analysis” addresses the influence of climate change on human diets, and section “The Impact of Food on Climate Change: A Philosophical Analysis” studies the influence of our practices of food production and consumption on climate change.

Climate Change and the Future of Food: Three Frameworks The evidence that food production and food cultures have a decisive impact on climate change and drive its acceleration is, by now, overwhelming (e.g. Thomas, 2019). It is, thus, unsurprising that efforts to reshape food systems are at the forefront of debates on climate change. These efforts are underlined by numerous narratives, which differ in terms of the key drivers they identify, or in the effects they anticipate, or in their political and ethical aims and values. For the sake of exposition, this section provides a systematization of these narratives in terms of three frameworks, each of which offers a specific angle to rethink the future of food. First, the section offers an introduction to the frameworks; then, it draws some broader considerations on the role that philosophers can play in shaping and revising narratives about food and climate change. Framework 1: finding the right fixes. A first, intuitive framework follows Belasco’s suggestion (2008: 105–125) to divide the envisaged solutions for the future of food between technological fixes and anthropological fixes. The former aim at reaching a sustainable food system via scientific progress and technological solutions without changing human behaviors and habits, for instance, by replacing conventional meat, produced through non-human animal exploitation, with in vitro meat, i.e., meat produced in the laboratory, which should offer a suitable alternative without changing the structure of Western diets and meals (see Wurgaft, 2019: 1–19). The latter instead aims at a radical conversion of human food lifestyles, concerning mainly dieting (e.g., veganism), but also production systems (e.g., vertical farming, i.e., growing plants in vertically stacked layers, often soilless, instead of traditional horizontal fields), in order to stop or slow down the causes of climate change. Framework 2: customizing the food system. A second framework focuses on how to suitably align the current food system with the new climatic conditions. Should we mitigate the effects of food systems on the environment, or should we find smart ways to adapt them (Jamieson, 2010)? The first view – mitigation – involves decelerating or halting the drivers of the alterations, for instance, by avoiding the production of foods that have a large carbon footprint (e.g., Niles et al., 2018; see also Jarmul et al., 2019 for an extensive overview of how diets and eating behaviors may be mitigated). The second view – adapting the food system to the consequences of the change (e.g., Fresco, 2009; see also Timmerman & Felix, 2015 for several case studies) – includes relocating geographic areas of production from traditional places to more climatically suitable ones, or reengineering future foods with producers and consumers (e.g., Himanen et al., 2016).

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Framework 3: engineering the meaning of sustainable food systems. The third framework focuses on the meaning of sustainability when it comes to food. How can a food system develop in a sustainable way without – first – compromising the identity of its food and – second – damaging the experience of future generations (Norton, 2005: 304–355)? Should a sustainable system protect foods threatened by climate change, or should it instead replace them with suitable substitutes? The former option corresponds to “strong sustainability,” which holds that each natural resource and the corresponding food is unique and hence it cannot be substituted (Kortetmäki, 2016). The latter option corresponds to “weak sustainability,” according to which we can replace depleted food as long as we provide a worthy substitute that is equally able to generate valuable experiences or match nutritional, economic, or gustatory value (for a general introduction, see Neumayer, 2013; for a philosophical interpretation of strong and weak sustainability applied to agriculture, see Thompson, 2010: 215–256). For instance, for a supporter of strong sustainability a threatened vine should be preserved, no matter the costs; for a backer of weak sustainability, instead, a vine can be replaced by a different variety (or even by a different crop) as long as the value of the land under the relevant respect (e.g., economic) is not compromised. The three frameworks form the basis for polarized views and solutions within the debate on climate change (see the review of recent newspaper articles by Chinn et al., 2020 and Biedny et al., 2020). They are invoked to justify clear-cut alternatives that may facilitate decision-making (for a general treatment of the topic, see Lewandowsky et al., 2015). And yet, it is worth noting that the frameworks are vague and generic. They seek to inspire solutions for rethinking the future of human diets by evoking narratives and providing intuitive models for abstraction and generalization. But, when dealing with practical concerns affecting food systems, the differences of the internal positions within each framework start to blur. For instance, Borghini et al. (2020b) stress that the first framework (“finding the right fixes”) misunderstands the complex dichotomy between changing habits and improving technology, since it does not acknowledge their interweaving and mutual dependence. For what concerns the second framework (“customizing the food system”), Landauer et al. (2015) systematically showcase the many different interrelationships between mitigation and adaptation. Finally, moving on to the third framework (“engineering the meaning of sustainable food systems”) DesRoches (2019) points out that strong and weak sustainability may practically reach the same tasks. Looking ahead to future theoretical, more nuanced and less polarized, alternatives for thinking about the future of food, the literature suggests that philosophers can play an important role in shaping the conversation. Not only can they shed light on the value-laden issues at stake and point out some principles to guide the transition (see, inter alia, Thompson, 2010; Gardiner, 2011; Shue, 2014); philosophers can apply their expertise in rethinking the foundational and conceptual aspects of the debate too. To elaborate further on the latter point, recent literature shows that philosophers can help to map out the different stances currently under discussion and spell out their underlying ontologies and conceptual structures, looking for differences,

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overlappings, and incompatibilities (Borghini et al., 2020b). Within this perspective, philosophers look at the food world as a domain of entities (abstract and physical objects, concepts, events, relations, properties, structures, etc.) composing a specific terrain of inquiry, not just a domain of case studies to which apply external principles and procedures, or to prove more general philosophical models (see Borghini & Piras, 2020; Borghini & Engisch, 2022; Borghini et al., 2021a). They couple proper philosophical methods – e.g., conceptual analysis, counterfactual reasoning, thought experiments, conceptual negotiation – with knowledge from the field gathered and analyzed by social and hard sciences (for a general overview of the philosophical work in the field, see Brister & Frodeman, 2020), in order to address food issues, without taking for granted any of the most basic concepts we use, including “food” (Kaplan, 2019; Borghini & Piras, 2021).

The Impact of Climate Change on Food: A Philosophical Analysis The first link section “Introduction” highlighted – i.e., how climate change impacts food – may be appreciated by considering the nefarious effects of climate change on the most widespread staple foods for human societies, e.g., wheat, maize, and rice (Liu et al., 2016): the alteration of temperatures, the sudden increase or decrease of rainfall, the erosion of soils, and the depletion of water availability are threatening both the cultural value of those food and the food security of the population who eat them (e.g., Bridges & McClatchey, 2009; Smith & Archer, 2020). For instance, in their study of the rural Bolivian food system, Saxena et al. (2016) report that loss of traditional potato crops and wild tubers is forcing 59% of consumers into a condition of inability to afford basic food products. Examples of the threats to the identity of some culturally central foods are instead represented by wine productions that are moving from their traditional land to more suitable ones (Clark & Kerr, 2017) or by the cabbage typically employed in Korean kimchi recipes, which is evolving to meet new climatic conditions (Lee et al., 2016). Moreover, climate change is jeopardizing the existence of living species that yield valuable foods (Ripple et al., 2019) and compromising their use for agricultural purposes (Reay, 2019). The consequences of climate change also affect a wide range of areas connected to food production and consumption. They call for a rethinking of our food systems and our diets, in ways that deeply connect to food values and cultures. Philosophers, as stressed in section “Climate Changes and the Future of Food: Three Frameworks,” can fruitfully deliver the means for settling and solving these conceptual disputes. Indeed, the literature suggests that philosophers’ contribution is twofold: on the one hand, since many controversies regard what concepts and data should be used for assessing the impact of climate change on food, philosophers can help in evaluating whether our extant food concepts (e.g., food identity, nutrition, and food system) should be revised in light of climate change. On the other hand, as long as different controversies regard the value-laden dimensions of food and climate change, philosophers can help in understanding how and whether our

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normative systems are still able to evaluate the global impact of climate change on food or whether we should adopt tailor-made solutions (Borghini et al., 2021a). To better illustrate the insights that philosophers have offered and can offer on the impact of climate change on food, next subsections (“Geographical Indications”, “Global Hunger”, “Food Biodiversity”) review three pressing issues: geographical indications, global hunger, and food biodiversity. The aim of looking into these three specific case studies is also to showcase the different forms of philosophical expertise and skills that are put to use in contemporary scholarship, including designing relationships between food, place, and people; devising suitable political and ethical principles; and mastering concepts within the philosophy of life sciences (on the philosophical skills that can be useful for addressing climate change issues, see Chislenko, 2022). Of course, these three cases are part of a wider pool of interconnected issues: for the sake of completeness, here some of the other themes are listed, highlighting the key questions that have involved or may involve philosophers. (i) The ethics and politics of technology in the food systems (Kaplan, 2017). The food market includes a host of agents, from agribusiness companies to food and beverage manufacturing corporations, that have the power and the knowledge to produce high-tech food solutions to address climate change issues. Philosophers may ask what values should guide scientific research on controversial issues like genetic engineering or cell culture (Thompson, 2020: 109–135) and who is in charge of the governance of such processes (Hartley et al., 2016). Philosophers can also wonder whether technological solutions can be patented or they should be accessible to everyone (Timmermann, 2020: 27–72). (ii) The value of wild food in mitigating the impact of climate change on human diets (Bharucha & Pretty, 2010). For many populations across the world, wild foods have great nutritional, cultural, and spiritual significance. Defining the concept of wild food, however, poses a philosophical challenge: what wild means is controversial and depends on different social and cultural milieus (Borghini et al., 2020a). The endorsed definition of wild may determine what role is assigned to such food in relation to a changing climate and the kind of preservation policies enforced to protect them. A possible definition is the one stressing the contribution of wild foods to global sustainability and their role in adapting diets to unforeseeable changes (Dempewolf et al., 2014; see also Makondo & Thomas, 2018 for a general account on Indigenous knowledge and climate change and Ludwig, 2017 for the relation between local knowledge and Western science). (iii) Food security. Climate change is severely affecting food security for many societies across the globe, i.e., the availability of nutrient and culturally appropriate foods (Branca et al., 2013). Philosophers have already questioned whether there is a sufficiently shared and clear concept of food security (Sen, 1998) suitable to underscore efficient policies. Also, they have wondered how we should represent the food system to keep track of all the trade-offs, in different socio-economic and bio-physical areas, facing food insecurity determined by climate change (Misselhorn et al., 2012).

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(iv) The role of food movements. Social movements have often played a leading role in opening the path to new fields of research (e.g., feminism) also in philosophy (e.g., analytic feminism). We can then wonder whether food movements can teach us something about climate change too (Jamison, 2010). Additionally, we can ask how food issues intersect with other social and political movements, e.g., those concerning local food, sexism, racism, and ableism (Sebo, 2018).

Geographical Indications Geographical indications (GIs), such as Champagne, Parmigiano Reggiano, Café de Colombia, and Sarawak Pepper, are forms of intellectual property that serve to protect the identity of a food product and its exclusive link with a specific region (Giovannucci et al., 2009). GIs are signs or marks put on food products that have special qualities by virtue of the specific features of their place of origin (e.g., climate, soil quality, rainfall, and sun exposure) and the specific production methods and human culture rooted in that place (Borghini, 2014a; Yeung, 2014). Nowadays, over 65,000 GIs have gained legal recognition. While it is difficult to provide a global economic estimate, the European Union (home to the largest concentration of GIs) has declared a total sale value of Euro 74.8 billion in 2017 for its 3153 protected GIs (On the European GIs, see the EU report https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/a7281794-7ebe11ea-aea8-01aa75ed71a1/language-en (last visited June 7, 2022). On the overall number of GIs, see the World Intellectual Property Indicators 2019 https://www.wipo.int/ edocs/pubdocs/en/wipo_pub_941_2019-chapter5.pdf (last visited June 7, 2022)). Arguably, the future of numerous GIs is put at serious risk by climate change, which is radically modifying the physical conditions of local environments and, hence, weakening or even severing the link between the qualities of the food and the features of the place (Holland & Smith, 2010; Clark & Kerr, 2017; Kizos et al., 2017). So far, many different solutions have been envisaged for safeguarding this place-food link (see Reay, 2019 for an extensive discussion). Three of them deserve to be showcased here because of their conceptual import. First is continuing to produce the GI in its original place even if it could not have the same original features and hence adopting a more nuanced notion of identity, which does not require commonality in physical properties. Second is moving the GI to a new place and hence removing the historical continuity conditions to the identity requirements, i.e., reducing identity to the commonality in physical properties. Third is resorting to genetic engineering, for safeguarding the “original” gustatory or physical features of the GI, and hence resorting to non-local and non-traditional methods in the production of GIs (see Feghali et al., 2022). How to govern these transformations? And, which role should be played by insiders and consumers in deciding how to deal with the future of GIs? These questions lead to further value-laden issues. First of all, who has the authority to settle the future of a GI is controversial since, while it is currently held by some producers’ lobbies, some scholars and activists have started to claim a shared management that should also involve the local communities and even the consumers

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(e.g., Grasseni, 2011 for the case of Bitto Cheese). This democratic position relies on the fact that the identities of GIs are considered identity markers for local communities (Di Giovine & Brulotte, 2014) and public goods (Belletti et al., 2017); hence, as those scholars and activists argue, they call for a collective decision on their future. The question of who should decide on the future of GIs entails further conceptual concerns too. If the climate conditions change, who can decide how to set up the new identities? And by means of which procedures? A first approach, supported by a growing movement of activists and scholars (e.g., Trubek, 2008; Paxson, 2010), champions that these identities are expressions of ideologies: political, ethical, and aesthetic stances that are rooted in local communities and that are part of their unique cultural heritage (Counihan, 2014). Hence, food identities should be negotiated by the insiders who can decide how to lay down and possibly relocate them, e.g., by means of deliberative process (see Feghali et al., 2022 for the application of a deliberative model to Lebanese fermented products; see Ankeny, 2016 for an overview of deliberative models and food). According to a second approach, the weight of the decision lies on experts who should establish whether a region still aligns the right physical conditions for producing that food and eventually where to move the production (see Borghini, 2012 and 2014a for a discussion of different strategies to settle the identity of GIs).

Global Hunger In the next few years, climate change will affect the availability, production, stability, and distribution of food. As the World Bank (2010) puts it, the most affected populations will be the ones who already suffer hunger and famine. The moral problem of global hunger is philosophically controversial on its own, regardless of its link with climate change (see, for instance, the classic divisive work by Singer, 1972). Also, the very concept of hunger is not easily explainable as it may seem (see Borghini, 2017; Borghini & Serpico, 2021). However, we can still ask how the fundamental right to food – defended in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948: article 25, paragraph 1) – is connected to a duty to feed the hungry, and who is in charge to fulfill such right, considering climate change responsibilities’ and burdens’ distribution. Although access to food is acknowledged as a basic right (see also Sen, 1981), it is controversial who should be responsible for enforcing this right as well as who is entitled to it. This section tries to pinpoint these two kinds of stakeholders – those who should be in charge of feeding and those who have a right to be fed – and highlight their complexity. The problem of identifying the group of those who have the responsibility of feeding starts with the difficulties of properly representing the causal chain from climate change to hunger. As Yadev et al. (2019) account for, this link may be either direct—when climate change directly affects the agroecological conditions of a given production, e.g., new atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and O3, different

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rainfall patterns, and more severe temperature—or indirect, e.g., when climate change effects on the global economy lead to the lowering of local incomes and hence of the food demand (see Tirado et al., 2010). Moreover, to take another example of the conceptual difficulties in tracing the causal chain, the relocation of entire crop productions to new latitudes for taking advantage of better climatic conditions may overwhelm local diets procuring hidden malnutrition and famine. How to appraise the (direct or indirect) effects of climate change is a hard task (e.g., Bunzl, 2015), whose uncertainty may undermine both policies and moral grounds to act (Moellendorf, 2015). Even if we could clearly identify those responsible, there are different ways of distributing this burden of responsibility, as framed by Caney (2020) in his overview of the literature: the pollution principle, i.e., the burden lies on who produced pollution determining climate change; the beneficiary principle, i.e., the responsibility is held by who benefits from the activities that trigger climate change; and the ability principle, i.e., duties are conferred to whom is able to compensate for the damage. Regardless of which one of the three options we buy into, on what ground agents should accept this burden of responsibility is still controversial. And here again, we can devise three alternative grounds for the duty: the no-harm principle, i.e., not harming other people with our actions; the beneficence principle, i.e., doing good things for people; and the vulnerability principle, i.e., protecting the most vulnerable people (see Reiheld, 2017). When it comes to the second group of stakeholders – those who are entitled to the right to be fed – we can ask: are we talking about our contemporaries or also future generations (e.g., Page, 2006; Vasconcellos Oliveira, 2018)? And even after identifying the right bearers, it is still controversial how and by what food they should be fed. For instance, according to FAO (2015), undernutrition is defined as the lack of the minimum food availability for covering the needs of a sedentary lifestyle. Hence, starving people should be firstly fed with energetic foods. Yet, as Pogge (2016) argues, this definition rests on a twofold bias: first, it takes into account only a lifestyle proper to the Western societies, excluding, for instance, nomadic populations. Second, human bodies need many substances which are not related to energy production and which are nevertheless keys for survival, e.g., iodine. Furthermore, as Borghini et al. (2020a, 2020b) stress, different local food ontologies, i.e., socially localized ways of composing the food domain, are related to diverse diets. These diets may require different recipes, ingredients, or nutrient intakes. Hence, a nuanced global policy against hunger may act accordingly, by recognizing such differences or neglecting them in the name of an overarching right to life (further concerns on how to settle policies against hunger are summarized by Thompson, 2015a).

Food Biodiversity Food biodiversity is meant to include a long and varied list of items related to human food cultures and eating practices: animals and plants intended for human

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consumption, whether domesticated or not; microorganisms involved in food preparation; organisms that underpin and support food production, such as insects that pollinate plants, beans that enrich the soil, plants that purify water in aquaculture, and supplements that help cattle digest fibers. However, the increasing scale and productivity of the global food system favored the dissemination of analogous or identical approaches to food production across different biological and cultural contexts resulting in the loss of biodiversity. More specifically, looking at biodiversity from the point of intersection between climate change and food vividly illustrates a trade-off between two different land uses: cultivation and conservation (Godfray, 2011). The pressure on agricultural lands to produce more food for a growing population poses a great challenge to conservation practices – at least for those food varieties that do not meet production standards; furthermore, it is in opposition to strategies that seek to diversify ecosystems, at various scales. Aware of this global process, which involves not only biological individuals but also environments, scholars have started to think of food biodiversity as a sui generis form of biodiversity that pertains to whole “edible environments.” That is, the portions of the living realm made up of animals and plants, fungi and bacteria, and all the biological individuals that are part of what humans see and consume as food (see Borghini, 2019 for a philosophical overview of the topic; for the different measurement tools of food biodiversity employed in scientific contexts, see Hanley-Cook et al., 2022). Edible environments include entities subject to the most different degrees of human influence, from spontaneous and wild to human engineered. Such biodiversity can be organized not only under scientific taxonomies, but also according to ordinary categories implied by our cultural and social relationship within the edible environment: the number and kinds of recipes, ingredients, or tastes (Borghini, 2019). In fact, the biodiversity of the edible environment is not only a biological concept, which rests on objective and measurable standards. It is an anthropic concept (Weiskopf, 2020) too, since it centers on the purposes of human diets, overshadowing the intrinsic value of all individuals that are edible for humans as well as the intrinsic and extrinsic value of the non-edible ones. The anthropic bias, however, can be seen in continuity with other fields where the concept of biodiversity is employed: as Sarkar (2005) points out, the strongest argument in favor of biodiversity preservation stems from the fact that humans attribute to it some value. (In addition, to tame the anthropic bias, one can envisage multiple concepts of trophic biodiversity, i.e., biodiversity related to nutrition, that are representative of the nutritional needs of non-human beings, so that the edible environment relative to humans would be only one among many trophic environments. Under this perspective, we could then tailor our food biodiversity calculations to include items within multiple trophic biodiversity concepts. Needless to say, though, trophic biodiversity will be specific to certain groups of biological individuals (e.g., those within the same taxon). For the purposes of the present discussion, this chapter sticks to the most common understanding of food biodiversity, namely an anthropic concept.) Moving from this relation between food biodiversity and human cultures, this section highlights three key contributions to the study of human diets in an age of

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changing climate (Borghini et al., 2020b): first, many living entities that we consider familiar are in danger of extinction due to agriculture and food production; second, there were far more edible species in the past than in the present; third, there are other species that could become our food in the future (Kortetmäki, 2016; Borghini et al., 2020a). These transformative processes bring out two chief threats that raise philosophical concerns: (i) the threat to food heritage and (ii) the threat to the naturalness of food. (i) Threat to food heritage. The main impact of climate change on the edible environment is represented by the threat posed to the existence of edible living entities. It is intuitive to see extinction as an outcome to avoid at all costs for a precious food item, so that the fostering and protection of edibles that are at risk of extinction should be prioritized over other categories. Yet, how to achieve such a goal is far from easy to establish. Consider, for instance, the agricultural regions that are charted to be affected by climate change in the near future (and discussed in 3.1): to preserve the crops, breeds, or wild foods specific to these regions, several strategies open up. First, we may move the areas of production by following new temperature and rainfall patterns; alternatively, we could foster biobanks (i.e., infrastructures that store biological samples for future use); or we could focus on reengineering the plants. Which strategy to choose? And which stakeholders should be involved in the decision-making process? Also, should we adopt a precautionary principle and extend our conservationist practice to all edible entities, even though they are not currently considered food? Beyond plants and animals, microscopic organisms (O’Malley & Dupré, 2007; Pradeu, 2016) also occupy a huge portion of the edible environment, playing a key role in food heritage (e.g., microbes have an essential part in fermentation processes of wine and cheese): some of those living inside the human body are fundamental for health, and recent evidence suggests that they can be significantly affected by climate change (Catania et al., 2021); also, some of those living outside play an indispensable role in the preparation of numerous food products (Paxson, 2008), which can be severely affected by climate change (Tiedje et al., 2022). This special role of microbes calls for a reassessment of well-established preferences and priority in conservation practice (O’Malley, 2014; Franklin-Hall, 2007). And yet, when it comes to biodiversity preservation, should we give equal value to any living entity? And, if so, how? Who has the authority to rank the hierarchy and whose interests should be taken into account – e.g., should the interests of future generations be accounted for and in what measure? Finally, another effect of climate change that is significantly entrenched in the heritage of human edible environments is migration. When people with particular food knowledge (e.g., traditional ecological knowledge) are forced to leave their homes due to climate-related reasons, there is a high risk of losing the food they used to eat, gather, and manage (Vandebroek et al., 2011; Jacobson et al., 2019). (ii) Threat to the naturalness of food. Human capacity to manipulate the edible environment, rather than just adapt to its transformations (Thomsen et al., 2012),

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opens up the problem of whether and when it is acceptable to manipulate living entities to fit new climate conditions. The manipulation of crops and animals to make them more resistant to climate change raises challenging philosophical questions regarding the idea of naturalness applied to food and the metaphysical assumptions entailed in the distinction between artificial and natural foods (Siipi, 2008; Borghini, 2014b). Do the new entities pose a threat to biodiversity (see the debate on Frankenfoods and GMO in Mazanek, 2016, and Comstock, 2012; see James, 2018 for an interdisciplinary overview of controversies)? How should we evaluate the biodiversity of such artifacts whenever we accept the assumption that they are constitutively different from other, more familiar, domesticates (Diamond, 2002; Sperber, 2007)? At the same time, the manipulation of food can also introduce a wealth of additional sustainable items on the food market, which could even replace the traditional ones (see Siipi, 2020). A remarkable case in point is in vitro meat, where manipulation occurs at the cellular level to obtain slaughter-free meat (Wurgaft, 2019).

The Impact of Food on Climate Change: A Philosophical Analysis This section now moves on to the second link – i.e., how food impacts climate change. For appreciating its huge effect, it should be noted that food production alone is today responsible for a major share of total GHG (26%, according to Poore & Nemecek, 2018), playing thus a significant role in accelerating climate change. This worrying output of the food systems occupies an important portion of public conversations regarding climate change and it has also been closely studied by the scientific community at large. Philosophers are no exception. To survey such an intertwined bundle of issues, the section adopts a division along three broad dimensions – production, consumption, and authority and responsibility – and it proceeds by analyzing in some depth three exemplary case studies – food waste, sustainable diet, and food sovereignty – taking into account perspectives from each of the three dimensions. Before proceeding further, it is useful to briefly present the three dimensions specified above. (i) Production. According to the extensive survey by Vermeulen et al. (2012), agriculture contributes respectively 60% and 50% of the global anthropogenic production of N2O and CH4 in 2005. Thirty-seven percent of the landmass is devoted to agriculture and about 80% of the new terrains under cultivation once were forests. Only this enormous deforestation process across the years brought about 17% of global GHG. The large-scale degradation caused by food production led many philosophers to address conceptual and ethical questions on agriculture and farming (Clapp & Dauvergne, 2005; see the works collected in Thompson, 2008): such as under what conditions a food system is sustainable (Thompson, 2010: 175–195; Piso et al., 2016)? Does a different, and more sustainable, food system also entail a change in the broader culture of a society (Cleveland,

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2014: 123–254)? How does technological progress challenge current theories of sustainable food production and their ethical standards (Thompson, 2009: 1257–1273)? How do sustainability and the fight against climate change intersect and interact with other social important concerns involving agriculture, such as equity (Watson II, 2015) and gender issues (Glazebrook et al., 2020)? Livestock breeding and industrial-scale aquaculture as well have been questioned, given their role in GHG emissions. Not just the practical processes of breeding but also their cultural meaning, conceptual structures, and ethical principles have come under philosophical scrutiny (see, inter alia, for meat Nordgren, 2012; Galusky, 2017, and Arcari, 2017; for fisheries Kaiser, 2012; Lam, 2016). Moreover, we can ask whether the words and concepts widely utilized to characterize food production reliably guide consumers toward sustainable choices. “Organic,” “local,” “zero miles,” “biodynamic,” and “farm to fork” – do these and cognate terms fulfill the aims they were coined for (for a critical analysis of food concepts, see Borghini et al., 2021a)? (ii) Consumption. All human beings take part in the food system, at least as consumers. The way we choose, purchase, prepare, consume, and dispose of our food has been proven to influence climate. Thus, a growing socio-political movement advocates for a change in individual diets in order to mitigate climate change. This stance is supported by academic literature (Hoffmann et al., 2021; Seidel, 2020), non-academic publications emphasizing individual responsibility (e.g., Safran Foer, 2019), and specific sub-movements, e.g., locavorism. Western diets, which heavily rely on animal products, have been distinctly criticized for their effects on climate change. The switch to a plant-based diet is seen as a promising mitigation strategy (as the reader shall see in “Global Hunger”. However, as many scholars noted, the role played by meat in Western culture is hard to be underestimated, as the taste for meat has deep cultural and symbolic roots (see, inter alia, Fiddes, 1991; Adams, 1990; and Bramble & Fischer, 2015). In fact, the imitation of a Western diet indicates an increase in meat consumption on a global scale for the next decades, rather than a decrease (González et al., 2020). In addition, the study of Western diets brings to light a wide-ranging set of issues linked to climate change: the tension between traditional foodways – such as hunting (King, 2010) or capture fisheries (Hilbourn, 2012) and aquaculture (Lam, 2016) – and sustainability goals; the right of future generations to enjoy our same food (Petrini, 2001; Meijboom, 2016); the need to identify new and old sustainable consumption patterns and their feasibility confronted with other cultural preferences, e.g., introducing insects in Western diets (Looy et al., 2014; Sexton et al., 2019). (iii) Authority and responsibility. Who should have the authority to settle all these issues? Who is to be blamed for this massive impact of the food system on climate? And who is in charge of designing and implementing mitigation and adaptation measures? Asking questions like these showcases the multiple

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domains in which philosophical reflection can help in critically analyzing the different power tensions in the food systems (Gilson & Kenehan, 2018; Ankeny, 2016): individual’s moral obligations (e.g., the ability of individuals to make climate-friendly food choices – see Meijboom, 2016); international, national, and non-governmental institutions’ rights and duties (e.g., the conception of food shaping their policy – see Bernstein, 2016; Newell & Taylor, 2018); the theoretical and ethical background of the special sciences embedded in their research (e.g., is the agricultural research agenda influenced by big food manufacturers interests? See, for instance, Scrinis, 2007; Scrinis & Lyons, 2007); justice issues emerging in the mitigation and adaptation processes toward global sustainability (Kortetmäki, 2019); the role of utopian thinking scholarship on our moral and political thinking about what is relevant when it comes to food (Stock et al., 2015; Olsson et al., 2016).

Food Waste The role of food waste as a driver of climate change poses value-laden and conceptual challenges, which are addressed by a multi- and interdisciplinary body of scholarship (for a general overview of food waste, see Reynolds et al., 2020). Here, the term “food waste” is used in a broad sense, which encompasses what FAO’s major report (2019: 5) refers to as “food loss” – “the decrease in the quantity or quality of food” due to food suppliers – and “food waste” – “the decrease in the quantity or quality of food” due to retailers, food services, and consumers. The adoption of this broad use of the term is due to the lack of a sharp distinction between what is lost and what is wasted in a food chain. This distinction is typically drawn in terms of the early stages (food loss) and final stages (food waste) of the food chain. But, what counts as early or final is often underdetermined too. Should we regard a food with a short shelf life, which goes unsold and hence expired in a supermarket, as a food loss (emphasizing the responsibility of the producers) or a food waste (focusing on the choices of the consumers)? Either way, the impact of food waste cannot be underestimated: as FAO (2019) highlights, the carbon footprint of food waste corresponds to 3.3 gigatons of CO2, equal to approximately 7% of total GHG emissions. Food waste also consumes 250 km3 of surface and groundwater resources, consisting in 6% of global water withdrawals. Furthermore, 1.4 billion hectares of land, corresponding to 30% of Earth’s agricultural land, produce food that will be wasted. Scholarship on food waste primarily focused on two value-laden issues: the uselessness of waste and its failure to maximize benefits. As noted by the FAO director-general Qu Dongyu: “losing food implies unnecessary pressure on the environment and the natural resources that have been used to produce it in the first place” (FAO, 2019: V). This quote well represents the idea that the emissions necessary to deliver those food products that go to waste are useless emissions. In these cases, waste undermines the argument according to which emissions should never be halted because they are always conducive to some greater benefit.

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The second value-laden aspect of food waste is its failure to maximize benefits. As some have added (see Thompson, 2015), on top of being sometimes useless, food waste is detrimental to a food system qua economic system because it works against the principle of maximization of potential benefits. These two aspects open up a third set of moral questions concerned with the individual and collective responsibility to manage and contain wasteful processes. For instance, an empirical and conceptual survey by Matthes and Matthes (2018) shows that focusing on individual duty-bearers squanders energy to find those who are really in charge of food waste, namely institutions. Additional empirical surveys on food waste are offered by Parfitt et al. (2010), with respect to the initial stages of the food chain, and by Galli et al. (2019), who present a more nuanced position involving both individuals and institutions (for a specialistic overview of how to measure food waste, see Bellemare et al., 2017; see also Toti et al., 2019). Matthes and Matthes (2018) pinpoint the conceptual subtleties of “food waste”, showcasing how they are entrenched with moral issues. In their study, they distinguish two notions of “food waste.” The first is a maximizing one: food waste is what could have been successfully used as food (but ended up being lost in the process). The second is a cultural-bounded notion, which relativizes the maximizing notion to a specific cultural perspective: thus, food waste is what could have been successfully used as food (but ended up being lost in the process) on the basis of an anterior normative decision of what is the best use of that item (see also Alexander et al., 2013 for an anthropological review on food waste). While the first notion seems more liable for being universally generalized, the second one moves the burden to localized communities and their needs. Both notions, however, do not settle the criteria for determining whether a certain particular entity counts as food waste within a climate change framework. They only focus on how much the notion should be general. In order to appreciate how complex it is to settle these criteria, consider now the following two examples. If the adopted criterion for defining food waste was the amount of calories that are lost in the process, then a piece of bread accidentally dropped into a river would count as waste even if it would not contribute to climate change. On the contrary, a food product causing high pollution by intensive exploitation of natural resources would not count as waste since it does not imply any calorie loss along the process. Likewise, if the adopted criterion was economic loss (i.e., what could have had an economic value as a commodity), then the pollution caused by intensive exploitation of natural resources would not count as waste. This criterion would also entail the controversial conclusion that food waste was caused by non-used resources, which were in fact more sustainably produced (see Koester, 2014). In conclusion, in order to arrive at a notion of food waste that reflects its contribution to climate change, we must preliminarily wonder, first, whether the emissions produced are due to what we consider food waste and, second, if the emissions themselves should be considered food waste. For additional ethical concerns on food waste, see also Barnhill & Civita, 2020 and Roe et al., 2020. Also, for the idea that standards of waste production should not be universal, but rather be based on a country’s economy and resources, see Shue, 2014: 47–67.

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Sustainable Diets How to define a sustainable diet, and what does it takes to observe it, is debated. The literature offers three main stances, each of which rests on a different take on sustainability, envisions a different way of realizing it, and involves different stakeholders. Let us briefly review each of them. (i) Production-based approaches, which focus on avoiding food whose production is harmful for the climate. For instance, it has been estimated that eating less meat would contribute to decreasing the CO2 emission of eight billion tons per year (Schiermeier, 2019). These data underly the moral positions known as climate vegetarianism (Alvaro, 2019) and veganism (Kortetmäki & Oksanen, 2020). (ii) Transportation-based approaches, which maintain that we should eat food whose transportation produces as little carbon footprint as possible. This position often goes under the tag “locavorism” (see McWilliams, 2010 for a critical introduction; see Werkheiser & Noll, 2018 for a classification of the various forms of local food movements). Locavorists typically claim that eating local food (i.e., food produced at less than some fixed distance from the consumption place, usually measured in terms of food miles) generates less pollution and that, in addition, bestows upon consumers the direct control of the food chain, with multiple beneficial social and environmental effects (e.g., Pollan, 2009; on a general philosophical analysis of the different takes on locavorism, see Borghini et al., 2021b). (iii) System-based approaches, according to which the whole food system needs to be rebuilt in order to reach sustainable goals (for a description and a critique of systemic approaches to local food, see Werkheiser & Noll, 2018; for a history and analysis of the agrarianism movement, see Thompson, 2010). The first two approaches may be adopted either by individual consumers or by the whole food system; the third approach is, instead, only systemic. This dichotomy between individual and systemic efforts for softening the climate effects of our diets gives way to two further problems. First, a practical one, namely whether individual dietary shifts may have a real impact. This problem has both empirical and theoretical components and has been highly discussed in broad terms of individual behavior and climate change (e.g., Hindriks, forthcoming) and also with a specific focus on diet (Desrochers & Shimizu, 2012). However, individual responsibility may be seen through the lens of the social and cultural basis of individual behaviors, i.e., whether our eating patterns are ultimately influenced by our social position. This brings up the second, political problem, namely whether national or supranational agencies may impose more sustainable diets over individual consumers. Those impositions may indeed be regarded as paternalistic, as they interfere with individuals’ lifestyles in order to promote common goals (see Thompson, 2015b: 80–105 for an overview of the social and individual aspects of diet; see Barnhill & Bonotti, 2022 on the ethical and political grounds for influencing dietary behaviors on the part of governments).

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Finally, the last problem emerges in connection to the three different understandings of “sustainability,” when applied to diet: social, economic, and environmental sustainability (Portney, 2015: 6–32). Making our diet, say, more climate-friendly does not necessarily entail that such a diet also matches the other two understandings or other ideological, political, or ethical goals, as Desrochers and Shimizu (2012) argued regarding local food choices.

Food Sovereignty Food sovereignty is generally defined as the governance of a food chain by a given community. However, this general definition does not do justice to the vast array of different ethical and political principles governing the various formulations of food sovereignty. Those principles dictate how to pick out the given group, what is the extension of the food chain, how to govern it, and what further rules food governance should abide by, e.g., gender balance, autonomy, and self-determination (see Epting, 2018 and Bonotti, 2020 for recent ethical and political characterizations). While providing an analysis of the concept would be a too complex task to take on here, this section is limited to presenting only the philosophical issues concerning the relation between food sovereignty and climate change, by isolating two of the most recurring points of intersection. First, some food activists and scholars have submitted that a right to food sovereignty should be bound to the ecological impact of food on climate (Lynn et al., 2014). In fact, one of the most prominent articulations of food sovereignty, advanced by La Via Campesina’s Nyéléni Declaration (2007), assigns a crucial role to environmental awareness. This declaration is echoed by numerous subsequent documents and scholarly works (inter alia, Massicotte, 2014; see also the art. 407.3 of Bolivia’s Food Sovereignty Law, which links environment preservation to food sovereignty), according to which all communities demanding sovereignty over their food supply chain have, at the same time, a duty (and a right) to exert such sovereignty in ecologically sound and sustainable manners. As McMichael (2014) historically reconstructs, in fact, food sovereignty movements were among the earliest to focus on the climate feedback of food and so to constrain food systems to comply with ecological tasks. Second, other scholars have argued that food sovereignty by its own nature leads to reducing the impact of food on climate change, since small-scale and communitybased formulations and implementations of food sovereignty would trigger better environmental conditions (Andrée et al., 2014: 31). A nice illustration is offered in the threefold empirical study conducted in Ecuador by Carrasco-Torrontegui et al. (2020), which shows how Indigenous people – whose food systems are among the most affected by climate change – can give an important contribution to find in “ancestral” agricultural techniques new ways of adaptation to climate change. Furthermore, food systems whose control is exerted by a specific community (e.g., a “local” one) are more resilient and hence more capable of both mitigating and adapting to climate change. The resilient capacity of food systems has been recently

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emphasized by different scholars, institutions, and activists (see Walsh-Dilley et al., 2016 for an overview). According to Tilzey (2018), resilience should be understood in a radical sense, as the feature of a counter-hegemonic sustainable movement capable of ensuring political and ecological conditions for the sovereign life of local communities. However, resilience of food systems may also be understood in a less radical way by pointing out that local peasants can carry out an autonomous management of natural and social resources that can help, among other things, to mitigate climate change because of its lowest impact on the environment (e.g., van der Ploeg, 2014). From a systemic point of view, Altieri and Nicholls (2012) argue that the variability of different local food systems may be used for enforcing a more resilient global system which would be more sustainable and less reliant on pesticides and other highly polluting materials.

Conclusion This chapter offered a survey of the issues at the intersection of food and climate change, with particular attention to those that call for philosophical analysis. It organized the materials based on two links between food and climate change (i.e., how food impacts climate change and vice versa), to which the chapter added a premise regarding the backup frameworks that guide conversations on food and climate change. As the reader may have noticed, however, this survey also rests on a number of overlapping categories, which cut across the different sections, the most important of them being production, consumption, and authority and responsibility. The chapter could have been assembled around those categories plus the chief guiding principles and stances; also, the literature could have been sorted out based on one of the three intuitive frameworks presented in section “Climate Change and the Future of Food: Three Frameworks”. Two chief reasons motivated the chosen layout: first, the drive to offer an analysis as close as possible to the rich multi- and interdisciplinary research on food and climate change; second, the need to showcase the broad spectrum of contributions that philosophers have given and can give to the topic at hand. The final picture bears witness to the cross-disciplinary attitude displayed by and required of philosophers operating in this domain of inquiry. Also, it proves how wide and articulate is the range of topics that calls for theoretical and value-laden guidance, which would benefit from well-assorted and dedicated philosophical attention.

References Alexander, C., Gregson, N., & Gille, Z. (2013). Food waste. In A. Murcott, W. Belasco, & P. Jackson (Eds.), The handbook of food research (pp. 471–485). Bloomsbury. Altieri, M. A., & Nicholls, C. I. (2012). Agroecology scaling up for food sovereignty and resiliency. In E. Lichtfouse (Ed.), Sustainable agriculture reviews: Volume 11 (pp. 1–29). Springer. https:// doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5449-2_1

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Climate Change and the Ethics of Agriculture Cristian Timmermann

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Inequalities at Five Dimensions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Global Inequalities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Local Inequalities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gender Inequalities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Relational Inequalities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nutritional Inequalities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Setting Priorities: Adaptation or Mitigation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Avoiding Wastage: Farmer and Consumer Responsibilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ideal: Resilience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Innovation and Social Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Landscape Changes and Social Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Land Use Changes and Social Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion: On the Challenges of Adequate Compensation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Agriculture is one of the dimensions where climate change is having its most devastating effects. As the impact of climate change affects disproportionally those who have contributed the least to it, i.e., the smallholder farmers in the Global South, and who at the same time are the ones with the least disposable income to adapt to these changes, it leads to a major challenge for global justice. This chapter introduces different forms of inequality that are aggravated by climate change, discusses the implications of emphasizing on mitigation and adaptation to the new climatic conditions, argues for the need to reduce the multiple wastages in agriculture and food consumption and the importance of

C. Timmermann (*) Ethics of Medicine, Medical Faculty, University of Augsburg, Augsburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_70

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building resilient farming systems, presents the challenges of innovating fairly to respond to the climate emergency, and analyzes the ethical implication of changing landscapes and land uses. It concludes by listing the main challenges of compensating for climate injustices. Keywords

Farming · Food production · Social justice · Greenhouse gasses · Poverty · Hunger · Land use

Introduction The impact of climate change on future food production is one of the most urgent problems for ethics and social justice. The range of challenges that are already emerging and which will become more serious and extensive in the future goes far beyond issues of distributive justice (Paavola, 2008). Climate change will reduce harvest yields in large parts of the tropics and increase yields in areas closer to arctic circle (Cline, 2007). Catastrophic disruptions and losses are already occurring with more frequency in the form of hurricanes and tropical cyclones, large-scale fires are likelier to emerge due to reduced precipitations, new pests will move in the areas that become warmer, and crop failure can be expected due to droughts or excessive rainfalls. Farm workers are likelier to be exposed to more diseases, as mosquitos and other disease vectors appear in higher latitudes and altitudes. Rising sea levels are threatening some of the most intensively cultivated land areas by increasing salination. At the same time, areas closer to the poles are exploring new agricultural opportunities that were unconceivable under the older climatic conditions (McMichael, 2017). Climate change obliges to surrender certain ways to relate to the land, restricts what can be done with the land, and comes with losses in what can be expected from the land. Yet it does so in highly unequal ways. In agriculture, the responses to these new conditions have concentrated on two strategies that reveal different priorities: mitigation and adaptation. Climate change mitigation recognizes the need to halt climate change to avoid the risk of not being able to grow food and survive in the future. An emphasis on adaption comes with the acceptance of the idea that mitigation alone will not suffice and therefore humanity needs to secure the continuity of agriculture if people want to survive as a large society. As the overall continuity of agriculture in the future is not the only concern, it needs to be guaranteed that food production has no major shortfalls in the present. This has led to a renewed interest in making food systems resilient and thereby make sure that food systems are adapted to the upcoming challenges. Unstable food production causes major social disruptions (Holt-Giménez et al., 2010). Food shortages have also major social justice implications, as they impact regions of the world differently, concentrating hunger and malnutrition among vulnerable groups, particularly persons with disabilities and refugees, as well as women and girls (Shiva, 2009).

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Agriculture has however never been about food production alone. As the term already reveals, growing food is also a cultural practice – a cumulative social effort with a history of over 11,000 years (Mazoyer & Roudart, 2006). It is therefore unsurprising that people have a strong interest on how agriculture and rural life will evolve in the future and what kind of food systems will be bequeathed to the next generations (Potthast, 2011). The strong traditional bond between people and their land leads to a series of demands in relation to social justice to transform existing food systems. After introducing the multiple inequalities amplified by climate change and the importance of building resilient food systems, three major issues will be discussed: innovation priorities and strategies, changes in land use, and changes in landscape. To conclude, an assessment of what is owed to those who will suffer adverse effects in agriculture is offered.

Inequalities at Five Dimensions While the effects of a changing climate are felt all over the world, climate change is far from being the great equalizer, rather the opposite is true. Four dimensions can be distinguished where climate change leads to increased global, local, gender, relational, and nutritional inequalities (Timmermann, 2021):

Global Inequalities Some regions in the Global North are likely to be better off in the short term (Cline, 2007). Other areas, mostly in the tropics, will be below sea level or affected by droughts. While climate change will become a threat to people in all countries, some areas are already facing some major climate-related problems and others are momentarily benefiting from new opportunities due to the milder weather before climate change becomes an issue. Another global justice issue is that countries of the Global South will end up having to adapt agriculture using imported technologies from the Global North. This is a great economic opportunity for future income by the Global North, but a major issue for global justice (Biddle, 2016). Cash crops that are important export goods for the Global South, such as cocoa, coffee, and bananas, are particularly sensible to climate change. A likely effect of climate change for the Global South is having less goods to export while being more dependent on importing agricultural inputs and food (Timmermann, 2020).

Local Inequalities A striking example of climate injustice are the effects of water availability as climate changes. Shorter rain seasons oblige farmers to harvest the same crops during the same time and abstain from planting water-intensive crops. Farmers who can afford

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irrigation can avoid harvesting crops when they are in high supply and additionally risk planting water-intensive crops, obtaining in areas where irrigation is a privilege much higher prices (Popke et al., 2016). Climate change thus multiplies the benefits of irrigation systems and thereby increases inequalities between those who can afford such investments and those who cannot. As a consequence, the worse off will end up selling their land and labor to those better off (Thompson, 2017).

Gender Inequalities At a household level, it is women and girls who are most vulnerable to food shortages, with increased levels of hunger and malnutrition (Shiva, 2009). Furthermore, much of agrobiodiversity is stewarded by women. Particularly female farmers possess key knowledge on local horticultural varieties, engage in traditional plant breeding practices, and take part in complex seed exchange networks (Glazebrook et al., 2020). The imposition of commercially seed varieties to respond to climate change destroys such practices and disempowers them (Nyéléni Forum for Food Sovereignty, 2007).

Relational Inequalities There are strong variations in how people who work on the land relate to the surrounding environment. For many, agriculture is much more than an opportunity to generate income. People may grow food despite having abundant means to buy food, in order to gain independence, contribute to the resilience of their community, build networks, exchange knowledge and know-how, maintain biocultural heritage, or just for being in closer contact with nature (Marrero et al., 2022). Continuous declines in harvests and catastrophic losses resulting from climate change will take something irreplaceable to some, while merely taking an important financial opportunity away for others. Relational losses are much more difficult to compensate and affect people in vastly different forms (Jax et al., 2018). These types of losses are seldom recognized as injustices and can negatively affect mental health, as new concepts such as ecological grief aim to visibilize (Cunsolo & Ellis, 2018).

Nutritional Inequalities Climate change does not only lead to food shortages but also changes the type of food that becomes available. Even in cases where total caloric intake is met or exceeded, diets that lack diversity can lead to malnutrition, particularly when people cannot gather the vitamins and minerals they need. When diverse food systems are replaced by monocultures and imported processed foods, an increase in obesity and malnutrition can be observed. Many traditional farming systems cultivate a broad range of herbs, fruits, and vegetables that diversify the diets of smallholders,

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improving their nutrition (Altieri, 2003). Once farmers are compelled to leave their lands or the cultivation of heritage varieties becomes impossible under the new climatic conditions, a decline in the quality of diets can be observed. Poverty makes it even more difficult to diversify diets as the climate changes.

Setting Priorities: Adaptation or Mitigation While early climate action concentrated on efforts to mitigate climate change, agriculture has never been given a central role in mitigation and its potential in capturing carbon is still vastly understated. Particularly ecological intensification of agriculture and agroforesty have enormous potential in sequestering massive amounts of carbon in soils and above ground (Altieri & Koohafkan, 2008). Before a decision on research priorities can be made, a careful assessment is needed on how much potential mitigation strategies have and how much should be already spent on adapting agriculture to the new climatic conditions. What are the ethical implications of prioritizing mitigation over adaptation, or vice versa? Depending on how this question is answered it has major implications for issues such as how research attention is distributed, how conservation efforts are to be shaped and financed, and the future of farming for younger and future generations. Concentrating on mitigation limits long-term damages at the possible risk of failing to meet harvest yield needs in short term. The promotion of soil conservation and programs to restore degraded soils can play a major role in storing carbon in the ground (Félix et al., 2018). Also, the sustainable stewardship of agroforestry system can play a major role in storing carbon. A major transition toward more climatefriendly food systems will come with a rise in food prices. The negative effect of higher prices can be limited by shifting current agricultural subventions from unsustainable production systems to more environmentally friendly systems. Nowadays countries in the Global North, particularly the USA and the European Union, are spending billions of euro in agricultural subventions with poor environmental protection standards. Redirecting such funds to incentivize more ecologically sustainable practices has huge potential (Tittonell, 2013). A different emphasis is to take a certain degree of climate change for unavoidable and focus on adapting agriculture to the new climatic conditions. Much of this strategy does not require a major transformation of the food systems, but concentrates on improving irrigation and replacing heritage varieties with new improved and specially adapted varieties, including often the use of genetically modified seeds. So-called climate-ready seeds should be better suited to withstand stress factors such as droughts and higher levels of salinity (Saab, 2015). This approach partly capitulates on the goal of limiting climate change and concentrates on being able to produce sufficient quantity of food at low costs for future needs. This strategy does not fully acknowledge the dependence of food systems on ecological services provided by well-functioning agroecosystems and natural reservoirs and is highly optimistic – or even illusive – about the limitless potential of technological fixes. However, it fully recognizes the immediate catastrophic impact food shortages have on the worst off.

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Furthermore, adaptation has limits. Historically, it needs to be noted that humans adapted to new environmental conditions by moving to more hospitable areas (McMichael, 2017). Droughts and rising sea levels are already forcing large numbers of people to become climate refugees, without regulations on which countries are obliged to receive whom and under what conditions (Biermann & Boas, 2010; Eckenwiler & Wild, 2022). Migration is particularly difficult for people with strong bonds to the land and profound knowledge of local flora and fauna (Rozzi, 2012), such as farmers. Considering immediate and long-term needs, agricultural systems need to be developed that are more resistant to climate change fluctuations and can sequester larger amounts of carbon.

Avoiding Wastage: Farmer and Consumer Responsibilities Another essential step toward climate change mitigation is to reduce wasteful farming practices. At current levels of carbon emissions, consumption of larger amounts of meat and dairy products becomes not only unacceptable from an animal rights perspective but also due to their massive contribution to climate change (Singer, 2004). The consumption of some off-season products, particularly those that have to be transported by air, is also an item that needs to be drastically reduced. The most publicized example are fresh strawberries in the winter. Here everyone has responsibilities as consumers to avoid demanding such goods, and from farmers and retailers in stopping to offer such goods. Much of these demands are bundled under the idea of reducing food miles (Iles, 2005). Consumers need to be aware that in terms of carbon footprint, a substantial amount of emissions does not come only from transporting food to stores, but from unsustainable purchasing habits. Driving by car long distances – particularly considering the increasing imprudence of acquiring supersized trucks – to purchase single items of locally produced foods may have higher overall impact than getting shipped industrial produce by bike. Sustainable consumption demands a certain degree of food literacy (Voget-Kleschin, 2015). Another step is to cooperate with farmers in avoiding the wastage of food by adapting consumption patterns to seasonal supply and helping absorbing surpluses (Timmermann et al., 2018). A food as a commons perspective, that goes beyond seeing food as a commodity but as something that should benefit everyone, is a particularly helpful concept for stimulating such cooperative behavior (Vivero-Pol et al., 2018). Nonfarmers need to also cooperate in bringing back organic matter to food production sites. There is a massive metabolic rift, particularly between the city and the country side, and between food producing regions and net food importers (Delgado Ramos, 2013; Schneider & McMichael, 2010). Organic residues need to find their way back into the soils through adequate collection and composting, thereby helping to rebuild soils and reduce methane emissions (Thi et al., 2015). Farmers themselves need to facilitate sustainable consumption by innovating in their business models. Some regions are showing great success with subscription

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models, where urban consumers commit to purchasing boxes with seasonably variable content that is selected at the farmer’s discretion based on available assortment (Torjusen et al., 2008). Increasingly, farmers will have to cooperate among themselves to make best use of resources such as water and ecosystem services. Even wealthier farmers need to acknowledge that their farms are often embedded in more complex ecosystem that need to be maintained. For example, when using carelessly water, wealthier farmers may oversee that they are dependent on pollinators harbored in nearby smaller farms and on seasonal wage workers, who also require adequate access to water to grow their food. Governments need to make a major effort in removing perverse incentives. Tax loops that make it lucrative to export and reimport food need to be removed, practices that transport foodstuffs over long distances for repackaging or cleaning need to disincentivized, and wages need to be adapted to make the consumption of locally produced food affordable.

Ideal: Resilience Climate change comes with major stress factors for food production. These can be related directly to weather events, such as changes in temperature, winds, and precipitation, or caused by such changes, e.g., wild fires and floods. New climate conditions also alter the behavior of species who provide important ecosystem services and lead to the migration of beneficial and harmful organisms, which may come with the propagation of new plagues (McMichael, 2017). Furthermore, food insecurity in one area may cause unrest and disruptions in other areas by rising the prices of foodstuffs and large-scale migration. Moreover, it needs to be recalled that the poor are the least able to absorb production shocks, and most food shortages place an increased burden on female household members. As humanity relies on food systems and disruptions are to be expected, building resilient systems needs to become a political ideal (Kolers, 2016). To minimize the impact and duration of agricultural production downfalls and improve recovery it has become common to talk about improving the resilience of a farming system. Resilience is understood as the persistence of relationships within a system when absorbing changes and disturbances of different variables (Holling, 1973). Newer interpretations of the concept of resilience in agriculture highlight the need to be able to withstand disruptions and reemerge in a strengthened state that allows to continue cultivating food (Santiago Vera et al., 2022). The resilience of a farming system can be improved by working on social cohesion, reducing dependency from externally produced inputs, and adopting climate-smart farm design principles (Marrero et al., 2022). Important for the social dimension is that disruptions in the food system are addressed at an early stage and that past mistakes are avoided. Freedom of press and transparency over governmental policies are crucial to allow civic monitoring and increase accountability (Sen, 1981). In this regard, much progress is still required, as

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environmental activists and journalists are continued to be harassed and even murdered in biodiversity-rich countries, particularly in Latin America (Arguedas Ramírez, 2019). Smallholders should have access to sufficient land and water, and need to be empowered, particularly in their capacity for self-organization without neglecting the active participation of women (Córdoba et al., 2020). Governments need to provide swiftly emergency assistance without discriminating smallholders. Well-connected smallholders can combine the benefits of close monitoring of farm conditions with knowledge exchange and risk-pooling. To build a resilient agricultural system inclusiveness and social cooperation becomes a necessity (Civita, 2015). As climate change comes with extreme weather events, the dependency on externally produced inputs need to be reduced. There are logistic reasons for this, storms may lead to shutdowns of ports and block transportation routes (Marrero et al., 2022). In addition, there are macroeconomic factors. As major crop losses can be expected, particularly poorer countries may face rapid currency devaluation. With reduced purchasing power, imported inputs become inaccessible (Timmermann, 2020). When it comes to the environmental dimension of resilience, it needs to be noted that agricultural systems can also be made more resilient by farm design. Agroecology, for example, seeks to reduce dependencies on externally produced inputs and mimic ecological processes (Gómez Echeverri et al., 2017). Reducing dependency from external suppliers makes a farming system less vulnerable to interferences in supply. Farming systems that aim to reproduce ecological processes acquire also some of the natural recovery mechanisms and thereby can recover more quickly. Evidence is adding up that suggests that agroecological farms recover more rapidly from extreme weather events, such as hurricanes (Holt-Giménez, 2002).

Innovation and Social Justice Climate change obliges to make changes in the way food is produced. As there are a few alternatives on which future food scenarios can be chosen from, having a social debate on which direction should we be headed becomes central to social justice (Kaljonen et al., 2021; Loo, 2019). Both the literature on climate justice and technology assessment demand wider citizen participation in decision-making, as a key demand of procedural justice (Jenkins, 2018) and responsible research and innovation (Stilgoe et al., 2013). Increasing democratic decision-making is both a demand of justice and comes with benefits for technology developers (Asveld et al., 2015). By giving people a say on the direction of agricultural research, people are likelier to accept technologies, and thereby the situation is avoided where large amounts of money are spent on technology development with little public acceptance. Yet to align innovation strategies to ideal of justice a broader assessment of the multiple interactions between food production and social justice is needed. Here four dimensions of

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social justice can be listed that need to be considered when assessing innovation to confront climate change: justice in exchange, distributive justice, contributive justice, and intergenerational justice (Timmermann, 2020). This demands that objects of innovation be accessible at fair prices. The outcome where industries situated in the countries with the largest historic emissions end up selling adaptation technologies to countries with the strongest needs and lowest historic emissions is particularly unfair and should not be left as it stands (Biddle, 2016). Further, it demands that innovation is destined to the problems of people all over the world and not only for the richer markets. This calls for a fairer distribution of research attention. There is also a wide demand to facilitate wider participation in innovation efforts. Farmers have continuously innovated to adapt to new social and environmental conditions, select the most desirable crop traits, and identify the best places for their crops. Innovation systems need to recognize this innovative dimension of farmers and allow sufficient room for their creativity. Lastly, innovators need to critically assess the long-term effects of diffusing their inventions in terms of social sustainability and ecological impact. Innovation should not leave people in a position of unwanted unilateral dependency. Such dependency can be exploited and is risky for basic goods. Prolonged states of dependency are particularly dangerous as they lead to losses of crucial skills to live an autonomous life. Once these skills are lost it is particularly difficult and time-consuming to reacquire them.

Landscape Changes and Social Justice Changes in climate may also affect soils and water availability, affecting the ability to produce food. A changing climate obliges species to adapt to new environmental conditions. Some species will prevail and other perish, altering ecological equilibria. The disappearance of a species is not only an ecological loss but also the loss of biocultural heritage. Biodiversity reduction is an irreplaceable loss of something of both instrumental and intrinsic value. Particularly people with strong ties to their natural environment lose biocultural heritage as species become rare or extinct and cannot pass on their ancestral knowledge to their offspring (Rozzi, 2012). Here it needs to be recalled that agriculture concerns more than the production of food, it is also about maintaining a cultural heritage (Borghini et al., 2022). Many crop varieties have special cultural values and are important for people’s identity, such as local corn varieties for the Mesoamerican indigenous communities (Mullaney, 2014). As certain heritage varieties cannot be grown anymore, a part of cultural identity gets lost. With far-reaching climatic change, adaptation will not only be about choosing between important local varieties, but even lead to the loss of whole crops. Changes in environmental conditions also alter the behavior of other species and their natural predators. This may lead to increases of outbreaks of plagues that destroy crops, such as locusts, and even to their propagation to new areas.

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Land Use Changes and Social Justice Climate change comes also with a substantial pressure to change land use. There are three major drivers: the use of land for energy production, strategies to give back land to nature, and rising sea levels. In terms of energy production, there is already a longer discussion on the enormous extension of cultivars for biofuels (Toft, 2013). This stresses the availability of land, water, and labor, and comes with an ecological and socioeconomic risk due to the extensive use of monocultures. The use of land to build large-scale photovoltaic installations is a new emerging factor. Designating land for nature conservation is also having a major impact on food production. Such ecological reserves and refuge areas offer a variety of benefits for all, and every nation should do their share in creating and maintaining such areas. Ecological reserves have a public good character, as they provide ecosystem services that benefit adjacent areas, sequester carbon, and allow in situ biodiversity conservation. There is much pressure on countries of the Global South to protect natural reserves, without a reciprocal commitment by the Global North in protecting areas under their jurisdiction and recovering or rewilding lost highly biodiverse habitats, such as northern temperate rainforests. This has led to the accusation of green grabbing, as a form of neocolonialism, which limits the freedom to use land for food production, particularly in the Global South (Corson & MacDonald, 2012). Rising sea levels are already forcing people out of their traditional lands, particularly in the river deltas and low-lying Pacific islands. Some of these areas, most notably the Nile delta and large parts of Bangladesh, are highly populous regions. These valuable agricultural lands are lost altogether or become unsuitable for agriculture due to higher levels of salinity, forcing people to migrate to other areas and become climate refugees. These changes in land uses lead to land scarcity for food production, making it even more difficult for farmers to work on the land to cover their own needs. Land scarcity often increases tensions and leads to conflicts, which often are fueled by droughts and water scarcity.

Conclusion: On the Challenges of Adequate Compensation Climate change raises distributive justice issues for both people in the present and in the future. Particularly famers in the tropical regions will suffer the most while being responsible for the lowest historic emissions (Onyekuru & Marchant, 2012). Today’s generations are burdening future people creating an intergenerational injustice with every day of insufficient climate action. What could count as adequate compensation for excessive emissions? How should such compensation be perceived when continuing to harm the climate vulnerable by failing to take sufficient action? There are a few cases where technological fixes are a form of reasonable compensation. Offering innovations to increase energy efficiency is usually an adequate form of compensation, when farmers, for

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example, can benefit from machinery that consumes less fuel. Another example is refrigeration. By keeping food at lower temperatures spoilage is reduced, which can save valuable resources and make up for poorer harvests. Moreover, refrigeration, particularly for foodstuff that spoils quickly such as fish, allows people to improve their bargaining position by not having to sell immediately their produce when offered low prices (Ariztia & Raglianti, 2020). Despite the potential benefits of compensatory goods, these goods are nonetheless imposed. As climate change may lead to the loss of heritage varieties, droughts, and a rise in sea level, compensation would have to counteract the losses of such valuable goods and the relation to land. History has plenty of examples showing that people will not easily accept new areas of land to resettle as a form of compensation. There are however excellent win-win opportunities. Farmers all over the world can be assisted in the development of agroforestry systems and in ecological intensification. Many farmers struggle to access new seeds and seedlings for their projects. As these types of farming systems produce both local and global ecosystem services, it is in the interest of outsiders to assist in the development of such projects by financing ecological agricultural extension services and seed diffusion programs. Compensatory goods need to avoid creating additional problems. One could for instance propose to compensate farmers for reduced precipitation rates by offering irrigation systems that use desalinated water from the sea. The carbon footprint for creating and maintaining such systems would most likely cause new climate-related problems. A holistic assessment of local advantages and global burdens needs to be made before recommending such projects.

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Climate Change and Animal Ethics Simone Pollo

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Animals and Ethics Before Modern Age . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Turning Points: The Moral Value of Suffering and Darwin’s Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Animal Ethics: A New Field for Philosophical Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Animal Ethics and Environmental Ethics: A Troubled Relation? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Farming, Greenhouse Emissions, Virtues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Climate Change, Wildlife, and Conservation Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

Climate change entails consequences also for non-human animals (from now on just “animals”). Since the 1970s of the twentieth century, moral status of animals has been the topic of “animal ethics”. This chapter will deal with the relation of this field of analysis with climate change and the challenges raised by environmental crisis for animal ethics. A multidimensional approach to the question of animal moral status is required. The case of animal-based food production and consumption is paradigmatic of the need for such a new multidimensional approach in animal ethics. Furthermore, the analysis of moral responsibilities toward wild animals is deeply affected by the new status of nature (“hybrid nature”) in the epoch of Anthropocene. The new status of wilderness makes the notion of conservation slippery and problematic, especially in the framework of a genuine Darwinian understanding both of life in general and human responsibilities toward the non-human world.

S. Pollo (*) Sapienza University of Rome and National Biodiversity Future Center, Rome, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_72

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Keywords

Animal ethics · Climate change · Food production · Wildlife conservation · Evolutionary biology

Introduction Climate change does not affect just human beings. The species Homo sapiens is the main responsible for climate change (in fact, it is called “anthropogenic”), but the rise of temperatures and all the linked effects have consequences for all the living beings on the planet Earth. Among all the organisms, the members of the kingdom Animalia, or Metazoa, seem to deserve special attention from the moral and political point of view. Many species of this kingdom (maybe the greatest part) have features, such as capacities of feeling pain and pleasure, that grant them some kind of moral status. At least since the 1970s of the twentieth century, moral status of non-human animals (from now on just “animals”) has been the topic of a new branch of philosophical analysis, that is “animal ethics” (Beauchamp & Frey, 2011). This chapter will deal with the relation of this field of analysis with climate change and the challenges raised by this phenomenon for animal ethics. Some main challenges will be examined after a general introduction about animal ethics and a brief critical discussion of the relation between animal ethics and environmental ethics.

Animals and Ethics Before Modern Age Animals are intertwined with the life of Homo sapiens in many ways since the dawn of the species Homo sapiens. As a matter of fact, the use of animals (mostly for food, but not only) has been fundamental for the biological evolution of human beings and for the development of civilization as humans know it. It is universally acknowledged that domestication of plants and animals, that is, agriculture and farming, represented a turning point in the history of human species (Diamond, 1997). Contrary to a widespread idea, the massive and continuous use of animals by humans has not coincided with a universally shared denial of affective and cognitive capacities of animals, and a consequential absence of any question about the possible recognition of the moral and legal status of animals. Besides their continuous use and exploitation of animals, human beings have not been universally “Cartesian”, endorsing the idea that animals are just mindless machines. As a matter of fact, human folk psychology spontaneously attributes intentions, mental states, and emotions to animals. Interpreting animal behavior as driven by minds has represented an evolutionary advantage for human ancestors, allowing them to be, for example, more successful hunters and domesticators (Shipman, 2011). Because of these tendencies of folk psychology humans spontaneously regard animals as agents and to look at them merely as machines requires a great amount of cold philosophical detachment from the ordinary perception. Of course, this natural

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tendency of attributing minds to animals and to regard them as agents does not entail per se that animal mental capacities really exist and that therefore animals are agents. Nonetheless, the acknowledgment of such a tendency of human folk psychology undermines the standard account of a prevalent, universal, and deeply rooted Cartesian attitude toward animals. What this acknowledgment means, if anything, is that the attribution of mental capacities to animals does not immediately and “naturally” follow the attribution of some kind of moral status to animals. Humans have always almost universally regarded animals as somehow capable of emotions and cognitions, but this has not prevented them to use animals as tools for their purposes. In the history of philosophy, the topic of the moral status of animals (and possible reform of human/animal relationships) has been only occasionally treated in a not systematic manner (Steiner, 2005). For example, vegetarian diet has sometimes been endorsed since antiquity but not always out of genuine moral respect for the animals slaughtered (Pytagoric and Porphyrian vegetarian diets are mostly a mean to preserve the purity of human beings) (Dombrowski, 2004). It is only during the modern age that philosophers started to develop a specific interest in the enlargement of the moral circle to animals. As it will be shown below, this interest flourished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries because of specific reasons. Before discussing these reasons, this (very) general introduction about animals before the modern age can be summed up in a specific statement. Leaving aside the discussion about the appropriateness of the concept of Anthropocene to interpret the role of the species Homo sapiens in shaping environment and climate (and the discussion about when Anthropocene starting point should be placed), it can be said that a great part in the story of human civilization (in its different forms and developments) has been played by human/animal relationships and different uses of animals made by humans for their purposes. The moral acceptability of such relationships and uses has been put under systematic scrutiny only recently (at least for what concerns Western philosophical tradition).

Turning Points: The Moral Value of Suffering and Darwin’s Revolution A detailed exploration of the roots of the contemporary debate on animal ethics and today’s increased sensibility toward animals is far beyond the scope of the present chapter. Here I just want to expose a general argument aimed at showing how two facts that happened in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries can be regarded as a turning point in (at least and at first Western) sensibility toward animals and they triggered a philosophical interest in animals’ moral status (I presented in detail this argument in Pollo, 2021). The first fact is a change in moral ordinary thinking and philosophical ethics that happened during the eighteenth century. Here there is no room for a reconstruction of this historical and theoretical change, but it can just be exposed. This change consists of a new appreciation of the moral value of pleasure and suffering. In fact, Enlightenment cannot be regarded merely as the “Age of Reason” and another tale of the Enlightenment can be told – as Michael Frazer clearly points

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out (Frazer, 2010). The “Enlightenment of sympathy” is the second tale parallel to the age of reason. Philosophers like Shaftesbury, Hume, Smith, and Bentham (in somehow different ways) created a new place for passions, sentiments, emotions, and sympathy in philosophical systems of morality. This new place for affectivity in ethics led to the widening of the circle of moral respect: the capacity for suffering and pleasure is possessed not just by humans but also by animals. To quote the famous words of Bentham from the Introduction to the principles of morals and legislation: “The question is not: Can they reason? or Can they talk? But: Can they suffer?” (Bentham, 2007). This shift in the focus of morality was not confined to philosophical debates but was also part of a general transformation process in ordinary morality. As the historian Lynn Hunt highlights, the process of “invention” of human rights in the eighteenth century was triggered and sustained by a general expansion of sympathy toward the suffering of other people by the use of imagination, for example, when reading novels (Hunt, 2007). This new attention to suffering extended to animals and led in the nineteenth century to initiatives like the foundation of animal protection societies and the first laws condemning animal abuse (Ryder, 2000a). The new role of suffering in ethics led philosophers and society to look differently at animals’ moral status and to the uses humans make of them. This change was paralleled by another event that is a turning point at the roots of contemporary animal ethics. The nineteenth century is the century of Darwin’s revolution. As Darwin himself clearly acknowledged very early in his scientific journey, his theory would have changed not just the scientific understanding of life but also many moral ideas. Among these ideas there is the human perspective on animals’ moral status and ideas about how to treat them. In the Notebook B (in which preparatory notes for The Origin of the Species are laid down) Darwin writes: Animals whom we have made our slaves we do not like to consider our equals. — Do not slave holders wish to make the black man other kind — animals with affections, imitation, fear of death, pain, sorrow for the dead. — respect. The soul by consent of all is superadded, animals not got it, not look forward. if we choose to let conjecture run wild then our animals our fellow brethern in pain, disease, death & suffering, & famine, our slaves in the most laborious works, our companions in our amusements. they may partake from our origin in these one common ancestor; we may be all netted. (Darwin, 1987)

Among many other things, Darwin’s new understanding of animals (Pollo, 2022) debunked any possibility of affirming ontological differences between animals’ mental states (suffering and pleasure included) and human ones. In general, after Darwin attributing moral significance to species membership became impossible, since species no longer represent ontological differences among living beings (Rachels, 1990).

Animal Ethics: A New Field for Philosophical Ethics The new role of suffering in ethics and the new understanding of animals after Darwin are the grounds from which philosophical reflection about animals developed in the second half of the twentieth century. The 1960s and 1970s of that century are the

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moment in which the so-called “applied ethics” arose as a reaction, for example, to the development of new biotechnologies in medicine (bioethics) and the awareness of the ongoing environmental crisis (environmental ethics). Among the causes of the birth of applied ethics there is also a rising concern for the uses of animals in farm production and lab experimentation. Such a concern gave birth to “animal ethics”. If one would identify a founding event of animal ethics, it could be recognized in the “invention” of the idea of “speciesism”. In 1970 at Oxford Richard Ryder, then a young psychologist formerly using animals in lab experiments, wrote and distributed a leaflet to raise a debate about the moral legitimacy of the use of animals in science. In the text of the leaflet (conceived when lying in a bathtub, according to the author) a new concept is defined: speciesism. Speciesism is defined as a form of unjustified discrimination based on species-membership just as sexism is an unjustified discrimination on the ground of sex/gender membership or racism is an unjustified discrimination because of “race” (a concept however without any scientific ragionale) (Ryder, 2000b). Speciesism is clearly rooted in the two turning points mentioned above: the moral value of avoiding suffering and the underestimation of species membership. The concept of speciesism and anti-speciesist arguments produced since the very beginning by animal ethics philosophers go beyond the kind of concern for animals expressed, for example, by nineteenth-century UK protectionists. As Peter Singer clearly explained, the notion of speciesism places the question of moral respect of non-human animals in the domain of justice and equality (Singer, 1975, 1979) rather than regarding it as a matter of compassion (as it largely was at the very beginning of animal protection in nineteenth-century UK). In its early steps, animal ethics is part of a philosophical discourse clearly placed into the development of contemporary liberal democracies. When elaborating arguments for the inclusion of animals into the circle of moral, political, and legal protection, even if in different ways (sometimes profoundly different ways) philosophers like Peter Singer (1975, 1979), Tom Regan (1983), Gary Francione (1996), Mary Midgley (1983), and Martha Nussbaum (2022) – just to quote some – are reasoning on how to expand some basic principles of the liberal democratic societies (freedom, equality, welfare) beyond the boundaries of human species. At least in its founding motives and historical causes, animal ethics is a way to reason on how to make liberal democratic principles and protection progress to include morally undervalued vulnerable subjects like animals. Besides the variety of metaethical and normative approaches, in general theories of animal ethics provide justifications for the recognition of moral status of animals when certain criteria are met (i.e., the capacity to feel pain and pleasure). From this recognition normative conclusions are drawn in order to invoke reforms in human/ animal relationships (abolition of animal-based food; ban or reform of animal experimentation, etc.). Such normative conclusions are derived from arguments claiming that some non-human individuals deserve moral respect and possibly some kind of legal status in order to protect their life or at least their welfare needs. As a matter of fact, thanks to animal ethics works and animal advocacy activism, nowadays all the legal systems of liberal democratic societies provide some kind of protection for non-human animals. For example, article 13 of the so-called “Lisbon Treaty” (something similar to a Constitution of European Union)

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states the obligation to respect animal welfare in every situation in which animals are employed. It is true that this statement is very different from an affirmation of fundamental animal legal rights, but it is also true that it recognizes animals as something different from mere objects that humans can use whatever they want.

Animal Ethics and Environmental Ethics: A Troubled Relation? Animal ethics is part of an ongoing process of philosophical rethinking and sociopolitical transformation of human attitudes and relationships with the non-human world. Such process is not limited to non-human animals (mostly those used in food production and lab experimentation) but also regards wildlife and the environment in general. As already mentioned above, another field of the applied ethics realm is environmental ethics, which is devoted to the analysis of moral issues in human relationships with the environment (Jamieson, 2012). In general, the domains of animal ethics and environmental ethics are partly overlapping and drawing a sharp line between them is pretty difficult, if not impossible. Nonetheless, whereas animal ethics is mostly concerned with the recognition of the moral status of animals as individuals, environmental ethics is especially focused on the moral status of entities like ecosystems, landscapes, and so on. The difference between the two attitudes has been recognized and critically analyzed by one of the most important contemporary environmental ethics philosophers, John B. Callicott. In the famous essay “Animal Liberation: a Triangular Affair” (1980), Callicott defended his Land Ethic approach (derived from Aldo Leopold’s work) against animal liberation perspectives like those of Regan and Singer. According to Callicott, Land Ethic is a holistic approach concerned with the good of ecosystems (the “biotic community”) rather than on the good of their individual parts (humans included). The holism of Land Ethic potentially clashes with the individualism of animal ethics (especially of animal liberation approaches), since sometimes preserving the good of the biotic community requires frustrating the interest of individuals. A classic and simple example of this kind of conflict is represented by the situation in which the “equilibrium” of an ecosystem is put at risk by the multiplication of an invasive animal species. Taking care of the ecosystem by removing individuals of that species (also killing them if necessary and unavoidable) means harming their individual interests. Because of the affirmation of the supremacy of the good whole on interests of individuals, Tom Regan labeled Callicott’s approach “environmental fascism” (Regan, 1983). Later on, Callicott reviewed his treatment of the relation between Land Ethic and animal ethics and softened his view on the conflict between the two perspectives. Nonetheless, his treatment in that paper highlights a fundamental issue for the philosophical reflection about moral responsibilities toward animals and the environment. The issue is about axiology and the nature of the moral value. Holistic perspectives – as the Land Ethic is – place value in systems, while individualistic perspectives (as Singer’s utilitarianism or Regan’s rights theory) recognize moral value in experiences or capacities possessed by individuals. Does the scenario of climate change confirm the conflict highlighted by Callicott between protection of

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individuals and the care for the environment? A precise definite answer to this question is very difficult to give. In very general terms it can be said that climate change deeply redefines the terms of the question. The global nature of the climate change situation seems to require a rethinking both of animal ethics and of environmental ethics, and above all of their relation. From a historical point of view, environmental ethics reflections have always been caused and fueled by local environmental crisis. Most famous environmental ethics theories aim to have a general scope, but they start from reflections on specific troubled relations between human and the environment (think, for example, of Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac or to Arne Naess Ecosophy). On the other side – as correctly Callicott points out – animal ethics is mostly focused on the expansion of individual rights. For sure it is difficult to understand concern for the environment without specific experiences humans can make of ecosystems and natural places in trouble. Similarly, on the other side, it is difficult to elaborate a logic of moral respect detached from the notion of individual moral status and rights, at least into the perimeter of liberal democratic societies. Given these premises and the global nature of climate change, the contraposition of individualism and holism seems to be a misleading problem. It is possible to be aware of the global nature of today’s climate crisis and, at the same time, to be concerned for individual rights and moved by local disruptions of nature. These three points can be taken together by an ecological approach to the environment and non-human animals.

Farming, Greenhouse Emissions, Virtues The case of farming is paradigmatic to show how to understand animal ethics into an ecological perspective. Traditionally, animal ethics arguments about farming and killing of animals for food highlight the suffering produced to animals (like the utilitarian ones: Singer, 1975, 1979) or the infringement of animal rights (Regan, 1983). In principle, right-based animal ethics theories are more likely to support the complete abolition of animals’ use for food than utilitarian ones, whereas some utilitarian approaches could admit cases of “happy farming” in which animals live good lives (for a given amount of time) and die painlessly. The positive experiences of those animals that otherwise would not have been born (plus the human enjoyment of animal food) could justify that kind of farming on a utilitarian basis. On the contrary, deontological right approaches cannot admit any use of animals as a means for human ends. For example, according to Francione’s animal rights approach any use of animals (farming included, of course) must be regarded as a form of unacceptable slavery (Francione, 2008). Besides theoretical differences, the two most important traditional approaches to animal ethics, utilitarianism and rights theory, claim a general moral obligation to give up food obtained from animal farming based on the moral status of animals currently used in livestock production. The duty to adopt a vegan (or vegetarian – even if more problematic since it does not completely avoid animal use) diet is deduced from the recognition of animals’ moral status.

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Placing animal ethics in an ecological framework because of climate change complicates the scenario and can lead to a different approach about food choices. As a matter of fact, livestock is one of the most important sources of greenhouse gas. According to scientists it could contribute up to 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Contribution to climate change caused by animal farming is the top of the iceberg of the today reality of animal use for food. In parallel with the world population growth the global consumption of animal-based food enormously grew in the last 80/100 years. Just with regard to meat production (dairy, eggs, and seafood excluded), in 2020 humans worldwide consumed around 350 million tons of meat (compared to about 70 tons of the early 1960s of the twentieth century) (Ritchie et al., 2017). Those 350 tons of meat correspond to about 80 billion terrestrial animals slaughtered per year (the great majority – ca 70 billion – is constituted by poultry). Nowadays, the biomass (Bar-On et al., 2018) of humans and livestock together surpass that of wild mammals. These figures clearly define the huge global dimension of human use of animals for food. From an ethical point of view, it is possible to recognize three great issues in the phenomenon of animal farming as described by the data previously shown. First, raising and slaughtering animals is morally critical because of the suffering imposed on animals or the infringement of their basic rights (as stressed by classic animal ethics approaches). In the second place, the practice of farming animals is morally problematic because of its contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. Finally, it can be recognized as a critical issue the fact that today, at least in economically developed societies, the relationships between humans and animals almost uniquely consist in a form of exploitation. Advancement in industrial farming (well exemplified by Chinese skyscrapers for pig-farming) reduces animals as mere commodities and the relation of meat-eaters with them is substantially the same as they have with any other kind of industrially produced good. Those three main issues about the use of animal for food are deeply intertwined and they cannot be easily separated. A philosophical analysis of the moral issues of animal use in times of climate change must therefore be multi-dimensional and able to take into account the different aspects of the problem. Here is not the place where to suggest and discuss a normative approach of this kind, but a general remark can be made. Traditional animal ethics approaches correctly focus on animal suffering and/or rights, but today’s scenario of human/animal relationships is far more complicated and puts into question something more. In general, it can be said that this “something more” consists of the attitudes of humans toward animals (and the whole of non-human world). The fact that today wild mammals are far less than humans and their livestock is one of the many reasons supporting the definition of the present age as “Anthropocene”. As well known, at the very core of this definition there is the fact that the species Homo sapiens is capable of shaping the Earth in an unprecedented manner (and as a matter of fact causing – among other things – the dangerous processes of climate change). The new kind of relation Homo sapiens has with the Earth (and all of its living inhabitants) requires a rethinking of human attitudes toward the non-human world. As previously said, here is not the place where trying to articulate a normative proposal for such a new understanding of the ethics of human/non-human

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relationships. Nonetheless, this rethinking involves a concept that traditional (consequentialist and deontological) animal ethics usually underestimates. This concept is “character”. In a nutshell, the present multidimensional nature of human/animal relationships seems to need to focus on the notion of character as far as the unprecedented capacities of humans to affect the Earth and non-human living beings require a change of attitude and new virtues (such as the “green virtues” which Dale Jamieson refers to: 2007). As a matter of fact, virtue and character approaches have already been elaborated into the field of animal ethics (Hursthouse, 2011), but those approaches generally lack or underestimate the “ecological” approach required by the new scenario of climate change. Traditionally, virtue ethics – in different manners and declinations – is concerned with the flourishing and self-development of the human being taking care of her/his own character. An ecological understanding of the notion of character widens the aims of self-development and flourishing beyond the borders of the individual. To put it very shortly: cultivating character in ecological terms means combining self-development with caring for the flourishing of the environment in which the individual is placed. Such a definition of an ecological virtue ethics approach would require a long and sophisticated theoretical analysis, but a very short discussion of how food choices could be understood in such a paradigm may help in clarifying it. Whereas consequentialist/deontological approaches prescribe abstention from animal-based food on the ground of animal moral status, an ecological virtue ethics regards the moral value of suffering (or respect for animal individuality) as a part of the reasons to cultivate attitudes and habits toward food that do not include the use of animals. Being vegan/vegetarian should be part of a character not just caring for oneself and animals (being someone who rejects suffering beyond species-barrier). Endorsing veg food habits is, more generally, a way to adopt an attitude of caring for the environment, the non-human living beings, and the future generations. In a nutshell, an ecological virtue ethics approach makes food choices a part of a more general lifestyle oriented to taking care in a relational manner of aspects under-evaluated (or ignored at all) by more traditional ways of living.

Climate Change, Wildlife, and Conservation Ethics Traditionally animal ethics has been mainly focused on human-animal relationships - like food production of lab experiments – in which humans directly use animals. “Wild” animals are less under the focus of those analyses. For example, according to Tom Regan in The case for animal rights there are no moral reasons to prevent killing and suffering of wild animals when it is caused by other animals (Regan, 1983). Recently, Peter Singer and Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek argued that ignorance about the complexity of ecological dynamics should impose us a prudential approach prescribing to abstain to intervene to prevent animal suffering in the wild (Singer & de Lazari-Radek, 2014; for a general discussion of the topic of wild animal suffering see: Johannsen, 2020). The idea of leaving wild animals alone can perfectly make sense in a scenario in which a line separating human civilization from

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wilderness can efficiently be drawn. In other words, it makes sense if animals that can really be “left alone” can clearly be identified. Hunting and killing animals that otherwise would have lived their lives undisturbed by humans seems to be a case in which such a line can be drawn. A similar case seems to be that of the destruction of the habitat of wild animals by a human artifact (i.e., a new road crossing the woods). The situation of climate change deeply modifies the scenario and profoundly undermines the possibility of drawing so sharp lines. The core idea of Anthropocene is precisely that “Homo sapiens is everywhere”: wilderness is now a really precarious concept that can hardly be used to identify “uncontaminated nature”. According to some scholars the notion of “hybrid nature” should now be adopted to describe such deep intertwinement of human activities and what used to be “wild nature” (Pellegrino, 2021). Here it is not the place to discuss whether today nature as a whole should be regarded as “hybrid” or if some spots of “wild nature” still exist on Earth. Here it is possible to stress the conceptual and empirical utility of “hybrid nature” and to establish that today the environment is, for the most part, hybrid. Since wilderness is a concept no longer fully available and appropriate for philosophical reflection, animal ethics should be aware of the fact that direct interactions of humans with animals are many more than usually understood (even if in less visible ways). Extending standard animal ethics approaches in tune with the new “hybrid nature” scenario would basically mean understanding human responsibilities for wild animals as directed to avoid the suffering caused them by climate change or to avoid the violation of their basic rights also provoked by the environmental crisis. Nonetheless, like in the case of farming animals for food the new scenario radically challenges the traditional ways of thinking about animal ethics. Of course, disruption of the environment and climate change causes suffering and death of individual animals, but on a more general level (and from an ecological point of view) they can lead (and as a matter of fact they are actually leading) to species extinction for anthropic causes. According to a huge number of scientific evidence, life on Earth is currently undergoing the so-called “Sixth mass extinction” mostly from anthropic causes (accelerated during the last two centuries). Such a situation raises a topic that is substantially absent in standard animal ethics and that can be summarized in the question “Do humans have a duty to preserve animal species?”. This question traditionally belongs to the domain of environmental ethics since is – as previously discussed – more focused on ecosystems and “nature” as a whole. Accepting the idea that animal ethics in times of climate change should take an ecological turn suggests that moral concern about non-human animals should take into consideration also this question (even if it does not regard individuals but collective entities like the species are). As a matter of fact, such a question could be translated into the more traditional context of animal ethics as a question about a possible duty to bring into existence future generations of animals living lives worth living. In fact, the extinction of a species means preventing new individuals of that species coming into life and some normative approaches (i.e., total utilitarianism) could regard this fact as a moral evil. Another more traditional way of putting the problem stresses the importance of preserving biodiversity for its function in

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protecting the welfare of animals into ecosystems. Besides these ways of framing the problem of responsibility toward species extinction a more general question remains: should animal species be preserved per se? Answering such a question would require a discussion about the notion of intrinsic value and the possibility that species possess it (for a critical discussion see: O’Neil, 1997). Any discussion on this topic should not ignore some fundamental facts about the nature of species from the evolutionary biology point of view. First, species classification does not refer to any actual ontological distinction in life. Species are the outcome of a conventional taxonomy that is for sure based on real facts (anatomical similitudes, genetics, capacity to breed, etc.) but species in themselves are not “real”. Darwin’s evolutionary biology proves that organisms constantly transform because of random variations and under the pressure of evolutionary forces (natural selection above all). Differences among all living organisms are differences in degree and do not correspond to any kind of ontological separation. Species classification is a snapshot taken by humans of temporary aggregations of organisms characterized by some relevant features. Second, since life undergoes a process of continuous transformation and mutation the extinction of the species is an inherent feature of the phenomenon of life. These two facts about species – their being both conventional and temporary – represent two serious questions that any discussion about the ethics of species conservation should face. As a matter of fact, the very concept of “conservation” seems to be profoundly inconsistent with the basic processes of life and its transformation as highlighted by Darwin’s evolutionary biology. In a nutshell, it can be said that the fundamental meaning of “conservation” is rooted in the human point of view since it does not correspond to “how nature is” but to “how humans would like nature to be”. Of course, the non-Darwinian character of the concept of conservation does not directly imply that conservation policies are morally unjustified (unless a highly problematic metaethical view about the identity between facts and values is taken). Being aware of that basic inconsistency just means that justifications of conservation moral concepts and policies should not be deduced from any idea such as “preservation of nature per se”. Very generally speaking, those justifications can rely just on the interests and values of human beings and the interests of sentient beings. Also, from a very general point of view, a moral argument about species extinction and human responsibilities toward conservation could somehow fruitfully articulate a morally significant difference between the extinctions that are provoked by anthropic factors and those that are not, even if in the hybrid nature scenario of the Anthropocene the line separating the two cases is hard to draw.

Conclusion Climate change challenges some key concepts and arguments of traditional approaches of animal ethics. The scenario of the present environmental crisis requires animal ethics scholars to widen and reframe their analysis into an ecological framework. At the same time, a rethinking of animal ethics should provide

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arguments able to take into account the need for justifying not only actions morally respectful of animals, but also the need for a reflection on what means shaping a character provided with virtues able to take care of animal individualities into an ecological framework.

Cross-References ▶ Climate Change and Environmental Justice ▶ Climate Change, Environmental Philosophy, and Anthropocentrism ▶ Climate Change and Security in the Anthropocene: Existential Threats, Ethics, and Futures

References Bar-On, Y. M., Phillips, R., & Milo, R. (2018). The biomass distribution on earth. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(25), 6506–6511. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1711842115 Beauchamp, T. L., & Frey, R. G. (Eds.). (2011). The Oxford handbook of animal ethics. Oxford University Press. Bentham, J. (2007). An introduction to the principles of morals and legislation. Dover. Callicott, J. B. (1980). Animal liberation: A triangular affair. Environmental Ethics, 2(4), 311–338. Darwin, C. (1987). In S. Smith, S. Herbert, D. Kohn, P. H. Barrett, & P. J. Gautrey (Eds.), Charles Darwin’s notebooks 1836–1844. Geology, transmutation of species, metaphysical enquiries. Cambridge University Press. Diamond, J. (1997). Guns, germs and steel. The fates of human societies. W.W. Norton. Dombrowski, D. (2004). A very brief history of vegetarianism. In S. Sapontzis (Ed.), Food for thought: The debate over eating meat (pp. 22–33). Prometheus. Francione, G. L. (1996). Rain without thunder: The ideology of animal rights movement. Temple University Press. Francione, G. L. (2008). Animals as persons: Essays on the abolition of animal exploitation. Columbia University Press. Frazer, M. L. (2010). The enlightenment of sympathy: Justice and the moral sentiments in the eighteenth century and today. Oxford University Press. Hunt, L. (2007). Inventing human rights. A history. W.W. Norton & C. Hursthouse, R. (2011). Virtue ethics and the treatment of animals. In T. L. Beauchamp & R. G. Frey (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of animal ethics. Oxford University Press. Jamieson, D. (2007). When utilitarians should be virtue theorists. Utilitas, 19(2), 160–183. Jamieson, D. (2012). Ethics and the environment. Cambridge U.P. Johannsen, K. (2020). Wild animal ethics: The moral and political problem of wild animal suffering. Routledge. Midgley, M. (1983). Animals and Why They Matter. A Journey in the Species Barrier. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Penguin. Nussbaum, M. C. (2022). Justice for animals. Our collective responsibility. Simon & Schuster. O’Neil, R. (1997). Intrinsic value, moral standing, and species. Environmental Ethics, 19(1), 45–52. Pellegrino, G. (2021). The traces of nature; or: The value of hybrid nature. In T. Tambassi & M. Tanca (Eds.), The philosophy of geography (pp. 211–239). Springer. Pollo, S. (2021). Manifesto per un animalismo democratico. Carocci.

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Pollo, S. (2022). Darwinian biology and the new understanding of animals. In S. Pollo & A. Vitale (Eds.), Human/animal relationships in transformation. Scientific, moral and legal perspectives (pp. 9–29). Palgrave Macmillan. Rachels, J. (1990). Created from animals: The moral implications of Darwinism. Oxford University Press. Regan, T. (1983). The case for animal rights. University of California Press. Ritchie, H., Rosado, P., & Roser, M. (2017). Meat and dairy production. Published online at OurWorldInData.org. https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production. Accessed 28 Mar 2023. Ryder, R. D. (2000a). Animal revolution: Changing attitudes towards speciesism. Berg. Ryder, R. D. (2000b). Speciesism again: The original leaflet. Critical Society, 2, 1–2. Shipman, P. (2011). The animal connection. A new perspective on what makes us human. W.W. Norton & C. Singer, P. (1975). Animal liberation. Harper Collins. Singer, P. (1979). Practical ethics. Cambridge University Press. Singer, P., & de Lazari-Radek, K. (2014). The point of view of the universe: Sidgwick and contemporary ethics. Oxford University Press. Steiner, G. (2005). Anthropocentrism and its discontents. The moral status of animals in the history of Western philosophy. University of Pittsburgh Press.

Plant Ethics and Climate Change Luca Stroppa

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Plant Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Intrinsic Value Theories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Instrumentalist and Relational Theories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Plants and Climate Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Role of Plants in the Climate System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Damages of Climate Change on Plants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Plant Ethics and Climate Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Duties of Preservation of Plants and Forests . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Responsibility of Planting Trees . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Duties to Help Plant Migration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

Plant ethics is a field of philosophy that discusses the moral value of plants, and individual responsibilities toward them. As anthropogenic climate change is likely to have devastating effects on plants, a plant ethics analysis of climate change is crucial to fully understand the extent of people’s responsibilities toward plants. However, surprisingly little has been written on this topic. This chapter aims to provide an overview of the main positions in plant ethics as well as an initial exploration of the following three salient questions concerning plant ethics and climate change. First, how stringent are people’s responsibilities to preserve plants? Second, do people have responsibilities to plant trees? Third, do people have responsibilities to help plant migration? Plant ethics theories struggle to different extent with each of these questions. On all theories, people have great responsibilities to preserve, if not individual plants, at least large forests, and on L. Stroppa (*) University of Turin (FINO), University of St. Andrews, Turin, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_73

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most theories people have some responsibility to help plant migration. On whether there are responsibilities to plant trees, different plant ethics theories deliver widely different results, from there being no responsibility to plant any tree to there being responsibility to plant as many trees as possible. All three questions are venues for future research in plant ethics. Keywords

Plant ethics · Climate ethics · Value theory · Moral status · Prioritization

Introduction Anthropogenic climate change is altering the world on a scale never seen before, impacting for the worse the lives of many individuals. While the environmental damage on humans and sometimes animals are often in the spotlight, the greatest number of individuals affected by climate change is likely to be plants, as they constitute more than 80% of the total biomass on Earth. Several devastating effects of climate change involving plants have already been observed: for example, in the year 2020, 160 million acres of terrain containing uncountable plants were burnt by climate change-induced wildfires in Australia and California alone (Binskin et al., 2020; GACC, 2023; Borchers et al., 2019; Williams et al., 2019). Given the large extent to which plants will be affected by climate change and the role that they could play in preventing it, it is crucial to examine people’s responsibilities toward plants. Ethical behavior toward plants has become a topic of philosophical investigation, prompted by the developments of environmental ethics on the one hand and by the progress in animal ethics on the other (Attfield, 1981; Hiernaux, 2021). The resulting philosophical field is known as “plant ethics”: it explores what individual responsibilities toward plants are, and what the grounds for this responsibility are. Even though the field has only a recent history and is widely underexplored, it provides several different frameworks for the morality of people’s treatment of plants. This chapter aims to give an overview of how theories of plant ethics apply to climate change. In order to set up this overview, two preliminary discussions are needed. Firstly, this chapter will provide an introduction to the main philosophical positions in plant ethics. This discussion focuses on what is the basis for people’s responsibility toward plants: if it is for their own sake (i.e., they have intrinsic value), if it is because they are of crucial importance for human beings (i.e., they have instrumental value), or if it is because of a special relationship toward them (section “Plant Ethics”). Afterward, this chapter will briefly point out how plants mitigate climate change, how climate change damages them, and how global warming forces plant species to migrate toward more favorable climates (section “Plants and Climate Change”). Once the core concepts of plant ethics are clear and the main interactions between climate change and plants have been identified, the reader finds the crucial section of

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the chapter, where pressing moral issues of plant ethics as connected to climate change will be explored. Since plant ethics is still at a very embryonic stage, there are not many active debates as to what people’s responsibilities toward plants given anthropogenic climate change are. This last section “Plant Ethics and Climate Change” aims to open the discussion on some key topics. These topics are: how stringent are people’s responsibilities to prevent plant and forest extinction, with a particular focus on the Amazon forest (section “Duties of Preservation of Plants and Forests”), whether people have duties to plant trees (section “Responsibility of Planting Trees”), and whether people should facilitate plant migration (section “Duties to Help Plant Migration”). The chapter concludes with a summary and some brief observations (section “Conclusion”).

Plant Ethics The sentiment that people owe something to plants is widely shared, to the point that several governments have recognized some moral responsibility toward plants. (On moral responsibility in climate change in general, see chapter ▶ “Consequentialism and Climate Change” in this volume.) For example, the national constitution of Switzerland protects the moral status of plants (ECNH, 2008), and New Zealand has given legal rights to the plants surrounding the Whanganui River (Vines et al., 2013). However, there is surprisingly little agreement on what exactly the moral status of plants is. The Swiss Federal Ethics Committee of Non-Human Biotechnology reports that “the only criterion on which all the members could agree, despite their very differing intuitions, was that we should not harm or destroy plants arbitrarily. Whether concrete ways of acting could be derived from this prohibition on the arbitrary handling of plants, and what they might be, remained unclear” (ECNH, 2008, p. 4). Similarly, in the plant ethics debate there is agreement that people morally ought to respect plants to some extent, but it is not clear to what extent, and why. This section explores the different theories about what people’s responsibility toward plants is based on. Many theories base individual responsibility toward plants in that plants have intrinsic value. For something to have intrinsic value means that it has moral value on its own. Intrinsic value is to be contrasted with instrumental value: for something to have instrumental value means that people’s moral concerns toward it are exclusively motivated by how it impacts humans or other intrinsically valuable beings (Moore, 1922). Typically, people take other human beings to have intrinsic value: people think they have responsibilities toward others as, plausibly, other people’s interests are valuable in themselves. As an example of things with only instrumental value, consider pencils: most people believe they have only instrumental value, and they do not think pencils matter for their own sake. They matter morally, if at all, only because they can be helpful (or harmful) to the interests of the intrinsically valuable beings.

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Whether plants have intrinsic or instrumental value is one of the main debates of the plant ethics literature. Let us start the overview of plant ethics theories from who thinks that plants have intrinsic value, namely zoocentrists, constitutivists, perfectionists, and biocentrists (for similar reviews, see (Hiernaux, 2021; Pellegrino, 2018; Kallhoff et al., 2018)).

Intrinsic Value Theories A prominent position according to which plants have intrinsic moral value is zoocentrism. Zoocentrists believe that plants have intrinsic value in virtue of being sentient (Hall, 2011, pp. 38–43, 156; Pouteau, 2014; Sandler, 2018). Being sentient is here understood as having goals, interests, or feeling pleasure, pain, or sensations that are positive or negative in general being sentient. In fact, it is virtually uncontroversial in ethics that sentience is a sufficient condition for intrinsic value. Traditionally, only humans and animals are considered to be sentient. However, according to various researchers, including the father of evolutionary theory Charles Darwin (Darwin & Darwin, 1880; for example see p. 574), studies on plant signaling suggest that plants may indeed be sentient (Baluška et al., 2008; Mancuso & Viola, 2015; Segundo-Ortin & Calvo, 2021). On the basis of this sentience, zoocentrists can defend that plants have intrinsic value. The Constitutivist position believes that plants have intrinsic value as they are constitutive of something with intrinsic value. Here is what they mean. Constitutivists defended that ecosystems have intrinsic value (Leopold, 1961; Attfield, 1981; Rolston III, 1988, Chap. 5; Johnson, 1993), or that species of plants have intrinsic value (Pellegrino, 2018). Since ecosystems and forests at least partially consist in their vegetation, and since a species of plants is instantiated in each individual plant, plants have intrinsic value. In other words, plants have intrinsic value since something with an intrinsic value is realized through plants. Another position according to which plants have intrinsic value is Perfectionism. On Perfectionism, what is best for any being is the fullest and most excellent development of its nature. In other words, what is paramount for Perfectionists is the flourishing of individuals, a concept indeed borrowed from botany by value theory. On Perfectionism, anything that can flourish is thereby valuable. Since it is clear that plants can flourish and develop their nature, some Perfectionists believe that they have intrinsic value (Kallhoff, 2018; Rolston III, 1988, p. 108; Nussbaum, 2006). Some other Perfectionists defend that the nature of plant is such that they have dignity (Odparlik, 2018), legal rights (ECNH, 2008), or integrity, here intended as capacity to reach natural aims (Bueren & Struik, 2005). Finally, Biocentrism assigns intrinsic value to plants. According to biocentrism limiting intrinsic value to species equipped with human-like consciousness or a nervous system is arbitrary: any living being has intrinsic, non-instrumental value. It trivially follows that plants, being alive, have intrinsic value, whether or not plants are sentient beings (Attfield, 1984, 1991; Stone, 2010; Rolston III, 1988, Chap. 3).

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While these theories agree that plants have intrinsic value, on most versions of these theories it is permissible to treat plants merely as a mean rather than an end (Odparlik, 2018, pp. 63–64). Someone or something is treated as a mean if someone uses them in order to benefit someone or something else. To treat someone or something as an end means that actions directly impacting something or someone aim to benefit this someone or something. On some moral views, and typically on Kantian views, it is impermissible to treat humans merely as means, and they should be treated always also as ends: for most theories of plant ethics, this does not apply to plants. It may seem strange that it can be permissible to treat as a mean something with intrinsic value, but it is not something unique of plants. Suppose, for example, that particularly remarkable pieces of arts are intrinsically valuable: for example, suppose that Modigliani paintings have value in themselves, and it would be wrong to destroy one of them even if no one were to ever look at it anyway. This is consistent with thinking that it is permissible to use a Modigliani as a mean by selling it in order to make a large charity donation. The same may be true of plants: while they may have value in themselves, most ethicists agree that people can use some of them in various ways for their own benefit, for example, in order to eat their leaves or to produce medicines.

Instrumentalist and Relational Theories Some theorists do not think that plants have intrinsic value, but only instrumental value (Maris, 2014; Višak, 2018). Even for Instrumentalist theories, however, plants have enormous value, for multiple reasons. Plants provide us with the oxygen necessary for our breathing. The overwhelming majority of human food comes from, is, or feeds on, plants. Plants are crucial in medicine: roughly 80% of the human population relies exclusively on plants for primary health care (Fowler, 2006). On less impressive, but still valuable respects, people derive pleasure from plants, and a great body of research suggests that mere exposition to plants improves human mental and physical health, mood and cognitive abilities (Han et al., 2022). People breathe, eat, and heal thanks to plants. These are just a few of the ways in which plants are instrumentally invaluable to humankind, and to any species on Earth. Some other valuable properties of plants will be explored in the next section. Instrumentalist theories do not deny that people have responsibility toward plants. They simply claim that this responsibility is derived from what humans and animals derive from plants: if animals and humans were not to use plants, there would be no reason to be responsible toward plants. Finally, some plant ethicists believe that people’s responsibility toward plant is not rooted in any discussion about value. This is true for relational theorists: they believe that people’s responsibility toward plant has to be found in the special relationship people have with them (Kallhoff, 2014; Kallhoff, 2018, p. 51; Schörgenhumer, 2018; Hiernaux, 2021). The relational perspective is rooted in

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virtue ethics or care ethics conceptions of morality, and has the advantage of giving action guidance without requiring background assumptions about whether or not plants have intrinsic value (Hiernaux, 2021, p. 3). (On the relation between virtue ethics and climate change, see chapter ▶ “Climate Change and Virtue Ethics” in this volume.) People’s responsibility toward plants can be based, for example, on the fact that plants are necessary for their survival, and this connects them with us tightly. Or the connection can be based on the recognition that people are part of the same environment. According to relational theorists, these may be the basis of virtuous relationship or a relationship of care with plants. This concludes the list of all the main positions explored so far in plant ethics. It is now time to examine the connections between plants and climate change.

Plants and Climate Change Since this is an ethics paper, the following discussion does not aim to provide the reader with an exhaustive representation of the botany of climate change, but to briefly give the very essential information to understand (section “The Role of Plants in the Climate System”) how plants help control global ecological balance and (section “Damages of Climate Change on Plants”) how climate change is harmful to plants.

The Role of Plants in the Climate System One of the key roles of plants in an ecosystem is to take out CO2 from the atmosphere. This happens in two ways. First, via photosynthesis, where plants absorb CO2 to generate oxygen. Second, by facilitating silicate weathering, a chemical reaction that allows the soil to absorb CO2 (Berner, 1992). Given plant’s abilities of photosynthesis and their effect on the soil, forests are important “carbon sinks”, that is, locations where the CO2 of the planet diminishes. The main way in which humans cause climate change is the production of large quantities of CO2. Emitted CO2 remains in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, where it absorbs heat from the Earth, and radiates it in all directions, including back at Earth itself. Since heat is retained on Earth by CO2, Earth’s temperature is rising. In order to absorb CO2, and thus mitigate the damage of anthropogenic carbon emissions, carbon sinks are required. The only natural carbon sinks are soil, photosynthesis, and ocean absorption: plants and forests have a key role in two of these three carbon sinks. In addition to these roles, large forests have additional beneficial effects in regulating the climate of the region they are in. These effects vary from forest to forest; as an example that will be useful later in this chapter, the Amazon rainforest has a great role in regulating South American rainfalls. The forest generates a significant quantity of its own rainfalls by retaining moisture, and this is central to the balance of rainfalls in the South American continent (Staal, et al., 2018). Similar forests have similar roles in regulating the local climate.

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Damages of Climate Change on Plants While plants can be immensely helpful to control climate change and diminish CO2, they suffer from climate change in various ways. This section does not aim to cover them all, but tries to give a rough idea of how worrying climate change is when it comes to the effects on plants. The most serious effect of climate change on plants is that climate change can end entire species. It has been estimated that a baffling 40% of plant species are threatened with extinction by climate change (Lughadha et al., 2020). Individual plant and species are threatened by climate change in various ways. The most evident, already mentioned in the introduction, are wildfires: as increased temperature makes it easier for wildfires to spread, wildfires will reach and burn larger numbers of trees the more global temperature increases. A main source of plant disruption are the changes in the structure of the ecosystem. For example, the composition of the soil may change (typically, the moisture of the soil would decrease), and it may not be suitable for some plants to grow where they used to. Another example is that, as the level of sea water rises, salty water may contaminate the fresh waters used by low-lying plants, which would be damaging for the plants. Or, climate change may introduce into the ecosystem some new pests that are particularly devastating for plants – famously, the Emerald Ash Borer, native of East Asia, has killed tens of millions of ash trees in the USA (Herms & McCullough, 2014). Climate change also hurts plants in ways that are not necessarily extinctionthreatening. For the purposes of this chapter, the most important non-extinctionthreatening effect of climate change on plants is that it causes them to migrate. In fact, as the soil where they usually grow becomes unfit for them, plants strive to reproduce in different, more favorable soils – typically, the soil of colder regions. The phenomenon of plant migration is not very well understood as it is hard to collect data, but as the next section illustrates poses some interesting philosophical problems.

Plant Ethics and Climate Change Now that the necessary information about plant ethics and about the impact of climate change on plants has been provided, it is time to discuss plant ethics and climate change together. The connection between plant ethics and the specific phenomenon of climate change is widely underexplored. This section points out three unresolved problems in this area: (1) how great is people’s responsibility to preserve plants? (2) do people have responsibilities to plant trees? (3) do people have responsibilities to aid plant migration?

Duties of Preservation of Plants and Forests There is agreement that plants have enormous value, at least instrumental (section “Plant Ethics”), and in particular that forests are important carbon sinks (section “Plants and Climate Change”). It follows that preserving large groups of plants, and

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certainly large forests, is extremely valuable (see also Attfield, 2018). But how valuable? And, given this value, what kind of responsibility do people have? To explore these questions, the Amazon rainforest is used as a case study: what will be said about the Amazon is true to different degrees for different groups of plants. The Amazon Rainforest is one of the most important carbon sinks of the planet, and it contains an impressive number of useful resources. It contains an enormous quantity of plants – specifically, it contains more than 80 thousand species of plants, half of which may be unique to this forest (Morales & Vinicius, 2003). It is also home to countless animal species (for invertebrates alone, see (Lewinsohn & Prado, 2005)), and more than 28 million people (Alves, 2023). Finally, as mentioned in section “Damages of Climate Change on Plants” the Amazon Rainforest is a centerpiece of the South American hydrological cycle. Scientists have warned that a decrease of the Amazon rainforest to 80/75% of its pre-industrial size would be a colossal ecological disaster: the rainforest would change vegetation and change into a savanna, modifying its hydrological role and triggering one of the “tipping points” of no return for global warming (Lovejoy & Nobre, 2018). Triggering the tipping point is predicted to increase, alone, the global temperature by a total of 0.2  C within a hundred years: that is equal to one-sixth of the total temperature increase from pre-industrial age to 2020. The anthropogenic disruption of the Amazon forest is very rapidly approaching the critical 26%: indeed, 20% of the forest has been irreparably disrupted already, and an additional 6% is worryingly degraded (Quillantilla et al., 2022). However, restoring this last 6% is still possible until 2030. Given the moral badness of reaching the Amazon rainforest tipping point, what does plant ethics say about people’s moral responsibility? On any theory of plant ethics, an anthropogenic decrease of 26% of the Amazon rainforest’s size would be morally bad. Theories, however, disagree on how bad it would be. This is an important question: it is plausible that individual responsibilities toward plants, and toward the Amazon rainforest plants in particular, are proportional to their value. This section will now explore how each position evaluates the loss of the Amazon forest, and the problems with each evaluation. Instrumentalism is the theory according to which this loss would be less bad, and the badness is already enormous. On Instrumentalism, the badness of a 26% decrease of the Amazon rainforest consists in its damage to humans (and possibly animals) only. This includes the damages to the million individuals living in the forest, the individuals who use resources from the forest, the entire global population which will suffer from triggering the tipping point, and the damage generated by not having access to some plants that may provide medications. However, there may be some species of plants that are going extinct that do not affect human lives at all, and individual plants that certainly have little to no impact on humans. If this were the case, on Instrumentalism people do not have responsibility to protect all plants of the Amazon rainforest. This significantly decreases people’s responsibility Suppose that, within the degraded (but still recoverable) area of the rainforest, there is a large section where no human lives, whose animals can be re-located, and

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there are no edible or medical plants. Suppose further that destroying this area, by itself, would not trigger the tipping point, and that there is the possibility to devote this area to housing for homeless people. Instrumentalists seem committed to conclude that it is better to devote this area to housing. Many environmentalists would balk at this conclusion. These environmentalists would prefer a theory according to which plants have intrinsic value. However, in order to provide a full account concerning individual responsibilities when it comes to conserving plants and forests, these theories need to answer some theoretical questions. Let us start with zoocentrism, biocentrism, and perfectionism. On all these theories, the intrinsic, non-instrumental badness of destroying the Amazon forest is equal to the badness of the death of each plant that disappears in that forest. Is this intrinsically better or worse than having the same number of animals dying? How easily can this intrinsic value be compensated? Suppose the forest was the only suitable location for some efficient, environmentally friendly way to produce energy. Under which conditions it would be best to decrease the area of that forest or even have it disappear? It is implausible that at no condition it is best to reduce a forest’s area: if people were to take down a single Amazon flower in order to install a small machine that provides zero-emissions energy to a nation of the size and industrial necessities of China for a century, it would be best to do that. But as the forest portion to be taken down increases in size, and the efficiency of the source of energy decreases, what is best becomes less clear. Should people let degrade 1% of the Amazon to have the entirety of North America and Europe running on zero emissions? Is it better to take down 0.01% of the forest to have a city like London running on zero emissions, or is it better not to do that? In order to answer these questions, theories of plant ethics need to research how the value of plants compares to the value of energy production. For Constitutivists, things are a bit different. If forests, ecosystems, or species have intrinsic moral value, as constitutivists believe, then the degradation of the biggest rainforest to a savannah, or the loss of hundreds of plant species, has to be added to the damage of instrumental value. However, the badness of this disruption depends largely on how the disruption comes about, and on which constitutivist theory one endorses. Let us analyze constitutivism about forest, ecosystem, and species in this order. Assume instead that ecosystems are intrinsically valuable: it is true that many ecosystems internal to the Amazon may change, maybe radically, but without necessarily disappearing. However, it is not clear why change would be bad. Is the change of an ecosystem a great intrinsic loss, that calls for great effort additional to the effort required to avoid the purely instrumental loss? It is not clear why this would be the case Assume finally that species are intrinsically valuable. If people were to save all or most seeds of the species that face extinction for the degradation of the Amazon forest, it seems the species loss would be fairly limited. This would be especially true if the value is “non-incremental”, that is, the value of a species does not depend on the quantity of its instantiation, but simply in its existence rather than non-existence

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(Pellegrino, 2018; Dworkin, 1993). Thus, on this interpretation of constitutivism, the badness of losing the rainforest depends on how many seeds of each species humanity manage to preserve. If one is unsatisfied by instrumentalists, constitutivists, and the other intrinsic value theories, one may want to adopt a Relational theory. However, it is not clear how this would help in answering how stringent are people’s responsibilities toward forest and plant preservations. Remember that Relational perspectives bypass questions about value. This creates an obstacle in answering the problems that intrinsic accounts have: without an account of how the value of plants works, it is unclear at which condition, if any, it is permissible to use plants from a forest. Additionally, relational theories seem to prescribe that who in a less direct relation with the plants have less obligations toward them. This, however, seem to have counterintuitive implications. This would mean that a businessman living in Europe whose relation with the Amazon forest consists in a very small percentage of revenue has less responsibility to preserve the forest than a person living in the forest. Still, the businessman may be damaging the forest significantly more: it seems that the businessman should have more responsibility than who lives in the forest. Relational theories may avoid these problems, for example, postulating that the relation is between the human species and the plant species, which would mean that all humans have equal responsibility toward the environment. However, this also needs an account of how individual responsibility is derived from species responsibility. To conclude, when examining people’s responsibilities toward plants and forest preservation, no account of plant ethics can deliver fully satisfying answers just yet. This is a crucial area for further exploration in plant ethics.

Responsibility of Planting Trees Trees have numerous properties that make them instrumentally valuable (sections “Instrumentalist and Relational Theories” and “The Role of Plants in the Climate System”). According to some theorists, trees may have intrinsic value (section “Instrumentalist and Relational Theories”). Thus, an increase in the number of plants seems desirable. This section explores the extent to which this is true by analyzing whether people have responsibilities to plant trees. Indeed, there have been numerous initiatives to plant large numbers of trees, such as the Trillion Trees campaign or Plant a Billion Trees. These initiatives have been criticized by environmentalists, since they can be counterproductive in many ways, from failing to recognize the value of diversity in an ecosystem, to increasing the risk of fires, to the accusations of incentivizing greenwashing. Of course, this does not mean that planting trees is impermissible. If a person decides to plant a tree and knows that they are respecting biodiversity, do not increase the risk of fire, and are not using the tree as an excuse to pollute, then it certainly seems that the person is doing a good thing. And indeed, the more the better. Efforts like the one performed by Jadav “Molai” Payeng, the “forest man of

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India” who turned a sandbar into a forest reserve hosting a variety of species, are certainly praiseworthy. Without going to that extreme, people may indeed have an obligation to plant some trees, at least for a matter of reparation. It is not that implausible, for example, that any time a person consumes a plant, this person may have some obligation to plant another in its place (or in a place where this tree serves the same ecological function). However, plant ethics theories do not immediately provide a justification for intuitions of this kind, or for a responsibility to plant trees in general. What remains of this section explores how each family of theories may do so. On instrumentalist theories, it is better to plant a tree whenever the tree will create an advantage for humans (or animals). However, this does not straightforwardly transform in a responsibility to plant trees. If the instrumentalist were to know that some action alternative to planting trees is more instrumentally valuable, the instrumentalist is committed to conclude that this other action would be better than planting trees. In order for the instrumentalists to conclude that they have a responsibility to plant trees, they need to show that planting trees is indeed among the best options they have available. On zoocentrism, biocentrism, and perfectionism, people have responsibilities to plant a tree independently from instrumental considerations only if people have a responsibility to make sure there are as many beings with intrinsic value as possible. However, this has heavily contested implications. If people have a responsibility to create as many beings with intrinsic value as possible, people should not only plant as many trees as possible: assuming, as plausible, that humans have intrinsic value, people should make sure to have as many kids as possible. But it seems counterintuitive that people have a responsibility to reproduce as much as possible. Trying to hold onto the intuition that humans have intrinsic value without also implying that people should reproduce as many of them as possible has been established as a very difficult problem within value theory (Parfit, 1984, 4th part; McMahan, 2009). In order to solve this problem, intrinsic value theories may try to defend that people have a responsibility to ensure that the currently existing value does not diminish. While this is intuitively plausible, it is not clear how this would follow from zoocentrism, biocentrism, or perfectionism. Constitutivists seem to be trapped between the problems of instrumentalism and the problems of zoocentrism, biocentrism, and perfectionism. In fact, constitutivists have two possibilities. One is to believe that what has intrinsic value is to preserve the existence, species or ecosystems. However, only very rarely planting a single plant will preserve a species or an ecosystem. Thus, this constitutivist view cannot justify responsibilities to plant trees on the basis of intrinsic value. It seems that this constitutivist view has to motivate planting single plants with instrumental justifications only. This obviously leads them to have the same problems as instrumentalists have. Alternatively, constitutivists may claim that an ecosystem, or a species thrives more, or increases value, whenever a new plant grows. Or they may claim that people have a duty to create as many forests, ecosystems, or species as possible. But this can justified only by claiming that people have a responsibility to make sure

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there are as many things with intrinsic value as possible, or that people have to ensure that what has intrinsic value is as thriving as possible. This leads to the same problems as zoocentrism, biocentrism, and perfectionism have: this version of constitutivism is committed to the claim that not only people should plant as many trees as possible, but also that people should reproduce as much as possible. Relational theories seem to fare a bit better than the others when it comes to justifying the duty to plant trees. If what motivates people’s responsibility toward plants is the fact that people share the same ecosystem, or people’s relationship of mutual support, then one may conclude that, indeed, the only way to ensure that this relation is preserved is to preserve the environment – that is, to plant a tree whenever one takes down one. While this conclusion is intuitively compelling, it has limited application, in that it does not justify planting trees in environments one has no connection with. For example, it does not justify why one should fight desertification around the equator by planting trees unless one lives near the equator. However, desertification near the equator may be caused by emissions of people living far from the equator: it is not obvious how to track the responsibility that people living far from the equator intuitively have. Still, note that this objection may not be that devastating: some people’s intuition that there is some responsibility to plant some trees is much stronger than their intuition that people need to plant some trees regardless of their distance from us. To conclude, on whether people have responsibility to plant trees, and whether planting a single tree is sufficient to repair to the consumption of another, plant ethics theories deliver widely different results, from there being no responsibility to plant any tree to there being responsibility to plant as many trees as possible. This must be a matter of future research in plant ethics.

Duties to Help Plant Migration As seen in section “Damages of Climate Change on Plants”, plants will move to a climate that is more favorable to them. However, migration is sometimes extremely hard for plants. Plant ethics should tell us what are people’s responsibilities toward plant migration. This leads to two questions. First, whether people have duties to help plant migration at all: while this may save a lot of plant species, piloting migration may be overstepping the scope of human agency. Second, if people have these duties, how to prioritize plants and plant species over one another, a necessary question given limited space to grow new plants. Before discussing in detail these two questions, let us start from exploring what the obstacles to plant migration are. They can be summarized into two main families. First, it is not always easy for a plant species to find a suitable environment. Indeed, certain features of the required environment may be missing for the reproduction or development of that plant in a radius that the plant can reach by reproducing. For example, the composition of the soil, or the humidity of the air may be unfit for the plant’s survival, or an insect crucial for the plant’s reproduction may be missing in the ecosystem the plant is attempting to migrate to.

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Second, there simply may not be soil available. Given the large surface occupied with infrastructure, houses, crops, and industries, the surface available for new plants shrinks as time goes by. It is unclear how many plants will migrate or are migrating: the data are scarce, and the migration models are limited (Nielson et al., 2005, p. 753). On some estimations, however, half of all species are migrating to more favorable climates due to global warming. There is no reason to believe that plants would differ much in that respect. Human beings cannot afford losing great percentages of plant species: remember the list of crucial benefits people get from plants listed when introducing instrumental value (section “Instrumentalist and Relational Theories”). Even if plants were to have only instrumental value, people most likely have, if not as individual agents at least as a collective, a responsibility to help plant migration. Here the morality of plant migration aid makes plant ethics intersect with the ethics of geo-engineering, that is the “the deliberate large-scale intervention in the Earth’s climate system, in order to moderate global warming” (Royal Society, 2009, p. ix) (for reviews of the ethics of geo-engineering, see (Gardiner, 2019; Pamplany et al., 2020)). While it is unclear whether preparing for plant migration needs necessarily to involve large-scale interventions, geo-engineering and plant migration aid face similar ethical issues. The first issue is that successfully aiding plant migration can prevent awareness toward climate action. In fact, preparing the environment for plant migration means fixing with human technology the environmental damage caused by human technology. This may push the dangerous idea that humans don’t need to change their environmentally careless lifestyle that much, given that some technology will always resolve any problem that may emerge from said lifestyle. In the words of Jeff Kiehl, pursuing geo-engineering would be “taking on the ultimate state of hubris to believe we can control Earth. We (the industrially developed world) would essentially be telling the (rest of the) world not to worry about our insatiable use of energy” (Kiehl, 2006, p. 227). Furthermore, some may worry that changing the environment and deciding where plants should live is being arrogant, or akin to “playing God” with nature, or “messing with nature” (Gardiner, 2010). The worry of this critique may take many shapes. On some views, humans seem to have a terrible track record when it comes to heavy interventions on nature: the “playing God” attitude is the same attitude that caused anthropogenic climate change in the first place. There aren’t many data on plant migration after all: humans may cause more damage than help. On other views, there is an opposition to intervening on nature: it seems that the scope of human agency has clear boundaries, and strong intervention on the natural order is beyond these boundaries. Finally, some may be concerned that reaching a too extreme level of control over nature may corrupt the moral character of humans (Hartman, 2017). However, the survival of too many plant species may be compromised if people don’t do anything about their migration. Thus, some may argue that considerations about moral corruption or arrogance can at best limit the pervasiveness of plant migration aid. If this is the case, it is important to balance intervention without incentivizing environmentally irresponsible behavior.

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Plant migration aid is peculiar with respect to the ethical challenges of geo-engineering in that may be continuous with normal agricultural practices. If there is enough continuity, the risk of moral corruption or “playing god” may be lower in plant migration aid, thus, plant migration aid is more permissible than other kinds of geoengineering. Certainly, however, this difference disappears if what needs to be changed are features of the air, or presence or absence of certain insects. But this would mean that people should privilege some plant species over others purely on the basis that some changes seem more like “playing god” than others. This is certainly a theoretical problem plant ethicists need to research on, that will require support from ethicists of geo-engineering, and whose answer seems invariant across all theories. The last moral dilemma examined in this section is that, given limited space, people may need to decide which plants to prioritize. The plants that are migrating need a specific environment, but the space that would be available is less and less. The surface of the potentially fertile sections of the world is already covered with infrastructures, houses, industries, and crops. And, as plants will migrate toward colder climates, so will animals and so will humans: more humans mean a greater need for infrastructure and houses. Thus, the space for plants in milder climates is not only limited, but is diminishing. Furthermore, as the migrating plants need specific conditions to survive, so do many other plants: the components of the soil and the air that may work for one plant species may not work for another. Thus, some plants may be incompatible with themselves, and people may need to decide which plants to prioritize. How to prioritize one species of plant above another is a topic of research in plant ethics that is widely underexplored. The question of how to prioritize plants when aiding migration is particularly thorny for relational theories. In fact, on these theories, people have responsibilities only for plants people are already in a relation with. And even if a theory were to somehow derive from this a responsibility toward plants that will exist, this does not help at all in deciding which plants should be prioritized over which others: to deal with this prioritization issue, a theory of the value of plants seems needed. This is incompatible with the commitment that relational theorists have to stay neutral between any position concerning the value of plants. Some may think that it is not a problem that relational views cannot justify plant migration. In fact, this position has some of its roots in virtue ethics, and virtue ethicists criticized geo-engineering as it would worsen moral character (Hiernaux, 2021). Relational views would therefore be very consistent with some of their roots in not being able to justify plant migration: on some virtue ethics plant migration aid is never permissible, as geo-engineering is never permissible. However, this reveals a problem for these virtue ethics theories and any relational theory that wants to be consistent with them. Aiding plant migration can be indistinguishable from agriculture at times: plant migration aid may simply consist in planting a tree in a new place. These theories imply that agriculture is never permissible as it corrupts moral character. This is very hard to believe: plant migration aid responsibility does represent a problem for relational theorists.

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Plant prioritization in migration aid is not much easier for those who believe that plants have intrinsic value, as there is no basis to conclude that all plants have the same intrinsic value. Plants may differ in the extent to which they have faculty of perceiving and desiring, the extent to which they can flourish, the extent to which they contribute to the environment, or the extent to which people have connections toward them. In fact, humans differ from plants in all these senses just listed, and in these differences, zoocentrist, perfectionists, and constitutivists may find the root of the justification for prioritizing human beings over plants. However, as it is difficult to compare humans and plants with respect to each of these parameters, difficulties in comparing plants between themselves according to these parameters are to be expected. Biocentrists may indeed defend that all plants are equally valuable, as it feels strange to think that some beings are more alive than others. However, this has two problems. First, it means that biocentrists can’t justify prioritizing humans over plants, which has the counterintuitive result that people should not pluck a single flower to make a medicine to cure a man’s life. Second, even if all plants had equal value, biocentrists will still need to rank plants according to their instrumental value, but instrumentalism requires further research before providing answers about prioritization. On instrumentalism, people should prioritize plants according to their value for human beings. Thus, people should, for example, prioritize plants with curating properties or nutritional properties over other plants. However, scientists are unsure of the properties of many plants. Humanity may be about to condemn to extinction some species with potentially useful properties scientists have just not discovered yet: this is surely undesirable. To avoid that, humanity may want to preserve as many species as possible even under instrumentalist assumptions. But this means giving less space to plants scientists currently believe having more instrumental value. How should people allocate space between plants scientists know are useful and plants scientists are unsure they may be? How much does the value of each individual plant weigh if compared to the value of preserving an entire species of plants with unexplored qualities? This is a venue of exploration for instrumentalists. Note that the difficulty may be more theoretical than practical for instrumentalists if there will be enough space in seed vaults. However, deciding to store seeds in seed vaults raises further ethical problems, as seeds do not increase biodiversity in the environment, nor will make the species further develop, which raises a new set of ethical issues beyond the scope of this chapter and discussed in Karafyllis (2018). Let us conclude by summarizing this section. It is often hard to justify large human interventions in nature. However, these interventions may be easier to justify when it comes to plants, because agriculture is a large intervention on nature. Thus, people may be in the position to help plants migrate without “playing God”; indeed, it may be required to do so, given the great value of plants (instrumental or intrinsic as it may be). A responsibility to aid plant migration, however, raises new moral questions. The space for plants is limited, and people may need to decide which plants to let survive, and which ones not to aid. All theories face different difficulties with this question.

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Conclusion This chapter explored the connection between plant ethics and climate change. It introduced the main theories of plant ethics, explaining some of the main ways in which it has been defended that plants have intrinsic value, highlighting their immense instrumental value, and examining whether people’s responsibility toward plants may come from the relation people have toward them rather than any conception of value. Afterward, this chapter gave a brief overview of how plants are a resource to fight climate change, focusing especially on how they capture CO2, and of how plants are damaged by climate change, which threatens them with extinctions, lowers their efficiency in performing photosynthesis, and forces them to migrate. Finally, the chapter introduced three new questions about climate change for plant ethicists. The first question is how to motivate people’s responsibility to preserve plants and forests. On all accounts of plant ethics, people have some responsibility to preserve forests. However, some theories currently struggle in motivating why people should save individual plants, and most theories seemed to struggle with tradeoffs between losses in plants and other kinds of gains. This is a crucial question for climate change, and because of this plant ethics needs much more research in this direction. The second question was whether people have a responsibility to plant trees. While no theory has a straightforward way to justify this responsibility, all theories show promise for this justification. In particular, relational theories seemed particularly close to a solution. The last question was whether people have a responsibility to aid plant migration. The question has two further specifications. First, is it permissible to aid plant migration, or does this constitute a too big modification of nature beyond the scope of what human activities would be? This chapter concluded that plant migration aid is most likely morally permissible, at least if one uses techniques sufficiently similar to agriculture. Second, given limited space, people are most likely unable to aid the migration of all plants. Thus, people may need to decide which plant species to let survive and which ones to let end. How to prioritize species over other species, and how to prioritize species of plants over individual plants? All theories greatly struggle with this question. In particular, relational theories seemed incapable to provide a solution. The destiny of the fight to climate change will be in great part determined by people’s attitude toward plants. Therefore, it is crucial for plant ethics to deliver answers on this topic. Plant ethics is a young subject, that shows promise: there is hope that this discipline can play a key role in understanding individual responsibilities toward their environment, and avoid the worst outcomes of anthropogenic climate change. Acknowledgments I am thankful to Mattia Cecchinato, Enrico Galvagni, Theron Pummer, Emilia Wilson, and the reviewer for their comments on this chapter.

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The Ethics of Geoengineering Daniel Edward Callies

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What Is Geoengineering? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Carbon Dioxide Removal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Solar Radiation Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Ethics of Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Moral Hazard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Slippery Slope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Ethics of Deployment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Procedural Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Substantive Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Ethics of a Geoengineered World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nature and Naturalness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cessation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

Defined as the “deliberate, large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment in order to counteract anthropogenic climate change,” geoengineering is an umbrella term that captures a variety of different technologies. This chapter will offer a concise overview of geoengineering as a response to anthropogenic climate change, with a primary focus on the ethical aspects this grouping of technologies engenders. We will start by exploring why it is that we are even considering these technologies rather than just doubling down on mitigation and adaptation, and then move into a brief explanation of some of the different technologies under consideration. With that brief explanation out of the way,

D. E. Callies (*) Institute for Practical Ethics, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_78

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we will then introduce a number of ethical considerations that some or all of the technologies give rise to. For the sake of organization, we will look at different ethical considerations that arise: (1) during research into these technologies; (2) after deployment or full-scale use of these technologies; and (3) in the kind of world in which these technologies have become the new normal. Keywords

Geoengineering · Solar radiation management · Carbon dioxide removal · Negative emissions · Climate engineering

Introduction Since at least 1990, when the IPCC published its First Assessment Report, we have known about the threat of global climate change. That knowledge notwithstanding, we have yet to take the kind of action needed to adequately address the problem. With each year that passes, our chances of keeping warming below 2 degrees Celsius, the internationally agreed-upon goal, are dwindling. With our chances dwindling, the previously considered taboo subject of geoengineering is now a serious subject within climate policy. Defined as the “deliberate, large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment in order to counteract anthropogenic climate change” (Royal Society, 2009, p. 1), geoengineering is an umbrella term that captures a variety of different technologies. Some of these technologies suck carbon dioxide out of the ambient air, thus reducing the concentration of the gas in the atmosphere. Others reflect a small portion of incoming sunlight so that that the Earth’s surface is, on average, slightly cooler than it would otherwise be. But all of the technologies carry with them potential benefits, potential burdens, and ethical considerations. This chapter will offer a concise overview of geoengineering as a response to anthropogenic climate change, with a primary focus on the ethical aspects this grouping of technologies engenders. We will start by exploring why it is that we are even considering these technologies rather than just doubling down on mitigation and adaptation, and then move into a brief explanation of some of the different technologies under consideration. With that brief explanation out of the way, we will then introduce a number of ethical considerations that some or all of the technologies give rise to. For the sake of organization (cf: Preston, 2013), we will look at different ethical considerations that arise: (1) during research into these technologies; (2) after deployment or full-scale use of these technologies; and (3) in the kind of world in which these technologies have become the new normal. The first thought one might have is a rather simple one: Why are we even considering intentionally manipulating the environment with technologies? Why don’t we just stop the activities that are causing our environment to change in the first place? The reason these technologies are currently under consideration is because of our previous actions.

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In 1988, when James Hansen implored the U.S. Congress to do something about global warming, the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases (GHGs) was 410 ppm and the world was releasing about 35 gigatons (Gt) of GHGs per year. Were we to have taken decisive action then, we could have started by simply stalling the growth in our emissions for a couple of years, and then gradually decreasing them over time. Were we to have taken this route, the cuts in emissions each year would have been relatively minor, and the economic impact of emissions reductions would have most likely been mild, if even felt at all. Unfortunately, that is not at all what happened. Rather than having decreased, yearly emissions of GHGs have gone from 35 Gt in 1988 to roughly 50 Gt in 2019 (Our World In Data, 2020). According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the atmospheric concentration of GHGs has gone from 410 ppm in 1988 to 500 ppm in 2019 (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, 2020). This is terrible news for our prospects of limiting climate change. According to the world’s leading expert body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, atmospheric concentrations of GHGs need to stabilize at 450 ppm if we are to likely limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2013). Let us call this group of facts – the current concentration of GHGs, our current annual emission of GHGs, and the atmospheric concentration of GHGs needed to likely limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius – the “geo-physical situation.” Given the geo-physical situation, limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius is now an ambitious goal. To be sure, some of those GHGs in the atmosphere will be cycled through natural processes. And if we were to stop emitting GHGs entirely today, atmospheric concentrations would certainly decrease, perhaps even below the 450 ppm the IPCC predicts will need to be reached to likely limit warming to 2 degrees C. But the unfortunate fact of the matter is that we are not reducing our emissions to zero any time soon. It is this lethargy around emissions reductions that has led some to start considering geoengineering as a potential response to anthropogenic climate change.

What Is Geoengineering? As was mentioned in the introduction, geoengineering is an umbrella term, encapsulating a number of different technologies. These technologies are generally broken into two categories: (1) carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies and (2) solar radiation management (SRM) technologies.

Carbon Dioxide Removal Carbon dioxide removal technologies do exactly as their name implies – they remove carbon dioxide (and sometimes other GHGs) directly from the atmosphere.

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Because of this ability to reduce atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and other GHGs, they are also referred to as negative emissions technologies (NETs). CDR technologies vary dramatically, with some sounding rather mundane and others sounding rather extraordinary. The technologies also vary significantly across a number of dimensions, such as feasibility, cost, cooling potential, and possible adverse side effects. Toward the mundane end of the spectrum is simply afforestation, or the large-scale planting and replanting of trees. The trees suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store it as long as the tree remains. Afforestation will almost certainly be a technique we use to limit climate change. But, because of the large area of land required, it is unlikely to be a significant contributor to limiting anthropogenic climate change. A proposal that lies closer to the extraordinary end of the spectrum would be ocean fertilization. There is a natural cycle in the oceans that involves photosynthesizing algae and carbon dioxide. The algae at the surface consume the carbon dioxide, these algae then eventually die and sink to the bottom of the ocean, where they are consumed by bacteria and other organisms. The result is that carbon dioxide is moved from the air down to the bottom of the ocean. By dumping large amounts of iron into the ocean, we could create artificial algal blooms that could significantly enhance this natural process. Though, the effects of dumping so much iron into the oceans remain uncertain, and concerns about ocean biodiversity make large-scale experiments risky. Generally, when people reference CDR or NETs, they have either bio energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) or direct air capture and storage (DACS) in mind. Basically, we would sow crops, like switchgrass, that pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. We would then burn the crops to produce energy and capture the carbon dioxide that escapes during energy production and store it so that it does not again return to the atmosphere. Most DACS facilities use large wind turbines to pull in ambient air where it encounters potassium hydroxide that extracts the carbon dioxide directly from the air and stores it, leaving the escaping air with only 25% of the carbon dioxide it originally had. There will most likely be a role for various kinds of CDR technologies in future climate policy. Though, it is important to stress that these technologies are far from being ready to “solve” climate change. For instance, in 2018 there were 3 BECCS plants in existence. In order to produce the amount of energy and remove as much carbon as the IPCC assumes they will, these three BECCS plants will have to be scaled up to 700 by 2030; then 5000 by 2040; and finally, 16,000 by 2050 (Lenzi et al., 2018). That is a tall order. Similarly, there are currently only 15 DACS plants operational (International Energy Agency, 2020), with each being able to capture around 1 Mt. of carbon dioxide each year. We would need thousands of these plants in order to offset even just a fraction of our current emissions. Furthermore, there is uncertainty surrounding the precise cost associated with extracting carbon dioxide from the ambient air, with estimates ranging from $400 to $1000 per ton (Honegger & Reiner, 2018); though, there have been reports that it can be done for as cheap as $100 per ton (International Energy Agency, 2020). If we count on these technologies playing a large role in our climate policy portfolio, and they turn out to be more expensive or to not scale as we imagined, we would be putting future generations in a very difficult situation.

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Solar Radiation Management Solar radiation management (SRM) technologies all aim to reflect some portion of incoming sunlight back out to space, thus minimizing the amount of solar radiation that remains at the Earth’s surface and in the oceans. And like CDR technologies, SRM technologies also vary significantly along a variety of dimensions, such as feasibility, cost, cooling potential, and possible adverse side effects. The two most prominent approaches to SRM are known by further acronyms: stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) and marine cloud brightening (MCB). MCB is aptly named. Clouds can help limit climate change by reflecting incoming solar radiation back out into space. The approach would start with spraying salt water up into clouds over the ocean. By spraying saltwater up into clouds, we could enhance their reflectivity or even create completely new clouds over large parts of the ocean, thus increasing the Earth’s natural albedo effect. Stratospheric aerosol injection is perhaps more ambitious. The proposal aims to mimic the natural cooling effect produced by large volcanic eruptions. Through releasing millions of tons of aerosols – for instance, sulfate aerosols – into the upper atmosphere, we could create a kind of sunshade capable of reducing incoming solar radiation by 1–2%. A Boeing 747 or fleet of similar aircraft could continually deploy 1 Mt. of aerosols at the required altitude, enough to offset roughly half of the expected temperature increase due to anthropogenic global warming. There are some significant selling points to SRM technologies. First, they are relatively inexpensive. For instance, an SAI program would cost 25–50 billion USD annually (Keith, 2013; Nordhaus, 1994), which is roughly 100x cheaper than achieving the same cooling through emissions reductions. It is “quick,” in that it can be deployed immediately and would start cooling the globe in a matter of weeks. And it is extremely effective. But there are also significant drawbacks. First and foremost, unlike mitigation and CDR, SRM does not directly affect the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases. This means that the technology would have to be used consistently (and to greater degrees each year) until emissions peaked and eventually reached zero. Additionally, given that SRM does not affect atmospheric GHG concentrations, ocean acidity will continue to rise until concentrations stabilize. Second, SRM has a number of known deleterious side effects – so-called “known-unknowns.” We refer to them as “known-unknowns” because we know about the potential negative side effects, but the exact extent of their impacts is unknown. For instance, achieving a given temperature target through SRM could have dramatic effects on precipitation patterns compared to achieving such a temperature target through reduced atmospheric GHG concentrations. In addition to disrupted precipitation patterns, SRM – specifically SAI of sulfate aerosols – could have negative effects on both atmospheric ozone recovery and surface air quality. While we do not know exactly what these effects would be, we know they would be harmful. Finally, in addition to the known side effects of SRM, there will almost certainly be unknown deleterious side effects as well. This category of “unknown-unknowns” is one of the major reasons not to rely upon SRM any more than we might have to. Whatever the unknown

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negative side effects are, reason would lead us to believe that they increase the more heavily the technology is relied upon. For these kinds of reasons, it would be a bad idea to rely upon SRM any more than we have to – if at all. The aforementioned problems with CDR and SRM make some generally wary of the technologies. But even if the aforementioned shortcomings are not decisive, there are a whole host of ethical concerns. The remainder of this chapter will explore some of those concerns, offering analysis where appropriate.

The Ethics of Research Consider first some concerns that arise simply by researching the technology. By research, I tend to mean computer modeling, indoor laboratory experiments, and, in some instances, very small outdoor experiments that can have no measurable effect on climate and carry little to no potential adverse side effects.

Moral Hazard Even if there is only research being done on CDR and SRM technologies, one might still worry that such research presents a moral hazard (Royal Society, 2009). A moral hazard describes a potential change in an agent’s behavior once some of the costs of that behavior are absorbed by another party (Dembe & Boden, 2000). For instance, you might be reluctant to build your house right next to a beautiful river, fearing that you could lose it in a flood. But, once you purchase flood insurance, you now might be willing to take such a risk. This is perfectly reasonable. The benefits of building your house near the river – i.e., the scenic view and water access – accrue only to you, whereas the costs of doing so – i.e., the potential cost of having to rebuild – is now borne by the larger insurance group. Having the insurance may have caused you to take on more risk than you otherwise would have (Callies, 2019a). The worry with respect to geoengineering is that, once we are researching CDR and SRM technologies, people might see them as a kind of insurance against climate change, which, in turn, may weaken their resolve to engage in emissions mitigation (Keith, 2013). That is, if people think that technologies like CDR and SRM will ultimately help us address climate change, then they may be less willing to take on the necessary, but difficult, task of reducing their GHG emissions. For this reason, the moral hazard worry also goes by the name of “mitigation obstruction,” on the account that there is a worry that even mere research into these technologies will obstruct our mitigation efforts (Reynolds, 2015). A number of authors have written on the moral hazard worry (Bunzl, 2008; Hale, 2012; Preston, 2013), and there has been some sociological research about the moral hazard potential of geoengineering. While the general worry is that research into geoengineering will weaken our resolve to mitigate our emissions, it appears as though the sociological data does not back this up. For instance, the Royal Society found that, “Although participants were generally cautious, or even hostile, towards

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geoengineering proposals, several agreed that they would actually be more motivated to undertake mitigation actions themselves (such as reducing energy consumption) if they saw government and industry investing in geoengineering research or deployment” (2009). And other studies have found a similar “doubling down” on emissions mitigation when individuals are presented with the prospect of geoengineering (Kahan et al., 2014; Mercer et al., 2011; Natural Environment Research Council, 2010). These studies are interesting. Yet, they are both inconclusive and perhaps inapt. Even if we were certain that individuals were likely to change their behavior in some way, we would still need to know (1) how large groups would change their behavior, not individuals; and (2) whether that change in behavior would have a net negative effect. I will briefly elaborate on each of these. First, consider the fact that climate change is not caused by the behavior of any single individual (Sinnott-Armstrong, 2010). Insofar as studies about the moral hazard effect of geoengineering are measuring the potential change in behavior of individuals, it is not particularly relevant to the problem of global anthropogenic climate change. Rather than knowing what any individual will do given the prospect of geoengineering, we would be much better off knowing what large collectives or the policymakers of those large collectives will do. Second, even if there is a moral hazard effect for large collectives, we would want to know whether this change in behavior would have a net negative effect. If the prospect of researching CDR technologies led some to decrease their mitigation efforts, we would not want to abandon research if this decrease in mitigation efforts was minimal and the potential effect of the technologies on climate change was massive. For instance, if research into CDR technologies were to lead us to release one extra gigaton of GHGs across a decade than we otherwise would have, but the mature technologies were able to pull 10 gigatons of GHGs out of the atmosphere across that same time span, then we should not let the moral hazard effect of research into such technologies serve as a ground for a moratorium. In short, for the moral hazard worry to ground a moratorium on research, we would want to know how research into these technologies will affect the behavior of large collectives and their policymakers, and we would want to know whether there is likely to be net negative effect. The purpose in raising these points is not to push one toward the conclusion that there is no moral hazard effect associated with geoengineering. Rather, the point is simply to note that a moral hazard worry alone is unlikely to a sufficient reason not to research these technologies.

Slippery Slope Some worry that if we start researching geoengineering technologies, we will be taking a first step onto a slippery slope, at the bottom of which awaits an objectionable future. If this is the case, perhaps we should abandon research into these technologies in order to avoid sliding down the slope. Slippery slope arguments take the same general form. They start with a conditional, empirical premise: If A, then B. They then move to a normative premise: not B. Being

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an instance of modus tollens, the conclusion – therefore, not A, necessarily follows. With respect to geoengineering, the thought is: If we research geoengineering, it will lead to deployment; we do not want the technology deployed; therefore, we should not engage in research. One of the first things to note is that the slippery slope worry is one generally associated with SRM rather than CDR technologies. A second thing to note is that it is important to distinguish between two different slippery slope arguments when it comes to SRM (Callies, 2018). Consider first what we will call the modest slippery slope argument (MSSA): 1. If we research SRM, it will lead to deployment. 2. We have serious moral reasons not to deploy SRM. 3. Therefore, we ought not to research SRM. Set aside premise 1 for now. Let us look at premise 2. Most would admit that, as of now, we have serious moral reasons not to deploy SRM. There are simply too many unknowns, and we simply have not done enough research. But the fact that there are serious moral reasons not to deploy SRM now should not push us to the conclusion that we should not continue researching the technology. Even if some of those serious moral concerns about the technology persist, it may well be that it would be a better alternative to allowing catastrophic climatic effects in the future. That is, while it certainly seems true that we have serious moral reasons not to deploy SAI now, what really want to know is whether we have decisive moral reasons not to do so, now or in the future. So, consider what we can call the decisive slippery slope argument (DSSA): 1. If we research SAI, it will lead to deployment. 2. We have decisive moral reasons not to deploy SAI. 3. Therefore, we ought not to research SAI. Like the MSSA, the DSSA is a valid argument. But it also appears unsound. The veracity of both the conditional, empirical premise and the normative premise are doubtful. First, when it comes to the empirical premise, notice that research into new technologies does not always lead to their full development. For instance, the vast majority of pharmaceutical compounds toward which significant funds are invested for research never actually end up being developed (Kola & Landis, 2004). And, second, even technologies that are developed are not always used or deployed. South Africa, for example, invested heavily into research on nuclear weapons in the 1960s and 1970s, and then dismantled their nuclear program in the 1980s after having successfully engineered a bomb. And there was a big uproar in the late 1990s and early 2000s about cloning. The successful replication of “Dolly” the sheep in 1997 led many to believe that the cloning of humans was not far away (Kass & Wilson, 1998). And yet, nearly 25 years later, the technology has yet to be used in this morally suspect way. Of course, the fact that research into medical technologies and nuclear weapons does not necessarily lead to their deployment cannot tell us

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whether research into SRM will lead to its eventual use. But these examples should cause us to question the empirical premise. What of the normative premise? To say that we have decisive moral reasons not to deploy SAI is to say that, having compared the reasons that speak in favor of deployment and having compared the reasons that speak against deployment, the reasons that speak against deployment are weightier, all things considered. That allthings-considered judgment is a difficult one to make, especially given that the future circumstances in which the technology might be used are not entirely clear. Given that we know too little regarding both what the particular adverse effects of climate change will be in 50 years, and that we know too little about both the potential benefits and the potential adverse side effects of SRM, one could argue that we simply cannot know whether we will have decisive moral reasons not to use the technology in the future. And with both premises being suspect, the DSSA’s soundness should be questioned. The DSSA may very well be unsound, as has been intimated here. What we should take from the slippery slope worry is not that we ought to abandon research. Rather, what the slippery slope worry should point us toward is the need for legitimate regulation of the technology (Callies, 2019b). Indeed, it is just this point that Catriona McKinnon makes (McKinnon, 2018). Rather than arguing against research into the technology, McKinnon worries that we might be “sleepwalking into lock-in,” a scenario in which research takes on a life of its own and locks a particular version of SRM in. What McKinnon, and the slippery slope worry more generally, rightly notes is that research into SRM technologies, especially large-scale outdoor research, should be overseen in order to avoid the deployment of significantly subpar technology.

The Ethics of Deployment Even if we were to address all of the worries surrounding research, and we were to produce viable CDR and SRM technologies, it would be just the beginning of the ethical concerns regarding geoengineering. Figuring out how to make decisions about the technologies and making sure that the benefits and burdens of these decisions were distributed in an equitable fashion will be difficult, to say the least.

Procedural Justice Consider first how we ought to decide whether or not to research, develop, and deploy geoengineering technologies? Whatever process we use for making these decisions, presumably, we should want it to be a just or a fair process. Some authors have claimed that the only reason to care about procedural justice is because of its influence on substantive justice (Arneson, 1979). That is, the only reason to care about fair procedures is because fair procedures are more likely than other procedures to produce fair outcomes. But, for most, the fairness or justness of a

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decision-making process is something we should also strive for, even if it the fairness of the procedure does not necessarily change the outcome of the decision. So, what would a fair decision-making process look like for geoengineering? This is perhaps one of the most morally and politically complex questions surrounding the technology. In the abstract, a fair decision-making process will be built upon two pillars: (1) fair terms of inclusion and (2) fair terms of participation. “Fair terms of inclusion” refers to a decision-making process that includes all those who ought to be included in the process, and “fair terms of participation” refers to everyone who ought to be included in the process being included on justifiable terms (Callies, 2019a). Consider the following three decision-making scenarios, and how they fare with respect to inclusion and participation. Consider first a unilateral decision-making process. If one state were to decide that a particular atmospheric concentration of GHGs or a particular temperature were to be in its interest, it could decide to implement geoengineering strategies on its own in an attempt to affect that concentration or temperature. Unlike mitigation, CDR and SRM technologies do not require broad collective action. So, there is certainly some possibility of a unilateral approach to geoengineering (much more so with SRM than CDR). But such an approach would be wildly unfair. Stephen Gardiner notes that “the climate system is a basic background condition of human life and social organization on this planet” (S. Gardiner, 2010, p. 294). And, by definition, geoengineering will have profound effects on the climate system. Making decisions about the basic background condition of human life and social organization while excluding the vast majority of people from that decision would be anything but fair or just. Such a decision-making process would grossly violate fair terms of inclusion and fair terms of participation. And this would be the case even if the decision resulted in a pareto improvement (which seems unlikely, but not impossible). Another unfair – though, perhaps more likely – process would be a minilateral decision-making process. A minilateral decision-making process involving a number of the world’s major powers would certainly make strides toward a more procedurally just decision. Such a process could, perhaps, take place in the United Nations Security Council. Of course, making decisions about geoengineering in the UN Security council would be an improvement over a decision made unilaterally. But, importantly, the UN Security Council would also leave something to be desired from the standpoint of procedural justice. While the Council has a clear decisionmaking process and represents a significant portion of the world’s population, it still leaves many who would be affected in a morally relevant way excluded from the decision. For instance, the Security Council comprises five permanent members and ten nonpermanent (temporary) members at any given time. Even in 2021, while India sits as one of the nonpermanent members, the Security Council still only boasts representatives who account for roughly half of the world’s population. Thus, any decision the broader council made would be arrived at by excluding nearly half of the world’s population, again violating fair terms of inclusion and participation. Perhaps the fairest and most likely body to make decisions regarding geoengineering is the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework

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Convention on Climate Change (United Nations, 1992). This body represents every person who would be affected by a decision regarding geoengineering (except, notably, future generations, who could be affected most profoundly by a decision one way or another). The strength of the UNFCCC from the standpoint of procedural justice is its near-universal representation. It thus goes a long way toward fair terms of inclusion. But the body does not fare as well on its terms of participation. Given that Draft Rule 42 to the UNFCCC was never approved, all decisions coming out of the UNFCCC process are done by consensus. A consensus choice rule can certainly be an ideal to strive for. But it also shackles decisions to the lowest aspiration of the voting parties, thus representing a significant status quo bias. It also disregards any idea of proportional representation, giving a party like Estonia the same voting power as a party like India. Ultimately, it is unlikely that a perfectly just decision-making process will be affected for geoengineering. But insofar as decisions are made on terms that are more justifiable from the standpoints of inclusion and participation, we move some step closer toward procedural justice if decisions were made on unilateral or minilateral bases.

Substantive Justice As the previous section claimed, we should be concerned with how decisions about geoengineering are made. And some procedures for making decisions are better than others. But, of course, we do not only care about fair procedures. We also care about the substantively just decisions that come out of fair procedures. There are many different geoengineering technologies, and many different portfolios of climate policy in which these different technologies could play roles to varying degrees. Any portfolio containing CDR and SRM technologies will carry with it a diverse group of associated benefits and burdens. Just as an example, some of the burdens associated with CDR technologies would be the cost of running them and the land they would need as well. The benefits are more widely dispersed in the form of lower atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. The burdens of SRM definitely include costs, but they also include erratic climate conditions, like changes in precipitation and intense storms. The benefits would also be climatic. SAI could reduce precipitation change and would almost certainly mitigate the rise in average global surface temperature. There will be unique distributions of the benefits and burdens depending upon how we decide to fund and how much of each of these technologies we decide to use. To the extent that we are able to reliably predict these benefits and burdens, how ought they be distributed? Since the beginning of the philosophical exploration of climate change, there has been an intense focus on how the burdens of climate change – specifically, the costs associated with mitigation and adaptation – should be distributed. Some have championed that causal responsibility should guide the assigning of mitigation and adaptation burdens (Shue, 1999). Others have argued that it should be those who have benefited from past emissions who should shoulder future burdens (Page, 2012).

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Still others have argued that one’s ability to shoulder burdens to guide their allocation (Moellendorf, 2014). I have argued that these three commonsense principles of fairness – causal responsibility, beneficiary responsibility, and ability – all point toward the conclusion that the distribution of benefits and burdens associated with any future geoengineering should be skewed heavily in favor of the least well-off members of the global community. To put it plainly, the costs of these technologies should be borne by those with the greatest causal responsibility for climate change, the greatest beneficiary responsibility for climate change, and those ablest to cope with such burdens, while the benefits should be directed toward those at the other end of the distribution. Consider first causal responsibility. Let us look at per capita historical emissions for four different countries: the United States, Germany, China, and Bangladesh. Per capita emissions for the United States in 1900 were roughly 8.5 tons; for Germany, per capita emissions were about 6 tons; the per capita emissions of China and Bangladesh are less than 0.1 ton. By 1950, the United States had per capita emissions of around 16 tons, Germany was around 7 tons, and again, China and Bangladesh were less than 0.1 tons. By 2000, the picture changed a bit. The United States had per capita emissions of about 21 tons, Germany was at 11 tons, China was at 2.5 tons, while Bangladesh was still at less than 0.1 ton per person. Finally, for 2017, the United States had per capita emissions of about 16 tons, Germany about 10 tons, China about 7 tons, and Bangladesh half a ton per person (Our World In Data, 2021). What these data show is that there is a strong relationship between CO2 emissions and development. The more developed and the better off people are, the more CO2 they have tended to use. And the more CO2 people have used, the more it is that they are causally responsible for climate change and the subsequent need to engage in geoengineering. This causal responsibility for climate change gives the wealthy, welloff citizens of the world a weaker claim against the burdens and in favor of the benefits associated with geoengineering. Conversely, given their relatively lower causal responsibility for climate change, the less well-off members of the global community have a stronger claim to the benefits and a stronger claim against the burdens associated with geoengineering. In short, insofar as we think causal responsibility bears moral responsibility, the distribution of benefits and burdens associated with geoengineering should be skewed heavily in favor of the less well-off members of the global community. But some might claim that it is unfair to hold current Americans or Germans responsible for the emissions of those in the past. Right now, the average German emits only three tons of CO2 more than the average Chinese national. So, should not their claim against the burdens of geoengineering and for the benefits of the technologies be more equal now? If their histories were the same, yes. But the average German is a significant beneficiary of the previous CO2 emissions from that country. Beneficiaries of the actions that have brought about climate change are not causally responsible, but they nonetheless have a connection to the cause of the problem through the relation of benefiting from it. Peter Singer has noted that “. . . the [current] wealth of the developed nations is inextricably tied to their prodigious use of carbon fuels” (Singer, 2010). And Eric Neumayer writes, “There can be no doubt that the development of the ‘Northern’ countries was eased, if not made feasible in the first place, by having had the possibility of burning large amounts

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of fossil fuel with the consequence of an accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere” (Neumayer, 2000). Germany’s previous emissions have turned them into one of the most developed and well-off countries in the world. Whether we conceive of the benefits of historical emissions as current income (Janssen & den Elzen, 1992) or more broadly as human development, the conclusion is clear. Those residing in places with high historical emissions are benefiting from them, and this beneficiary responsibility should have bearing on their claims to the benefits and against the burdens of geoengineering technologies. Finally, there is a third reason that pushes us toward the same conclusion: the idea of one’s ability to cope with climate change, or one’s climate vulnerability. The simple thought here is that climate vulnerability is morally salient when deciding how to distribute benefits and burdens associated with geoengineering. Researchers at the University of Notre Dame have compiled an index called the ND-GAIN index that measures, among other things, a country’s vulnerability to climate change (Notre Dame Global Adaptation Index, 2017). According to the ND GAIN Index, Bangladesh is significantly more vulnerable to climate change than most other countries. If we were to attribute moral salience to the idea of vulnerability, which seems entirely justifiable, we would conclude that those residing in the countries that are most vulnerable to climate change have the greatest claim to the potential benefits of geoengineering. There is no fault being attributed to those residing in the least vulnerable countries. Rather, we are simply maintaining that, as a matter of fairness, those who are most vulnerable have greater claims to the potential benefits and greater claims against the potential burdens of geoengineering. Given the preceding discussion, it seems safe to say that we have a rough idea of what substantive justice demands when it comes to geoengineering. Substantive justice would require us to choose a distributive scenario in which the benefits are directed primarily toward – and burdens directed away from – the least well-off members of the global community.

The Ethics of a Geoengineered World Were we to come to justifiable answers regarding the decision-making process surrounding geoengineering and the equitable distribution of benefits and burdens that arise from those decisions, there would still be ethical concerns arising in our newly geoengineered world. First, we would have to recognize that we might be losing something of value by living in a geoengineered world. Second, we would have to figure out how to end our geoengineering endeavor.

Nature and Naturalness Consider the effect geoengineering could have on our relationship to nature. Were we to decide to deploy geoengineering, we could lose something of value even if everything were to go exactly according to plan. Even if CDR or SRM technologies

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were to function exactly as envisioned, with no adverse side effects to speak of, some might argue that we would still be losing something of value: nature’s naturalness. That is, once we embark on the geoengineering program, we would be bringing about what Bill McKibben called “the end of nature” (McKibben, 2006). What is nature’s naturalness and how would geoengineering undermine it? Well, as many complex concepts are, nature is used differently by different people. But there would appear to be two main features of something’s being “natural.” Naturalness could refer to freedom from control or to a pristine ecological condition. In the first sense, something is natural if it is free from human influence, if it is autonomous, or self-willed. But in the second sense, something is natural if its historic composition is as it was at some point in the past. And, of course, these are not binary terms, but rather admit of degree. So, naturalness can be said to have two continua, ranging from controlled to self-willed (with respect to human control) and from pristine to novel (with respect to ecological condition). As Allen Thompson notes, self-willed and pristine ecosystems used to always go together (Thompson, 2017). Whenever there was a self-willed ecosystem free of human control, it also happened to be pristine, meaning that it had historic fidelity or that its composition was qualitatively identical (at least within certain a time span) to itself prior to any anthropogenic control. Of course, in an era of anthropogenic climate change, these two senses of naturalness are diverging more and more. For instance, because of climate change, certain ecosystems are disappearing, and others are migrating to higher latitudes or higher altitudes to escape the increase in temperature. Because of the greenhouse gases we have emitted over the previous centuries, we are now in a situation in which we can have one or the other: we can either have “pristine” ecosystems that bear historic fidelity to ecosystems in the same places years before, or we can have self-willed, autonomous ecosystems that are free from intentional human interference, but that are compositionally different than they used to be. Having both is becoming less and less a possibility. Imagine these two different continua of naturalness on a cartesian plane, with autonomy from human control as the y-axis and ecological condition as the x-axis. The y-axis of autonomy starts at control, where humans have complete control over a natural environment, and goes toward an environment that is completely autonomous or self-willed. The y-axis starts with a completely novel environment that bears no historical fidelity to the recent past and goes to a pristine environment qualitatively identical to the past. Gregory Aplet and David Cole note that these two continua of naturalness can lead to four different kinds of ecological stewardship: drift; transformation; restoration; recovery (Cole & Aplet, 2010). The path of transformation lies in the southwest corner of the plane, where novel ecosystems and maximal human control intersect. The paths of drift and restoration lie in the northwest and the southeast corners, respectively. Drift entails completely self-willed or autonomous ecosystems, but lacks fidelity to the composition of nature in the past, while restoration entails pristine ecosystems compositionally identical to the past, but that achieves this historical fidelity via intensive human control over the environment. Finally, recovery is in the northwest corner of the plane, where selfwilled and pristine environments meet. This path of recovery would come about if

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there were to be some disturbance to nature – say, from minor anthropogenic climate change – followed by an autonomous return to previous conditions once the disturbance dissipated. Recovery is no longer an option. Given the alteration of the chemical composition of our atmosphere, recovery simply cannot take place – nature simply will not return to a pristine state without human interference. Thus, with respect to geoengineering, the question is whether we should adopt a strategy of restoration, transformation, or drift. If we choose drift, then we have to be willing to forgo geoengineering and any of the anthropogenic benefits it may be able supply. If we chose to go forward with geoengineering, then we must decide between two trajectories. On the one hand, we could engineer the world in such a way that it is most suitable for us, which may entail that we end up with not only controlled ecosystems, but novel ecosystems. On the other hand, we could aim to maintain our ecosystems in such a way that they bear historic fidelity to those of the past. Though, taking this route may mean forgoing some anthropocentric benefits. Of course, we could get “lucky.” It may be that we will be able to exhibit control over the natural environment in such a way that we secure anthropocentric benefits and maintain pristine wilderness. But, at this point, that is uncertain.

Cessation Finally, even once the decision to use these technologies is made, there are questions about how we end their use. There are three distinct things I want to touch on under this heading of cessation. First is what is often referred to as termination shock. Second is how we decide when to stop geoengineering (given that, even after atmospheric CO2 concentrations stabilize, there will be different points at which states think geoengineering should stop). Third, there is a question of where we draw the line when it comes to modifying our natural environment. Could it be that mastering the climate will lead us to continue to dominate nature in the Anthropocene? Consider first the idea of termination shock. Termination shock is generally a worry associated exclusively with solar radiation management as this grouping of technologies is merely masking warming rather than avoiding warming. To illustrate the worry, imagine we were to start an SRM program around 2025. Assume that we start slowly, but reach a point in 2050 where SRM is offsetting 0.5 degrees C of warming. Now imagine that, for whatever reason, the SRM project is abruptly terminated. It could be that there is a particularly bad monsoon season that wreaks havoc throughout much of Asia and Africa. Imagine further that a large coalition of states, including China and India, conclude that the overloading of sulfates in the atmosphere is at least partially responsible for this bad monsoon season. Finally, imagine that they demand the SRM experiment be terminated right away. Such a cessation of the technology could bring about a termination shock, with the 0.5 degrees C of masked warming quickly materializing. Warming that otherwise would have taken half a century to accumulate would be felt in a year or two. This is critical because it is not just an increase in temperatures that is problematic when it comes to

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climate change, it is the rate at which the temperature increases. Basically, experiencing a 0.5 degree C increase in average global surface temperature across half a century is bad. But experiencing a 0.5 degree C increase in average global surface temperature across a time span of a couple of years is catastrophic. And this rapid increase in warming would have catastrophic effects on biodiversity as plant and animal species failed to cope with the rapid increase in temperatures (Trisos et al., 2018). Now, some argue that, because termination shock is such a terrible outcome, it is something we would never do (Parker & Irvine, 2018). That is, rather than abruptly stopping SRM, we would slowly draw it down in order to avoid these catastrophic effects. Even if this is the case, the mere threat of termination shock makes SRM a gamble for both human and nonhuman species alike. Consider next the second worry associated with cessation. It is clear that we do not want to quickly abandon any SRM program once it has been going on for many years. But even if we are going to slowly draw it down, how do we decide when that drawdown should begin? For instance, once greenhouse gas concentrations stabilize, we will have a decision to make with respect to SRM and CDR. Do we then use these technologies to set the “global thermostat,” so to speak, at a particular temperature? And, if so, how do we decide where to set it? It is not difficult to imagine that India and Russia will have different ideas as to what the ideal average global surface temperature is. And these competing claims will make determining a particular cessation point rather difficult. This underlines the importance of the discussion in the procedural justice section. We will need to have a reliable and agreed-upon procedure for making decisions about geoengineering before we initiate its use. Finally, consider a third worry associated with cessation: the idea of where to draw the line in intentional modification. Imagine everything with the geoengineering experiment were to go as planned. Would this lead us down a slippery slope to even further control over the natural world? And would this be problematic? There are two concerns here, an anthropocentric and a more biocentric concern. First, are we impoverishing the planet for our descendants by making it more and more under our control? Are we losing the wildness of nature, as mentioned previously, which is something our descendants will lament? And, second, at what point should we stop and take a hands-off approach, not because it is good for us or our descendants, but because it is good for other members of the biotic community. Is there some number of lost species (animals or plants) that should cause us to not geoengineer the planet, even if it would be beneficial to us?

Conclusion As should be clear from the preceding discussion, intentionally altering the Earth’s climate with geoengineering technologies raises a host of ethical issues. Some of these issues arise while researching the technologies; others during use; and still others once the decision to lean on the technologies is years behind us. Of course, the

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real hope is that these technologies will not be needed, or that we will only have to rely on them slightly. The real hope is that the international community snaps out of the lethargic state it has been in for the past three decades and starts to take emissions mitigation and climate change adaptation seriously. That hope notwithstanding, in the event that it does make sense to rely upon geoengineering to some extent, we will want to make sure the technologies are researched, deployed, and managed with at least the aforementioned ethical concerns in mind.

Cross-References ▶ Abrupt Climate Changes and Tipping Points ▶ Climate Change and Distributive Justice ▶ Climate Change and Environmental Justice ▶ Climate Change and Global Justice ▶ Climate Change and Institutions for Future Generations: The Litigation Option ▶ Climate Change and Intergenerational Justice ▶ Climate Change and the Ethics of Technology ▶ Climate Models and Robustness Analysis – Part I: Core Concepts and Premises ▶ Climate Models and Robustness Analysis – Part II: The Justificatory Challenge ▶ Compensation Duties

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Climate Change and Human Engineering Pei-hua Huang

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Rationale Behind Direct Human Engineering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Evolutionary Lag . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Psychological Constraints . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Biological Constraints . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Human Engineering as a Possible Way Out . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cognitive Enhancement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Moral Bioenhancement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dietary Preference Modification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Physiology Modification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ethical Concerns Against Human Engineering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Safety . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Feasibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Resources Allocation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Unpredictability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Violation of Autonomy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Moral Rigidity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Social Injustice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Designing the Next Generation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Disrespect for Human Nature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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P.-h. Huang (*) Department of Medical Ethics, Philosophy and History of Medicine, Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_79

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Abstract

Recently, several scholars have argued that governments worldwide should seriously consider using direct human engineering to curb global climate change. Prominent proposals include (1) cognitive enhancement, (2) moral bioenhancement, (3) preference modification, and (4) physiological modification. These direct human engineering programs could alleviate global climate change by reducing the consumption of resources, improving the understanding of the danger of climate change, and increasing moral motivations to adopt eco-friendly behaviors. Yet, each of these proposals raises several ethical concerns. This chapter provides a review of the rationale behind human engineering and the current state of the literature on human engineering and climate change, concluding that at the moment human engineering raises more problems than it solves. Keywords

Moral bioenhancement · Cognitive enhancement · Preference modification · Human engineering · Climate change

Introduction Overwhelming evidence shows that global climate change is anthropogenic and requires immediate response from the global community. Numerous international agreements and protocols have been introduced to curb climate change: the Montreal Protocol was introduced in 1987, the Kyoto Protocol in 2005, and the latest being the Paris Agreement in 2015. Nevertheless, experts criticize that these agreements and protocols are unlikely to bring down global temperatures fast enough. According to the latest CAT Thermometer report published in December 2020, even if governments around the world closely abide by the pledges they made in the Paris Agreement, global temperatures would remain 2.1  C higher by 2100 (Climate Action Tracker, 2020). More has to be done. Many factors make it difficult to address climate change. Part of the difficulty comes with the challenges of implementing international agreements with the right frameworks. It has been found that, for instance, the carbon trading framework introduced by the Kyoto Protocol created perverse incentives to increase the production of greenhouse gases because the temporarily increased levels of gases could later be used to accumulate more credits from waste gases abasement abasement (Schneider & Kollmuss, 2015). Part of the difficulty comes from the magnitude and complexity of climate change. The nonlinearity of climate change makes it especially difficult for nonexperts to comprehend ramifications that might be brought by inaction and understand the urgency to act right now (Overpeck et al., 2011). The collective nature of climate change also creates challenges for people to make the first move to change their lifestyles. Any single individual’s effect on climate change is so negligible that it is not worth sacrificing their comfortable life (Hardin, 1968). Human psychology also plays a role here. For instance,

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the bias toward the near future makes people less concerned about climate issues that will only manifest in the distant future (Loewenstein & Elster, 1992). Spatially speaking, humans also discount risks and dangers that do not occur nearby (Gifford, 2011). Several solutions to climate change have been proposed. Many governments try to mitigate climate change by offering incentives that aim to encourage low carbon emission lifestyles, joining international frameworks for collaboration, implementing geoengineering projects like large-scale reforestation, and so forth (Liao et al., 2012). Despite the diversity of the adopted solutions, few directly address psychological issues such as the bias toward the near future and inertia toward dangers that would not affect oneself. Recently, many scholars have argued that governments around the world should seriously consider means that can directly address the root cause of anthropogenic climate change – humans. The upshot of this proposal is simple: Given that climate change results from human activities and collective inaction, using technologies to modify humans into beings who willingly opt for eco-friendly activities and proactively seek collective solutions could resolve the issue. This chapter introduces four types of human engineering that have been proposed by various scholars: (1) cognitive enhancement, (2) moral bioenhancement, (3) dietary preference modification, and (4) physiological modification. These proposals aim to curb climate change by modifying different aspects of human psychology and physiology. Potential means to achieve these goals varies from one proposal to another. For instance, cognitive enhancement can be achieved via traditional and low-tech means like education. However, it could also be achieved via biomedical means such as genetic modification and pharmaceutical intervention. This chapter will focus only on introducing the rationale behind using human engineering to tackle climate change and concerns about these proposals. Section “The Rationale Behind Direct Human Engineering” provides a brief introduction to the rationale behind direct human engineering, explaining why some scholars believe that human engineering is the only way out. Section “Human Engineering as a Possible Way Out” reviews the four proposals for human engineering and relevant scientific findings. Section “Ethical Concerns Against Human Engineering” offers an overview of major concerns about human engineering. Section “Conclusion” concludes that more research on human engineering is required to better evaluate this idea’s feasibility. At the moment, the idea of human engineering raises more problems than it solves.

The Rationale Behind Direct Human Engineering Evolutionary Lag Humans are products of evolution. Throughout human history, humans spent most of their time living with their close kin in small hunter-gatherer societies. Traits like moral psychology are likely to be adapted to help humans better survive under these conditions. Given that human technologies have dramatically changed the current

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living conditions, some worry that humans might not be able to evolve and adapt themselves to deal with the new challenges fast enough without the help of biotechnology. Humans might create a future for which we are unfit, laying the path for our own self-destruction. Concerns like this motivate Persson and Savulescu (2012) to argue for an urgency to dedicate substantial resources into biomedical technologies that can transform humans into morally better beings by liberating humans from biological and/or psychological constraints.

Psychological Constraints According to Persson and Savulescu (2012), one of the morally relevant capacities that is unlikely to adapt quickly enough to address climate change is empathy. Persson and Savulescu argue that the capacity to empathize with suffering from distant strangers was unlikely to matter much when humans all lived in small societies where everyone knew each other. It is only recently that humans came to dwell in huge cities with countless strangers, and we have yet to evolve empathy for the vast majority of people. Persson and Savulescu hypothesize that most people living in the developed world are not motivated to change their lifestyle to ease the rise of global temperatures related to the underdeveloped capacity to empathize with others’ suffering. Another trait frequently highlighted by scholars working in this field is humans’ tendency to assign greater importance to events that will occur in the near future and/or in close geographic proximity. Throughout human history, the technology available to human ancestors was too primitive to produce a long-term impact on the world, nor could the technology affect the environment far away from their settlements. Under these conditions, natural selection is unlikely to select individuals who strive to improve the distant future or faraway lands. The limited progress in forging collective effort might also have something to do with the “outdated” moral psychology. Many scholars have noticed that human psychology is not well-adapted to issues like climate change. Limited altruism and partiality toward close kin have been frequently highlighted as one of the major causes of climate change inaction (Liao et al., 2012; Persson & Savulescu, 2012). The difficulties in garnering strong moral emotions about climate change might also have something to do with the fact that humans tend to associate moral responsibility with intentionality and causality (Markowitz & Shariff, 2012). In the case of climate change, the collective nature of this problem makes it challenging to incite strong moral responses because most people did not intend to cause climate change. Furthermore, our moral psychology is wired to take responsibility as a proportional concept, i.e., one’s responsibility for an event is proportional to one’s causal contribution to it. This causal conception of responsibility might be why many people believe they bear only negligible or no responsibility at all for climate change. This might also be why many have only a weak, if any, motivation to change their lifestyles to a lower-carbon one or demand their government pass stricter regulations to reduce the total amount of greenhouse gas emissions.

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Biological Constraints One of the frequently discussed biological features of humans that might negatively impact the effort to forge collective commitments to curb climate change is the size of human neocortex. Studies done by the anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar (1992, 2008) found that the size of primates’ neocortices relative to the rest of their brain seems to work as a constraint on the number of social relationships they can maintain at one time. For example, adding one more family member into one’s pool of the social relationship one wants to maintain could mean losing a friendship. Humans as members of the primate family also seem to be bounded by this sort of constraint – the neocortex ratio for the human species indicates that most humans can only maintain around a maximum of 150 social relationships at one time. This number is later called the Dunbar’s Number. Many findings confirm Dunbar’s view. An extensive survey conducted by Hamilton et al. (2007) found that most hunter-gatherer societies around the world maintain a population of around 165 members. Similarly, the typical size of an eighteenth-century English village was 160 (Laslett, 1971). Dunbar’s number also appears in modern societies. According to Malcolm Gladwell’s (2000) work, W. L. Gore and Associates (later renamed Gortex Inc.) followed this number by grouping their employees into groups with no more than 150 people, precisely because the company repeatedly found that numerous social problems occurred once group size exceeded that number. Dunbar and colleagues recently found that even powerful social media like Facebook cannot enable us to break the constraint set by the relative size of our neocortices. While it is true that social media enables us to connect to vast numbers of people easily, frequent interactions usually are limited to a few (Pollet et al., 2011). In the case of Facebook, the mean and modal number of Facebook friends people interact with is around 130 (Dunbar, 2012). As well as the biological structure of our brains, the levels of chemicals naturally existing in our bodies also seem to contribute to humans’ inaction to change their lifestyles for alleviating climate change proactively. For instance, some findings suggest that the ability to empathize with others and the willingness to trust others could be influenced by oxytocin, a type of hormone that naturally exists in human bodies. According to Baron-Cohen’s (2004) research, females tend to be more empathetic than males because the natural levels of oxytocin in females are usually much higher than in males. Besides oxytocin, studies also suggest that our moral behavior and judgment could be affected by serotonin – when serotonin levels are pharmaceutically increased, such as by selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), the respect to fairness and the willingness to cooperate with others seem to be heightened. For example, Tse and Bond (2002) found that in the dictator game – a game where one player, the dictator, must decide how a given sum of money is to be distributed between herself and other players – people receiving SSRIs tend to distribute the money more fairly than those in the control group. Similarly, a series of studies led

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by Crockett (2008) found that higher serotonin levels lead people to be more pro-social and more reluctant to harm others directly. Crockett’s team (2008) also found that people’s responsiveness toward unfairness and injustice is linked to serotonin levels in their bodies.

Human Engineering as a Possible Way Out The findings mentioned above give us sufficient reason to consider human engineering as a possible way to address climate change. Some scholars, such as Persson and Savulescu, even argue that it is a normative imperative for dedicating more resources to research on biotechnologies that can make humans better address climate change collectively. The evolutionary story also provides a solid foundation for the idea of human enhancement. Briefly, the proponents of human enhancement hold the view that if it is morally permissible to use biotechnological means to close up the ever-widening gap between human evolution and human technology, in principle, there is no reason to stop the engineering once the gap is closed. Human traits can be further enhanced with the help of biotechnology. Below, I introduce four prominent proposals for using human engineering to address climate change: (1) cognitive enhancement, (2) moral bioenhancement, (3) dietary preference modifications, and (4) physiology modification.

Cognitive Enhancement The unfortunate backfire of the Kyoto Protocol as mentioned before shows how challenging it is to design policies that can bring down greenhouse gas emissions. The climate science itself is complicated enough. The cognitive abilities and capacities required for analyzing the vast amount of data from different fields to come up with feasible policies are daunting. The Kyoto Protocol’s failure tells us that even the well-informed experts were struggling to find a solution. Expecting the laypeople to understand the rationale of climate change policy and follow the insights might simply put the hope in the wrong place. These findings suggest that cognitive enhancement might effectively tackle climate change (Jefferson et al., 2014). First, with cognitive abilities enhancement, humans will be more capable of comprehending the science behind climate change. Second, an increased understanding of the science related to climate change may also boost the motivation of participating in ecofriendly activities. However, the science of cognitive enhancement is still in its infancy. Most of the studies about cognitive enhancement were done in laboratory conditions, and many were conducted with people with certain cognitive impairments. For instance, pharmaceuticals such as methylphenidate and modafinil have been proven effective in improving cognitive functions under laboratory conditions (Müller et al., 2004). However, whether these pharmaceuticals can also improve

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healthy people’s cognitive capacity outside the laboratory is unclear. Similarly, while studies on noninvasive brain stimulation like transcranial direct current stimulation show promise in producing long-lasting improvement in the mathematical ability of children with low numeracy skills (Kadosh et al., 2010), it is not clear whether this type of intervention can also benefit people with no cognitive impairment.

Moral Bioenhancement Some of the tentative proposals focus on using biomedical means to address the lack of moral motivation for dealing with climate change. It is argued that since many studies show that humans’ moral shortcomings are deeply linked to their neurological wiring, biochemical interventions could provide solutions for these motivational problems. For instance, the reason most people living in the developed world are not motivated to change their lifestyles to slow the rise of global temperatures might be that the sheer number of victims is beyond their ability to empathize with (Dunbar, 1992, 2008). Studies mentioned above on hormone levels and human morality also give rise to the idea of using pharmaceutical means to directly fix the indifference toward other people’s suffering. For instance, by increasing the general population’s oxytocin levels with pharmaceuticals, people living in the affluent world might be more capable of empathizing the suffering of the climate change victims and have stronger motivation to help, even though the victims are strangers to them. The heightened empathetic ability might also induce more pro-environmental behaviors (Berenguer, 2007). It is noteworthy that most of the scientific studies cited by proponents of moral bioenhancement are ongoing studies and remain subject to further examination. For instance, some of the early studies on oxytocin appear to be not replicable (Lane et al., 2015), suggesting that arguments based on those studies are likely mistaken. Walum, Waldman, and Young (2016) also point out that studies of intranasal oxytocin are generally unable to provide sound statistical conclusions due to the limited sample size. Furthermore, follow-up studies conducted by Carsten De Dreu and his colleagues on the effects of oxytocin suggest that oxytocin’s effect on increasing altruistic tendencies and willingness to trust others are more complicated than previously thought. Higher oxytocin levels could indeed increase altruistic tendencies, but the scope is narrow – the increased altruistic tendencies mostly work only on “in-group” members (De Dreu et al., 2010). If what we want is a society where “outgroup” strangers could also be greeted with great altruism, increasing oxytocin levels might turn out counterproductive.

Dietary Preference Modification There are also other proposals for human engineering that focus on engineering humans into less resource-intensive beings. Citing the influential greenhouse gas emissions report published by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United

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Nations, Matthew Liao and his colleagues (2012) argue that greenhouse gas emissions might be significantly reduced once humans are engineered to become meat intolerant. According to the report of the United Nations, it is estimated that 18% of the greenhouse gas emissions in the world are from the livestock farming sector, among which cattle (both for meat and dairy consumption) contribute 65% of the emissions (Steinfeld et al., 2006). Observing the limited effect brought by various social and cultural means, Liao et al. argue that a more “realistic” option might be using pharmacological means to induce meat intolerance alongside the existing programs. Theoretically speaking, artificial meat intolerance could be induced by modifying the immune system. Despite the rarity of beef intolerance, it is found that bovine serum albumin (BSA), the protein that causes lactose intolerance, can also trigger allergic responses in some humans when they consume products containing beef (Aparicio et al., 2005). Should it become possible to artificially induce hypersensitivity to BSA, potentially, the uncomfortable experiences after consuming meat could help those who lack the willpower to change their dietary preferences make the change. However, given the scarcity of studies related to artificial meat intolerance, it is challenging to evaluate this proposal’s feasibility.

Physiology Modification Another proposal made by Liao et al. (2012) is to use biomedical technologies to downsize humans. It is found that the energy required for healthy human individuals is positively and linearly correlated to the subject’s weight and height (Mifflin et al., 1990). According to the calculation made by Liao et al., a 15 cm reduction of average US citizens in height could yield a significant decrease in metabolic rates (15% for females; 18% for males). Besides reducing the amount of energy required for basal metabolism, other things being equal, transporting a smaller human also require less fuel per mile; necessities such as clothing and furniture can also be made with fewer resources. There are a couple of biomedical means that could be used for downsizing humans. Given that human height is partially determined by genetic factors, it might be possible to use preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) to actively select embryos that are more likely to grow shorter. Downsizing humans in this way does not involve altering humans’ genetic make-up but merely changing the selection criteria for embryo implant. The height of human populations will be gradually shortened generation by generation. It is also possible to use hormones to intervene in human growth. For instance, testosterone and somatostatin have been used for treating excessive tall children by reducing their height (Hindmarsh et al., 1995). Applying the same treatment to healthy individuals might also help reduce their height and subsequently reduce energy consumption. It is also speculated that the birth weight and height of a human infant might also influence its height in adulthood (Sorensen et al., 1999). Artificially reducing the birth weight and might also help downsize humans. However, it is important to note that all highly speculative and controversial.

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Ethical Concerns Against Human Engineering While considerations such as the evolutionary lag and suboptimal moral psychology provide strong reasons for exploring the biotechnological solutions for climate change, the attempt to directly modulate human beings raises many ethical concerns such as safety and feasibility. However, since most of the discussion about the potential of human engineering to curb climate change focus on moral bioenhancement, the majority of the concerns reviewed here will pertain to this proposal.

Safety Safety is arguably one of the most frequently raised concerns. While the hormones mentioned by the proponents of human engineering naturally exist in the human body, altering the levels of hormones still carries risks. For instance, modulating testosterone levels in young children for height reduction might trigger an early onset of puberty. As for oxytocin, an increased level of oxytocin in pregnant female might induce premature labor. Should a female receive oxytocin without the knowledge of her pregnancy, this might cause miscarriage and harm to the female’s health. Some also worry that if oxytocin could truly increase the level of willingness to trust strangers, people with oxytocin levels heightened might become an easy target for exploitation (Handfield et al., 2016). Pharmaceuticals for cognitive enhancement are not risk-free either. In the case of methylphenidate, indeed, the known adverse side effects are generally minor and tolerable when used clinically (e.g., treating attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder). However, methylphenidate also has potential for abuse (Morton & Stockton, 2000). Methylphenidate could produce effects similar to those of cocaine when used intranasally. Abusing methylphenidate in large doses could lead to toxic psychosis, hallucinations, confusion, and so forth. Rolling out cognitive enhancement programs with pharmaceuticals like methylphenidate might create other social and health problems that are difficult to address.

Feasibility Feasibility is another major issue faced by all human engineering proposals. As I have briefly touched on in the previous section, most scientific studies cited by proponents of human engineering are inconclusive. Some of the reviews even cannot be replicated. In the case of moral bioenhancement, we still do not know enough about the operation in the brain of the biochemicals that might potentially enhance our morality. It is not clear, for instance, whether increasing the levels of oxytocin can truly make humans more altruistic toward others – most studies are conducted in laboratory environment, with limited numbers of participants, and without female participants. Under these conditions, it is hard to evaluate whether human engineering is feasible.

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Even if human engineering is scientifically feasible, it might still be practically infeasible. Take the artificial meat intolerance as an example. Indeed, livestock farming is one of the major sources of greenhouse gas emissions. Changing people’s dietary preferences by inducing artificial meat intolerance might reduce greenhouse emissions from this sector. However, to significantly reduce the emission via this means will need to biologically alter a significant number of people. The logistics and resources required might make the implementation of this proposal impossible. Other proposals such as moral bioenhancement and cognitive enhancement also face serious challenges in implementation.

Resources Allocation As the outcome of these projects are highly uncertain, dedicating substantial resources to them to address an urgent quest like solving climate change may be strategically wrongheaded. Human engineering may be worth exploring, but it is still in its infancy. It will take a considerable amount of time and resources to develop means that is effective and safe. If, like what some proponents of human engineering said, human societies have to act right now to avoid irreversible climate change, we should not put our hope in solutions that are still highly speculative. Kulawska and Hauskeller (2018) recently also argued that characterizing climate change as a moral or biological problem overlooks that climate change is also a social problem. By social problem, Kulawska and Hauskeller mean that climate change is a problem that arises from factors like how human societies function, which social norms are adopted, and also what sort of infrastructure is established. How the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the social norms we took for granted is one vivid instance. Working from home was once a radical idea, but now more and more companies, especially the tech giants, are willing to allow their employees to opt for working from home. Changes like this might help reduce the overall greenhouse gas emissions. According to an analysis recently published by the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (2020), London has seen almost a 60% reduction in CO2 emissions during the lockdown. Instances like this, again, question whether it is prudential to priories human engineering over social engineering.

Unpredictability Additionally, even if scientists were to discover a biomedical means of improving the treatment of outgroup strangers, it is not entirely clear whether this sort of bioenhancement could help us effectively deal with climate change as some enthusiasts claims. For instance, drawing insights from game theory, Handfield et al. (2016) argue that climate change might not be solvable via this bottom-to-up approach. Indeed, from the individual level, biomedical means might make an individual more altruistic, more willing to trust others, and so forth. However, climate change is not solvable by a single morally enhanced person. To solve it

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requires collective effort. Indeed, increasing trust will be beneficial when people are in a situation where all parties are better off if they cooperate with each other. However, the real world is full of strategic uncertainty. The willingness to trust might lead to suboptimal result when a person is under a situation where others are ready to exploit their trust. Furthermore, modifying people’s moral dispositions might also change how frequently different types of situations will occur. Evolutionary reasoning predicts that humans with exploitative tendencies will be more likely to opt for exploitative strategies when they notice the number of people willing to trust increases. Situations where mutual cooperation can yield the highest outcome for all parties involved will become fewer and fewer, making mutual cooperation less likely. The dynamic feature of human interaction makes it very difficult to predict whether using biomedical means to modulate people’s moral dispositions will foster more collaboration. The problem of unpredictability also applies to the seemingly less concerning form of human engineering, cognitive enhancement. Interestingly, Persson and Savulescu, the two most ardent supporters of human enhancement, argue that we should not pursue cognitive enhancement because the enhancement might turn out to increase the likelihood of hastening climate change. Persson and Savulescu’s argument against cognitive enhancement can be understood with some of the points made in the evolutionary lag section. Briefly, what worries them is that cognitive enhancement might further shorten the time humans need for developing more powerful technology. Yet, it is hard to predict whether humans know how to use these technologies wisely and whether humans are willing to use them to benefit one another.

Violation of Autonomy Some scholars, such as Persson and Savulescu, argue that given the urgency of curbing climate change, once scientists successfully develop safe means to engineer humans into better beings, governments worldwide should make the engineering programs compulsory for all. Take moral bioenhancement as an example. Suppose the program is introduced as a voluntary program. In that case, those who will voluntarily enroll the program are likely to be people who have put into considerable effort into reducing their carbon footprints. People who are indifferent to climate change are unlikely to enroll the program, even though they are the group of people who can make the most difference to the situation. As a result, to capitalize on the power of moral bioenhancement, it must be implemented in a compulsory manner. While the proposal for making human engineering compulsory is wellintended, it will severely violate people’s bodily integrity and moral autonomy. Many criticize the proposal for bioenhancement for the threat it poses to people’s freedom of self-determination (Harris, 2011; Huang, 2018; Sparrow, 2014). The critics worry that once compulsory moral bioenhancement is introduced, the effects of pharmaceuticals will dictate people’s moral life, undermining people’s

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moral agency. For instance, Huang (2018) recently argued that the pharmaceuticals could change hormone levels in a way that is so subtle that people cannot tell whether the moral view they hold is genuinely theirs, or just a product produced by the pharmaceuticals. Without the knowledge that the moral view they hold does not reflect their moral commitments, resisting the otherwise alien view is impossible.

Moral Rigidity It is also worried that moral bioenhancement might create obstacles for us to act morally (Harris, 2011; Huang and Tsu, 2018; Sparrow, 2014). Arguments along this line usually do not deny that moral bioenhancement could produce effects that are generally associated with morally desirable consequences. These arguments do not doubt that respect for fairness often leads to morally desirable results. What they question is whether moral bioenhancement could help its recipients be in a better position to act in a morally righteous way across a wide range of situations. Huang and Tsu (2018) argue that each moral situation has its particularities. It is impossible to find a set of moral principles that can offer people definite normative guidance under all sorts of moral situations they face. To act morally requires practical wisdom that can help one navigate through the complexities of each moral situation and act righteously. Take, for example, the case of serotonin. Even if we accept the finding that lower serotonin links to a stronger adherence to the value of fairness, the effect itself could still be considered a failure of moral bioenhancement. This is because, in most situations, fairness is not the only moral value at stake. When all important values cannot be respected at the same time, we must make a choice – and sometimes, fairness has to be sacrificed. If lowering serotonin could really strengthen our tendencies to respect fairness, it might, at the same time, make us less capable of responding to complex moral situations in a morally righteous way. This sort of challenge is particularly critical to the type of moral bioenhancement that falls into the affective approach or the direct intervention categories. Justifications for these proposals are often grounded in how a particular moral emotion could be influenced by a particular biochemical means, for example, SSRIs and the sense of fairness, or oxytocin and altruism. Hence, attempting to apply these findings to designing moral bioenhancement may lead to the discovery that enhancement recipients become less capable of conducting moral deliberation in a context-sensitive way (Huang and Tsu, 2018). For example, enhancement recipients who received an SSRIsbased enhancement program could act in a manner that is fair but does not seriously consider other values such as altruism. In contrast, those who received oxytocin-based enhancement may give excessive weight to in-group altruism. Douglas has tried to reply to this sort of challenge by arguing that the challenge only suggests that the affective approach to moral bioenhancement must be done with better tuning (e.g., Douglas’s (2013) fine-tuning argument). However, some of the earliest proponents of this approach seem to agree that the challenge is critical,

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and we might be better off seeking help from other forms of moral bioenhancement (Savulescu & Maslen, 2015; Schaefer & Savulescu, 2019). It seems that increasing numbers of scholars now acknowledge that the rigidity of moral bioenhancement could indeed be a serious problem. Given that there are numerous moral situations related to climate change, it will be counterproductive if moral bioenhancement ends up making people less capable of finding and acting on the best moral act to address the moral issue they encounter.

Social Injustice Attempts to use human engineering to solve climate change might also exacerbate existing social injustice. As mentioned before, to curb climate change via human engineering requires a mass participation. Most governments in the world probably would not go as far as Persson and Savulescu suggest, that is, making human enhancement compulsory to all. The most likely scenario is to introduce incentives to attract more people to enroll human engineering programs voluntarily. Presumably, by doing so, the government could still respect its citizens’ autonomy while increasing the total enrolment of human engineering. However, as Liao et al. (2012) acknowledge, even if human engineering is not implemented in a compulsory manner, it could still worsen existing social injustice. Take the proposal for downsizing human beings as an example. Given that most societies value tallness, it is foreseeable that the majority would not respond to the incentives, but the least welloff who find the incentives too good to refuse. Under this situation, the human engineering program will place a disproportionate amount of burden on the least well-off and exacerbate existing social injustice. Regarding this worry, Liao et al. (2012) argue that downsizing would not necessarily worsen social injustice. According to the sufficientarian approach to distributive justice (Crisp, 2003), justice only requires that people receive sufficient levels of resources. In the case of downsizing, so long as those who are downsized still enjoy a sufficient level of height that would not be disabling to them, the issue about social injustice would not occur. However, one may question whether appealing to the sufficientarian approach helps here. The matter at stake here is not about the height per se, but about the introduction of a new sort of inequality between the well-off and the least well-off. That is, with the downsizing program, “socioeconomic” inequality now can also manifest in the form of “biological” and “physiological” inequality. The appealing to sufficientarian approach does not properly address the concern about placing more burdens on the shoulders of the least welloff than they otherwise ought to bear.

Designing the Next Generation Related to the previous concern about inequality is the moral permissibility of designing the next generation. Recall Liao et al.’s suggestion of using PGD to select

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embryos that are more likely to grow shorter. Indeed, using this method to downsize the next generation does not inflict any direct physical harm to the selected in the sense that their height is not made shorter than they could otherwise have. Downsizing humans in this way is very different from giving children pharmaceuticals that can interfere with their hormone levels. The latter not only places unduly heavier burdens on the children than they otherwise would have to bear, but also risks violating these children’s bodily integrity. (However, cf. Parfit’s (1987) non-identity problem.) However, prominent philosophers such as Francis Fukuyama (2002), Jürgen Habermas (2003), and Michael Sandel (2009) have expressed concerns about using genetic technologies in this manner. One of the most frequently raised worries is about the child’s right to an open future. With the genetic make-up prescreened before they are implanted, children born in this way would not enjoy the same opportunity to explore their future. Being selected based on the result of the screen also means that the fates of these children are indirectly programmed based on an agenda conceived by others (in this case, the agenda for curbing climate change). Knowing that one is born in this way might severely impact the interpersonal relationship they have with their parents and their ability to pursue a future that belongs to themselves, rather than others’ expectations.

Disrespect for Human Nature Most scholars who worry about designing the next generation also express deep concerns about the disrespect for human nature. Roughly speaking, philosophers holding this view believe there is a human nature shared by all human beings. Biomedical technologies should be limited to restoring the diseased status to the normal and healthy status. According to this line of thought, attempting to use biomedical technologies to go beyond the scope of restoration is a disrespect for human nature. Michael Sandel (2009) even describes the aspiration that everything could be biomedically engineered to suit one’s purposes and desires as a “promethean aspiration.” However, concerns expressed under the name of human nature are not free of criticism. First, albeit the slowness, humans are still evolving. Suggesting that there is an unchangeable human nature does not fit well with our current understanding of biology. Second, the rationale behind this concern will also rule many contemporary medical practices morally unacceptable. For instance, IVF is hardly a natural way for humans to conceive the next generation.

Conclusion The slowness of the evolutionary process and the increasing speed of technological advancement make it ever challenges for humans to deal with unintended mistakes they make with the powerful technology they developed. The dramatic increase in greenhouse gas emissions is arguably one of the instances of how consuming

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modern technology recklessly might result in severe ramifications that are difficult to resolve. Indeed, many resources have been dedicated to developing new technologies, such as carbon capture and storage and green energy solutions, to curb climate change. Given that humans are engineerable, it is understandable that some would believe that governments around the world should dedicate more resources to research on biomedical means that could address climate change by engineering humans into more intelligent, more considerate, and/or less resource-intensive beings. However, as I have mentioned in the previous sections, since many findings cited by proponents of human engineering are still inconclusive, it is unclear whether it is wise to allocate substantial resources into human engineering. The direct modification of human beings also raises several ethical and political concerns, making human engineering much more controversial than other technological solutions for curbing climate change. While we do need to conduct more research on human engineering, at the moment, human engineering raises more problems than it solves. Given the urgency of the current situation, it might not be prudent to put our hope in technologies that are still in their infancy.

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Climate Change and the Ethics of Technology Vera Tripodi

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Engineering Ethics: What Kind of Future Are We Designing? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Do Technologies Present a Moral Hazard? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Does AI in Relation to Climate Change Pose Moral Issues in Relation to Climate Change? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Final Ethical Values and Climate Engineering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

Climate change is considered one of the most pressing problems for life on Earth. Climate engineering technologies, it is believed, can offer a potential response to climate change and effective solutions to deal with its effects. However, these technologies may also pose risks. This chapter explores the ethical issues raised by climate engineering. It is divided into two parts. The first part asks what the ethical constraints of the technology might be and how moral responsibility in climate engineering technologies might be articulated. The second part explores the role that artificial intelligence (AI) in information and communication technologies (ICTs) could play in relation to climate change and mitigation and adaptation measures. Keywords

Engineering ethics · Climate engineering · Value sensitive design · The use of artificial intelligence for climate change mitigation and adaptation · Climate change and ethics of technology V. Tripodi (*) Politecnico di Torino, Turin, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_69

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Introduction Climate change is widely acknowledged as one of the most acute threats to life on our planet that human society is required to address. Global warming and climate change exert an immense impact on humanity, and experts predict that this impact will intensify in the coming decades. Moreover, several irrevocable changes have already occurred. As such, the obligation to meet the world’s growing energy needs and protect the Earth’s delicate climate and ecological balances under threat constitutes one of the greatest scientific, technological, and social challenges facing humankind in the future. Climate engineering technologies (e.g., geoengineering or “solar radiation management”, designed to cool the Earth by reflecting solar energy back into space, or carbon dioxide removal techniques aimed at eliminating CO2 from the atmosphere) have been identified as potential responses to climate change and effective solutions that may help attenuate its effects. Two broad types of solution to climate change have been proposed: mitigation (i.e., rendering the impact of climate change less severe by preventing or reducing, for example, the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere) and adaptation (i.e., anticipating the adverse effects of climate change and taking appropriate measures to prevent or minimize the damage it may cause or exploit the opportunities that may arise). In the context of climate change solutions, mitigation may be defined as human and technological interventions that reduce the sources of greenhouse gas emissions and/or strengthen sinks. It may be achieved by, for example, increasing the share of renewable energy, creating a cleaner mobility system or enhancing carbon storage (e.g., by increasing the size of forests). Adaptation may be understood as the process of adjusting to the current and future effects of climate change. Examples of adaptation measures include large-scale infrastructural changes, such as the installation of safeguards to protect against rising sea levels, and behavioral changes, such as the reduction of food waste. Both solution types rely considerably on the development of innovative technologies that can support and propel mitigation and adaptation responses to global warming. Nevertheless, climate engineering technologies raise serious ethical questions. These technologies are highly controversial and have given rise to debate regarding whether and under what conditions they should be considered. The need to address climate change is not simply limited to the development and use of certain technologies (e.g., technologies for capturing and storing excess carbon dioxide, preventing global warming, and mitigating the greenhouse effect) or the engineering design process grounded in technical and scientific knowledge. Herein, we shall identify and analyze the ethical issues that climate engineering has highlighted. The chapter is divided into two parts. In the first part, we offer arguments in favor of the idea that ethics can contribute to framing the moral issues that technology generally raises beyond the specific case of climate engineering and explore whether, how and under what conditions the ethical debate in technology might precipitate positive change in the world. We shall further demonstrate why ethical concerns should be addressed during the initial stages of technological development by anticipating potential future social consequences, identifying the

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ethical constraints that apply to technology and determining how moral responsibility can be articulated for those in the engineering profession. In the second part, we explore the role that artificial intelligence (AI) in information and communications technology (ICT) might play in relation to climate change from a philosophical perspective. More precisely, we demonstrate how AI might be used in mitigation and adaptation measures.

Engineering Ethics: What Kind of Future Are We Designing? It has become evident that the use of technology and, in particular, engineering processes, cannot be wholly exempted from social, ethical, and ecological considerations. An interdisciplinary approach is warranted so that professionals may cultivate greater awareness of the ethical, environmental, health, political, and social aspects of technology (Terrone & Tripodi, 2022; Kroes & Verbeek, 2014; Sclove, 1995). This new awareness in technology and engineering calls for a thorough assessment of its ethical implications so that any unintended and adverse environmental and social consequences may be minimized, with a particular focus on ethical issues in technology and engineering. Climate engineering technologies may pose several risks and potentially harm vast numbers of people. Equity should thus be a prime consideration for engineers working to address climate change, with full consideration afforded to inequities in climate change impacts and how engineering decisions might exacerbate or alleviate them by incorporating more social science into engineering design and bringing ethical considerations to bear on engineering practice. While applied ethics is required to assess the implications of ecological engineering, engineers must also effectively and concretely evaluate the feasibility and potential merits or demerits of their novel technological framework. During the design process, engineers should consider the potential unintended consequences that might exacerbate existing inequities, particularly those rooted in poverty and gender discrimination. How can ethics help frame the moral issues pertaining to the use of technology in addressing the challenges associated with global climate change? Is a specific ethical framework required? What role might ethics play in developing technologies designed to “engineer” the climate (i.e., the broad set of methods that aim to deliberately alter the climate system to limit the impacts of climate change on a planetary scale) or those designed to mitigate climate change and support adaptation strategies? To address these questions, let us first examine more generally the role that ethics might play in framing the moral issues of technological innovation and design. The past two decades have witnessed an increase in the ethical study of specific technologies, particularly computer ethics (the conceptual foundations of which are at the core of information ethics), which recently turned its attention to robotics, AI, machine ethics, and ethics of algorithms, while biotechnology, nanotechnology, and geoengineering also feature prominently. These new fields of ethical reflection have broadly emerged in response to the acceleration of technological progress in tandem with the development of engineering across various research fields (e.g., aeronautics

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and space, bio-medical, civil, environmental and territorial, industrial and information, construction, etc.). These new fields of ethical reflection are manifestations of applied ethics—that is, the application of theories, concepts and methods rooted in moral philosophy—which is closely linked to modern society’s processes of selfreflection and reflects society’s division into multiple subsystems and institutions. Does this technological progress necessarily require the emergence of new modes of applied ethics? Can the issues that new technologies and engineering fields pose be addressed using the tools of traditional ethics? Might different fields of ethical reflection on specific technologies raise their own philosophical and ethical questions? Does technological progress justify the emergence of research sub-disciplines and new branches in ethics? Philosophical answers to these questions are rather discordant. For example, we may assume that the development of nano-ethics framework is unnecessary on the grounds that nanotechnology raises no new ethical questions but rather variants of existing ethical questions (Franssen et al., 2022; McGinn, 2010; Tavani, 2002). For this reason, the questions that nanotechnologies pose may be addressed using existing conceptual tools from moral philosophy. At best, the application of traditional ethical principles may yield insights that prompt a reformulation or improvement of existing concepts and theories. Otherwise, we may assume that traditional moral philosophical theories and concepts are not sufficiently generalizable for application to any specific moral problem and that ethical issues in specific technological fields require new concepts and frameworks. For example, in computer and information ethics, it has become necessary to reconceptualize the notion of “privacy” in the specific context of the Internet age (Franssen et al., 2022; Johnson, 2003). The notion of privacy is relatively modern, and, as such, it is a concept about which traditional philosophy can tell us little. That is to say, in this particular case, we cannot draw on the philosophical tradition since the privacy issue – as we know it today – was completely unknown to ancient and modern philosophers. New ventures in technological research may, therefore, give rise to new philosophical questions. The definition and investigation of these hitherto unexplored questions may demand new research methodologies and delineate new fields of ethical application and may thus warrant detailed knowledge of specific technologies. Moreover, the emergence of multiple sub-disciplines in applied ethics calls for increased interaction with experts in disciplines that are not ostensibly philosophical, such as law, psychology, medicine, economics, science, and technology, in the belief that much can be learned from interaction and discussion among ethicists who have specific expertise with respect to certain technologies and experts in other fields. However, scholars have lamented the fact that such interaction remains infrequent or wholly absent today, with few exceptions (Franssen et al., 2022). In the last two decades, the moral debate surrounding questions of technology and responsibility has focused not only on the question of whether a given technology is ethically appreciable but also on the different phases of its design. The idea driving this debate is that technology is still malleable and revisable at the design stage and that negative social consequences are less easily avoided and positive effects less easily obtained when a technology is already in use. As such, the ethical question

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arises as early as the design stage. Thus, to exert a real and positive impact on society, ethical constraints should be applied to shape technology during the design phase before said technology is already in use (Santoni de Sio & van den Hoven, 2018). Scholars have recently proposed expanding the remit of engineering ethics (Herkert, 2001; van de Poel & Royakkers, 2011), focusing primarily on two specific concerns. The first is that the traditional approach in engineering ethics tends to take for granted a certain working context within which engineers operate. Here, however, the main ethical issues pertain to how this working context is organized. The second concern relates to the traditional failure to sufficiently consider the impact that technology has on society and the decisions and choices that influence technological design. The purpose of engineering ethics, then, must be to afford greater attention to issues of societal concern. In computer ethics, in particular, as we shall demonstrate below, the so-called Value-Sensitive Design was developed explicitly with the aim of addressing design’s ethical aspects as opposed to limiting the consideration to criteria such as maintainability, cost, and reliability and to examine the ways in which ethical values (including safety, sustainability, and human wellbeing) can be operationalized and incorporated into the design (Bhamra & Lofthouse, 2007; Birkeland, 2002). In line with this approach, decisions concerning a given project’s appropriateness are no longer made by considering exclusively economic parameters (i.e., whether a project is monetizable and measurable in physical or qualitative terms). Engineering ethics is a relatively recent area of inquiry and philosophical research. It is also concerned with the actions completed (or which may be omitted) and decisions made (or which may not be made) individually or collegially by those in professional engineering practice. Engineering is also a liberal profession akin to that of the lawyer or the doctor. The work that engineers perform can directly influence the quality of life enjoyed by members of a given community. Like physicians and other professionals, engineers perform work that has a special social relevance; their work affects factors that are considered fundamental to life and public sustainability (such as safety, pollution, energy use, and public health). Consequently, as members of a professional category, engineers are expected to conduct themselves in accordance with the highest standards of honesty and moral integrity, loyalty, and independence (Davis, 1998; van de Poel, 2015, p. 669; Pritchard, 2009), and the services they provide should be inspired by values such as impartiality, fairness, and equity. These values are often acknowledged as paramount in professional codes of ethics. Moreover, these services should be oriented toward respect for and protection of public health and collective welfare. Ethical reflection on the issue of engineers’ responsibility requires that, first, we delineate more precisely what a “profession” is and how exactly it is defined. While no consensus exists with respect to how this concept should be defined, we can identify several general characteristics that professional practice presupposes. According to Davis (1998, p. 417), a profession may be defined as “a number of individuals in the same occupation voluntarily organized to earn a living by openly serving a certain moral ideal in a morally

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permissible way beyond what law, market, and morality would otherwise require”. Further to this, we may state that professional practice requires specific knowledge and skills acquired over a lengthy study and training period; that members of the same profession can evaluate the quality of a colleague’s work (if it has been competently performed); that it serves society and thus provides products and services that are considered socially useful and beneficial; and that its daily practice is governed by ethical standards geared toward serving society. What, then, are the professional obligations of engineers outlined in the codes of ethics adopted by engineering societies? What role should the engineer assume relative to the design team? How can an engineer fully assume responsibility and shape the world for the better? How should cases of whistleblowing (the reporting of illegal or fraudulent activities) and conflicts of interest be approached (Martin & Schinzinger, 2005; Harris et al., 2008; Santoro & Kumar, 2018)? These questions are all pertinent to the issue of engineering ethics; to address them, the next section examines what it means for a project to implement and embody ethical values.

Do Technologies Present a Moral Hazard? Value-sensitive design is a theoretical approach to technological design that aims to synthesize methods and applications in a design process that involves human values at every stage (Friedman & Kahn, 2003; van den Hoven, 2007, 2013). This approach aims to combine three different types of analysis (conceptual, empirical, and technological) and to integrate ethical principles, such as sustainability, inclusivity, and affectivity, into the design phase (Franssen et al., 2022). For example, one might say that an inclusive design (Clarkson, 2003; Desmet, 2013; Erlandson, 2008) is one that aims to achieve something that is accessible to all members of a community—that is, one that does not exclude society’s most vulnerable actors, such as the elderly, children, women, and the differently abled. An affective design is one that aims to evoke positive emotions in those who use a certain type of technology and contribute to individual well-being. A sustainable design, meanwhile, aims, for example, to exert no negative environmental impacts, such as endangering the survival of certain animal species or jeopardizing biodiversity. How might engineers implement such an approach and how might they determine which values they should prioritize? The idea of incorporating values in design may be articulated in various ways. During the various phases of the design process, a distinction is made between instrumental values (such as effectiveness, quality, economic profit, efficiency, reliability, and maintainability) and final values (such as human well-being, justice, safety, health, and sustainability). These phases typically comprise a series of essential activities, including “analysis (of the design problem), synthesis (of possible design solutions), evaluation (of the possible solutions in the light of the problem), and choice (of one design solution)” (van de Poel, 2015, p. 672–674). During all phases, values can play different and varied roles. For example, in the analysis phase, the design problem is conceptualized by the designer and the team. In this phase, the values that are incorporated may affect how the problem is conceived

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and framed. The analysis phase, then, culminates in a particular formulation of the design problem and certain design constraints that an ethically good or acceptable solution must satisfy; alternatively, it may be necessary to revise the problem formulation or design requirements. During the evaluation phase, the simulation results of various project solutions are evaluated in different ways (e.g., keeping in mind the satisfaction of functional or cost requirements and the instrumental and final values). At this stage, it is necessary to choose which conceptual project will be pursued and developed. Here, the decision will be informed by the evaluation results of various projects, and values are a key decision criterion. However, difficulties may arise at this stage: it may not be possible to choose a project that meets all design requirements and satisfies all instrumental or final values. Therefore, it is necessary to choose between conflicting values. For example, as has been noted (Franssen et al., 2022), a safer car is not necessarily the most eco-sustainable option. In this case, safety and eco-sustainability are two conflicting ethical principles. Where conflict arises between principles, the challenge is to determine at the design stage which principle takes precedence over the other by establishing a hierarchy among the different principles. The methods that engineers implement in dealing with conflicts of this nature include not only cost–benefit analysis but also multi-criteria analysis, which also considers environmental and social impacts to be relevant in assessing a project’s cost-effectiveness. However, several open ethical questions remain unanswered with respect to how the values to be normatively incorporated into a design should be chosen, how conflicting values should be handled at the design stage, and how to determine whether a project embodies or represents the values that informed its design (van de Poel, 2015, p. 686) (Flanagan et al., 2008). Attempts to incorporate moral values in design are not immune to critical issues, including the major issue mentioned above relating to managing the conflict between ethical principles and the elimination of possible risks. As various researchers have highlighted (Asveld & Roeser, 2009; Hansson, 2003, 2009; Shrader-Frechette, 1991; Roeser, 2012), risk elimination is not always a viable option; sometimes, it may not even be desirable. In some cases, risk elimination is not possible because not all technological devices are completely safe. Therefore, safety is a standard that cannot always be guaranteed. In other cases, however, while risk reduction may be feasible, it may not be ethically appreciable. In fact, risk reduction often comes at a high cost; safer technological devices and artifacts are sometimes less user-friendly and less sustainable with respect to environmental protection. Therefore, the moral questions with respect to the question of responsibility in the terms we are developing here are as follows: What makes a risk acceptable or unacceptable? When is a technological device definable as “safe enough”, and What precisely is meant by “safe enough”? The process that examines technological risk assessment may be broadly divided into three stages: assessment, valuation, and management (Cranor, 1990; ShraderFrechette, 1991). Of these three stages, the most relevant from an ethical perspective is the second. However, some have observed (Franssen et al., 2022) that the stage at which risk is ascertained may already include some value judgment (e.g., which type of risk should be ascertained primarily). At this stage, the question regarding the

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degree of evidence that is required to establish a risk is ethically important. In decreeing a risk in accordance with a set of empirical data, two types of error may arise: one might erroneously determine that there is a risk when in fact, that risk is not there (error type 1); alternatively, one might erroneously come to believe the opposite—that is, that there is no risk when, in fact, there is some risk (error type 2) (Franssen et al., 2022). Traditionally, science has been tasked with avoiding error type 1. In the context of a specific risk, the ascertainment stage may be regarded as the most crucial in avoiding error type 2. The ascertainment of a risk aims not only to establish scientific truths but also to achieve practical purposes—that is, to establish the requisite knowledge that facilitates sound decisions regarding the desirability or undesirability of reducing or avoiding a certain risk with the aim of protecting individuals and communities. The assessment stage may be approached in different ways (Shrader-Frechette, 1985). One approach is to estimate the acceptability of a risk by comparing it to other risks or to certain standards; for example, one might compare a technological risk with a natural risk. A key limitation of this approach, however, is that it falls into a naturalistic fallacy: the fact that a natural risk may sometimes be inevitable does not necessarily make it acceptable from an ethical perspective. Another option is to evaluate risk by means of cost–benefit analysis and based on the weight that may be assigned to risks over benefits. As a rule, the following criterion is applied in cost–benefit analysis: a risk is acceptable if—and only if—the ultimate benefits of exposure to the risk outweigh the likely disadvantages. A third approach is to evaluate the acceptance of risk based on the consent of people who, having been adequately informed of the potential harms, are willing to accept that risk. The difficulty with this third approach lies largely in the fact that technological risk can impact very large populations. Informed consent may thus result in decision stalemates. To address these difficulties, alternatives to traditional risk assessment approaches have been proposed, and several reforms suggested for adoption in risk assessment or evaluation procedures. One approach might be to consider certain moral issues that are traditionally considered marginal. For example, at the valuation stage, it would serve to consider whether individuals might derive some benefit from the risk in question or whether the distribution of risks and benefits is equitable. By contrast, some authors have criticized the excessive focus on the risk factor. This position is motivated by the fact that it is not possible to reliably assess the risks of a new technology before it comes into use, given that the necessary information is not always available. That is, for the most part, we are unable to predict that something might go wrong since we do not always have sufficient information regarding the potential negative consequences of a given technology. In some cases, the focus on risks has weakened the moral evaluation of new technologies. Generally, only a certain type of impact is assessed as risky— the impact on physical well-being and safety, for example—while other types of impact, such as those of a social and psychological nature, are often overlooked. This concludes the general part of this chapter, which sought to introduce several of the most relevant questions in the field of the ethics of technology and engineering. In the section that follows, we shall consider whether AI poses moral issues in

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relation to climate change and the moral principles to which engineers should adhere in promoting desirable and minimizing undesirable outcomes in the field and in the developmental process associated with AI in climate engineering and climate change response.

Does AI in Relation to Climate Change Pose Moral Issues in Relation to Climate Change? AI has been defined and understood in various ways. We might understand AI broadly as “any kind of artificial computational system that shows intelligent behaviors, i.e., complex behaviors that is conducive to reaching goals” (Muller, 2021). According to McCarthy et al., “for the present purpose the artificial intelligence problem is taken to be that of making a machine behave in ways that would be called intelligent if a human were so behaving”. (McCarthy et al., 2006). According to a World Economic Forum report entitled “Harnessing Artificial Intelligence for the Earth”, the term AI refers to computer systems that “can sense their environment, think, learn, and act in response to what they sense and their programmed objectives”. AI may be applied across several areas (industry, agriculture, health care, education, finance), and its applications may include various techno-scientific branches, machine learning, and software. While there are ways in which AI can support efforts to address climate change, other applications of AI may actually exacerbate climate change and its effects. Despite technological advances, AI systems and solutions are often energy-intensive and produce significant volumes of carbon emissions, thus negatively impacting the climate. Although it is often regarded as “clean” technology, as some authors have argued, AI has a dual role in relation to climate change. On the one hand, AI accelerates the environment’s degradation because of the current dependence of electricity on fossil fuels and consequently affects human health, livelihoods, and security; on the other hand, technological progress in relation to AI is an essential component in solutions to ecological breakdown and may contribute to addressing the Earth’s environmental challenges, particularly mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and supporting social adaptation to the adverse effects of global warming. At this juncture, let us consider first how AI in ICT impacts climate change. According to several recent important studies on the carbon footprint (the total greenhouse gas emissions) caused by ICT, AI is largely unsustainable and exerts a significant environmental impact, and evidence suggests that, with greater use and diffusion of these technologies, their negative effects will intensify. A study conducted by Belkhir and Elmeligi (2018), which included the production and the operation energy of ICT devices (laptops, smartphones, and tablets), has shown that “the ICT GHGE [greenhouse gas emissions] contribution relative to worldwide footprint will roughly double from 1 to 1.6% in 2017 to 3–3.6% by 2020”. They noted that “ICT’s relative contribution would exceed 14% of the 2016-level worldwide GHGE by 2040”. According to this study, the bulk of these emissions are generated by ICT infrastructure, including data centers and communication

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networks. Strubell et al. (2019) examined the carbon footprints of different AI models and found that the estimated emissions varied among the models. The training of AI for natural language processing (NLP) models was found to be associated with the highest emissions, with estimates suggesting that these emissions amount to approximately 300,000 kg CO2e. Other studies have yielded similar conclusions. AI requires electricity to function, and this demand for electricity continues to rise. Most global electricity production is currently generated by coalfired power stations. AI additionally relies on the production of hardware and other devices, such as computers, data services, cables, and batteries. This also includes the mining and the transportation of metals (such as lithium and cobalt), the production of components, and transportation of the final product to users and developers. Moreover, most digital technologies rely on rare minerals that are becoming increasingly scarce. Therefore, when calculating the emissions associated with the development, production, and various uses of AI, one might also consider the emissions generated by this production chain and that the energy requirements, which mean that this chain relies largely on fossil fuels. The environmental impact in terms of climate change is thus likely to be immense. It has been estimated, for example, that global CO2 emissions from the ICT sector have now surpassed the airline industry in terms of impact. Nevertheless, as has been argued (Nordgren, 2022), from an environmental perspective, AI may serve as a tool that can support better management of climate change and play a key role in strategies against climate warming, with the potential to deliver transformative solutions in this respect. While AI technology is not in itself sufficient to solve climate change, researchers have proposed various ways in which AI may best be applied to this end. AI facilitates automatic monitoring through remote sensing: as such, its use may allow us to detect deforestation or collect data on buildings and assess damage in the aftermath of environmental disasters. AI can accelerate some scientific processes and discoveries—for example, by suggesting new materials for batteries, construction, and carbon capture. AI allows us to optimize systems to improve efficiency (e.g., consolidating freight transport, designing carbon markets, and reducing food waste). It can also accelerate physical simulations computationally through hybrid modeling (such as climate models and energy programming models). Additionally, the development of AI-based techniques may help improve short-, medium-, and long-term forecasts (e.g., on an annual scale) in the future. Let us now consider in greater detail some of these proposals regarding how AI might reduce greenhouse gas emissions and help mitigate the adverse effects of climate change. One key proposal concerns energy efficiency and machine learning models training. Individual practitioners and organizations can take concrete actions that target key aspects of a neural network to mitigate carbon emissions. These aspects may include “the location of the server used for training and the energy grid that it uses, the length of the training procedure, and even the make and model of hardware on which the training takes place” (Lacoste et al., 2019) and the selection of more efficient hardware. As noted above, the energy consumption of AI systems— machine learning, in particular—has doubled in recent years. According to experts,

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several factors affect the carbon footprint of neural networks, including where the server used for training is located, the energy network to which it is connected, the size of the dataset, and the hardware in which the training takes place. AI training and use may be more energy-efficient in terms of model performance and environmental impact, but a reduction is warranted, since training a machine learning model generates significant amounts of carbon emissions while using no more data than is necessary. Therefore, the use of increasingly energy-efficient processing units, servers, storage, devices, and hyperscale data centers is important in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Another proposal is that the AI model should be trained using mainly electricity from renewable sources as a means of reducing the carbon footprint. Some suggest making efficiency an evaluation criterion: AI researchers, when publishing results relating to new models, should report the financial costs of developing, training, and running the models to help make AI more sustainable (Schwartz et al., 2019). Some have also suggested that the data centers at which algorithms are trained should be selected consciously and located in countries in which cloud providers are low-carbon and powered by renewable energy sources. Another proposal is to distinguish where possible between luxury consumption, wastefulness, and sufficiency. This may suggest that the use of AI to counter phenomena such as droughts, unsafe levels of air pollution, the depletion of fishing stocks, toxins in rivers and soils, overflowing levels of waste on land and in the ocean, biodiversity loss, and deforestation or to make health care and people’s welfare more effective is ethically appreciable, while other uses of AI—for entertainment purposes, for example— are not. Proposals regarding the use of AI for climate change mitigation include the idea that machine learning may help prevent methane (an extremely potent greenhouse gas) leakage from natural gas pipelines and compressor stations. Mitigation methods include reducing emissions from fossil fuels, minimizing waste associated with electricity delivery, and flexibly managing demand to minimize the impact of emissions: “reduce emissions from freight transportation of solid fuels, identify and manage storage sites for CO2 sequestered from power plant flue gas, and optimize power plant parameters to reduce CO2 emissions” (Rolnick et al., 2019, p. 11). AI may further help to enhance energy efficiency; improve energy storage; make cities more energy-efficient and liveable; monitor ecosystems; monitor drinking water quality and manage residential water use; detect underground leaks in drinking water supply systems and predict when water plants need maintenance; simulate weather events and natural disasters; and improve the accuracy of climate change projections. Moreover, AI may be useful in determining the best times to plant, water, and harvest crops and prevent plant diseases, allowing for greater efficiency in reducing water use as well as the use of fertilizers and pesticides. AI may also be instrumental in raising awareness and encouraging people toward more climate-friendly lifestyles while helping governments and various institutions to achieve national and international climate goals by making nudging activities more efficient (Coeckelbergh, 2020, p. 69). AI can also influence human behavior by incentivizing more climate-friendly actions. More specifically, AI can help prompt

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people to waste less energy, generate less waste, avoid using cars, and encourage travel by more environmentally friendly means, such as cycling. Gentle nudging will not force people to change but rather will encourage users, consumers, and citizens to choose certain options over others. For example, food retail outlets could be designed to ensure that products that are more climate-friendly and have a lower carbon footprint are afforded the locations with the greatest visibility. Encouragement of this nature does not restrict people’s freedom but exploits their propensity to make biased decisions, albeit for positive environmental purposes in this case. These nudging operations exploit heuristics and cognitive biases, such as framing, confirmatory bias, and negativity bias, which have been shown to simplify decisionmaking in multiple contexts. Let us now consider some of the proposals put forward regarding the use of AI for climate change adaptation. AI may be used to develop more resilient designs for buildings, landscapes, and communities capable of withstanding the effects of extreme weather, natural and man-made disasters, and climate change such as including rising sea levels, heatwaves, droughts, severe storms, flooding, wildfire, and other impacts that are expected to result from a warming climate. AI may be useful in identifying design solutions based on future climate conditions rather than relying on past data; creating buildings that can maintain liveable conditions during prolonged power or heating fuel shortages and capable of withstanding hurricanes and other high winds; optimizing the use of on-site renewable energy; and implementing water conservation practices and water resources that replenish themselves (rainwater harvesting). It may also improve weather forecasting and protection against extreme weather events, help predict the trajectories of hurricanes and other storms as well as the onset of natural phenomena, such as droughts or floods. In addition, AI may prove to be a useful agricultural tool in terms of adjusting planting times. Any application of AI in climate change mitigation and adaptation should ensure that negative environmental impacts do not affect society’s most vulnerable and that the benefits are not exclusive to the richest and most technologically advanced countries. Based on this brief examination, the AI developer and programmer community should begin working toward new paradigms and models that, for example, do not require high energy use. Energy efficiency is an evaluation criterion for research— namely, using more computationally efficient hardware and algorithms and tools (such as machine learning emissions calculators) that can help estimate the amount of carbon emissions produced by training AI models. In this context, it has been proposed that, for example, published findings relating to new AI models should include data on how much energy was expended in model development or that contracts with fossil fuel companies should be canceled. Ethical questions pertaining to the application of AI in climate change mitigation and adaptation increasingly emerge as a fundamental challenge. How should engineers determine which values they should prioritize during the design stage (Dym et al., 2014)? What risks does the deployment of these technologies entail? What tradeoffs might emerge as a result of their deployment? In the following paragraph, we shall explore and further define

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several key final values that are instrumental in climate engineering—more specifically during the design process—and the development and use of AI in relation to climate change. In doing so, we shall turn our attention to some ethical values that engineers might incorporate into the technologies that they design and develop.

Final Ethical Values and Climate Engineering One of the final values considered relevant to climate engineering design and often mentioned in ethical codes is safety. As noted, there is no such thing as risk-free climate protection, and none of the climate geoengineering pathways (in particular, radical geoengineering technologies such as space mirrors, ocean iron fertilization, and cirrus cloud thinning designed to modify the Earth’s climate system) is inherently safe (Sovacool et al., 2022). Every possibility offered by climate geoengineering has associated risks. For example, low-cost carbon storage options (such as afforestation or ecosystem restoration) may have negative outcomes in terms of ecosystem health and functionality. Afforestation and ecosystem options, in fact, require considerably more land and irrigation if no fertilizer is used (the best option for local ecosystems). However, to double or triple the yield, environmentally harmful nitrogen fertilizers must be introduced. Sovacool et al. (2022) suggested a framework that clusters the risk–risk tradeoffs into three categories: institutional and governance, technological and environmental risk, and behavioral and temporal. As a final institutional tradeoff, they write, “the urgency and immediacy of addressing climate change could generate a powerful incentive to deploy geoengineering options as soon as possible— but this also means there will be fewer tests, possibly less stringent safety protocols, and greater uncertainty about their impacts. In this way, urgency lies in direct tension to safety” (Sovacool et al., 2022, p. 8). Their research recognizes a total of 12 risk–risk tradeoffs in climate geoengineering that must be weighed against the risks of climate change itself. It may be difficult to manage some of these tradeoffs—for example, weaponization or social backlash. This may render some options unmanageable. Nonetheless, the authors maintain that “while these approaches pose risks of their own across different types of populations and ecosystems, they also have the (greater) potential to significantly reduce the pending impacts of climate change to humans” (Sovacool et al., 2022, p. 2). Another relevant final value for engineering is that of “human well-being” and “health”. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), “health” may be defined as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity” (World Health Organization, 2006). From this perspective, “the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being without distinction of race, religion, political belief, economic or social condition”. As noted above, climate change is already affecting human health and human well-being. The effects of these changes can exacerbate various diseases (e.g., heart and lung diseases). Intense weather events (e.g., heatwaves, droughts, bushfires, storms, and floods) caused by these changes also have major impacts on electricity supply, transportation, and

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communication systems. These effects, in turn, impact the ability to meet increased demands for health services. Climate engineering should address climate risks by reducing carbon footprints and health damages and improving the sustainability of health systems and the effects that climate change has on the delivery of these services. Technologically supported use of AI in public health is essential for climate-resilient health systems and the transition away from existing coal. In climate engineering, the goal should be to avoid negative influences on human health and to contribute positively to human well-being. The relevance of human rights as ultimate ethical value in the contribution that engineering can make to the fight against climate change has been outlined. The effects of climate change manifest themselves not only as weather phenomena. These ecological disasters have dramatic consequences for human populations. Migration, violence, poverty, inequalities, and exploitation are negative consequences of some of the effects of climate change. Moreover, these changes also involve violations of the rights of unconsenting individuals, such as children and future generations. It should also be noted that, as some data indicate, the poorest women in developing countries are one of the social groups most vulnerable to the effects of climate change (Tripodi, 2023). Excessive greenhouse gas emissions and the causes of global warming may also be framed as a violation of certain human rights (Zwolinski, 2014; Torpman, 2021). Evidence suggests that populations with lower emissions are more affected by climate change than those that consume more as climate change affects their lives and their rights. As several authors have noted, climate change poses serious social injustice problems and jeopardizes people’s ability to enjoy the full range of human rights. According to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person”. Climate engineering should thus incorporate a human rightsbased approach to duties, rights, and participation (Suarez et al., 2010, 2013; Suarez & van Aalst, 2016; Svoboda et al., 2019). Climate engineering should increasingly incorporate environmental values in terms of sustainability with an eye toward future generations as well. According to the Brundtland Commission (WCED, 1987), “sustainable development” entails “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. According to The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, many of the challenges facing humanity relate directly to the environment and human influence on it. To meet the needs of current and future generations, there must be a balance between economic growth, environmental protection, and social welfare. Climate engineering must address climate change in ways that optimize innovations to advance transformations toward sustainability, ensure that the transition to low-carbon energy systems is equitable, and create new and sustainable mobility systems. Technological innovation should be used to conserve and use the oceans, seas, and marine resources for sustainable development; protect, restore, and promote the sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, biodiversity, and endangered species; combat desertification; develop sustainable cities; and provide affordable clean energy. Sustainable development can only be achieved through climate action, and climate engineering should help to create

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sustainable outcomes for humanity and the planet we inhabit. The challenge is to make sustainability considerations central to the development and use of AI in general. Other final values mentioned and considered relevant in this engineering field include autonomy (understood as the citizens’ right to participate in research as potential subjects of climate change impact), integrity (in relation to conducting scientific research for the common good and freedom of scientific research and its limits), and freedom of research on climate engineering.

Conclusions Ethical values play a key role in engineering climate change design. Strategies aimed at counteracting the effects of global warming cannot be limited to (i) the identification of innovative strategies for monitoring and analysis of climate change, (ii) the mitigation of this change through in-depth analysis of the cycle of resources and materials in their overall supply chain, from extraction to use, resulting in emissions or re-emissions to the environment, and (iii) the technological and planning solutions for adaptation to climatic variations. Rather, climate engineering warrants careful ethical consideration, and attempts to address the issue of climate change also require reflection on what interests and rights are at stake and, at the technological design stage, which moral principle should take precedence over another.

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Strubell, E., Ganesh, A., & Callum, A. M. (2019). Energy and policy considerations for deep learning in NLP, available at: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.02243.pdf (accessed 27 October 2021). Suarez, P., & van Aalst, M. K. (2016). Geoengineering: A humanitarian concern. Earth’s Future, 5. https://doi.org/10.1002/2016EF000464 Suarez, P., Blackstock, J., & van Aalst, M. (2010). Towards a people-centered framework for geoengineering governance: A humanitarian perspective. Geoengineering Quarterly, 1, 2–4. Suarez, P., Banerjee, B., & Mendler de Suarez J. (2013). Geoengineering and the humanitarian challenge: what role for the most vulnerable? (Opinion Article), Geoengineering Our Climate Working Paper and Opinion Article Series. Available at: http://wp.me/p2zsRk-8H Svoboda, T., Buck, H. J., & Suarez, P. (2019). Climate engineering and human rights. Environmental Politics, 28(3), 397–416. Tavani, H. T. (2002). The uniqueness debate in computer ethics: What exactly is at issue, and why does it matter? Ethics and Information Technology, 4(1), 37–54. Terrone, E., & Tripodi, V. (Eds.). (2022). Being and value in technology. Palgrave Macmillan. Torpman, O. (2021). Libertarianism, climate change, and individual responsibility. Res Publica, 28(1–3). Tripodi, V. (2023). Gender and climate change. In F. Corvino & T. Andina (Eds.), Global climate justice: Theory and practice (pp. 289–303). E-International Relations. United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Available at: http://www.un.org/sustainablede velopment/sustainable-development-goals/ van de Poel, I. (2015). Design for values in engineering. In J. van den Hoven, P. Vermaas, & I. van de Poel (Eds.), Handbook of ethics, values, and technological design. Springer. van de Poel, I., & Royakkers, L. (2011). Ethics, technology and engineering. Wiley-Blackwell. van den Hoven, J. (2007). ICT and value sensitive design. In P. Goujon, S. Lavelle, P. Duquenoy, K. Kimppa, & V. Laurent (Eds.), The information society: Innovation, legitimacy, ethics and democracy in honor of professor Jacques Berleur S.j (pp. 67–72). IFIP Springer US. van den Hoven, J. (2013). Value sensitive design and responsible innovation. In R. Owen, J. Bessant, & M. Heintz (Eds.), Responsible innovation (pp. 75–83). John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. WCED. (1987). Our common future. Report of the world commission on environment and development. Oxford University Press. World Health Organization. (2006). Constitution of the World Health Organization – Basic documents supplement, 45th ed. Zwolinski, M. (2014). Libertarianism and pollution. Philosophy and Public Policy Quarterly, 32(3), 9–21.

Part VI Climate Change and Political Philosophy

Climate Change, Uncertainty, and Policy Jeroen Hopster

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conceptualizing Uncertainty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Typology of Uncertainty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ground Versus Extent of Uncertainty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Policy Implications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Locating Uncertainties in Climate Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I. Observational Uncertainties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . II. Simulation Uncertainties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . III. Impact Uncertainties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Uncertainties in Climate Economics and Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Future Technologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Future Institutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Future Populations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Representing Uncertainty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Quantifying Uncertainty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The IPCC’s Treatment of Uncertainty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Scenarios, Narratives, and Storylines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Decision Strategies in the Face of Uncertainty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Expected Utility Maximization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Robust Decision-Making . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Adaptive Decision-Making . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

While the foundations of climate science and ethics are well established, fine-grained climate predictions, as well as policy-decisions, are beset with uncertainties. This chapter maps climate uncertainties and classifies them as to their ground, extent, and location. A typology of uncertainty is presented, centered along the axes of scientific and moral uncertainty. This typology is illustrated with paradigmatic examples of uncertainty in climate science, climate ethics, and climate economics. The chapter discusses the IPCC’s preferred way of representing uncertainties and evaluates its strengths and weaknesses from a risk management perspective. Three general strategies for decision-makers to cope with climate uncertainty are outlined, the usefulness of which largely depends on whether decision-makers find themselves in a context of “deep uncertainty.” The chapter concludes that various uncertainties engrained in climate discourse cannot be overcome. It offers two recommendations to ease the work of policymakers, given this predicament. Keywords

Climate change · Scientific uncertainty · Moral uncertainty · Deep uncertainty · Risk · IPCC · Storylines · Probability · Expected utility

Introduction The issue of uncertainty in climate change discourse is complex and thorny. Its complexity is due to the fact that there are different kinds of climate uncertainties, which interact with each other, and manifest themselves at various locations in climate science, economics, and ethics. Its thorniness stems from the track record of interest groups who have appropriated – and manufactured – climate uncertainties for political and ideological purposes, typically to downplay the importance of climate action (Oreskes & Conway, 2010). This chapter focuses on the former issue: the genuine uncertainties that beset climate discourse and that are relevant for policymakers. To preclude misappropriation, however, let me preface the discussion by highlighting some of the issues over which very little uncertainty exists within communities of relevant experts (IPCC, 2021): (i) The main physical mechanism that gives rise to global warming is the greenhouse effect, which has been known for a long time and is scientifically well understood. The accumulation of greenhouse gas molecules in the atmosphere causes ever more heat to be retained on Earth, resulting in rising temperature levels, as well as other changes to the Earth’s climate. (ii) Anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases, specifically of CO2, are the major driver of the climate change we are currently experiencing. Unless global greenhouse gas emissions are rapidly curtailed, the impacts of climate change are very likely to become more severe over the next decades.

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(iii) Anthropogenic climate change is associated with several risks and hazards, including an increase of weather extremes, droughts, floods, rising sea levels, biodiversity loss, and associated risks to food security, human health, water supply, liveability, and economic growth. (iv) While some countries might benefit, at least in the short run, from global warming, and while some animal species may thrive in warmer climates, there are clear indications that the overall consequences of climate change on human well-being and animal welfare should be negatively evaluated. Populations in the Global South and future generations are specifically vulnerable to the negative impacts of climate change. These findings, and the hard-won scholarly consensus that pertains to them, should suffice to undercut the challenge of climate skeptics and denialists, who question that anthropogenic climate change is real or should be regarded as a ground for concern. But with that said, when it comes to assessing the regional impacts of climate change, or evaluating the desirability of different mitigation and adaptation policies, various scientific and moral uncertainties do come into play. This chapter overviews the sources of these climate uncertainties, as well as various strategies for coping with them.

Conceptualizing Uncertainty The term uncertainty is infused with meanings. Uncertainty is typically associated with lack of knowledge and therefore negatively appraised: It is a deficit that should be overcome. This is only one face of uncertainty, however. Apart from what is unknown, uncertainty might also refer to what is unstable, indefinite, or indeterminate. Not all species of uncertainty can be overcome by retrieving further information. In fact, sometimes new information serves to increase, rather than reduce, the complexity of a problem, thereby adding a new layer of uncertainty. Uncertainty may refer both to states of knowledge and to states of the world. It has been regarded as a measure of ignorance and as a hallmark of complexity. Hence, there are various kinds of uncertainty, and the term is conceptualized somewhat differently in different fields of inquiry. For instance, a standard definition in the study of measurement (metrology) is the following: • Metrological definition: The word “uncertainty” means doubt, and thus in its broadest sense “uncertainty of measurement” means doubt about the validity of the result of a measurement (JCGM, 2008). A rather different definition is found in the fields of economics and standard decision theory, where a distinction is commonly drawn between decision-making under risk and decision-making under uncertainty (Luce & Raiffa, 1957). This distinction goes back to the work of the economist Frank Knight (1921), who treated risk as calculable and uncertainty as incalculable. Knight’s distinction is sometimes

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complemented with the further category of decision-making under ignorance. If we understand probabilities in evidential terms, i.e., as the degree of evidence that pertains to a given proposition, then this leads to the following tripartite structure: • Economical/decision-theoretical conceptualization: – Decisions under risk involve the availability of precise evidential probabilities with high epistemic credentials. – Decisions under uncertainty involve imprecise evidential probabilities, or evidential probabilities with low epistemic credentials. – Decisions under ignorance involve a complete absence of decision-relevant evidence.

A Typology of Uncertainty Various proposals have been advanced to articulate a typology of uncertainty which disentangles its multiple dimensions (e.g., Kwakkel et al., 2010; Smith & Stern, 2011; Petersen, 2012; Walker et al., 2013; van der Bles et al., 2019). Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the divergent conceptualizations of uncertainty in different fields of inquiry, no single framework is endorsed across disciplines. The variety of typologies need not be regarded as an embarrassment of riches, however; uncertainty typologies can serve different purposes, and it may be helpful to tailor typologies to specific contexts. Moreover, the typologies that have been articulated in the scholarly literature do involve clear commonalities. For instance, in one way or another, all of them distinguish between (1) uncertainty due to lack of knowledge; (2) uncertainty due to variability in the phenomenon of interest; and (3) uncertainty due to ambiguity. This threefold distinction, one might say, pertains to the grounds of uncertainty: It articulates what makes it the case that we are not fully certain. Below I outline a typology that elaborates on the grounds of uncertainty in climate policy. It does so by introducing an orthogonal distinction between uncertainty in the scientific and in the moral domain. Scientific uncertainty pertains to states of the world, as well as our knowledge and understanding of it. Moral uncertainty pertains to judgments of how the world ought to be, and the associated norms, obligations, and values. In practice, the distinction may be blurred. Policydecisions about climate mitigation and adaptation are typically beset with both types of uncertainty, and sometimes they are difficult to disentangle (see B1). Nonetheless, it is useful to clarify what types of uncertainty are involved in a policy-decision. Doing so can help decision-makers to figure out to whom to turn for expert advice – a scientist, an ethicist, or both? – and to determine whether uncertainty can be reduced, and how so (Fig. 1).

A1. Scientific Uncertainty Grounded in Lack of Evidence Scientific uncertainties about climate change can be grounded in a lack of solid evidence. Instruments of measurement may be deficient, resulting in incomplete or biased observations. Sampling errors can lead to unrepresentative data. The models

Climate Change, Uncertainty, and Policy Fig. 1 Grounds of scientific and moral uncertainty

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into which data are fed can be overly simplistic. The initial conditions from which computer simulations that project future climate change are run, maybe unknown. These and other deficits yield imperfections in our body of evidence and lead to scientific uncertainty (see section “Locating Uncertainties in Climate Science” for more detail). Importantly, evidential uncertainty transpires in virtue of impaired observations, skewed data, and inadequate scientific models, but not in virtue of the phenomena under observation. At least in principle, evidential uncertainty can be overcome, for instance, with better measurements.

A2. Scientific Uncertainty Grounded in Theoretical and Conceptual Shortcomings Scientific uncertainty can also be grounded in conceptual or theoretical deficits. Uncertainty of this kind is sometimes referred to as “ambiguity.” Like uncertainty, ambiguity is a term infused with meanings. In the context of the present typology, A2 refers to unclarities of conceptualization and theoretical interpretation. In such contexts of ambiguity, even when an appropriate amount of information is provided, it remains unclear how this information should be understood. Hence, contrary to A1-type uncertainty, A2-type uncertainty does not stem from a paucity of good evidence, but from deficits in the conceptual and theoretical frameworks for interpreting the evidence, or from a lack of clarity about the problem structure and the variables involved. Uncertainty of this kind may be overcome by improving our

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conceptual and theoretical toolkit. Note that in the economics literature, ambiguity is often contrasted with the notion of risk, and taken to be synonymous with uncertainty in the decision-theoretical sense outlined at the opening of this section, i.e., as referring to situations in which probabilities cannot be determined (also known as deep uncertainty). Indeed, contexts of ambiguity often preclude probabilistic assessment. For purposes of the present typology, however, the question of whether uncertainty can be represented in probabilistic terms had best be regarded as an orthogonal issue, which has to do with the representation of uncertainty (see section “Representing Uncertainty”). What grounds uncertainty is not the absence of probabilities per se, but the absence of an adequate theoretical or conceptual framework of interpretation.

A3. Scientific Uncertainty Grounded in Contestation Some uncertainties are consensus-based: The community of experts agrees there is uncertainty regarding a given issue. Other uncertainties are based on disagreement and conflict (Hansson, 2018). Scientists can have a different take on an issue, and there may be good arguments on either side. Rather than a shortage of theoretical frameworks, an issue may be theoretically overdetermined, with different scientists adhering to different theoretical frameworks. Peer disagreement can itself be a source of uncertainty: Sometimes we do not know what to believe, because we do not know who to believe. Importantly, in discussing contested facts it is important to make a further distinction: Are the facts contested among scientific experts, or are they contested by interest groups or among the general public, with no specific expertise? These types of contestation have different epistemic implications. While expert disagreement can be a justifiable reason to lower one’s credence in a scientific proposition, the same does not hold for any kind of disagreement regarding a scientific proposition. A4. Scientific Uncertainty Grounded in Variability Not all scientific uncertainty transpires in virtue of human ignorance, or theoretical deficits. Uncertainty may also transpire in virtue of the variability that is inherent to the system under study. Natural variability is common in climate science. The Earth’s climate is a complex system, which changes over time. Similarly, the evolution of human societies, whose emissions and technological capacities are key determinants of future climate change, is unpredictable in many respects. Absolute certainty about the state of the Earth’s climate in the year 2100 will not be achieved until the year 2100. Causal chains to the future are still open, rendering future states of the system indeterminate. The resulting uncertainty – sometimes called aleatory uncertainty – cannot be fully eliminated. The variability of the system and the forces that influence it preclude full predictability. As an aside, it might be noted that there has been a long philosophical tradition, inspired by the work of Laplace, of questioning whether not all uncertainty is ultimately due to human ignorance. Hard determinists following Laplace’s cue maintain that if scientists would be equipped with better epistemic capabilities, they could eliminate the uncertainty due to variability. Philosophers should bear in mind, however, that this

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stylized metaphysical doctrine is detached from modern-day scientific practice. In actual climate science, there is no indication that aleatory uncertainty can be eliminated – not even with superior tools and models. In practice, the distinction between uncertainty due to knowledge gaps and ambiguity (A1–3) versus uncertainty due to variability (A4) cannot always be clearly drawn. Climate change frequently confronts scientists with mixed cases, in which uncertainty results both from limited knowledge and from system variability (see section “Simulation Uncertainties”). Furthermore, scientists may not be able to tell whether knowledge gaps can be overcome by further observation and better theorizing, or whether variability is a fundamental property of the system under scrutiny. Such metauncertainty – uncertainty about the species of uncertainty one is dealing with – is itself an example of conceptual ambiguity (A2).

B1. Moral Uncertainty Grounded in Epistemic Uncertainty In recent years, normative and moral uncertainty have become topics of scholarly interest. Like scientific uncertainties, normative uncertainties can be grouped in different types (cf. Taebi et al., 2020). One ground are the scientific uncertainties previously discussed. To the extent that essential factual matters are unsettled, we may be uncertain over which course of moral action to pursue. Consider the question of how much of our mitigation resources should be devoted to Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS). One area of ethical contention is the worry that money spent on CCS diverts investments away from green energy solutions, thus posing a moral hazard for climate mitigation. This worry is grounded in a factual claim, but the factual claim is itself contested; the resultant epistemic uncertainty can be a ground for moral uncertainty. Note, however, that greater epistemic uncertainty does not necessarily translate to greater moral uncertainty. For instance, with regard to a very risky undertaking (e.g., solar geo-engineering; see section “Future Technologies”), substantial epistemic uncertainty about associated impacts arguably provides strong support to the moral judgment that this undertaking should not be pursued lightheartedly. Hence, epistemic uncertainty can foster moral uncertainty, but it may also breed moral certainty. B2. Moral Uncertainty Grounded in Shortcomings of Moral Inquiry As noted in A2, our scientific theories and conceptual frameworks may be deficient. The same holds for our moral theories and concepts. There may be moral uncertainty as to who should be the recipients of moral duties and how concepts of moral evaluation should be explicated. There may be uncertainty about the ontological and moral status of entities to which moral theorizing pertains (e.g., Żuradzki, 2019). Moral values might be vague, imprecise, and may turn out to be incommensurable when spelled out. Vagueness also pertains to what is precisely entailed by moral theories and normative principles, and how they should be combined (MacAskill et al., 2020). Indeed, moral theory may turn out to be underdeveloped in relevant respects. This may be particularly true for climate ethics, as leading scholars in the field have argued (see Gardiner, 2011 on the “theoretical storm”).

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B3. Moral Uncertainty Grounded in Contestation Moral uncertainty and ambiguity can come along with – and can be grounded in – moral disagreement. Consider decisions that rely on expected utility maximization versus decisions that rely on the precautionary principle (section “Decision Strategies in the Face of Uncertainty”), or person-affecting versus nonperson affecting views in population ethics. Serious arguments have been articulated on both sides of these debates, which are subject to ongoing academic dispute. Indeed, reasonable disagreement is widespread in ethical scholarship. Conflict might also be felt at an individual level: A moral decision-maker can feel torn about how to weigh the interests of future people against the interests of presently living people and be at loss in formulating an overall moral judgment. Arguably, there simply is no truth to the matter as to how this should be done. Some moral claims are inherently contestable. B4. Moral Uncertainty Grounded in Variability Moral inquiry is not static: Over time, new values might emerge and existing values can be conceptualized anew (van de Poel, 2021; Hopster, 2022). The moral desirability of a given course of action might change over time, for instance, because of a different prioritization of values, or because of shifts in our circle of moral concern. Conceivably, in the future we may come to regard all mammals as our moral equals, or we may come to think differently about the perils of existential risk. This insight, in turn, casts some degree of moral uncertainty over policy decisions, as these might have unexpected moral ramifications. For instance, our current decisions might put future groups at risk, of which we were not able to foresee their existence as morally significant entities (Hayenhjelm, 2018). These kinds of unknown unknowns are most prevalent with regard to decisions that have long-term implications, as climate mitigation and adaptation decisions often do (section “Future Populations”).

Ground Versus Extent of Uncertainty The typology outlined in this section captures several faces of uncertainty, but not all of them. Further distinctions could be made, some along orthogonal dimensions. For instance, a further category frequently invoked in classifying uncertainty is “deep uncertainty.” According to the Society for Decision-Making under Deep Uncertainty (DMDU) “deep uncertainty exists when parties to a decision do not know, or cannot agree on, the system model that relates action to consequences, the probability distributions to place over the inputs to these models, which consequences to consider and their relative importance” (cf. Lempert et al., 2003). While deep uncertainty, thus understood, cuts across some of the aforementioned categories, the term is typically used to emphasize the extent of uncertainty, rather than the ground of uncertainty. More specifically, deep uncertainties cannot be expressed in meaningful probabilistic terms; as a result, they require “non-standard” approaches to decision-making. In contexts of climate change decision-making, deep uncertainty is actually quite common, however, and nonstandard approaches are becoming increasingly prevalent (section “Decision Strategies in the Face of Uncertainty”).

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Policy Implications I have illustrated that uncertainty can be broken down in many different parts. Yet in policymaking, these different parts are often entangled. Consider the question of whether a government should invest in nuclear energy to realize its CO2 reduction targets, while guaranteeing energy security. This question has both a scientific and a moral component and is subject to uncertainties on both sides, such as scientific uncertainty regarding the feasibility of satisfying energy needs with other energy resources (A1), or moral contestation over the harms of nuclear waste (B3). Hence, it is important to bear in mind that the presence of one type of uncertainty does not preclude the presence of others. Furthermore, it merits emphasis that different kinds of uncertainty may warrant different kinds of response. As a result, the exercise of identifying which type or types of uncertainty are at stake with regard to a given policy issue can help in formulating adequate responses. For instance, the typology can help policymakers to ascertain whether uncertainty can be reduced by stimulating further research, whether a probabilistic or a nonprobabilistic model of decisionmaking is warranted in the face of uncertainty, and whether policy measures are sufficiently flexible to cope with unknown unknowns.

Locating Uncertainties in Climate Science Apart from their grounds and extent, we can also categorize uncertainties by their location (Petersen, 2012). Uncertainties are located at various stages of scientific enquiry and normative decision-making. This section discusses important locations of uncertainty in climate science. Since the climate sciences span many disciplines, each of which comes along its own uncertainties, a comprehensive treatment is beyond the chapter’s scope (chapter “Climate Change and Scientific Uncertainty”). Instead, in what follows, I will focus on three locations of scientific uncertainty in particular: observation, simulation, and impact. These respective locations are not associated with specific policy implications. Nonetheless, it will be useful for climate policymakers to have some grasp of the different ways in which uncertainties feed into climate science. This can help in building the right kind of sensitivity to judge the strengths and limitations of scientific policy-advice.

I. Observational Uncertainties In the 1940s controversy arose over historical measurements of the sea temperature. The controversy was resolved when researchers realized that the bucket that had been used to measure the water’s temperature had at some point been replaced, and that the new bucket gave rise to different measurements (Schmidt, 2008). Measurement errors like these are common to practices of data collection. The quality of observed data depends on the reliability of measurements. If equipment is ill-calibrated, measurement errors may creep in. Unfortunately, for some instruments

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used in climate measurements, calibration is difficult. For instance, satellites that are inaccessible once deployed cannot easily be recalibrated (Baumberger et al., 2017). There are various other ways in which measurements can be unreliable and may give rise to biased data. Observations are typically sparse in space and short in time: A sample that is obtained through observations may not be representative of large-scale trends. Historical measurements may be absent altogether, in which case scientists typically gather proxy data, which are less reliable than direct measurements. Incompleteness, potential bias, and the possibility of error all add to scientific uncertainty about the quality of observed climate data (e.g., Winsberg, 2018). Observational uncertainties can sometimes be reduced. For instance, it may sometimes be possible to compare datasets, which have been obtained by independent measurement devices. Following the insight of Pierre Duhem, however, it should be kept in mind that data are theory-laden: The calibration of measurement devices, as well as the regimentation, restructuring, and subsequent interpretation of data, are influenced by auxiliary hypotheses (idem). The theory-ladenness of observations, and the accompanying possibility of theoretical error, constitutes a further source of uncertainty in measurement, which cannot be eliminated entirely.

II. Simulation Uncertainties One major endeavor in climate science – especially the physical climate sciences – is to simulate future temperature changes and their impact on the climate system (e.g., Petersen, 2012; Winsberg, 2018). Computerized simulations are based on climate models, which pertain to ocean circulations, atmospheric circulations, or couplings thereof. Several global climate models (GCMs) have been designed by teams of scientists around the globe. These models can be compared and integrated, resulting in complex “multimodel climate ensembles” that simulate climate change for this century and beyond. These multimodel ensembles provide key inputs for reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). To generate projections of future climate change, these models require input about indeterminate variables, such as future human greenhouse gas emissions. Hence, the projections of climate models are conditional on emission scenarios. These projections should not be conflated with predictions about what is going to happen in the future: Climate projections merely show how climate models respond to external forcing scenarios, and the IPCC is explicit not to attach any likelihood to these scenarios. This caveat notwithstanding, projections are important instruments for policymakers, as they provide some indication of what might plausibly happen in the future, depending on future human greenhouse gas emissions. Indeed, the different emission pathways outlined by the IPCC are frequently used as a basis to assess different mitigation options. There are several kinds of uncertainties that pertain to climate simulations, which can be partitioned in different ways. Here I discuss three subclasses, following Hawkins and Sutton (2009): uncertainty due to the internal variability of the climate system,

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uncertainty regarding the external forcings of the climate system, and uncertainty about climate models.

Natural Variability The Earth’s climate system exhibits substantial natural variability. Fluctuations occur even in the absence of external forcings and transpire naturally from the system’s nonlinear interactions. An example is the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, which results from the interaction between atmosphere and ocean in the tropical Pacific. Natural variability generates aleatory uncertainty (A4), which is unlikely to be reduced even if climate models improve (Deser et al., 2012). External Forcings External forcings are influences on the climate system that shift the equilibrium between how much energy the Earth receives from sunlight and how much energy is radiated out. Several external forcings influence the climate system, including forcings that are anthropogenically induced. While part of the carbon dioxide humans emit remains in the atmosphere for a long time, the majority of the warming response is due to emissions caused within people’s own lifetime (Ricke & Caldeira, 2014). By implication, how climate change will evolve over the next decades and centuries crucially depends on the actions of current and future generations. Yet there is substantial uncertainty with regard to the amount of greenhouse gases humans will emit over the next decades and the rate with which emissions will be curtailed. Hence, there is uncertainty regarding future emissions scenarios – a type of uncertainty sometimes called “scenario uncertainty.” This uncertainty, in turn, is bound up with questions about the future of human technology, political institutions, and demography, to which we will return in section “Uncertainties in Climate Economics and Ethics”. The further we look in time, the greater scenario uncertainty becomes. Apart from uncertainty about anthropogenic forcings, there is also uncertainty about the natural forcings that will influence future climates. Massive volcanic eruptions, for instance, are difficult to predict, but historical and geological evidence shows that they can be game changers in episodes of global warming and cooling. Solar intensity, too, can vary over time. In climate science, such effects are not described as being internal to the natural variability of the climate system (section “Natural Variability”), but as external forcings that act on the system. Hence, apart from “internal variability” the climate system also exhibits “external variability.” Model Response Even in response to the same emission scenarios, different models simulate different climate futures. This variability points to uncertainty about the accuracy of these models. Our knowledge of the climate system is limited, for instance, with regard to the question of how sensitive the climate is to increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Note, however, that in recent years scientists’ understanding of “climate sensitivity” has become increasingly refined, and that the associated uncertainty margins have narrowed down (Sherwood et al., 2020).

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Model uncertainty stems from various sources. Aerosols and processes of cloud formation are notoriously difficult to represent in spatial and temporal detail; their parametrization is a substantial source of uncertainty in climate models (McFarlane, 2011). Another source of uncertainty is incompleteness: by representing some phenomena and neglecting others, modelers may overlook relevant processes, such as various positive and negative feedback cycles that are currently not well understood. Current models tend to assume – perhaps naively – that atmospheric feedbacks scale linearly with surface warming. Thresholds effects that are uncertain but nonetheless deemed possible by many experts, such as the collapse of the West Antartic Ice Sheet, are typically not incorporated in simulation models. Simplification is inherent in making models; no model perfectly emulates reality. While this holds true for models in general, there are some characteristics that make existing climate models specifically problematic – more so, for instance, than weather models. For instance, a crucial test for validating climate models is to evaluate them against present observations and to predict the historical record (hindcasting). The shortness of the observational record, however, constitutes an obstacle in doing so (Parker, 2010). Furthermore, to the extent that validation is possible at all, it appears that none of today’s climate models has a perfect fit with the observed record. In fact, all extant models give rise to many results that do not come close to matching observed data, beyond margins of statistical error (Baumberger et al., 2017). One might hope that using an ensemble of models serves to balance the biases that stem from the reliance on any particular model and can help to infer which simulations are more well-founded than others. Prima facie, it seems plausible to think that robust projections – i.e., projections that are replicated in a majority of models in the ensemble – are likely to be true. However, when it comes to model ensembles, an inference from the robustness of projections to their likely truth is problematic (Baumberger et al., 2017). The models in multimodel ensembles rely on similar assumptions and might have similar flaws, which could lead to similar projections. The combination of uncertainties at play in model ensembles, and the imperfections of bias correction measures, makes our epistemic position with regard to the resulting climate simulations somewhat opaque and suggests that surprises are to be expected.

III. Impact Uncertainties While computerized simulations constitute an important component of climate science, the climate sciences span a much wider field. Various environmental, social, and medical sciences study the environmental and public health impacts of rising temperatures and atmospheric CO2 levels. Each of these disciplines brings along its own set of uncertainties regarding observed data and anticipated impacts. When it comes to adaptation planning in the face of anticipated environmental impacts, policymakers often find themselves in situations of even greater uncertainty than when presented with uncertainties regarding mitigation decisions. This is because uncertainties are additive: They cascade from one level to the next, leading to an ever-broadening “envelope of uncertainty” (Wilby & Dessai, 2010).

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Even though substantial confidence may pertain to assessments of the kinds of environmental consequences that are to be expected in the face of rising temperatures, sea levels, and ocean acidification, the precise details of these consequences, such as the magnitude of storms caused by sea-level rise, may be impossible to predict. The same holds for the regional distribution of climate change impacts, which is a source of substantial uncertainty. Merely focusing on changing global average temperatures conceals substantial regional variation. Techniques to downscale global climate models to regional levels are fraught with difficulties (Hewitson et al., 2014). This is unfortunate, since from the perspective of risk assessment and for purposes of adaptation planning, regional differences and associated climate hazards are of distinct importance. Special mention should be made of compound risk events (e.g., heavy rain on saturated soils, or globally synchronized heatwaves affecting global food production), which amplify environmental and human impacts (Zscheischler et al., 2020). While compound events are impossible to predict in detail, the increased frequency of this type of event due to climate change is of great importance for adaptation planning.

Uncertainties in Climate Economics and Ethics There is some overlap between the key uncertainties that pertain to the climate sciences, on the one hand, and uncertainties in climate economics and ethics, on the other. For instance, as discussed in section “External Forcings”, climate simulations crucially depend on assumptions about future greenhouse gas emissions. Future emissions, in turn, depend on variables such as the development of human technologies for reducing carbon emissions and carbon uptake (Negative Emissions Technologies), the pace of the energy transition and associated political challenges, and the future of demography as well as economic growth. These topics are also of great importance in climate ethics and economics. Economists, in particular, have played an important role in the development of so-called Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) (Fleurbaey et al., 2019). These are models which incorporate the interactions between climatic changes and social developments, and which are meant to assist policymakers in making good decisions regarding climate mitigation. But they are also controversial: IAMs inevitably rely on normative assumptions, some of which are contested. In this section, I single out three topics which are couched in substantial factual as well as moral uncertainty: future technologies, future institutions, and future populations. I highlight these topics as they constitute important variables which may tilt the overall balance of decision-making, for instance, in the context of IAMs. It should be borne in mind, however, that uncertainties in climate ethics and economics are not limited to these three issues.

Future Technologies Emerging technologies will play a crucial role in the transition toward a nonfossil economy. Examples include decarbonization technologies in transportation,

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CCS-technologies in heavy industry, and advanced energy storage technologies that stimulate the deployment of renewable energy. Each of these have a clear potential to help curtailing greenhouse gas emissions, but the pace at which they will be deployed is uncertain. Various other technological developments might serve to accelerate CO2 mitigation, although some innovations can also have mixed or opposite effects. For instance, the development of cultured meat has potential to reduce agricultural emissions. On the other hand, growing cultured meat is energy intensive; its potential effect on climate mitigation will depend on broader developments in the energy sector. Similarly, future use of artificial intelligence and blockchain might serve to exacerbate energy demands. Whatever new affordances and constraints emerging technologies generate, it is plausible that they will have a major – yet partly unpredictable – influence on climate change mitigation and adaptation. Somewhat more speculative, but of substantial interest to ethicists, is the emergence of geo-engineering technologies, such as carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and solar radiation management (SRM). There are various kinds of CDR-technologies, some of which are unconventional and risky, such as the iron fertilization of the oceans. The idea behind SRM is to block incoming sunlight, for instance by increasing the concentration of atmospheric aerosols. While this will not reduce the amount of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere and its uptake in the oceans (as a result, it will not stop the acidification of the oceans), it could serve to revert global temperature rise. Both SRM and some of the more invasive forms of CDR come along with substantial amounts of recognized uncertainty and risk. Many ethicists think that – at least at present – they are much too risky to be deployed (e.g., Gardiner, 2011). Notice, in this case, that the substantial amount of scientific uncertainty that pertains to the effects of geo-engineering does not serve to increase moral uncertainty. In fact, the opposite is the case: The amount of scientific uncertainty that comes along with deploying invasive geo-engineering technologies is part of what fosters the present ethical consensus to refrain from deployment (Pamplany et al., 2020).

Future Institutions The future of political institutions is another source of substantial uncertainty with regard to long-term economic models. Societal ambitions regarding climate mitigation are unpredictable, and democratic elections may yield surprising results. Of specific importance in the context of climate mitigation will be the ambitions of economic and demographic centers of gravity like China, India, and the United States. For each of them, mitigation ambitions over the next decades are somewhat unpredictable. Moreover, the political and societal dynamics can be disrupted by unforeseen events. Examples are the Covid-19 pandemic and the war between Russia and Ukraine, which have had a notorious impact on efforts at on reducing global greenhouse gas emissions in the early 2020s (Liu et al., 2020). The institutional response to such disruptions, and the institutional changes that might occur in their wake, cannot be predicted but could be of great importance with regard to socioeconomic pathways and future emissions.

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Turning to normative questions of ethics and political theory, there is some uncertainty over the question of how future institutions should be designed. Does an effective global response to climate change require new forms of global governance, and if so, under what conditions would these be legitimate? Furthermore, there is uncertainty over the question of how future people should be institutionally represented, which is related to foundational questions regarding the status of future people in moral theory (Gonzalez-Ricoy & Gosseries, 2016).

Future Populations Future populations are a further variable with major impact on long-term economic models. How will population growth proceed in different parts of the world, and affect global energy demands? Scientific uncertainty on this question is constrained: Predictions about twentieth century population growth have been fairly stable over time. However, future populations are also a source of moral uncertainty. Specifically, the discount rate that economic models apply to the goods of future people has been a source of contention among climate economists (Scovronick et al., 2017). Such contention is entangled with the question of how the risks and benefits of climate mitigation should be distributed across generations, and with assumptions about the future of human welfare. Given the complexity of these issues, moral ambiguity cannot easily be resolved. Debates about discounting have a salient ethical dimension (Mintz-Woo, 2021). If people will be better off in the future, then it may be morally justified to prioritize the interests of the present generation and to discount the interests of future people. But by what degree, if any? Is the assumption that people will be better off in the future plausible to begin with? These questions are beset with different species of scientific and moral uncertainty. Since policy decisions are sensitive to these uncertainties, an important task in normative theory is to assess how decision-making in the face of uncertainty should proceed.

Representing Uncertainty Before turning to the topic of decision-making under uncertainty, it is worthwhile to reflect on the different ways in which uncertainties can be represented. Such reflection has conceptual priority: The merits of different decision-procedures under uncertainty depend, in part, on the conceptual framework used to represent uncertainty.

Quantifying Uncertainty A common way to represent uncertainties is by quantifying them and expressing them probabilistically. Probability statements admit of different degrees of precision.

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Some statements can be framed in terms of precise probabilities, e.g., “the probability that a given climate expert endorses the scientific consensus that global warming is human caused is 97%” (Cook et al., 2013). A greater range of uncertainty can be attached to statements couched in terms of a probability interval, e.g., “the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming is in the range of 90%–100%” (Cook et al., 2016). Probability statements are conditional on the assumption that the underlying argument, method, or model on which they are based is correct (Ord et al., 2010). First-order probability statements can themselves be qualified, if there is uncertainty regarding the accuracy of the underlying model. Such second-order epistemic qualification – which, too, may be expressed in probabilistic terms – is often desirable when scientific predictions derive from a particular model, the reliability of which should itself be assessed. For instance, the assertion that “the probability that a given domain expert endorses the scientific consensus that global warming is human caused is 97%” is conditional on the soundness of the method employed by Cook et al. (2013). We might conceive of a climate skeptic whose confidence that this method is sound is quite low – say only 10% – in which case the climate skeptic might still feel entitled to question whether a majority of scientists endorse the view that global warming is human caused. Judged by standards of probabilistic rationality, nothing is at fault with such reasoning. There are definite upsides to quantifying probabilities. Qualitative terms such as “likely” or “improbable” can be interpreted in many different ways and may give rise to misunderstandings or conflicting interpretations. In order to rank risks and to reason precisely about degrees of evidence, numbers are indispensable (Ord, 2020). That said, the language of probabilities is not the only one that can be used to represent uncertainty. Furthermore, qualitative terms can have certain advantages. While qualitative representation often comes at a loss of precision, it may lead to a gain in faithfulness, if the uncertainty is such that probability estimates cannot be reliably made. Also, in some instances, natural language might actually convey more clearly whether or not a probability is decision-relevant (“this chance is non-negligible”), whereas probabilistic language is more open to interpretation (is a chance of 1 in 100 non-negligible? 1 in 1000? 1 in 10,000?). Moreover, not all kinds of uncertainty lend themselves for probabilistic representation. For instance, there is no straightforward method to cast uncertainties due to ambiguity in probabilistic terms. This puts some pressure on efforts to rank contexts of knowledge in terms of the extent of uncertainty they involve, going from complete certainty, uncertainty that involves precise probabilities, uncertainty that involves vague probabilities, and deep uncertainty in which probabilities are inherently contested, all the way down to total ignorance (Walker et al., 2013). Such a ranking of uncertainty can be misleading, as it identifies the extent of ignorance with the precision that probabilistic statements allow for. Yet some uncertainties are genuinely different in kind, which precludes any straightforward ranking. Which means of representing uncertainty – probabilistic or not – is most suitable depends not only on the extent of uncertainty, but also on the type of uncertainty in question (see section “Conceptualizing Uncertainty”).

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Apart from conceptual reflection, when it comes to the effectiveness of different kinds of uncertainty representations, psychological research can be of great importance. Recent work suggests that in communicating climate uncertainty there is a delicate balance to be struck between being too precise and overly vague (Ho & Budescu, 2019). While decision-relevant details should not be left out in uncertainty communication, efforts to be too comprehensive may backfire. Moreover, it is important to use terminology that puts clear bounds on the uncertainties being communicated (e.g., by specifying a specific range of sea-level rise, rather than specifying that the range is unknown). Bounded uncertainty statements are more easily accepted among the public, whereas uncertainty statements that admit to a lack of resolution decrease confidence in these statements (Howe et al., 2019).

The IPCC’s Treatment of Uncertainty The IPCC employs a standardized vocabulary to represent uncertainties, meant to communicate uncertainty in a clear and consistent manner. The framework that has been in place since the fifth assessment cycle is outlined in Mastrandrea et al. (2010). The IPCC’s “calibrated language” contains two key metrics for communicating the degree of uncertainty of a statement: confidence and likelihood. Confidence is expressed in qualitative terms (e.g., “high confidence”). Levels of confidence are a function of the type and quality of evidence, on the one hand, and degree of agreement, on the other. Hence, if an assertion is qualified with “high confidence,” then we can infer that there is solid evidence and substantial scientific consensus regarding its truth. The IPCC’s likelihood scale contains quantified measures of uncertainty presented in terms of likelihood intervals for relevant variables. Likelihoods are based on statistical analysis of observations or model results, or on expert judgment. For instance, the fifth assessment report states that it is “extremely likely” that more than half of the late twentieth century warming was human caused (IPCC, 2013). Since the IPCC uses the term “extremely likely” to express a probability interval of 95–100%, we can infer that climate models paired with expert judgment give us a 95–100% likelihood that a majority of the temperature rise that occurred during the last century has been human induced.

Scenarios, Narratives, and Storylines In the wake of AR5, increasing criticisms regarding the IPCC’s representation of uncertainty have been voiced, as it seems to underplay the severity of the risks of global warming. (e.g., Stoerk et al., 2018; Herrando-Pérez et al., 2019). For one, it has been questioned whether the terminological conventions the IPCC employs convey the right message to the public and to decision-makers. Arguably, the IPCC’s terminology has been too conservative and occasionally vague: Reliability

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is achieved at the cost of informativeness (Løhre et al., 2019). Moreover, it has been questioned whether the IPCC’s treatment of uncertainty is not too probability oriented. Arguably, given the range of uncertainties that pertain to climate science (see section “Locating Uncertainties in Climate Science”), for many statements about the magnitude of global warming, let alone for statements about its regional impacts, it is questionable whether meaningful probability statements – and even vague probability estimates – can be attached to them (Sutton, 2019). This is not to say, however, that we do not have any relevant information with regard to these magnitudes and impacts, or that such information is not relevant for decisionmakers. To the contrary, in the context of risk assessment and adaptation planning “low likelihood high impact events” are of the utmost importance. Hence, the general tenor of the criticism is that the IPCC’s approach should be better aligned with key principles of risk assessment (King et al., 2015). In its most recent Assessment Report (AR6), the IPCC has begun to shift its approach accordingly, incorporating a “disaster risk reduction” framework that puts emphasis on low likelihood, high-impact events (IPCC, 2021). Another notable development is that in recent years increasingly scholarly attention has focused on qualitative climate scenarios, which are advanced as explorative tools that aim to sketch realistic possibilities of what might happen. Shepherd et al. (2018) call this the storyline approach. A storyline is a physically self-consistent unfolding of past events or of plausible future events, to which no specific probability is attached. Storylines are intended to provide information that is particularly well suited for decision-makers. At a psychological level, their built-in narrative enhances emotional engagement. From a risk perspective, they help to focus attention on compound risks which could have major impact, but are not captured in global climate models (see section “Impact Uncertainties”). Furthermore, the logic of research questions that guides the storyline approach implies that it tends to safeguard against false negatives. That is to say, it tends to avoid missed warnings and to ensure that significant impacts of climate change are not overlooked. Arguably this is justified: Climate science should become more like medicine or public health in its assessments of risk, where false alarms (false positives) tend to be preferred over failures to prevent (Lloyd & Oreskes, 2018).

Decision Strategies in the Face of Uncertainty It is commonly assumed that decision-makers should seek to eliminate or maximally reduce uncertainty. This is not always feasible, however, as some uncertainties simply cannot be eliminated. Moreover, the aspiration to maximally reduce uncertainty may not be desirable. Uncertainty can be an indicator of the complexity of an issue; disregarding this complexity might have the unwanted consequence of impoverishing decisionmaking. But there are other ways of coping with uncertainty, apart from seeking to reduce it. Idealized frameworks for decision-making in the face of uncertainty are increasingly giving way to “non-standard” frameworks and approaches, such as adaptive decision-making, which are better suited for contexts of deep uncertainty.

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In this section, I single out three general strategies of decision-making in the face of uncertainty (cf. Hinkel et al., 2019). These need not be looked at as rivalling strategies, at least not in all contexts. Instead, they can be regarded as strategies that might be suitable in different decision-context, depending on the nature and the degree of uncertainty that confronts decision-makers.

Expected Utility Maximization Proponents of expected utility theory, or expected value theory, counsel to take decisions by conducting a consequentialist risk-benefit analysis. The expected utility for an action is the sum of the probability-adjusted utility of possible consequences. Maximizing expected utility is the default approach to “decision-making under risk” – i.e., in contexts where decision-makers can assign high-credential probabilities to different outcomes (section “Conceptualizing Uncertainty”). While such contexts dominate textbook examples, however, clear-cut cases of decision-making under risk are unusual in real-life decision-making (Hansson, 2009). When probabilities are not readily available, or can only be estimated with substantial margins of uncertainty, reliance on expected utility theory is controversial (e.g., Bradley et al., 2020). Some proponents advise to stick with the expected utility approach and try to estimate probabilities as well as possible (Broome, 2012). Critics might argue that in contexts of deep uncertainty this either invites false precision, or leads to paralysis in decision-making, as there is no expert consensus regarding the appropriate probability estimates (Hopster, 2021).

Robust Decision-Making The aim of robust decision making is to define policies that yield acceptable outcomes across a wide range of plausible future states of the world (Walker et al., 2013). Hence, in the case of climate change, acceptable outcomes should be robust to the range of different scenarios that might transpire in virtue of the various scientific uncertainties we face (section “Locating Uncertainties in Climate Science”). This strategy might conflict with the strategy of expected utility maximization, which is generally biased in favor of realizing (or preventing) outcomes that are particularly likely to occur. There are different types of robustness strategies. One of them is to outline a static policy that will perform well in practically all conceivable situations. A weakness of this strategy is the potential mismatch between what is conceivable and what is realistically possible: Human imagination is limited and likely to be tainted by various cognitive biases. A second robustness strategy is to seek resilience, which may be defined as a system’s ability to recover from external disturbances. Resilient decision-making counsels to follow a policy such that whatever happens in the future, a given system will be able to quickly recover. A third type of robustness approach is to plan specifically for the worst possible case. This approach is

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sometimes associated with the precautionary principle, although it should be kept in mind that the precautionary principle has been operationalized in many different ways, not all of which are specifically geared at avoiding the worst outcome. An element that many operationalizations have in common is their reliance on a decision tripod, which consists of a damage condition, an epistemic condition and a proposed remedy (Steel, 2014). Precautionary decisions may be defensible if the envisioned damage is great, its occurrence constitutes a realistic possibility, and the remedy is effective in preventing this possibility from actualizing (Hopster, 2021).

Adaptive Decision-Making A third family of decision-making strategies counsels to come up with dynamic policies that can change over time and are adaptive to the challenges at hand. Given that the rate of future climate change is couched in substantial uncertainty, and given that human societies and technologies may evolve in unforeseen directions (section “Uncertainties in Climate Economics and Ethics”), it seems desirable to design policies that can easily be updated when new information becomes available and that allow for flexible maneuvering in the face of novel affordances and constraints. Adaptive planning policies are designed from the outset to respond to how the future unfolds, how the risk landscape changes and how societal values evolve (Taebi et al., 2020). The adaptive planning framework is partly compatible with expected utility maximization. Yet, it involves something of a paradigm shift from planning based on expectations to planning conditional on observed developments (Kwakkel & Haasnoot, 2019). Decision-making is regarded as an experimental learning process. Especially in contexts with clear potential for unrecognized ignorance, the flexibility that adaptive decision-making nurtures is beneficial.

Conclusion In the face of the uncertainties that beset climate science, ethics, and economics, it might appear that taking climate policy-decisions, which holistically incorporate considerations from each of these domains, is extremely daunting. This is certainly true. But as I will underline in conclusion, there are two ways in which scientists, ethicists, and economists can ease the task of decision-makers: by filtering uncertainty information that is policy-relevant, and by adequately communicating uncertainties. First, not all uncertainties that matter to scientists are equally relevant for policymakers (Hansson, 2018). Climate experts involved in policy-advice have a moral responsibility to be selective in their reporting of uncertainty and to emphasize those uncertainties that are specifically relevant in tilting the overall balance of evidence. Apart from recognized ignorance (known unknowns), special attention should thereby be paid also to include unrecognized ignorance (unknown unknowns). For instance, given the natural variability of the climate system, as

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well as the limitations of our understanding of this system (section “Locating Uncertainties in Climate Science”), we know that in climate science – more so than in many other scientific disciplines – surprises are to be expected (Parker & Risbey, 2015). Indeed, in virtue of the possibility of surprises, greater epistemic humility is warranted than a mere focus on recognized ignorance suggests. Second, the question of how uncertainty is represented and communicated is of great importance. Uncertainty communication should be adequate for the purpose it is meant to serve (Keohane et al., 2014). Since much climate decision-making is an exercise in risk management, uncertainty reports should be sensitive to the requirements of risk analysis (King et al., 2015). This includes filing complete reports: taking into account all the relevant sources of uncertainty and the available evidence. For instance, returning to a distinction made in section “Representing Uncertainty”, it would be misleading to report only on first-order probabilities, if the second-order credentials of these probabilities are rather low. Instead, it is more expedient to highlight the all-things-considered balance of evidence. If there is not much we can positively assert regarding the prospect of a given catastrophe, but the catastrophe cannot be excluded as a realistic possibility, then this should be the key message of the uncertainty report. There are various further avenues for philosophical work on the topic of climate uncertainty. At a conceptual level, progress can be made by further teasing apart the different dimensions of uncertainty, and by articulating a more fine-grained uncertainty vocabulary, especially at the levels of deep uncertainty and ambiguity. At a normative level, there is ample room to further develop and refine decision-strategies in the face of deep uncertainty. Conceptual and normative work might also be combined, for instance, in attempts to conceptually ameliorate the IPCC’s uncertainty terminology. Last but not least, moral uncertainty has only recently been taken up as a standalone topic of philosophical inquiry. Future work on this topic, and the theoretical insights it might induce, are likely to benefit policymakers. Acknowledgments I thank Lukas Meyer, Kian Mintz-Woo, Thomas Pölzler, Jonathan Knutzen, Daniel Petz, Elias Moser and Romina Rekers fur their helpful suggestions. This chapter was written with the generous support of an NWO Rubicon Grant

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Climate Change and Democracy Matthias Fritsch

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Defining Democracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Diagnosing Climate-Related Problems in Democracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Less Democracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . More Democracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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This chapter offers an overview of the serious challenges with which democracies must contend in the face of increasing climate destabilization and menacing environmental breakdown. After a brief introduction, the second section will discuss various accounts of what democracy is or should be, from liberal and republican to deliberative and radical, and briefly indicate which difficulties these accounts face. The third section diagnoses democracy’s climate-related weaknesses. As a global and long-term intergenerational problem that is connected to deeply entrenched economic fossil fuel infrastructure, climate change challenges national and usually short-termist democratic governments to consider noncitizens (especially the global poor, nonhuman beings, and future generations) as well as safeguard the basic safety of the populace and secure constitutionally guaranteed rights of citizens. The fourth and fifth sections provide an overview of the many remedies found in the literature, including eco-authoritarian proposals Forthcoming in Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, edited by Gianfranco Pellegrino and Marcello Di Paola. M. Fritsch (*) Concordia University, Montréal, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_142

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for less democracy, which some authors either recommend or predict and fear. Section “More Democracy” discusses a host of proposals for more democracy, from expansion to previous noncitizens and deeper citizen participation, including climate disobedience, to institutional reforms, especially regarding future people. The chapter ends with suggestions for how climate change might force democracies to adapt, including the alternative between eco-fascism and eco-socialism that some see as a likely prospect. Keywords

Climate change · Democracy · Sustainability · Intergenerational justice · Shorttermism · Global justice · Republican democracy · Deliberative democracy · Liberalism · Radical democracy · Eco-authoritarianism · Eco-socialism · Civil Disobedience · Fossil capitalism · Democratic participation · Institutional reform · Citizen engagement · Boundary problem · Parliament of the living · Environmental governance · Expertocracy · Voter ignorance · Consumerism · Degrowth · Economic inequality · Climate denialism

Introduction Climate change confronts democracy with a number of severe challenges. As cumulative and wicked problems, global heating and environmental destabilization call for large-scale action and policy coordination by many actors across nation-state borders and across long timescales. Many of these actors are caught in competition with each other and in collective action problems. Some observers think the charge of fundamental failure must be directed not just at particular politicians or governments but against democracy as the very form of government as well as against the mainstream moral and political theories that support democratic institutions. This worry can be found both inside and outside government. Famously, Al Gore stated as Vice President of the United States that “the minimum that is scientifically necessary [to combat global warming] far exceeds the maximum that is politically feasible” (Gore, cited in McKibben, 2001, 38). Then Danish Minister for Climate and Energy and President of COP15, Connie Hedegaard, said in the run-up to the 2009 UN climate negotiations in Copenhagen: “If the whole world comes to Copenhagen and leaves without making the needed political agreement, then I think it’s a failure that is not just about climate. Then it’s the whole global democratic system not being able to deliver results in one of the defining challenges of our century” (Business Today, 2009). As we know, many observers credit UN climate change negotiations in Copenhagen with a major failure to achieve mitigation commitments (Clémençon, 2016; Skidmore & Farrel, 2021). Since 2009, GHG emissions have continued to rise dramatically, even after the so-called Paris Agreement of 2015, which some saw as a success given the (albeit voluntary) agreement on the goal to stay under 1.5  C average warming, with 2.0 a fallback option. The last COP (in Sharm-el-Sheikh, Egypt, 2022) failed to deliver

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any meaningful results on mitigation and adaptation. As I write (Jan 2023), it seems clear to experts that, at 1.2 currently, we will surpass 1.5 in the next 10 years, and are on track to exceed 2.0 heating, which scientists have identified as a very serious tipping point, with a 50% chance the grave benchmark would be met by 2050 (Diffenbaugh & Barnes, 2023). Equally since 2009 or thereabouts, there has been a massive upsurge in the already existing literature, both empirical and theoretical, on environmental governance, democracy, and climate change. Here, I will provide a necessarily selective overview of this upsurge.

Defining Democracy The notion “democracy” is what some philosophers have called an “essentially contested concept,” one where it belongs to the meaning of the term that its definition lacks general agreement (Connolly, 1983; Crick, 2003). If we cannot agree to define the term in the same way, it is because the very definition carries a different social, moral, or political agenda, and permitting this expression and open confrontation of differences, within the limits of civility, may be part of the very meaning of democracy. Perhaps because of this, today most governments claim to be democratic (Sen, 1999), even though the lack of consensus on democracy and the lack of robust democratic institutions in many countries may already indicate the international difficulties of treating the political side of climate change only through this lens (Wood, 2019, 122). In view of relating it to climate change, we can approach the definition of democracy by seeking to capture both some core theoretical accounts and the actual institutional arrangements currently prevailing in many self-proclaimed forms of democratic government, forms in reference to which the question of its ability to handle climate change has been raised. By democracy we should then be understood to mean a set of institutional arrangements and constitutional devices that both give form to the rule of the people (usually by electing representatives) for collective decision-making (decisions understood to be binding on all citizens) and put restraints (largely liberal rights) upon the actions of the government. Modern democracies are the result of a historical and variable marriage of the liberalism of individual rights with popular sovereignty, where the latter usually entails majority consent. These institutional arrangements are meant to give expression to the equal liberty and dignity of citizens, who collectively decide their fate, not only by holding regular elections but also by way of a public sphere in which democratic deliberation is fostered through the constitutional right to free speech and free assembly (Habermas, 1994, 1996; Christiano & Bajaj, 2022). The equality and the freedom required here may be more or less extensive, ranging from formal and legal to more substantive forms, for instance tied to social and economic spheres. Likewise, the engagements of individuals in the rule of the people may be more or less participatory.

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The “more or less” in these areas gives rise to different accounts of democracy, ranging from liberal and aggregative to republican, deliberative, and radical-agonistic interpretations of democracy. This is not the place to offer a comprehensive overview (see Held, 2006), but some indication of the most salient inflections in the theoretical literature may help to grasp the challenges of climate change. The most well-known model may be the Lockean or liberal one, so-called because it favors the liberal side over popular sovereignty. The primary point of democratic and collective will formation is on this view more or less instrumental, to keep the government from overstepping its power and to ensure the enjoyment of individual rights as well as the functioning of society, which is largely pictured as interactions among private citizens structured by the market. State power should then remain neutral with regard to individuals’ conception of the good life. Neutralist liberalism and action on climate change are sometimes thought to be incompatible because promoting environmentally friendly policies appears to involve endorsing a particular view of the good life, which the neutrality of the state disallows (Achterberg, 1993; see Bell, 2002 for a Rawlsian counterargument). The republican view, by contrast, stresses collective self-determination and active citizenship participation for their own sake. Tracing its roots back to ancient Greece and, in modernity, Rousseau rather than Locke, politics is here not instrumental to or a mere medium of private interests but constitutes society in a way that shapes the ethical life of the community and the interdependence of its members into free and equal consociates under law. This political society and its relations of mutual recognition first of all expresses the dignity of individual citizens and enjoys genetic and normative priority over both the state and the market (Held, 2006, 29ff.; see also Pettit, 1997). Deliberative democracy, too, stresses citizenship participation but denies it expresses any substantive community and elaborates such participation rather in terms of democratic procedures (Habermas, 1994). In contrast to the liberal view, which sees the majority result from the mere aggregation of pre-deliberative preferences (e.g., by voting), deliberative or discursive democracy puts emphasis on the process of opinion- and will-formation, both in individuals and in society at large (Lafont, 2020). On this view, in a democracy arguments aimed at agreement matter more than mere numbers. If claims and interests should be regulated by means of norms and laws that embody an impartial and egalitarian perspective, these norms can only claim validity if all those affected by them test them in argumentative discourses and find shared bases on which to accept them. As we will see, many “green democrats” have argued that the “all-affected principle” renders deliberative democracy particularly relevant to environmental concerns, as the interests of non-citizens and future generations must be considered by current democratic decision-making (Dobson, 1996; Shrader-Frechette, 2002; Goodin, 2003; Eckersley, 2004; Fuji-Johnson, 2007; Heyward, 2008; Fritsch, 2021). Radical democrats, by contrast, stress disagreement rather than agreement (see Breaugh et al., 2015). In defining democracy, radical democrats rely less on constituted power, that is, institutional forms that are claimed to manifest democracy (e.g., constitutional guarantees of equal liberty, division of powers, parliaments, referenda, etc.). Rather, radical democrats give more attention to constituent power, that is, the

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power of the people (the demos) to materialize in institutional form. In this sense, democracy is not just a form of governance among others. Rather, it is seen as a political process in which the constituent power of the demos manifests and articulates itself in a necessarily open-ended and conflictual manner (Celikates, 2021, 130). The emancipatory potential of such a re-articulation is usually not directed towards an ideal end state, outlined by the theorist, but primarily defined negatively, by being directed against entrenched forms of unfreedom and inequality. However, in the context of climate change the negative definition can also be directed against threats to environmental safety and social ecology (Machin, 2013). Hence, radical democrats lend strong theoretical support to increasing climate disobedience (or climate sabotage, eco-tage, etc.), such as that of movements like Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, Ende Gelände, Last Generation, Just Stop Oil, and Sunrise (Malm, 2021; Scheuerman, 2021; chapter ▶ “Climate Change and Social Movements”). The definition of democracy just offered is meant to be non-normative; it doesn’t say that democracy is inherently good, or better than other forms of government – unless of course we take, say, freedom as self-determination or equality as given moral truths, so that anything we describe as exhibiting these values is thereby also affirmed as good. Many people today tend to assume something of this sort, so that questioning democracy is, in many contexts, akin to blasphemy. And yet, climate change has resurfaced doubts about nominally democratic governments to ensure the long-term survival of its populations, posing the question whether, e.g., the legitimacy of political authority would not first of all derive from securing safety rather than prioritizing equality and freedom (e.g., Mittiga, 2022). Let us then proceed to discuss the diagnoses of the climate-related weaknesses of democracy. After discussing these diagnoses, we will look at recommendations in response to the diagnostics, responses that for the sake of this overview, I will classify as recommending more or less democracy.

Diagnosing Climate-Related Problems in Democracy A key problem many authors see with democracy, as defined above, is that non-members of the group engaging in collective decision-making (the people, the demos) include those most affected by climate change, such as nonhuman nature, noncitizens (especially the global poor), and future generations. Hence, the vulnerably affected tend to be excluded from the democratic process (chapter ▶ “Climate Change and Global Justice”). Spatially, the demos is usually defined by geographical borders and citizenship in the nation state and its territory. Like many other global issues, climate change extends beyond such borders and therewith raises the so-called boundary problem. Against the traditional identification of demos with nation, birth, and ethnos – which has led Balibar to associate democratic civic rights with genocide (2013) – some democratic theorists have put forward the principles of affected interests and coercion as the basis for defining the boundaries of democracy. Accordingly, the demos

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would not consist in co-nationals or fellow citizens but all affected or all subjected to coercion (Abizadeh, 2008). In response, others have argued that this understanding would undermine the conditions of democratic solidarity and equality and pose questions for the size of the demos and the stability of institutions (Song, 2012). Regardless, it seems clear from many international climate change negotiations, e.g., the UN CoP meetings taking place each year, that nation states are caught in a global collective action problem (Gardiner, 2011, 25ff.). Given the cumulative and thus collective nature of global heating, it is rational for each state to want to see other states, but not one’s own, reduce emissions, even if this is collectively irrational. Going it alone will not suffice and the problem will most likely affect all states negatively, perhaps even catastrophically, in the long run. Hence, the centrality of questions of transnational governance of the climate (Dryzek et al., 2013, 93ff.), which are hampered by “weak multilateralism” (Di Paola & Jamieson, 2018, 404ff.). Further, many nominally democratic nation states are historically associated with colonialism and imperialism, either as settler-colonial states (such as Australia, the USA, and Canada) or by having benefited enormously, before and during fossilfueled industrialization, from what Marx called “primitive accumulation” (Marx, 1992, Part 8), including the massive slave trade and the dispossession of native populations (chapter “Climate Change and Post-Colonialism”). Such violence in the past and the contemporary realities it has created and often continues to support is seen by some as an obstacle to the trust needed for the cooperation required to overcome collective action problems, in particular climate change, in whose case some proposed solutions (like carbon offsetting by re- or afforestation, hydro dams, mineral mining for battery resources, etc.) threaten to sideline Indigenous populations once more (chapter “Climate Change and Indigenous People”). The Indigenous Environmental Network, for one, worries that so-called nature-based solutions, so widely touted at recent UN climate change negotiations, are “a new form of corporate land grabbing” (ICA, 2021). The Potawatomi scholar Kyle Whyte speaks in this context of “relational tipping points” that have been crossed (from broken treaties and unkept promises to lack of reciprocity) and that need to be taken into consideration alongside climate tipping points (Whyte, 2020; see also Yussuf, 2019; Táíwò, 2022). These spatial-geographical and ethnic-racial exclusions are historically and conceptually connected to an understanding of the human in opposition to the nonhuman. Especially in the Western tradition and its sources in Athens and Jerusalem, the polis has usually been understood in opposition to nonhuman nature (Jonas, 1985, 3ff.). Accordingly, the citizen is one whose eligibility for political membership depends on features defined in alleged contradistinction to “animals” and other nonhuman entities, such as death awareness, mourning and burial, language and reason, etc. (Plumwood, 1993; Fritsch, 2015). This results in binary hierarchies within and without the polis (man-animal, man-woman, propertied vs. propertyless, white vs. nonwhite, etc.) that mask their political violence. The modern West re-invented democracy in the context of the scientific revolution, which is said to have further overanimated the human and de-animated the non-human (Latour, 2017). The democratic social contract is then made in opposition to or independently of nature. That is why today, when climate

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change makes of nature a much more visible political actor in its own right, this line of thinking suggests a “contract” with nature is needed (Serres, 1995). Latour, Serres, and others join eco-feminists in calling for a new understanding of the political in which human activity is inseparable from the non-human earth unmarked by artificial borders reinforced by the walls of the polis. Democracy would need to be reconceived as a “parliament of things” (Latour, 1993, 144) or “parliament of the living” (Wood, 2006). The collective action problems mentioned above thus ride on the back of noncitizens, human and nonhuman. Of course, many global issues face the spatial dimension of the collective action problem. What is special about climate change is that GHG emissions stem from energy sources deeply entrenched in the infrastructure of industrialization and that the worst damages of climate change are believed to occur in the future. To the extent that climate change is cumulative and will get worse with inaction or insufficient action over time, future generations are especially at risk. According to the well-known Stern Review of 2006, “perhaps 90% of climate change damages will occur after 2200” (see Jamieson, 2014, 165). As a result, much of the literature on democracy and climate change focuses on the temporal boundary problem, that is, the status of the young and future generations (where that may or may not include nonhuman beings). Gardiner has also argued that in the case of global warming, the collective action problem at the spatial level of nation states is in part so intractable because “moral corruption” entails the constant temptation of all states and other pertinent actors to push the problem to the future (Gardiner, 2011). Future generations are typically excluded from “the people” or “the demos” that is to engage in collective decision-making (see e.g., Saunders, 2011). Democratic legitimacy would stem from already existing people (e.g., voters), perhaps in line with norms and institutions inherited from past people, but exclude not yet existing individuals or groups. Hence, democracies are often accused of presentism or short-termism, that is, of giving priority to net benefits in the present at the cost of future ones (Di Paola & Jamieson, 2018, 407ff.). This allegedly excessive focus on the short term is particularly problematic in policy domains that call for an extended timeframe, including climate destabilization (chapter ▶ “Climate Change and Intergenerational Justice”). Meaningful remedies (such as mitigation and adaptation) tend to impose costs in the short term (e.g., increasing taxes and imposing regulation, divesting from existing energy infrastructure), but the associated benefits typically materialize only in the long run, and in some cases mostly or only for later generations, overlapping and non-overlapping. Given this temporal disjunction, democratic institutions are often tempted to pass the costs on to the next generations. McKenzie suggests four potential sources of short-termism in democratic systems: “1) short-sighted voters; 2) politicians with short-term incentives; 3) special interest groups with short-term objectives; and 4) the fact that future generations cannot be included in decisionmaking processes today” (MacKenzie, 2016a, 24; see also Thorseth, 2015; Gesang, 2014). While the last source depends of course on the definition of “inclusion” (for future generations could be represented by proxies – see below), it will be helpful to briefly elaborate and expand on the first three reasons. Short-termism is often said to result from democracy’s relation to free market competition, in particular in so-called post-Fordist increasingly global capitalism

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since the 1960s (Harvey, 2005), and by the fact that state power is beholden to special economic interests. These interests are pushed by economic actors that exert a lot of power on states (e.g., by way of the dependence on corporate taxes and investment and the creation of employment) and on politicians (in particular if public financing of electoral campaigns is insufficient). Under competitive conditions, these economic agents typically operate with very short and accelerating time frames. The existence of groups with strong short-term preferences and significant political influence may skew decision-making processes in the direction of concessions that distribute the burdens of long-term policies to others and confer (perceived) short-term benefits on themselves (MacKenzie, 2016b). Well-organized economic agents may influence democratic decision-making processes directly by electoral campaign contributions, funding political advertisements, fielding their own “insider” candidates, and so on (Mansbridge, 2012; Lessig, 2011; Nichols & McChesney, 2013). Less directly but very powerfully, corporations can affect democratic processes by moving, or threatening to move, to other jurisdictions if regulations that are perceived as adversely affecting their profits are discussed in the legislative arena (e.g., Dryzek, 1995; Ekeli, 2005; Lindblom, 1982; Paehlke, 1989). As we know, they can also powerfully skew debate by various forms of climate denialism, even if they themselves are well aware of anthropogenic global heating and its possibly disastrous and irreversible effects (see Supran et al., 2023). This economic dependence of democratic political systems (Caney, 2016; Boston & Lempp, 2011) may have become worse during the very time period that environmental crises became so pressing. As Naomi Klein argues specifically with respect to global warming, neoliberalist policies since the 1960s, from deregulation of markets to shrinking of governments, have made concerted action on climate change seem so intractable by weakening the democratic state in the face of increasingly postnational economic actors facing global competition (Klein, 2014). In broader social theory, these competitive conditions have been argued to contribute to the instrumentalization of rationality and of action, and thus a favoring of narrow interests in the present (Habermas, 1984, 1985). While instrumental reasoning, as the focus on the means toward given ends, is important to all action, the so-called Frankfurt School argued that in modernity it comes to progressively eclipse independent rational goal-setting (Horkheimer, 1974). In political terms, democratic collective determinations of overall (and typically longer-term) goals are sidelined by the pursuit of all-purpose means, such as money and profits (Schecter, 2010). The instrumentalization of action orientations applies in particular to economic agents, individual and collective, who find themselves in competitive conditions, but also to democratic nation states to the extent they compete with each other for attracting capital investments (Przeworski & Wallerstein, 1988; Przeworski, 2010). Economic dependence and instrumental reason may be further enhanced by the growing social acceleration that has gripped all societies in the process of industrialization, in particular since World War II (Scheuerman, 2004; Connolly, 2002; Rosa, 2010, 2013). Long-term thinking, one may surmise, has a hard time installing itself in motivational apparatuses of voters and office holders if these are already overstimulated and overstressed (cf. Stiegler, 2018). This means that today, political

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decision-making is caught in an increasingly perilous paradox. On the one hand, our collective impacts (which, as collective, call for political responses), as well as our knowledge of these impacts – and hence, our responsibilities – reach longer and potentially more harmfully into the future. On the other, the futural timescales that our political decisions take into account tend to get shorter and shorter (Rosa & Scheuerman, 2009). Democracy may be particularly vulnerable to acceleration; Rosa and others have argued that technology and economy affect society much faster than democratic (especially deliberative) processes, which merely play catchup. Information-gathering and deliberation simply take time, as does the verification of legislative proposals against normative standards, existing law, and long-standing policies. In response to this desynchronization, political scientists have noted an increasing displacement of decisions away from elected democratic bodies toward faster but less democratic agencies, from the legislative to the executive branch, to courts, and above all to the private sector, to corporations, and to the economic sphere (Rosa, 2012, 357–373). In turn, it has been argued that overall acceleration is largely caused by global competitive market conditions (Jessop, 2009; Connolly, 2011; Rosa, 2012). Presentism consists, then, in a favoring of the present rather than the future, but this present is itself fleeting, swiftly giving way to the ever-new future, hampering democratic action. Presentism has also been related to the frequent change of guards required by the electoral cycles of representative democracy (cf. Gardiner, 2006; Garvey, 2008; Dryzek, 1995). Simon Caney speaks in this context of “harmful short-termism,” and political scientists King and Crewe argue pointedly: “politicians lack accountability for the future impacts of their policies, and this leads them not to think policy through, often with disastrous results” (King & Crewe, 2014, 356–359, 395). The short-term cycles of elections in many existing democracies render policies and decisions presentist because politicians are oriented towards the next election, where they seek to win or keep majorities for the next 3-to-5-year cycle. They fear that hurting the putative interests of those who voted for them or those who possibly might vote for them, in favor of long-term policies, however reasonable these are, constitutes a failure to maximize their chances of winning the next election. As with short-termist business cycles and quarterly reports, then, competition tends to orient agents to the short term, for a competitor might not be able to compete in the long term at all if losing in the short term. Another argument that has been put forward for (democratic) short-termism is the intergenerational intensification of the well-known “tragedy of the commons” (Hardin, 1968). As we already heard, present and future people are said to be caught in a particularly vicious collective action problem that pits individual rationality against collective interests: what is rational from an individual’s point of view (an individual consumer, say, or an individual state) is irrational, perhaps even catastrophic, for the collective. In the intergenerational case of such a tragedy, a present generation bent on utility maximization exploits its asymmetrical power over the future, resulting not in the famous “tyranny of the majority” (Mill, 2003: 76), but in what Gardiner has called the “tyranny of the contemporary” (Gardiner, 2011, 143). While intragenerational collective action problems may be addressed,

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among other things, by enforcing rules that benefit the collective, in the intergenerational case such enforcement depends on institutions of governance that tend to be weaker the more they have to be shared over time. Liberal democracies may be particularly vulnerable to such a tragedy of the commons, especially in the case of climate change (Wallimann-Helmer, 2015). Supposing one accepts this bleak picture – one that assumes largely self-interested agents, perhaps resulting from increasing instrumentalization of action – part of the conclusion is that powerful democratic institutions are needed with sanctioning power to counter the presentist effects. These institutions would have to be more independent of economic power and have global reach (to address a global tragedy of the commons), but they should also survive generational discontinuities and takeovers. Democracies must be able to sustain their sovereignty over time, but they must also understand sovereign power as globally and intergenerationally shared. As indicated, some authors also diagnose a presentist time preference on the part of the voting public, perhaps exacerbated by increasing instrumentalist action orientations and consumerism (Mackenzie, 2016a; Wood, 2019, 112ff.). We should here also mention a number of psychological, all-too-human factors affecting democratic citizens: the difficulty of noticing and properly acting on so-called creeping problems, the unidentifiability or invisibility of the future victim, weakness of will, tendency to procrastination (“we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it”), and so on. Just one of the above sources of presentism seems germane to democracy, namely, the regular change of guards, e.g., by way of election cycles. Two of the causes of short-termism are putatively universal, such as the last one regarding human psychology and the tragedy of the commons (though both are, if not caused then exacerbated by the other, more historically specific factors; on the tragedy of the commons, see here especially Ostrom, 1990). The other reasons for presentism – economic dependence, instrumentalization of action, and social acceleration – derive from the amalgamation of democracy and the capitalist organization of production and distribution, as well as the path dependence regarding fossil fuels and other infrastructure (Caney, 2016). It seems hard to escape the conclusion that capitalist markets tend to render democratic self-government short-termist, at least at a certain stage of development (O’Connor, 1998; Foster et al., 2010; Wright, 2010). One may wonder why contemporary democrats should be moved to better represent future generations in the first place. Most work on this issue seeks to reform democracy on the basis of extrinsic (i.e., not necessarily democratic) supplements, such as theories of justice more generally: inadequate treatment of future generations just seems unfair to notions of equality, of rights, and so on – notions which need not be related to democracy, but may be so related, of course, at least in a broad way (Gonzalez-Ricoy & Gosseries, 2016: 4). However, one internal argument linking democracy to concern for future people is, as indicated, often said to be the “all affected” principle in deliberative democracy (Eckersley, 2000; Jensen, 2015; see also Thompson, 2010; more generally on discursive ethics and future people, see Brumlik, 1986, 2004; Kettner, 1992; Ott, 2008a, b). According to this principle, a proposed norm, policy, or course of action attains normative validity only if all those

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affected by it could rationally consent to it (Habermas, 1996). Many “green” deliberative democrats or discourse ethicists have argued for the temporal extension of some version of this principle (Dobson, 1996; Shrader-Frechette, 2002; Goodin, 2003; Johnson, 2007). Another internal argument for understanding democracy in a pro-futural way is the turn-taking view of democracy. Here, the Aristotelian idea is that taking turns among rulers and ruled is a normative notion particularly germane to the concept of democracy. If democracy implies the principled consent to others ruling after one’s turn, then this can also be understood as consent to other generations having their turn with governance after one’s death (Fritsch, 2023). Apart from tending toward the exclusion of those most vulnerable to climate change (noncitizens, nonhumans, future generations), authors have also diagnosed weaknesses internal to the workings of democratic societies and institutions. First and foremost may be the mismatch between climate science and climate politics, which Latour and others see as the result of the divorce of politics from nature (see above). “[E]xpertise is subservient to the voice of the people” in a democracy (Jamieson, 2020) and citizen opinions – the doxa which already led Plato to dismiss the democratic form of government (see The Republic, Book VIII) – need not respect the facts (Di Paola & Jamieson, 2018, 394ff.). Thus drawing on the long tradition of philosophical critiques of democracy from Plato to Hobbes and beyond, and with a focus on existing liberal forms of democracy (see above), Di Paola and Jamieson (2018) discuss the lack of expertise on the part of those governing, voter ignorance, the proliferation of veto players due to “checks and balances” and the weakening of state power in a global economy, as well as the instability of democratic policies due to the constant competition for power. Climate change, they argue, confronts liberal democracies with a dilemma that may quite likely give rise to a populism that thrives in the vacuum of (perceived) illegitimacy. The dilemma consists in a choice between the Scylla of ineffective climate policy and the Charybdis of having to relax the core democratic principle of popular sovereignty (see also Achterberg, 1993, 83ff.). Both options are likely to question the legitimacy of liberal democratic systems, for policies that fail to adequately address climate change threaten the physical and social security of citizens, while effective policies may require going against voters’ expressed preferences, as such policies require a concern for the affected but excluded as well as “robust commitments to multilateral cooperation, long-term planning, significant deviations from the status quo, and increased reliance on expert knowledge” (Di Paola & Jamieson, 2018, 402ff). Despite this diagnosis of difficulties, Di Paola and Jamieson do not counsel less democracy, but others do, as the next section will discuss.

Less Democracy Let us then move from diagnosis to advocacy, from the causal account to the proposed remedies. In response to colossal failures to act on climate change (mitigation, adaptation, and compensation), one can either suggest that these failures are largely due to democracy and its short-termism or ask for deeper engagement with

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democratic principles. In this section, I will focus on the former and discuss proposals that suggest less democracy is needed to address climate change. Authors in this category hold, grosso modo, that there is sufficient evidence to suggest that today, under conditions of global consumer society, democracy has taken on a form that is geared more towards stabilizing rather than radically changing the unsustainable status quo (Blühdorn, 2011, 2013, 2014). Machin (2022) helpfully suggests calling this the “skeptical imaginary” regarding democracy’s ability to handle climate change. Some of the diagnoses above have animated eco-political skeptics of democracy since at least the early 1970s. A number of neo-Malthusian intellectuals made a very public case that environmental protection could only be achieved through the abandonment of individual rights and a conscious embrace of authoritarian rule. For instance, economist Heilbroner argued that democracy will not be capable of adequately addressing future ecological crises and resource disruptions, so that it should be replaced by a new kind of autocracy that would combine a “religious” orientation with a “military discipline” in order to ensure a stable socioeconomic order (Heilbroner, 1974). Similarly, Ophuls predicted that democracy had no conceivable chance of survival in the coming age of overpopulation and resource depletion. The crisis “may require the sacrifice of political equality and majority rule” so that, under conditions of “ecological scarcity,” “democracy must give way to elite rule” (Ophuls, 1977, 159). If human civilization were to endure, it would have to embrace a technocratic rule by experts, managed by an elite of “ecological mandarins” (Ophuls, 1977; for an overview of these arguments and an attempt at refutation, see Fiorino, 2018a, b). Even Hans Jonas, whose then-novel work in intergenerational justice influenced the famous UN Brundtland Commission on sustainability in the 1980s (WCED, 1987, 55; see also Schmidt, 2013), suggested that “a well-intentioned, well-informed tyranny . . . appears superior, for our uncomfortable purposes, to the capabilities of the capitalist-liberal-democratic complex” (Jonas, 1985, 147). More recently, and in response to “the failure of the Copenhagen climate conference” in 2009, the well-known ecologist James Lovelock, author of the famous Gaia hypothesis, wrote: “even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while” (Lovelock, 2010). Lovelock acknowledges, however, that there is no alternative to democracy, such that suspension could only be temporary. However, others argue that adapting to climate change will be a long struggle in which temporary suspensions will not suffice (for an overview of these views, see Fiorino, 2018a, b, here esp. 36). On similar grounds, Shearman and Smith conclude that the underlying cause of the sustainability crisis is not the capitalist growth economy but, ultimately, liberal democracy itself. They argue that the environmental crises resulting from the failures of liberal democracy will facilitate the emergence of more authoritarian political structures to restore order (Shearman & Smith, 2007). In his Politics of Climate Change (2009), the noted sociologist and spokesperson for “Third-Way” politics, Anthony Giddens, argues that the faith of

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many environmental movements and many Green parties in participatory democracy is toothless in the face of eco-political challenges (Giddens, 2009, 56). Due to the diffuse effects and distant time horizons of climate change, he thinks governments will continue to delay mitigation, and when the range of global warming effects are pressingly noticeable, it will be too late to adapt. Giddens calls for the de-politicization of climate policy and insists that centralized planning and an “enabling state” are the best strategies for averting future catastrophes (91). Guided by experts, the depoliticized state is seen as the only institution that can establish and enforce ecological sustainable policies and re-direct energy investments. The concern to avert climate catastrophe and to ensure survival has also moved scholars to reconsider the very source of the legitimacy of political authority. Many contemporary political theorists see eco-authoritarianism as illegitimate as they ground legitimacy on political justice, democratic values, and basic rights, which are elaborated and defended in ideal theory. Independently of climate change, the so-called realist turn in democratic theory turned away from this perceived subjection of politics to morality (Williams, 2005 calls this moralism; see also Geuss, 2008). Realists claim that the dominant (Rawlsian) paradigm in political theory is too removed from reality to meaningfully relate to, let alone to guide, political action (Valentini, 2012). Rejecting a primary focus on justice, or shoring up feasibility constraints on justice, realists demand greater attention to existing power structures and drop what they see as overly idealized assumptions about institutions and human nature (see Galston, 2010; cf. Mills, 2005; Farrelly, 2007; Sangiovanni, 2008; and some so-called critical theorists more generally, e.g., Habermas, 1996). If normative priority is given to peace, security, order, legitimacy, and so on (Williams, 2005; Galston, 2010: 394–5), then the real world in which politics occurs will have to be taken more seriously in theorizing. Today, this real world of course includes climate change, so one should not be surprised to find theorists who argue that citizen safety and community survival trump justice and democracy as grounds for legitimacy. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as a recent example of arguably legitimate techniques of government that impose severe limitations on free movement and association, Mittiga argues that climate change poses an even graver threat to public safety and therefore may legitimately require a similarly authoritarian approach (Mittiga, 2022). Other authors that could be put in the “less-democracy” camp only with qualifications do not commit to the view that expertocratic-authoritarian approaches are more promising but nonetheless argue against democratization in response to environmental destabilization. Blühdorn, for one, expands the worries about increasingly individualistic, ego-centric, and consumerist voters; he argues that consumer capitalism has precipitated a “shift towards the inherently unsustainable self,” a self that “necessitates an ever-accelerating pace of (resource-)consumption” (2011, 2013). Under conditions of advanced modern societies, then, more democracy would likely imply even less sustainability. Deeper engagement on the part of civil society groups could perhaps be beneficial only if ruling elites and institutionalized authorities act in ecologically destructive ways. But, since the 1960s, emancipation from elite powers has come to usher in even more individualist consumerism (Heath & Potter, 2004).

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Let us then look at the views we can classify as seeking “more democracy” in response to climate change.

More Democracy Proposals for responding to climate change by furthering democratization do not necessarily begin by arguing against eco-authoritarian or democracy-skeptical views, but those that do suggest that there is little reason to think that eco-authoritarian governments will do better. Even if the model is no longer the Soviet Union and its centralized planning as advocated by the 1970s Neo-Malthusians, but the more mixed authoritarian government of present-day China, characterized by open markets with authoritarian government – or Singapore in the case of Shearman and Smith (2007) – the overwhelming response has been to point to empirical evidence that casts doubt on the ecological credentials and prospects of non-democratic governance. Given that major carbon polluters include both democratic and non-democratic states, one may try to examine the empirical evidence as to which governmental system (democratic or authoritarian) has done better to protect the environment in general and act on climate change in particular. Scholars examining the environmental performance of actual authoritarian governments such as China, Egypt, Iran, and Thailand have revealed a largely mixed track record (for details and references, see Shahar, 2015, 354ff.). Similarly, Fiorino offers an analysis of contemporary governments’ environmental programs, concluding that autocracies lag far behind in controlling greenhouse gas emissions, protecting forests, and advancing renewable energy (Fiorino, 2018a, b, 58–61). He concludes that environmental critics of democracy are naïve in envisioning “an idealized, benign, ecological autocracy that places climate action above other social and economic priorities and makes the tough choices that democracies are incapable of making” (Fiorino, 2018a, b, 53). Given the centrality of alleged “overpopulation” that sparked the vogue for Neo-Malthusian eco-authoritarianism in the 1970s, Fiorino presents evidence supporting the argument that more civil rights, especially for girls and women, offers a better path to sustainable populations and greenhouse gas reductions (2018a, b, 94). Further, Fiorino argues that any regime that suppresses political differences through autocracy will prove too rigid to respond to the unpredictable consequences of climate change. But, on the other side of the balancing sheet, is there some empirical evidence that democracies fare better? Fiorino argues that democratic governments are better equipped to meet the challenge of climate change because they are “less corrupt, foster more innovation, respond better to public needs [. . .] and encourage longerterm thinking than occurs in any authoritarian regime” (Fiorino, 2018a, b, 113). Similarly, Li and Reuveny (2006) present evidence that democracy tends to reduce environmental degradation. The overall claim is that some features typical of democratic states – civil society participation, environmental awareness through freer media, and active collaboration in international environmental negotiations – help to place environmental issues on the political agenda and to adopt

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environmental policies. Ever since the social movements of the 1970s and 1980s (social, green, anti-nuclear, anti-armament, etc.) forced environmental issues onto national and international political agendas, democracy and ecology have been seen to be deeply connected. Many political ecologists have suggested that environmental protection and the empowerment of citizens go together. Conversely, the power of political and economic elites should be curtailed to secure long-term sustainability, in part because elites tend to believe – correctly or not – that they can insulate themselves from environmental degradation (Plumwood, 1995). Here, we can see the link between views, on the one hand, on the relation between climate change and democracy, and, on the other, views on whether there are “lifeboats for the rich” (see the debate between Malm & Hornborg, 2014 and Chakrabarty 2017). Those who believe elites will tend to selfishly seek to insulate themselves from environmental destabilization will call for more citizen engagement in favor of effectively registering in democratic politics the varied vulnerabilities to environmental destabilization, including nonhuman beings, marginalized races, the poor, and so on. It seems clear to many observers that democracy’s ability to address climate change is severely curtailed by massive economic inequalities (Klein, 2014; Latour, 2018). Accordingly, a significant number of contemporary authors believe that, in the words of Clive Hamilton, “the climate crisis is upon us because democracy has been corrupted” by “the wealthy and the powerful,” the solution lying in “reclaiming democracy for the citizenry” (Hamilton, 2010, 223, 224; see also Hausknost, 2011). Other scholars, however, caution that democracy will do better on environmental issues only if it can curb corruption. Responding to research such as that of Fiorino and Li & Reuveny, Povitkina (2018) uses a sample of 144 countries over 1970–2011 to suggest that the benefits of democracy for climate change mitigation are limited in the presence of widespread corruption. By corruption, they refer to obstructions to the coercive power of the state, e.g., by lowering the quality of inspections, monitoring, and the ability of bureaucrats to effectively design and implement policies. Corruption also hampers voluntary compliance by reducing trust between the individuals and government and diminishes the capacity of the state to extract tax revenues. Further, it hampers environmental policy-setting by giving powerful economic agents additional channels to influence political decision-making (Povitkina, 2018, 412ff.). Corruption thus defined includes the myopic view of politicians and the susceptibility to vested interests, as discussed above, but also references more generally the ability of democratic institutions to freely set and enforce policy. Below we will review suggestions by other scholars as to how to reform current democratic institutions so that they are indeed less corrupt and encourage longer-term thinking. Still, overall many scholars suggest that more democratization will help drive action on climate change, though of course much will depend on what is meant by democratization (see Burnell, 2012). In view of environmental breakdown, the “more-democracy” proposals can be divided, for heuristic purposes, into those calling for more citizen participation vs. institutional reforms, though of course there will be overlap. When it comes to participation, we can distinguish deliberative

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from radical-democratic forms of citizen engagement. On both participation and institutional reforms, we can further divide proposals along economic lines, roughly capitalist vs. socialist. Similarly, Machin helpfully suggests dividing the defenders of more democracy into those who hold a “rational imaginary” vs. a “radical” one and divides democratization into expansion towards previous nonmembers, rescaling towards the global or the local, and deepening participation (Machin, 2022). Some proposals for more democratization are less focused on reforming institutions or the economy, and more on citizen engagement in response to climate change. To achieve the lifestyle changes needed, and to overcome the unsustainable power of elites, citizens should develop new identities built more on care for the environment and for future generations (Leggewie & Welzer, 2008). Similarly, drawing on deliberative democracy, Willis, Curato, and Smith believe climate change calls for treating individuals not as consumers but as co-citizens living through a crisis (Willis et al., 2022). Willis aims at creating community action initiatives to formulate a new social contract between government and people, so as to increase citizen participation (Willis, 2020: 36). Central to such participation are citizen assemblies in which collective deliberation would aim at the co-creation of a radical transformation. The “rational imaginary” of democracy acknowledges global heating to be a major challenge for existing democratic institutions but believes they can be revised in a well-planned manner guided or designed by political and philosophical theory (Machin, 2022; see most chapters in Gonzalez-Ricoy & Gosseries, 2016) (chapter ▶ “Climate Change and Institutions for Future Generations: The Litigation Option”). By contrast, the radical imaginary – inspired by what has come to be known as radical democracy – sees climate change as an (or another) occasion to reconstitute democracy by way of constituting rather than constituted power (see below). If one accepts this rough division, the “rational” imaginary has made various proposals to act on climate change by, in particular, better representing affected noncitizens and future people in current democratic decision-making processes. Regarding geographical expansion, democracy is here envisioned beyond nation-state borders, at the global level, that is, for reasons discussed above, more appropriate for formulating and implementing policy on climate change. Understandably, authors theorize a “cosmopolitan” or “supranational” democracy in which formal international institutions are democratized (Archibuigi & Held, 1995; more specifically in response to climate change, Holden, 2002; Deese, 2019), but attention is also directed toward more local and informal democratic spaces in a decentralized global system (Stevenson & Dryzek, 2014, Eckersley, 2020). Some suggest that we need not only expand democracy to the global but also further down to the local “grassroots” level, such as municipalities, cities, and so on (Fischer, 2017; chapter “Climate Change and the Philosophy of the City”). Already in the 1970s, eco-anarchist Murray Bookchin argued that social ecology called for a federation of municipalities in which “faceto-face democracy” would counteract elitist state power (Bookchin, 2015, 2021). As for the temporal, intergenerational dimension, some of the reform proposals involve specialized institutions meant to promote pro-futural policies, while other proposals seek to increase the future-oriented nature of inherited, existing political

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institutions (Kates, 2015). Regarding the former, one could mention regular constitutional conventions in view of updating democratic constitutions (Thompson, 2010; see also Thomas Jefferson’s famous Letter To James Madison, Sept 6, 1789; Jefferson, 1904); an ombudsperson for future generations; parliamentary committees dedicated to future generations, such as the Standing Parliamentary Committee for the Future that the Israeli Knesset had 2001–2006 (Shohay & Lamay, 2006), or the Finnish Committee for the Future within the Finnish Parliament (Caney, 2016); a citizens’ assembly specifically aimed at safeguarding the perennity of the democratic process (Thompson, 2016); a global climate bank (Broome & Foley, 2016); and a common heritage fund for climate change and future generations (Szabó, 2016). Gardiner proposes a “global constitutional convention,” akin to that convened in Philadelphia in 1787, to overcome the “institutional gap“ that consists in current democratic institutions not being designed for handling political responsibility for future generations (Gardiner, 2014, 2019). As an ethics of transition moving away from the fundamental failures of existing institutions, the purpose of the convention would be to devise a constitutional system that embodies a set of norms constraining governments to treat future generations fairly (Gardiner, forthcoming). As for proposals that seek to increase the pro-futural consideration of existing democratic institutions, they include explicitly mentioning future people in constitutions (as some already do); reserving a certain proportion (e.g., 5%) of the legislature for elected representatives of the future (Dobson, 1996, 132–135; Ekeli, 2005, 429–450, esp. 434); making the second chamber that many democracies have a randomly selected one, so as to counterbalance some of the short-term tendencies associated with elected chambers (Mackenzie, 2016b); introducing youth quotas in parliament (Bidadanure, 2016); demanding “posterity impact statements” of legislators (Caney, 2016); introducing age-differentiated political (e.g., voting) rights; e.g., a system in which parents can exercise votes on behalf of their children (Schmitter, 2000, 40–41; van Parijs, 1998, 308–314); attaching social and environmental obligations to pension funds so as to render corporate activities more responsible to future generations (Sandberg, 2016); and setting up an Intergenerational Endowment Requirement, the compliance with which would trigger tax-incentives (Cordelli & Reich, 2016). Other proposals that could be regarded as democratization are even more focused on the market economy, which as we heard is often seen as a key driver of environmental destabilization. We could distinguish, with lots of grey in between, proposals that seek to reform the market economy without giving up on the overarching goal of growth, from those who give up on growth and those who wish to overcome capitalist markets altogether in response to climate change. Regarding the former, we should mention environmental economics and the concept of green growth, which has garnered much attention in recent years (see Shmelev, 2017 for an overview). Rather than giving up on economic growth, the idea here is that the right mix of policies, investments, and technologies will lead to beneficial growth within ecological limits (Fiorino, 2018b). This can be understood as a mode of democratization because the proposal suggests that democratically controlled governments regulate and manage markets more than before, and specifically in view of climate change and other forms

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of environmental destabilization, so as to overcome the stark dichotomy between economic growth and further ecological degradation. Capitalist growth itself, as currently understood, is seen as the ultimate driver of climate change and environmental destabilization by defenders of degrowth (Muraca, 2020; Hickel, 2021), ecological economists, and eco-socialists (Baer, 2018). Of the latter, many also argue that the economy needs to be democratized, either in the form of market socialism or democratic planning (Roemer, 1994; Schweikart et al., 1997; Wright, 2010; Devine, 2002; Laibman, 2002; Hahnel, 2021). As with the Indigenous responses to climate change mentioned above, eco-socialists trace the roots of climate degradation not back to post-WWII (the Great Acceleration) or even the industrial revolution, but the prior period (roughly, 1450 to 1750) that Marx had called “primitive accumulation.” Marx theorized it as an indispensable aspect of capitalism’s principal presupposition and ongoing mode of operation: the separation of human populations from the land and the insertion of the market in commodity and labor between land and life (Marx, 1992, Part 8; Perelmann, 2000). Next to the massive slave trade, colonial land grabbing and the dispossession of European serfs, this process included the privatization of the commons for competitive profit making and the increasing externalization of waste products, including GHG emissions (Harvey, 2005). The struggle against climate change thus needs to stop such externalization generally and retrieve carbon sinks and the climate itself as the commons to be placed under democratic stewardship rather than privately exploited or used as dumps. Further, climate change is not a single-button issue. Given that capitalism inserts all of nature into the circulation of capital (Moore, 2016), climate change is connected to the profit-driven overstepping of planetary boundaries more generally, an overstep that increasingly destroys the ecosystems that support life, human and nonhuman(chapter “Climate Change and Capitalism”). It will therefore not do to merely decarbonize an otherwise capitalist economy (Lawrence & Laybourn-Langton, 2021). Further, the very use of fossil fuels by capitalist industries is inseparable from control over workers and huge income and power inequalities within countries (especially wage laborers and capital managers) and internationally (especially Global North vs. Global South; Malm, 2016). Stemming global heating must thus resist capitalism’s inherent tendency for both social-political inequality and for further expansion and growth (Carter, 1996; Foster et al., 2010). Depending upon one’s understanding of democracy, the “more” camp may then also include authors who call for or justify radical political upheaval or revolution, if the latter can be understood to proceed from “the people” and so fall within the orbit of democratic self-determination. Eco-socialists call for resistance to the status quo by radical forms of people empowerment, seeking to overcome extractivist and nature-destructive capitalism, thereby joining radical democrats in supplying theoretical support for climate disobedience (Carter, 1998; Malm, 2021). The argument is that a proper account of the oxymoron “capitalist democracy” and the poor record so far on climate change mitigation by capitalist states shows that the entrenched interests of private capital in maintaining the destructive status quo can only be fought, not convinced in deliberation (Huber, 2022). Indeed, there can be little doubt that so-called high-carbon

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interests which profit enormously from the status quo – such as the oil, gas, and coal industries; extractivist states which rely on fossil fuel exports; and high-carbon industries like airlines and car manufacturers – use their massive resources to sway political decisions in their favor (Brulle, 2019; Lamb et al., 2020). An important argument in this eco-socialist literature concerns not how democracy can adapt to climate change, but how climate change adapts democracy – that is, precipitates a change in the political system. Many authors, especially but not only eco-socialists, argue that global heating and environmental breakdown more generally increasingly force a choice between democratic eco-socialism or eco-fascism (Mann & Wainwright, 2018; Lawrence & Laybourn-Langton, 2021; Malm & Zetkin Collective, 2021). The destabilization of the environment destabilizes democracies, e.g., by widening inequality gaps and further immiserating parts of the working class and the poor; the destruction of nature-based livelihoods; the production of masses of climate refugees pushing on borders of democracies; climate wars; and so on. Accordingly, one must expect an impetus for more aggressive populist governments, and possibly the folding of neoliberal expertocracy and conservative denialism into forms of eco-authoritarianism. The fight against climate change, the argument goes, would then compel committed democrats in an anti-capitalist direction, one that displaces democracy from a liberal model focused on preserving individual rights (including rights to productive property and capital) to a socialist one that de-privatizes the terrestrial bases of human life.

Conclusion This chapter reviewed the sources of the serious challenges with which democracies must contend in the face of increasing climate destabilization and environmental breakdown. The chapter began with various accounts of what democracy is or should be, and which difficulties these accounts face, actually existing forms in particular. As a global and long-term intergenerational problem that is connected to deeply entrenched economic fossil fuel infrastructure, climate change challenges national and usually short-termist democratic governments to consider noncitizens (especially the global poor, nonhuman beings, and future generations) as well as safeguard the basic safety of the populace and secure constitutionally guaranteed rights of citizens. The chapter provided an overview of the many remedies found in the literature, including those recommending less or more democracy. After discussing the pros and cons of eco-authoritarian proposals, the chapter discussed suggestions for further democratization, ranging from greater citizen participation and reforming existing democratic institutions to eco-socialism and climate disobedience.

Cross-References ▶ Climate Change and Global Justice ▶ Climate Change and Intergenerational Justice

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▶ Climate Change and Social Movements ▶ Climate Change and Institutions for Future Generations: The Litigation Option

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Climate Change and Gender Susan Buckingham

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Feminist Philosophies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Feminist Philosophies of Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ecofeminisms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ecofeminist Philosophy As a Way of Understanding and Responding to Climate Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Masters Tools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Challenging the Heteronormativity of Climate Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Strategically Playing with Stereotypes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Climate Change Reinforcing the Gender Hierarchy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ecofeminist Praxis: Philosophy into Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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The philosophies required to understand the relationship between gender and climate change are rooted in feminism. Understanding climate change also requires knowledge of context: how the natural and physical world is known and how knowledge is produced, as well as cultural, social, economic, and legal structures. Critical understandings of these also owe a debt to feminist philosophies, including feminist philosophies of science, the economy, philosophies of care, and feminist-inspired legal philosophies. Feminist philosophies emerged in force in the twentieth century, although these are informed by influential forerunners. Arguably one of their greatest strengths is to question the privilege and objectivity of “modern” or “enlightenment” science or knowledge, which now dominates ways of thinking on this S. Buckingham (*) Cambridge, UK e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_129

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planet. Exposing the agendas and beliefs of those in power as equally as subjective as the rest of us, and grounded or situated in all of our backgrounds and interests, is core to feminist philosophy. Many of these philosophies, to some degree or another, have both informed and drawn upon ecofeminist philosophies which explore the relationship between how dominant society treats nondominant humans and how it treats other-thanhuman nature. To understand this, it is also important to understand how the social structures within which we are all embedded interact with our natural and physical environment, of which feminist environmental philosophy has been a powerful interpreter. Further, it is necessary to clarify that how we interpret “gender” is a cultural or social act, and feminist philosophy and theory has laid the groundwork for this. Keywords

Gender · Feminism · Ecofeminism · Care · Climate emergency

Introduction The climate emergency facing humanity, and much other-than-human nature as well, is a product of inequality between a powerful minority of humans and the rest of nature – human and other-than-human. Ecofeminism argues the position that humans are inescapably part of nature. To distinguish between human nature and other forms, a number of terms are used. Candace Fujikane writes about those which/ who are not human as “life otherwise,” while Robin Wall Kimmerer, environmental biologist and native American of the Potawatomi Nation, writes of Native ways of knowing human people as “the younger brothers of Creation” (Kimmerer, 2013). This chapter uses “other-than-human” nature to signify equivalence between what is human and what is beyond human (compared to “non-human,” on the one hand, or “more-than-human,” on the other). Power is held by this dominant minority characterized by monetary wealth, whiteness, masculinity, and frequently by their settler status (that is, non-Indigenous, as throughout the Americas, Australasia, and South Africa, for example). One could also add, characterized by greed and fear. Philosophies which help us to understand the current climate emergency have to be able to explain the emergence, longevity and persistence of hierarchical power structures. If these power structures have created the environment we currently are part of and experience, then these same structures are unlikely – at best – to be able to deliver us from them. As the African-American feminist Audre Lorde famously wrote in 1984 “The Master’s tools are unlikely to be able to dismantle the Master’s house” (Lorde, 2018). So many technologies which have been developed ostensibly to address a former problem have created multiple problems in their wake. The development of nuclear power as an allegedly “clean” power source to replace coal, from the 1950s, is a case in point. Elizabeth Kolbert has written about how each technological step to address one part of an environmental system causing people

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bother, without considering the whole, has mired its community in deeper and deeper trouble. She uses the management of the Mississippi Delta, through heavily and expensively engineered infrastructure around New Orleans, as a case in point (Kolbert, 2020). So, if large-scale “Master” technology will not enable us to address the climate emergency, what exactly will we be able to do? Addressing the climate emergency requires us, then, to address fundamental questions about how we want to live. And establishing who “us” and “we” are is of critical importance. From the 1980s, feminist standpoint theory has argued that decisions made by the most privileged in society will be biased by their vested interest in maintaining the status quo. All the institutions addressing environmental problems – Parliament, Government, the Civil Service, lobbyists, research institutions, and universities – as well as the media which communicates these decisions, the law which upholds them, and the police which enforces them – are dominated by hegemonic masculinity. To address this, feminist standpoint theory argues that “outsiders” are more likely to see the negative impacts from a vision less clouded by the privileges endowed by the continuance of the current system (Harding, 2003). This chapter introduces the feminist philosophies which have most profoundly influenced how we understand the relationship between humans and our environment (all more-than-human nature), and also between human beings. It first considers feminist philosophies which explain the relationship between women and men, and more recently between and among genders. This is followed by an explanation of feminist philosophies of science, how is science created and defined, and by whom? Are there different kinds of knowledge, and which are more likely to deliver us from the climate emergency? Through this, we can see how environmental problems are framed and imagined as well as how they tend to be addressed. Representational and distributional issues are then considered, which include legal and economic perspectives. These issues have most commonly been used in arguments concerning environmental justice (and injustice), determined by race and ethnicity, but are no less applicable to gender. Philosophies of care are important here as monetized value systems have tended to neglect care of what sustains us: both care of ourselves and each other, and of our environments. The chapter then applies these philosophies to the relationship between humans and our environment (or other-than-human nature). Specifically, feminist ecological philosophies as they have developed over the past 50 years will be considered for their critiques and influences. Finally, the chapter applies the theories it has considered to the climate emergency and imagines how we might be able to de-escalate the emergency through praxis, that is, by implementing ideas through action.

Feminist Philosophies Feminist philosophies have tried, over time, to explain historic and persistent gender hierarchies and oppression. We can look to women (and some men, such as John Stuart Mill) whose legacies have helped to frame the more formal feminist movement. “Western” examples of these precursors include women active in the

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eighteenth and nineteenth centuries such as Abigail Adams, Mary Woolstencraft, Caroline Norton, and Olympe de Gourges, but it is important to note that feminist ideas emerged contemporaneously across global regions and crossing cultural divisions, from the former African-American slave and poet, Phyllis Wheatley (1753–84) to the Egyptian “Rasheed Women’s Conference” (1799) (summarized by Lucy Delap, 2020). What has become known in retrospect as “first wave” feminism emerged since the mid-nineteenth century, coalescing around women’s representation and their right to vote (achieved first in New Zealand, when Maori and settler women could vote from 1893, but not until 1971 for Swiss women when their right to vote in national elections was established). Second wave feminism in the 1960s and 1970s engaged with equal employment rights and equal pay, as well as women’s reproductive rights, none of which had automatically followed as a result of representational equality. Third wave feminism from the 1990s has responded to earlier challenges of elitism (white women in rich countries), although African American feminists were voicing these concerns throughout the second wave. It also aligns itself with the dominant postmodern identity politics of the fin-de-20th siecle, as well as with postcolonialism. A number of philosophies have underpinned these feminisms, in roughly chronological order, but with much, and enduring, overlap. A liberal version of feminism argues that its desired object is women’s equality with men, but without other systematic changes. Women’s inequality and social economic status is perceived as due to historic inequalities. By enacting legislation for equal political representation, equal access to education, employment rights, equal pay, and equal treatment under the law, it is assumed that women will eventually catch up with men and gender equality will have been achieved. Enabling women to compete in a “man’s world” and facilitated by widely available contraception, family planning, and child care provision, can be seen as dominating Western ways of thinking in North America, Europe, and Australasia, and through the export of Western styles of governance and business models worldwide. It was also a feature of centrally planned economies such as the USSR and soviet-influenced central and eastern European states. Despite its current ubiquity, liberal feminism clearly has not achieved gender equality, whereas a feminist philosophy challenging patriarchy seeks a more fundamental explanation of continuing gender inequalities. This philosophy – radical feminism – argues that the structures in and through which we live our lives are deeply masculinist and attempting to (re)shape women to fit into this world will never result in equality. Radical feminism argues that it is the system that needs fixing not the (female) individual. It is important to note here that it is not individual males and females who achieve equality, but those who are ascribed masculinist and feminine characteristics. In reality, the way dominant institutions have been established is through the efforts of a ruling elite characterized by a particular kind of forceful masculinity variously described as “alpha,” “industrial,” “hyper,” or “hegemonic,” depending on who we read. Collectively, these dominant institutions determine what is the right education; how the law will be designed, administered, and policed; acceptable working and employment practices; and so on. Some individual women may succeed in such a masculinist world (and we can all

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think of a few – my own include the three women Prime Ministers of the UK), mostly by adapting themselves to its demands. They generally are not supportive of other women and do not agree with affirmative action, believing that they have won their place in this world due entirely to their own merit (Affirmative action, or positive discrimination, recognizes a systematic bias against women (and other people disadvantaged by their ethnicity, or disability) and is used to correct this bias). Conversely, many men are not well served by this arch-competitive world in which success is almost always won by the vanquishers distancing themselves from the majority of people who enable them to work (and socialize) punishingly long hours, often over several locations, and distanced from the rest of nature which sustains them. This way of working has become dominant worldwide and is a significant component of environmental damage and the climate emergency, which is one reason for the increasing interest in the ecofeminisms that will be discussed below in some detail. These broad feminist philosophies are the products of the milieus in which they developed and reflect the backgrounds of those who refined them: mostly based in the global North, and white, middle class, and highly educated in the conventional sense. This particular standpoint has been criticized for ignoring the experiences of black and brown, colonized, disabled, poor, and poorly educated (in the conventional sense) women. Following critiques from majority world women, and women disadvantaged in the minority world by their race or ethnicity, an African-American lawyer, Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989), proposed the adoption of intersectionality. This considers the multiple intersections of other lines of disadvantage (primarily race and ethnicity, but since expanded to include age, disability, sexuality, and parenthood) with gender, to explain many and varied inequalities. The law has been criticized by feminists as a product of prevailing sexist, as well as racist, attitudes. The feminist philosopher Iris Marion Young criticizes Western law whose universality (in which previously excluded groups have been incorporated over time) is mapped on to existing differences and levels of advantage, which inevitably produces an uneven effect (Young, 1990). She also considers how participatory democracy discriminates against those whose voices are less heard, or raised (generally, the same groups). Her stress on the need for recognition as well as representation and a fair distribution has been influential in the US environmental justice movement, which challenges how environmental ill-effects (such as pollution) affect communities of color more severely than white communities. In many countries, it can be seen that environmental damage is both inflicted on, and felt more acutely by disadvantaged ethnic groups, colonized and Indigenous populations. Women are also caught in particular ways in these nets of disadvantage through processes that will be examined later in this chapter. Feminist economists explain women’s persistent financial disadvantage. The global financial system is built around the concept of scarcity, and on a distorted valuation of goods and services in which transactions involving money are valued most highly. Other transactions, such as “in kind,” gifts, and reciprocity, are considered less valuable. The New Zealand economist, Marilyn Waring – once the youngest female politician in New Zealand – memorably recounted how a massive oil

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spill (her reference spill was the Exxon-Valdez off the coast of Alaska in 1989) added substantially to gross national product through transactions involved in legal and insurance businesses and the marine and coastal clean-up, and was therefore considered a “good,” while the damage done to the ocean and marine life was not counted in economic terms. (The example of the Exxon-Valdez oil spill is one of the case studies illustrated in a film made about Marilyn Waring in 1995 by Terre Nash and the National Film Board of Canada: Who’s Counting? Marilyn Waring on Sex, Lies and Global Economics). In her book “Counting for Nothing,” she drew attention to the complete lack of recognition of (mainly) women’s work caring for children and doing housework, because it was not paid (Waring, 1988). Secondwave feminist “wages for housework” campaigns drew attention to this anomaly (James, 2012). That housework persists in being an undervalued aspect of society is demonstrated by a UK national audit which revealed how the majority of housework is still undertaken by women and that, if house work and care work were monetarily valued, it would represent a contribution of over one trillion pounds to the national economy, a staggering 56% of gross domestic product (see The Office for National Statistics (ONS) 2016 report “Women shoulder the responsibility of unpaid work”). Feminist philosophies of care challenge the artificial division between productive (paid, valued) and reproductive (unpaid, not valued) labor which diminishes the value of the care we take of each other, and the care we take of nature beyond ourselves (Held, 2006).

Feminist Philosophies of Science The dominance of Western science lies partly in its ability and success to portray itself as something inevitable, something which pre-exists human understanding, and is therefore unchallengeable. As the feminist historian philosopher Carolyn Merchant points out, the science which emerged in the European “Enlightenment” (so called) was heavily determined by a culture which was bent on domination: of people, of cultures, and of nature. Drawing on Greek philosophy, it privileged what it defined as “logical” and “rational” through a system of dualistic thinking which valued, among other qualities, culture over nature, mind over body, and men over women (Merchant, 1995). This dualistic way of thinking justified the subjugation of one group by the other. Val Plumwood’s itemization of the key elements in this dualistic structure of Western thought provides the basis for Table 1. One of the critical contributions of feminist scientists from the 1970s onward was to expose this inevitability as a fallacy. For any scientist – or philosopher – to abstract themselves from the world into which they are born, are raised and live, and claim to see the world objectively (without being subjected to social and cultural influences) is an arrogant conceit. Donna Haraway (1991) calls out this way of observing as “the God trick.” The highly educated and privileged scientist and philosopher are no less influenced by their families, education, societies, cultures, religions, and environments than anyone else. But failing to acknowledge this obscures these influences. However, it is undeniable that the more privileged a

Climate Change and Gender Table 1 Key elements in the dualistic structure of Western thought

1033 Culture (prioritized) Reason Male Mind Master Reason Rationality Reason Mind/spirit Freedom Universal Human Civilized Production Public Subject Self Heteronormativity Gender binary

Nature (secondary) Nature Female Body (nature) Slave Matter (physicality) Animality Emotion (nature) Nature Necessity (nature) Particular Nature (nonhuman) Primitive Reproduction Private Object Other Queer Gender complexity

Source: Val Plumwood, 1993, added to by author

person is, the more abstracted they become from life-sustaining practices – growing, provisioning and preparing food, maintaining a household, and caring for children. And this abstraction no doubt contributes to feelings of intellectuality and universality. In 1974, Dorothy Smith wrote that “the only way of seeing a socially constructed world is knowing it from within. We can never stand outside it” (p. 24). This has been influential in feminist critiques of science and knowledge since. Evelyn Fox Keller (1982), who documented how who one is determines what one studies, has been one of the main proponents of a feminist empiricism. Donna Haraway (1991) has coined the influential term “situated knowledge” as a form of feminist objectivity which requires us to recognize where we see from, and to acknowledge that our knowledge can only ever be partial. Rosi Braidotti (2011) goes further in stressing the importance of valuing embodiment and lived experience, the politics of everyday life, collective affirmative action, and political and ethical accountability. This questions any form of objectivity and makes a virtue of subjectivity, which aligns with standpoint theory, referred to in the introduction. “Citizen science,” while not explicitly a feminist approach, stresses the importance of people’s own lived experiences and encourages people to collect their own data and observations to campaign for change. Indeed, some national campaigns specifically recruit enthusiasts for annual bird and insect counts, recognizing the wealth of knowledge and interest among “amateurs.” (Examples in the UK include the RSPB to monitor birds and Butterfly Conservation which monitors butterflies.) When used by women community activists, citizen science has, however, often been discredited by vested interests. In the USA, the community living in the vicinity of an abandoned chemical plant in Love Canal, New York State, had noted increased morbidity and serious illness among residents, including miscarriages, birth defects, and cancers, since the

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1970s. Led by the persistent Lois Gibbs, it took more than 20 years before government acknowledged there was a problem, and even then the chemical company was never penalized (Gibbs, 1998). The health data she and neighbors collected was disparagingly labeled “housewives data” and dismissed by universities, government, and the industry for decades. Similar denigration attended the publication of Silent Spring, now acknowledged as one of the key events to spark the environmental movement in the 1960s. The chemical industry led a barrage of opposition against its author, Rachel Carson, spending over a quarter of a million dollars in a publicity campaign designed to undermine Carson’s science, while the chief spokesperson for the chemical industry attacked her as “a fanatic defender of the cult of the balance of nature.” This attack achieved a measure of short term success in that Carson was described by “[j]ournalists and reviewers as “an hysterical woman” who used “emotion-fanning words”, a woman with an overly sensitive nature, whose book was “more poisonous than the pesticides she condemns”” (Lear, 1999, p. 261). Writing style, it seems, also has a dominant form, and failing to use a quasi-objective language as determined by science and the “academy” can consign environmental concerns to the margins. (It is interesting that a number of female environmental writers, researchers, and campaigners (sometimes all three in one) are lyrical writers. For example, the researcher/writer Sandra Steingraber, who campaigns against fracking and has researched and written about carcinogenic pollution, is also a poet.) Recognizing who one is and one’s influences is a first step toward enabling us to control for these influences. For example, scientific studies have long been unconsciously or consciously biased toward the male, from cell studies to the study of fish. (For further detail, see Gendered Innovations (2023) and European Union (2020). Likewise, being conscious of male dominance of science, and the masculinity embedded in science habitats (the laboratories, the conference halls, and the professional societies) is a necessary prerequisite to addressing this sometimes called “toxic” masculinity as well as increasing the number of women taking science degrees and entering research. Evidence that attitudes toward women scientists have persisted beyond the vilification of Rachel Carson can be found in more recent reports. Senior and influential male scientists working at CERN, University College, London, and Boston University are on record as expressing views that, respectively, women should not be working in the laboratory; are a distraction to male scientists; and (Giuffrida and Busby, 2018; Shattuck and Cheney, 2021) are fair game for sexual abuse in field settings. (See, respectively, the article by Giuffrida and Busby (2018) a BBC news article in 2015 on the resignation of an honorary professor because of inappropriate gendered remarks, and the film about bias and discrimination against women scientists “Picture a Scientist” released in Shattuck and Cheney (2021). Western science has become so dominant that it is easy to forget how it has systematically dislodged preindustrial and Indigenous ways of knowing, and communicating about, the world. Prior to colonization, and continuing to run in isolated pockets in parallel to global westernization, there were and remain alternative, more holistic and respectful, ways of knowing the world, and humans’ relationship with the rest of nature. Indigenous women feature prominently, often take leading roles, in

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environmental protests against egregious damages to nature and communities which rely directly on maintaining nature in balance. Prominent examples of these protests range from the Himalayan Chipco movement in the 1970s in which women encircled (“hugged”) trees to prevent them being cut down, to the continuing protests by First Nation women in the US state of North Dakota, opposing the construction of an oil pipeline. The climate emergency, along with other environmental disasters, has provoked wider interest in preindustrial and Indigenous knowledge (note, for example, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “Braiding Sweetgrass,” which, in 2020, started to rank in the top ten of all paperback sales 7 years after publication). Exploring these links between women and nature was also an element of ecofeminism, to which this chapter now turns.

Ecofeminisms Given the amount of environmental damage that dominant masculinist structures wreak, it does not take a huge leap of imagination to realize that achieving gender equality by “levelling up,” but without changing structures and practices, will simply add to those pressures. Travel is a good example: Men are more likely to use carbonintensive forms of transport, from flights (men routinely outnumber women on all measures of flying, from frequency to business travel, to passenger numbers) to cars (men are more likely to own – and drive – cars, and to drive them for longer each trip). (Data supporting this is provided by Statista (2017, 2019): on gendered car use and air travel.) If women were to adopt men’s travel patterns, primarily driven by work requirements, then carbon emissions would undoubtedly rise. If, however, men followed women’s travel habits (more likely to walk and travel by public transport), then there would be considerable carbon savings. But doing this requires us to consider how we organize society, work, and resulting gender roles. The emergence of ecofeminism from the 1970s considered this conundrum. Believing unequivocally in equality between genders, but aware of the ecological toll of “levelling up,” different ecofeminist philosophies sought to explore the links between persistent male dominance and environmental degradation, and to propose ways of redressing this. I examine two broad philosophical strands of ecofeminism which emerged in parallel before considering the contemporary ecofeminist landscape. The “essentialist” approach inverted the value of dualisms. Since the historically elevated male “qualities” of reason, mind, rationality, universality, and so on were considered to have led to a vastly degraded natural world and subjugation of women, not to mention other cultures through enslavement, colonialism, and other forms of exploitation, prioritizing qualities that had been associated with the female, such as nature, matter, emotion, the body, and reproduction, was proposed. This was seen as more likely to have a chance of achieving both gender equality and living harmoniously with nature, of which humans are an intrinsic part. “Essentialist” – or “cultural” – ecofeminism celebrated the ways in which women’s bodies were seen as demonstrating this connectivity – through menstruation, conception, childbirth, and breast feeding as well as through natural healing traditions often passed from

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mother to daughter (mostly lost in Western culture, but alive in Indigenous cultures elsewhere). It proposed that this connectivity guide our relationships with the otherthan-human world. Charlene Spretnak writes retrospectively about her “exhilarating discovery” of earlier societies that had “honoured” both the female and nature, to which she was drawn “like a magnet” (1990, p. 5). While this “essentialist” approach has been widely criticized as deterministic (a charge that feminists had long fought as limiting women), it needs to be seen in the context of a challenge to hypermasculinity, and as an attempt to offer an alternative vision toward a more socially and environmentally just future. Rianne Eisler is justifiably skeptical of equating all societies existing before recorded history with a beneficial relationship between humans and between human and other-than-human nature. However, she has noted that, prior to recorded history, a “sacred” or “spritual” relationship with the Earth acknowledged the integrity of culture, nature, spirituality, science, and technology. Reclaiming some of these nondualistic traditions, she argues, can be the basis for restructuring atomized and destructive society (1990, p. 34). Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein’s book, “Reweaving the World” published in 1990, is a useful compendium of cultural ecofeminist writers. It also presents the environmental activism of women, which is an important component of ecofeminism: both a philosophy and a call to action, where each aspect informs and, arguably, strengthens the other. It is notable that this cultural ecofeminist approach emerged primarily in North America and Australia, both countries in which Indigenous knowledge and practice had managed to survive Western colonialism and oppressive settler cultures. And while this twentieth-century cultural approach to ecofeminism can seem rather naïve, particularly in retrospect, the climate and other environmental movements are increasingly concerned with and interested in indigenous knowledge in fighting carbon-intensive developments. (See Robin Wall Kimmerer, who melds her Western expertise in environmental biology with her own traditions as a citizen of the Potowatomi Nation in North America.) At around the same time as the emergence of cultural ecofeminism, a social constructivist consideration of the relationship between masculinity and women/ nature was proposed in France by Francoise d’Eaubonne. It was d’Eaubonne who first used the term “ecofeminism” in 1974 to describe an approach to understanding how patriarchy is jointly responsible for ecological degradation and “women’s low status in society” (d’Eaubonne, 1974, 2022; Roth-Johnson, 2013, p. 54). d’Eaubonne also prefigured later work on masculinities by describing how those who do not fit the “alpha-male” profile are “assimilated to the female in market society” through the “condition of feminitude” (Roth-Johnson, 2013, p. 54). Where essentialist – or cultural – ecofeminists turned prevailing dualistic thinking on its head, social constructivist ecofeminists challenge dualisms altogether as a construct developed by the powerful to present a “norm” against which everything and everybody else is an “other.” As the prominent Australian ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood argued, in 1993, that seen as the (female, nature) “inferior” side of the binary (identified on the right hand column of Table 1) is backgrounded to and used to elevate the “superior” (male, intellectual) side. Through a social constructivist understanding, women and girls are born and conditioned into a society where they

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undertake the majority of unpaid (caring for children, domestic work, and subsistence farming) and low paid (for example, as carers of children, disabled people and elders, food preparers, and cleaners) reproductive roles. This, and their relative poverty compared to men, exposes them to environmental problems which are less controlled than in unionized workspaces. The inferiorization of women has led to pollution being insufficiently calculated on female bodies (and other, for example, child or male bodies which do not fit the “norm”), so that in many cases a safe chemical load for “other” bodies is simply not known. Women-headed households are more likely to be in poverty, and therefore more vulnerable to environmental pollution, as studies on childhood asthma demonstrate. Judy Sze has linked the environmental campaign of a group of African-American mothers with accusations of poor mothering and housekeeping leveled at them by the city government. Living on a major polluted road in New York City, they were worried about their children’s breathing problems and had approached City Hall with their concerns (Sze, 2004). Through something of a resurgence of intellectual, philosophical, and practical interest in ecofeminism since the turn of the millennium (there was a time when critiques of, particularly essentialist, ecofeminism threatened to derail the whole approach), ecofeminist philosophies have become broader and more nuanced. This encompasses the following: (i) strategic essentialism, which promotes using the perceived singularity of women as a political strategy (Danius et al., 1993; Moore, 2018); (ii) critiques of heteronormativity (Krupar, 2013), a focus on reproduction and motherhood (MacGregor, 2006), and the gender binary; (iii) inclusion of a focus on masculinities; and (iv) explorations of boundaries between species or through, as Stacey Alaimo puts it, “trans-corporeality” or “how we humans recognise our material interconnections with the wider environment” (2009, p. 26), and queer ecology (Gaard, 2014). Feminist political ecology, which acknowledges a debt to ecofeminism (Rocheleau et al., 1996), has been particularly attentive to colonialism, colonization, and extractivism and more explicitly focuses on the relationships between the global South and North. It also has reintroduced the body as a focus of interest in a nonessentialist way – as a site of “contestation in a series of. . .struggles” (Harcourt, 2009, p. 11). It is noticeable that protesters who see themselves as in a “condition of feminitude” sometimes use their bodies to protest environmental damage, often in examples of strategic essentialism, as will be explored below. So, while philosophies concerning the links between gender and environmental problems are, compared to environmental philosophies more broadly, relatively recent, they have become influential in how we think about our relationships with other-than-human nature, and with each other. Arguably one of the reasons for the upsurge in recent interest in ecofeminism(s) is the dramatic impact of climate-related problems which have pushed even conservative governments to declare climate (and other environmental) emergencies. The remainder of this chapter therefore uses the focus of climate impact and protests to more fully explain a philosophy which has been groundbreaking in challenging the very system that underpins our social and economic structures and which has created such inequalities and environmental damage that it is unable to dismantle within the system.

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Ecofeminist Philosophy As a Way of Understanding and Responding to Climate Change The Masters Tools The climate emergency has been created through disregard for nature, and the treatment of elements of nature as a “resource” for humans. And not all humans equally. Carolyn Merchant’s interpretation of how classical binary values gained momentum through mutually reinforcing mercantile capitalism, colonialism, and empire, and thereby the industrial revolution, is a good starting point for understanding the fundamental causes of destructive anthropogenic climate change (Merchant, 1980). Martin Hultman’s work on the relationship between masculinities and the environment has focused on climate change, drawing on work on different masculinities by, among others, Raewyn Connell. Connell had undertaken groundbreaking work in Australia where she had interviewed men active in the environmental movement. She found that their exposure to feminism either in countercultural, environmental action groups or through feminist family members was instrumental in forming their approach to nature (Connell, 2005). Hultman explains how the dominant masculinity – what Connell describes as “hegemonic,” and Hultman terms “industrial/breadwinner” – is implicated not only in dominance over other humans and other-than-human nature, but also in blocking any attempts to effectively address climate change. Climate skeptics (those who actively challenged first the existence of anthropogenic climate change and, when that became untenable, began arguing that it could be dealt with by technological fixes without requiring any changes to the ways in which we collectively organize our lives) are predominantly male. They are also notable for their lack of scientific background in climate science. Prominent climate change skeptics include politicians, and business leaders, particularly in the extractive industries, and manufacturing industries which promote fossil fuel use; they are all privileged by their wealth and position (Hultman, 2017). Hultman, and later in collaboration with Paul Pulé, explores other kinds of masculinities, including those which have been nurtured by environmental action and ecological awareness, which need to be used as alternative role models for young men if we are to avert environmental catastrophes. Hultman and Pulé have taken their analytical work a step further by producing practical guides for working with small groups of men to achieve more positive relationships with women and with other-than-human nature. The ecological masculinities discussed here need to be distinguished from mythopoetic masculinity which was used by (mostly white, working and middle class, middle aged, and heterosexual) men in the global North to restore a sense of masculine value, perceived to have been threatened by feminism. Such a strategy appropriates nature as a backdrop and a resource (Hultman & Pulé, 2018).

Challenging the Heteronormativity of Climate Change The role of industrial/breadwinner masculinity in creating climate change and the climate emergency extends to the range of social structures which this dominant

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masculinity demands. The family, for example, has long been thought to be instrumental in the subjugation of women and others who exhibit “deviant” forms of behavior (including women who exert independence or those identifying as “queer”). (Cameron Butler (2017) uses “queer” to refer to lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, questioning, two-spirit, intersex, and asexual people.) “The family” is often called in as a last resort by politicians seeking to undermine collective action. Margaret Thatcher famously declared that “There is no such thing [as society]! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.” (This quote is found in an interview with Margaret Thatcher by D. Keay (1987)). An example of many government interventions to reinforce the heteronormative family is Hungary’s 2019 financial incentives to families to have more children, including tax breaks and financial support for larger cars. This is also a direct appeal to nationalism in the face of a declining “native” population and fear of rising immigration, on which Hungary would otherwise need to rely (Walker, 2019). Feminist philosophy has a long tradition of explaining the oppressive aspects of the male dominated, heteronormative family, from Mary Wollstonecraft, through Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir to Francoise d’Eaubonne. Focusing on ecofeminism for clarity and brevity, it is notable that d’Eaubonne accused ecologists for contributing to “the oppressive conception of motherhood” and called for the abolition of the nuclear family unit in view of its oppression of women (RothJohnson, 2013). Sherilyn McGregor’s work on ecological feminism since the mid-2000s has questioned the compression of female experience into motherhood, and has focused on citizenship as a more comprehensive, inclusive, and effective line of enquiry, not only for women who are not mothers, but also recognizing that motherhood is but one of a number of roles which influence women who are mothers, and their environmental engagement, as the next section will illustrate. Nonetheless, it remains the case that, 50 years since the first ecofeminists were writing, once women become mothers they are less valued by a society in which standing is conferred by wealth and/or professional status. Routinely, once women have children, their career progress and earnings potential are diminished as workplaces continue to be structured to conform to heteronormative norms, with a culture of working long hours and a lack of flexibility to accommodate caring responsibilities. This has certainly been found to be the case in sectors prominent in producing carbon emissions (such as architecture, construction, energy, transportation, waste, and water) as well as in environmental professions and nongovernmental organizations (Buckingham, 2020a). Care and caring is devalued while it is unpaid (as in the family or household) and low paid (as in child care, or social care), and both sectors are heavily dominated by women. Women’s “good citizenship” is frequently conferred by what is deemed to be acceptable mothering skills, as the example of African-American women in New York City provided earlier has indicated. For these reasons, Ali Young has called for the recovery of the role of mothers in ecofeminism (Young, 2017). Further criticisms of heteronormativity can be found in queer ecology which questions the reliance on futurity – specifically the lives of children and grandchildren – as an incentive for action to address the climate emergency.

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Cameron Butler explains how the futurity argument fails to address current environmental inequalities and, in the case of climate change, how whole communities are, right now, experiencing loss of livelihoods, homes and habitats. Trans and queer ecologists also challenge how “sexual relations organise and influence both the material world of nature and our perceptions, experiences and constitutions of that world” (Mortimer-Sandilands & Erickson, 2010, p. 5). The preoccupation of concern about the impact on chemical pollutants on reproductive systems, particularly chemical pollution which is said to influence sex or the ability to reproduce, is also challenged on the basis that it reinforces prevailing hetero and reproductive normativity (di Chiro, 2008). The family can become a more oppressive institution when (as a household at least) the state is exhorting it to be the front line of action against climate change. Strategies to address climate change are often formulated for household action: recycling, replacing disposable materials with reusable ones, shopping for organic food, or products free of harmful chemicals, reducing water use, and so on. My own research on gender and waste is among others that have found that such exhortations are more likely to be taken up by women, whose days are already more burdened by household maintenance than men, even when they are in equivalent paid employment (Buckingham et al., 2021).

Strategically Playing with Stereotypes Stereotyping as a political act is the starting point for “strategic essentialism,” a term first used by Gayatri Spivak. While not granting essentialism any independent explanatory power, it can be used to dismantle oppressive structures or alleviate suffering (Danius et al., 1993). Niamh Moore provides a good example of how this works in her exploration of (mostly) women’s action against climate change-inducing deforestation in Clayoquat Sound, in British Columbia, Canada. The irony is that in using the image of the caring mother or grandmother in protecting trees from clear felling, these women were sometimes arrested and jailed, thereby disrupting family life, and the image of a “good mother.” Their political activism – named “The Raging Grannies” – therefore could lead to accusations of unmotherly behavior (Moore, 2018). Meanwhile, the “Fracking Nanas” have been protesting against exploratory fracking in Lancashire, England. While original members of the “Nanas” are older women (though not all with grandchildren, or children), the movement has expanded to include women of all ages, sexualities, and parental experience. Nonetheless, the Nanas parody the traditional grandmotherly or housewifely image of wearing aprons and headscarves, flourishing dusters and teapots from which they dispense hot drinks. It is a disarming image with which to challenge a technology which is carbon intensive, and destructive to the local environment. Stacy Alaimo, in writing about “trans-corporeality,” considers naked protest as paradoxically vulnerable and powerful where it occupies a boundary space between human bodies and their environments (2009, p. 23). While she is writing about performance, this can equally be applied to the political protests by radical women’s groups such as Femen.

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Queer ecology questions the separation of nature and culture and has adopted Haraway’s elision of natureculture signifying both that humans cannot see nature but through culture, and that culture affects all that is nature (which includes humans). Shiloh Krupar takes this a stage further, promoting a “transnatural ethics” which overrides the binaries dividing both nature and humans from waste. This challenges the hiding away of “waste” from what is publicly visible. She uses the example of a remediated disused nuclear waste site – Rocky Flats in Colorado – which, visibly at least, is disguised to appear to have reverted to a semblance of “purity,” but which obscures ongoing and unresolved issues of contamination of the land and people who live, or who have lived, there. Krupar’s analysis is also relevant to the case of Love Canal mentioned earlier where a contaminated chemical waste storage site was capped with concrete over which a school was later built. The point of referring to the Rocky Flats example here is Krupar’s use of how a dramatic protest by the queer performer “Nuclia Waste” materializes transnatural ethics through their “mutant drag” performance, illustrating the porosity between bodies and their environments. Nuclia Waste’s actions have been taken as a starting point for an analysis of an area of remediation of land used for a nuclear storage repository. The argument that Shiloh Krupar uses is that once contaminated, land will never be the same again, and that any attempt to hide previous use is dishonest (Krupar, 2013). Likewise, the human (and other-than-human) bodies contaminated by technological processes become permanently transformed, aligning with Haraway’s proposition that bodies are hybrid beings: cyborgs, in her influential 1991 essay – A Cyborg Manifesto. This has relevance for the plethora of technological fixes proposed to address the climate emergency, the impacts of which cannot be anticipated, as previously stressed with reference to Elizabeth Kolbert’s work.

Climate Change Reinforcing the Gender Hierarchy McGregor writes that the prevailing way in which climate change is being thought and written about continues to cast men as providers of solutions (particularly through security discourses), and women as either part of the problem (as in overpopulation discourses) or vulnerable victims (2017). The “solutions” in these scenarios are to “change” women to become less fertile or more “resilient.” This fails to recognize the forces and social pressures involved, against which women must become “resilient” or those which result in women (and surely men too) having many children. The decisions being made about governing carbon emissions and addressing the climate emergency are still, despite the Gender Action Programme (GAP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), heavily dominated by men. This commitment of the UNFCCC to gender equality and the launch of the GAP coincided with the appointment of Christiana Figueres, a feminist, as its first woman executive secretary. However, the numbers of women delegates to UNFCCC meetings has fluctuated – with gains in numbers of women delegates in one year not necessarily being sustained in following years. (Buckingham, 2020b). And, as the earlier discussion on the limitations of liberal

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feminism and measuring progress of gender equality simply by numbers of women has indicated, without systemic change it is unsurprising that the carbon emissions trajectory has not been significantly altered. Only an ecofeminism-related argument can help us to understand this misalignment.

Ecofeminist Praxis: Philosophy into Action This chapter has already drawn attention to the mutually constructive relationship between philosophy and theory, and action. Leading activists acknowledge ecofeminism and other environmental feminisms on their practice, and environmental feminists who have been critical of ecofeminism have also bemoaned the influence of this philosophy on international decision-making (Leach, 2007), though this influence is probably over rated. Nevertheless, there are committed feminists who are also environmentalists (if not ecofeminists) who have and have had influential positions on the world stage. As well as Christiana Figueres, there is Mary Robinson (former President of Ireland and global diplomat who set up her eponymous foundation to support women to address climate change); Anne Hildago (Mayor of Paris and when chair of the C40 Cities network set up a mentoring program for young women); and Jacinda Ardern who has acknowledged Marilyn Waring as a key influence, and under whom New Zealand is the first country to introduce a law requiring banks, insurers, and investment managers to report the impacts of climate change on their business. Meanwhile, five of the nine European cities identified by the digital gateway “Goodnet” as “making great strides to becoming car free” were, at the time of writing, run by women mayors (Amsterdam, Barcelona, Madrid, Oslo, and Paris). Feminist environmental groups such as WEN in the UK, and WECAN International (The Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network) and WEDO, both headquartered in the USA and working with groups in the global South, have integrated a gender perspective into climate change. But myriad day-to-day environmental struggles, such as those highlighted in this chapter, are powered by women’s energy and work and are often motivated, even if not explicitly, by ecofeminist concerns that environmental impacts on women and children’s bodies are not taken seriously, that women’s voices are silenced. They can also see that women – other than those promoted under “femocracies” (that is, structures of power in which women achieve positions of power but do not use this to enhance the political status of women generally, Mama, 1995) – lack position as decision makers. As well as (sometimes) being inspired by ecofeminist philosophies, researchers and writers from environmental feminist perspectives draw on these protests and actions to develop theories further.

Conclusion It is dangerous to compartmentalize climate change as a single environmental phenomenon, issue, or problem. This, in itself, would fall into the trap of following a line of “Enlightenment” thinking. Environmental problems are interwoven in

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complex ways, and inextricably with their social context. Declaring a climate emergency, while strategically useful (hopefully) for galvanizing action, reinforces that climate can be seen as distinct from and managed by human activity, systems and structures. Such an approach can deflect from the fact that we face a human crisis of greed, fear, possessiveness, and a need for control which generates climate, biodiversity, water, and other crises, not to mention the exploitation of the majority of human beings by a minority. Ecofeminism and other associated philosophies most clearly illuminate this dilemma and also identify that the mechanisms currently available to address the human crisis are, themselves, governed by a “dominator” society which has brought us to the pass we now face. Ecofeminism and other gendered analyses of power explain how this dominator society works, what we need to do to change this, while offering a platform for action for this change to be achieved.

Cross-References ▶ Climate Change and Distributive Justice ▶ Climate Change and Environmental Justice ▶ Climate Change and Intergenerational Justice

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Eisler, R. (1990). The Gaia tradition and the partnership future: An ecofeminist manifesto. In I. Diamond & G. F. Orenstein (Eds.), Reweaving the world. The emergence of ecofeminism. Sierra Club Books. European Union. (2020). Gender, healthy oceans, seas, coastal and inland and waters. . . and their gender implications. https://genderaction.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/HE_Mission_ Oceansgender.pdf. Accessed 9 Apr 2023. Gaard, G. (2014). Towards new eco masculinities, eco genders, and eco sexualities. In C. J. Adams & L. Gruen (Eds.), Ecofeminism. Feminist intersections with other animals and the Earth. Bloomsbury Academic. Gendered Innovations. (2023). Science case studies demonstrate methods of sex and gender analysis. http://genderedinnovations.stanford.edu/case-studies-science.html. Accessed 12 Apr 2023. Gibbs, L. (1998). Love Canal. The story continues. New Society Press. Giuffrida, A., Busby, M. (2018). Physics was built by men: Cern suspends scientist over remarks. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/oct/01/physics-was-built-by-men-cern-sci entist-alessandro-strumia-remark-sparks-fury. Accessed 25 Jan 2023. Accessed 12 Apr 2023. Haraway, D. (1991). Simians, cyborgs and women. Free Association Books. Harcourt, W. (2009). Body politics in development: Critical debates in gender and development. Zed Books. Harding, S. (Ed.). (2003). The feminist standpoint theory reader: Intellectual and political control. Routledge. Held, V. (2006). The ethics of care. Personal, political and global. Oxford University Press. Hultman, M. (2017). Natures of masculinities: Conceptualising industrial, ecomodern and ecological masculinities. In S. Buckingham & V. Le Masson (Eds.), Understanding climate change through gender relations (pp. 87–103). Routledge. Hultman, M., & Pulé, P. (2018). Ecological masculinities. Theoretical foundations and practical guidance. Routledge. James, S. (2012). Sex, race and class. The perspective of winning. A selection of winning 1952–2011. PM Press. Keller, E. F. (1982). Feminism and science. In E. F. Keller & H. E. Lomgino (Eds.), 1996 Feminism and science (pp. 28–40). Oxford University Press. Keay, D. (1987). Interview with Margaret Thatcher. Woman’s Own. Margaret Thatcher Foundation. https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689. Accessed 25 Jan 2023. Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding Sweetgrass. Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants. Milkweed Editions. Kolbert, E. (2020). Under a white sky. Bodley Head. Krupar, S. R. (2013). Hot spotter’s report. Military fables of toxic waste. University of Minnesota Press. Leach, M. (2007). Earth mother myths and other ecofeminist fables: How a strategic notion rose and fell. Development and Change, 38(1), 67–85. Lear, L. (1999). Afterword to Rachel Carson (2000) Silent Spring Harmondsworth (pp. 258–264). Penguin Modern Classics. Lorde, A. (2018). The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. Penguin. MacGregor, S. (2006). Beyond mothering earth. Ecological citizenship and the politics of care. University of British Columbia Press. MacGregor, S. (Ed.). (2017). Routledge handbook on gender and environment. Routledge. Mama, A. (1995). Feminism or femocracy? State Feminism and Democratisation in Nigeria Africa Development/Afrique et Développement, 20(1), 37–58. Merchant, C. (1980). The death of nature. Routledge. Merchant, C. (1995). Earthcare. Women and the environment. Routledge. Moore, N. (2018). Refiguring motherhood and maternalism in ecofeminism. In T. Marsden (Ed.), The Sage handbook of nature. Sage. Mortimer-Sandilands, C., & Erickson, B. (Eds.). (2010). Queer ecologies: Sex, nature, politics, desire. Indiana University Press.

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Plumwood, V. (1993). Feminism and the mastery of nature. Routledge. Rocheleau, D., Thomas-Slayter, B., & Wangari, E. (1996). Feminist political ecology, global issues and local experiences. Routledge. Roth-Johnson, D. (2013). Back to the future: Francoise d’Eaubonne, ecofeminism and ecological crisis. The International Journal of Literary Humanities, 10(3), 51–61. Shattuck, S., Cheney, I. (2021). Picture a scientist an uprising production film. https://www. pictureascientist.com/. Accessed 25 Jan 2023. Smith, D. (1974). Women’s perspective as a radical critique of sociology. In E. F. Keller & H. E. Longino (Eds.), 1996 Feminism and science. Oxford University Press. Spretnak, C. (1990). Ecofeminism: Our roots and flowering. In I. Diamond & G. F. Orenstein (Eds.), Reweaving the world. The emergence of ecofeminism. Sierra Club Books. Statista (2017) Motor vehicle ownership in the United Kingdom (UK) by gender Statista. https:// www.statista.com/statistics/682605/consumers-who-own-a-motor-vehicle-in-the-united-king dom-uk-by-gender/. Accessed 25 January 2023 Statista (2019) Gender distribution of air passengers in the UK by airport, https://www.statista.com/ statistics/304677/gender-distribution-of-passengers-by-airport-uk/ Accessed 25 January 2023 Sze, J. (2004). Gender, asthma politics, and urban environmental justice activism. In R. Stein (Ed.), New perspectives on environmental justice. Gender, sexuality, and activism (pp. 177–190). Rutgers University Press. Walker, S. (2019). Viktor Orban: no tax for Hungarian women with four or more children. The Guardian 10 February 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/10/viktor-orban-notax-for-hungarian-women-with-four-or-more-children Accessed 25 January 2023 Waring, M. (1988). Counting for nothing. What men value and what women are worth. Allen and Unwin New Zealand. Young, I. M. (1990). Throwing like a girl and other essays in feminist philosophy and social theory. University of Indiana Press. Young, A. (2017). Latest scientific discovery drops bombshell – Mother nature is biologically male – Ruminations on the value of care as sustainable organizational practice gender. Work and Organization, 25(3), 294–308.

Climate Change and Human Rights Francesca Pongiglione

Contents Human Rights, the Environment, and Climate Change: A Brief History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Climate Change as a Threat to Human Rights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Human Rights Approach to Climate Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Limits of the Human Rights Approach and Reasons for Skepticism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Responses to Skepticism and Final Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Since 2007, climate change has officially been considered a threat to the enjoyment of human rights. Its impacts have been observed practically everywhere in the world in the last decades and are expected to grow in both frequency and intensity, bringing about grave harms to the environment. Human beings will be severely affected and many fundamental rights jeopardized. No human right to a safe environment has been articulated to date, but many scholars are convinced such a right would prove an effective instrument to address the human dimension of climate change. Others, however, maintain that human rights and environmental norms inhabit separate and scarcely reconcilable bodies of law. Furthermore, since both mitigation and adaptation measures can jeopardize rights as well as safeguard them, they claim that climate action cannot be identified with human rights protection. This chapter addresses both advantages and side effects of adopting a human rights framework for climate change. It concludes that most objections to the adoption of this framework can be addressed and that an international acknowledgment of a human right to a healthy, safe, and clean environment would probably be beneficial. F. Pongiglione (*) Faculty of Philosophy, University Vita-Salute San Raffaele, Milano, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_133

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Keywords

Climate change · Human rights law · Enforcement · Implementation · Duty-bearers

Human Rights, the Environment, and Climate Change: A Brief History The idea that human beings have specific rights merely insofar as they are human has its roots in the modern age with the theory of natural rights, whose most popular representative is John Locke. Natural rights theoretically belonged to every individual, yet in Locke’s time, women, slaves, ethnic and religious minorities, and members of the working class were included barely or not at all. The concept and international recognition of human rights is much more recent, tracing back to December 10th, 1948, when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was released by the General Assembly of the United Nations after a 2-year writing process that involved representatives of many countries from around the world (for a full history of the UDHR’s drafting process, see Morsink, 1999). The UDHR contains 30 articles that concern basic civic and political freedoms, such as the rights not to be tortured, abused, arbitrarily arrested, or enslaved; freedom of thought, speech, and religion; and the rights to vote in free elections and to participate in political and cultural life. Legal, social, and economic rights are also included, such as the right to a just process, the rights to minimum living standards, protection for those in vulnerable categories (children and people who are old, sick, or unemployed), and the right to decent working conditions (including a fair salary and holidays). The UDHR does not mention the environment. The closest reference to it can be located in the first clause of article 25, which affirms that “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, [and] housing.” Adverse environmental conditions, obviously enough, can jeopardize human rights. It should not, however, come as a surprise that the environment, and climate change as an environmental issue, is not mentioned in the UDHR, especially if one considers that: (i) The UDHR itself was born in the aftermath of the Second World War, with the explicit aim of preventing something similar from happening in the future; (ii) No extra rights have been added to the UDHR over the years; (iii) Climate change was not recognized as a potential threat at the time, nor was it acknowledged as such for many years afterward. The role of the environment in the full enjoyment of human rights was recognized in the early seventies (for a complete history of this recognition, see Burger et al., 2015). In 1972, in Stockholm, the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment issued a Declaration that had as its objective “the preservation and enhancement of the human environment.” Subsequent binding human rights-based international treaties acknowledged the importance of the environment only marginally. The 1976 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights mentions, in article 12, “the improvement of all aspects of environmental and

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industrial hygiene” as one of the conditions for enjoying physical and mental health. A similar statement is made in the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, which considers the “dangers and risks of environmental pollution” as threats to the enjoyment of “the highest attainable standards of health.” Climate change was not officially considered as a threat to the enjoyment of human rights until 2007, with the Male’ Declaration on the Human Dimension of Global Climate Change, the first intergovernmental statement that explicitly made this point. Four assessment reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had been published at the time, and the possible risks raised by climate change were clear enough. Following the Male’ Declaration, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) released a report in 2009 on the relationship between climate change and human rights. In this document, various implications of climate change for human rights are outlined, mentioning not only the specific rights jeopardized but also the groups that are more at risk (OHCHR A/HRC/10/61, pp. 8–18). States are emphatically said to be obligated to take steps to protect human rights from the harmful effects of climate change. Yet, and crucially, the report concludes that “qualifying the effects of climate change as human rights violations poses a series of difficulties. First, it is virtually impossible to disentangle the complex causal relationships linking historical greenhouse gas emissions of a particular country with a specific climate change-related effect [. . .]. Second, global warming is often one of several contributing factors to climate change-related effects, such as hurricanes, environmental degradation and water stress. [. . .] Third, adverse effects of global warming are often projections about future impacts, whereas human rights violations are normally established after the harm has occurred” (OHCHR A/HRC/10/61, p. 23). This formulation of the relationship between human rights and climate change reflected the position of some developed countries, such as the United States and Canada, which insisted that no relationship existed, as a legal matter, between climate change and human rights. Those two issues, they claimed, inhabited separate bodies of law that were not formally connected. Most developed countries, Limon reports, strongly maintained that human rights are a national issue, which individual states accordingly have duties to protect and promote within their borders. Developing countries, on the other hand, claimed that under human rights law, developed countries, being primarily responsible for climate change, bore responsibility for human rights violations that occurred beyond their national borders. They thus argued in favor of extraterritorial human rights obligations in the face of climate change (Limon, 2018, pp. 202–204). Since 2009, several OHCHR resolutions on human rights and climate change have followed, almost one per year. The most recent one (at the time of the drafting of this chapter) is Resolution A/HRC/RES/44/7, released in July 2020. No right to a healthy, safe, and clean environment is declared: the document rather affirms “human rights obligations relating to the enjoyment of a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment” (A/HRC/RES/44/7, pp. 4–5, my emphasis), thus confirming the wording already adopted since 2011 in resolution 16/11 (for a detailed analysis of the wording adopted and its possible implications, see Limon, 2018, p. 213).

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Keeping in mind the current achievements of the United Nations, we will devote the pages that follow to some issues currently at the core of the philosophical debate on climate change and human rights, especially issues concerning the very viability of framing the harmful effects of climate change in terms of human rights violation or deprivation, and consequently concerning climate action as a way to protect human rights. There are some advantages to using the language of human rights: such language has proved extremely useful for expressing judgments that appeal, not to unspecified or arguably arbitrary moral principles, but to the shared standards set by the UDHR (Knox, 2014; Chomsky, 2005; Tasioulas, 2003). The adoption of a human rights perspective would, in other words, lend more strength to arguments for the need to mitigate climate change. By emphasizing the fact that people hold a right to enjoy a safe environment and therefore to be protected from harmful climate change, we would provide a solidly documented moral consensus grounding the duty to cut emissions. However, possible adverse side effects of the adoption of this perspective have been observed as well. We can agree that climate change jeopardizes human rights and yet disagree on the value of appealing to human rights protection to promote climate action, both in the form of adaptation and of mitigation. This chapter will be structured as follows. In section “Climate Change as a Threat to Human Rights,” recent data on climate change impacts will be analyzed, with consideration of current impacts and future projections according to expected temperature increase. The effects of climate change on the enjoyment of specific human rights will be outlined. Section “A Human Rights Approach to Climate Change” will explore the advantages arising from the adoption of a human rights perspective on climate change, which ultimately includes the adoption of a human right to a healthy, safe, and clean environment. Proponents of this perspective emphasize the fact that this approach is centered only on the human dimension of climate change as, unlike other approaches, it gives primary importance to human needs and human suffering. In section “Limits of the Human Rights Approach and Reasons for Skepticism,” the principal objections to the adoption of the human rights framework will be addressed. In most cases, skepticism is grounded in doubts about the actual effectiveness of this approach, in the light mainly of legal considerations that underline the distinct (and apparently scarcely reconcilable) functioning of human rights law and environmental norms. Problems arise as well from the observation that climate action, as well as climate change, can jeopardize human rights. Section “Responses to Skepticism and Final Considerations” will draw some conclusions regarding the opportunity to adopt a human rights framework for climate change, considering in addition how successfully the objections raised can be addressed.

Climate Change as a Threat to Human Rights In the 2010 Cancun Conference of the Parties, the global community agreed to try to limit the temperature increase to +2
C above preindustrial levels, while also trying to reach the more ambitious target of an increase of no more than +1.5
C

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(UNFCCC/CP/2010/7/Add. 1, p. 3). The Kyoto Protocol, however, was not an effective instrument for reaching that goal. The 2015 Paris Agreement represented a turning point in climate negotiations by adopting a bottom-up approach to emission reductions based on individual pledges (called “Nationally Determined Contributions,” or NDCs). If greenhouse gas emissions are reduced according to what was pledged in Paris, however, the UNFCCC estimates that global mean temperatures will rise by +2.7
C by the end of the century. A significantly stronger effort would be required to stay below a þ 2
C increase—let alone to limit the temperature rise to +1.5
C (Falkner, 2016, p. 1115). Even assuming that the most ambitious reduction target is reached, climate change is projected to have a significant impact on both wildlife and human environments within the current century. Effects of climate change have been observed, in the last decades, practically everywhere in the world. Heat waves, extreme weather events, droughts, floods, and cyclones have increased in frequency and intensity and are expected to become even more frequent, intense, and widespread in the next 30 years (IPCC, 2014a, pp. 6–10). The severity with which these phenomena will strike naturally depends on the actual increase in temperatures, but even if greenhouse gas emissions were stopped now, the Earth would still experience significant impacts (IPCC, 2014a, p. 16). IPCC projections for the current century reveal an alarming situation. In most subtropical regions that already face problems of water availability, freshwater resources will be further reduced. This reduction is due to a decrease in rainfall and consequent increase in droughts; to a decrease in snowpack, resulting in diminished snowmelt to supply rivers and streams; to higher temperatures, causing an increase in water evaporation; and to sea level rise, which causes salinization of freshwater resources. Sea level rise will cause submerging, flooding, and erosion of coastal and low-lying areas, with consequent degradation of land, soils, and ecosystems (Burger et al., 2015, p. 3; IPCC, 2014b, p. 232). Both terrestrial and marine ecosystems will endure severe changes. Many plant and animal species have altered their behavior in response to current climate changes, and many others, unable to adapt, will risk extinction (IPCC, 2014b, p. 275). IPCC’s estimates also predict a further shift in the distribution of species as a result of ocean warming. This will lead to a decrease in species at tropical latitudes and a consequent lowering of marine productivity in tropical areas (IPCC, 2014b, p. 414). Each of these expected impacts will directly affect human beings. Climate change will undermine food security; exacerbate already existing health problems; compromise common human activities (such as growing food); and reduce water availability and supply. The competition for water among agriculture, ecosystems, settlements, industry, and energy production will be intensified. The continuing sea-level rise will not only cause damage to ecosystems and biodiversity but also generate a loss of livelihood and generally affect human settlements (IPCC, 2014a, pp. 14–15). Several human rights will be compromised even in the best-case scenario of a þ 1.5
C to +2
C increase in global mean temperature—and to a much greater extent if the temperature rises by more, up to +2.7
C. Risks to health and well-being

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anticipated by the IPCC experts are due to the following expected events: increase in wildfires; drought-related water and food shortages; river and coastal urban floods; reduced catch potential in fisheries (at low latitudes); mass coral bleaching and mortality; and reduced crop productivity (IPCC, 2014a, p. 14). The right to life and to security of person (art. 3) and to an adequate standard of living, which includes food (art. 25), will be clearly jeopardized. The right to life will also be put at risk by the expected increase in heat-related mortality and in vector- and waterborne diseases. Coastal inundation, especially in low-lying coastal areas, will cause losses to habitat, ecosystems, and infrastructure (IPCC, 2014a, p. 14). The right to housing will be clearly affected (art. 25), together with property rights (art. 17), as people will endure the loss of their home and local environment. In many areas of the world, entire populations will be forced to relocate, thus losing not only their housing and land but also their jobs—which can potentially affect rights such as the right to free choice of employment and the right to just and favorable conditions of work (art. 23). Migration may also provoke the loss of people’s cultural roots, thus affecting cultural rights such as the right to participate in the cultural life of the community (art. 27). Local cultures indeed risk severe impoverishment by forced migration, even supposing that migration happens within the borders of their original country. If, in contrast, people are forced into international migration, individuals will lose all human rights connected to citizenship: political rights, such as the right to take part in the government and to vote (art. 21), and welfare rights, such as the rights to education (art. 26), medical care (art. 25), social security (art. 22), and security in the event of unemployment, motherhood, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age, or other lack of livelihood (art. 25). Both internal and international migrations have the potential to provoke conflicts between tribes or ethnic groups for space or resources or simply because of the forced cohabitation of groups with different traditions and cultures. Conflicts, needless to say, gravely endanger the enjoyment of human rights. (For a further analysis of climate change impacts on human rights, see also Caney, 2009, pp. 76–83 (Caney’s analysis, though, is based on older data and reports than the present one). A more recent table that lists climate-induced risks to human rights can be found in Robinson & Shine, 2018, p. 565.) To be sure, the magnitude of climate change impacts in a given area depends largely on its vulnerability, which is established in part by considering the population’s ability to adapt to those impacts. This adaptability, in turn, depends largely on available economic resources. According to World Bank data, in 2017, 9.2% of the world’s population, amounting to 689 million people, lived below the poverty line (on $1.90 a day). However, poverty is unevenly distributed: 40.2% of sub-Saharan Africans live below the poverty line, as do 15.2% of South Asians, but only 1.1% of Europeans (Data was drawn from the following interactive webpage: https://povertydata.worldbank.org/poverty/home/). Unfortunately, sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia are located in those tropical and subtropical regions that, as we have seen above, will be the most strongly affected by climate change impacts. Thus, human rights will not be harmed by climate change to the same extent everywhere: not only are the richer countries less affected geographically, but their

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wealth also allows for more resilience to climate change impacts. Poorer countries, on the other hand, will be further disadvantaged (IPCC, 2014, p. 13). Countries lacking economic resources are standardly less able to fulfill certain human rights, especially socio-economic ones. As observed by Humphreys, this issue has motivated the notion of “progressive realization” of rights. Under the constraints currently imposed by climate change, though, these same rights will instead progressively deteriorate (Humphreys, 2009, pp. 5–6), both from lack of resources and because of the increased vulnerability of the latitudes at which those regions are located. Poorer countries, as well as poorer segments of populations around the world, will be severely harmed by climate change. The above-mentioned extreme weather events, such as cyclones and floods, will periodically strike almost all latitudes, destroying crops, houses, and properties. Only the better-offs will be sufficiently resilient, leaving the worst-offs to endure not only the loss of their livelihoods but also the price increases for food and other critical commodities that often follow such events (IPCC, 2014b, p. 817). In a 2008 interview, the current Minister of Foreign Affairs for the Maldives, Abdulla Shahid, declared that one of the problems with climate change is that many people continue to see it as a scientific problem measured in degrees centigrade, thus failing to see it for the “human problem with human consequences” that it is (Shahid, 2008, p. 17). Leaving climate change unabated would be, in Shahid’s words, “a systematic violation of the human rights of the world’s poor and the rights of future generations, as well as a step back from universal values” (ibid., p. 18).

A Human Rights Approach to Climate Change The arguments presented above seem to indicate quite clearly that climate change is also, and perhaps primarily, a human rights problem: it will jeopardize human rights in many places of the world, and it will make conditions a lot worse in countries where human rights are already at risk. However, the human rights approach is not generally adopted in climate policy, as the discussion is normally framed in costbenefit terms (Humphreys, 2009, p. 15) that tend to suggest market-based solutions (Adelman, 2009, p. 159). This framing, though, has some flaws. Caney has observed how cost-benefit analysis, by virtue of its aggregative nature, considers only the net utility and wealth of current and future generations. This results in neglecting the harms suffered by the most vulnerable and disadvantaged if such harms are outweighed by the utility of others. This can indeed happen, since economic growth, despite its environmental impact, brings undeniable advantages, and since a warmer climate brings benefits to some regions (Caney, 2009, pp. 84–85). A human rights perspective, in contrast, by establishing a moral threshold below which no individual should fall, does not risk ignoring the harms that are imposed upon the most vulnerable (p. 85). Caney enumerates further advantages of adopting a human rights approach to climate change. First, it facilitates a more comprehensive evaluation of the costs of

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mitigation. Many agents, among them governments, question the expediency of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, emphasizing the costs of doing so. However, if we focus on the fact that human rights are violated by the impacts of climate change, the argument that mitigation is costly loses much of its strength. Suppose, suggests Caney, that someone builds a private business (such as a restaurant) with many side effects harmful to the local community—its fumes pollute the air, its waste leaks into the neighborhood water supply. The community accordingly requests that the owner of the business stop engaging in such rights-violating behavior. The owner replies that this would be costly. Would we consider this argument valid? Surely not. When rights are violated, insisting on the costs of desisting in the rights-violating activity is not a powerful argument. The fact that cutting emissions is costly does not tell against it (p. 87). A human rights approach and the acknowledgment of a human right to a safe environment would make this argument much stronger. Secondly, the adoption of a human rights approach entails the opportunity to revise the dualistic framework of mitigation and adaptation in response to climate change. Standardly, actors are invited to mitigate climate change by reducing their emissions and to adapt to climate change impacts by adjusting to them. However, as observed by Caney, mitigation can fail to reach its objectives, and adaptation can be insufficient for various reasons, including lack of economic resources. In this scenario, fundamental human rights are violated. Introducing the human rights perspective allows compensation to be included as a third response to climate change, to be adopted when both mitigation and adaptation fail. Those whose rights are violated by climate change impacts would thus be entitled to compensation (p. 88). It is worth observing that the possibility of awarding compensation for human rights violations does not imply that such compensation will counterbalance the harm. In fact, another positive implication of the human rights approach is that it rules out the assumption of comparability between harms and benefits (p. 89). Human rights are defined as those fundamental rights that ought not to be violated no matter the benefits that may be drawn from such violation (Nagel, 2002, p. 32). Thus, a human rights approach would allow the rejection of strategies that permit human rights violations provided that compensation is given. Robinson has further observed that adopting a human rights framework when addressing climate change has the benefit of reminding us that “climate change is about suffering” (Robinson, 2009, p. xviii). Incorporating human rights constraints into climate policy and specifically acknowledging the existence of a human right to a healthy, safe, and clean environment would ensure that climate action does not achieve its goals at the expense of the most vulnerable (ibid.; see also Robinson & Shine, 2018, p. 564). As a final and fundamental consideration, Robinson points out how closely climate change mitigation is bound up with the realization of the larger goal of addressing poverty. Climate justice will be achieved not through technology alone, but through a wider range of political and social innovations that take steps toward a more equal world, where human beings and their needs are at the center of any discourse and action (Robinson, 2009, p. xx). A truly sustainable society cannot be built if individuals and their fundamental rights are not its primary concern.

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Knox has remarked that even among ethical approaches to climate change, the human rights approach is the only one that considers climate change impacts on individuals rather than on humans in the aggregate: other approaches, in fact, tend to consider the state dimension when deciding how to distribute the burdens of mitigation (Knox, 2014, p. 23). Furthermore, Knox observes, the human rights framework is the most widely endorsed ethical system in the world (p. 24) and the only one that is implemented through legal instruments. This allows for both the institutional application of human rights norms to a wide range of issues and the possibility of drawing on a detailed set of norms with an already established method of enforcement (p. 26). This last claim assumes that international legal recognition of a human right to a healthy environment would have a positive impact on its promotion and fulfillment. Leaving aside the theoretical debate over whether the legal recognition of rights should be considered a constitutive and necessary component of rights themselves (see for example Geuss, 2001; O’Neill, 2005, and for an opposing view, Tasioulas, 2003; Sen, 2012), there are some apparent advantages arising from the legal enforceability of rights. As observed by Rodríguez-Garavito, in the specific case of the right to a healthy environment, a legal instrument would give “greater certainty, precision, and coercive power” to those seeking its protection (Rodríguez-Garavito, 2018, p. 163). If it is true that many national constitutions and domestic legislations explicitly acknowledge this right, a global recognition of it “would provide additional procedural and substantive grounding for national and international litigation” (ibid.). Political benefits would follow as well, as the human rights framework could become a powerful mobilizing instrument, offering not only a shared language that would help environmental advocates coordinate their efforts with those harmed by violations, but also an existing social justice perspective and enforcement infrastructure capable of supporting those efforts (pp. 164–165). Furthermore, to date, in the absence of a specific right to a safe environment, victims of climate change can hardly be protected by international law: they can appeal to the right to health, for example, but this requires them to show a causal connection between climate change and violation of that right, which is not easy to establish with certainty; moreover, there is a risk that by the time the connection is established, it will be too late for them. If, however, a stand-alone right to a safe environment were acknowledged, people could request intervention before the situation became irreversible. This, according to Atapattu, is perhaps the greatest advantage of the institution of a human right to a healthy and safe environment (Atapattu, 2018, pp. 265–266).

Limits of the Human Rights Approach and Reasons for Skepticism Despite the abovementioned advantages of a human rights perspective on climate change, this approach is not generally adopted. Many scholars have in fact pointed to several problems that make it unappealing and that elicit skepticism about its viability. We can group arguments against the adoption of a human rights framework

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for climate change into two broad categories: the applicability of human rights law to climate change and the violations of human rights that can arise from climate action itself. Contributing to the first group of arguments, scholars have identified both general and specific aspects of human rights law that make it seem ill-suited to address climate change. The general concern is that climate change has uncovered a much deeper global justice problem, which human rights law is not equipped to treat (Humphreys, 2009, p. 64). Climate change is a problem grounded mainly in the current economic system, and the neutrality of human rights law vis-à-vis economics could significantly limit its effectiveness for addressing climate change (Hammonds, 2020, p. 346). What is needed to curb climate change is a revision of our model of development, keeping in mind that many crucial development actors such as international financial institutions, multilateral development banks, and private foreign investors systematically refuse to consider human rights law as imposing bounds on their activities (Humphreys, 2009, pp. 10–11). Human rights law, Robinson echoes, has so far not been able to prevent private actors from taking advantage of the current system by producing carbon-intensive goods in developing countries, where rules are less strict, and exporting them to developed countries (Robinson, 2009, p. xix). The private sector has indeed adopted environmental and labor rights standards that are now well established; those standards, though, are voluntary, and this by default makes them weaker (Roht-Arriaza, 2010, pp. 608–609). The second problem with applying human rights law to climate change concerns implementation and enforcement. Human rights are mainly a national affair; despite their universalist aspirations, they are fulfilled mostly in the domestic dimension. Climate change mitigation, in contrast, is unquestionably an international issue (Humphreys, 2009, p. 13). Thus, a bridge between the national and international context needs to be built: without an operational link between climate change and the international human rights regime, it is not clear who could monitor and enforce state compliance (Roht-Arriaza, 2010, p. 611). Furthermore, the majority of rights at risk from climate change are socio-economic rights (see above, section “Climate Change as a Threat to Human Rights”). But socio-economic rights are by their very nature the most difficult to implement, as they strongly depend on (national) economic resources, while at the same time international legislation suffers from the weakest methods of enforcement (Humphreys, 2009, p. 4). This last point forces us to consider perhaps the greatest challenge at stake: the attribution of responsibilities. Two meanings of responsibility are involved here— outcome responsibility and remedial responsibility, following the distinction made by Miller (2007). In the first meaning of the term, agents are responsible for the outcome they produce through their actions and decisions; herein lies the difference from mere causal responsibility, where human agency is not necessarily involved (Miller, 2007, pp. 86–90). Remedial responsibility, meanwhile, amounts to the duty to aid those who are “unjustifiably deprived in some ways,” where it is not morally acceptable to leave people in that condition (p. 98). In such cases, responsibilities need to be allocated; otherwise, the risk is that no one will intervene (p. 100). What we need, therefore, is criteria for assigning remedial responsibility. Sometimes, there

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are identifiable and significant connections between certain agents and the state of need—for example, when some agents bear causal, moral, or outcome responsibility for the state of need. These connections can establish a strong basis for remedial responsibility. Sometimes, however, such connections are either missing or too loose to be appealed to. In that case, other principles for assigning remedial responsibility must be adopted. In the climate change context, the identification of both outcome and remedial responsibility is problematic. As concerns the former, Atapattu observes that even if it is well known which countries are the most responsible for current climate change, it is impossible to apply state responsibility principles, as they require identifying a “perpetrator” whose activities are clearly linked to the damages produced (Atapattu, 2018, p. 257). And even assuming that a perpetrator is clearly identified, human rights violations due to climate change occur in most cases outside the responsible state’s jurisdiction, which further complicates accountability (Rodríguez-Garavito, 2018, p. 166). Sunstein and Posner have further argued that, besides the perpetrator identification issue, the main challenge would be the acknowledgment of a causal link, as climate change in most cases increases the likelihood of certain weather events, which are however due to multiple factors of which knowledge is scarce (Sunstein & Posner, 2008, p. 1598). The issue is further complicated by the multiplicity of types of actors involved and the diversity within each category: governments, private actors, and corporations, to mention just a few. Even if we could identify, among them, those who are outcome responsible for climate change, it would be hard to establish whether they would all qualify as duty-bearers when it comes to remedial responsibility (Rodríguez-Garavito, 2018, p. 166). Troubles assigning outcome responsibility have implications for the attribution of remedial responsibility. The underlying problem of the attribution of remedial responsibility is the lack of an agreement on the nature of the obligations of public and private actors to address the human rights implications of climate change. This has obvious repercussions for the identification of duty-bearers. Even if we suppose that we find strong connections between agents and climate harms, the possibility of applying corrective justice in this context ought not to be taken for granted. Caney has argued that the adoption of a human rights approach to climate change would allow the addition of compensation as a third instrument to respond to climate change beyond mitigation and adaptation (cf. supra, section “A Human Rights Approach to Climate Change”). Developed countries such as the United States are, historically, among the greater contributors to existing emissions. Does this mean they owe compensation to countries that are experiencing human rights violations because of climate change? The application of corrective justice principles to climate-induced human rights violations has indeed been questioned. Sunstein and Posner list multiple reasons for rejecting this approach, which can be summarized in the claim that it would force innocent people to pay other people who are not victims (Sunstein & Posner, 2008, p. 1593). More specifically, the two scholars claim that: i. Current climate change is the result of the actions of people who are, for the most part, dead now; ii. Many people in developed countries are currently adopting proenvironmental behaviors;

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iii. Not all Americans necessarily benefit from their ancestors’ emissions-causing actions, nor can we claim that they would have inherited less if their ancestors had emitted less; iv. For some countries, climate change has brought not only harms but also benefits, since temperature rise has increased agricultural productivity in some cold regions; v. American industrial activity has produced goods that are used outside America, and its technological achievements gave rise to widespread benefits not limited to Americans; vi. Most victims of climate change live in the future; vii. Mitigation policies will surely benefit future people, but the obligation toward them is not based on past actions, and therefore, we do not need corrective justice to motivate taking steps on their behalf (pp. 1593–1596). The two scholars conclude that the attractiveness of corrective justice actually stems from “suppressed redistributive and welfarist assumptions” (p. 1602), according to which it is also (or perhaps mainly) because of their wealth that rich countries are obligated to give compensation. This would not in itself be a confutation of the duty of rich countries toward poorer ones. In fact, at times certain states of need are due to many and diverse reasons that go well beyond the agency of single entities. In such cases, other criteria need to be adopted for allocating remedial duties, and one such criterion is capacity. Supplying remedies for states of need is costly, but needy, vulnerable agents cannot be left in their state of deprivation. Therefore, wealthier agents can be assigned remedial responsibility in virtue of their superior capacity (Miller, 2007, pp. 103–104). However, this principle for identifying duty-bearers has been widely contested. Sunstein and Posner argue that attributing climate change-related costs to developed countries for redistributive reasons is pointless and is not even particularly beneficial to the poorer countries themselves (Sunstein & Posner, 2008, p. 1570). In general terms, since there is no internationally acknowledged human right to a healthy environment, it is in principle hard to allege human rights law violation in the case of climate change harms (Posner, 2007, p. 6). Human rights law is not meant for extraterritorial application, as no country wants to bear remedial duties toward other countries on the grounds of human rights violations due to climate change (Atapattu, 2018, p. 265). In any case, assigning remedial responsibility for climate-induced harms is challenging even on a local scale. Several developing countries ordinarily fail to protect their citizens’ human rights because they lack the necessary economic resources. It would be even more difficult to hold them accountable for remedying human rights violations to whose creation they have not contributed (Humphreys, 2009, pp. 5–6). The second main source of doubts regarding the efficacy of adopting the human rights framework when addressing climate change arises from the fact that human rights can be (and indeed have been) violated not only by climate change but also by mitigation and adaptation measures. In fact, we do not have two opposing scenarios, one in which climate change, left unabated, severely damages the planet and thereby harms human rights, and another in which climate change is mitigated and rights are thereby protected. What we rather face is a situation where multiple rights are at times in direct conflict and at other times simply in competition, calling into question the very cogency of framing climate action as protection of human rights.

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The most apparent competition between rights exists between the right to be protected from (the harmful effects of) climate change and the right to development. Developing countries claim the right to develop so as to be able to provide for the rights of their citizens, for which they currently lack resources. Mitigation policies, however, by determining who will have access to certain resources in the medium-long term, can affect the rights of many, especially of those living in developing countries (Humphreys, 2009, p. 2). And as things presently stand, their development would mean a significant increase in global greenhouse gas emissions. China, India, and Brazil, for example, are huge countries whose emissions are steadily increasing. Decoupling economic growth from emissions and thereby achieving sustainable development is possible, but significant technological instruments would be required, together with much greater energy efficiency. Currently, many developing countries lack these instruments and appeal to the priority of development over the protection of certain rights (Rodríguez-Garavito, 2018, p. 166). Thus, there seems to be a conflict: either we allow poorer countries to grow, allowing emissions—and consequently global mean temperature—to rise; or we curb both emissions and the economic growth of developing countries, thereby preventing the eradication of poverty inside their borders. A second field of conflict between rights concerns specific mitigation or adaptation policies which, even if meant to protect human rights (globally conceived) from climate change impacts, could endanger the human rights of local populations. An example of this comes from hydroelectric and biofuels projects and renewable energy plantations. In all such cases, significant human rights violations have been observed: local people have been forced to relocate, their land has been expropriated, and the ecosystems on which their subsistence was based have been destroyed. Hydroelectric projects can cause the reduction of river flows, thereby affecting people who live downstream. Renewable energy plantations have at times jeopardized human rights, particularly by expropriating indigenous people’s land, as in the case of Baharini Electra Wind Farm in Kenya (Robinson & Shine, 2018, p. 566). Biofuels projects often contribute to further deforestation, at times entailing forced relocation for indigenous people (Burger et al., 2015, pp. 8–9; Atapattu, 2018, p. 260), and may lead to an increase in the price of food arising from competition for the use of crops (Robinson & Shine, 2018, p. 566). Biofuels projects have also been criticized for the damage biofuel production inflicts on ecosystems, highlighting the additional concern of competition between human rights and the rights of nonhuman species. If other species have a right to exist, we need to consider carefully those policies that promote climate change mitigation but harm the environment (Hammonds, 2020, p. 365). The fate of causing harm greater than the protection offered to local peoples’ rights threatens not only mitigation strategies but also some adaptation policies. Resettlement programs have drawn particular criticism in this respect (Burger et al., 2015, p. 10), but also notable are new infrastructures such as dykes or coastal fortifications, which, while protecting one group, may expose another (Burger et al., 2015, p. 10; Robinson & Shine, 2018, pp. 565–566). The emerging conflicts and competition between rights cast further doubts on the efficacy of adopting a human rights perspective for addressing climate change and on the value of insisting on legal recognition of a human right to a safe environment.

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This right, even if acknowledged, could still conflict with other rights, and this very conflict could cause political action to stall.

Responses to Skepticism and Final Considerations The benefits of applying the human rights perspective to climate change seem debatable in light of the arguments just presented. However, for at least some of these skeptical arguments, there are possible answers that could lead, eventually, to a positive judgment on the efficacy of this framework. Let us analyze them. The first main source of skepticism was inherent in the applicability of human rights law to climate change, considering that: i. Human rights law and environmental norms are scarcely compatible, as the former is enforced and implemented mainly in the national dimension, while the second needs to be international in scope and enforceability; ii. Human rights law is neutral vis-à-vis economics and private actors, which do not recognize the limits it sets; iii. Responsibilities are hard to allocate. Scholars who defend the human rights approach do not ignore these objections but have tried to address them. On a general level, some objections can be addressed by a deeper observation of the current interaction between human rights and environmental law, which shows how the two, even if they amount to different bodies of law, are in fact far from incompatible and have interacted quite a bit over the years. Human rights tribunals have acknowledged that human rights can be put at risk by climate change, and their judicial decisions have ascribed obligations to states when rights were infringed by environmental degradation, including climate change (Knox, 2014, p. 28). In general, two kinds of duties are ascribed to states regarding the protection of human rights from environmental harm. The first is a procedural obligation, extremely relevant at the local level, that prescribes the involvement in deliberation processes of communities whose rights could be, or already are, affected by climate action. The second duty is more general in scope: states are free to decide both how to address climate change and how to balance economic development with the protection of the environment, but they are not free to adopt policies “that result in unjustified, foreseeable infringements of human rights” (Knox, 2014, pp. 30–31). If, in addition, a human right to a safe environment were to be acknowledged and integrated into an international treaty, states would need to create new laws and institutions, assess and monitor environmental and social impacts, make effective remedies available, and—most of all—prevent environmental harm and rights violation by private entities (Atapattu, 2018, p. 265). Naturally, they would also have to undergo international scrutiny. It is true that in most cases human rights law, when addressing environmental issues, has not crossed national borders, and obligations have been allocated only at the local level. Climate change, in contrast, needs to be addressed at the global level, crossing national boundaries. When applied to climate change, human rights law must become extraterritorial. How do we reach this goal? According to Knox, examples of trans-boundary human rights law application already exist. Specifically, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR)

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imposes extraterritorial obligations. This treaty binds states to international cooperation by stipulating that states must refrain from acts that risk preventing the fulfillment of human rights in other states. Although this language is quite general, Knox observes, it still shows that, in principle, states are expected to engage in joint efforts for the protection and promotion of human rights (Knox, 2014, pp. 32–33). Burger and colleagues have made a similar point, claiming that, following ICESCR prescriptions, states have an obligation to “promote universal respect for, and observance of” human rights. Thus, it is not implausible to argue that states have duties to refrain from activities that can cause environmental harms even outside their jurisdiction (Burger et al., 2015, p. 24). As for private actors, they are in principle not subject to human rights law. There are, though, some standards they are expected to meet according to the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, which prescribe, for example, that businesses should safeguard human rights and avoid violating them. They should also assess potential human rights risks raised by their activities and provide some remedy in case of rights infringement (Burger et al., 2015, p. 29). This is perhaps not enough, but at least it shows that even private actors are subject to some constraints. It is widely held that if a human right to a healthy, safe, and clean environment were internationally acknowledged, the parties involved would find a way to address many of the objections. It is crucial to underline that official recognition of this right must be conceived not as an end, but rather as a starting point for developing a commonly shared body of law. Let us consider the problem of the identification of duty-bearers. It has been emphasized that it is not clear who should bear the responsibility of fulfilling a potential right to a safe environment. However, Knox and Pejan have observed that normally the recognition of a human right precedes the attribution of obligations under human rights law (Knox & Pejan, 2018, p. 5). To be sure, further clarification is needed regarding both duty-bearers and specific actions to be taken, but experience with socio-economic rights has shown that rights can be progressively realized, and doctrine and jurisprudence refined, over time and with practice. Socio-economic rights, like environmental rights, engender “imperfect” obligations. Courts have developed enforcement mechanisms that advise authorities on how to advance those rights. Something similar could come about with an environmental right (Rodríguez-Garavito, 2018, pp. 166–167). Let us now address the second source of objections to the human rights framework, which concerns the rights conflict or competition that could arise from the international acknowledgment of a human right to a safe environment. Infringements on the rights of local peoples due to climate action (both for mitigation and adaptation purposes) have already occurred in many contexts. However, conflicts of this kind can be successfully addressed by a well-organized plan to involve indigenous peoples in the discussion of local mitigation and adaptation policies. Locally contextualized information can significantly decrease the risk of rights violation stemming from climate action (Robinson, 2018, pp. 565–566). For every mitigation project, it is necessary to evaluate costs and benefits from a strictly local perspective in order to make sure that the project does not risk violating human rights more than it protects them. In such an event, the project would have to be either abandoned or significantly rethought.

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Similar considerations apply to adaptation measures that need to be implemented in response to already occurring climate harms. Not only the most vulnerable countries, but also the most vulnerable segments of richer ones, need assistance in the choice of proper adaptation measures. Adaptation measures can amount to relocation programs, which need to be undertaken with full involvement of the interested communities to minimize the impact on their well-being. Indigenous people might also offer crucial support arising from their knowledge of the local environment (Atapattu, 2018, pp. 265–266). Not all objections have been addressed with equally strong arguments. The conflict between a human right to a safe environment and the right to development is perhaps the greatest challenge, still partially unanswered. As observed by Atapattu, a human right to a safe environment “will have to be balanced against other competing rights, and societal interests and community rights will often trump individual rights” (Atapattu, 2018, p. 266). Even in this case, however, a discussion can be held, benefits and harms debated, and a balance between conflicting rights found. Certain conflicts, perhaps, cannot be eradicated. Still, with constraints officially acknowledged, both perspectives (environmental and development rights) must be considered. In conclusion, several human rights-based environmental norms currently exist and are applied in many countries around the world. Each country on however, refers to different norms and follows different procedures. A universal right would provide a useful reference point for what has been done so far and a strong basis for developing further, internationally recognized norms in the future (Knox & Pejan, 2018, p. 6). It seems like a step worth taking, all things considered.

Cross-References ▶ Climate Change and Environmental Justice ▶ Climate Change and Global Justice ▶ Climate Change and Legal Theory ▶ Compensation Duties ▶ Responsibility for Climate Harms

References Adelman, S. (2009). Rethinking human rights: The impact of climate change on the dominant discourse. In S. Humphreys & M. Robinson (Eds.), Human rights and climate change (pp. 159–180). Cambridge University Press. Atapattu, S. (2018). The right to a healthy environment and climate change: Mismatch or harmony? In Knox, J. H., Pejan, R. (eds.) The Human Right to a Healthy Environment, Cambridge University Press, New York: 252–286. Burger, M., Wentz, J., Knox, J., Kreilhuber, A., Ognibene, L., & Ayres, K. (2015). Climate change and human rights, UNEP & Sabin centre for climate change law (Columbia law school). UNON Publishing Service Section. Caney, S. (2009). Climate change, human rights, and moral thresholds. In S. Humphreys & M. Robinson (Eds.), Human rights and climate change (pp. 69–90). Cambridge University Press.

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Chomsky, N. (2005). What we know. On the universals of language and rights. In Boston review. A political and literary forum. Boston Critic. Falkner, R. (2016). The Paris Agreement and the new logic of international climate politics. International Affairs, 92(5):1107–1125. Geuss, R. (2001). History and illusion in politics. Cambridge University Press. Hammonds, R. (2020). How can we overcome the great procrastination to respond to the climate emergency? Health and Human Rights Journal, 22(1):363–366. Humphreys, S. (2009). Introduction: Human rights and climate change. In S. Humphreys & M. Robinson (Eds.), Human rights and climate change (pp. 1–33). Cambridge University Press. Knox, J. H. (2014). Climate ethics and human rights. Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, 5, 22–34. Knox, J. H., & Pejan, R. (2018). Introduction. In J. H. Knox & R. Pejan (Eds.), The human right to a healthy environment (pp. 1–16). Cambridge University Press. Limon, M. (2018). The politics of human rights, the environment, and climate change at the human rights council. Towards a universal right to a healthy environment? In J. H. Knox & R. Pejan (Eds.), The human right to a healthy environment (pp. 189–214). Cambridge University Press. Miller, D. (2007). National Responsibility and global justice. Oxford University Press. Morsink, J. (1999). The universal declaration of human rights. Origins, drafting and intent. University of Pennsylvania Press. Nagel, T. (2002). Concealment and exposure – And other essays. Oxford University Press. O’Neill, O. (2005). The dark side of human rights. International Affairs, 81(1), 427–439. Posner, E. A. (2007). Climate change and international human rights litigation: A critical appraisal. Coase Sandor Institute for Law & Economics, Working Paper No. 329, 1–23. Posner, E. A., & Sunstein, C. R. (2008). Climate change justice. Georgetown Law Journal, 96, 1565–1612. Robinson, M. (2009). Foreword. In S. Humphreys & M. Robinson (Eds.), Human rights and climate change (pp. xvii–xx). Cambridge University Press. Robinson, M., & Shine, T. (2018). Achieving a climate justice pathway to 1.5
C. Nature Climate Change, 8, 564–569. Rodríguez-Garavito, C. (2018). A human right to a healthy environment? Moral, legal, and empirical considerations. In J. H. Knox & R. Pejan (Eds.), The human right to a healthy environment (pp. 155–168). Cambridge University Press. Roht-Arriaza, N. (2010). “First, do no harm”: Human rights and efforts to combat climate change. Georgia Journal of International and Comparative Law, 38, 593–612. Sen, A. (2012). The global reach of human rights. Journal of Applied Philosophy, 29(2), 91–100. Shahid, A. (2008). Life on the high(er) seas: Adapting to climate change in the Maldives. An interview with Abdulla Shahid. The Fletcher Forum of Foreign Affairs, 32(2), 15–23. Tasioulas, J. (2003). The moral reality of human rights. Ethical and human rights dimension of poverty: Towards a new paradigm in the fight against poverty, UNESCO poverty project. Philosophy seminars. All Souls College.

Documents and Reports Convention on the Rights of the Child. Adopted and opened for signature, ratification and accession by General Assembly resolution 44/25 of 20 November 1989; entry into force 2 September 1990. International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Adopted and opened for signature, ratification and accession by General Assembly resolution 2200A (XXI) of 16 December 1966; entry into force 3 January 1976. IPCC. (2014a). Synthesis report. Summary for policymakers. IPCC. (2014b). Impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability, contribution of the working group II to the fifth assessment report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change. Male’ Declaration on the Human Dimension of Global Climate Change, Adopted 14 November 2007.

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OHCHR, A/HRC/10/61, Annual Report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and Reports of the Office of the High Commissioner and the Secretary-General. Report of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights on the relationship between climate change and human rights, 15 January 2009. OHCHR, A/HRC/RES/10/4, Human Rights Council, Tenth Session. Resolution 10/4. Human rights and climate change, 25 March 2009. OHCHR, A/HRC/RES/44/7, Human Rights Council, Forty-fourth Session. Resolution 44/7. Human rights and climate change, 23 July 2020. UNFCCC/CP/2010/7/Add.1, Report of the Conference of the Parties on its sixteenth session, held in Cancun from 29 November to 10 December 2010. Addendum Part Two: Action taken by the Conference of the Parties at its sixteenth session, 15 March 2011. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on 10 December 1948, General Assembly resolution 217 A.

Climate Change and the Circumstances of Justice Fausto Corvino

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Climate Agreement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Circumstances of Climate Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Two Asymmetries and the Intergenerational Conflicts of the Climate Transition . . . . . . . The Cost Asymmetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Benefit Asymmetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Intergenerational Conflicts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Unravelling an Intricate Prisoner’s Dilemma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Global Vulnerability to Asymmetric Shocks Narrows the Benefit Asymmetry . . . . . . . . . . . The Co-benefits of Climate Action Narrow the Cost Asymmetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . It Is Not Rational to Ignore Future Generations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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This chapter questions whether the objective circumstances of justice, and in particular the assumption of mutual advantage, apply to climate action. The first part of the chapter explains why two asymmetries, of benefits and costs, further exacerbated by intergenerational conflicts, both past and future oriented, make climate change an intricate multiplayer prisoner’s dilemma. The second part of the chapter analyses whether and how the two asymmetries can be scaled down, based on a series of empirical arguments: global vulnerability to local economic setbacks, financial risks and security threats (benefit asymmetry), co-benefits of the energy transition immediately collectable, especially in developed and some emerging countries (cost asymmetry), moral, axiological and economic benefits F. Corvino (*) Department of Philosophy, Linguistics and Theory of Science, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_88

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of intergenerational sustainability (intergenerational conflicts). The conclusion is that the circumstances of justice, that make climate cooperation both possible and necessary, obtain, in spite of the two global asymmetries and of intergenerational conflicts. Keywords

Climate transition · Future generations · Mitigation benefits · Mitigation cobenefits · Prisoner’s dilemma · Rational choice · Social contract · Vulnerability

Introduction Scientists and economists agree that it pays to stop climate change as soon as possible. The costs of an emission pathway that is compatible with the Paris mitigation targets, i.e., keeping global warming to well below 2  C compared to pre-industrial levels, are lower than the (discounted) economic value of the climate burden that would fall on present and future generations as a consequence of higher global temperatures (Burke et al., 2018; Glanemann et al., 2020). The costs of climate mitigation are usually reckoned by taking into account both the investments in emission-abating technologies and the financial resources needed to shield the net losers of the climate transition, e.g., people working in the fossil-fuels industry, blameless investors, and so forth (see Carley and Konisky 2020). The economic value of climate damages, in turn, is estimated through so-called integrated assessment models (see Metcalf & Stock, 2017). The latter join together data and predictions on society, the economy, and climate to put an economic value on the climate damage caused by a marginal ton of CO2 added to the atmosphere. Obviously, we are dealing with predictions, which can be questioned depending on the methodology used. Yet, three main facts are certain. If climate mitigation fails, the costs of global warming would be enormous, according to the majority of studies, and exceeding the costs of the ambitious climate action – i.e., leading to net zero global CO2 emissions by the middle of this century (see IPCC, 2022: 48–51; Köberle et al., 2021). The more time passes, the more the costs of climate mitigation increase – e.g., if humanity had acted earlier, the transition would have cost much less than it does now (Sanderson & O’Neill, 2020). The benefits of climate mitigation accrue to the global community as a whole and no one can be excluded, neither single countries nor individuals. This poses a strong incentive for freeriding: reaping the benefits, if any, of climate mitigation produced by others, without doing one’s own part. The above considerations would seem to frame climate change as a multiplayer prisoner’s dilemma, only on a global scale (Hilbe et al., 2014; Wood, 2011). Humanity has an interest in stopping climate change as soon as possible. However, lacking certainty about the strategies of others, the dominant strategy for the individual agent is non-cooperative. If a sufficient majority of others choose to cooperate, the agent gets the benefits and does not pay their share of the costs. If others do not cooperate, there are no benefits, but at least the agent has avoided the

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costs (Hardin, 1998; Paavola, 2012). This would apply both on an individual level and to much larger communities, such as countries (For a broader discussion of the prisoner’s dilemma see Binmore, 2015). The main way out of this sort of non-cooperative drift is usually a fail-and-retry process, through which people are persuaded to cooperate after experiencing at first hand the negative consequences of one or more cooperative failures. For instance, in the absence of valid or credible sanctions, the dominant strategy for any agent would be not to pay taxes, since if others pay taxes, the agent gets public services for free, and if others don’t pay taxes, at least the agent won’t have lost out. Yet, if everyone followed the individually rational strategy, all would end up with the worst-case scenario, both for society and for any single agent: no taxes, no basic services, no society, and so on. This prompts the various agents to lay the foundations of a social contract, through which they establish rules and principles for distributing costs and benefits of social cooperation that are justifiable as rational to any member of society (see Vlerick, 2020). The purpose of the chapter is to question whether climate cooperation is mutually beneficial for all parties involved, exactly as other forms of social cooperation. If the answer is positive, then climate justice has also a political and not only a moral dimension (Rawls, 1985; Sangiovanni, 2008). This would imply that climate change fits into the standard pattern of the prisoner’s dilemma, and it lends itself to an institutional solution. Accordingly, it would be possible to arrive, through hypothetical reasoning, at norms for the distribution of the climate burden that every party involved would accept, if they act rationally and disinterestedly. The starting assumption of the chapter, however, is that climate change exhibits a series of asymmetries of power and vulnerability between the parties involved that depart it from the canons of a classic multiplayer prisoner’s dilemma. The chapter proceeds in the following way. Section “A climate agreement” briefly introduces the normative aspects of a climate agreement. Section “The circumstances of climate justice” lays out the social and human circumstances that make cooperation both possible and necessary (Rawls, 1999, 109–112; see also Hume, 1978 [1740]; Brandstedt, 2015). Section “The two asymmetries and the intergenerational conflicts of the climate transition” addresses the two asymmetries, cost and benefit, further exacerbated by intergenerational conflicts, that test the existence of the circumstances of climate justice. Section “Unravelling an intricate prisoner’s dilemma” proposes a series of arguments that narrow, at least in part, the two asymmetries, allowing the assumption of mutual benefit to be defended and thus lending support to the possibility of a climate agreement.

A Climate Agreement A climate agreement is an accord through which the parties involved in climate change, essentially the global community, agree on a fair distribution of the climate burden, i.e., the costs of mitigation of, adaptation to, and loss-and-damage compensation for climate change. There are two basic normative issues at stake in the

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climate agreement. The first, much debated issue, is what the content of a climate agreement should be. In particular, the parties to the agreement may want to distribute the climate burden taking into account, among other things, both the benefits that each country obtains from GHG emissions (present and past) and its ability to contribute to climate action (see Baatz, 2013; Caney, 2010; Page, 2011). For instance, should those who have polluted the most in the past bear a larger share of the climate burden (Caney, 2006; Meyer & Roser, 2010; Moss & Robyn, 2019; Shue, 2015)? What principles of justice should be applied when allocating remaining sustainable emissions, i.e., the carbon budget? (Alcaraz et al., 2018; McKinnon, 2015; Williges et al., 2022)? The second, less discussed issue, is whether the circumstances of justice for a climate agreement obtain at all (see Klaser et al., 2021). In other words, when rational and mutually disinterested individuals come together to define the ground rules of communal living, do they all have enough reasons to agree, among other things, on a just distribution of the climate burden? The chapter addresses this second question.

The Circumstances of Climate Justice Interpretations and variations aside (see Barry, 1989), social-contract theory is based on three main assumptions. First, the contracting parties live in a world with limited resources, hence it is structurally impossible for all to take possession of all the resources to which they may aspire. Second, it is mutually advantageous for all parties to cooperate, renouncing the indiscriminate maximization of their advantage and acquiescing to common rules. Third, each co-operator has an interest in obtaining the largest possible slice of cooperation outputs (see also Rivera-Castro, 2014). The first assumption is merely empirical and therefore does not need further investigation, it is simply given with respect to the vast majority of resources on which human well-being depends. The second assumption can be either expressed in terms of gains in security, hence we may want to say with Thomas Hobbes (1996 [1651], part 2) that the contracting parties agree to transfer sovereignty to a third party because in doing so they can be secure in their physical integrity and property, or we may say with John Rawls (1999, pp. 3–6) that through cooperation based on shared rules, the parties can secure more individual wealth than they would obtain through isolated work. In both cases, the bulk of the story is that the parties are assumed to be better off by cooperating than by acting alone. And it is important to underline that the assumption of mutual advantage holds only in so far as the contracting parties are quite equal in power before signing the contract – i.e., none of them has the power to dominate over the others. Otherwise, the strongest party would rationally prefer to seize the big share of the resources that exist in the pre-contract scenario, rather than the fair (but smaller) share of the resources they would get after signing the contract. The third assumption is a very general claim about human psychology and motivations. It simply postulates that, other things being equal, and regardless of one’s life plans, most people prefer to have more resources rather than fewer.

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While the third assumption is universal in scope and there is no point in questioning it when moving from one distributive context to another, the first and the second assumption are instead context-sensitive, as they refer to facts about the world and have to be re-tested from time to time, as conditions may change. Accordingly, Rawls (1999, 109–12) refers to the third assumption as the “subjective circumstances of justice” and to both the first and the second assumption as the “objective circumstances of justice”. The question that will interest us here is whether the objective circumstances of justice apply also to the parties to a climate agreement (see also Gardiner, 2011b; McKinnon, 2012, ch. 2). The limited-resources assumption certainly does. If the capacity of the atmosphere to absorb GHGs were unlimited, or if the carbon sinks (soils, plants, and oceans) were able to capture more CO2 than humans emit, it is reasonable to assume that everyone would keep on with business as usual. There would be no question of distributive justice at all. Yet, the fact that this absorption capacity is finite, for reasons that do not depend on humans, makes GHG emissions (or it would be more correct to say emission permits) a pool of limited resources, with respect to which it is structurally impossible for every party involved to appropriate at the same time as much as they wish – at least if we want to prevent the dramatic consequences of unrestrained climate change. The discourse becomes much more complex when we address the mutualadvantage assumption. In the opening of the chapter it was mentioned that the rational choice for humanity is to implement the climate transition; yet, the individually rational strategy is not to cooperate. Moreover, if many (or all) agents follow the individually rational strategy, humanity ends up in the collectively worst-case scenario: a climate out of control. In the standard multiplayer prisoner’s dilemma, no one wants to end up in the collectively worst-case scenario; which is why, according to social-contract theorists, agents agree, not before repeated failures, to give up the strategy that maximizes individual gain (non-cooperation) in order to achieve an intermediate outcome between the individual optimum (non-cooperation while others cooperate) and the social worst (no-one cooperates): everyone cooperates (Gauthier, 1986). What makes climate change an intricate prisoner’s dilemma is that not all agents necessarily prefer the intermediate solution (everyone cooperates) to the collectively worst solution (no one cooperates), even after repeated failed attempts of climate cooperation. This is because of asymmetries in both costs and benefits. The cost asymmetry consists in the fact that the climate transition requires an unequal mitigation effort: those who emit more today must reduce their emissions more and faster. The benefit asymmetry entails that not all agents stand to gain equally from the climate transition; some are exposed to climate damage far more than others, while some can even expect net gains from a further escalation of global warming. Both asymmetries then have an intergenerational dimension, which further aggravates them. The climate transition serves, above all, to lay the groundwork for a future sustainable world. The costs of this effort fall, for the most part, on the people now living, while the benefits will be reaped, in part, by future generations.

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The Two Asymmetries and the Intergenerational Conflicts of the Climate Transition If climate change is an intricate multiplayer prisoner’s dilemma, one must first grasp the origins of the double asymmetry of costs and benefits that make it intricate. Next, one has to understand how the two asymmetries are complicated at the intergenerational level, both with respect to the inequitable allocation of the costs and benefits of past emissions and of the climate transition. Finally, one must ask if and how the two asymmetries can be reconciled in order to bring climate change back into the canons of social-contract theory.

The Cost Asymmetry In absolute terms, some countries emit much more GHGs than others. Given that the path toward carbon neutrality is a zero-sum game, the bulk of the mitigation burden would fall on a limited number of polluters. In 2020, China emitted more than 10 GtCO2 (just under a third of global CO2 emissions, which amounted to around 25 GtCO2 in the same year), followed by the US with 4.7 GtCO2, India with 2.4 GtCO2, Russia with 1.5 GtCO2, Japan just over 1 GtCO2. Countries such as Pakistan, Vietnam, Thailand, and Malaysia, in contrast, emitted less than 0.3 GtCO2 each (Statista, 2022; see also Ritchie & Roser, 2020). If we simply look at the cumulative CO2 emissions that are produced in individual countries, i.e., production-based emissions, we might come to the conclusion that the climate transition imposes a geographically cross-cutting mitigation burden. The latter would fall in an equal way on both the industrialized countries of the global north as well as on some emerging countries of the global south. However, two elements determine a more clear-cut cost asymmetry between the global north and the global south, with respect to the climate transition, which is not immediately visible when looking at cumulative production-based emissions. The two elements are per capita emissions and consumption-based emissions accounting. First, GHG emissions are attributed to countries for political and statistical reasons, yet we should not lose sight of the fact that, in most cases, the purpose of emission-generating activities is to promote human welfare. Therefore, by looking at per capita emissions one can find that individuals emit much more in the global north than in the global south, or at least much more than appears if we look at the cumulative emissions of countries. For instance, China emits almost twice as the US, but China has a population more than four times larger than the US (Ritchie & Roser, 2020). This implies that the average individual mitigation effort required of the US citizen, consistent with the climate transition target, is much larger than the average individual mitigation effort required of the Chinese citizen; despite the fact that Chinese people on the whole emit more than US people. More generally, after switching from cumulative to per capita emissions, the balance of emissions from Eastern countries decreases, together with that of African and South American countries (which already emit little in absolute terms), while that of Western countries increases (Ritchie & Roser, 2020).

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Second, the mere fact that emissions take place in one country does not mean that the associated benefits are reaped in their entirety in that country. Many emerging and developing countries produce goods and services that are exported and/or purchased in other countries (see Davis & Caldeira, 2010; Ritchie, 2019). A basic example is a T-shirt manufactured in Malaysia, under contract to a Swedish company, which then markets the final product in Austria. Therefore, reducing the production of CO2 emissions in a particular country does not necessarily reduce CO2 consumption only in that country. More precisely, emission reductions in countries that are net CO2 exporters will also impose costs in countries that are CO2 importers. In fact, emission reductions will increase production costs in countries that export CO2, either because environmental regulations become more stringent or simply because production (and hence supply) is reduced, and this is likely to impose a burden also on consumers in CO2 importing countries (On the more general normative debate on consumption-based emission accounting see DuusOtterström & Hjorthen, 2019). Most countries in the global south, particularly those in Asia, are net exporters of CO2, i.e., the emissions embedded in the goods and services they export are higher than the emissions embedded in the goods and services they import. In contrast, most countries in the global north, particularly those in Europe and the US, are net importers of CO2 (see also Karakaya et al., 2019) (For example, in 2020 Spain had more than 18% of CO2 emissions embedded in trade, meaning that Spain “imported” more emissions than it “exported”, and the difference accounts to a 18% of its production-based emissions – hence if we want to adjust Spanish emissions for trade, or in other words, if we want to know Spanish consumption-based emissions, we should add 18% to its production-based emissions). Conversely, in that same year China had almost 8% of CO2 emissions embedded in trade, because it “exported” more emissions than it “imported”, hence Chinese consumption-based emissions can be obtained by subtracting roughly a 8% to Chinese production-based emissions (Ritchie, 2019)). This implies that part of the emission abatement costs in countries that are net exporters of CO2 is passed on to consumers in countries that are net importers of CO2. In short, there is a global asymmetry of emissions abatement costs, consistent with an emissions trajectory that guides humanity toward the climate transition. The drivers of this cost asymmetry are threefold: cumulative production-based emissions are higher in the global north than in the global south, with the exception of some emerging countries; per capita emissions are higher in the global north than in the global south; many consumers in the global north purchase products and services in which emissions made in the global south are embedded.

The Benefit Asymmetry Although everyone is potentially vulnerable to climate change in the medium run, not everyone has the same level of vulnerability. First, low-latitude countries (i.e., both tropical and sub-tropical) are mostly exposed to the risk of extreme weather events, such as droughts, frequent rains, typhoons, and so on. Second, low-latitude countries have production systems predominantly based on agriculture,

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and in many cases on monocultures, and are therefore both more economically exposed to climate damage (agriculture is generally the production sector most vulnerable to climatic instability) and less able to diversify production in response to adverse weather conditions (Mendelsohn & Dinar, 1999). Third, low-latitude countries have less resources to invest in adaptation and hence are more vulnerable to unavoidable climate-related shocks (see Bush, 2017). Fourth, against the victims of climate change, there are also net winners. These can be countries as well as individuals or productive groups within countries. In general, the countries that are expected to reap the greatest benefits, both economic and pertaining to quality of life, from higher temperatures are the colder ones: i.e., the possibility of expanding arable land, lower heating costs, reduced cold-related mortality, the possibility of navigating previously frozen seas, and so on (see Conley et al., 2021) (On the normative implications of gains from climate change see Mintz-Woo and Leroux (2021), and in particular their distinction between passive winners of climate change, i.e., those who continue to do the same things as before and receive benefits from warmer temperatures, and active winners, i.e., those who change their production strategies to reap new and/or additional benefits from warmer temperatures). The benefit asymmetry is thus roughly the reverse of the cost asymmetry. Since many countries of the global south are located at low latitudes, they have more to benefit, especially in the short and medium term, from an ambitious climate transition than the countries of the global north. Moreover, for various production sectors in some countries in the global north, there could even be benefits in an increase, albeit limited, in global warming.

Intergenerational Conflicts Intergenerational climate conflicts consist of both a past and a future-oriented component. The past-oriented intergenerational conflict implies that if the climate agreement took past emissions into account, some countries, especially developing and emerging ones, would reap net gains, while other countries, especially developed ones, would face net costs. The former countries have an obvious interest in entering into a climate agreement that turns the past-oriented intergenerational conflict into a matter of compensatory and/or distributive justice, while the latter countries would benefit from retaining the full benefits of unequal past emissions. The past-oriented intergenerational conflict thus exacerbates the global double asymmetry of costs and benefits, by increasing the burden that the climate agreement would place on countries from the global north. Human beings discovered the existence of a distributive problem concerning the capacity of the atmosphere to absorb GHGs when a large part of the climate burden, including not only GHG emissions but also climate damage, had already been allocated unfairly between the countries of the global north and of the global south, to the prejudice of the latter. If we simply look at which countries emitted the most CO2 throughout human history, we see that both the US and the EU28 (EU countries plus the UK) take the lead, with respectively 25% and 22% of

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cumulative historical emissions, while the share of newly industrialized countries is much lower than their annual emissions level today, with China accounting for 12% and India for 3% of global historical emissions (Ritchie & Roser, 2020). This makes climate change different from the standard prisoner’s dilemma, in which there is no historical background. Parties to a climate agreement who are historically disadvantaged in the distribution of the climate burden could join the negotiating table with the moral expectation that the climate agreement will take past injustice into account. The future-oriented intergenerational conflict complicates things further (see Brandstedt, 2015). If present generations decide to act decisively in climate mitigation, the risks for future generations will be minimized. If, conversely, present generations do not do their part, the risks will fall more heavily on those who come after. The lure of intergenerational freeriding is high (Gardiner, 2011a; Page, 2006). The future-oriented intergenerational conflict reduces the incentives to act now to mitigate climate change, across the globe, but obviously more strongly in developed countries that are currently less affected by the climate crisis or can more easily adapt to short- or medium-term climate damage.

Unravelling an Intricate Prisoner’s Dilemma The first part of the chapter outlined the reasons why climate change is an intricate tragedy of the commons. This has led us to raise the question of whether the circumstances of climate justice exist at all, i.e., whether all (or at least most) of the parties involved could prefer collective cooperation toward the climate transition rather than an out-of-control climate – or at least a partial or delayed climate transition. Far from providing definitive answers, which of course depend on a number of climatic and socio-economic contingencies, the second part of the chapter aims to highlight some lines of argumentation that may show that the circumstances of climate justice are given, depending on the occurrence or non-occurrence of certain events.

Global Vulnerability to Asymmetric Shocks Narrows the Benefit Asymmetry We have seen that the global benefits of an ambitious climate agreement are asymmetrically dispersed. If we lived in a Westphalian international system, made up of independent and self-sufficient states, which can easily isolate and protect themselves from what occurs outside their borders, then perhaps the benefit asymmetry would prevent us from maintaining that the circumstances of global climate justice obtain (see Buchanan, 2000). The current global context, however, is much more complex. It consists of an intricate web of countries linked by commercial, financial, cultural, and political connections. A recent Swiss Re report (2021) estimates that if climate mitigation fails, i.e., global warming goes beyond a 3  C increase, global GDP would collapse by about

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18%. It is worth considering how the losses would be distributed. In the US and Europe, the GDP loss would be smaller, but still very severe, at around 10% of GDP. The emerging economies of South-East Asia, instead, would experience a GDP loss of close to 40%. However, these numbers only look at one part of the problem, namely how much individual production systems lose as a result of climate damage. In addition to this, one must also ask whether and what repercussions these losses have on other countries. There are three aspects to consider: economic setbacks, financial uncertainty, and security threats. First, emerging countries tend to be commodity exporters. A further rise in average temperature could lead to a sharp reduction in labor productivity in these areas, which would slow down, and in some cases prevent, the extraction of raw materials and the cultivation of agricultural products (see Brenton & Chemutai, 2021). In addition, an increased frequency and danger of atypical weather phenomena would bring enormous risks to the agricultural sector (Noorka & Heslop-Harrison, 2015). This could likely result in a series of funnels to the global production chain. Moreover, many Southeast Asian countries play a decisive role in the global manufacturing sector, by providing relatively cheap exports of semifinished or finished products (Chandna et al., 2021). If global warming threatens these manufacturing realities (UNFCCC, 2021), this can easily translate into global inflation, which could cause economic setbacks worldwide. Moreover, many people living in the global north have economic and/or financial interests in the global south, e.g., real estate, shares in companies, businesses, and so on (see Howard & Schwartz, 2017, pp. 241–244). Second, climate change poses a problem of financial risks, that can easily spread through the global financial system. For instance, under a business-as-usual emissions scenario, the default risks for European companies most exposed to climate risks would increase by almost 30% (ECB, 2021). Similar if not greater risks would arise in emerging and developing countries, especially with respect to their sovereign debt. This would have worldwide repercussions. Just think of how the US subprime mortgage crisis, in 2008, generated a domino effect that led the entire world into recession (Zestos 2015). The same happened with the Asian financial crisis of 1997, albeit with geographically smaller contagions (Khan & Park, 2009). A progressive deterioration of production conditions in countries most vulnerable to climate damage could have dire repercussions on the global financial system. Add to this the problems of uncertainty and volatility that asymmetric production shocks would bring about, with spillovers into the real economy of countries even far removed from the initial local shock. Third, climate change is associated with local migrations and wars, which can easily turn into global security threats (see Capisani, chapter ▶ “Climate Change and Human Mobilities” in this volume). According to the World Bank, in the absence of sound and immediate climate mitigation policies, more than 140 million people could migrate from Sub-Saharan Africa, South-East Asia, and South America by 2050 (Rigaud et al., 2018). Already in 2017, between 22 and 24 million people worldwide were forced to leave their home due to extreme weather events (Brookings Institution, 2019). Climate migration risks translating into political

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instability, and the latter, combined with social resentment and anger, is the perfect fuse for civil war and, in some contexts, even terrorism (Cattaneo et al., 2019; The White House, 2021). These three factors teach a common lesson. The socio-economic costs imposed by climate change manifest themselves asymmetrically, more harshly in the global south, but then they tend to spread like wildfire toward the global north (see also Steel et al., 2022). This is not due to climatic reasons but to economic and social characteristics of contemporary societies. Obviously, the greater the level of globalization, the greater the ease with which asymmetric climate damage translates into global economic and financial damage. Moreover, even though not all asymmetric climate shocks have the same weight and/or propagation capacity, it is still clear that climate change is a global phenomenon that does not compartmentalize. For instance, if European citizens might remain indifferent to the flooding of a Pacific small island state (if we take this dramatic event in isolation), a rise in the Earth’s average temperature such as to cause ocean level rise would certainly be accompanied by other climate damages in other countries that are more closely connected to Europe.

The Co-benefits of Climate Action Narrow the Cost Asymmetry It is undeniable that the climate transition is more expensive, at least in absolute terms, for those who start from higher emission levels. Yet, the marginal costs of emissions abatement are often accompanied by co-benefits (Ürge-Vorsatz et al., 2014). On the one hand, emission reductions translate into better air quality, thus leading to lower health risks for citizens and reduced health expenditure (Karlsson et al., 2020). Moreover, climate mitigation inevitably passes through energy efficiency, and this translates into significant cost savings (Mayrhofer & Gupta, 2016). On the other hand, renewable-energy technologies require initial investments, but then they allow for much lower marginal energy-production costs than polluting technologies (think of solar panels, electric cars, wind turbines). Add to this that green investments foster employment, since they create new jobs and boost labor demand (see Bergant et al., 2022). In essence, the cost asymmetry is made less relevant than it appears at first glance by the fact that there are several co-benefits that go hand in hand with the increase in mitigation effort. In some cases, the global asymmetry of costs could even be leveled out by the fact that industrialized and some emerging countries are poised to reap significant co-benefits in the immediate term: they have more capital to invest in climate action, they have more skilled workers who can be retrained for green jobs, more opportunities to transform transport infrastructure, more efficient bureaucracy, and so on (see also Carley & Konisky, 2020).

It Is Not Rational to Ignore Future Generations The more present generations mitigate climate change, the greater the costs to present generations and the lower the negative externalities for future generations

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(Burke et al., 2018). This creates a double question. The first question is whether it is rational for present generations to enter into a climate agreement instead of letting the climate spiral out of control, to the detriment of future generations. This, of course, would not necessarily imply that we should remain ethically indifferent to the fate of future generations – we could, for example, have reasons of beneficence to take care of them. Yet, it would entail that we have no duties of justice toward future people, as we have toward present people. If we believe that it is rational for present generations to sign a climate agreement, in the interest of future generations also, then the second, normative question is how favorable to future generations the climate agreement should be. The intergenerational conflicts mentioned above, especially the future-oriented ones, would seem to prompt a negative answer to the first question, thus making the second question superfluous. There are three arguments, however, that can help us defend a positive answer to the first question and justify stringent intergenerational obligations of climate justice. First, present generations have an interest in mitigating climate change to ensure the intergenerational continuity of the institutions that can realize social justice. An out-of-control climate would cause institutional collapse in various countries, making it impossible to implement those forms of protection of individual freedom and socio-economic distribution on which the broader concept of justice depends (see also Kim, 2019). This is roughly the climatic application of Rawls’ just savings principle (Rawls, 1999, pp. 251–258; Rawls, 2001, pp. 158–161). When the representatives of the present generations are called upon to enter the social contract, they have an interest in introducing a principle of intergenerational justice that constrains the principle of intragenerational socio-economic justice (the difference principle). The just savings principle presupposes that members of present generations are interested in making net intergenerational savings (i.e., to refrain from maximizing their consumption) to provide future generations with the minimum resources to ensure the continuity of just institutions (According to Rawls, the just savings principle is based on both an accumulation stage, in which present generations make positive real savings for future generations, and a steady-state stage, in which the stock of intergenerational resources has already reached the level that satisfies the just savings principle, and the task of present generations is to protect the stock, instead of increasing it further – i.e., net real saving can become zero (see Gosseries, 2001)). Obviously, this kind of argument starts from a moral assumption, which in a sense is free standing, namely that human beings value social justice intrinsically and want to protect it, regardless of whether doing so benefits them or those who will come after them (see Heyd, 2009). Second, present generations are linked to future generations via a deep axiological bond. Many of the actions that people alive today perform have a temporal extension that goes far beyond the lives of the individuals taking part in them, and the meaning and value of these actions therefore depend on whether there is someone in the future to follow up on them (Scheffler, 2013). As S. Scheffler (2018) argues, this is true for both long-term goal-oriented actions and for meliorative actions. Goal-oriented actions refer to all those projects that, while also delivering intermediate results and milestones, aim to achieve one or more distant goals.

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For instance, people working in robotics and artificial intelligence are engaged in activities that generate medium-term results, such as knowledge and applications. These results, however, only acquire full meaning when they are combined with other actions and projects by future individuals that will lead to the increasingly complex and articulated development of robots and software. The same applies to many other fields, such as astrophysics, space technology, some frontier sectors of medicine, and so on. Meliorative actions, on the other hand, are those that aim to develop and protect group practices to which individuals tend to attribute value, either intrinsic or instrumental, e.g., a football team, a political party, an association, and so on. The meaning and value of meliorative actions rests, to a large extent, on group practices being continued into the future. What sense would it make, for example, to fight for a reduction in global wealth inequality without a reasonable expectation that future generations will live in a hypothetical fairer world? A specific sub-category of meliorative actions, moreover, are those that refer to and transmit a certain tradition, such as making music, philosophy, literature, and so on. For instance, what would be the point of researching Kant’s philosophy if there were no future generations to continue the Kantian philosophical tradition? The research could certainly address the readers of the present generations, but that seems so little compared to the potential intergenerational audience. In essence, the sense and meaning of many of the things we do depend on the reasonable expectation that future generations exist (see also Andina, 2022). Mitigating climate change means not only ensuring that future generations exist, but also that they are reasonably able to take the baton of many of the collective long-term actions that present generations will bequeath to them. Thirdly, economic arguments could be given as to the benefits that future generations provide in the present. Future generations enable present generations to keep the economic system capital-preserving and future-oriented. On the one hand, future generations provide present generations with a motivation to invest in activities that do not aim at short- or medium-term consumption, but at a more-or-less constant capitalization that yields earnings over time. This allows companies to continue to exist in the long term, and those who do not possess capital to obtain forms of income, from wage labor or performance, that would not exist in a non-futureoriented economic system. On the other hand, future generations are the prerequisite for the viability and stability of the financial system. Both public and private actors expand their “real” spending possibilities by obtaining medium- to long-term credit. Future generations perform a dual function with respect to intergenerational credit: they guarantee debt coverage in the present, by the mere expectation that they will exist, and they repay the debt in the future, either with taxes or by consuming the products and services of companies that have received credit. Protecting future generations from climate disasters means, for present generations, reaping a number of economic benefits in the present (Corvino, 2022). The above three arguments show that the intergenerational conflicts, which cut across the two asymmetries of benefits and costs, can be narrowed, at least in part. The rational choice for present generations is not the reckless exploitation of natural

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and economic resources to the detriment of future generations. On the contrary, present generations can maximize their well-being by securing the conditions for intergenerational sustainability.

Conclusions In this chapter, I maintained that the objective circumstances of climate justice can obtain. This is in spite of the fact that climate change is an intricate multiplayer prisoner’s dilemma, due to two global asymmetries, of benefits and costs, and to the intergenerational conflicts involved. There are three main reasons for this. Local climate damage, initially asymmetrical, easily propagates within global socioeconomic structures. Climate mitigation brings with it a number of co-benefits that partially offset the asymmetry of direct benefits of the climate transition. There are sound axiological and economic reasons to safeguard the climate interests of future generations. A climate agreement for the fair distribution of the climate burden is both possible and necessary.

Cross-References ▶ Climate Change and Decision Theory ▶ Climate Change and Distributive Justice ▶ Climate Change and Global Justice ▶ Climate Change and Intergenerational Justice ▶ Climate Change and Security in the Anthropocene: Existential Threats, Ethics, and Futures

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Rivera-Castro, F. (2014). Circumstances of justice. In J. Mandle & D. Reidy (Eds.), The Cambridge Rawls lexicon (pp. 92–96). Cambridge University Press. Sanderson, B. M., & O’Neill, B. C. (2020). Assessing the costs of historical inaction on climate change. Scientific Reports, 10, 9173. Sangiovanni, A. (2008). Justice and the priority of politics to morality. Journal of Political Philosophy, 16(2), 137–164. Scheffler, S. (2013). Death and the afterlife. Oxford University Press. Scheffler, S. (2018). Why worry about future generations? Oxford University Press. Shue, H. (2015). Historical responsibility, harm prohibition, and preservation requirement: Core practical convergence on climate change. Moral Philosophy and Politics, 2(1), 7–31. Statista. (2022). Carbon dioxide emissions in 2010 and 2020, by select country. https://www. statista.com/statistics/270499/co2-emissions-in-selected-countries/ Steel, D., DesRoches, C. T., & Mintz-Woo, K. (2022). Climate change and the threat to civilization. PNAS, 119(42), e2210525119. Swiss Re. (2021). The economics of climate change: no action not an option. https://www.swissre. com/institute/research/topics-and-risk-dialogues/climate-and-natural-catastrophe-risk/exper tise-publication-economics-of-climate-change.html The White House. (2021). Report On The Impact Of Climate Change On Migration. https:// reliefweb.int/report/world/report-impact-climate-change-migration-october-2021 UNFCCC. (2021). Climate Change Danger to South Asia’s Economy. https://unfccc.int/news/ climate-change-danger-to-south-asias-economy Ürge-Vorsatz, D., Tirado Herrero, S., Dubash, N. K., & Lecocq, f. (2014). Measuring the co-benefits of climate change mitigation. Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 39(1), 549–582. Vlerick, M. (2020). The evolution of social contracts. Journal of Social Ontology, 5(2), 181–203. Williges, K., Meyer, L. H., Steininger, K. W., & Kirchengast, G. (2022). Fairness critically conditions the carbon budget allocation across countries. Global Environmental Change, 74, 1–20. Wood, P. J. (2011). Climate change and game theory. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1219, 153–170. Zestos, G. K. (2015). The global financial crisis from US subprime mortgages to European sovereign debt. Routledge.

Climate Change and Distributive Justice Dominic Roser

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Building Blocks of Climate Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Intergenerational Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Intragenerational Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Implementing Climate Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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People benefit from activities such as heating a home, flying a plane, or eating cheese. Given current technology, greenhouse gas emissions are a side effect of these activities. These emissions cause harmful climate change over the coming decades and centuries. An effort must therefore be made to limit them. This presents us with large-scale and novel issues of justice with two questions at the core. First, a question of intergenerational justice: How much effort does the present generation have to make to protect future generations from dangerous climate change? And second, a question of intragenerational justice: How must the effort to address climate change be distributed? As far as intergenerational justice is concerned, a minimal principle requires that the human rights of future generations are fulfilled. The fact that there is large scientific uncertainty about how precisely present actions affect future generations means that this translates into significant duties for the present generation. As far as intragenerational justice is concerned, a whole range of principles for the distribution of the various climate-related benefits and burdens have been proposed. The Polluter Pays Principle and the Ability to Pay Principle stand out as particularly plausible. D. Roser (*) University of Fribourg, Fribourg, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_120

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Whatever principles are correct, there is also the question of implementation given that current political institutions – with their short-termist and national focus – are not well adapted to the intergenerational and global dimension of climate change. Keywords

Climate change · Justice · Ethics · Global justice · Future generations · Risk · Uncertainty · Polluter pays principle · Human rights · Development

Introduction Do the rights of future generations imply that we must radically mitigate climate change, even at great costs to ourselves? Or can we justifiably ask our descendants to deal with the challenge of a changing climate since they will be richer than us? If we must strongly limit our emissions, should everyone on the planet limit their emissions at the same speed? Or should people in developing countries receive more time in order to be able to catch up economically? These are just some examples of the issues at stake to highlight that climate change presents us not only with scientific, technological, and political questions but also with a host of questions about justice. Answering these questions of justice is important for two reasons. First, justice contributes to the political feasibility of policy proposals (Miller, 2009). For this reason, the justice dimension has always been present in the climate discourse in various ways. The Paris Agreement is the first international climate treaty to mention the expression “climate justice” explicitly and the first global environmental agreement to emphasize human rights as an integral element (Knox, 2020). But starting already with the negotiation of the UNFCCC in 1992 (most notably Article 3.1), implicit and explicit references to the importance of equity, fairness, human rights, justice, responsibility, morality, and ethics are a constant feature of the policy discourse and policy documents (Pickering, 2016). Of course, not all justice rhetoric is conducive to achieving justice. Political agents frequently invoke it only when it is aligned with their self-interest (cf. Lange et al., 2007). Also, political feasibility depends on perceived justice rather than actual justice. In addition, being explicit and clear about one’s conception of justice might prove to be divisive (Seidel, 2016) which might be one of the reasons for the resistance to transparent equity reviews of the national efforts in international climate policy. Thus, the initially appealing view that answering open questions about climate justice increases political feasibility should not be taken for granted. However, there is a second reason why answering questions of justice is important: Justice matters in itself. We should be concerned with determining the shape of a just solution (and implementing it, of course), even apart from how bringing such proposal to the negotiating table is instrumental in promoting or impeding climate action. If climate justice is so important, why is reality so far from it Heyward and Roser, (2016)? Lack of political will is a straightforwardly plausible but not the only

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answer. Another important obstacle is our lack of insight into what a just response to climate change would actually look like. Climate change presents us with questions that our moral intuitions, our historically developed moral traditions, and our existing moral theories are not well equipped to deal with (Gardiner, 2011). First of all, climate change is about justice across large stretches of time since the effects of greenhouse gas emissions extend far into the future. Second, climate change is about justice on a truly global scale: Each individual is a tiny fraction of the global cause of climate change, and each individual across the globe feels its effects – with the additional twist that while both cause and effect are spread out globally, they are so very unequally. Third, there are large scientific uncertainties about precisely how costly or catastrophic climate change will be. Fourth, as humans comprehensively affect the face of the earth, our relationship to nature is fundamentally altered. Thus, the overall picture that emerges amounts to a genuine challenge to our conventional approaches to moral issues. This chapter helps to structure this challenge and to present potential answers to a number of open questions. The second section provides the necessary groundwork: Which benefits and burdens are at stake in climate justice, and how should we answer questions of justice with respect to these benefits and burdens? The third section asks what the present generation owes future generations. The fourth section asks how benefits and burdens should be split up among the present generation. The fifth section discusses how decision-making about implementing a just solution is itself a matter of justice and the last section concludes. This chapter is primarily (but not exclusively) about questions of justice in a narrow sense, where justice is understood to be about what humans owe each other. Ethics in a broader sense subsumes questions of justice but also covers further reasons for climate action such as compassion for the suffering, the goal of increasing aggregate welfare, the rights and interests of animals, concern for biodiversity, respect for nature as a divine gift or as divine itself, as well as climate action as a manifestation of green virtues – in each case regardless of whether there is an individual human to whom such action is owed. Duties toward animals, in particular, would merit more attention than the space of this chapter allows. While the policy implications of giving more serious attention to animals converge to a significant extent with the policy implications of reducing injustice toward future generations, they also come apart at many points. For example, humans can adapt more flexibly to climatic changes than animals and have the option of planning ahead of expected changes. This implies that the optimal mix between mitigation and adaptation would tilt more toward the former if we took the rights of animals seriously (Nolt, 2011). Also, on a less general level, the choice of specific mitigation and adaptation methods and projects can have very divergent impacts on animals. Besides the various ethical reasons for climate action, it is also possible to argue for some extent of climate action on the basis of self-interest. The appeal to self-interest, possibly extended to include a concern for one’s direct descendants to whom one feels an attachment, is very common in rhetoric attempting to generate public motivation. However, it only takes us so far. Due to the temporal and spatial dispersion of the effect of greenhouse gas emissions, a consistently self-interested approach is less

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powerful for grounding climate action than often hoped for (for a contrasting view, see Green, 2015).

The Building Blocks of Climate Justice The big picture story about climate justice goes as follows: People benefit from various more or less essential economic activities, such as heating a home, flying a plane, or eating cheese. Given current production technologies, the consumption of these goods comes with the side effect of greenhouse gas emissions. These emissions increase the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases. This increased concentration causes climate change over the coming decades and centuries. Climate change, in turn, harms people via heat waves, diseases, flooding, etc., which in addition, has follow-on effects in terms of conflicts, migration, etc. These climate impacts reduce welfare. Therefore, the emissions responsible for these impacts must be limited. Since the economic activities of which the emissions are a side effect yield welfare, the effort to limit these emissions comes with sacrifices. Therefore, this effort must be fairly distributed. Figure 1 represents this situation graphically. There are a number of complicating factors, however, in particular the fact that not only activities (at the beginning of the causal chain) and climate impacts (at the end of the causal chain) affect welfare. Rather, there are direct welfare effects from various intermediate steps, too. Starting from left to right in the figure: First, the link between economic activity and emissions is not a given. Rather, it depends on which technology we use to produce goods and which goods we choose to consume. Providing heat with the help of nuclear power instead of fossil fuels or providing nutrition by growing plants instead of animals produces fewer emissions. However, inventing and deploying low-carbon technologies is often costly and thus reduces welfare (at least in the short term). Second, using low-carbon technologies has a number of additional side effects, both good and bad, such as air pollution, energy security, etc. Third, given how even emission reduction policies that are maximally

Fig.1 The building blocks of climate justice

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ambitious (given current political will) do not keep us within minimally safe bounds, quite some attention has turned toward Carbon Dioxide Removal methods, such as Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Sequestration and afforestation. This breaks the link between emission of greenhouse gases and the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases. Fourth, there are suggestions for trying to affect the link between atmospheric concentration and certain aspects of climate change by engaging in Solar Radiation Management. Carbon Dioxide Removal and Solar Radiation Management come with both the cost of inventing and deploying such technologies and the cost of additional (in particular small probability, high impact) risks. (Note that terminology is unclear. Carbon Dioxide Removal can also go under the heading of Negative Emission Technologies. Also, (parts of) Carbon Dioxide Removal and Solar Radiation Management often jointly go under the label of geoengineering or climate engineering. In addition, mitigation is often taken to include (at least parts of) Carbon Dioxide Removal (cf. Heyward, 2013; IPCC, 2014a). For views that put into question listing geoengineering in a way that makes it look like a legitimate solution among various alternatives (see for example Gardiner (2010), Hamilton (2013), or Preston (2011).) Fifth, by adapting to climate change, negative climate impacts can be reduced (or, in some cases, beneficial impacts can be enhanced). Such adaptation policies also come with additional negative and positive side effects. At the end of the chain, we find the climate impacts which remain as a residual after adaptation. Depending on the definition at hand, parts or all of these impacts can go under the label of Loss and Damage. Speaking crudely of distributing various “benefits” and “burdens,” or also “goods,” “bads,” or “costs” is purely for simplicity’s sake. Reality is more complex. First, in reality, it is not only about carrying certain costs in the form of personally performing certain actions such as personally carrying out technological research, personally adapting to climate change, personally reducing consumption, or personally suffering climate impacts. It is just as much about carrying a burden in the form of paying others for doing so, for example, paying them for engaging in research or providing them with financial compensation for the impacts they suffered. Second, it is not just about having certain benefits or burdens but also about having the right to certain benefits or the duty to carry certain burdens, for example, the right to emit a certain amount of emissions or the duty to reduce emissions by a certain amount. Third, the concepts of economic activity and welfare are just two options – and questionable options – for describing the value of the benefits and burdens in question. This language, while general, can be misleading since what I described as “economic activity” is for many people about much more serious goods than consuming a further slice of fine cheese. It is about developing so as to escape poverty or about keeping up health in the face of climate-induced heat waves. Economic activity and welfare are economic concepts for referring to goods that are instrumentally and intrinsically valuable, respectively. But one can, of course, suggest other currencies than consumption and welfare to be used in a theory of climate justice. For example, one could argue that the intrinsically valuable good to be distributed fairly is not welfare but a list of basic capabilities, such as life, bodily health, being able to belong to a community, etc. Some would also argue that a just

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distribution must not only be determined for intrinsically valuable goods (such as welfare or capabilities) but also for instrumentally valuable goods, such as emission rights. The debate about the goods for which a just distribution must be determined (welfare, capabilities, emission rights, etc.) is confusing because it is often conflated with the debate about which measures to use as proxies for these goods. Thus, GDP losses due to climate change are often used as a proxy for measuring welfare losses, carbon dioxide emissions are often used as a proxy for levels of all greenhouse gas emissions, and acceptable atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases (such as 350 ppm) and temperature increase (such as the two degrees goal) often serve as a proxy for the acceptable extent of climate change. Summing up, climate justice is about justly distributing the following benefits and burdens (and the increases or decreases that they yield in terms of welfare, capabilities, or whatever intrinsically valuable good one chooses to focus on): economic activity, technological progress, emissions, Carbon Dioxide Removals, Solar Radiation Management, adaptation, residual climate impacts. More precisely, it is not just about justly distributing these benefits and burdens themselves but also about payments for these benefits and burdens and rights and duties with respect to these benefits and burdens. (Note that this taxonomy leaves out factors that cannot be conceived of in terms of benefits and burdens. For example, climate justice requires that the wrongfully harmed victims not only receive material compensation by the perpetrators but also an acknowledgment of the harm done (see for example Thompson & Otto, 2015) or even a public apology for it.) Given the huge diversity of benefits and burdens at stake, one important question is whether we should develop a theory of justice for each of these benefits and burdens separately or whether we should develop a theory of justice for them jointly. For example, should we discuss justice in adaptation and justice in mitigation separately? More precisely: Should the answer to the one be sensitive to the answer of the other? This is the question – as Simon Caney (2012) has captured it – of atomism vs. holism. He also brings up an even more fundamental question, the question of isolationism vs. integrationism: Should climate justice as a whole be singled out for separate treatment among broader questions of justice? Or should the benefits and burdens at stake in climate action be lumped together with all other benefits and burdens that are stake in global and intergenerational justice more broadly? Even though climate change is so thoroughly interwoven with all aspects of life that disentangling might seem difficult, the former – i.e., considering the just distribution of climate-related benefits and burdens to be insensitive to justice in trade, health, aid flows, etc. – is the implicit stance of many climate justice proposals. For example, the idea of equal per capita emission rights or the polluter pays principle (in the sense that one should make up for the harm caused by one’s emissions) both distribute rights and burdens relating to an individual’s emissions independently of how that individual fares otherwise. However, given that theories of justice are usually about the distribution of a fairly small number of benefits and burdens of a general character (such as welfare, voting rights, education, etc.) and given that many of the climate-related benefits and burdens are substitutable in yielding these benefits and burdens of a general character, the integrationist approach

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is the more plausible starting point. In addition, Caney (2012) forcefully argues against potential arguments for treating climate-related benefits and burdens in isolation anyway. Thus, climate justice is best thought of as justice regarding a range of climate-related benefits and burdens, which should be treated in conjunction with justice in other domains.

Intergenerational Justice How much climate action should the present generation pursue given its duties of intergenerational justice? Economic activities such as heating homes, flying planes, or eating cheese yield benefits now but – via slow changes in the atmosphere – harms later. The choice of emission reduction levels, thus, amounts to a straightforward trade-off between benefits for the present and future generations. In a stylized fashion, the following four answers can be distinguished: We owe it to future generations that they are better off than we are, equally well off, sufficiently well off, or we owe them nothing at all. What speaks for the first position, i.e., that our descendants should be better off than we are? The first major international conference on the environment in 1972 spoke not only of an imperative to protect the environment but to improve it. One theory that supports making the world a better place over time – not only as a supererogatory action but as a genuine duty – is utilitarianism. Utilitarianism calls for maximizing welfare across time and space. And since foregoing welfare in the present – for the sake of climate action or for the sake of other productive futureoriented investments – usually comes with smaller costs in the present than benefits in the future, utilitarianism calls for large future-oriented investments in the present. In response to this implausible demand for strong self-sacrifice of the present generation, one could amend utilitarianism with a so-called discount factor. A discount factor gives less weight to future welfare than to present welfare. (To be precise, in this paragraph I have in mind in this paragraph a positive, pure discount factor, i.e., a discount factor that applies to welfare rather than consumption and one that gives less rather than more weight to future benefits.) When utilitarianism is amended by a discount factor, it still calls for maximization across time and space, but in doing so, it gives less weight to welfare that accrues in the future. This approach underlies much policy advice of climate economics. Much then depends on the choice of the discount factor: Giving little weight to future generations translates into calling for little climate action and vice versa. However, it is a questionable strategy to salvage utilitarianism by amending it by a discount factor. After all, it is very hard to find reasons why future generations should count for less than present generations. It is more plausible to give up the utilitarian idea of maximizing welfare across time and space and rather to insist that both present and future generations have certain rights which should be immune to trade-offs, even when such trade-offs come with net benefits. The right of future generations could, for example, consist in the right to be at least equally well off as the present generation or in the right to be sufficiently well

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off. The latter standard does not rely on a comparison with how the present fares. It simply demands that some sufficiency threshold be reached. This threshold could be spelt out in various ways. For example, it could mean that we create a future which allows people to enjoy their human rights. Human rights – such as the rights to life, health, subsistence and the benefits of culture – are thwarted by climate change (see, e.g., Humphreys, 2010). Or, in line with the most famous definition of sustainable development (United Nations General Assembly, 1987), sufficiency could mean that future generations have the ability to meet their needs. In line with the wording employed in article 2 of the UNFCCC, it could also mean that we reach the threshold of preventing “dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” One might think that calling for future generations to be at least equally or sufficiently well off is not a very demanding standard. After all, recent decades have seen an upward trend in living standards and a downward trend in poverty numbers (United Nations, 2015; Van Zanden et al., 2014). The models of climate economics assume this trend to continue into the future and our descendants to be much better off than we are, even after subtracting the losses due to climate change (for example Schelling, 1997). There are two reasons, however, why intergenerational justice still calls for strong climate action despite expected growth in living standards. The first reason is inequality within future generations, which is reinforced by the greater vulnerability of the poor to climate change. Thus, the fact that average living standards are expected to be higher in the future than in the present does not necessarily provide a justification for the rich in the present to refrain from protecting the poor in the future from climate change. The second reason why rising living standards do not absolve us from a duty to take action on climate change is uncertainty about the extent of climate change. Climate change could be worse than expected or it could be better than expected. But the two do not cancel each other out – and therefore it is wrong to take action on the assumption that the central estimate will materialize. An insight along these lines is what animates calls for a Precautionary Principle. But why is it that the prospects of things going worse or better than expected do not cancel each other out? First, there are nonlinearities in the climate system (the extreme case of which are tipping points). Assume that the central estimate of warming is 3  C and that there is an even chance of going a degree Celsius above or below the central estimate. If the harmful impacts of climate change rise much less when going from 2  C to 3  C than they rise when going from 3  C to 4  C, then relying on the assumption that the central estimate will materialize is misleading. Second, there are nonlinearities in the moral system, so to speak. Assume, for the sake of argument, that future generations have a right to be equally well off as the present generation. If someone has a moral right, however, a chance of giving that person more than she is owed and a chance of giving her less than she is owed do not cancel each other out. Rather, if someone has a moral right, then the risk of infringing that right must be kept tolerably low. What counts as a tolerable risk is a difficult matter, but a 50% chance of infringing the right is definitely too high. Third, many would characterize the far future as a case of uncertainty rather than risk. This means that it is not really feasible to ascribe probabilities to various possible future states (including a probability of more than

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50% to the future being better off than the present). If there really are no probabilities to go on, some claim that our choice of policies should be guided by making the worst possible outcome as tolerable as possible (for example, Gardiner, 2006). This guide which goes under the label of maximin speaks for slowing down climate change even if this simultaneously means slowing down economic growth. Thus, the fact that there is inequality in the future and that there is uncertainty about the future means that we cannot just count on rising living standards to bring about intergenerational justice automatically. There are, however, further and more radical attempts at undermining any duties of climate justice toward future generations. For one, this is the denial that humans affect the climate. This is an empirical issue (on which the science has spoken clearly (IPCC, 2014a)). Insofar as there are moral questions regarding this issue, they are not about the empirical issue itself, but rather about the communicative responsibilities of scientists and a morally correct approach to lobbyists and journalists who spread disagreement with the scientific mainstream and who do so in bad faith. Less radically, one could agree that humans affect the climate but deny that they affect it in a bad way. However, even if the negative effects of climate change would not outweigh the positive effects (as they, in fact, do as is evidenced by the fact that estimates for the Social Cost of Carbon are predominantly positive (Havranek et al., 2015)), this would still not be a decisive issue. After all, the benefits for some – say, industrial farmers in Canada – cannot (or at least not straightforwardly) justify harms to others – say, subsistence farmers in Cameroon. On a more philosophical level, one could also try to radically undermine any duties of climate justice to future generations by putting into question duties to future generations in general. This might be done by claiming that duties of justice only hold between people who stand in certain specific relationships, such as the relationship of engaging in mutually beneficial cooperation, co-citizenship, etc. However, such relationship-based theories of justice lose their plausibility if they deny even minimal duties outside of the specified relationships. And, even if they did deny even minimal non-relationship-based duties, some duties toward future generations could still be justified on the basis of certain types of relationships, in fact, holding between (in particular adjacent) generations (e.g., Howarth, 1992). Another radical philosophical worry about duties toward future generations is grounded in the nonidentity problem. Pursuing ambitious climate policies not only makes future generations better off but it also has a second effect. In the long run, the world would be so much altered by pursuing ambitious climate policies that future generations would be composed of different individuals compared to a scenario in which weak climate policy is pursued. Thus, any specific person in the distant future who suffers from climate change cannot truly claim that she would be better off had a more ambitious policy been pursued. Rather, someone else would have been born and that other person would be better off. The nonidentity problem is a fundamental challenge to whole classes of moral theories and there is a lively debate about its relevance and solutions to it (see, for example, Roberts, 2015). Summing up it can be said that while it is difficult to argue that we owe a better future to our descendants, even less demanding theories – which only call for

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equality or sufficiency – justify significant climate action. This is so because the rights of our descendants have to be protected robustly, i.e., even for those at the bottom of an unequal income scale and even if climate change turns out to be worse than expected. Note, however, that the fact that we owe something to our descendants does not yet determine which specific goods we owe them. In climate debates, the initial presumption is that we owe them a stable climate which we achieve by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. One could, however, argue that we ought instead to bequeath the resources and knowledge for adapting to climate change and for engaging in climate engineering. Still more radically, one could argue that we just have to bequeath sufficient economic growth as an all-purpose good to our descendants rather than climate-related goods such as mitigation or adaptation. In fact, however, these alternatives to mitigation (adaptation, geoengineering, and economic growth in general) do not seem justifiable as sole bequests for our descendants. Given expectations about the continued rise of living standards, it is difficult to argue that the present generation is bequeathing too little as far as all-purpose goods are concerned. To the contrary, we might bequeath a larger basket of such goods to our descendants than we owe them. We are failing our descendants in a very specific respect: The basket that we pass on to them includes significant downside risks related to the uncertain development of climate change. By increasing adaptation investments or increasing economic growth, we do not diminish these risks sufficiently. Research into climate engineering is even worse since it is risky both in the sense that the research might not provide the hoped-for results and, additionally, provide us with new risks. As some (most prominently Broome, 2010) have pointed out, the present generation could even do better for future generations at no costs to itself if it engaged in more mitigation of climate change but “compensated” itself for doing so by reducing other long-term investments that benefit its descendants.

Intragenerational Justice Intergenerational justice requires that we strongly reduce emissions. But who among the present generation must take on how much of this effort? And how must the effort to develop the technology for future emission reductions be split up? And who must respond to the climate impacts that are already visible across the globe? These are the major questions of justice among contemporaries that climate change presents us with. Article 3.1 of the UNFCCC outlines an answer to these questions: The parties to the convention should protect the climate system “on the basis of equity and in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities. Accordingly, the developed country Parties should take the lead in combating climate change and the adverse effects thereof.” However, this leaves a lot to interpretation. In this section, we look at ways to specify the general call of the UNFCCC by examining a number of intragenerational justice principles for climate action. (Note that there is a difference among the various principles: Grandfathering and the Equal per Capita Principle are more specific to the climate context than the

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Ability to Pay Principle, the Polluter Pays Principle, and the Beneficiary Pays Principle. The latter are more general and reflect fundamental moral principles more directly.) It should be noted that the different principles are often about different benefits and burdens: While some prescribe a certain distribution of emission rights (or, conversely, of duties to reduce emissions), others are about distributing the level of effort to promote mitigation, while still others ground duties to compensate those who suffer from climate impacts. Thus, they are only partly alternatives. Partly, they also complement each other. Most principles can, in principle, be applied to both individuals and nation-states (as well as to further agents such as companies, subnational polities, professions, or civil society groups). If one is committed to normative individualism, the application to nation-states is very crude, however, since there are significant differences within nations regarding the extent of affectedness by climate change, the contribution to climate change, and the ability to pay for solutions. These differences also include gender differences which are less often highlighted. Grandfathering. A first principle of intragenerational justice in climate change is Grandfathering. In a narrow understanding, it calls on everyone to cut emissions by the same percentage (or by the same absolute amount). Since this allows past high emitters to continue emitting more than others in the future, Grandfathering carries over past inequalities into the future. There could be extensions of the principle which share the idea that the bill for meeting the climate challenge should in some sense be split equally. For example, all nations could be called upon to make an equal sacrifice, say, in terms of loss of GDP growth or in terms of contributions per capita for adaptation funding. (Depending on how this is spelled out, the principle can resemble the Ability to Pay Principle.) The principle’s political relevance is largely due to the fact that it aligns better with the interests of powerful high emitters rather than any moral considerations that would speak in its favor. It could be said – in analogy with entitlements to land – that continued use of the atmosphere by high emitters in the past created an entitlement which allows for continued high use in the future; or, such an entitlement could be based on a legitimately acquired expectation of high emitters to be able to continue their emission-intensive lifestyle. Both arguments are dubious (Meyer & Roser, 2006), and if there is anything to be said in favor of Grandfathering, it might need to be restricted to a transitional principle whose purpose is to avoid overly abrupt and harmful interventions in the current global economic structure. Equal per Capita Emissions. The Principle of Equal per Capita Emissions demands that every human is granted the same share of the total amount of emissions that can safely be emitted. This allowance could be tradable or nontradable. A first point to note is the principle’s restricted scope: It determines how emissions ought to be distributed, but it remains quiet regarding other climate-related benefits and burdens. Since greenhouse gas emissions do not only have to be reduced to a fairly low global total (which could then be split upon an equal basis) but need to reach net-zero (IPCC, 2014a, p. 19), splitting up remaining permits to emit does not seem to be the most relevant issue of justice anymore. In particular, the Equal per Capita Principle remains silent regarding such crucial burdens and benefits as the necessary investments in research, development, and diffusion of technological innovations to

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achieve complete decarbonization, regarding a just transition of the labor force employed in carbon-intensive sectors, regarding a fair response to the owners of stranded assets in the fossil fuel sector, and – of particular importance to the least developing countries (Abeysinghe & Huq, 2016) – regarding the costs for dealing with unmitigated climate change (i.e., adaptation and compensation). The Equal per Capita Principle can be based on the claim that the atmosphere equally belongs to everybody (or, alternatively, but also symmetrically, to no one at all). However, it does not obviously follow from equal ownership (which can be questioned itself) that there should be equal rights of use to dump emissions in it. Other considerations should also affect who may use the atmosphere to what extent: first, different people have different needs. For example, people in cool countries need to heat more than people in countries with a mild climate, and people in poor countries more urgently need economic growth than people in rich countries (see Subsistence Exemptions below). Second, some have already dumped more emissions into the atmosphere than others (see Historical Responsibility below). Should they not receive a lower share of emissions than others? A positive answer to this question can either be seen as a rejection of the Equal per Capita Principle or else as an application of the Equal per Capita Principle to cumulative emissions over time (rather than to emission levels at each future point in time). Third, why should we distribute emission rights into the atmosphere in isolation from other burdens and benefits? If we are interested in equality, we might as well argue for equality for the use of all natural resources jointly such that those who use up less of other resources can justifiably use more of the atmosphere, and vice versa (Caney, 2012). Thus, the equal per capita principle faces objections. Polluter Pays Principle and Historical Responsibility. The Polluter Pays Principle – or, more precisely, the class of principles that go under this heading – demands that those with high emissions take on some cost in return for the burdens imposed by their emissions. This is just the opposite of Grandfathering, which takes high past emissions as a basis for a relative advantage in the future, rather than a relative disadvantage. Versions of the Polluter Pays Principle differ from each other on four different dimensions. First, the principle can apply to future emissions (for example, in the form of a carbon price such that those who pollute more have to pay more) or to past emissions (in which case it is often referred to as the principle of Historical Responsibility). Second, the principle can demand that emitters must pay without implying that these payments must benefit the polluted. It can also demand that the emitters must pay in the form of compensating those who suffer from the effects of the emissions, for example by taking over the adaptation costs that have become necessary due to the emissions or by compensating for the Loss and Damage which occurs despite adaptation efforts. A still further option is for the principle to demand that past high emitters pay in a specific form: by using up a smaller emission budget in the present. Note that in neither of these three forms, the principle determines what counts as fair shares of emissions. It only says that one must pay for emissions (which could either mean that one must pay for all emissions or for emissions that exceed the fair share – but even in the latter case, it presupposes an answer to the question what constitutes fair shares of emissions rather than providing it). Third, the principle splits up into different versions

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depending on whether it identifies the responsibility for emissions on which a duty to pay is based as causal responsibility, moral responsibility, or on a still different notion of responsibility. Also, it needs to be determined who counts as responsible for emissions according to these different notions of responsibility. For example, are a carbon-intensive good’s producers or consumers (who create the demand for the good in the first place) causally responsible for the emissions associated with the good? Are stockholders of fossil fuel companies morally responsible for the associated emissions? Can I be responsible for the harm caused by my emissions if it is known that my emissions expectedly cause harm but if it is not possible to say where and when exactly the causal chain starting from my emissions ends in a specific harm? Fourth, and related to previous distinctions, the polluter pays principle can be seen as calling for either a fee or a fine. In the case of the former, the payments of the polluters are considered to justify the emissions in question. In the case of the latter, emissions are considered a wrong, and any payment ex post does not right this wrong but is rather justified as compensation (or even punishment) which the victim is owed due to the wrong. In debates about Loss and Damage as well as in the ever more prominent climate litigation, the latter interpretation – compensation as a response to a wrong – is an important interpretation. There are a number of rationales for the polluter pays principle. A first rationale is the incentives it provides to reduce emissions. A second and less obvious rationale applies under the assumption that polluters draw a benefit from emitting in roughly equal size to the harm that the polluted suffer. In that case, it can be seen as a crude egalitarian tool for evening out advantages and disadvantages. The third justification for the polluter pays principle is that it embodies the idea that one should take responsibility for one’s actions. In particular, one should compensate others if one harms them. The application of this basic moral idea to the case of climate change has some limitations, however: First, insofar as present climate impacts go back to the emissions of people who are no longer alive, the idea of personal responsibility has no traction. One might, however, try to salvage the idea by relying on the claim that present citizens of a state can be held responsible for the outcomes of some of its past citizens’ actions. A second limitation is the fact that one is hardly morally responsible for outcomes of one’s actions of which one was not aware and was not liable to be aware. Given that the harmful effects of greenhouse gas emissions have only been widely known since some time, this limits moral responsibility for emissions in the distant past. This effect should not be overestimated, however. After all, there were attempts even before the twentieth century to estimate the warming effect of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and Lyndon B. Johnson warned congress already in 1965 about the steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels. But even if one relied believed ignorance to provide an excuse until as late as 1990 (when the first IPCC report appeared), a significant fraction of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions since the start of industrialization would still be covered. (If we only take into account emissions until 2010, then half of cumulative anthropogenic CO2 emissions between 1750 and 2010 have occurred between 1970 and 2010 (2014b, p. 7).) Within those constraints, however, i.e., with respect to recent and future emissions, the polluter pays principle is one of the most straightforwardly justified principles.

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Beneficiary Pays Principle. The two limitations of the Polluter Pays Principle – some emissions go back to people who are now dead or who were (excusably) ignorant about the emissions’ effects – point to a modification of the principle. Rather than asking polluters to pay, we could ask the beneficiaries of the polluting activities to pay. After all, the beneficiaries of the activities that led to emissions in the past are still alive and they are benefiting regardless of whether past emitters knew about the harmfulness of their actions or not. In practical terms, the Beneficiary Pays Principle means that those who reap disproportionately much prosperity from past fossil-fuel-based industrialization must make up for the side-effects of the cause of their prosperity. However, the Beneficiary Pays Principle rests on a shakier foundation than it seems at first sight. After all, it is not obvious why involuntarily receiving benefits should come with strings attached. Why should one incur a duty to make up for the harms generated as a side-effect of bringing about the benefits one has received but has not asked for? The Beneficiary Pays Principle could avoid resting on this dubious foundation: Instead of relying on the rationale that the beneficiary has to make up for the harm associated with her benefits, the principle could rely on a simpler rationale: that the benefits of past industrialization must be fairly shared. If people in industrialized countries already have a disproportionately large share of the benefits of fossil-fuel-based industrialization, and if fossil-fuel-based industrialization must now be limited due to its harmful side effects, it should now be the turn of people in developing countries to have a disproportionately large slice of the cake, so to speak. However, this simpler rationale raises the question of why it is specifically the benefits of fossil-fuel-based industrialization that must be fairly shared on a global scale. Should we not more generally share resources, opportunities, and wealth fairly on a global scale? An affirmative answer to this question is the rationale for the next principle. Ability to Pay Principle and Subsistence Exemptions. The Ability to Pay Principle is a broadly applicable principle for any climate-related burdens: It simply says that those who have the “ability to pay” should shoulder the burdens of mitigation, adaptation, etc. The idea is not that the rich must pay on the basis of having done something wrong. Rather, it is the sheer ownership of the means to solve the problem that generates the duty. The expression “ability to pay” can, for example, refer to command over financial resources, technological know-how, or effective political institutions. When the Ability to Pay Principle is applied to those at the bottom, it calls for Subsistence Exemptions: Not only should the well-off pay but also do those below some subsistence threshold have no duty to do so. This could translate into the demand that nobody should be denied the emissions necessary for escaping poverty or, similarly, it could translate into a focus on development rights: Nobody’s development should be stymied by climate policy. Subsistence exemptions do not mean that people in poverty have no responsibilities at all: They still have the duty to carry out projects which are financed by others, they still have the duty to be a cooperative partner in international negotiations, they still have the duty to share the necessary data etc. But they do not have a duty to sacrifice the flight from poverty as long as others have the means for solving climate change. Subsistence Exemptions may well be the least questionable principle in global climate justice, not least because they can be defended on the basis of the human

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rights to an adequate standard of living and to development. The Ability to Pay Principle more generally stands on an almost similarly firm footing, at least for cosmopolitan theorists who believe that even strong principles of justice have a global reach. The Ability to Pay Principle can be supported in various ways: For one, it can be based on the idea that a large fraction of the prosperity of the well-off is held by luck. Neither did the well-off do much to deserve it – primarily, they were just born at the right place at the right time – nor did they necessarily do anything wrong to acquire it. If one believes in the case for evening out undeserved differences in living standards, then having the well-off pick up the bill for climate change is a step in the right direction. Another argument for the Ability to Pay Principle rests on two premises: First, on the premise that a given amount of costs translates into a smaller sacrifice in terms of welfare for the rich than for the poor and, second, on the consequentialist premise that we should choose smaller sacrifices in terms of welfare over larger sacrifices, regardless of who has to bear these sacrifices. One counterargument to the Ability to Pay Principle is that it disregards responsibility for causing the problem of climate change. Thus, two equally well off nations would have to pay equally much even if one of them had made a much greater effort to develop in a clean way and consequently had contributed much less to climate change. However, as we have seen in the discussion of the Polluter Pays Principle, it is difficult to base a complete approach to climate justice on the idea of responsibility anyway. This is in particular so, first, because the harm caused by dead polluters and excusably ignorant polluters is not plausibly covered by the Polluter Pays Principle, and, second, because the Polluter Pays Principle does not by itself determine to what extent it is justifiable to emit greenhouse gases or how much effort one must make to facilitate future global mitigation. Thus, the Polluter Pays Principle leaves gaps in a theory of climate justice and the Ability to Pay Principle is first in line to complement it. Summing up, there is a wide array of principles for distributing the various climate-related benefits and burdens. There are three principles that face more extensive objections: Grandfathering, the Beneficiary Pays Principle, and the Equal per Capita Principle. In contrast, the Polluter Pays Principle and the Ability to Pay Principle fare better. However, the Polluter Pays Principle faces limitations and it can hardly be a basis for distributing all the burdens of climate change. The Ability to Pay Principle provides a compelling way to fill its gaps or to partly replace it. This applies particularly forcefully to Subsistence Exemptions which should take priority ahead of other principles: The application of no principle should block or stymie development, at least as long as others could take up the costs. Note that in practice, support for one of the principles may well be disguised support for another principle. This is so because a country’s wealth, past emissions, present emissions, necessary emission reductions to achieve equal per capita emissions, and benefits from past emissions correlate with each other. Therefore, the various principles often arrive at similar conclusions (in particular the conclusion that developed countries must make a greater effort) and they can in practice work as proxies for each other. Still, it is important to distinguish them, first, because the conclusions are only similar to a certain extent, and, second, because the rationale for

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a certain distribution of burdens and benefits matters independently. For example, it matters to global relationships whether climate action by industrialized countries is based on an acknowledgment of wrongdoing, on a commitment to global equality, or on supererogatory compassion with the poor.

Implementing Climate Justice The previous sections discussed the contours of a just outcome in climate action. But who has the duty to implement this just outcome? And what if people disagree about which outcome ought to be implemented – whose view ought to be decisive in that case? The first issue – who has the duty to bring about climate justice – encompasses the question to what extent individuals have a duty to voluntarily take action on climate change, even in the absence of being forced or incentivized to do so by collective decisions. (Besides the question of individual responsibility there is also the related question of the responsibility of private associations, in particular businesses.) There are a lot of dubious arguments against such individual responsibility, first among them is the claim that individual action is not effective. However, given that the aggregate of individual emissions expectedly causes great harm, it would need a sophisticated argument to show that individual emission reductions expectedly make no difference when looked at in isolation. While there are some arguments to this effect – for example, the case of carbon leakage where emission reductions by some lead to emission increases by others – it is hard to make these arguments strong enough to support radical claims about the inefficacy of individual emission reductions (see for example Fragnière, 2016). Also, there are arguments for individual responsibility (based on virtue, for example) which are independent of individual emission reductions being effective. If one wants to argue against an individual duty to reduce emissions, the more promising strategy is to focus on the fairness of doing so rather than the efficacy. Going ahead with a green lifestyle while others shirk is indeed unfair. Such unfairness, however, at most weakens – rather than completely undermines – a duty to take unilateral climate action. After all, refraining from any climate action due to the shirking of others would merely shift the burden to the victims of the resulting climate change. The unfairness of unilateral action does bring up the question whether the state ought to enforce everyone’s fair share of climate action. Since coercive state action is generally justified in order to protect rights and since climate change expectedly violates the rights of present and future persons around the globe, political action is indeed appropriate. (Of course, not all climate action by the state is coercive, at least not in a narrow sense. Market mechanisms work by incentives and there are also education, information, and motivation campaigns. It should also be noted that the choice of policy instruments brings with it a host of issues which cannot be discussed in the space of this chapter. For an examination of instruments such as market mechanisms, population policy, a simpler lifestyle, etc., see Roser & Seidel (2017).) As a side benefit, collectively enforced action also reduces the necessary effort to achieve the goal. For example, it

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provides coordination for the otherwise dispersed effort, it can employ efficiencyenhancing market mechanisms, and it spares the individuals from constantly having to voluntarily bring up the necessary willpower. Thus, climate justice ought not merely to be implemented through individual voluntary action but also be legally enforced. The traditional site for coercive action has been the nation-state. However, the nation-state is an inadequate tool for responding to climate change. After all, emissions know no borders. Also, traditional politics has been oriented toward the short-term, whereas emissions have effects over centuries. This points to the importance of institutional innovation: political decision-making procedures with a global and long-term scope must be strengthened at the expense of the narrow and short-termist focus of the traditional nation-state. Creating new decision-making procedures is no easy feat, however, and it must be done with two criteria in mind. First, decision-making procedures ought to be effective in delivering just outcomes and, second, they also ought to be just themselves. The second criterion means that decision-making procedures must be democratic and inclusive, in particular by allowing all who are bound to obey the decisions to have an equal say in arriving at the decisions, by allowing all who are affected by the decision to have a voice to make their concerns heard, and by making transparent information about the various policy options widely available. There is a worry that the two criteria for designing more global and long-term political institutions – i.e., that they must both deliver justice and also be just in themselves – are at odds with each other. In particular, there is the worry that democratic institutions are a paralyzing obstacle for swift and comprehensive climate action. However, the empirical evidence does not indicate that democratic regimes do worse in the field environmental policies than more authoritarian regimes (Burnell, 2012, p. 823ff.). Some means for strengthening more global and long-term political institutions and doing so in accordance with the two criteria of justice include (see Roser & Seidel, 2017): shifting from the requirement of unanimity in climate negotiations to a majority voting principle, enhancing accountability and legally binding elements of agreements, capacity-building for climate negotiators from less well-resourced countries, giving voice to underrepresented groups – such as indigenous peoples – in climate negotiations (for example through a careful strengthening of civil society), using more long-term performance indicators for assessing political outcomes, instituting committees for the future at the UN and national level tasked with improving the visibility of long-term issues, or improving foresight capacities.

Conclusion Climate change raises some of today’s most weighty issues of justice. Even if we believed that intergenerational justice merely requires the protection of the basic needs and human rights of future generations, the fact that climate change disproportionately affects the poor and that there is uncertainty about how catastrophic it will be, means that we must reduce emissions ambitiously. The effort of doing so – and of addressing the climate change that happens despite mitigation efforts – must

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be shared on a global scale, most plausibly in line with the Polluter Pays Principle and the Ability to Pay Principle. This task requires current political institutions to adapt to the shape of the climate challenge, in particular to its intergenerational and global scale. This would not only be helpful for addressing climate change but also for addressing further novel risks and opportunities that the twenty-first century holds in store.

Cross-References ▶ Adaptation Duties ▶ Climate Change and Animal Ethics ▶ Climate Change and Decision Theory ▶ Climate Change and Democracy ▶ Climate Change and Distributive Justice ▶ Climate Change and Environmental Justice ▶ Climate Change and Gender ▶ Climate Change and Global Justice ▶ Climate Change and Human Rights ▶ Climate Change and Institutions for Future Generations: The Litigation Option ▶ Climate Change and Intergenerational Justice ▶ Climate Change and the Ethics of Technology ▶ Compensation Duties ▶ Mitigation Duties ▶ Responsibility for Climate Harms ▶ The Ethics of Geoengineering Acknowledgments Many thanks to Chris Armstrong, Michel Bourban, Ludovico Conti, Augustin Fragnière, Clare Heyward, Corey Katz, Luise Schudel, Hanna von Allmen, and Heinrich von Allmen.

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Climate Change and Global Justice Sarah Kenehan

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Justice-Relevant Facts of the Matter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Polluter Pays Principle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Beneficiaries Pay Principle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ability to Pay Principle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Equal Per Capita Distribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Protection of the Vulnerable: Future Generations and the Global Poor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Future Generations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Global Poor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sufficientarianism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Burden Sharing Vs. Harm Avoidance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Challenges to Achieving International Justice in the Context of Global Climate Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Challenge 1: Feasibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Challenge 2: Noncompliance, Free-Riding, and Additional Concerns of Justice . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

The problem of global climate change is a complex problem for several reasons, not the least of which is its international character. As such, questions of justice between nations arise in consideration of the distribution of the burdens associated with addressing the climate crisis. This chapter outlines some of the most prominent frameworks of global justice in the context of global climate change, and sketches some of the challenges that these proposals face.

S. Kenehan (*) The University of Scranton, Scranton, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_51

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Keywords

Global justice · International justice · Polluter pays principle · Beneficiaries pay principle · Ability to pay principle · Equal per capita shares · Global poor · Future generations · Harm avoidance · Feasibility · Burden sharing

Introduction In the 2018 report titled “Special Report: Global Warming of 1.5
C,” the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) delineates the potential climate change impacts on a world that has warmed 1.5
C or more beyond preindustrial levels. The outlook is grim: at an increase of 1.5
C, multitudes of natural and human systems are threatened, and the risk only increases as the temperatures rise (IPCC, 2018). Already, as a result of human activities, the Earth has warmed about 1
C, with predicted future warming to 1.5
C by as early as 2030 (ibid, p. 4). Concerted global efforts to tackle the problem of global climate change (GCC) began in the 1980s. Most recently, the Paris Climate Agreement has attempted to unify global actors toward the goal of limiting warming to 1.5
C to 2
C. But the IPCC reports that we have already used the majority of our allotted carbon budget toward the 1.5
C threshold (ibid, p. 12). As such, now, more than ever, the international community needs to commit to a formal agreement that lays out the road ahead, one that clearly delineates mitigation and adaptation responsibilities, as well as their respective timelines and funding mechanisms. One such way to think about these responsibilities is through the framework of global justice: What is the fair distribution among nations of the benefits and burdens associated with global climate change? Ideally, any global agreement that attempts to combat the problem will be rooted in concerns of justice, and agents party to the agreement will be motivated, at least in part, by their obligations of justice so understood. (It is important to note here that some theorists have warned against categorizing climate change as a problem of global justice. See, for instance: Jamieson & Di Paola, 2014.) Climate justice theorists have spent decades exploring and articulating the demands of global justice in the context of GCC. This chapter outlines some of the most prominent proposals, and then considers some of the difficulties that must be overcome if we are to achieve global justice in a warming world.

Justice-Relevant Facts of the Matter Before diving into the various understandings of global climate justice, it will be helpful to consider some justice-relevant facts of the matter, as these inform how theorists think about climate justice. Often, in efforts to determine responsibility (whether about climate change, or something more mundane, like who is responsible for cleaning the dinner dishes), we seek information about the agents in question that will inform our moral judgments.

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For instance, we often ask: Who was the actor? What did they know? When did they know it? Could they have acted differently? Who benefited, and who was harmed? Many of these questions (and other relevant queries) are easily answered in the context of climate change; others are subject to some debate. Here’s what we do know: • The impact of human activities on the climate has been understood since at least 1990, when the IPCC issued their first report. In it, they wrote: “. . .Increases in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases may lead to irreversible change in the climate. . .” (Working Group II, 1990, p. 1). And: “We are certain of the following: . . .emissions resulting from human activities are substantially increasing the atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide, methane, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and nitrous oxide. These increases will enhance the greenhouse effect, resulting on average in an additional warming of the Earth’s surface” (Working Group I, 1990, p. xi). • Developed countries, like the United States, countries in the EU, Japan, Canada, Russia, and many others, have contributed the most to the problem in terms of historical GHG emissions (Union of Concerned Scientists, 2020). The notable exceptions to this trend are China, which is the highest global emitter, and India, which is ranked third in emissions. Despite the enormity of these economies, they are still developing countries (ibid). • Importantly, though, if we convert these rankings to per capita emissions, China and India fall out of the top ten worst emitters. Put differently, per person, Americans, Australians, Saudi Arabians, and others are responsible for more GHG emissions than the average Chinese or Indian person (ibid). • By and large, the world’s poorest nations have contributed the least to the problem. For instance, in 2014, 34 of the worst-off nations in the world contributed less than 1% of total GHG emissions (Fuhr, 2019). • But, this trend is quickly changing. Recently, emerging economies have outpaced the developed nations in their emissions trends, increasing 63% between 1990 and 2017 (ibid). And while China and India a responsible for more than half this growth, the trend toward increasing emissions is reflected in most developing economies (ibid). • Those countries that are most responsible for the problem (i.e., the wealthy developed nations) have also garnered the most benefits by way of industrialization and development, and the goods, powers, and stability such processes afford. • Those countries who are least responsible for the problem are the most vulnerable to the deadly consequences of climate change and likewise lack the resources to adapt to it. The IPCC reports: “People who are socially, economically, culturally, politically, institutionally, or otherwise marginalized are especially vulnerable to climate change and also to some adaptation and mitigation responses (medium evidence, high agreement). This heightened vulnerability is rarely due to a single cause. Rather, it is the product of intersecting social processes that result in inequalities in socioeconomic status and income, as well as in exposure. Such social processes include, for example, discrimination on the basis of gender, class, ethnicity, age, and (dis)ability” (Working Group II, 2014, p. 6).

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• Addressing the climate crisis necessitates a global effort. This means that all nations must find ways to reduce their GHG emissions and must remain faithful to the reductions that they commit to. A failure to do so by even one nation may threaten the entire collective endeavor. Each framework of global justice in the context of global climate change discussed below takes these facts into consideration. While all converge on the general conclusion that the wealthy, developed nations must take the lead in addressing the problem, they may diverge on the level of responsibility, the role of developing nations in combatting the problem, and their justifications for the specific distributions of responsibility, among other things.

The Polluter Pays Principle The polluter pays principle (PPP)) simply states that whoever caused the problem is responsible for fixing it. Morally, this principle has a great deal of force, as it is a simple principle of fairness, and has been defended by various thinkers (e.g., Gosseries, 2004; Meyer & Roser, 2010; Shue, 1999; Singer, 2002). As Singer (2002) argues: “. . .to put it in terms a child could understand, as far as the atmosphere is concerned, the developed nations broke it. If we believe that people should contribute to fixing something in proportion to their responsibility for breaking it, then the developed nations owe it to the rest of the world to fix the problem with the atmosphere” (pp. 33–34). Or, in Shue’s (1999) words: “Those societies whose activities have damaged the atmosphere ought. . .to bear sufficiently unequal burdens henceforth to correct the inequality that they have imposed” (p. 105). However intuitive, there are some difficulties with the PPP. To begin, it is not clear how far back a nation should be held responsible for their emissions: should they be completely accountable, or should they be accountable only from the point at which they knew their actions were causing harm (see, e.g., Kenehan, 2017; Meyer & Sanklecha, 2017)? In addition, and perhaps most importantly, an application of the PPP ignores what many theorists and policymakers contend should be a fundamental goal of climate justice, namely that the global community act collectively to achieve future climate stability. In particular, because the vast majority of GHGs emitted since the Industrial Revolution come from only a few nations, and because most of the warming that we will experience over the course of the next several decades is because of those emissions, then an application of the PPP might exempt nations that are not historically responsible from engaging in mitigation efforts (Page, 2012).

Beneficiaries Pay Principle Some thinkers reject the polluter pays principle because they argue that it is unfair to hold the descendants of the polluters morally responsible for emissions that they themselves had no control over. And, if the original polluter is no longer alive, then it is unclear who is now responsible for the pollution (e.g., Caney, 2005; Neumayer,

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2000; Shue, 1999). Instead, some theorists argue that the beneficiaries pay principle (BPP) is a more appropriate principle of global justice in the context of climate change. This principle says: “where A has been made better off by a policy pursued by others, and the pursuit by others of that policy has contributed to the imposition of adverse effects on third parties, then A has an obligation not to pursue the policy itself (mitigation) and/or an obligation to address the harmful effects suffered by the third parties (adaptation)” (Caney, 2005, p. 756). Thus, instead of thinking about the distribution of climate burdens in terms of obligations of compensation like the PPP, the BPP is concerned with establishing remedial responsibility, i.e., the identification of an agent who is responsible for remedying a certain state of affairs (Miller, 2007, p. 98). There are lots of ways to determine remedial responsibility in the case of GCC, but the BPP does so by identifying beneficiaries and pointing out the relationship that these beneficiaries have to some harmful behavior. So, a simple application of the principle would state, then, that because (for example) Americans emitted great deals of GHGs during the Industrial Revolution, and because current generations of Americans have benefitted from those emissions by way of economic growth and stability, quality of life, and the like, then current generations of Americans have a responsibility to either (or both) transition from a fossil-based economy or pay for the costs of their fossil-based economy that are externalized to the rest of the world. Responsibilities can be attributed to beneficiaries via arguments that the beneficiaries were unjustly enriched as a result of the harmful (though perhaps not wrongful) behaviors of their ancestors (Heyd, 2017), that beneficiaries were wrongfully enriched as a result of the behavior of their ancestors (Page, 2012; Singer, 2002), or because to not pay for the benefits one has received constitutes free-riding (Gosseries, 2004). Though, like the PPP, the BPP is not without theoretical problems. Most critically, it may be argued that previous generations’ emissions cannot properly be construed as harmful or beneficial since they were a condition of existence of the current generation. That is, fossil-intensive policies pursued by our predecessors led to the existence of persons who would not have existed otherwise (Caney, 2005; Meyer & Roser, 2009; Parfit, 1984). Therefore, as Caney (2005) explains: We cannot say to people, ‘You ought to bear the burdens of climate change because without industrialization you would be much worse off than you currently are.’ We cannot because without industrialization, the ‘you’ to which the previous sentence refers would not exist. Industrialization has not brought advantages to these people that they would otherwise be without. And since it has not, we cannot say to them, ‘You should pay for these because your standard of living is higher than it would have been.’ For this reason the BPP is unable to show why member of industrialized countries should pay for the costs of the industrialization that was undertaken by previous generations. (p. 758)

Ability to Pay Principle If the PPP and BPP are unable to ground strong obligations of compensation or remedial responsibility in the case of GCC, then the natural next stop is the ability to pay principle (APP). This principle of global distributive justice states: “Among the number of parties, all of whom are bound to contribute to some common endeavor,

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the parties who have the most resources normally should contribute the most to the endeavor” (Shue, 1999, p. 537). Like the BPP, the APP also aims to establish remedial responsibility. And, in the context of GCC, this principle aligns with the intuitions that motivate the PPP and BPP: more often than not, those who are able to pay have benefitted from excessive emissions and they are also those who have historically done the most emitting. Some thinkers defend this principle as a basic principle of fairness (Shue, 1999, p. 537), and others assert that the simple fact that some nations can bear the costs of mitigation and adaptation means that they should (Caney, 2005, p. 769). However, it may be argued that the application of this principle has damaging disincentivizing effects: “Why should I take more risks, display more imagination, or expend more effort in order to gain resources if the result will only be that whenever something must be paid for, I will have to contribute not merely a larger absolute amount. . .but a larger percentage? I might as well not be productive if much of anything extra I produce will be taken away from me, leaving me little better off than those who produced far less” (Shue, 1999, p. 538). Additionally, while this principle may help in identifying who should bear the cost burdens of mitigation and adaptation, it does not help us to identify how much they should actually be responsible for. And finally, the APP does not attribute moral blame in the same way that the PPP and the BPP do; so, to the extent that past emissions behaviors were wrongful, employing the APP may deny the wronged peoples the opportunity to receive restitution, and thus the opportunity to right a moral wrong will be lost.

Equal Per Capita Distribution Peter Singer (2002) takes a different approach to thinking about international justice in the case of global climate change. Specifically, he argues that we should allocate emissions quotas according to “equal per capita future entitlements to a share of the capacity of the atmospheric sink, tied to the current United Nations projections of population growth per country in 2050” (p. 43). In other words, after we decide on a global emissions cap, we divide that equally among all future people, based on the estimated population for some fixed year in the future. As Singer points out, this method gives incentive to keep a nation’s population down: the smaller the population is at the target year, the greater the allocation is per capita. Furthermore, this type of distribution embodies the idea that each individual has an equal share to the global commons, regardless of what nation she is from, it protects nations from having to pay for offenses that they did not know that they were committing, and it allows developing nations the much-needed room to grow, since their claim on the atmosphere will not be diminished because they are not yet industrialized (Singer, 2002, ch. 2). Despite these advantages, this framework is not without problems. First, Singer’s proposal depends on a global cap and trade policy, which is an instrument that has been rejected several times over by nations like the United States on the basis that such a system would slow economic growth,, make it less competitive in the global market, and more generally place infeasible burdens on wealthy nations. (Gardiner

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& Weisbach, 2016, pp. 232–236; Posner & Wesibach, 2010, ch. 6). Second, at present, there is no real enforcement mechanism that could police a global carbon market, even if all global players would agree to participate. Put simply, those nations with the most economic or military force have the most power in global relationships, and so forcing these nations to comply with the rules of the market may be difficult without an enforcement mechanism if acting within the rules did not directly align with their interests.

Protection of the Vulnerable: Future Generations and the Global Poor Instead of thinking about the fair distribution of the burdens and benefits associated with GCC, some theorists have argued that justice demands that we prioritize the interests of the most vulnerable, and then act in way to protect these interests. In the case of GCC, there are two groups that are particularly vulnerable: the global poor and future generations. The interests of the global poor are often underrepresented in climate negotiations because they lack economic and political strength, relative to other more powerful nations seeking to advance their own interests. Similarly, future generations – because they don’t yet exist – cannot participate in negotiations, and therefore cannot advocate for the protection of their interests. This position is particularly precarious since the worst impacts of GCC are expected to manifest in the future. Thus, each of these groups is situated in such a way that they lack agency in current climate negotiations, and so are particularly vulnerable to both unfair treatment and the dangerous consequences of GCC. And so it is perhaps unsurprising that calls to protect these groups are often ignored or minimized by the nations or groups that have the most power, since the most powerful nations are thought to have little to gain by acting out of concern for future generations or the global poor. As a result, they choose instead to advance their own short-term interests, which are often in conflict with mitigating their contributions to global climate change.

Future Generations Some thinkers have argued that future generations have rights to subsistence that will be violated if we do not seek to mitigate GCC (Shue, 2010a, p. 151). There are similar concerns that failing to curb GCC subjects future generations to danger that they would otherwise have not faced, thus inflicting upon them unnecessary suffering (ibid). Still others argue that it is unethical for an earlier generation to impose costs on a later generation without providing compensation or gaining consent, or that current generations have at least a modest obligation to engage in some projects that primarily benefit future generations. (Gardiner, 2011, p. 159). And yet, however intuitive our concerns for future generations are, many of the frameworks that work to protect the interests of future generations are susceptible to the nonidentity problem (Parfit, 1984). This problem arises when a harmful action or policy is a

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condition of a person’s existence, which suggests that the action or policy in question cannot be categorized as harmful. So, some may argue that while policies allowing for the excessive use of fossil fuels are surely damaging to the environment, the institution of different (perhaps more environmentally-friendly) policies would have led to the existence of other people and so future generations cannot be said to have been harmed, as the so-called damaging policies were a condition of their existence.

The Global Poor In similar fashion to offering special concern for future generations, some thinkers focus their approach to climate justice by drawing attention to and prioritizing the global poor, since they are simultaneously the most vulnerable to the impacts of GCC, and have the lease ability to adapt. Because of this situation, some thinkers argue that GCC threatens the human rights to life, health, and subsistence (Caney, 2010, pp. 166–169). Others argue that we can separate emissions into two categories: subsistence emissions and luxury emissions (Shue, 2010b). Securing subsistence emissions are crucial, since they provide things essential to human survival; accordingly, if emissions are to be cut, we must first think about what emissions the poorest among us need to reach (at least) levels of subsistence, and so focus on cutting emissions that are luxury in nature (i.e., not survival oriented), even if doing so is economically inefficient. In this way, the more urgent needs of the poor are prioritized over the less urgent needs of the (relatively) wealthy (ibid).

Sufficientarianism We can also account for the interests of the global poor and future generations by appealing to principles of sufficientarianism. Sufficientarians identify a certain morally importantly threshold – like subsistence, human rights, or democratic stability – and then argue that our moral obligations are first to those that are below (or in danger of falling below) the identified threshold (Blake, 2001; Kenehan, 2015; Miller, 2007; Meyer & Roser, 2009). In terms of GCC, taking such thresholds seriously would mean that nations have obligations of justice to mitigate their contribution to GCC and/or to aid in climate change adaptation to the extent that doing so will protect the vulnerable (i.e., the global poor and future generations) from falling below the threshold.

Burden Sharing Vs. Harm Avoidance The principles delineated above are examples of what Simon Caney calls burdensharing justice (Caney, 2014); they guide us in dividing the burdens associated with the mitigation of and adaptation to GCC. But, the concerns for future generations and the global poor are examples of harm avoidance justice: this brand of justice

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seeks first and foremost to avert dangerous GCC and is primarily concerned with the potential victims of the disaster (ibid). Caney points out that these two justice frameworks don’t always overlap, and he argues that what is thus needed is an account that takes both forms of responsibility seriously and that helps us to mitigate conflict between the two perspectives when it arises. Caney proposes one such scheme that begins by prioritizing the prevention of dangerous climate change and assuming that some sacrifices will need to be made. By prioritizing prevention, Caney necessarily has to take concerns of feasibility into account. For him, this means taking both the institutional context and the political challenges seriously. (More will be said about feasibility below.) As such, Caney points out that we cannot assume compliance with duties to mitigate and adapt (ibid), as they might be understood according to any of the burden-sharing accounts of justice. He dubs such obligations first order responsibilities (FOR) (ibid, p. 134). As noncompliance with FOR is to be expected, some agents have second order responsibilities (SOR) (ibid, pp. 133–134), which respond to the fact of noncompliance and consist of an obligation to ensure both that agents comply with their FOR (ibid, pp. 134–135) and to create opportunities for appropriate agents to be designated FOR (ibid, pp. 137). On this understanding, there are thus two kinds of responses to GCC. First, if an agent fails to take their FOR seriously (i.e., in cases of noncompliance), then other capable agents are under an obligation to cover these duties (ibid). And since we know that noncompliance is a fact of the matter, there must be ways to convince agents to comply. Thus, the second response is comprised of SOR: It details who is in a position of relevant influence and encourages such agents to act such that their power is exerted in appropriate ways (ibid). While these second order actors are not responsible for mitigation, they are responsible for holding first order agents to their duties of mitigation and adaptation. Toward this end, second order agents can aid in enforcement, incentivization, enablement, and norm creation; they can act to undermine resistance, to change demographic policy, or even participate in civil disobedience (ibid, pp. 136–139). As such, governments and international institutions, research councils, academics, corporations, urban planners, church leaders, and many others can be effective second order agents. Caney attributes SOR on the basis of the power/responsibility principle (P/RP), which “attributes responsibility to those who can make a valuable difference” (ibid, p. 141). Importantly, the P/RP principle is different from the APP because, first, it speaks to SOR; and second, the power of second order agents isn’t necessarily derived from financial resources, but rather from their political position, their knowledge or expertise, or their powers or communication and persuasion (ibid). Caney asserts that the P/RP applies in the case of GCC: . . .since there is a prospect of disastrous effects on people’s lives and since some agents not only can play an effective role, but their action is critical to avoiding these disastrous impacts; and, finally, since these agents lack compelling countervailing reasons for action we are, I think, driven to the conclusion that those agents with the power to discharge second-order responsibilities have a duty to do so. (ibid, p. 146)

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Challenges to Achieving International Justice in the Context of Global Climate Change As described above, there are various ways to think about international justice in the context of GCC. While each perspective has a great deal of support among normative thinkers, they are not free of criticism. In what follows, two broad categories of criticism will be discussed.

Challenge 1: Feasibility Whatever brand of global justice one adopts, it is becoming more common for theorists to think about the applicability of their work to the nonideal conditions surrounding climate negotiations and policy-making. That is, they are thinking about whether and to what extent the messiness of the real-world should affect their theorizing about justice. So, to be concerned about feasibility is to be concerned with the actual and practical viability of a proposal or theory (Gilabert & LawfordSmith, 2012; Lawford-Smith, 2013). According to Gilabert and Lawford-Smith (2012, p. 809), a state of affairs is feasible “. . . if it is one that we could actually bring about. . .” They identify two general sorts of feasibility constraints: hard constraints, which rule a proposal out altogether, and soft constraints, which make a proposal more or less feasible. Examples of the former include the logical, physical, and biological constraints on a theory; examples of the latter include the economic, institutional, cultural, psychological, and motivational constraints (Gilabert & Lawford-Smith, 2012, p. 813). Soft constraints are not permanent (hard constraints are), as the strength of a soft constraint is malleable and changes with time, as conditions, agents, motivations, and the like change. Accordingly, proposals that are currently infeasible may be feasible in the future, depending on the relative longevity and influence of the relevant soft constraints. Concerns of feasibility become most obvious when one considers the great deal of scholarly work on climate justice that has been accomplished over the last several decades and compares that to the extent to which concerns about fairness, equity, and responsibility are dealt with substantively in the policy realm. Since the 1980s, political philosophers and moral theorists (among others) have been exploring the ethical complexities of global climate change; indeed, there is a robust and comprehensive literature detailing exactly what global justice demands in the face of climate change. Yet, in the real world, these theories are rarely debated, let alone substantively reflected in the agreements that are meant to dictate our responsibilities toward combatting the problem. One might argue then, that this chasm between the real world of politicians and diplomats and the ideal world of scholars and academics represents, at least in part, a failure of theorists to really consider the real world and all its messiness in their theorizing. It could be that the scholarly focus on articulating moral ideals (with some exception), has been pursed at the cost of neglecting to think about how those ideals would fit into our less-than-ideal reality.

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To be sure, this trend is changing, as the last ten years has shown an uptick in theorists taking this challenge more seriously (see, e.g., Broome, 2012; Caney, 2014; Gardiner & Weisbach, 2016; Heyward & Roser, 2016; Kenehan & Katz, 2021a, b). And the recent report of the IPCC even included a chapter on the normative concerns raised by climate change (see Working Group III, 2014, ch. 3), which suggests that the moral worries being raised by theorists are finally being heard. But there are many who reject the idea that justice should be a concern at all, especially in consideration of the fact that, because of or failure to act, we find ourselves in an urgent situation: we either act immediately or we commit ourselves to the consequences of a rapidly warming world. Seriously considering concerns of justice in this predicament might actually be something of luxury, given what’s at stake. Perhaps, then, we must sacrifice some or all of our moral ideals to achieve climate stability, which may be the greater moral good (Kenehan, 2017). Or, perhaps our theories of justice are so far removed from the realities of international relations, negotiations, and treaty-making, that it is foolish to think that states would actually be motivated by such justice-oriented demands. Posner and Weisbach (2010) advance a version of the latter claim that they call International Paretianism (IP) (see also: Gardiner & Weisbach, 2016; Weisbach, 2021). IP states that “all states must believe themselves better off by their lights as a result of the climate treaty” (Posner & Weisbach, 2010, p. 6). They describe this principle as a pragmatic constraint, and not a moral constraint, arguing that feasibility “rules out the vast distributions of wealth that many believe are morally required on grounds of corrective and distributive justice. . .” (ibid). This view has been widely criticized (see, for e.g., Caney, 2014; Gardiner & Weisbach, 2016; Gardiner & Lawson, 2021), but it is hard to ignore the fact massive emitters like the United States, as of yet, have not been motived to participate in climate mitigation or adaptation measures in ways that come anywhere close to reflecting what might be demanded of them as a matter of international justice. A telling example of this state of affairs is the “Brazilian Proposal.” This proposal was advanced in the late 1990s in negotiations leading up to the Kyoto Protocol. The idea behind the proposal was that industrialized nations should bear the burden of the costs of mitigation and adaptation since the largest share of GHG emissions had (at that point) originated in the developed countries (UNFCCC, 1997). That is, the authors of the proposal were advocating for a version of the polluter pays conception of international justice. The proposal was not adopted, and the official reasons offered by the industrialized nations were grounded in concerns about the methodologies for determining national historical responsibility. And while these concerns surely existed, the unofficial stances of nations like the United States toward GCC mitigation are telling. George W. Bush argued “that mandates in the Kyoto Treaty would affect our economy in a negative way” (Burbank, 2007), and shortly after he took office, he withdrew the United States from the agreement, an agreement that notably had far less ambitious reduction goals than those that would have resulted from the adoption of the Brazilian Proposal (ibid). This pursuit of national self-interest, very narrowly defined, was also a position held by the Trump administration. Like Bush, when Trump took office, one of his first acts was to abandon the Paris Accord, stating: “The bottom line

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is that the Paris accord is very unfair at the highest level to the United States” (Cama & Henry, 2017). He added that it would “undermine our economy, hamstring our workers,” and “effectively decapitate our coal industry” (Colvin & Pace, 2017). Trump also criticized the Green Climate Fund, calling it a scheme to redistribute wealth from rich to poor countries (Sengupta et al., 2017). To the extent that these attitudes will continue to be held by damaging emitters, and to the extent that we believe that global actors should be motivated by concerns of justice, it may be fair to point out that there are likely very serious concerns of feasibility with regard to our theories of right and wrong in relation to GCC. Nonetheless, there is surely hope that we, as a global community, will be able to move forward in a cooperative and effective effort to combat GCC. President Biden has already rejoined the Paris agreement, and climate change is one of his administration’s top concerns (WH.GOV, 2021). Whether and to what degree those efforts are aligned with or motivated by concerns of international justice has yet to be seen.

Challenge 2: Noncompliance, Free-Riding, and Additional Concerns of Justice Beyond the feasibility concerns laid about above, there are additional challenges that will be faced by any justice framework that is advanced to assign national responsibilities in the face of GCC. Perhaps the most serious is noncompliance with one’s duties, or even free-riding. As of yet, there is no enforcement mechanism for ensuring that a nation complies with its GHG reduction commitments; as such, there is no strict penalty for failing to comply (beyond, perhaps, the moral shame of noncompliance). The questions of how to manage free riding and noncompliance, and what is to be done with the neglected share of the climate burden is a matter of justice, and so must be worked out, both in the normative literature (e.g., Gosseries, 2004; Schuppert, 2016) and on the policy front. This problem is an important one, since, depending on the size of the emitting nation, a failure to comply can threaten the whole of the climate agreement. Geopolitically, relationships between the United States and China – two of the world’s largest emitters – also threaten the likelihood of achieving an effective climate agreement that will be taken seriously by both nations (Stern, 2020). Nonetheless, despite these tensions, the nations issued a joint declaration at COP26 (2021) to combat climate change in the coming years (U.S. Department of State, 2021). In addition, in seeking to advance global justice in the face of GCC, we must be careful not to commit further injustices or to perpetuate current or historical injustices. Justice theorists and policymakers alike should consider the ways in which their proposals are compatible with calls for food, gender, and racial justice (to name a few) (see, for e.g., Gilson & Kenehan, 2019 on climate and food justice, and Godfrey & Torres, 2017 for essays on climate change and race, gender, and class justice). Similarly, we may be concerned about our moral obligations toward animals and nonhuman nature in the face of GCC (e.g., Jamieson, 2010; Noll, 2018; Palmer, 2018); none of the theories outlined above speak directly to these concerns.

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Conclusion Several proposals that seek to fairly distribute the burdens of climate change between nations have been developed and analyzed by normative theorists, and this chapter explored some of the most prominent frameworks of international justice in the context of global climate change. Such theories are important because the problem of GCC is necessarily a global concern: harmful GHG emissions defy our geopolitical borders, and any effort to combat the problem must be global in nature. As such, questions about how to mitigate further change and how to adapt to the warming that we are already committed to raises fundamental questions of justice between nations.

Cross-References ▶ Adaptation Duties ▶ Climate Change and Distributive Justice ▶ Climate Change and Environmental Justice ▶ Climate Change and Intergenerational Justice ▶ Compensation Duties ▶ Mitigation Duties ▶ Responsibility for Climate Harms

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Climate Change and Human Mobilities Simona Capisani

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gaps in the Global Protection Regime . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Refugee Convention . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Limitations of a “Refugee” Paradigm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Alternative Moral Principles for Climate-Related Mobilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Causal Responsibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Humanitarian Obligations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The International State System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Co-ownership of the Earth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Right to a Livable Locality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Group Rights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What Is Owed? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Immigration and Inclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Territory and Land . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Compensation or Reparation? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

Human migration has long been a type of adaptive response to climatic conditions and environmental pressures. However, anthropogenic climate change threatens to exacerbate vulnerabilities and impact adaptive capacity. Climate change impacts human mobility by way of long-term climate processes as well as sudden events whose intensity and frequency are exacerbated. Climate-related mobilities include the range of outcomes that result from climate change’s impacts on human mobility. The effects of climate change on human mobility are diverse. They include various types of movement, including movement within borders as S. Capisani (*) Department of Philosophy, Durham University, Durham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_124

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well as external or cross-border movement. Such mobility outcomes also include various degrees of agency in whether people can choose to move. Furthermore, climate change can impact whether humans will move more or will move less. Instances of immobility also vary with regards to agency in decision making, with some populations choosing to stay in vulnerable locations while others may be “trapped.” Vulnerability and adaptive capacity under conditions of climate change depends on the interaction of climate impacts with political social, cultural, economic, and additional factors. The heterogeneity of climate-related mobility outcomes and the difficulty in determining the scale and scope of the impact on human well-being raises a number of practical and normative challenges. The chapter examines and compares a range of normative frameworks that address the moral problem of climate change’s impacts on human mobility. These approaches articulate the nature of the moral problem, identify the rights that are violated and the associated harms of displacement, and identify correlative obligations to those who are vulnerable to climate-related impacts. The chapter concludes by suggesting further directions normative theorizing about climate-related mobilities can take considering the complex challenges the phenomena poses for the international state system. Keywords

Climate mobility · Displacement · Immobility · Climate refugees · Migration · Adaptation · Rights · Sovereignty · Climate justice

Introduction Human migration has long been a type of adaptive response to climatic conditions and environmental pressures. However, anthropogenic climate change threatens to exacerbate several intersecting vulnerabilities that contribute to various forms of human displacement, migration, and immobility. Individuals and populations are vulnerable to two major types of climate change impacts. These include the slowonset effects of climate change—such as sea level rise, precipitation level changes, desertification, and salination of fresh water sources—as well as the increased frequency and intensity of quick-onset events and disasters such as hurricanes and other extreme weather events. The rapidity, diversity, and scale of climate change’s effects on human mobility pose a global challenge. Every nation state could be impacted to some degree, either directly, or by the movement of people away from threats to territory and livelihood. Within the past decade a concentrated, interdisciplinary field of study has emerged to focus on the phenomena of climate change-related displacement, migration, and immobility and the associated political, legal, and moral challenges involved. Relatedly, the notion of a “climate change refugee,” “environmental refugee,” or “ecological refugee” has increasingly been invoked in the media, in advocacy campaigns, and in public and political discourse. The label has been used

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in both academic and public contexts to convey the urgency of climate change’s impacts on human mobility as well as the need to help people find “refuge” from the impacts of climate change. While the notion of the “climate refugee” has often framed the challenge as a matter of large-scale migration flows from the Global South to the Global North, this is only one climate mobility outcome (Boas et al., 2019). According to the recent literature on climate-related mobilities, the phenomenon includes instances of movement (which is often internal rather than across borders) as well as cases of immobility (Zickgraf, 2021; Schewel, 2019). Furthermore, migration or immobility are not always the result of people’s choice or desire to relocate or stay in place. A range of resources and various social, political, economic, and institutional factors can limit or facilitate people’s choice to move or remain in response to the variety of climate-related impacts (de Haas, 2021). For this reason, it is important to address the fact that the role of climate change on human mobility and the diversity of mobility responses to climate change is complex and a broader phenomenon than the “climate refugee” paradigm suggests. Furthermore, the diversity of climate mobility outcomes varies across geographical locations as well as across demographics within a territorial space (Cattaneo et al., 2019). Being attentive to how phenomenon of climate-related mobilities is conceptualized in moral theorizing is important for understanding the impact of such framing on both the perception and nature of the response to it. For example, how moral theorizing conceptualizes the phenomena can be consequential for the development, evaluation, and implementation of legal strategies and policy responses. In light of the heterogeneity of the effects of climate change on human mobility, this chapter includes but does not exclusively focus on climate-related cross-border migration. Given the complexity of climate change-induced impacts on human mobility, the specific jurisprudential understanding of the term “refugee,” and the broader controversial nature of the label “climate refugee,” following the practice used in the recently released white paper “Shelter from the Storm” (Bustos et al., 2021), the chapter remains agnostic regarding the promotion of a specific terminological designation for the phenomena and uses “climate-related mobilities” as shorthand. When the chapter discusses arguments for extending specific legal frameworks and their related terminological designations, the use of the term “climate refugee” may be used in the context of such arguments. The first part of the chapter addresses some of the complexities associated with conceptualizing climate related mobilities and identifies protection gaps in the international legal protection regime. While the international refugee paradigm does not currently provide protection for so-called “climate refugees,” some theorists argue that its normative underpinnings can account for our obligations to address their claims to protection. Section three examines these arguments and a range of objections to using a refugee paradigm to ground our obligations to those whose mobility is impacted by climate change. Section four introduces alternative normative frameworks for addressing the moral problems that arise. These approaches articulate the nature of the moral problem, identify the rights that are violated and the associated harms of displacement, and identify correlative obligations without

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appealing to the Refugee Convention. Section five evaluates two general responses to the question of what is owed in cases where people are vulnerable to climaterelated impacts to human mobilities. It discusses whether these solutions ought to be grounded by reparative or distributive principles. The chapter concludes by suggesting further directions normative theorizing about climate-related mobilities can take.

Gaps in the Global Protection Regime While people displaced within their own states may have limited access to protection under national laws, international human rights laws, and other regional instruments, cross-border movement due to climate-related displacement is not protected. This gap in the global protection regime is partly due to the jurisprudential understanding of “refugee.” The established legal definition of the term “refugee” originates in the 1951 Refugee Convention. According to the Convention, the term applies to all those who “owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside of the country of [their] nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail [themselves] of the protection of that country” (Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, 1951). The Convention establishes specific criteria that must be met for someone to qualify as a refugee. Specially, a person claiming asylum under the Refugee Convention must have already crossed an international border. According to refugee law, “refugees” are those fleeing forms of persecution in which the persecutor is engaging in discriminatory acts. Finally, to qualify as a refugee, the home state must be unwilling or unable to protect against such discrimination (McAdam, 2012). Those displaced by climate-related impacts may fail to be protected under the Convention for several reasons. First, given climate change’s role as a “threat multiplier,” it is difficult to identify the specific cause of forced movement (McAdam, 2012). Climate impacts multiply nonenvironmental threats which contribute to the degree of vulnerability of individuals and populations. Nonclimate drivers, such as development, governance, political, technological conditions, and wealth impact the adaptive capacity of individuals and communities to respond, recover, move away from, or return to impacted territories. By interacting with or exacerbating food insecurity, poverty, water shortages, and developmental challenges, climate change may serve as a “tipping point” that compels people to move away from places in which livelihoods may no longer be sustained (Laczko & Aghazarm, 2009). This raises the question of whether the source of displacement was climate-related or whether it was some other vulnerability that served as the decisive “push” factor (Adger et al., 2014). Various studies reveal that migration decisions are often multifaceted and include a range of socio-economic and political considerations (Black et al., 2011; Meze-Hausken, 2000). For this reason, it is difficult to legally claim that people are increasingly displaced solely or specifically because of climate factors.

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Second, even if climate-related impacts can be understood as a source of displacement, it is unclear whether they can be characterized as forms of “persecution” that the Convention criteria requires. Judgments regarding persecution would assess the nature of the threat, the right(s) at risk, and the likely severity or chance of their violation (McAdam, 2012). While the impacts of climate change are harmful and often fatal, they may not amount to the technical understanding of persecution at play in international refugee law. There could be several reasons why the “persecution” threshold is not met. For example, it may be difficult to identify a “persecutor” in cases of climate displacement. In many instances of climate-related displacement, states may be willing to protect their citizens from the harmful impacts of climate change but are unable to do so (McAdam, 2012). Additionally, a refugee claim which appeals to the harms of climate related impacts may not succeed because it must demonstrate a differential impact on the individual in question (McAdam, 2012). The claim would lack the discriminatory element required by the norms of the Convention. Finally, according to the Convention, one must already be beyond their state of origin to qualify as a refugee. If “climate refugees” are displaced, but have not yet left their countries of origin, the Convention is limited as a legal instrument for grounding protection. Internally displaced people, for example, will not qualify as “refugees” according to the conditions established by the Convention (McAdam, 2012). The Convention establishes a limited set of normative obligations for states, where the strongest requirements relate to what states ought to do when asylum seekers are on their territory (Parekh, 2020). For example, the Refugee Convention only establishes that states must not send “refugees” back into conditions of persecution. The principle of nonrefoulement, found in Article 33 of the 1951 Refugee Convention, binds states in the 1967 Protocol and prevents a state from sending refugees back to their state of citizenship if doing so would leave refugees subject to persecution. The protection gap for climate-displaced people in international law is further widened by the fact that the Refugee Convention does not establish formal requirements for funding and aid. Thus, any aid states give to refugees is regarded as an act of generosity rather than the satisfaction of a legal norm or moral obligation (Parekh, 2020). Protection is consequently ad hoc and up to the discretion of individual states. States determine the degree to which they engage in “charitable acts” that extend safety and resources to “climate refugees.” Furthermore, climate-displaced people are also largely without protection under human rights law, which is silent on issues regarding admissions requirements. A lack of interstate cooperation and other institutional shortcomings pose further challenges to the establishment of an adequate legal climate-displacement protection regime. Regardless of the status of legal norms and the difficulty in accounting for climate-related displacement in the Convention, some theorists argue that its underlying moral justification can be extended to account for our obligations to “climate refugees.” The following section examines these arguments and objections to using such a normative framework to address climate-related displacement.

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The Refugee Convention There is a consensus in the philosophical literature that states may have stronger obligations to refugees than other immigrants. This is due to the forced nature of displacement and the lack of protection from one’s state of origin (Parekh, 2020). Refugees thus represent a morally distinct group which can advance special claims to assistance from the international community that are not available to other migrants. For this reason, some philosophers draw from the underlying moral structure of the Refugee Convention and argue that it can serve as a moral foundation for addressing climate-related displacement as well (Chang, 2017). Theorists argue that grounding our obligations in the Refugee Convention is advantageous as it can ground special claims to protection, it mandates durable solutions, and that it offers a rights-centered approach to protection. Despite the difficulties in classifying those forced to migrate due to climaterelated impacts as “refugees” in the strictly legal sense of the term, some theorists argue that the underlying normative principles and logic of the Convention can be extended to ground obligations to those displaced by climate change (Lister, 2014; Pellegrino, 2014). Both Mathew Lister and Gianfranco Pellegrino argue that “climate refugees” can fit within the logic of the Convention, even if they do not fit with the current legal language used within it (Lister, 2014, Pellegrino, 2014). While both Lister and Pellegrino argue that the Convention provides the requisite normative grounds for protection, they differ in their interpretation of the underlying moral logic that justifies a refugee’s claims to protection. Lister argues that the normative basis for refugee protection in the Convention is based on an understanding of what makes refugees a normatively distinct group from other migrants. According to Lister, people may be understood as refugees if they “can only, or at least could best, be helped by providing them the particular remedy of asylum, understood as including both nonrefoulement and a ‘durable solution’” (Lister, 2014). In other words, refugees are a morally distinct group in that they are owed two rights associated with asylum. Specifically, they are owed the right to not be returned to a state where they face harm and danger as well as the right to remain indefinitely in a safe country where they eventually have access to full membership within that state. Thus, refugee status and the corresponding rights to nonrefoulement and a durable solution are also owed to the subset of people impacted by climate effects. Specifically, they are owed to those for whom (i) cross-border movement is necessary and (ii) where a threat of indefinite duration puts in jeopardy the possibility of living a “decent life at all” (Lister, 2014). Pellegrino argues that the Convention remedies the violation of a specific right to a territory, which in turn grounds a right to asylum or admittance for political refugees as well as “climate refugees.” Pellegrino argues that to enjoy state protection one must have a right to live in a territory. If one loses the jurisdiction of their own state, other states have a duty to take in stateless people. “Climate refugees” loss of a territory is literal, as it may not be able to be returned to due to climate change’s impacts. Pellegrino argues that for people whose territories of origin are rendered uninhabitable by climate change, “climate refugees,” unlike some political

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refugees, can claim the right to a new territory and citizenship within it. In contrast, political refugees may only require temporary refuge if they can exercise the right to return to their territories of origin (Pellegrino, 2014). Despite the potential of extending protection to “climate refugees” under the Convention, critics disagree (McAdam, 2012). A “climate refugee” framework can present normative as well as legal and strategic difficulties that have material consequences for people displaced by climate change. For this reason, some theorists, activists, and policy makers have cautioned against framing the challenge of climate displacement as a class of “refugee” issues centered around forced crossborder migration, resettlement, and asylum. Normative accounts that ground our obligations to climate-displaced people in the moral logic of the Refugee Convention also face the challenge of relying on the fraught concept of “climate refugee.” This notion may be unsuitable for immigration law purposes or inadequate in its capacity to identify the subjects of our obligations. Consequently, a normative refugee paradigm may have trouble accounting for all that is owed in the context of climate-displacement or may perpetuate problematic narratives. The next section examines various challenges to adopting the Refugee Convention as a normative framework. It also explores objections to conceptualizing climate-displaced people as “climate refugees.”

Limitations of a “Refugee” Paradigm Focusing on obligations in the context of the refugee paradigm may entail the exclusion of a morally significant group of people displaced by climate change (Chang, 2017). Research has shown that a significant amount of climate-related movement will likely be internal and gradual (McAdam, 2012). Communities may even opt, if possible, for an adaptive strategy that does not involve movement at all. In situ adaptation may be a more likely or more cost-effective option than long-distance cross-border migration for some impacted individuals and communities (Penz, 2010). Initial responses of in situ adaptation to climate change-related risks, if successful, lead to a decrease in risk and often decreases in movement (Mcleman et al., 2021). Though cross-border movement is and will continue to occur, it is only the subset of those who find themselves beyond the borders of their country of origin that would qualify for protection under the Convention. For these reasons, the Convention is limited in both its legal and normative scope. While proponents of a Convention approach acknowledge this (Lister, 2014), critics argue that there are additional concerns associated with a “refugee approach” which provide reasons for developing more normatively expansive frameworks. The following section considers some of these additional considerations and their relevance for our moral reasoning about climate-related displacement and the nature of our protection obligations.

Vulnerability, Resilience, and Agency The rejection of the label “refugee” by some communities susceptible to climaterelated displacement raises the question of whether obligations to centralize the

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agency of impacted communities are beyond the normative scope of the Refugee Convention. Resistance to being classified as a refugee is often advanced on the grounds that it violates the dignity and resilience of those individuals and communities who are impacted. As the President of Kirabati—Anote Tong—has argued, the label suggests that those most exposed to climate-related impacts are passive victims who must rely on the charity of others for aid and protection (McAdam, 2012). Tong argues that those whose mobility is impacted by climate change should instead be “given as a matter of right something that we deserve, because they’ve taken away what we have” (McAdam, 2012). Such a claim identifies an entitlement to international support that extends beyond a state’s willingness to receive “climate refugees” as an act of charity or humanitarian assistance. Considering these concerns, some theorists caution against focusing too closely on vulnerability in climate change research (Haalboom & Natcher, 2012). Usually, a notion of vulnerability is applied externally by those who may not have full knowledge or understanding of the interests or values of an impacted community. This may impact how individuals are perceived and treated. Focusing on the vulnerability of a community may also obscure the way in which historical injustices and policies have hampered the adaptive capacities of communities (Marino, 2012). Frameworks that centralize the vulnerability of the displaced may mask the causes for exposure to risk and may problematically shift responsibility on to the displaced themselves. A focus on vulnerability can undermine the agency of people whose mobility is impacted by climate change (Gendreau, 2017). While helpful in articulating deprivations and violations that require remedy, an emphasis on vulnerability does not characterize people as having the capacity to engage in deliberation and choice-making with respect to protection (Gendreau, 2017). Critics argue that a refugee framework is easily at risk of perpetuating vulnerability narratives that problematically constrain the understanding of our obligations.An agencyrespecting framework would instead include the aims of preserving collective forms of agency and securing conditions under which agency could grow (Gendreau, 2017). Obligations to those who experience negative climate-related mobilities may have to extend beyond providing safe harbor and means of subsistence in order to be agency-protecting (Zellentin, 2010). Obligations may include providing support to find adequate jobs, aiding in societal integration, and establishing institutional preconditions to secure full and equal membership in a new society (Zellentin, 2010). It also may require developing institutional arrangements of special representation or changes to current practices that contribute to discrimination (Zellentin, 2010). An agency-focused approach might also conceptualize migration or immobility as an adaptive strategy (Chandler, 2012). These additional, agency-preserving responsibilities may be beyond the scope of normative arguments drawing from the Refugee Convention. Protecting the right to move may be regarded as “agency preserving” insofar it recognizes the interests of communities threatened by climate change (Methmann & Oels, 2015). However, the Convention regards cross-border migration as “flight” away from harmful conditions and thus may consider such movement as an indication of a failure to adapt. In conceptualizing cross-border migration as a “worst-case scenario” or failure, the

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Convention cannot ground policies that facilitate migration pre-emptively as a matter of choice. Yet, such pre-emptive policies could be beneficial and necessary for alleviating pressures within a territory susceptible to slow-onset impacts (McAdam, 2012). It is important to note that some theorists have raised the need for critical engagement with the concepts of resilience and agency in a normative reasoning about climate-related mobilities. For example, it may be morally relevant to distinguish between the way resilience varies from a global to an individual level and to understand the degree to which achieving resilience is a multiscale agenda (Ahmed et al., 2016). Theorists have also questioned to what extent a focus on resilience and agency shifts adaptive responsibility to the most impacted populations. Those concerned with such questions argue that such a shift could problematically justify arguments for developmental assistance exclusively, rather than justifying claims to mobility rights and migration assistance (Methmann & Oels, 2015). Thus, despite its limitations, one benefit of the Convention is its guarantee of special rights of mobility. It preserves the normative relevance of movement in conditions in which a state is unable to provide protection from the uninhabitable conditions of its territory (Scott, 2020).

Alarmist and National Security Narratives A related concern with adopting a refugee paradigm as the appropriate normative approach is its association with large scale “flight” across international boundaries. Despite the accumulation of data on climate-related displacement, the exact scale of such movement is difficult to predict (McAdam & Limon, 2015). Certain alarmist narratives addressing climate-related displacement appeal to projections of mass movement across international borders. In doing so, they strengthen the association of the phenomena of climate-related displacement with cross-border movement itself and may perpetuate falsehoods regarding the complex nature of climate-related movement. Usually, the aim of such alarmist approaches is to highlight the devastating consequences of climate change on the human population (McAdam, 2012). However, such an approach also has the potential to work counter to the aims of mobilizing protection. For some theorists and activists, the adoption of a refugee paradigm may perpetuate a perceived threat of unchecked cross-border migration and thus may frame the problem of climate-related displacement as a threat to national security (Jakobeit & Methmann, 2012). A national security narrative centralizes the focus on receiving states and strengthens stereotypical associations between environmental degradation and poverty. This dynamic is part of a larger strategy that Western states have increasingly relied on since the 1980s to restrict access to those in need of protection (Parekh, 2020). By characterizing asylum seekers as unauthorized migrants “flooding” borders, states routinely violate legal rights to asylum seeking. As Serena Parekh explains, this is due to Western states conceptualizing asylum as “a ‘back door’ for people from the poor countries of the Global South to enter richer countries in the West” (Parekh, 2020). This framing perpetuates established xenophobic immigration responses in Western liberal democracies. It risks promoting unjust policies and militarized

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responses aimed at “securing” borders in the name of stability and state sovereignty (Hartmann, 2010). Many deterrence strategies, including detention as a response to asylum seeking, are often invoked by conceptualizing displacement as “unauthorized” migration. While such responses are not unique to the issue of climate-related displacement, we can already observe them being employed in the context of U.S. responses to displacement and migration from the Northern Triangle, a region impacted by both slow and quick-onset events linked to climate change (Bustos et al., 2021). The potential to conflate displacement and asylum seeking with “unlawful migration” in a refugee framework suggests reasons to seek alternative normative grounds. Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò argues that assumptions of criminality in the climate-related mobilities context have rendered people “hyper-disposable” (Táíwò, 2020). This characterization is applied to U.S. citizens impacted by the impacts of climate change as well as those seeking asylum from regions outside the United States. Táíwò argues that the impacts of state-sanctioned violence and policing as responses to climate crisis disproportionately impact communities of color, subjecting these communities to brutality and further vulnerability to the impacts of climate change (Táíwò, 2020). In short, violent intervention is often invoked as a necessary response to the instability caused by climate-related impacts. Furthermore, as Serena Parekh argues, refugees, however they are defined, are unable to access conditions of human dignity. This is due, in large part the asymmetry between the types of obligations established in the global refugee regime. As she explains, “Western states have few obligations or incentives to help refugees not on their territory, but because of the strength of the principle of nonrefoulement they have strong incentives to prevent refugees from arriving on their territory and keep refugee populations contained in the Global South” (Parekh, 2020). When people find themselves displaced from their home country, whether it is due to political persecution or climate-related impacts, their chances of protection are low (Parekh, 2020). Situations of displacement are themselves complicated by the global refugee regime given the lack of agreement over which forcibly displaced people are refugees and what such people are owed. Given these challenges, we may ask if an alternative normative framework addresses the complexity of climate-related movement and displacement without needing to ground obligations in the Refugee Convention. The following section examines distinct alternative frameworks that articulate the moral wrong of displacement, identify the nature of our obligations to climate displaced people, and identify duty bearers, without directly appealing to the Convention or its underlying normative principles.

Alternative Moral Principles for Climate-Related Mobilities Joseph Carens argues that there are three general kinds of obligations that ground our obligations to refugees understood in the conventional sense (Carens, 2013). These are obligations grounded in (i) causal connections, (ii) humanitarian concerns, and

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(iii) normative presuppositions of the state system. For Carens, all three types of reasoning may be sufficient to create (at least) a prima facie duty to refugees. This classification structure can also provide a useful taxonomy for understanding the range of normative approaches to climate-related mobilities. Each can be applied to justify our obligations to those who are impacted without specifically appealing to the normative foundation provided by the Refugee Convention. The first two approaches—an appeal to causal connections and to humanitarian concern—make no essential reference to the state system. They might equally apply, though perhaps with different implications, under any or no social order. The third strategy derives moral responsibility from the state system given its moral commitments and organizational structure. This section compares moral arguments which appeal to these general categories of obligations. In the case of climate-related mobilities, there may be reasons to adopt one rationale over the other given the complexity of the relationship between climate change, migration decisions, and displacement.

Causal Responsibility Some theoretical responses to climate-related mobilities centralize the moral responsibility and compensatory liability of emitters. These approaches often assume that in the case of climate change, moral responsibility follows from causal responsibility. On such views, emitters are morally responsible for the uninhabitability of territories impacted by climate change given their contributions to unsustainable emissions (Dietrich & Wündisch, 2015). Such emissions represent a disproportionate amount of the world’s carbon budget and have allowed some states to become substantially wealthier than others (Byravan & Rajan, 2010). These “luxury” emissions also have asymmetrical impacts as countries in the global South will assume unequal burdens due to the vulnerability of these regions even though they have contributed and benefitted less from emissions and industrialization (Byravan and Rajan 2010). Thus, high-emissions countries are especially responsible for addressing the needs of those whose mobilities are impacted by climate change given high-emitters contribution to climate change as well as their capability to aid (Byravan & Rajan, 2010). Legacies of colonialism and exploitative histories of heavy emitters may serve as additional grounds for obligations to displaced people, given the impact on the adaptive capacity of certain people and states to address climate change (Ahmed, 2018). Causation is the basis of obligations in part because displacement is understood as a type of negligent harm rather than a condition of bad luck (Dietrich & Wündisch, 2015). In the case of climate displacement, such responsibility applies as an ex post obligation by states and limits the actions and claims of emitter states in various ways (Angell, 2021). Causality frameworks are vulnerable to a range of objections. For example, in addition to the difficulties of measuring and attributing emissions and related effects to any specific country, it is not clear that future harms would be due to past emissions. While these difficulties may not be decisive, they are perhaps a thin

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reed upon which to base a climate-displaced person’s claim to protection or compensation. As Mathias Risse argues, if compensation for harm done is the sole basis for such claims, then “considerations of causality will be the only relevant considerations to that end” (Risse, 2009). Risse poses two specific difficulties to the causal connection approach. The first is that, given the lengthy time span of emissions contributions, many may not have been aware of the harms they were contributing to and thus responsibility allocation seems fraught. The second challenge is that nonemitter states may also have benefited from the improvements to economic and living conditions ushered in by causes of climate change. Theorists advocating for a causal connection approach have responded to such challenges. Some theorists argue that regardless of the unintentional nature of historical emissions, there has been a disproportionate distribution of harms and benefits, and this disproportionality grounds moral responsibility (Byravan & Rajan, 2010). Even if some vulnerable countries have benefited from industrialization, they may still experience an undue amount of the burdens and harms. Most causal views also suggest that duty bearers are states themselves (Buxton, 2019; Byravan & Rajan, 2010). This state-centered model of responsibility helps to address the intergenerational challenges Risse, and others raise. Because states are themselves intergenerational entities, causal approaches argue that they can bear the responsibility for causing emissions regardless of the existence of individuals who have contributed to climate change (Buxton, 2019).

Humanitarian Obligations A humanitarian requirement to aid the plight of those whose mobilities are impacted by climate change might apply equally to any or all human associations, or perhaps even in a “state of nature.” These moral views may have different sources, but they all tend to characterize our duties as ones that arise after individuals find themselves in conditions warranting address. For example, the fact that someone has had to flee is itself treated as sufficient evidence of a need for protection (Carens, 2013). These moral arguments parallel certain legal decisions regarding protection. Courts have recognized how dire humanitarian conditions can lead to degrading treatment or arbitrary deprivation of life. With such a focus, humanitarian approaches can avoid the complex issue of causation about climate change and moral responsibility for its impacts (McAdam et al., 2016). However, humanitarian-based responses to climate-related displacement may be insufficient to address the complex nature of climate-related displacement. Most humanitarian interventions focus on assistance ex post. The obligations that underlie such interventions are triggered after a claimant has been impacted or has fled the source of harm. But in cases of displacement due to slow-onset impacts, we may have obligations to act before people find themselves in conditions of uninhabitability. It is crucial to pre-empt climate-induced events and anticipate the complete deterioration of habitable spaces to prevent displacement in the first place (McAdam, 2012). It remains an open question whether a humanitarian approach can

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address obligations to pre-empt displacement, migration, or forced immobility whether such an approach can provide sufficiently principled reasons, and whether it can adequately identify duty-bearers.

The International State System To avoid the difficulties that arise when linking causality to moral responsibility, or in relying on humanitarian considerations, some theorists appeal to the normative presuppositions and the organizational structure of the state system. Such an approach does not require identifying specific states that are causally responsible for climate change to justify obligations. Additionally, unlike the humanitarian approach, state-system arguments demonstrate that the conditions warranting address are specifically tied to the organizational structure of the state system. Thus, protection should not rely on the ad hoc decisions of states. Rather, state system approaches demonstrate that there is a shared responsibility to address the foreseeable failures of the organizational arrangement and power distribution states benefit from. The state system carves up all the inhabited land in the world into sovereign states that have the exclusive authority to decide what happens in their territories (Carens, 2013). Consequently, all people are assigned at least to one state at birth, and it is this state that is primarily responsible for its citizens. In cases where people are excluded from their state of birth or citizenship, other states share a collective responsibility to protect them. This obligation emerges from the normative presupposition that everyone within the state system will be assigned to at least one state. Being stateless can be understood as one possible failure that can be anticipated by an institutional structure that organizes the entire surface of the earth into these discrete sovereign units (Capisani, 2020). Insofar as climate-related impacts contribute to such forms of exclusion, state system approaches argue that there is a moral obligation to address climate-related displacement, migration, or immobility. While various normative approaches to climate displacement appeal to the state system in their moral reasoning, they argue for different moral rights and thus derive distinct correlative obligations from the state system.

Co-ownership of the Earth Mathias Risse argues that those who are displaced by climate change have a justified claim to immigrate across state borders based on an egalitarian principle of common ownership of the earth. On this view, since all humans are co-owners of the earth, there exists a human right to relocation for those who are not able to continue to exist in the places where they live (Risse, 2009). According to Risse, since the earth’s resources are needed by all to live, but are not the byproduct of anyone’s accomplishments, they belong collectively to all humankind equally. By “equally,” Risse means that all human beings, as co-owners, should have an equal opportunity to

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satisfy their basic needs. They have an equal claim to natural resources when the use of such resources is necessary to secure basic needs. In the case of climate displacement, the only way to respect climate displaced peoples’ right of equal opportunity to satisfy basic needs (through acquiring collectively owned resources) is to permit their relocation to other countries. This is because the nature of the state system exposes co-owners, in this case climatedisplaced people, to ex ante risks of being denied access to essential resources, and to ex post conditions in which they cannot exercise their right of co-ownership when necessary (Risse, 2009). The state system both undermines the possibility of securing basic needs and hinders their ability to relocate elsewhere to do so. Climate change-related displacement disrespects natural co-ownership rights, by violating a “right of necessity.” For Risse, the common ownership rights which provide the moral foundation for our obligations to “climate refugees” are “natural and pre-institutional” (Risse, 2009). In a state of nature, prior to the establishment of property conventions, all individuals would have a natural right to use the planet’s resources to meet their basic needs. Risse contends that natural rights are rights that all could reasonably accept, and that the conception of collective ownership can be endorsed across cultures (Risse, 2009). A natural rights approach raises several philosophically controversial claims. To begin with, “needs” are hard to define in naturalistic terms: are they what a person requires in a state of nature, or in modern society? Another difficulty facing a natural rights approach to basic needs concerns the moral importance of such basic needs and, consequently, how robust they are as a legitimacy constraint. Risse assumes the moral significance of basic needs. However, as Anna Stilz argues, the account in that case does not generate a specific distribution principle; it simply assumes the principle it intends to argue for (Stilz, 2014). As Stilz points out, our natural or fundamental interests in the earth do not necessitate an interest in satisfaction of basic needs; other interests could be justified as a fundamental interest (Stilz, 2014). If there are a range of ways to characterize the distributive implications of the equal moral status Risse identifies, it is not clear that basic needs satisfaction can be defended over competing considerations.

The Right to a Livable Locality Given the controversial elements of natural rights views, we might ask if a normative framework can ground our climate displacement obligations in the state system without appealing to a natural co-ownership right. Simona Capisani answers this question in the affirmative and argues for a practice-based account of responsibility that does not rely on any further principle—natural or otherwise—that is external to the territorial state system (Capisani, 2020). Like Risse’s natural rights-based account, Capisani appeals to normative presuppositions of the state system. However, she does not need to argue why presocial practice principles should apply to individuals now. Rather than a co-ownership right, Capisani claims that all persons

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have a basic right to be somewhere livable and that it grounds our obligations at least when a territorial state system exists. What moral rights people may have under different arrangements—whether in a state of nature or partially territorialized world—is a further question. It is a further question that need not be answered to justify robust rights for those who are negatively impacted. Capisani argues that we can begin with the world as it is to ground obligations of protection without needing to invoke moral principles that are preinstitutional, as Risse does. Having a secure right to be somewhere livable, Capisani argues, is a necessary condition for the attainment of objectives one might ascribe to the state system. As a social practice, the state system coordinates actions of different agents within the practice toward presumably shared ends by way of commonly recognized or shared social understandings. It organizes the world in a territorial, decentralized manner. The exercise of jurisdictional authority—which states may lay claim to when excluding people from their territory—is justified or constrained by judgments regarding presumed ends attributed to a practice, including those of peace and stability. Capisani argues that traditional means of addressing foreseeable forms of exclusion may no longer be sufficient given the territorial instability climate change introduces. On her view, the right to a livable locality is a basic right: its security is indispensable for the full enjoyment of other rights whose protection is an aim of the social practice. When the right to a livable locality is violated and states continue to exercise sovereignty rights and refuse the provision of livable space, those whose mobility is impacted by climate change have lost the effective guarantee against exclusion that the social practice of the state system ought to guard against. By understanding the wrong of displacement in this way, Capisani illustrates that the obligation to protect the right to a livable locality emerges as an internal normative regulatory principle from the state system itself. Responsibility is assigned in the first instance to all states, by virtue of their participation in the system, understood as a social practice. Those whose mobility is negatively impacted by climate change are in conditions of precarity because of the very way the territorial state system is arranged. The problem of displacement is thus structural and political and cannot rely solely on a given state or international institution’s ad hoc immigration policies. The structural and political nature of the wrong of displacement calls for systematic, principled address, but it does not require a claim to preinstitutional rights to be true. The notion of livability on Capisani’s account aims to capture the embodied, relational element of existing as a person within a territorial state system. The basic claim to livable space is not merely a claim to a set of basic resources allocated in a static environment. Capisani utilizes the normative tools of the capability approach to characterize the relevant conception of livability at the heart of the practice-based framework she advances. She argues that conceptualizing livability as a functioning captures the normative significance of the co-constituting relationship of the body to the spaces that are impacted by and constrain one’s agency. The obligation to acknowledge people’s claim to the right to a livable locality thus includes addressing the instability associated with migration as well as facilitating in situ adaptation.

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Group Rights A notable feature of Risse and Capisani’s arguments is that they follow an “individualistic” approach to protection. Individuals, rather than groups, are regarded as claimants and subjects of protection. Some theorists argue that there are important moral and practical reasons to depart from individualistic methodologies. These theorists argue that individualistic solutions cannot sufficiently address the wrong of climate displacement or remedy the harms it causes and thus offer alternative frameworks that are grounded in a group or collective rights approach. While they have different reasons for why individualistic approaches fail to address the wrong of displacement, many group rights approaches suggest similar remedies, such as “territorial” solutions, which require states to cede territory to climate-displaced people. This section examines some examples of collective rights approaches to climate displacement. Both Avery Kolers and Cara Nine provide prominent examples of a “group rights” approaches to climate displacement. Kolers argues that individual approaches only offer a limited constraint on a state’s territorial right to determine entry into a state (Kolers, 2012). Grounding the claims of climate-displaced people in an individual human rights approach or common ownership of Earth framework fails to account for a specific nature of the loss people suffer when they are displaced by climate change and is thus limited in the obligations it requires. Kolers argues that a better alternative to an individual rights view is a moral argument that recognizes the prima facie right of people displaced by climate change to claim a collective or corporate right of resettlement. In other words, such populations have a right to reconstruct their polities in another state (Kolers, 2012). Nine takes a similar approach and argues that climate displaced people are owed a territorial right to resettle an entire displaced state (Nine, 2010). Like Risse, Nine argues that climate refugees have natural rights. However, instead of an individual right to the opportunity to satisfy basic needs, Nine defends the right of a group of people to have an opportunity of self-determination. Nine explains that such a right is collective in the sense that it is a right “that individuals hold collectively but that individuals cannot hold individually” (Nine, 2010). Nine applies the Lockean sufficiency proviso to justify the distribution of this territorial right. The Lockean proviso specifies that the procurement of property should leave “enough and as good” in common for others. Nine extends the proviso to current territorial holdings. Specifically, the current territorial holdings of a state could violate the Lockean proviso if people displaced by climate change are prevented from exercising their collective right to self-determination. Unless a group is sovereign over the geographical territory where its members reside, Nine argues that they simply no longer exist as a self-determining group. If a group is unable to exercise their right of self-determination because the system of territorial rights excludes them, then uninhabited land of another state is susceptible to the group’s justified claims to it. Like Nine, Kolers also invokes the sufficiency proviso and advances a group rights framework. However, he disagrees with Nine’s conception of territory around which her arguments are based. For Kolers, territory is

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not only a particular volume of geographical space. Rather, territory has a normative quality and should be understood as the “ratio of achieved public aims (such as justice) to a given land base” (Kolers, 2012). Group rights approaches are susceptible to a range of critiques that take issue with conceiving of groups as moral entities. For example, some theorists argue that group rights dissolve into individual rights (Griffin, 2008). Others are concerned about the consequences of ascribing rights to groups in the first place. For example, if moral standing is given to a particular group, such rights might mask the rights of individuals within the group or even override the rights of individuals (Buchanan, 1994). Though group rights may not necessarily clash with individual rights (Waldron, 1993), one might worry that a group rights approach may obscure morally relevant contextual elements that factor into an individual’s particular circumstance of displacement. Consequently, the solutions justified by a group rights approach may fail to appropriately account for the agency and resilience of individuals in the context of climate related displacement. Individual rights frameworks can sidestep these and other challenges to establishing a normative framework dependent on identifying a group right.

What Is Owed? The next section examines the question of what is owed to those who are exposed to climate-related impacts and compares various solutions proposed by both group rights frameworks and individualistic approaches. This section will examine two categories of proposed answers: the expansion of protections for cross-border immigration and the provision of territory or land. Regardless of whether a framework adopts a group or individual rights approach, we might ask whether these proposed solutions sufficiently address the wrong of negative climate-related mobilities or remedy the harms it causes.

Immigration and Inclusion Views that advocate for minimizing immigration restrictions suggest that we can reconceptualize migration as a protection obligation and a solution rather than a mere symptom of the failure to adapt to climate-related impacts. For example, some theorists argue for a more robust immigration right than a right to claim asylum as proponents of the Refugee Convention paradigm. Howard F. Chang argues that an extension of the refugee paradigm is still too narrow to help most people displaced by climate change unless it is broadened to liberalize migration law more generally. On this view, liberalized immigration laws are a necessary response to the challenge climate change poses to human mobility (Chang, 2017). Emigration can be understood as one part of the “optimal mix of responses to climate change” (Chang, 2017).

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Another way to expand international immigration is to argue that we have obligations to protect the right of climate-displaced people to choose the state they wish to migrate to. Recognizing the right to choose a resettlement location would amount to partial compensation for what the displaced have lost (Eckersley, 2015). Being de facto stateless due to climate impacts puts one in conditions of territorial dispossession with respect to the rest of the world. It is this condition that can ground a moral right to citizenship in another country of their choice. As Heyward and Ödalen argue, there is no way to fully restore the conditions in which citizens displaced by climate change formed their former life plans (Heyward & Jörgen, 2016). However, some forms of partial compensation are still owed. A free choice over where to resettle amounts to partial compensation because it enables the voluntary element in identity construction and create voluntary relationships with a new place. Conversely, if people are told where they must resettle, they will continue to suffer forms of alienation associated with displacement. Securing rights to immigration or free movement raises concerns over how such a right can be discharged. Risse argues that the logistics of securing the human right to relocate must be connected to larger climate policies. He suggests a way to distribute benefits and burdens would be to combine a “polluter pays” principle (Bayes, 2017) with an “ability to pay” principle. To determine how various countries would satisfy the obligation to address climate displacement, the international community would have to evaluate to what extent countries contributed to and benefitted from emissions. Eckersley advances a similar argument and rests the obligations of states on their ability to pay (Eckersley, 2015). Those who have taken a causal approach to climate displacement often argue that immigration responsibilities should be tied closely to responsibilities for harmful emissions (Byravan & Rajan, 2010). For example, the number of people a state ought to accept and protect may depend on the state’s historical emissions rather than its ability to offer aid (Byravan & Rajan, 2010). Bryavan and Rajan propose that an international treaty can be used to institutionalize this obligation (Byravan & Rajan, 2010). While principles determining an immigration quota increase may vary, these “increased quota-based” accounts face numerous practical and moral challenges. Questions about determining quota sizes per state, or questions over how to determine where claimants are relocated to requires principled address. For example, a lottery system could be used. However, such an approach may continue to violate the autonomy of those who are displaced. For this reason, proponents of an immigration approach have offered an alternative to framing the obligations as a quota-increase requirement. For example, Heyward and Ödalen argue that the best way to involve elements of choice and preserve voluntary elements of identity formation in the immigration approach is to issue a “Passport for the Territorially Dispossessed” (Heyward & Jörgen, 2016). This passport would protect the right to choose a new nationality, and all states would have the moral duty to accept holders of such passports (Heyward & Jörgen, 2016). The requirements of accepting a passport would fall on any state. This alternative to quota-based approaches faces its own moral and practical challenges. One challenge is the possibility of such duties becoming overdemanding

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if any one state becomes responsible for admitting a large majority of claimants. Heyward and Ödalen argue that such worries can be addressed by regulating the pace of migration through the implementation of a yearly queuing system (Heyward & Jörgen, 2016). They also suggest that in cases where one state is overwhelmingly responsible for satisfying the obligation to accept passport-holding claimants, that state may have a claim to having contributed their “fair share” (Heyward & Jörgen, 2016). Regardless of how it is argued for and conceptualized, the immigration solution is understood as a general answer to the question of what is owed to people whose mobility is impacted by climate change. Critics of this general strategy argue that it is morally insufficient. One category of critique argues that the immigration solution is unable to address the specificity of what has been lost in the context of climaterelated displacement. Such losses include the loss of place (Buxton, 2019) or home (de Shalit, 2011) which is integral to identity formation (de Shalit, 2011). Given that it may be impossible to return climate-displaced people to their home, the permanent loss of connection to home territory cannot be rectified by ensuring a right to immigrate. Relocation to new territories alone does not supply the memories and attachments associated with birthplace and thus cannot support identity expression and formation (de Shalit, 2011). For this reason, Shalit argues that governments have a duty to prevent such displacement from occurring rather than assuming they can compensate for the harms it causes (de Shalit, 2011). Additionally, critics of immigration approaches argue that expanding the right to immigration does not address the needs and preferences of people wishing to remain in their homes for as long as possible. While some communities are rendered vulnerable because of barriers to migration, climate-related immobility could be a matter of choice that involves socio-cultural commitments and values, attachment to place, and kinship obligations (Suliman et al., 2019). Decisions to remain may be a preferred and possible solution for impacted communities and individuals (Samid et al., 2019). For example, many “sinking island” states wish to develop adaptation initiatives to remain in their home states for as long as possible (Nansen Initiative). Developing tools for enhancing the capacity of people to remain in situ is an important element of responding to climate-related displacement (McAdam, 2012). Yet, most normative arguments, including those arguing for expanded immigration rights, do not explicitly justify a right to in situ adaptation assistance or understand the latter as a claim against the international community. Finally, group rights theorists may object to an immigration rights solution on the grounds that it is too individualistic in that it focuses exclusively on an individual’s rights to immigrate, claim to asylum, or right to choose the state of resettlement. Those worried about the collective elements of displacement argue that securing the rights of individuals may not address the preference or need to keep a community together (Buxton, 2019). Without considering the collective issue at hand in climaterelated displacement, an immigration proposal may not be able to secure a community’s right to self-determination or may be unable to advance “agency preserving” policies that recognize the preferences of the displaced to preserve a community and its shared history and culture (Gendreau, 2017).

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Territory and Land Some group rights accounts often differentiate themselves from individualistic approaches by offering an alternative answer to the question of what is owed. Instead of satisfying obligations to protection through the expansion of immigration rights, group rights views argue for the need to provide territory or land to the displaced. While these solutions may involve resettlement, the normative focus is on a group’s claim to such a right and on the collective harms experienced by displaced communities. For example, Nine argues that a group must have the authority to establish justice over a geographic region. Land must be provided to ecological refugee states because doing so helps to restore displaced people to a position of status quo ante. This requirement also involves the possibility of establishing sovereignty over some land that is currently part of another state’s territory. Those arguing for the provision of land and territory may disagree over the specific characterization of the duty. For example, Dietrich and Wündisch (2015) argue that land rights and territorial rights are conceptually different because they protect different interests. While both rights refer to the same spatial unit, property rights over land allow individuals to exclude others from use. In contrast, jurisdictional rights over territory are a precondition for a group’s self-determination. In making this distinction, Dietrich and Wündisch illustrate that displacement due to climate change can impact both rights, and thus produce different kinds of harms that require different forms of repair. Nine’s approach, according to Dietrich and Wündisch, is insufficient because it provides the wrong reasons for justifying the provision of territory and does not specifically hold emitters responsible. Kim Angell (2021) adopts a reparative framework for justifying the provision of territory. Like Nine, Angell argues that a collective right over territory exists because it is necessary for satisfying the shared interest in that territory by the individuals in the collective. However, Angell goes further and argues that the duty to provide suitable territory to those displaced by climate change includes a right to reestablish full territorial sovereignty as a reparation for emissions. Angell invokes the Reparative principle to argue that the duty to permit full territorial sovereignty will not impose unreasonable costs on the states required to relinquish territory. This is because there is an additional collective duty to modify one’s way of life such that territory is gradually ceded (Fruh, 2021). Theorists have suggested reasons to remain critical of the territory and land solution as an answer to the question of what is owed. For example, there are moral and practical challenges to how such an obligation would be fulfilled (Buxton, 2019). Nine has proposed the use of an international mechanism to cede land from states that have the most territory to do so. However, Buxton has argued that such an approach is in danger of replicating the same harms it aims to repair, given that land may be taken without the consent of current residents. Furthermore, if climatedisplaced people do not have the right to choose where their community is resettled, or are not provided with relevantly similar land, the provision of land alone may not restore certain cultural ties between communities and land.

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Compensation or Reparation? As has been discussed, both the immigration solution and the territory/land solution can be evaluated along a range of dimensions. An additional element that has yet to be explicitly discussed is whether such solutions ought to be grounded by compensatory frameworks as opposed to reparative approaches (Fruh, 2021). Nonreparative arguments are often informed by comparing the contemporaneous claims of climatedisplaced people against some requisite standard. Reparative arguments, in contrast, focus on historical claims and the need to restore climate-displaced people—as close as possible—to preharm conditions. Reparative views explicitly focus on restoring relationships and holding emitters—as causal sources of harm—responsible for addressing the deprivations associated with such harms. While a focus on compensation has been represented more frequently in moral arguments regarding the claims of climate displaced people, arguments advancing the benefits of reparative approaches to climate displacement have emerged. They provide a range of critiques and alternative solutions (Heyward & Jörgen, 2016; Ahmed, 2018; Angell, 2021; Buxton, 2019; Fruh, 2021). Rebecca Buxton, for example, argues that compensatory approaches are insufficient from the perspective of justice (Buxton, 2019). Kyle Fruh (2021) argues that nonreparative arguments are problematic in that they do not aim to return climate displaced people to the status quo ante and do not sufficiently attend to the range of deprivations associated with climate-related displacement. Theorists who take a reparative approach do not assume full repair is possible given the nature of the losses associated with climate displacement. However, given the nature of the deprivations associated with climate displacement, reparative views recognize that such deprivations are losses of something that formerly obtained rather than failures to reach some threshold (Fruh, 2021). Reparative views take the neutrality of redistribution in on-reparative approaches to be problematic because it does not include the restoration of just relations between harm-doers and the harmed (Fruh, 2021). Given the complexity of climate-related displacement, migration, and immobility, further work is required to explore how reparative and nonreparative approaches can justify multifaced solutions and to what extent such approaches centralize the rights and needs of affected individuals within their respective normative frameworks (McAdam, 2012).

Conclusion Given the complexity of the phenomena, no one policy solution is likely to satisfy the obligation to protect against and limit the impacts of climate change related displacement, migration, and immobility. The dynamic process of climate-related mobilities generates challenges for moral reasoning in addition to governance mechanisms and institutional reform. Policies and strategies that facilitate internal relocation, asylum protections, planned migration, resettlement, and in situ

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adaptation can be viable forms of response. Furthermore, a range of interventions can be used in both domestic and international spheres to strengthen the capacity for adaptation to both slow-onset climate impacts and quick-onset events. In addition to managed migration, barriers can be constructed to protect against flooding due to sea-level rise, or protection and expansion of natural coastal ecosystems can help stabilize coastal regions subject to erosion (McAdam et al., 2016). If states have obligations to address climate displacement, part of discharging the obligation may amount to the development of multilateral framework on investment facilitation and contribution to interventions aimed at strengthening adaptive capacities. Further principled justification is required to advance arguments for when and in what contexts such solutions should be deployed or how responsibilities for facilitation and burdens ought to be distributed among the international community. McAdam has suggested several normative principles that might inform frameworks that provide the foundation for policy interventions (McAdam, 2012). While she does not endorse any one model, she argues that any normative and policy-based responses to climate-related mobilities should include duties of international cooperation and certain norms, including duties to respect human dignity and human rights (McAdam, 2012). Climate-related displacement, migration, and immobility has emerged as a pressing challenge for the international community. While responses to it can be informed by the needs and desire of impacted communities, existing scholarship on migratory trends, and existing legal and policy tools, there is an additional need to address a further challenge. This challenge “lies in strengthening the normative and operational implementation of these instruments” (McAdam et al., 2016). Philosophical work has the potential to address this task and can be relevant in its potential to inform how we ought to think about the moral and political questions climate-related mobilities present. In doing so, philosophical work can identify normative assumptions and gaps in both domestic and international policies, it can identify specific principles for evaluating solutions, can identify, diagnose, and propose remedies to states of affairs that are morally inferior to (known) feasible alternatives (Wiens, 2015), or can clarify the concepts used in these value judgments. To effectively provide normative grounds for the development of protection strategies, philosophers must remain attentive to the complexities of movement and immobility decisions, must address intersecting structural injustices associated with climate change’s impact on human mobility, and account for the dynamic and heterogeneous nature of the phenomena of their theorizing.

Cross-References ▶ Adaptation Duties ▶ Climate Change and Global Justice ▶ Climate Change and Human Rights ▶ Compensation Duties ▶ Responsibility for Climate Harms

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Climate Change and Social Movements Kostas Koukouzelis

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Political Philosophy: From Civil Society to Social Movements, and Back . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Varieties of Climate Change Social Movements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Forms of Contestation in Climate Change Social Movements: Participation, Civil Disobedience and Beyond . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Timing, Democracy, and Cosmopolitanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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This chapter will present the philosophical grounding of (global) civil society and its connection to social movements, both from a general point of view and a climate-specific point of view (section “Political Philosophy: From Civil Society to Social Movements, and Back”). The next step will be to present the variety of climate movements with a special focus on the climate justice social movement and its current manifestations (section “Varieties of Climate Change Social Movements”). Last, it will discuss some of the means (boycotts, civil disobedience, etc.) often used by climate movements, and their prospects for influencing the wider public, put pressure on states and other agents’ action, and ultimately produce certain knowledge (section “Forms of Contestation in Climate Change Social Movements: Participation, Civil Disobedience and Beyond”). Climate change social movements might indeed be an important framework for rethinking not only international political philosophy, but political philosophy itself, especially the connection between democratic loyalty and advancing politics based on the right reasons (section “Timing, Democracy, and Cosmopolitanism”). K. Koukouzelis (*) Philosophy & Social Studies Department, University of Crete, Rethymno, Greece e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_131

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Keywords

Climate change · Social movements · Civil society · Civil disobedience · Democracy

Introduction The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states that ‘it is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land. Widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere, and biosphere have occurred’ (IPCC, 2021, p. 5). Climate change is a major cause of environmental degradation as well as a great source of injustice, global and intergenerational. One of the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is that humanity must urgently reduce CO2 emissions. This is now a climate emergency, and ‘climate change’ is now increasingly referred to as a ‘climate crisis’. Unfortunately, the political progress made so far is far from satisfactory. The great failure of the Copenhagen summit in 2009, but also the inadequate fixes made in subsequent summits, were a significant indication that there are certain limits to what can be decided, when the discussion is confined within a national interest’s framework. Sovereign states remain to a certain extent the main actors in international negotiations and national interests dominate discussions, with their conflicts determining the poor results on climate change and other issues. Yet, somewhat paradoxically, one of the many features of globalization is the disempowerment of statehood. This also means that states can no longer press international and multinational corporations to comply with environmental principles. At the same time, the climate crisis is also correlated to a certain, energyintensive way of life that is typical of affluent democratic countries and their citizens’ preferences cannot just be changed through state action. Something more radical is needed. Climate change social movements are emerging and expanding nowadays, making possible and sometimes effective the exercise of pressure on states and corporations. They also help create new knowledge especially on issues of climate justice, which lately takes a more cosmopolitan orientation. Indeed, the mobilization for climate change has been enormous and is still growing. Organizations range from neighborhood to international groups. Their aims vary and span from a wholesale adoption of non-anthropocentric ethics to the optimistic reliance on technology as a panacea, and from the abandonment of capitalism to the achievement of cosmopolitan justice. They also vary as to the means they employ in order to influence political decisions in global summits and elsewhere. They may start with urging for participation in decision-making, peaceful protesting, and activism, and move on to boycotting and to acts of civil or uncivil disobedience. In any case, climate movements are at the forefront of global civil society, as acknowledged by the IPCC itself – first, on grounds of policy advocacy; second, by providing policy research; and third, by opening political space for political reforms (IPCC, 2007, pp. 713–4).

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This chapter will present the philosophical grounding of (global) civil society and its connection to social movements, both from a general point of view and a climatespecific point of view (section “Political Philosophy: From Civil Society to Social Movements, and Back”). The next step will be to present the variety of climate movements with a special focus on the climate justice social movement and its current manifestations (section “Varieties of Climate Change Social Movements”). Last, it will discuss some of the means (boycotts, civil disobedience, etc.) often used by climate movements, and their prospects for influencing the wider public, put pressure on states and other agents’ action, and ultimately produce certain knowledge (section “Forms of Contestation in Climate Change Social Movements: Participation, Civil Disobedience and Beyond”). Climate change social movements might indeed be an important framework for rethinking not only international political philosophy, but political philosophy itself, especially the connection between democratic loyalty and advancing politics based on the right reasons (section “Timing, Democracy, and Cosmopolitanism”).

Political Philosophy: From Civil Society to Social Movements, and Back Social movements are phenomena that originate in civil society. Social movements and civil society have long been separated both conceptually and practically, and it is only recently that there is a growing effort at their reconnection (della Porta & Diani, 2011; della Porta, 2020). I will start by briefly stating the philosophical importance of ‘civil society’ before I move on to explaining the concept of ‘social movement’. This is because I take it that the concept of ‘civil society’ precedes both historically and conceptually that of ‘social movement’ (although there is a mutual influence despite differences). This will prepare the ground for dealing later with climate change social movements. From the point of view of political and social philosophy, ‘civil society’ has a long history, going back to the Greeks and Romans. At the beginning it was basically identical to that of political community (the polis for the Greeks and the res publica for the Romans), a collective with its own notions of common good, citizenship, and civic virtue. Modernity changed this meaning radically. Locke announced the appearance of modern civil society and Adam Smith presented it as a sphere of private striving organized by economic processes separate from the state. Hegel’s skepticism toward Smith’s market-based picture of civil society opened the road for a fierce attack by Marx. According to Marx, civil society is the space of the alienated bourgeois and its self-interested activity, plus the locus and trigger of inequality and antagonism. Its formal independence from the state is not liberating but rather establishes the domination of religion, property, and social class (Marx, 1978). Marx’s antidote, of course, was not a retreat to the Hegelian state, but a radical transcendence of civil society itself (Ehrenberg, 2011). Civil society’s revival came along with the communist crisis. This involved the East European development of civil society back in the 1980s, bringing back what,

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supposedly, constituted the secret life of democracy itself, its real fuel and firepower, which is that space between the individual and the state that had been suppressed by totalitarian communism. Nowadays, it is thought that civil society covers ‘the space of uncoerced human association, and also the set of relational networks – formed for the sake of family, faith, interest, and ideology – that fill this space’ (Walzer, 1991, p. 293). Examples of such associations are charities, NGO’s, community-, gender-, or faith-based groups, professional associations, as well as social movements. From a normative point of view, civil society is the space of voluntarism and uncoerced association – a space where individual autonomy is enhanced through the exercise of communicative freedom outside the coercive frame of the state or the market. There are several approaches that express these normative values. One of them has it that civil society is the realm of social life which, when viewed from the perspective of government, is characterized by plural and particularistic identities [. . .] [i]t is a zone of freedom for individuals to associate with others and for groups to shape their norms, articulate their purposes, and determine for themselves the internal structure of group authority and identity. (Rosenblum & Post, 2002, p. 3)

Civil society is a sphere of pluralism and identity formation, where one is free to join or exit an association. In it people set and pursue individual and social goods, and through that a diversity of comprehensive conceptions of the good is brought forth, tested and shaped. This has promoted Kantian conceptions of civil society as a sphere where citizens can make a public use of reason and openly deliberate on matters concerning the common good (Habermas, 1991). Civil society, therefore, can incorporate non-politicized forms of association based on trust and solidarity (charities, self-help groups) just as well as more politicized, interest-based associations, such as trade unions and business councils. From the point of normative political philosophy, civil society is thus often seen as a condition for the very possibility of an egalitarian democratic society (Keane, 2010, p. 464). Now, social movements are an expression of civil society. They share certain key characteristics with it, but also differ in some others. On the one hand, it seems that civil society stresses the importance of autonomy, cooperation, and civility, while social movements point toward the role of contestation and conflict. On the other hand, civil society and social movements converge in the sense that they are both loci of potential opposition to top-down, particularly state power, and means through which the collectivity can defend itself from it (Cohen & Arato, 1994, p. 493). In at least this sense, social movements are as necessary to democracy as is civil society – even though there also exist anti-democratic social movements (della Porta, 2020), as we shall see below. But what are social movements? Social movements are distinct from formalized political parties and organizations such as NGOs – which strive to gain a share in state power, develop a business-like professional approach to politics, or can be funded by public means. Frequently, they are described as social networks that function at the margin of official politics. Some define a social movement as a collection of organizations, groups, and individuals who

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develop and attempt to realize a collective project, based on specific knowledge interests. These interests give it a ‘collective identity’, which is also an essential part of its definition (Touraine, 1981; Diani, 1992). Others relax the demand for a collective identity and adopt a ‘network approach’, which stresses the linkages and interactions among groups and individual activists (Castells, 1996). Neither of the two approaches is sufficient by itself, though. On the one hand, the existence of a ‘collective identity’, especially in an era that radically questions identity politics, cannot be taken as a given not presupposed. For example, M. Hardt and A. Negri (Hardt & Negri, 2004) have argued that there are no social movements that resemble those of the past, but only an assemblage of disenfranchised individuals characterized now as the ‘multitude’, which is not a unified political subject like the ‘people’ or ‘social class’ and is not made one just by its actors calling themselves members of a social movement. On the other hand, an exclusive ‘network approach’ is insufficient too, because it is not clear just how much networking is required to constitute a social movement. A third, major characteristic of social movements is contestation. A social movement expresses conflictual dynamism, contests laws and policies of the status quo, and aims at fundamental social change. To be sure, contestation is again not enough as a defining feature of a social movement, if taken separately, and also needs the above two elements. In fact, it provides the crucial link between them – between the ‘network’ and the ‘collective identity’. Social networks that are dynamic and disperse come together to form something close to a collective identity, when they do, through acts of contestation. Therefore, a social movement is a discrete, autonomous agent, seeking to inform and influence the general public, the state, plus international organizations and corporations, with the aim of changing policies and possibly relevant everyday practices (Keck & Sikkink, 1998, pp. 1–38; della Porta & Diani, 2011). These aims are typically accomplished by articulating and employing several discourses for the purpose of framing problems for better communication to the public. Framing is of utmost importance, because frames are seen as ‘cognitive schemata’ employed to make sense of and interpret situations, attribute blame, find solutions, and motivate participation (della Porta & Parks, 2014, pp. 20–1; Walstrom et al., 2013). In that sense, social movements produce a form of digested, oriented ‘knowledge’ and insert it into the political process by communicating it to the public in creative ways (e.g., by politicizing the ‘hard facts’ of science, or creating vivid visual representations of these facts). Framing is also essential for mobilization. This is because the ability of people to learn and respond to changed conditions depends on the recognition of a shared social problem and the advocacy or criticism of certain policy proposals. Mobilization, of course, can come from below or from above. Mobilization from below is considered to be the most effective and faithful in identifying the common good, whereas mobilization from above mostly refers to industry interest groups or wealthy foundations, who could also manipulate framing in their own interest (Caniglia et al., 2015, p. 238). It is time to move on to social movements that engage with climate change. There is a wide variety of voices in the mix, and a first way to ordain them is to zero in on the contents of their contestations.

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Varieties of Climate Change Social Movements Climate change social movements can be categorized into four groups, in relation to how they frame climate change itself as a social phenomenon. They can also be divided into local and global climate movements, depending on whether they want to reach a local or a global audience, but equally on whether they aim to make local governments respond or multinational corporations adopt green policies. Given that climate change is indeed a global problem, this division tends to become obsolete. The categorization provided here does not aim at presenting climate movements, which are complex and hybrid in form, as essentialized or fixed. On the contrary, the aim is to provide some context, by highlighting at least some threads within such diverse and vast networking and hybridity. I mainly follow here the categorization provided by Jamison (2010), though with significant refinements. Alternative, but to a certain extent overlapping categorizations are proposed by Newell (2006), and Backstrand and Lovbrand (2006). A. Social movements that are skeptical of the truth value of scientific knowledge regarding climate change, or the latter’s status as a crisis, and/or of climate as a global public good. These three versions of skepticism are closely connected. Those skeptical of science either deny it or argue that climate change, even if true, is part of natural processes – climate was always variable, so there is nothing we should do about it. Those skeptical of the status of climate change as a crisis typically have it that, even if climate change is true and anthropogenic, there is plenty of time to fix it and thus no emergency or need for radical solutions here and now. Those skeptical of the conceptualization of climate as a global public good tend to contest the globalist flair of the whole discourse, often on nationalist grounds (Jamison, 2010, p. 815). This group of social movements also tends to deny that climate change’s repercussions violate any rights, as well as the legitimacy of invoking global justice considerations, when climate change rather falls within a conception of traditional international law that sees state sovereignty as inviolable. All these versions of skepticism are compatible and often accompanied by neo-conservative, sometimes far-right social movements and approaches that blur conspiracy theories, the primacy of national interest in global politics, and religion (Norgaard, 2011; McCright & Dunlap, 2010). B. Other climate movements are instead quite radical in their contestation of the status quo. Moving away from climate change deniers, there are also climate change social movements that define the content of contestation in a radical way, as an intellectual and practical revision of human relations to nature. The immediate practical goal is to promote a substantial lowering of the emissions of carbon dioxide and a transition to a ‘low carbon society’. Most versions of these movements are based on biocentric or deep ecology philosophical views, which are clearly non-anthropocentric. These movements prioritize direct action in defense of the natural environment, even to the point of expressing forms of hostility to humankind itself. ‘Earth First!’ is the best-known organization inspired by such an approach. Such social movements are typically small,

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command few resources, and are usually led by charismatic individuals (Rootes, 2004, p. 615) – yet this is changing in some important cases. Some of these movements call for a radical change in human relations to nature because non-human beings or non-human nature enjoy certain rights – the philosophical grounding being an acknowledgment that nature in general has intrinsic, not instrumental value. These right-based approaches are increasingly gaining traction: for example, the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, adopted by the World People’s Conference on Climate Change, April 27, 2010, in Cochabamba, Bolivia (IICAT, 2014, pp. 93–95), recognizes inherent rights to every being, human or non-human, on Earth (art. 2). C. There are also social movements advocating a convergence between economic growth and environmental protection, including climate mitigation. They tend to argue that existing social and political institutions can remain in place because they are capable of managing the climate crisis without structural changes. The belief in such a convergence has produced a framing that has been dubbed ecological modernization (Backstrand & Lovbrand, 2006), which has been influenced by a broader neo-liberal movement sometimes dubbed ‘transnational capitalism in action’ (Sklair, 1997), and places high hopes on technological innovation providing sustainable solutions (e.g., biofuels, clear/renewable energy). Jamison (2010) presents these movements as a process of commercialization of science, which has taken the path of private funding for commercially oriented technological innovation and development. He argues that such marketbased orientation was behind the Kyoto Protocol’s international negotiations that established the ‘cap-and-trade’ mechanism of carbon dioxide emissions (Jamison, 2010, pp. 816–7). Many other climate movements are very critical of ecological modernization, which they denounce as camouflaging the interests of developed, industrialized countries and big private interests. D. The criticisms just mentioned underpin the perspectives of climate justice movements in particular. These movements are both local and global and stress the importance of dealing with climate crisis in a way that takes issues of justice (harm or distribution of rights and duties) seriously (della Porta, 2007; Chawla, 2009; IICAT, 2014; Dawson 2010; Pettit 2009). They are typically subscribers to the broader movement on global justice, and can refer to high-level endorsements, for example, with the United Nations Development Program’s statement that climate change is intensifying the risks and vulnerabilities especially of the global poor in many different ways (United Nations Development Program, 2023). The climate justice movement is rather young but gaining increasing momentum (Tokar, 2014). In the US, its immediate predecessor was the movement for environmental justice, which began in the 1980s and stressed the fact that indigenous and poor rural communities were confronted with disproportionate exposure to environmental hazards and expressed sustained concern about such exposure tracking racial divides. It was in 1997 that a United Nations conference produced the Kyoto Protocol, introducing the ‘cap and trade’ system – a market-based solution to the lowering

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of greenhouse emissions. Even though developing countries signed the Protocol, the market orientation of that solution fueled the impression that the industrialized North was simply planning to buy its way out from the task of radically changing its production and consumption patterns (the North-South dichotomy is a prevalent framing feature in the advocacy of most global justice and climate justice movements – see Doyle & MacGregor, 2013). The concept of climate justice first appeared in a 1999 report under the title ‘Greenhouse Gangsters vs. Climate Justice’ (Tokar, 2014). The concept was further acknowledged in the Bali meeting in 2002 and later in Durban, South Africa, where market skeptics raised objections in the Durban Declaration on Carbon Trading (2004). It was in 2007 in Bali that representatives of communities affected by climate change gathered and united under the slogan ‘Climate Justice Now!’ (CJN). This was the place where several principles were stated, to ground the movement’s claims: (a) the principle of historical responsibility or ecological debt. According to the CJN declaration it is imperative that responsibility for reducing emissions and financing renewable energy is taken by those who have most benefited from fossil-fueled economic growth; (b) principles of distributive justice in relation to natural resources (energy, land, and water), (c) the right of compensation to those who are being displaced due to climate change-related phenomena (climate refugees), (d) rights of equal participation in decision-making. Climate justice advocates intervened in parallel sessions to UN climate negotiations during the eighth Conference of the Parties (COP8) held in India in 2002. There, a parallel climate justice summit organized by social movements resulted in the Delhi Climate Justice Declaration, which affirmed that climate change is a human rights issue and rejected the market-based policies that tended to guide the negotiations. It also recognized that unsustainable production and consumption in the affluent North is the most serious cause of the phenomenon (India Climate Justice Forum, 2002). Among the central claims climate justice movements raise are that human rights include people’s rights to a clean and healthy environment. The reference to human rights is crucial, because it distinguishes this group of movements from the other climate change movements mentioned above, including those that advocate for the ‘rights’ of Mother Earth and non-human entities. In the context of climate change, human rights claims are based on a vision of global ecological interdependence, strengthening the notion that human rights claims, when it comes to climate, be indeed a matter of justice not mere solidarity or moral obligation. These are claims not simply about the eradication of destitution, or compensation for the intended or unintended effects of atmospheric pollution or natural resources’ exhaustion, but about the eradication of systemic dependency and domination structures (Koukouzelis, 2017). In time, climate change social movements have issued various other declarations of their central aims. One of them is The Durban Declaration on Carbon Trading in 2004, arguing that carbon trading not only will not halt the climate crisis but will magnify social inequalities in many ways (IICAT 2014,

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pp. 75–77). Recently, The Margarita Declaration on Climate Change, signed in Margarita Island, Venezuela on July 18, 2014, was explicit in recognizing, among other things, the rights of future generations (IICAT, 2014, pp. 96–104). Nowadays, the youth-led Fridays for Future (FFF) movement, inspired by Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, antagonizes past and present generations for pillaging the ecosystem, thus violating youth’s rights to an open future or indeed a decent life. Nowadays, the CJN network includes hundreds of grassroots groups throughout the globe, such as the African Biodiversity Network, the Global Forest Coalition, the Jubilee South-Asia/Pacific Movement on Debt and Development, La Via Campesina, Peoples’ Movement on Climate Change, and the Philippine Movement for Climate Justice (Dietz & Garrelts, 2014, pp. 237–266), the European Climate Justice Action network (CJA) and the UK Climate Camp movement, among many others. In December 2011 (Global Day of Action), during the 17th UN conference of the parties (COP17) in Durban, South Africa, the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, and La Via Campesina of North America called on all their members and allies to mobilize under the banner of ‘1000 Durbans for Climate Justice! Stop the 1% from profiting from pollution, lift up community solutions that cool the planet!’. The activist agenda included stopping solutions like ‘cap and trade’ and other carbon trading mechanisms. The call urged members to organize events of political education in their own cities, with the aim of exposing corporate polluters and promoting climate justice solutions. In March 2014, 400,000 people gathered and marched for climate justice in Manhattan, New York. Nevertheless, the climate justice movement remains heterogeneous, and there are various tensions and contradictions within it. One very basic source of tension stems from different understandings of ‘climate justice’ entertained by people living in developed countries of the North and those living in the poor countries of the global South (Parks & Roberts, 2010). Furthermore, many movements in the Global South tend to emphasize other things next to climate action, particularly biodiversity, ecosystem, and resources conservation. To a very large extent, this heterogeneity is a consequence of different histories, places, and circumstances, and in this sense its richness may be a blessing. The disagreements, trade-offs, organizational complexities, and transaction costs that may result are something of a curse, if the aim is to constitute a unitary front of contestation. But these challenges can, at least in principle, be successfully managed if contextualized within a larger and more fundamental picture and practice: that of equal participation in communicative networks – precisely that which civil society and social movements are supposed to enable. The categorization of the climate movements sketched above can be helpful in showing the varieties of proposals and claims, strategies, and justifications that these movements countenance. Some pathways are shared by some of them: for example, neoliberal strategies of sustainable development are also endorsed by many climate

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justice movements. Yet there is a huge difference between neo-liberal and climate justice movements on how they define ‘sustainable development’ (Kumi et al., 2014; Knodel, 2012). And ultimately, what truly distinguishes social movements from one another as knowledge-producers, is how they define the issues of concern and how they frame their communication. In short, there are strong tendencies both toward a common front and toward fragmentation – again, something that has traditionally been thought to be true of civil society itself, the generator of social movements.

Forms of Contestation in Climate Change Social Movements: Participation, Civil Disobedience and Beyond Local or global climate change social movements have been and still are extremely active. The categorization in the previous section tracked the content of contestation (claims and ideological premises), and content often also defines the form of contestation, although there is no causation there. The means and tactics used by social movements also clarify the role that these movements assign to themselves within democratic politics. Indeed, looking at such variations may help achieve a deeper understanding of important aspects of democracy itself, including its meaning, function, and scope in the face of global climate change. On the one hand, there are climate movements that subscribe to a kind of civic environmentalism, which potentially includes contestation but is not confined to it. These movements are often interested in achieving wider and more efficient participation in treaty negotiations, and that is why they become more active during UNFCCC COP meetings, typically at the hands of NGOs that organize parallel or counter meetings and engage in lobbying, reporting, and blaming and shaming. This goes back to the idea that civil society is the space of voluntary association and open participation, seen in turn as essential to informed deliberation, joint decisionmaking, and/or further contestation. On this view, climate movements are a counterforce to the myopic exercise of national or corporate interests (Muller & Walk, 2014). Of course, access to institutionalized decision-making processes is key – and such access is precisely what climate movements often lack, particularly when their financial capacities are limited, as is often the case for movements from the global South. Other social movements de-emphasize civic environmentalism and emphasize civil disobedience instead (Burkett, 2016; Hettinger, 2001), often on the grounds that high-level talks and negotiations are mostly ineffective and should therefore be overtaken by and through on-the-ground actions, such as active boycotts, mass protests, and other nonviolent means such as blockades of roads and bridges or occupations of coal mines. Non-violent movements of civil (or climate) disobedience are often fiercely criticized by other, as it were ‘un-civil’, movements that employ rather more radical and direct, and indeed sometimes violent, means of contestation, such as destruction of infrastructures and damage of public or private property – what has been dubbed ‘ecotage’.

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Civil disobedience climate movements are predominant. Examples are Extinction Rebellion (XR), Fridays for Future (FFF), 350.org, and Sunrise, a US-led movement founded in 2017. In the tradition that has been revived and restated by John Rawls (1999), civil disobedience is defined as nonviolent, public, conscientious, and with a readiness to accept punishment because of its eventual lawbreaking (Rawls, 1999, 319–323; Kyllonen, 2014). Extinction Rebellion is explicit in asking activists joining its lines to be prepared to take legal responsibility for their actions. These are public and openly conducted, accompanied by explicit statements of illustration; they are conscientious in showing respect for other persons, including government officials and police forces; and they are nonviolent, aiming at harmless disruption. Prohibition of harm, however, often refers to persons, whereas property damage can be occasionally allowed and justified if the purpose of communicating messages is thus particularly well served. All these characteristics of civil disobedience by climate activists show both respect for the law, and sincerity of intentions (Berglund & Schmidt, 2020; Extinction Rebellion, 2023). Ultimately, civil disobedience is not something that stands outside democratic culture and politics, but rather a way – albeit an exceptional one – for strengthening citizenship with the aim of achieving democratic self-correction. Its task is not to cause institutional change by lawbreaking, but to push for institutional change democratically, that is, by gaining the hearts and minds of fellow citizens (or, indeed, fellow cosmopolitan citizens, in the case of global climate movements) through symbolic, highly communicable actions. Some contemporary work in political philosophy criticizes the civil disobedience paradigm because of its being restrictive, not radical enough, inefficient, and long outdated (Delmas, 2018). Un-civil disobedience climate movements appropriate this perspective while they vocally underline that climate change is a climate crisis, demanding urgent and decisive, even extraordinary measures. The list of climate movements that engage in uncivil disobedience is short, but its members are loud. They include deep ecologists, biocentric activists, and green Marxists among others, and involve such organizations as Earth First!, Earth Liberation Front, and Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. In climate activism uncivil disobedience is not necessarily public, may opt for lawbreaking without accepting punishment, and can potentially become violent. It may be imaginative, including practices like monkeywrenching and ‘tree spiking’. A case of monkeywrenching is that of J.B. Hill, who sat on a treetop in North California for 738 consecutive days, and successfully secured the tree, a 1000-year-old redwood, against logging by the Pacific Lumber Company. ‘Tree spiking’ is a potentially more violent action, in which metal spikes are driven deep within trees so as to cause damage to chain saws. Uncivil disobedience can also be more conventional, adopting practices like damaging pipelines and petroleum infrastructures, or vandalizing SUVs as a way to demonstrate opposition to the so-called ‘luxury emissions’ of the wealthy social classes. Some of these forms of protest are now called ecotage; in some cases, they have been called ecoterrorism (Loadenthal, 2017). Climate movements that practice uncivil disobedience presuppose the futility of persuasion or communicative pressure. This, in turn, is often based on a deep lack of trust in governments and corporations, and their conjunctions at policy levels. No point

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in following the tactics of nonviolent protest, then. And besides these considerations of efficacy, there is also one of reciprocity: given that fossil-fueled power structures exercise violence through their exploitative attacks both on nature as a whole and on vulnerable humans and non-human animals, the answer should also be violent – indeed, counter-violent. The loyalty to the law that is central to nonviolent civil disobedience is powerfully questioned, on the grounds that there is not much to be loyal to and respect, if that law is involved with power structures that show nearly complete indifference for the harms and burdens it imposes onto human and non-humans both present and future. Consequently, ecotage is seen as both more urgent and better justified than enlarging the movement in view of reform (Malm, 2021).

Timing, Democracy, and Cosmopolitanism To conclude, consider three interrelated issues. The first is about the timing value of climate movements; the second is about the opportunity they offer to reflect on the very function, value and limits of democracy; and the third is the fact that climate movements expand the scope of moral and political concern, because they deal with a problem that is global (as well as intergenerational). Climate movements typically make much of timing and seek to accelerate operations by pushing governments to take urgent action. Civil society can be more effective in mobilizing people than governments, and that it can do so is a peculiarity of democracy and itself a very powerful democratizing factor. However, the emergency frame within which climate movements tend to work may also be in contrast with democratic demands for accurate, informative and informed, open, and fallible deliberation. Talk of ‘emergency’, after all, is often used by authoritarian regimes as an excuse for putting forward extralegal measures. This is a danger civil society and social movements need to bear very clearly in mind (Scheuerman, 2022, pp. 804–5). This takes us to the second issue, related to the very role of social movements in general and climate movements in particular. Section II noted that contestation depends on, or descends from, communicative freedom. The latter is in turn dependent on the fundamental importance of autonomy, and so is the essentially developmental and educational character of democracy that values autonomy as an end-in-itself. The climate crisis calls for radical innovations not only at the institutional level, but also at the scale of individual and collective lifestyles and may thus challenge elements of individual and collective identities and conceptions of the good. If only to be effective and sustainable, any such radical innovations should be autonomously endorsed. Democracy can countenance transformative changes exactly because it is based both on the right reasons for action and sufficiently large numbers that can promote real change. Therefore, it allows for self-corrective mechanisms. Civil disobedience is such a mechanism (Rawls, 1999, pp. 313–318); whereas uncivil disobedience is at risk of jamming it. Democracy is not only about truth – whatever its content might be, perhaps that of the best climate data – but also about persuasion and motivation. Avant-garde groups that act secretly and violently

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in order to bring change and justice can be both dangerous and ineffective (Scheuerman, 2022, p. 806). The third issue has to do with scope. Climate movements become all the more global in scope nowadays mainly because climate change proves to be about global ecological interdependence, and climate is indeed a global public good (Koukouzelis, 2017). It has been argued that climate change has bound us together worldwide in a morally distinct way (Maltais, 2008, p. 597). The political translation of this should be some form of cosmopolitanism that enjoys four characteristics: (a) it is based on a freedom, (b) it is distinctively contestatory (which enhances the cognitive dimension, as well as burden, of cosmopolitanism), (c) it challenges statist logics, (d) it sees global social movements’ claims as manifestations of membership rights in humanity. Climate movements’ activity gives us not only a deeper way to conceptualize threats to liberty, but more importantly a way to realize it, that is, a normative reason to create a ‘republic of humanity’, the civil condition necessary for common liberty. The modal and institutional aspects of such a liberty require that human rights should be better conceived as membership rights. Indeed, working out the nature and content of human rights is a matter of specifying the preconditions of membership in the community of humanity (Cohen, 2004, 203, Koukouzelis, 2014). Such cosmopolitanism is to be conceived as a process of learning. By contesting and de-contesting norms, climate movements insert in global dialogues their own interpretations of rights and duties, enabling the political inclusion of different people’s cultural and economic perspectives. In this way, they also cognitively expand our horizons – as they also do by insisting on ecological interconnectedness. And it is through the actual exercise of contestation that individual and collective identities are dynamically formed and reformed.

Cross-References ▶ Climate Change, Environmental Philosophy, and Anthropocentrism ▶ Climate Change and Democracy ▶ Climate Change and Environmental Justice ▶ Climate Change and Global Justice ▶ Climate Change and Human Rights ▶ Climate Change and Intergenerational Justice ▶ Climate Change Conspiracy Theories ▶ Responsibility for Climate Harms

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Climate Change Conspiracy Theories Juha Ra¨ikka¨

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Climate Change Conspiracy Theories: Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Empirical Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conspiracy Theory: A Definition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ethical Issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Policy Options . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Climate change conspiracy theories raise many questions. Some of the questions are philosophical in nature. They include issues such as how to define “conspiracy theory” (a conceptual question), what the ethical status of conspiracy theorizing is (a moral question), and how decision-makers should deal with climate change conspiracy theories (a practical question). One way to define “climate change conspiracy theory” is to say that they are explanations that (1) refer to conspiracies, (2) are not in line with more or less unanimous views of the climate scientists, and (3) offer clearly insufficient evidence in support of the alleged conspiracies: Relevant experts find the evidence so bad that the theories are not considered even as competing explanations. Climate change conspiracy theories are ethically problematic. The theories tend to reduce individual persons’ commitment to cut down their carbon footprint. More generally, conspiracy theories undermine trust toward epistemic authorities and social institutions generally. There is no agreement on what the right policy toward climate change conspiracy theories would be, but there are many options. Increasing social trust is among them. J. Räikkä (*) Philosophy, University of Turku, Turku, Finland e-mail: jraikka@utu.fi © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_141

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Keywords

Conspiracy theories · Conspiracy · Climate change · Denialism · Ethics · Policy options

Introduction There is a large consensus among climate scientists that global warming is a fact and that it has partly a human origin. There is also consensus that urgent measures are needed to mitigate the climate change. However, public discussion in many countries, especially in the United States, has shown open skepticism toward the results produced by climate scientists. The denialist position that climate change is the “greatest hoax in the history” has been surprisingly common (cf. Powell, 2011, p. 148). The skepticism about global warming is usually related to the rejection of policy recommendations that encourage to lessen greenhouse gas emissions and take precautionary measures to mitigate forthcoming harms. It is difficult to tell why many ordinary people reject established scientific findings. People’s ideological backgrounds play a role, and two people with different ideologies (say, political opinions) can interpret the same information in very different ways (Uscinski et al., 2017; Jylhä & Hellmer, 2020). People also use strikingly different testimonial sources when they form their beliefs (Levy, 2019). But why has the rejection been particularly visible in the case of climate science? After all, it is unlikely that the climate skeptics are exceptionally irrational or ignorant (Levy, 2019). However, there are some explanations why climate science may appear to be a particularly tempting target for those who are ready to suspect results that almost all experts support. For instance, climate scientists are reported to vote about their results, and lay people may think that voting does not sound like a proper method for natural sciences. The findings showing that anthropogenic climate warming is true appear to change relatively often, and these changes (say, related to climate effects of the Amazonian rain forests) may give the impression that the results are not reliable (Qin et al., 2021). Furthermore, during the Covid spring 2020 there was a clear reduction of CO2 emissions, but still the overall amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere went up, which may suggest that their root cause cannot be anthropogenic (Le Quéré et al., 2020). These kinds of reasons do not justify climate skepticism – there are very good replies to these and similar worries – but they may explain it, at least to some extent. However, not all who deny that human activities are causing the global climate change and who therefore oppose present policy suggestions literally believe what they say. Some opponents present skeptical arguments in academic debates and in public merely because defending those arguments is considered strategically wise, politically or economically. There are “merchants of doubt” who benefit from misunderstandings and confusions (Oreskes & Conway, 2010). The creation of artificial disagreements and fake controversies is an important strategy of climate science

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denialism (Hansson, 2018). Backlash campaigns against awareness of climate change have been common and well-funded (Lahsen, 2013). Public resistance to policies intended to lessen or stop carbon emissions benefit many states and industries, including people who own the companies. Thus, an important explanation for the rejection of established scientific findings and policy recommendations connected to them is simply that some people are intentionally misled. Climate change conspiracy theories form a special ground for skepticism. Sometimes they are created and distributed to mislead people; in other times conspiracy theorists seem to believe in the theories and take them to be true. Probably the most well-known climate change conspiracy theory is the claim that the scientific consensus about climate change is manufactured and based on a scientists’ conspiracy to guarantee lavish research funding. The current section sketches some of the most prominent features of the philosophical debate on climate change conspiracy theories. There are many different conspiracy theories that are related to climate change or global warming. The empirical research on the effects of theories has been rich and fruitful in recent years. The philosophical debate includes questions such as how to define “conspiracy theory” (a conceptual question), what the ethical status of conspiracy theorizing is (a moral question), and how decision-makers should deal with climate change conspiracy theories (a practical question).

Climate Change Conspiracy Theories: Examples Usual climate change conspiracy theories aim to support at least one of the following claims: (1) climate change is not really happening; (2) anthropogenic climate change is not really happening; (3) climate scientists’ policy proposals intended to mitigate (alleged) climate change are not acceptable. A conspiracy theorist may aim to argue for all the claims – by a conspiracy allegation – but she need not try to support them all. Although the view that climate change is not really happening implies that anthropogenic climate change is not really happening, the opposite is not true. Obviously, a person can deny the human origin of global warming without denying the warming itself. The claim that climate scientists’ policy proposals intended to mitigate climate change are not acceptable can be defended by claiming that climate change is not really happening, but surely one can criticize the present policy proposals also without denying climate change. One can simply say that they are too costly (and that there is a conspiracy that explains the costs). Similarly, a person can agree with climate scientists’ policy proposals intended to mitigate climate change, but still think that, actually, climate change talk is a great scam, based on a conspiracy. Perhaps he agrees with the policy proposals simply because he thinks (correctly) that their likely effects are welcome in terms of health and well-being. What kinds of climate change conspiracy theories are there? Climategate conspiracy theory has gathered a lot of attention. Climategate refers to an incident that started on November 19, 2009, when an anonymous hacker stole and published e-mails from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia. The e-mails included sentences that suggested that scientists aim to silence their critics

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by boycotting certain journals and corrupting peer-review processes, forge information about climate change, and manufacture the forthcoming report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The news was published in Britain’s Daily Telegraph, Wall Street Journal and elsewhere (Powell, 2011). At the beginning, the question was about a gross misunderstanding rather than a conspiracy theory. The sentences were interpreted out of their context. However, when it became relatively clear that there was no orchestrated cover-up, some people continued to claim that scientists conspire, as suggested by the e-mails. According to Climategate conspiracy theory, the original interpretations of the e-mails were correct and show that climate scientists are lying to secure research funding. Their data is fake. They want money and are willing and able to engage in extreme scientific misconduct (Uscinski et al., 2017). According to some surveys, the Climategate incident and the debate that followed weakened public trust in climate science and scientists. Consequently, people were less confident that anthropogenic climate change is happening and requires serious concern and political action (Lahsen, 2013, p. 548). Perhaps merely cloud coverage is responsible for global temperature changes and the idea of manmade global warming is a hoax (Merlan, 2019). Climategate conspiracy theory says that scientists are the bad guys. But there are climate change conspiracy theories that blame industry, political parties or ideological groups rather than scientists. These theories include a set of wild claims. Oil companies are intentionally hiding technologies that would totally stop global warming, as these technologies would be disastrous for business (Uscinski et al., 2017, p. 5). Environmentally oriented people have put their money on the green energy companies, and they bribe authorities to doctor the data to save their investments. The United Nations wants to overpower member nations and uses the climate change trick to convince people that there is a problem that countries cannot solve on their own (Kennedy, 2016). Left-wing activists want to centralize power and undermine local sovereignty by using the global warming hoax. Climate change is a communist ploy (Uscinski & Olivella, 2017). Climate change talk is a sneaky way for governments to tax ordinary citizens more and more (Kennedy, 2016). The concept of climate change was created by the Chinese to make products from the United States less competitive in global markets (Schulman, 2018). Climate engineering has created many conspiracy theories. Climate or geoengineering refers to an intervention that aims to change the planet’s climate system, for instance, by regulating sunlight (Goodell, 2010; Hamilton, 2013). The most common conspiracy theory related to geoengineering is (somewhat surprisingly) the so-called chemtrails conspiracy theory. According to the theory, airplanes are spraying a toxic mix of chemicals through contrails to control weather and possibly people’s minds. According to one version, the intention is to destroy humankind. Another version says that chemtrails are responsible for climate change. Chemtrails conspiracy theory accuses geoengineering, although dreams of weather modification and the plans to change the climate system are not the same thing (Hamilton, 2013, p. 107; Tingley & Wagner, 2017).

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Empirical Studies Empirical studies about climate change conspiracy theories concern mainly their social and psychological background and their real or likely consequences. These studies are not philosophical, but they are in many respects relevant to philosophical questions – for instance, to the ethics of climate change conspiracy theorizing. Karen Douglas, Stephan Lewandowsky, and Joseph E. Uscinski are well-known researchers in the field. What kinds of empirical results there are? Probably, the key finding is that conspiracy thinking has a positive correlation with climate change denial (Douglas & Sutton, 2015; Uscinski et al., 2017, p. 19). But there are many other, more subtle, results. One need not believe in one of the climate change conspiracy theories to be vulnerable to climate denialism: Endorsement of a cluster of any conspiracy theories (concerning, say, the Moon landing and Princess Diana’s death) predicts rejection of climate science (Lewandowsky et al., 2013). Those who think that climate change is a hoax are more likely to reject many other scientific propositions, which are not related to climate (Lewandowsky et al., 2015). Endorsement of free-market economics ideology predicts rejection of climate change (Lewandowsky et al., 2013). The effects of conspiracy thinking on climate change denial are conditional on individuals’ party identification, at least in the United States (Uscinski & Olivella, 2017). Elsewhere, people’s political attitudes, in particular conservative attitudes, do not predict climate skepticism that clearly. Conspiratorial ideation need not make a person denialist, although it can (Hornsey et al., 2018). Males are more likely to deny human influence on climate change (Jylhä et al., 2016). In the future, it would be important to add interdisciplinary collaboration to empirical research projects and to gather still more valuable and diverse data. Also, the notion of “conspiratorial thinking” needs further clarification, and researchers should strive to agree on how to measure underlying conspiracy thinking and climate change conspiracy beliefs (Uscinski et al., 2017).

Conspiracy Theory: A Definition Climate denialist claims are sometimes based on conspiracy theories, but not always. In order to know when there is conspiracy theorizing in the background, we need to know what conspiracy theories are. However, there is no consensus on how the concept “conspiracy theory” should be understood, although we can list examples of them – including examples of climate change conspiracy theories. The claim that Elvis Presley conspired with his doctors and fabricated his death certificate is a conspiracy theory. The view that climate scientists have decided to lie about global warming is a climate change conspiracy theory. In his Discources on Livy (1531), Niccolò Machiavelli points out that conspiracies are often made by those who are not very powerful, and that some conspiracies are made for morally valuable reasons, for instance, to fight against tyranny. Both observations are correct. Conspirators need not be particularly powerful (for they can

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be ordinary medical doctors), and there are many historical examples of welcome conspiracies (such as Operation Valkyrie to assassinate Adolf Hitler). When it comes to conspiracy theories, they tend to attribute conspiring to powerful and morally corrupt groups. Hence social psychologists and social scientist often define conspiracy theories as explanations that refer to “powerful persons” who act in secret “for their own benefit” (Douglas & Sutton, 2011; Uscinski et al., 2017). This is an acceptable way to think about conspiracy theories, as far as one is interested in an important subgroup of them. However, generally speaking, conspiracy theories are not limited to alleged actions of powerful and selfish people. The claim that Paul McCartney died in 1966 and a replica took his place in the Beatles is a conspiracy theory (if something is), but the theory attributes conspiracy to a group of young artists who were not particularly powerful at that time. A person who thinks that the first Moon landing was framed need not think that the operation was morally blameworthy. She may think that it was a clever move, given the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union (Räikkä, 2009). Obviously, conspirators themselves do not usually think that they are doing something wrong. They tend to be ready to defend their decision to conspire. President Ronald Reagan surely did not think that Irangate conspiracy was problematic. In his view, it was patriotic. However, there is something in the idea that conspiracies are morally suspect. A group’s secret plan to organize a funny birthday party is not a conspiracy, possibly because there is nothing morally wrong in the plan. In conspiracies, there is something wrong. However, conspiracies need not be wrong all-things-considered, but merely prima facie wrong, or they may go against the so-called conventional moral norms. Although a plan to assassinate a dictator can possibly be morally justified all-things-considered, people certainly have a prima facie obligation not to kill others, including failed political leaders. In this sense, conspiracies are indeed morally problematic. But not all morally problematic secret plans are conspiracies. For instance, secret military operations are not usually called conspiracies even when they look morally questionable. When a group conspires, it does or attempts to do secretly something that it should not do, given its role and function. Some groups exist to make secret military operations and when they do, they do not conspire – even if their actions do not meet appropriate moral standards (Ichino & Räikkä, 2021). Conspiracy theories refer to conspiracies. Climate change conspiracy theories refer to conspiracies related to climate science, geoengineering or something similar. Notice, however, that many ordinary explanations concerning historical events also refer to conspiracies. Brutus, Cassius and other conspirators killed their leader Julius Caesar in 44 BC. The Pazzi family conspired to assassinate Lorenzo ja Giuliano de’ Medici in 1478 in Florence. It can be argued that all explanations that refer to conspiracies should be called conspiracy theories, and that we should not distinguish between ordinary historical explanations that refer to conspiracies and conspiracy theories (Dentith, 2016, p. 581; Pigden, 2007, p. 221). Possibly, such a redefinition of “conspiracy theory” would free us from the pejorative meaning the concept has. That, in turn, would help us to study conspiracy theories open mindedly (Dentith,

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2019). However, it is clear that the redefinition would change the subject of the discussion concerning conspiracy theories. In ordinary language, conspiracy theories do not refer to incontestable historical explanations that mention some real conspiracy as a part of an explanation. When someone says that conspiracy theories are potentially dangerous, she does not mean that knowledge about past conspiracies is dangerous. Empirical studies show that in spoken language we distinguish between ordinary conspiracy explanations (concerning, say, Caesar’s death) and conspiracy theories (Napolitano & Reuter, 2021). Conspiracy theories explain past, present or future events by referring to (alleged) conspiracies. What makes conspiracy theories special is that they are not in line with more or less unanimously accepted “official” explanations and that they rely on a low standard of evidence, regarding the alleged conspiracy. In spoken language, “conspiracy theory” refers to an explanation that satisfies not only the (1) conspiracy criterion but also the (2) conflict criterion and the (3) evidence criterion (Ichino & Räikkä, 2021; Napolitano & Reuter, 2021). 1. Conspiracy criterion: an explanation of a given event refers to an actual or alleged conspiracy. 2. Conflict criterion: the explanation is not in line with the received explanation of the event and provides an alternative to the “official view” (if there is one). 3. Evidence criterion: the explanation offers insufficient evidence in support of the alternative explanation, so that it is not considered as a competing theory (Ichino & Räikkä, 2021). The conspiracy criterion is clear, but we need to look closer to the conflict criterion and the evidence criterion. The conflict criterion separates conspiracy theories from ordinary historical explanations that refer to conspiracies (Räikkä & Basham, 2018). An explanation that refers to a conspiracy is a conspiracy theory only if representatives of the “official view” find the conspiracy claim strikingly implausible or would find it strikingly implausible in case they considered it. The view that vaccines will kill millions of people and health authorities know it (but do not reveal the truth) is a conspiracy theory, as it is obviously unrealistic according to clear majority of the epistemic authorities on which we normally rely – such as scientific researchers, investigative journalists, various state authorities, and so on. Their view is the “official” view. The conflict criterion does not imply that new conspiracy theories that have not yet been evaluated by the epistemic authorities cannot be genuine conspiracy theories (Ichino & Räikkä, 2021). The evidence criterion helps to distinguish between conspiracy theories and explanations that may also refer to conspiracies and conflict with the received view. The claim that Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin was killed by the British intelligence service is not considered (or is not always considered) to be a conspiracy theory, but a competing historical theory about the death of Rasputin. Those two kinds of theories – conspiracy theories and “rival theories” that refer to conspiracies – differ with respect to the quality of the evidence they provide. Conspiracy theories

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offer relatively little good quality evidence in support of the conspiracies they talk about. Competing historical theories, in turn, offer a good amount of good quality evidence in support of their claims (Martin, 2010). They may not convince most of the experts, but they are taken seriously, because of the evidence they provide (Ichino & Räikkä, 2021). Whether evidence is good or bad depends on the view of epistemic authorities. In principle, although it is unlikely, an explanation which is conspiracy theory today may be a competing theory tomorrow and finally, someday, the official truth of the matter. The definition based on three criteria does not mean that conspiracy theories must be false: epistemic authorities can make mistakes. Notice also that the definition does not imply that a person who would be considered one of the epistemic authorities could not be a conspiracy theorist. A biologist or a historian may well defend an explanation which refers to an alleged conspiracy, but which is nonsense according to most other experts (Ichino & Räikkä, 2021). If the definition based on three criteria is adopted, then climate change conspiracy theories are explanations that (1) refer to conspiracies, (2) are not in line with more or less unanimous views of the climate scientists, and (3) offer clearly insufficient evidence in support of the alleged conspiracies: relevant experts find the evidence so bad that the theories are not considered even as competing explanations. However, it is important to keep in mind that the question of the appropriate definition is still open, and that some definitions are based on conceptual engineering of “conspiracy theory” rather than on descriptive conceptual analysis of the spoken language (Napolitano & Reuter, 2021). Authors who have done valuable and pioneering work on the definition issue include Lee Basham (2001), Steve Clarke (2002), David Coady (2003), and Brian Keeley (1999), among others.

Ethical Issues Climate change conspiracy theories raise many ethical questions. Some questions concern the ethical acceptability of climate conspiracy theorizing, while others are related to issues of responsibility. A further question is about the ethics of belief: given that climate change conspiracy theories are unlikely to be justified – this follows from their definition – is it ethically problematic to believe in them? There are many arguments against conspiracy theorizing in general and against climate change conspiracy theorizing in particular. Conspiracy theories can include libels and they can stigmatize certain groups. Relatively many conspiracy theories are created and distributed merely to gain something questionable (Räikkä, 2014). These are serious moral costs of those theories. However, the most common argument is the consequentialist objection that conspiracy theories and especially climate change conspiracy theories lead to undesirable outcomes. On the individual level, an exposure to climate change conspiracy theories tends to reduce a person’s commitment to cut down her carbon footprint (Jolley & Douglas, 2014). People who really believe in climate change conspiracy theories and who act on the basis of their beliefs are likely to make morally problematic choices (Merlan, 2019). On social

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level, political decisions are unlikely to serve peoples’ interests, if the selection of political representatives is based on erroneous beliefs (Uscinski et al., 2017). More importantly, widespread bizarre and libelous conspiracy theories (“Hillary Clinton and her conspirators abused children in satanic rituals”) compromise the value and authority of democratic practices and institutions (Muirhead & Rosenblum, 2019, p. 7). As conspiracy theories in general, climate change conspiracy theories can be bad for democracy. Conspiracy theories undermine trust toward epistemic authorities and social institutions generally. By manifesting distrust, conspiracy theories weaken the grounds of the default stance that institutions and information provided by them are trustworthy. Climate change conspiracy theories do not make an exception. Thus, it is ethically problematic to create and distribute them: surely our moral obligation is to try to increase rather than decrease social trust, at least in stable liberal-democratic countries. In a sense, conspiracy theories and lack of trust form a vicious circle. Conspiracy theories feed distrust in social institutions and usual sources of information, but one of the reasons why many people support conspiracy theories in the first place is lack of trust and a tendency to find alternative sources for testimonial knowledge (that is, knowledge we learn from others). Some people do not find mainstream media trustworthy, as it is considered a part of the elite establishment that does not deserve trust (Levy, 2019). If the elite does not show any goodwill and willingness to distribute well-being to all members of the society, why should a person trust it and the information it provides? This question shows that the ethics of conspiracy theorizing is closely related to difficult issues concerning trust and testimonial knowledge. (Increasing social trust does not mean that we reject healthy skepticism toward powerful actors in our societies.) There are arguments in favor of conspiracy theorizing. It can be argued that conspiracy theorists watch and monitor media who should watch politicians and financial elites. Possibly, conspiracy theories can lead to further investigations (as early rumors of the Climategate did) and wake up epistemic authorities. They can sharpen the official truths, and in any case, they are part of the democratic civic discussion, even when they are not warranted (Clarke, 2002). To criticize conspiracy theories too heavily is to create a smoke screen for those who like to conspire (Pigden, 1995, p. 4). Perhaps conspiracy theories could deter likely conspirators (Coady, 2003). These arguments are interesting, but at least in the case of climate change conspiracy theories, on which we are focusing, the negative aspects (that are listed above) seem considerable. Overall, we should think twice before we share conspiracy theories and murky rumors that question climate scientists’ alarming findings. Given the moral undesirability of climate change conspiracy theorizing, it is in place to ask who are responsible for the spread of those theories. Possibly, we can name some individual agents such as lobbyists of the oil industry and certain conservative politicians. But it is likely that different actors are collectively responsible for the popularity and expansion of the theories. To understand what the sense of “collective responsibility” here is, it is helpful to distinguish between (1) ordinary believers and disseminators and (2) developers and publishers of conspiracy

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theories. The distinction between these two groups is useful, although not completely clear (as the developers and publishers tend to disseminate their theories) (Räikkä, 2020). The dissemination of unverified information is not morally unproblematic. This is especially so, when the disseminator should be aware that the information conflicts with what is told by the relevant epistemic authorities, and when it is likely that the information will be taken seriously so that it will have an influence on behavior. The ordinary dissemination of climate change conspiracy theories can be compared to littering. Litterbugs may appreciate a clean environment but refuse to do their own share. They do not care about the bad example they provide. Although a single litterbug’s contribution can be small and harmless in her own eyes, the overall effect may be quite unpleasant. Both the ordinary disseminators of climate change conspiracy theories and litterbugs are responsible for their conduct, for they should realize what they are doing. Although the question is of the overall impact of the actions committed by individual persons, we can talk about “collective responsibility” here (Räikkä, 2020). The undesirable effect is produced together, and participants share the responsibility for the undesirable outcome. Shared responsibility does not require shared intentions or shared goals (May, 1992). Developers and publishers are active conspiracy theorists, and their responsibility is different than that of the ordinary believers and disseminators. However, both groups are collectively responsible. The question about the origin of climate change conspiracy theories varies case by case, but often active conspiracy theorists get ideas for their theories by following other active conspiracy theorists. In some cases, conspiracy theorists work together in groups (Sunstein & Vermuele, 2009). The groups, in turn, may be connected to one another. (An example would be the 9/11 Truth Movement that consists of various groups.) Although the dissemination of climate change conspiracy theories happens largely in ordinary people’s personal networks on the internet, or in the “alternative media,” the active conspiracy theorists get support from each other and share the attitude of distrust. They then transmit the attitude to others. Since conspiracy theorists act jointly, they are collectively responsible in that sense. Collective responsibility does not necessarily entail group responsibility; active conspiracy theorists who develop and publish climate change conspiracy theories can be collectively responsible without being responsible as a group (Räikkä, 2020). Climate change conspiracy theories are ethically problematic, and many actors are jointly responsible for their spread. But what is the ethical status of believing in nonexistent climate change conspiracies? Suppose that a person is convinced that that the scientific consensus about climate change is manufactured and based on a scientists’ conspiracy to guarantee research funding, but that she does not tell about her view to anyone or distribute the claim to others and that she does not act on the basis of her conviction. Not everyone who supports climate change conspiracy theories believes in them, but she does (Ichino & Räikkä, 2021). Should we blame her morally? It can be argued that people are free to believe whatever they wish about anthropogenic global warming – whether it is real or a ruthless lie that is based on

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a conspiracy (Uscinski et al., 2017). Opinions, however wrong they happen to be, have no impact on the Earth’s climate. It can also be said that “intellectual vices” are not within people’s control and that, therefore, we should refrain from being excessively moralistic toward climate change conspiracy theorists (Cassam, 2016, p. 169). “Ought” implies “can,” and people cannot directly choose their beliefs and control what they happen to believe. However, there are famous views that, in fact, we are in some measure morally responsible for our beliefs and that beliefs are appropriate targets of both epistemic and moral criticism. According to a doctrine called evidentialism (that derives from the nineteenth century), “it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence” (Clifford, 1996/1877). Notice also that in our everyday practices we do evaluate morally other people’s inner life, even when we know that they do not have direct control over it. For instance, we tend to condemn (tacitly, at least) overly jealous emotions and attitudes. We feel that people are ethically accountable for their involuntary sins (Adams, 1985). At this point, however, we need not settle issues on the ethics of beliefs. Two observations suffice here. First, the conclusion that dissemination of climate change conspiracy theories is morally problematic does not imply that we should condemn people’s beliefs. There is something deeply disturbing in the idea we have strong moral obligations that should govern our mental life, although some mental states (such as willingness to help others) are good and some others (such as excessive jealousy) are bad. Our well-being and mental health require that we are free to think, dream and feel without a mental hygienic program that tells what should happen in our inner life. It is one thing to say that a person’s belief in climate conspiracy is unwarranted and another thing to claim that it is morally reprehensible. Second, people are able to control their belief formation processes, to some extent at least. They can try to evaluate the evidence open-mindedly and in an unbiased way. They can respect arguments even when their conclusions seem unpleasant. They can try to double check that their own interests do not influence their reasoning. They can be careful when they choose the sources they rely upon. A person who fails to do these things and ends up supporting a climate change conspiracy theory is responsible for her failures. She lacks intellectual virtues and, possibly, this is a moral failure too. Believing in a climate change conspiracy theory need not be morally wrong, but it is likely that a person who believes in such theory has done something wrong in the process that preceded the belief.

Policy Options In recent years, there has been a lot of discussion on how we should deal with conspiracy theories. Climate change conspiracy theories have received a special attention in the debate, as they are problematic in ways many theories are not. For instance, theories that are made for fun (“Finland does not exist”) or which are related to artists (“Elvis faked his own death”) do not probably require public reactions. Climate change conspiracy theories do – insofar as the analysis that they

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are morally problematic and harmful for democracy is correct. But what would be the right policy toward climate change conspiracy theories? The options include the following strategies all of which have some merits but also drawbacks. One option is that climate change conspiracy theories are left to the “marketplace of ideas” and state actors do not actively intervene in the debate. According to this proposal, public discussion will eventually bring out the problems of the theories – if they have any. It is important that climate change conspiracy theorists are free to defend and introduce their theories, as that will sharpen the “official truths” and make epistemic authorities present their data in a clearer way. The defenders of the passive approach also remind us that although conspiracy theories can be dangerous so can conspiracies, and one way to prevent conspiracies is to allow conspiracy theorists to act freely, without state intervention (Clarke, 2002; Pigden, 2007). This option has defenders, but a problem is that total passivity in the face of harmful climate change conspiracy theories does not sound appropriate. Surely someone should do something. Perhaps the dissemination of climate change conspiracy theories should be prohibited by the law? States should act. This suggestion may sound extreme, but it has its supporters. According to them, climate denialist rumors and fake news that cause serious harm and aim to produce doubt are not protected by the freedom of speech. Climate change conspiracy theories belong to this category. Proponents of the proscription line distinguish between critics who act in good faith and believe what they say, and opponents who are insincere and spread false claims intentionally. Only the latter should be silenced by laws (Lavik, 2016). In the time of fake news, the idea of using prohibitions or taxes to govern public debates has not been uncommon (Douglas & Sutton, 2015, p. 216; Wood & Ravel, 2018; Cibík & Hardos, 2020). However, the problem with the hard line seems rather obvious. Although it is unlikely that a climate change conspiracy theory is true, it is still possible that it is (Räikkä, 2020). Permitting the dissemination of conspiracy theories is risky, but so is their eradication by legislation and force. In democratic countries, freedom of speech can be restrained of course, but it is unclear whether claims that challenge climate scientists’ findings should be on the proscription list. When it comes to policy recommendations that scientists offer, there is no question that they should be open to public evaluation, including evaluation which is not of the best quality. If prohibition is too harsh an option, how about using secret means and adding “cognitive diversity” to the groups that create and disseminate climate change conspiracy theories? This strategy would not restrict people’s freedom of speech. The option is “cognitive infiltration of extremist groups, whereby government agents or their allies (acting virtually or in real space, and either openly or anonymously) will undermine the crippled epistemology of believers by planting doubts about the theories and stylized facts that circulate within such groups, thereby introducing beneficial cognitive diversity” (Sunstein & Vermuele, 2009, p. 219). The idea of using secret agents in the fight against harmful and false conspiracy theories has gathered a lot of attention. Not surprisingly, the comments have not always been favorable. Critics have pointed out that it would be very risky and ironic to make a conspiracy against citizens to lessen the popularity of conspiracy theories. Such

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conspiracy would warrant the claim that there are conspiracies operated by the state (Hagen, 2010, p. 154; Hagen, 2011, p. 17). A liberalist option is to educate people so that they can critically and rationally select the information sources they use and avoid the usual logical mistakes and fallacies of reasoning (such as confirmation bias). When people’s general knowledge and media literacy is in an appropriate level and their reasoning skills are well developed, they have good tools to notice the most obvious errors in conspiracy theories (Douglas et al., 2016). Sometimes, the evaluation of conspiracy theories requires expertise – this is also true of many climate change conspiracy theories – and in these cases it is important to educate people to identify real experts. This may be difficult, but not impossible. However, a challenge for the liberalist strategy is the fact that it assumes that the supporters of the climate change conspiracy theories always or typically believe in those theories. The assumption can be contested, even when we leave out the lobbyists of the oil industry and others who have strategic interest to support climate change conspiracy theories. By supporting a conspiracy theory, a person can manifest her disappointment in the social elites and the official system, although she may not have any firm view of the plausibility of the theory she supports (Ichino & Räikkä, 2021). This raises the question how to fight against such “supporting attitudes.” If a person does not really believe that a climate change conspiracy theory she supports is true, it is pointless to try to correct her beliefs about it. All kinds of people can support conspiracy theories. But social psychological studies have shown that conspiratorial thinking is especially correlated with certain things, including radicalism, unemployment, low education, and superstition (Cassam, 2019, p. 52; Douglas & Sutton, 2015, p. 104). One option is to try to eradicate these things to mitigate the spread of climate change (and other) conspiracy theories. Radicalism and other phenomena on the list are usually considered undesirable in any case, so why not eradicate them? Of course, the correlation does not say much about causal relations: does radicalism cause conspiracism or vice versa or do they just share a common background, say, general distrust toward social institutions and epistemic authorities? Be that as it may, there is a problem in the suggestion that we should first study what the correlates of conspiratorial thinking are and then try to eradicate those correlates. The problem is that that it is very difficult, in real life, to eliminate radicalism or unemployment, for instance. Were these policies easy, they would have been implemented already. Let us consider one more option. According to the trust strategy, states and other actors should do their best to increase trust in social institutions in general and epistemic authorities in particular (Harambam, 2021). Climate change conspiracy theories arise partly from distrust; therefore, it is important to try to get rid of it. Policies that advance equality and social justice in society tend to advance trust as well. Fight against climate change conspiracy theories may require economic resources and redistribution. A media environment which is pluralistic and allows many voices increases trust. The state should secure that truly diverse views can be published and get publicity in civic debate, so that there would be less need for specific conspiracy theory forums. The state can certainly enhance diversity, say, by

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supporting newspapers and other media that cannot survive without financial backing (Räikkä & Ritola, 2020). Scientific practices should be open and inclusive, encouraging people to citizen science, and all the research data should be publicly available when possible (Lewandowsky & Bishop, 2016). The trust strategy sounds potentially effective, although it is likely that many means should be used at the same time concurrently. Increasing trust is probably one of the policies that would be advisable to carry out. But relying merely on the trust strategy would not help much: many supporters of the climate change conspiracy theories have a good economic position and some of them are politically powerful (Powell, 2011). Getting them on board demands something else than economic resources and showing of goodwill.

Conclusions Climate change conspiracy theories are conspiracy theories that typically challenge climate scientists’ findings about global warming or the policy recommendations that are based on those findings. Not all climate denialist claims are conspiracy theories, for denialists need not refer to an alleged conspiracy in their criticism. But when they mention a conspiracy or conspiracies, their explanation is a conspiracy theory rather than an ordinary conspiracy explanation that refer to an actual, historical conspiracy. For instance, Climategate theory is a conspiracy theory, as it gives low-quality evidence for the existence of scientists’ alleged conspiracy and provides an alternative to the “official view,” explaining climate change talk as a scam. Climate change conspiracy theories are ethically problematic. There is evidence that an exposure to those theories tends to reduce a person’s commitment to cut down her carbon footprint. On social level, conspiracy theories that are widely distributed tend to delegitimize democratic procedures. False claims are presented in public debates, as if it were indifferent whether the views are true or false. Delegitimation includes a tacit statement that democratic institutions are not valuable (Muirhead & Rosenblum, 2019.) Furthermore, conspiracy theories undermine trust toward epistemic authorities and social institutions generally. This raises the question who is responsible for their spread and popularity. Perhaps we all are, as we all can do something to further equality, justice, and a sense of belonging that increases trust in society. Trust, in turn, would lessen the popularity of the theories. In any case, the responsibility is collective. Both (1) ordinary believers and disseminators and (2) developers and publishers of conspiracy theories are responsible. They share responsibility, even if they may not be responsible as a group but only as individuals. The question whether believing in climate change conspiracy theories is wrong, is difficult. But two points are important to notice. First, the conclusion that dissemination of climate change conspiracy theories is morally problematic does not imply that we should condemn people’s beliefs. Their behavior is more important than their beliefs. Second, people can control their belief formation processes, at least partly.

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Although believing in a climate change conspiracy theory need not be morally wrong, it is likely that a person who believes in such theory has done something wrong in the process that preceded the belief. In recent years, there has been a lot of discussion on how we should deal with conspiracy theories, and climate change conspiracy theories have received a special attention in the debate. Total passivity does not seem an appropriate reaction, given that the theories are harmful when all the pros and cons are considered. Possibly, the best strategy to mitigate climate change conspiracy theories is to increase trust in social institutions in general and epistemic authorities in particular. This said, it is important to keep in mind that it is likely that many policies should be used at the same time, side by side. It is sometimes argued that conspiracy theories “are too toxic” to be discussed publicly in forums of mainstream media (Basham, 2018, p. 73). This is an interesting claim but, historically speaking, the ordinary institutions of public information have been willing to publish news that must have seemed very “toxic.” Mainstream media, investigative journalists, and historians have written about political corruption, targeted killings, and questionable military programs and reported on outrageous frauds and insolent deceptions committed by people in high and honorable positions. Nothing seems to be too “toxic” (Räikkä & Ritola, 2020). It is true, however, that in some cases conspiracies get publicity surprisingly slowly even if they are revealed. For instance, the NSA spying system (the Echelon system) was originally leaked out already in 1972 but got more publicity only after Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 (Jansen & Martin, 2015, p. 665). Whether the delay was due to the “toxicity” of the issue is unclear. In any case, climate change conspiracy theories have certainly not been too toxic for the media actors. On the contrary, their dissemination and analysis have been so wide that it raises the question whether the overwhelming discussion has actually helped the denialist program. It is not impossible that it has. Climate change conspiracy theories are very unlikely to be justified. This follows from the defining features of “conspiracy theory.” However, even if those theories are implausible, worries that make people create and disseminate such theories can be real. Politicians contribute to debates that concern difficult and often technical issues of climate science, as the issues have immediate social, economic, and political impact at the scale of humanity. But politicians’ statements make people ask whether climate science is a true science at all. And why there is so little debate about the distribution of costs that follow if the policy recommendations of the climate scientists are accepted? The silence around this issue makes people wonder not only whether justice will be done in this context but also whether relevant people are interested that it will be done. Climate science raises emotions. Therefore, the conspiracy theories that surround it will stay here for some time. Acknowledgments I would like to thank Anna Ichino, Mikko Puumala, Andrei Rodin, Helena Siipi, Saul Smilansky, and Jukka Varelius for helpful comments on an earlier version of the article. I am grateful to the editors and the reviewers for their work.

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Climate Change Action as Collective Action Angela Kallhoff

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The “Tragedy of the Commons” Reconsidered . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Collective Action Failures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Duties to Cooperate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Climate Cooperation as Joint Climate Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Removing Obstacles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

Philosophers argue that climate change and shortfalls in climate change action result from problems of collective action. The biggest problem is the failure not to reach the commonly agreed goals of mitigation. This contribution explores problems of collective action and the related, so-called tragedy of the commons. Even though an analysis of the problems is important, the main part of this contribution focuses on a forward-looking way to address collective action. By taking the nature of climate action goals as collective goals seriously, and by introducing a theory of joint agency into the debate on climate action, a theory of joint climate action can be articulated. The main part of this chapter explores the constituents of such theory of joint climate action and its normative implications. Keywords

Climate change · Tragedy of the commons · Collective action problems · Joint action · Climate goals

A. Kallhoff (*) Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_80

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Introduction Philosophers investigate climate change not only as a result of physical processes. They also explore the role that persons and their actions play with respect to climate change. In that perspective, climate change is often seen as a tragedy of the commons and the outcome of collective action failures. Instead of working together in view of shared climate goals, people forfeit the shared goals, for two main reasons. As a natural common pool resource, the atmosphere succumbs to a “tragedy of the commons” (Hardin, 1968). In addition, the appropriation of the atmosphere as a sink for greenhouse gases is not coordinated in such a way that climate goals could be achieved. Instead, it is already being overused as a common sink for greenhouse gases. Shortfalls in collective action propel that drama. In Reason in a Dark Time. Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed – And What It Means for Our Future (2014), Dale Jamieson notes that “climate change can be seen as presenting us with the largest collective action problem that humanity has ever faced, one that has both intra- and inter-generational dimensions” (Jamieson, 2014, p. 61). Jamieson also explains that additional complexity results from “the high degree of connectivity in the climate system, the non-linear nature of many of the relationships, threshold effects, and buffers that exist in the system” (Jamieson, 2014, p. 162). Chaotic patterns of exploitation, plus over-exploitation of the atmosphere as a sink for greenhouse gases, cause the climate crisis, which is the result of an accumulation of greenhouse gases to a degree that sets the stability of the climate system at risk. To this day, the world community has not succeeded in coordinating the activities that generate greenhouse gases in a way that a climate crisis will be prevented. At the heart are problems of collective action that need to be resolved. This diagnosis of climate change as a “collective action problem” is the backbone of a bundle of explanations of the climate crisis. In “The Real Tragedy of the Commons” (2001), Stephen Gardiner explains that humankind is facing a particularly grave scenario of a “tragedy of the commons”. Climate trouble amounts to a tragedy that is stimulated by irreparable aggravation through time. Future generations cannot negotiate or interact with present ones, but it is those future generations that will bear the higher costs of present failures of collective action in addressing atmospheric resources. In their analysis, Wagner and Weitzman (Wagner & Weitzman, 2015, pp. 38–40) also state that climate change is spurred by the behavior of free riders profiting from the engagement of others without contributing anything to the achievement of the shared goal. Even when institutions are in place for climate protection, free riders can sabotage their efforts. Obviously, these diagnoses work with a broad concept of “failures of collective action” as related to public goods problems. Collective action problems occur when actors do not succeed in achieving a shared social goal, even though this goal is highly desirable and favorable and even though each single actor acts in a rational way. In this contribution, I shall investigate some important dimensions of the narrative of climate change as “the world’s largest and most complex collective action problem” (Jamieson, 2014, p. 162). Such narrative does have explanatory force: the atmosphere is a common pool resource, which has open borders but is competitive in usage.

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Common pool resources of such kind are indeed likely to succumb to the tragedy of the commons (Hardin, 1968). And the self-interested behavior of multiple beneficiaries does indeed contribute to collective action failures. Nonetheless, this chapter presents an alternative to that narrative, by introducing a notion of collective action as joint agency. This takes into account recent work in social philosophy, which explains “cooperation” in an entirely new way. In that context, collective action is thought of as an option to “act together” and as “joint agency” (Bratman, 2014; Gilbert, 1996; Tuomela, 2010). In that interpretation, people are well equipped and ready to work together to achieve a collective goal through common efforts. The theories explain not only that this is possible, but also the conditions under which it works. Equipped with ideas of how this can be translated into “joint climate action”, and insights from climate ethics that regard climate cooperation as morally obligatory, a theory of collective climate action can be articulated. The chapter has five sections. Section “The ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ Reconsidered” explains one of the standard problems in the climate change scenario. This is the narrative of the over-exploitation of the atmosphere as a “tragedy of the commons” . That tragedy occurs when too many users profit from one and the same resource that does not have entrance-barriers and that is depletable. Section “Collective Action Failures” explains the impact of collective-action problems in that drama. In the climate debate the discussion of collective action problems has been mixed up with the tragedy view, but collective action problems do not result from the make-up of the atmosphere as a common pool resource, but from individual incentives not to cooperate: selfish behavior is rewarded, “virtuous” behavior is not. The outcome from both sections is that once we invest in intelligent and coordinated schemes of appropriation of the atmosphere as a sink, we can and should succeed in acting together toward positive climate goals. Section “Duties to Cooperate” sketches a theory of “joint climate action”. The first question to discuss is: Even when the problems of the tragedy and the shortfalls of collective action do obtain, does that hinder us from acting together? Following debates in individual climate ethics, it is argued that the climate change scenario is so special that individuals have a duty to invest in climate cooperation. Section “Climate Cooperation as Joint Climate Action” explains how such cooperation can succeed. According to theories in social philosophy, people are capable not only of working together but also of actually achieving together their shared goals, if they only wish to. “Joint climate action” will be presented as an application of theories of joint agency to actors and goals in the climate change scenario, giving guidance about the conditions of cooperative success. Section “Removing Obstacles” discusses obstacles to the realization of this proposal.

The “Tragedy of the Commons” Reconsidered The atmosphere shares the classic characteristics of an impure public good. As a common pool resource, the atmosphere lacks natural entrance barriers, but is prone to over-consumption (Kaul et al., 1999). Because of this feature, it was possible to

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overexploit the atmosphere as a waste dump for greenhouse gases for decades (Singer, 2002). Greenhouse gases cumulate in the atmosphere and their increased concentration spurs the heating of the planet. A tragedy of the commons occurs when too many users profit from a natural resource simultaneously. The narrative of a tragedy of the commons looks for its origin in the structural features of the resource: it is the lack of entrance barriers that invites over-exploitation. Anti-exploitative frameworks for managing much smaller common resources than the atmosphere have famously been proposed by Elinor Ostrom (1990). Indeed, H. Shue writes: This [the features of the atmosphere] makes planetary absorptive capacity for carbon (and other GHGs) a classic example of what Elinor Ostrom has called ‘common-pool’ resources, with each use of the capacity being ‘subtractable’ from the remaining total and ‘rival’ to all other possible uses, most notably use by our descendants . . . The ‘budget’ of absorptive capacity is being consumed, depriving the people of the future of options. (Shue, 2013, p. 395)

But while atmospheric degradation is an Ostrom-like problem, it does not seem easy to employ Ostrom-like frameworks to respond to it, given the planetary scales of atmospheric exploitation. A closer look shows that it is not only the structure of the atmosphere as a common pool resource that leads to the depletion of the atmosphere as a sink. Environmental degradation also results from the attempt to coordinate two types of usage which are, in fact, not compatible. Jamieson explains that by profiting from a natural resource both as a source of eco-services and as a waste sink, the former option gets increasingly eroded through time. He states: Environmental problems, from the perspective of economics, concern the allocation of two types of scarce resources: sources and sinks. Things as different from one another as oil, elephants and the Grand Canyon can be seen as sources that provide opportunities for consumption. [. . .] Sinks provide opportunities for disposing the unwanted consequences of production and consumption. [. . .] Some of the most serious environmental problems occur when the same resource is used both as a source and as a sink: for example, when the same stretch of river is used both as a water supply and as a sewer; or when the same region of the atmosphere is used as a source of oxygen to breathe and as a sink for disposing of various pollutants. Using the environment as a source or a sink typically degrades its ability to function. Thus, opportunities to use the environment in these ways can be viewed as scarce resources. (Jamieson, 2008, p. 14)

In this interpretation, atmospheric degradation does not occur exclusively because of over-exploitation, but also because of uncoordinated and chaotic patterns of exploitation (Kallhoff, 2021, pp. 41–44). It is the uncoordinated action of various beneficiaries, each appropriating bits of the atmosphere as sinks for their greenhouse gases, which generates the problem of climate change. As an effect, the socially best outcome, that is, the protection of the atmosphere from degradation and its reasonable usage, is forsaken. Gernot Wagner and Martin L. Weitzman defend a similar but more drastic claim. They illustrate the problem with a metaphor:

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Think of the atmosphere as a giant bathtub. There’s a faucet (emissions from human activity) and a drain (the planet’s ability to absorb that pollution). For most of human civilization and hundreds of thousands of years before, the inflow and the outflow were in relative balance. Then humans started burning coal and turned on the faucet far beyond what the drain could handle. The levels of carbon in the atmosphere began to rise to levels last seen in the Pliocene, over three million years ago.” (Wagner & Weitzman, 2015, p. 15)

This rendition retains the tragedy of the commons framework, but Wagner and Weitzman insist particularly on the need for concerted and coordinated action, specifically focused on achieving a sharp turn-around to zero emissions. They argue that all practices worldwide should be revised in view of the overarching goal to turn the emissions inflow to zero. They also add (darkly) that “Society can most directly control the inflow of emissions, and even turning that inflow to zero immediately wouldn’t solve the problem” (Wagner & Weitzman, 2015, p. 16). Nonetheless, the way to zero is the one to follow to at least minimize damages. And it is notable that the authors also call for “an entirely new way of thinking” (Wagner & Weitzman, 2015, p. 17) when it comes to facing the climatic tragedy of the commons, which should also include a reconsideration of collective action itself, and the conditions under which it can succeed. These themes are taken up in sections “Duties to Cooperate” and “Climate Cooperation as Joint Climate Action”. Before moving on to them, however, it is worth articulating more carefully the collective action problems at play.

Collective Action Failures Among the goals of climate change action, mitigation – the reduction of emission levels – is a very important goal. The most recent report of the IPCC officially states the necessity of having worldwide emissions reach their peak in 2024 and then drop significantly (IPCC, 2022, Sect. C.1). Moreover, the average emissions need to be reduced by 40% by 2030 (IPCC, 2022, Sect. C.1.1). In addition to mitigation goals, there are adaptation goals, to cope with the new living conditions brought about by climate change. Both sets of goals are in a literal sense “collective”: neither can be achieved by unilateral action, and both require concerted action at various scales – local, national, supranational, and intergenerational. So climate action goals are collective goals, and as such are open to collective action problems. A collective action problem occurs when individuals would all be better off when cooperating, but they fail to do so because individual rational decisions prevail over cooperation for the social goals. The discussion of collective action problems in the climate scenario reveals that there are a host of different problems (Kallhoff, 2021, pp. 53–78) at play, listed below. The list is not exhaustive, but it provides sufficient evidence for the claim that collective action problems contribute to climate failures. Free riding: Schemes of cooperation that relate to the shared usage of a common pool resource invite potential profiteers to a behavior classified as “free riding”. Free riders ripe the fruit of a common pool resource without contributing to the protection

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of that good, often by not paying the price for using it. In the case of climate change, a free rider does not contribute to the costs of climate protection, but profits from her lifestyle or wealth-generating emissions. Wagner and Weitzman think that free riding is the most common behavior in the climate scenario: You alone can do little beyond scream to get the right policies in place, which could then guide the rest of us in the right direction. Meanwhile, the overwhelming majority of the seven billion of us on this planet are free riders. We enjoy the going while the going is good. We don’t pay for the full cost of our actions. Worse, polluting is subsidized worldwide to the tune of some $500 billion dollars per year. (Wagner & Weitzman, 2015, p. 97)

Free riders benefit not only from the atmosphere as a free good; they also benefit from the concerted efforts of those other actors who do invest in climate protection. For without at least some efforts to mitigate, the climate crisis would likely be or more quickly become dearer than it already is, and free riding itself would likely be a harder feat to accomplish. In this sense, polluters are dependent on other actors’ engagement with climate protection. However, free riding is still a very live option, which not only ruins the atmosphere, but also sabotages efforts toward climate protection. And it might reduce the motivation of cooperators. Scoop-the-poop: Another intricate problem of collective action is the scoop-thepoop problem: [I]f many cooperate, the gain for each person is large, but the portion of that gain that stems directly from any one person’s cooperation is too small to repay his or her effort or cost. Therefore each person has an incentive not to cooperate, regardless of whether many or only few others cooperate. . . . Discharge of chemical wastes into waterways, or discharge of polluting or greenhouse gases or aerosols into the atmosphere provide a host of examples. (Krantz et al., 2008, p. 168)

From an individual point of view, the imbalance between the costs of cooperation in a large scheme and its returns is quite significant. This encourages “scooping the poop”: not supporting mitigation and passing its burdens to others. Stephen Gardiner has analyzed this type of behavior in an intergenerational setting, and coined the term “intergenerational buck-passing” to describe it (Gardiner, 2011, pp. 160–163). Instead of internalizing the costs of the emissions we produce today, and investing in pathways of mitigation, we enjoy a carbon-based lifestyle and destroy the living conditions of future generations. This still leaves open the possibility of inventing climate institutions to set mitigation incentives, but as long as these institutions are not in place, individuals are once again very “rational” not to invest in mitigation. The virtuous-as-the-fool problem: single actors may be willing to invest in climate protection and change their individual behaviors in climate-friendly ways. This may be motivated by a desire to do what is right, but it is costly – as things like taking a plane, driving a car, or eating meat will have to be given up. The problem is that, as long as it is a unilateral investment in cooperation, such climatically virtuous behavior is both ineffective and, in a way, also “stupid”. As for climate goals, single and probably small investments cannot achieve the results that are needed. Investing

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unilaterally in climate protection will not stop dangerous climate change and its effects; it is inefficacious. A related problem is that if you do spare climate emissions, another person will go for them. This problem has been dubbed “the green paradox”, whereby one’s foregoing the consumption of a common pool natural resource just enables another to consume it (possibly with more negative sideeffects – Sinn, 2009). The result is lack of incentives to go first. This narrative is quite general and possibly relies on a somewhat naïve market-style interpretation of natural resources appropriation – but there is still some truth in it. After all, “only fools rush in”. Individuals who behave “virtuously” and yet inefficaciously and naively might even forestall engagement from others, by showcasing how unjustifiably costly mitigation engagements are. While discussing the utilitarian legitimacy of bearing such costs, Dale Jamieson notes: [. . .] when facing collective action problems there are instances when I would do best and indeed contribute the most to the world by defecting from collective purposes. While it may be better for no one to drive or fly than for everyone to engage in these activities, what may be best of all is for me to drive or fly while everyone else refrains. If despite this reasoning I refrain from driving or flying then I risk my utilitarian credentials, for I knowingly do what is less than the best. Even worse is the case in which I conform to some ideal set of rules to which there is not widespread conformity. In these cases, I might find myself riding my bicycle through the snow while everyone else blows by me in their SUVs. In both cases the only difference my behaviour makes is to reduce the general happiness by reducing my own happiness. (Jamieson, 2014, p. 173)

In Jamieson’s view, no authentic utilitarian would be virtuous in a case like that. Be that as it may, not to be an authentic utilitarian is not to be a fool; nor does it take a commitment to maximizing general happiness to be one. In the climate case, the fool is a fool also in terms of her own self-interest alone. What the free rider, scoop-the-poop, and the virtuous-as-fool problems have in common is that unilateral and individual action in favo of climate goals is not rational from the perspective of individuals. Unilateral action does not satisfy the person who tries to invest in climate mitigation, for it has little to no individual return; others will likely shoulder such investments anyway, and in any case it would be foolish to do largely inefficacious things and to do them first. This might counsel a shift of responsibility to organizations and institutions who shall take responsibility for climate goals. According to John Broome (2012), governments hold that responsibility. Whereas private morality does not include climate goals, governments hold a public morality that has to include climate goals (Broome, 2012, pp. 12–14). However, shifting the responsibility to governments just leads to a situation in which the very same problems of collective action recur on another level. Collective action problems also accrue to nation states who do not succeed to work together for the same reasons. Why should individual nation states invest in climate goals when non-cooperative behavior is the most rational choice? It is, however, possible to draw from these pictures – of the foolishness of investing in a situation that is not particularly promising, and the foolishness of

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not following self-interest alone – conclusions very different from those that are typically drawn. The virtuous is no longer a fool when schemes of cooperation are in place that support his or her right behavior. Non-cooperative behavior would have to be delegitimized by such schemes; and virtuous behavior would have to be supported, encouraged, and made efficacious. On this view, what is primary is to discuss ways to bring individuals together, build opportunities for them to achieve collective goals, and rethink pathways to success. The remainder of this chapter tries to rethink climate action in this regard and gives a theoretical foundation for an alternative conceptualization of climate cooperation.

Duties to Cooperate To re-articulate climate cooperation on different grounds, two steps are necessary. The first is a justification of the claim that people should cooperate in favor of climate goals. This also includes an explanation of who has to cooperate. The second step is a theory that explains how actors can succeed in cooperating, and what the premises of success are. Let us start with the first step, the moral side of the problem. The climatic tragedy of the commons results from over-exploitation of the atmosphere as a sink for greenhouse gases. However, it also results from failures of collective action – particularly in not aligning uncoordinated individual behaviors with zero-emission goals. Besides explaining this as a tragedy and/or as inevitable in the context of rational behavior of individuals, there is also a moral side to look at. The so-called tragedy as well as the collective action problems are the outcome not only of individually rational behavior, but also of a lack of commitment to support life-sustaining collective goals. Such lack is morally suspect. Is there a duty to cooperate in favor of climate goals? The answer is Yes, but these are not individual duties in the sense of unilateral – to be discharged regardless of whether others also do so. Rather, these are cooperative individual duties, which accrue to individuals under the conditions of concerted action that has a chance to efficacy and demands individuals to carry a fair share of burdens (Kallhoff, 2021, pp. 180–202). Do people who profit from a shared natural resource also have the obligation to support the sustenance and continued availability of that resource? Do they have an obligation to contribute to the prevention of a tragedy of the commons? Robert H. Myers, who discusses the role of cooperation in ethics (Myers, 2011), articulates a moral framework that yields positive answers to these questions. He argues that morality and cooperation are tied together much more closely than is usually proposed. In his view, moral activity is best framed as cooperation in terms of a real engagement with others in the promotion of value (Myers, 2011, p. 124). This view supports the idea that individuals should contribute to the protection of the climate in a concerted effort. That is because a joint effort, and only a joint effort, could help prevent climatic destabilization, and because climate stability is not one good among others, but a life-sustaining global good. As an indispensable natural good on whose integrity people are dependent for their very lives, not only it is

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reasonable to demand from individuals that boundaries beyond which greenhouse gas emitting consumption is dangerous be respected, but also, because “opting out” of consumption is not a real option, it is also reasonable to demand that they actively support cooperative schemes that protect the resource. The argument has two steps. First, there is a special status of obligations to cooperate once cooperation is not voluntary, but the integrity of a life-sustaining good depends on that cooperation. Arneson, discussing goods that people are not free to choose or to reject, claims that “accepting or even simply receiving the benefits of a cooperative scheme can sometimes obligate an individual to contribute to the support of the scheme, even though the individual has not actually consented to it” (Arneson, 1982, p. 623). Authors in the debate on climate duties mostly agree that the atmosphere is such a case. Risking the tragedy of the atmosphere is not only bad and unwise; it is also morally wrong, since literally each person depends on the integrity of the good and climate catastrophe being prevented. Now add to that human rights arguments, such as those proposed by Simon Caney (2008, 2010), to the effect that people have a right not to be hit arbitrarily by climate change in such ways that their livelihood and life are set at risk (Caney, 2008, 2010). The resulting judgment is that in the case of the atmosphere, non-cooperative behavior is not only risky, but morally flawed. Non-cooperative behavior does not pay respect to the rights of persons not to be hit arbitrarily and heavily by climate change. And, as Tracey Skillington (2017) argues, not to contribute to the achievements of climate goals, besides setting lives of other persons at risk, also amounts to a violation of duties to act in order to achieve the shared goal of climate protection: By shaping and enacting social, economic and ecological conditions that knowingly cause harm to others [. . .], polluting actors violate negative duties not to arbitrarily deprive others of their human right to health [. . .] or minimum subsistence, and fail to fulfill duties of responsibility to achieve a stabilization of greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system‘ (UNFCCC, Article 2, 1992). (Skillington, 2017, p. 67)

This line of thought resonates with a recent debate on climate duties as duties to cooperate, or possibly even set up cooperation schemes, to realize eminently important shared goals. In cases in which people would die from others not cooperating, a duty to cooperate in order to prevent the deaths of those persons is justifiable (Schwenkenbecher, 2013, 2014). This claim addresses individuals who should cooperate in order to prevent climate catastrophe. Collins (2013) adds that in situations in which the life of persons is at risk, individual moral obligations might even include a duty to set up a group actor capable of systematically dealing with the challenge (Collins, 2013). Debate on these themes is complex, and disagreement acute, but for all that, at least one thing is clear: since not acting on climate goals sets at risk the lives of many people in vulnerable areas of the planet at risk, the tone of discussion on individual roles in climate cooperation must also be moral, not just prudential (Kallhoff, 2021, pp. 180–202). In short, there is not only a duty of individual actors not to pollute the atmosphere any longer, but also a duty to participate in a constructive and cooperative scheme of

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climate protection, and to continuously work in view of better schemes (Kallhoff, 2021, pp. 154–179). On this view, there really is no middle way when profiting from a shared natural resource such as the atmosphere: either profiteers build and comply with a scheme (and further schemes) that protects the good from over-exploitation, degradation, and destruction, or they do not comply and are morally blameworthy for contributing to the tragedy of the commons.

Climate Cooperation as Joint Climate Action We have learned that there is a duty to cooperate in favor of life-sustaining climate goals. Goals of mitigation that have been settled in the Paris Agreement are those life-sustaining goals. Each single actor has a duty to cooperate in the given circumstances. However, this still leaves an important question unanswered: Is there any chance of success? As long as “ought implies can”, it is very important to show that success in, and through, climate cooperation is at least possible. Otherwise, the call for obligations cannot be convincing. One important ingredient in this argument are insights from social philosophy regarding joint action. Social philosophers have articulated a fertile alternative to both collective action models and market-style cooperation models. That alternative is called “joint agency” (see Bratman, 2014; Schmid et al., 2008; Tuomela, 2010). Acting jointly means undertaking an action together that could not be undertaken by any individual acting alone. The debate on joint agency is broad and includes some fundamental revisions of theories of action and social ontology (Pettit, 2002; Searle, 1995); but here, the focus is restricted to one specific explication of joint agency, namely the “planning theory of joint action” by Michael E. Bratman (2014). Bratman’s approach differs from other theories of joint agency in that he regards it as roughly an upgrading of individual action. For joint agency to obtain it suffices that two or more individuals share the intention to bring about a goal that they all subscribe to together (Bratman, 2014, p. 84). Acting together in the mode of shared agency already forecloses purely strategic behavior. Instead, participants in shared agency have not only the intention to bring about a shared goal, but also mutual awareness of participants’ intentions and sub-plans in accomplishing the shared goal (Bratman, 2014, p. 84; for a discussion of objections, see pp. 92–96). For joint agency to obtain, it suffices that each person who invests in a shared goal holds the intention to bring about that goal and is aware that the intention and the commitment of other persons is also needed in order to accomplish it (Bratman, 1993, 2014, pp. 40–47). This model of cooperation can be applied to action in favor of environmental goals. This presupposes that each actor is aware of the shared goal and wishes to realize it together with other actors. One has to conceive of one’s role as that of a “coactor” (Kallhoff, 2021, p. 88), and of others not as pre-existing units but as elements of a collective constituted by shared agendas (Poteete et al., 2010). This model of joint climate action has the additional advantage that the logic of “crowding in” and the logic of “visible peers” help connect to and include additional participants. Set up

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more embracing and big groups. In addition, joint action can in principle support various pathways to the shared goals. To apply a theory of joint action to climate protection consistently, three steps are necessary: Firstly, actors who engage in climate goals need to understand them as shared goals. This includes an understanding of why they cannot be achieved by unilateral action. Secondly, it is also necessary to break down that overarching goal of zero emission in the future to single goals that are closer to individuals’ hearts and lives. It has possibly been a mistake to frame climate change in purely quantitative terms and to frame climate goals in an abstract and detached physical narrative. Even though we have to acknowledge the facts, one has to ask: Who will be motivated to achieve a goal that is as abstract as 1,5 degrees? Instead, it is helpful to break down climate goals to environmental goals that groups of actors can identify with. To achieve “clean air” together, or to “green a city” in order to reduce emissions and to realize better living conditions, are goals that function as joint action goals. Thirdly, joint action is spurred not only by joint goals that can admittedly only be reached together, but also by the intention to really achieve the goal. Groups of actors will achieve environmental goals best when each single person identifies with a narrative that supports the goal in question. This section has argued that theories of joint agency not only present an alternative to cooperation models that are not focused on a shared goal, but also provide applicable models of goal-driven cooperation. This model can be applied to situations in which actors relate to shared goals as “their goals”. However, one additional normative claim also has to be made. Cooperation and investment in joint agency in favor of climate goals is obligatory, and it does have a chance of efficacy. But the burdens of cooperation also need to be allocated to actors in a fair way. The debate on climate justice cannot be reiterated here, but it is important when moving from voluntary cooperation to schemes of cooperation that are set up by and through institutions, and to enhance individual motivation and commitment (Kallhoff, 2021, pp. 203–226). Relevant principles of fairness are, among others, principles of historic justice as well as capacities to act (see Caney, 2014).

Removing Obstacles The suggestion has been that when people act in favor of shared climate goals as joint actors, and when the allocation of burdens is fair, the problem of overexploitation can be managed by setting up a scheme of cooperation that protects the resource effectively. In addition, collective action problems can be alleviated when the intention to achieve a shared goal governs action, and when this is supported by and coupled with schemes of cooperation that follow and reward the principles of joint agency. To develop its full force, joint climate action needs significant institutional support. Although it is not as vulnerable to certain shortfalls as other cooperative models may be, big defectors can still destroy the efforts of many joint actors. Recall Jamieson’s virtuous bicyclist: she will not be acting or looking of feeling foolish

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when supported by institutions that incentivize cycling, does not marginalize her efforts, and explicitly support the moral qualities of cycling rather than driving. To spur joint climate action, the most important thing to do is to set up schemes of cooperation that set incentives for sharing climate goals intentionally, and to become part of a concerted investment in view of their realization. Basically, there are two different ways to implement an approach to joint climate action as portrayed in this chapter. The most straightforward way is to support voluntary initiatives of joint climate action. It is often overlooked that groups of actors who engage for climate change action and for climate goals already exist. The dynamics even in favor of zero-emission goals has gained momentum. Therefore, a promising way to nourish joint action consists in removing obstacles that actors who are already willing to cooperate still face. Flawed incentives, market style cooperation where joint action is needed instead, and the real physical obstacles posed by a climate-destructive world infrastructure need to be removed in order to pave the way for joint actors who work in favor of climate goals. In a recent contribution on “How Change Happens” (2019), Cass Sunstein calls this a policy of “unleashing” (Sunstein, 2019, p. 274). In at least some cases, it might suffice to remove flawed policies to achieve goals that people adhere to. The second way works the other way around: We also need to understand why certain actors are not willing to subscribe to climate goals and what would be needed to get them on board. A preliminary distinction of various types of “defectors” should include distinct portrays of those actors who do not cooperate for strategic reasons (who might need to be coerced to cooperation), and those who are simply not capable of accomplishing their fair share in addressing climate goals. The latter should be empowered with the means to cooperate on climate goals.

References Arneson, R. J. (1982). The principle of fairness and free-rider problems. Ethics, 92(4), 616–633. Bratman, M. E. (1993). Shared intention. Ethics, 104(1), 97–113. Bratman, M. E. (2014). Shared agency. A planning theory of acting together. Oxford University Press. Broome, J. (2012). Climate matters. Ethics in a warming world (Norton global ethics series). W.W. Norton & Company. Caney, S. (2008). Human rights, climate change, and discounting. Environmental Politics, 17(4), 536–555. Caney, S. (2010). Climate change and the duties of the advantaged. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 13(1), 203–228. Caney, S. (2014). Two kinds of climate justice: Avoiding harm and sharing burdens. Journal of Political Philosophy, 22(2), 125–149. Collins, S. (2013). Collectives’ duties and collectivization duties. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 91(2), 231–248. https://doi.org/10.1080/00048402.2012.717533 Gardiner, S. M. (2001). The real tragedy of the commons. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 30(4), 387–416. Gardiner, S. M. (2011). A perfect moral storm. The ethical tragedy of climate change. Oxford University Press. Gilbert, M. (1996). Living together. Rationality, sociality, and obligation. Rowman and Littlefield.

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Hardin, G. (1968). The tragedy of the commons. Science, 162(3859), 1243–1248. https://doi.org/ 10.1126/science.162.3859.1243 IPCC. (2022). Summary for policymakers. In P. R. Shukla, J. Skea, R. Slade, A. Al Khourdajie, R. van Diemen, D. McCollum, M. Pathak, S. Some, P. Vyas, R. Fradera, M. Belkacemi, A. Hasija, G. Lisboa, S. Luz, & J. Malley (Eds.), Climate change 2022: Mitigation of climate change. Contribution of Working Group III to the sixth assessment report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009157926.001 Jamieson, D. (2008). Ethics and the environment. An introduction. Cambridge University Press. Jamieson, D. (2014). Reason in a dark time. Why the struggle against climate change failed—And what it means for our future. Oxford University Press. Kallhoff, A. (2021). Climate justice and collective action. Routledge. Kaul, I., Grunberg, I., & Stern, M. A. (Eds.). (1999). Global public goods. International cooperation in the 21st century. Oxford University Press. Krantz, D. H., Peterson, N., Arora, P., Milch, K., & Orlove, B. (2008). Individual values and social goals in environmental decision making. In Kugler, T., Smith, J.C., Connolly, T., & Son, Y.-J. (eds.). Decision Modeling and Behavior in Uncertain and Complex Environments, 21, 165–198. Myers, R. H. (2011). Cooperating to promote the good. Analyse & Kritik, 33(1), 123–139. Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the commons. The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge University Press. Pettit, P. (2002). Collective persons and powers. Legal Theory, 8, 443–470. Poteete, A. R., Janssen, M. A., & Ostrom, E. (2010). Working together: Collective action, the commons, and multiple methods in practice. Princeton University Press. Schmid, H. B., Schulte-Ostermann, K., & Psarros, N. (Eds.). (2008). Concepts of sharedness: Essays on collective intentionality. Ontos. Schwenkenbecher, A. (2013). Joint duties and global moral obligations. Ratio, 26(3), 310–328. https://doi.org/10.1111/rati.12010 Schwenkenbecher, A. (2014). Joint moral duties. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 38(1), 58–74. https://doi.org/10.1111/misp.12016 Searle, J. (1995). The construction of social reality. The Free Press. Shue, H. (2013). Climate Hope: Implementing the exit strategy. Chicago Journal of International Law, 13(2), 381–402. Singer, P. (2002). One atmosphere. In O. World (Ed.), The ethics of globalization (pp. 14–50). Yale University Press. Sinn, H.-W. (2009). Das grüne Paradoxon: Plädoyer für eine illusionsfreie Klimapolitik (2nd ed.). Econ Verlag. Skillington, T. (2017). Climate justice and human rights. Palgrave Macmillan. Sunstein, C. R. (2019). How change happens. The MIT Press. Tuomela, R. (2010). The philosophy of sociality: The shared point of view. Oxford University Press. Wagner, G., & Weitzman, M. L. (2015). Climate shock. The economic consequences of a hotter planet. Princeton University Press.

Climate Change and Republicanism Ashley Dodsworth

Contents Republicanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Climate Domination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Republican Economics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Vulnerable Places and People . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Virtuous Citizens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Polis Versus Cosmopolis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

The climate crisis requires new politics, new ways of thinking, and organizing our societies. In this chapter, I argue that the republican political tradition is particularly well suited to help us face the challenge of climate crisis. Even the tensions with republicanism, such as the focus on citizenship, are useful as they highlight the political roadblocks to action on climate change. As we seek to understand the injustices of climate change, create and maintain sustainable political systems, and address barriers to action, republican political theory is a valuable resource. Keywords

Republicanism · Domination · Vulnerability · Virtue · Citizens Section “Republicanism” introduces the republican political tradition, from its origins in the classical city-states, through the work of Machiavelli and the revolutions of the eighteenth century, to the contemporary understanding of civic, or A. Dodsworth (*) University of Bristol, Bristol, UK e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_130

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“neo”-republicanism. Section “Climate Domination” explores the concept of domination and how it can help unpack the injustices of climate change, leading to the discussion in the following section on the relevance of republican understandings of the economy, property, and the market. Sections “Vulnerable Places and People” and “Virtuous Citizens” look at the republican emphasis on people and place, highlighting the republican emphasis on vulnerability, which is to be protected through the actions of virtuous citizens. However, there is a seeming tension between this focus on specific people and the global problem of climate change, which is examined further in the final section that looks at the distinction between the polis and the cosmopolis, the republic vs. the world. Overall, this chapter will demonstrate that republicanism can help us understand the causes and injustices of climate change, as well as supporting the more urgent task of helping to decide how we should respond and adapt. Republicanism, therefore, provides both “an alternative political and theoretical framework to respond to the challenges that we now face” (Dodsworth & Honohan, 2021: 667) and “a better guide to action” (Barry, 2021: 727) – and both are desperately needed.

Republicanism The republican tradition grew out of the politics of the Classical Western world, especially the Roman Empire, which promised freedom to all its citizens while emphasizing the virtues and duties that were needed to maintain the strength and independence of the empire. Centuries later, Machiavelli sought to apply the lessons of the Roman Empire to his city-state of Florence, and so reinvigorated the republican tradition. Indeed, so influential was he that Pocock’s examination of republicanism in eighteenth-century England, France, and America was called The Machiavellian Moment (Pocock, 1975). During this period of revolution, republicanism played a key conceptual role as its arguments against domination and arbitrary rule underpinned opposition to that most arbitrary of ruling systems, hereditary monarchy, and supported the arguments for self-government developed in the Dutch Republic, the British Civil Wars, and the American, Haitian, and French Revolutions. Historically republican freedom was often restricted along lines of race, class, and gender (Thomas Jefferson, for example, saw no contradiction between his republican support for self-government and owning slaves) though this was challenged even at the time, and slowly dismantled (e.g., Mary Wollstonecraft used republicanism to support claims for gender equality). In the nineteenth century, republicanism was taken up and developed by the “labor republicans” such as George McNeill and Ira Steward. These “working-class appropriators of republican ideals” used the republican understanding of freedom to support their opposition to economic exploitation (Gourevitch, 2013: 594). From the end of monarchical rule, to increased political participation, republicanism helped drive the political transformation of the Western world. But “despite this influence on the development of the modern political world, the dominance of liberalism and socialism meant that civic republicanism was obscured

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until the work of historiographers, legal scholars and political theorists revived the tradition towards the end of the twentieth century” (Dodsworth & Honohan, 2021: 669). This republican renaissance was sparked by Philip Pettit’s highly influential book Republicanism and by historians of political thought such as Quentin Skinner (e.g., Skinner, 1997), showing how the past and present understandings of republicanism are tightly linked (see also Honohan, 2002). Since the publication of Republicanism, the field has flourished, often under the heading of “civic” or “neo”-republicanism to distinguish it from the historical conception. Yet republicanism should not be seen a monolith – there are debates between republicans, both in the past and the present, and though there is a shared commitment to freedom from domination there is no fixed understanding as to how this can be best achieved. And, as republicanism has developed, and engaged with other political traditions and political problems, distinct strands of republicanism have emerged, including green republicanism. This latter approach grew out of the “important historical and conceptual connections” (Cannavò, 2016: 72) between the republican and environmental political traditions, such as an emphasis on the need for sustainable political systems, and the types of institutions and individual behavior that are required to maintain them. Grounded in these shared concerns, green republicanism seeks to develop the critical tools and political practices that can help address the environmental and climate crisis that we now face. In seeking to demonstrate the merits of a republican approach to climate change, this chapter is therefore both representative of, and grounded in, green republicanism.

Climate Domination Central to republicanism, and especially contemporary neo-republicanism, is the idea of freedom as non-domination. Freedom is typically characterized, particularly within liberalism, as being either positive or negative. Drawing on Isiah Berlin’s famous essay on liberty, negative freedom refers to being without restrictions, so that “no man or body of men interferes with my activity” (Berlin, 2002: 169). I am free to go to the park in the negative sense because there are no rules that prevent me from doing so. In contrast, “the ‘positive’ sense of the word ‘liberty’ derives from the wish on the part of the individual to be his own master. I wish my life and decisions to depend on myself, not on external forces of whatever kind” (ibid.: 178). Positive liberty can be said to include not just mastery of ourselves but the means to achieve the goals we set ourselves, “the conditions necessary for individuals to be selfsufficient or to achieve self-realization” (Carter, 2022). So I am free to go to the park in the positive sense when I wish to go for myself, rather than being required to, and have the material means to get there. Republicanism identifies a third conception of freedom, a hinterland between positive and negative freedom that reflects the wider context in which individuals are able to act. What is key to freedom is therefore not whether rules restrict our actions, or whether I “depend on myself” (Berlin, 2002: 178), and have the capacity to carry out these actions, but whether I have a say in the rules imposed upon me. If we cannot shape the rules under which we live, then we

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are dominated by others and are not free, regardless of how much those rules interfere with our lives, or the support we have to realize our own desires. Drawing on its classical roots, the republican tradition often defines domination through reference to slavery. If a slave owner does not restrict the actions of those they have enslaved, leaving them free to make their own decisions and live their lives as they see fit, even providing assistance and support to meet their chosen goals, or encouraging them to take actions that will benefit them in the long run, then the criteria of positive and negative freedoms are met. But to say that the slaves are “free” is grossly mistaken. They are not free because their situation could change at any moment and they could do nothing to prevent it – the slave-owner could change their mind, withdrawing their support and enforcing draconian restrictions, and the slaves could not stop them. They are “subject to arbitrary sway . . . to the politically capricious will or to the potentially idiosyncratic judgement of another” (Pettit, 1997: 5), and are therefore in a state of domination, as their freedom is not in their own hands. In contrast, when we are free from domination we have a say in the rules that govern our lives, equal to others, and so have “the capacity to [metaphorically] stand eye to eye with our fellow citizens, in a shared awareness that none of you has a power of arbitrary interference over another” (ibid.: 5). How does domination work in practice? Rafeeq Hasan draws attention to the way in which domination is not just actively imposed by the actions of individuals but through broader structural factors: “structural domination – a more abstract, less intuitive concept – is domination by social, economic and legal institutions that both enable and are sustained by instances of dyadic domination” (Hasan, 2021: 293). An employer’s capacity to dominate their employee, that is, to change the conditions under which they work, or the pay that they receive without consulting them or without the employee being able to challenge this, is determined by the labor laws in that location, and the wider social economic context (e.g., is other equivalent employment available or is there an adequate social safety net to support the employee if they leave?). Lillian Cicerchia suggests that domination is a two-way process, involving agential and structural factors, exploring how individuals create, empower, or even just maintain structures that dominate so that “an alternative account of structural domination must be agential to avoid mystifying the social processes that reproduce it” (2022: 5). The concept of domination can help reveal and articulate the wrongs of climate change (For example, see Cannavò, 2021, though Anne Frémaux offers an alternative perspective, arguing that “green republicanism challenges the conception of freedom as non-interference (negative liberty) and even considers as insufficient the neo-republican (liberal) definition of freedom as ‘non-domination’” (2019: 10).) in three ways: in the domination of the natural and nonhuman world by (some) humans; in the domination of some people by others through the destruction of the climate; and as the domination of future generations by current generations, again through the actions taken now that will fundamentally damage the world they will be born into. As Steven Slaughter notes, “The environment is not just an issue concerning the relationship between humans and nature, but also an issue where people exercise power over other people” (Slaughter, 2005: 217) and Pettit argues that “any damage

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done to the environment means that there is an assault on at least the range of our undominated choices” (Pettit, 1997: 137, emphasis added). For example, those living in areas that are vulnerable to sea-level rise, such as small island states like Tuvalu, low-lying areas like the Netherlands, or the coastal regions of the world, will have their lives, at best, utterly altered, due to the arbitrary decision of others to either lead carbon-intensive lifestyles, or to permit carbon-intensive industries. And those who rely on immediate access to natural resources for survival (often due to broader patterns of colonization and economic exploitation) are dominated through the actions that change the climate and so alter these resources (e.g., those who must go to collect water every day will be heavily impacted by droughts caused by climate change, despite the fact that they have contributed the least to climate change). With regard to the nonhuman world, despite the recognition of several rivers as having legal personhood (Tănăsescu, 2022) and the inclusion of representatives for animals in some political cultures, the natural world is not represented within the major political, economic, and legal regimes within the international system, so that it can be transformed almost at will by those who wish to do so – the ultimate in arbitrary rule and so domination. Future generations are also unable to “stand eye to eye with [current] citizens” (Pettit, 1997: 5) and have their voices heard and so must inherit the consequences of decisions they had no say in. The concept of domination provides a way of articulating the injustice and the wrong that is done by those who have caused climate change, drawing attention to not just the act of releasing immense amounts of carbon into the atmosphere or other environmentally destructive actions, or of enabling the systems that carry out such actions, but the lack of consultation of these actions and their arbitrary nature – so that not just the end actions, but the means by which they are carried out, is wrong. The accounts of structural and micro-domination also reveal the complexity of factors that have led to the current climate crisis. Hasan, for example, notes that contemporary acts of domination are driven by a “complex interdependence of structure and agency” (Hasan, 2021: 298 and see also Cicerchia, 2022: 5), a description that can also be applied to climate crisis. All individuals make choices about their uses of carbon, which will in turn fuel the climate crisis and impact others, but it is the society in which they operate and the roles that they occupy that makes some choices more likely than others, and gives these choices weight and impact. For example, the CEO of an energy company who chooses to keep extracting and producing carbon-based fuels instead of moving to sustainable sources of energy is impacting the lives of all those who have to live in a changing climate, arbitrarily exercising domination over their lives. But the CEO’s actions take place within a social, political, and economic context that enables (indeed often rewards) them for unsustainable decisions. Or someone may use their car for short journeys, contributing to the release of carbon that will alter the lives of others, but feel that they have no other option due to the lack of available public transport. Climate domination can only be stopped by understanding the structural and agential factors that enable the arbitrary release of carbon. Orlando Lazar’s account of microdomination that, like the concept of micro-aggression, argues that “a series of dominated choices are individually inconsequential but [become] collectively

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consequential” (Lazar, 2021: 2), is also relevant here. Lazar notes that “the accretion of small intrusions into [our] free choice is consequential and harmful, even though none of those component intrusions may themselves be consequential” (ibid.: 4), thus providing a way of connecting the seemingly small actions taken by specific individuals with the domination of global climate crisis, through an understanding of thresholds and aggregation. As climate activists look to try and limit the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere in order to prevent increased warming, looking at the structural and agential ways in which domination operates and is maintained can identify what actors and processes need to be opposed, and highlighting the arbitrary nature of the decisions around carbon usage can provide a way to mobilize. Overall, the concept of domination, so central to the republican tradition, highlights the injustices of climate change, and through understanding domination we can identify the intersection of structural and individual factors that have driven this crisis and so need to be addressed.

Republican Economics No discussion of the climate crisis is complete without a discussion of the role of capitalism, and the way in which the demand of increasing consumption results in the destruction of natural resources and the exploitation of people, while also preventing sustainable politics. Limiting warming to 2
C and rebuilding capacity within the natural world will therefore require significant changes to the current dominant economic model, changes that the republican perspective on economics can support and guide. Though there is a wide literature on republican economics (e.g., Dagger, 2006; Pettit, 2006, Barry, 2012; Fremaux, 2019), there are four key themes, all of which aim to prevent domination and promote the common good of the republic as a whole. The first is “a powerful critique of economic domination” (Gourevitch, 2013: 592), a recognition of the way in which economic inequality is either equivalent to or enables domination (this reflects the structural conception of domination, explored above.) For example, republican economics seeks to limit the inequality between the richest and poorest, requiring a minimum beneath that no one is allowed to sink and a maximum that no one is permitted to exceed. Policies suggested to achieve this include a minimum and maximum wage, universal basic income, and limits to property. If all have means to support themselves independently of others, and no one is able to gain a significant material advantage, then domination is prevented as all are in a position of equality and cannot exercise arbitrary power over each other. Furthermore, there will be a relative equality of access to the political system. With regard to climate change, these measures could be mapped onto carbon emissions, with each person allowed a minimum and maximum level of emissions. However, this approach risks perpetuating an individualistic approach that does not take account of structural factors and the context in which individuals use carbon – and again a broader understanding of domination can help identify the tensions within these policies. Limits to property could prevent the accumulation of massive

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resources, or could be understood as limits on what can be done with property, for example, companies could be prevented from exploiting sub-soil resources through drilling for oil or fracking, even if they own the land in which those resources are located. The second key theme is that of taxation. Under a republican model, taxes would prevent economic inequality and encourage the citizens to act in a way that supports the common good. For example, many historical republicans warned against luxury, as spending on luxuries can distract from securing the common good, elevating private interests over public need. Republican taxation is therefore designed to be progressive, focusing on nonessentials. This understanding of taxation has parallels with, and lessons for, the concept of carbon taxes, taxes on goods and services that are carbon intensive in order to either to discourage their use, or to either raise funds to offset the carbon released or help to adapt to the resulting changed climate (e.g., see Clean Air Zones in UK cities, in which cars that produce high emissions are charged, while lower-emitting vehicles, such as electric cars, are not). Such taxes are often critiqued for being inherently regressive because they impose greater costs on the poorest who are less able to afford either the initial start-up costs for greener options or the increased taxation that results (Andersson & Atkinson, 2020). Increased taxes for petrol or diesel cars, for example, will hurt those who can only afford to buy an older, or second-hand car, as opposed to those who can afford a new hybrid or electric car. The republican focus on luxuries provides a way to reorientate these taxes by focusing on emissions that go beyond what is needed for the good life and to ensure equality against domination. For example, this approach would support extensive taxes on luxury, carbon-intensive activities and goods, but permit what Steve Vanderheiden calls “survival emissions” (Vanderheiden, 2008) in order to ensure that all have the resources to survive in a state of equality with others. The focus on the context of our choices that structural understandings of domination emphasize will also highlight the need to provide sustainable, affordable alternative options. Taxes on fossil-fueled cars, for example, will be less regressive when green, cheap, safe, and convenient public transport is available to all, and cars are no longer a necessity. These arguments are linked to the third theme of republican economics, which concerns the necessity of reconfiguring both private property and the market in order to better support the common good, and to ensure the survival of the republic and its citizens. When considering private property, republicanism argues that while an individual’s rights and liberties are important, this must be balanced against the needs of all, and the common, shared good of the republic as a whole. Machiavelli concluded that the best way to achieve this was to “keep the republic rich and the citizens poor” (Machiavelli, 1996: 79), emphasizing the need to prioritize public property that is available to all, over individuals’ exclusive private property. While contemporary republicans have no desire to keep the citizens poor, indeed quite the opposite, the need to reconfigure the absolute sovereign status of private property, and to shift the balance toward common ownership is a recurring theme, especially among green republicans. John Barry, for example, notes that green republicans seek “an ecologically informed and instrumental view of private property, which

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correlates with a civic republican instrumental view of the market itself” (Barry, 2012: 243). Private property and the market would not be abolished by republicans, but neither would they remain sacrosanct, ends in and of themselves as is the case under contemporary capitalism, where private profit and individual entitlements permit actions that destroy our shared earth. Instead, they would be placed in service of the common good, rather than the interests of a minority, and would not be allowed to place barriers in the way of a sustainable transition. The final theme examines the type of work that is available to citizens, and the conditions under which it is carried out. As Alex Gourevitch highlights, “The republican theory of liberty delivers a powerful critique of economic domination and leads to arguments for various kinds of democratic control over work” (Gourevitch, 2013: 592). Drawing on the work of the labor republicans of the nineteenth century, he argues that republicanism requires not just economic provisions, such as basic income or minimum/maximum wages, but a transformation in the understanding of work. Domination in the workplace, for example, is restricted if employees have representation in the organization they work for, and a greater concern for dignity and respect in employment conditions also ensures equality of standing among all. Abolishing zero-hour contracts, increasing worker protections regarding hiring, firing, and workplace health and safety, and enabling more workercollectives will all improve the conditions of work. Furthermore, a republican approach to work would recognize the labor inherent in care work, and properly value and compensate this. Such arguments are reflected in the calls for a “Green New Deal” to tackle climate change. Transitioning away from a carbon-intensive economy will involve changes to the type of work that is available and only through support for workers and a reimagining of work can this be fairly managed. This transition also provides a way to not only promote jobs that support sustainability, but also to improve conditions in which work is carried out. Like republicanism, the Green New Deal, therefore, calls for a change in both the ends and the means of work, for example, “The Green New Deal is not just a plan to tackle a number of ongoing and interrelated crises; it represents an opportunity to build a new model for our economy, and in particular the nature of work and of workers’ rights” (Labour for a Green New Deal, 2019: 5). A new approach to work, which puts workers and not the market or private property and capital at its heart, will prevent domination, thereby supporting the transition to a low-carbon economy to the benefit of all. As these four themes show, there is much overlap between republican economics and the actions required to mitigate and respond to the climate crisis. Combined, these themes create an economic model that seeks to promote the common good and preserve the republic (e.g., Barry, 2012; Fremaux, 2019). All members of the republic will have access to the material conditions needed for a good, fulling life, will work under conditions of dignity and respect, and will have the tools needed to carry out their duties and responsibilities. Though strict equality is not required, rampant inequality will be curbed, and none will have so much that they can dominate others or distort the republic’s institutions and political systems. Taxes will be designed to reflect the citizen’s shared goals, rewarding climate-virtuous behavior that supports this shared good (against a backdrop of easily accessible

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sustainable alternatives), and private property and the market will also be subservient to this goal – or will, at least, not be permitted to actively promote and profit from the destruction of our shared climate. This economic model can limit climate destruction and promote sustainability: taxes, for example, will be placed on items that are unsustainably produced, with the proceeds used to ensure that more sustainable items are made easily available and to offset the impact they caused. Work will be focused on contributing to environmental preservation and transitioning to a low-carbon society, in ways that take account of the perspectives of all those who undertake such labor, as workers will be drivers of this change. And the market and private property will be reconfigured to either reward sustainable practices or to least not stand in the way of climate action. Republican writings on economics can therefore provide the more sustainable models that we desperately need.

Vulnerable Places and People Republicanism is particularly well suited to thinking through climate change because it centers on the vulnerability of a specific people in a specific place, offering an alternative to what Breen characterizes as “a political model based on an assumption on placelessness” (Breen, 2017: 30). It therefore reflects our connection to the world around us, which has been taken for granted by many, but on which our shared dependence is made explicitly clear as the climate changes. Machiavelli, for example, sought to preserve the Florentine republic of his day, and so examined the vulnerabilities and fragilities inherent in that specific city-state. He saw that the republic was at the mercy of what he called fortuna, or the “ruinous river,” a shifting, unpredictable tide of fortune, luck, and chance (Machiavelli, 1984: 82). No polity can outrun fortuna forever, as change and decay are an inevitable part of life, and “very few classical republican theorists imagines that one could create a constitution and polity that would last indefinitely” (Barry, 2021: 226, emphasis in original). (Not all republicans accept the inevitability of fortuna. Harrington, Jefferson, and Madison, for example, all thought that the republic could be made to endure; however, they thought that this was only possible through strict control of the distribution of natural resources, e.g., extensive restrictions on property ownership (Harrington, 1992), or the division of the republic into smaller, self-governing areas (Jefferson, 1977: 537). The republic could therefore only survive and outrun fortuna through sustainable policies and an attention to the governance of the specific resources within its borders.) But Machiavelli argued that a republic could delay the inevitable effects of fortuna through sacrifice, virtue, and duty. While all republics must end, a careful citizenry can postpone decay and secure the republic for as long as possible. In this acceptance of the fragility of the republic and the recognition of the constant work needed to try and support the polity and people in the face of their shared vulnerability, republicanism provides the tools to respond to a changing climate. Within republicanism, the survival of the republic is explicitly linked to a recognition that we do not live apart from the natural world, but intwined within it, with our lives and political structures literally built upon the shared

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earth. Our societies and institutions are fundamentally threatened by climate change – the tide of fortuna is literal, and rising. Past republicans examined how the resources and climate of a specific place shaped the people who lived there and their subsequent politics – for example, Rousseau argued that republican self-government best suits “states that are small and poor” (Rousseau, 1994: 112), as “the greater the density of the population, the harder it is for a government to encroach on the sovereign authority” (ibid.: 115). Without slipping into stereotypical determinism, following this approach would enable our politics to reflect the specific circumstances of our immediate environment, and so be more responsive to it. For example, our politics could start by asking what the specific resources within our community require, and what can they enable, and building policies from these answers – what behaviors and institutions would a sparsely populated coastal community require? And how would this differ from the needs of an urban city on the edge of a forest? The actions that led to climate change were, at best, a denial of the reality of our rootedness in a specific place: a presumption that natural resources could be used and transformed without any impact on the people and politics that depended upon it matched with a failure to recognize the uniqueness of specific environmental resources. Republicanism is uniquely able to ground political thought and action in the climate crisis because it begins with a recognition of the vulnerability and fragility of our political systems and our lives in the face of broader forces that we cannot control. In addition to a focus on specific places, and the ways in which they can be maintained, republicanism is also focused on specific people, namely, the citizens who are members of the republic. This provides a way to ground the rights of the members of the republic through clearly identified duty-bearers (namely other citizens and the institutions of the republic) that are tightly bound together, and to also allocate the duties of maintaining the fragile, vulnerable republic. Historically, the definition of the republican citizen was twisted by biases of race and gender. Rousseau, for example, denied that women could be citizens, as “whether a monarch reigns over men or women, it is very indifferent to him, provided he is obeyed: but in a republic, men are wanted” (Rousseau, 1759: 135), and Jefferson explicitly stated that were our state a pure democracy, in which all its inhabitants should meet together to transact all their business, there would yet be excluded from their deliberation, 1. Infants, until arrived at years of discretion. 2. Women . . . 3. Slaves . . . Those then who have no will, could be permitted to exercise none. (Jefferson, 1999: 219–220)

As noted in section “Republicanism”, these prejudices were challenged at the time – Mary Wollstonecraft, for example, pointed out in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman that women’s supposed irrationality was due to their lack of education and societal expectations, and that if these barriers were removed women would be equally capable of participating in the republic (albeit primarily through being better able to teach their children). Contemporary neo-republicanism has rightly stripped citizenship of discriminatory qualifications (e.g., Pettit, 1997: 293), emphasizing citizen’s consent, and how exclusion enables domination.

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Citizenship can therefore be seen as a way to provide a bond between people, and between people and place, to protect them against fortuna. Such bonds last as long as the republic, proving a clean chain between past, present, and future generations that stretches “to the thousandth and thousandth generation” (Jefferson, 1801). This chain enables cross-generational obligations between citizens in service of the republic to which they all (will) belong. As a result, republican citizenship can provide a valuable resource for justifying action on climate change, which requires transformative change now to reduce the harm to future generations of citizens. It is not only the intergenerational aspect of republican citizenship that can ground climate action. Republican citizens are required to cultivate virtues and fulfill the duties of citizenship in the cause of the common good of the republic. For past republicans such as Machiavelli, this took the form of valor in battle and guarding against corruption in public office, whereas for Wollstonecraft raising children was a crucial duty for the survival of the republic. Though Wollstonecraft was mistaken in assigning this duty on gendered lines, it shows a recognition of human vulnerability and the work of care that is required to sustain the republic. Neo-republicans also emphasize the duties of taking on public office and providing political oversight and scrutiny. Citizenship requires sacrifice, engagement with politics, a dedication to the common good, and self-government. It can be seen as austere and cold, a privileging of the collective over the individual needs and preferences, for “republican citizenship is quite demanding” (Honohan, 2010: 91). But republican citizenship can be configured to emphasize solidarity and joy through shared duties and the communal life of the republic that all citizens benefit from and see themselves in (Barry, 2012; Fremaux, 2019: especially 190–199). And this is matched by a focus on the need for both the institutions of the republic, and our fellow citizens, to provide us with the tools needed to fulfill these duties and develop our virtues, which can be an act of solidarity and emancipation. Here is an outline of citizenship that can underpin the transition to a sustainable, low-carbon economy and society that can weather the storms of a changing climate, through collective strength and shared purpose, equally borne, grounded in a recognition of the vulnerability of both ourselves and the places in which we live.

Virtuous Citizens Republicanism’s focus on the people that make up a specific polity in a specific place, their duties to sustain their shared home, and the virtues required to motivate such action, was a key impetus in the development of green republicanism (e.g., Barry, 2006: 27). For here was a political tradition that provided a way of justifying and motivating the changes needed to mitigate and adapt to climate change without top-down authoritarianism. These shared concerns regarding how to motivate citizens and what kind of political systems best support the development of sustainable behaviors in face of fortuna form a key pillar of green republicanism. Adapting to climate change and trying to mitigate the damage caused to the environment will require sacrifices of our time, energy, and resources, as well as changes in behavior, and republicanism is a tradition that explicitly addresses how to promote specific

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types of behavior amongst its citizens and how to share these responsibilities. The view of citizens as participants in the shared task of maintaining the vulnerable republic therefore reflects the approach needed to preserve our shared environment. As Babcock points out, “Republicanism – with its emphasis on public education, civic involvement and achieving the common good through civic virtue – provides a useful construct for thinking about how to make people behave in a more environmentally responsible way” (Babcock, 2009: 517). This is later characterized as “a shared life self-consciously accepted” (ibid.: 527 and see Fremaux, 2019), calling back to the emphasis on choosing to take up citizenship and the community that is formed from those who commit to a shared good, as well as the freedom from arbitrary rule that is so central to the republican tradition. But what would the “civic virtue” that promotes climate action include? [G]reen virtues could include a sense of place; an appreciation of ecological complexity and interdependence; sensitivity to ecological impacts; scientific literacy; caution and humility regarding human relations with nature; care and respect for nature and also for the existing built environment; a broadened spatial and temporal perspective; flexibility, courage, resilience, creativity, and hope in the face of ecological change; the ability to adapt existing goods and values of the past to radically changed ecological conditions; a strong sense of international, intergenerational, and interspecies justice; and a sense of collective responsibility for the planet. (Cannavò, 2016: 84)

This range of virtues reflects the extent of the work required to respond to climate change. Citizens must cultivate such virtues through a variety of means, including lifelong education, engagement with institutions and public life, and perhaps even a form of sustainability service, in which all citizens would “give up some proportion of their time to engage in a range of sustainability activities” (Barry, 2006: 29) as best suits their abilities and talents. But these virtues are not a compulsory “to-do” list, which all citizens are required to complete at all times. Rather they should instead be seen as options to choose from, with each citizen developing the virtues that best suit their character and circumstances, thereby creating a vibrant and diverse republic that follows many paths to the same common goal (Fremaux, 2019: 190–199). There is one duty that all citizens must perform, though; participation in the governance of the republic. “Central to republicanism is that political participation is a crucial element in the promotion of the public good and the avoidance of domination” (Slaughter, 2005: 214). Republicanism is committed to shared decisionmaking in order to prevent domination, that is, arbitrary rule – rules not chosen by the person who must follow them – and a focus on the common good of the republic requires all to participate so that private interests cannot have undue influence. Thus, all citizens are to be given access to information needed for informed decisionmaking, strongly encouraged (at minimum) to take part in free debate in order to decide how the republic should be run, empowered to hold officials to account, and supported in taking up roles within the republic. (Whether the republican emphasis on citizen participation is compatible with representative democracy is debated. Pettit, for example, argues that republics and their institutions should “embody this idea of a democracy that is at once electoral and contestatory” (Pettit, 1997: 297),

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while Rousseau argued that “the moment that a people provides itself with representatives, it is no longer free: it no longer exists” (Rousseau, 1994: 129).) For some historical republicans, the service work that made such intensive engagement with governance possible was to be forcibly shouldered by excluded groups, frequently along the lines of race, gender, and class – such as the slaves in Jefferson’s republic. Contemporary neo-republicans have dismantled these requirements and demonstrated how the work of political participation can be more easily borne, but this is still a time-consuming task, requiring energy and dedication – part of the sacrifices of being a citizen, and careful attention will be needed to ensure that all can bear this burden equally. For example, political meetings such as climate assemblies should be accompanied by free childcare, with the option to attend virtually, and with translations and interpreters available. Political education should also be embedded in schools and made freely available to the adult population. Though political participation can be burdensome, it can also be emancipatory, as seen in Wollstonecraft’s claim that “I do not wish [women] to have power over men, but over themselves” (Wollstonecraft, 1989: 131). Political participation is a form of self-government, and so brings with it self-respect and independence for both citizens and the republic as a whole: it is therefore worth the price paid in terms of time, effort, and energy diverted from other actions. This emphasis on political participation, collective decision-making, and selfgovernment has clear resonance for climate politics: The republican idea that self-government imposes responsibilities on citizens, and asks their elected representatives to cultivate that quality of character in themselves and in others that self-government requires, is not that different from the need to get people to behave more responsibly toward their environment. (Babcock, 2009: 520)

Greater participation in decision-making is viewed as key to ensuring sustainable politics and enabling a just transition to a low-carbon future and a climate-changed world (see Ostrom, 2015). But is the republican model of participatory governance really capable of producing effective climate politics? Cannavò highlights the potential tensions between the twin commitments to “community and contestation” within the republican tradition (Cannavò, 2016: 74). After all “a decentralized, democratic politics in no way guarantees ecologically viable outcomes. Moreover local autonomy and decentralisation would seem to exacerbate the kinds of collective action and coordination problems that have dogged efforts to address climate change” (ibid.: 83). The range of actors, across different levels and political spheres, that are entitled to participate in decisions regarding the shared climate also seems to argue against participatory governance. Furthermore, political debate and tension is often seen as intrinsically valuable by republicanism. “Democratic processes must also secure non-domination by providing opportunities for contestation whereby citizens can claim that public interests are not being upheld or tracked by the state” (Slaughter, 2008: 27), while Marcel Wissenburg argues for a constitutional republican approach to Anthropocene government that “recognises and embraces the indispensable value of discord and of free and open debate” (Wissenburg,

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2021: 797). Wissenburg links this argument back to historical republicanism, particularly Machiavelli (ibid.: 786), who argued that disagreement and “tumult” between citizens kept the Roman republic free by ensuring checks and balances and preventing any group from consolidating power (Machiavelli, 1996: 16). But surely more political tumult and disagreement is that last thing that climate politics needs? Bad-faith actors have exploited the scientific process to argue that a lack of consensus on the specifics of climate science meant that no action to limit emissions was needed, thus protecting their own profits (Big Oil vs the World, 2022). And the voices of those with knowledge of the climate crisis, whether from academic expertise or lived experience, have been ignored or shouted down, particularly by those with greater wealth and political capital, as the lobbying of US politicians by fossil fuel industries illustrates (e.g., “oil and gas companies . . . contributed more than $84 million to candidates running for the US Congress in 2018”; Goldberg et al., 2020). It is explicitly clear that action to reduce carbon emissions and protect the planet is needed, and quickly, and that the processes of debate and governance need to be protected from those who abuse them to secure private advantage. The political disagreement and contestation that republicanism either requires or enables aims to secure the common good and freedom from domination. Action on climate change should be seen as the shared good that such tumult is designed to protect, not another subject for debate. It should be used to create a political climate in which how to best limit carbon emissions is a constant concern, with candidates for office competing to offer the best policies. Contestation in the form of debate over whether or not climate change is taking place or, as contemporary climate deniers now argue, whether there is anything that can be done to prevent climate change, whether climate action will cost “too much” or whether nontransformative solutions will be enough (Lamb et al., 2020), should not be entertained. But contestation due to increased representation from those who have so far been marginalized should be encouraged. What would including the voices of the dispossessed and poorest in the world mean? Consider how different the COP climate negotiations might be if the voices of activists, especially indigenous voices and representatives of marginalized groups, were brought into the main debate (Brooks, 2021). The need for a process of climate decision-making that represents all voices is clear, but this is in service of self-government and a commitment to a shared common good, as set out by republicanism. The republican citizen is however accompanied by a shadow, the noncitizen who is kept out of the debates, and whose voices is not heard in the republic. Though neorepublicanism states that noncitizens should be protected (e.g., Bohman, 2015), the question of what happens to those who are not members of the republic remains (as explored by Fine, 2014). For if they have not chosen to be part of the republic, and do not share the virtues, or fulfill the duties required of republican citizens, then surely they cannot share in the exact same benefits, rights, and recognitions. With regard to the question of climate change, this question of exclusion from citizenship is double-edged. As climate change forces more and more people to leave their homes, the question of membership and belonging becomes increasingly important, so how can we ensure that climate displaced peoples access citizenship, and the

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accompanying rights and protection? And surely everyone, not just citizens, needs to fulfill the duties required for sustainability. How is the global problem of climate change to be solved through an approach that emphasizes discrete polities?

Polis Versus Cosmopolis As Cécile Laborde points out, the “republican tradition has a blind spot about global justice . . . Most would agree that republican values have traditionally been realised in the polis not in the (oxymoronic) cosmopolis” (Laborde, 2010: 48). So while republicanism may be able to respond to threats to specific resources within the bounds of the republic (such as rainforests or lakes) or to specific republics (such as low-lying states), how can republicanism apply to problems that cross the boundaries of the republic? There are three possible responses here. The first is to say that, paradoxically, the capacity to exclude might be a useful tool in the fight against climate change. After all, if international corporations were shut out of the political systems of resource-rich nations, so that the decisions regarding the use of those resources were taken only by those who had to bear the consequences of it, we might perhaps see more sustainable use. A republican system of governance that considers the needs of future generations of the republic, over the voices of powerful outside actors’ intent on their own private gain, would surely take climate change more seriously. But perhaps this sounds too much like an endorsement of sovereignty, the principle that states can do what they chose within their own borders, that some critics see as a barrier to effective climate governance. (See Robyn Eckersley’s argument that the state needs to move “toward less exclusionary ideals of sovereignty” in order to limit “its ecologically destructive potential” (Eckersley, 2005: 160).) Alternatively, we could envision a world of multiple republics, working collectively in pursuit of shared goals, with a livable climate being the most obvious common good for all. These republics would each be committed to freedom from domination, recognize their equal vulnerability, and the connection of each to their specific places and peoples, and would so share similar aims and motivations. Working together would also enable the individual republics to manage the global structural sources of domination in order to increase freedom for all, enabling a degree of self-government at this higher level. The third option is that of global republican institutions. The republican tradition is deeply concerned with political institutions, with questions of how to best design and maintain them (see, for example, Rousseau’s description of the republic in The Social Contract, Jefferson’s arguments regarding wards and constitutions, Pettit’s Republicanism, and for green republican institutions Fremaux, 2019: Chapter Six). Institutions provide the means for consistency through time, a way to pass on the traditions, virtues, and practices of the republic to future citizens, and so ensure the conditions for nondomination throughout the span of the republic. Republican institutions also provide the means and space for participation and contestation, enabling self-government and preventing arbitrary rule. And because these institutions are committed to the common good of the republic, they can ensure such

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contestation is productive, and in good faith. Global institutions, committed to republican principles and supported by individual republics, could therefore provide a way to address global problems, and root out domination at all levels, for example, by providing a means of redress, or of balancing the playing field between richer and poorer countries. Thus, “republicanism entails the potential for a significant institutionalization of global politics, albeit one that falls far short of the political and institutional cosmopolitan” approach (Slaughter, 2005: 223). Indeed, as Miriam Ronzoni notes, there is no straightforward pathway from a commitment to nondomination “to a clear vision for a global institutional order,” and “careful balancing” is therefore required (Ronzoni, 2017: 186). Yet this balancing may in itself be the point, a way to ensure that all voices are heard and that domination and power differentials are constantly scrutinized, so that the needs of all are included in the global good. Everyone would be a “citizen” of these institutions, regardless of which republic they belonged to (or even if they belonged to a republic). A global response to climate change that is grounded in such institutions would be open to the voices of the world’s poorest and those most at risk of climate change, and thus is more likely to produce effective climate action. Regardless of the solutions to the problem of the noncitizen, the explicit focus on citizenship does at least mean that the republican tradition has to think through and respond to these questions, and justify its exclusions. “For the liberal view can be used by the privileged to mandate such exclusions to prevent unjustified interferences with their entitlements – be it the property rights of the rich or the sovereignty of wealthy states. By contrast, the republican view mandates inclusion as a political equal within the decision-making processes of those powerful bodies capable of exercising domination over our lives” (Bellamy, 2013: 263). Republicanism engages directly with questions of exclusion and membership, mapping out the means through which people can become citizens and subjecting this to scrutiny, rather than starting from a presumption of belonging that is often not shared in contemporary politics and tends to leave the most vulnerable outside. This is reflective of other tensions within republicanisms, which when applied to the problem of climate change can highlight the inadequacies of our current responses. For example, is tumult and contestation, both within climate institutions and the wider global response, useful in that it prevents hegemonic dominance and increases the chances that underrepresented voices are heard, or will it just slow down any chance for efficient action? Who should participate in global climate governance, and how? And do we need stronger institutions, or more cooperative states? Even if we reject the answers that the republican tradition offers, it has performed a valuable service if it has pushed us to think seriously about the limits of institutions and participation, and who is left outside and why.

Conclusion This chapter aimed to demonstrate the merits of a republican approach to climate change, and the ability of this tradition to offer a political framework that can ground sustainable, climate-friendly politics. Section “Republicanism” set out the republican

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tradition, past and present. Section “Climate Domination” explored the central concept of freedom as nondomination and the way this helps explain the injustices of climate change. Section “Republican Economics” explores the republican model of economics. Section “Vulnerable Places and People” looked at the republican focus on specific people and places, and how the recognition of vulnerability makes republicanism particularly suited to the problem of climate change. This led to a discussion of the role of the virtuous republican citizen, and how the emphasis on the duties and virtues of the citizen can be used to ground sustainable actions. Finally, this chapter concluded with a discussion of the tensions between the rooted republic and global problems, and the citizen and the noncitizen, to ask how an approach that is so focused on a specific, bounded polity can responsd to the global problem of climate change. We desperately need new ways of thinking and organizing our societies, new concepts, and new politics, if we are to limit temperature rises to 2
C and to adapt to the consequences of climate change that are already with us, particularly for the most vulnerable. The merits of a republican approach to climate change suggest that it is through looking back at alternative political traditions that we can best move forward into a sustainable future.

References Andersson, J., & Atkinson, G. (2020). The distributional effects of a carbon tax. Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, Working Paper No. 349, ISSN 2515-5717. Babcock, H. M. (2009). Civic republicanism provides theoretical support for making individuals more environmentally responsible. Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy, 23(2), 515–536. Barry, J. (2006). Resistance is fertile: From environmental to sustainability citizenship. In D. Bell & A. Dobson (Eds.), Environmental citizenship: Getting from here to there? (pp. 21–48). MIT Press. Barry, J. (2012). The politics of actually existing unsustainably. Oxford University Press. Barry, J. (2021). Green republicanism and a ‘Just Transition’ from the tyranny of economic growth. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 24(5), 725–742. Bellamy, R. (2013). Rights, republicanism and democracy. In A. Niederberger & P. Schink (Eds.), Republican democracy (pp. 253–273). Edinburgh University Press. Berlin, I. (2002). Liberty: Incorporating ‘Four Essays on Liberty’. Oxford University Press. Big Oil vs the World, 2022, dir. Jane McMullen. Bohman, J. (2015). Domination, global harms, and the problem of silent citizenship: Toward a republican theory of global justice. Citizenship Studies, 19(5), 520–534. Breen, S. D. (2017). Plato: Private property and agriculture for the commoners – Humans and the natural world in The Republic. In Engaging Nature (pp. 29–44). MIT Press. Brooks, L. (2021). Hundreds of global civil society representatives walk out of COP26 in protest. The Guardian. Accessed at https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/12/globalcivil-society-representatives-walkout-cop26-protest Cannavò, P. (2016). Environmental political theory and republicanism. In T. Gabrielson, C. Hall, J. M. Meyer, & D. Schlosberg (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of environmental political theory (pp. 72–88). Oxford University Press. Cannavò, P. (2021). Vulnerability and non-domination. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 24(5), 693–709. Carter, I. (2022). Positive and negative liberty. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2022 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (Ed.). Accessed at https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2022/ entries/liberty-positive-negative/

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Cicerchia, L. (2022). Structural domination in the labor market. European Journal of Political Theory, 21(1), 4–24. Dagger, R. (2006). Neo-republicanism and the civic economy. Politics, Philosophy and Economics, 5(2), 151–173. Dodsworth, A., & Honohan, I. (2021). Introduction: Green republicanism. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 24(5), 667–675. Eckersley, R. (2005). Greening the nation-state: From exclusive to inclusive sovereignty. In J. Barry & R. Eckersley (Eds.), The state and the global ecological crisis. MIT Press. Fine, S. (2014). Non-domination and the ethics of migration. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 17(1), 10–30. Fremaux, A. (2019). After the Anthropocene: Green republicanism in a post-capitalist world. Palgrave Macmillan. Goldberg, M. H., Marlon, J. R., Wang, X., & Leiserowitz, A. (2020). Oil and gas companies invest in legislators that vote against the environment. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 117(10), 5111–5112. Gourevitch, A. (2013). Labor republicanism and the transformation of work. Political Theory, 41(4), 591–617. Harrington, J. (1992). ‘The commonwealth of Oceana’, 1656. In J. G. A. Pocock (Ed.), The commonwealth of Oceana and a system of politics. Cambridge University Press. Hasan, R. (2021). Republicanism and structural domination. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 102(2), 292–310. Honohan, I. (2002). Civic republicanism. Routledge. Honohan, I. (2010). Republican requirements for access to citizenship. In G. Calder, P. Cole, & J. Seglow (Eds.), Citizenship acquisition and national belonging: Migration, membership and the liberal democratic state (pp. 91–104). Palgrave Macmillan. Jefferson, T. (1801). Inaugural address. Accessed at https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/ jefinau1.asp Jefferson, T. (1977). ‘Letter to John Adams’, 1813. In M. Peterson (Ed.), The portable Thomas Jefferson (pp. 533–539). Penguin. Jefferson, T. (1999). ‘Letter to Samuel Kercheval’, 1816. In J. Appleby & T. Ball (Eds.), Thomas Jefferson political writings (pp. 218–220). Cambridge University Press. Laborde, C. (2010). Republicanism and global justice: A sketch. European Journal of Political Theory, 9(1), 48–69. Labour for a Green New Deal. (2019). A just transition to well-paid, unionised, green jobs. Available at https://www.labourgnd.uk/gnd-explained Lamb, W. F., Mattioli, G., Levi, S., Roberts, J. T., Capstick, S., Creutzig, F., Minx, J. C., MüllerHansen, F., Culhane, T., & Steinberger, J. K. (2020). Discourses of climate delay. Global Sustainability, 3(e17), 1–5. Lazar, O. (2021). Micro-domination. European Journal of Political Theory, 1–21. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/14748851211020626 Machiavelli, N. (1984). The Prince, 1532 (P. Bondanella & M. Musa, Trans.). University of Oxford Press. Machiavelli, N. (1996). Discourses on Livy, 1517 (H. C. Mansfied & N. Tarcov, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. Ostrom, E. (2015). Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge University Press. Pettit, P. (1997). Republicanism. Oxford University Press. Pettit, P. (2006). Freedom in the market. Politics, Philosophy and Economics, 5(2), 131–149. Pocock, J. G. A. (1975). The Machiavellian moment. Princeton University Press. Ronzoni, M. (2017). Republicanism and global institutions: Three desiderata in tension. Social Philosophy and Policy, 34(1), 186–208. Rousseau, J.-J. (1759). A letter from M. Rousseau, of Geneva, to M. d’Alembert of Paris. Accessed at https://go-gale-com.bris.idm.oclc.org/ps/i.do?ty¼as&v¼2.1&u¼univbri&it¼search& p¼ECCO&dblist¼ECCO&qt¼BIB_ID~0058402100&lm¼&sw¼w

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Rousseau, J.-J. (1994). ‘The social contract’, 1762 (C. Betts, Trans. and Ed.), The social contract. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Skinner, Q. (1997). Liberty before liberalism. Cambridge University Press. Slaughter, S. (2005). The republican state: An alternative foundation for global environmental governance. In J. Barry & R. Eckersley (Eds.), The state and the global ecological crisis (pp. 207–227). MIT Press. Slaughter, S. (2008). The republican state and global environmental governance. The Good Society, 17(2), 25–31. Tănăsescu, M. (2022). Understanding the rights of nature. Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH. Vanderheiden, S. (2008). Political theory and global climate change. MIT Press. Wissenburg, M. (2021). The Anthropocene and the republic. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 24(5), 779–796. Wollstonecraft, M. (1989). ‘A vindication of the rights of woman’, 1792. In J. Todd & M. Butler (Eds.), The works of Mary Wollstonecraft (Vol. 5, pp. 65–266). Pickering.

Climate Change and Communitarianism Volker Kaul

Contents Morality Has Its Origin in the Community . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Failure of Communitarianism Regarding Climate Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A New Communitarian Approach: The Transgenerational Community Grounds Obligations of Global Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Why the Future Community Cannot Obligate the Present Community . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . In Theory, Only Present Cultural Identities Can Be Sources of Obligations Toward Future Communities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Yet, Present Identities Are Not Sources of Obligations Toward Future Communities . . . . . . . The Psychology of Cultural Identity as Source of Global Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Concluding Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

It is widely held that, as a matter of justice, rich countries should compensate poor countries for the transition towards net zero emission through some global redistributive scheme. Yet, communitarianism is a political theory of ethical partiality and explicitly rejects any conception of global redistributive justice. This chapter analyzes the conceptual problems that communitarian theory has with climate change and seeks a way from within communitarianism to engage with it specifically in terms of global justice. It argues that, while cultural identity as a normative and moral notion fails to give rise to obligations towards future people, cultural identity understood in moral psychological terms may provide support for a systematic concern for future people. And that, in turn, may give rise to strong communitarian reasons supporting forms of global climate cooperation and redistribution. In short, the moral sentiments and social emotions that are characteristic of and define a community provide the V. Kaul (*) Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_82

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psychological and motivational grounds to care about the future and instrumentally engage in climate justice. Keywords

Communitarianism · Climate change · Global justice · Populism · Cultural identity · Transgenerational community · Future people · Moral psychology · Moral obligation · Commitments

As the last Synthesis Report (Following is the link to the various documents of the 2023 IPCC Synthesis Report: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/ (accessed on March 21, 2023)) of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states clearly, climate change is already taking place and we risk missing the targets of the Paris Agreement if the world does not cut greenhouse gas emissions to zero in less than 20 years. This means that both rich and poor countries must undertake decisive climate actions today. However, given the enormous global inequalities and the persistence of world poverty as well as the historical responsibility of wealthy countries for climate change, it is widely held that, as a matter of justice, rich countries should compensate poor countries for that transition toward net zero emission through some global redistributive scheme [CROSS REF “CC and Global Justice”]. Communitarianism is a political theory of ethical partiality and explicitly rejects any conception of global redistributive justice. As a matter of fact, communitarian intuitions underlie much of the current global populism and nationalist movements that question any kind of global agreement regarding climate change, such as the Paris Agreement, and are partly responsible for many of the delays in addressing climate change. This chapter analyzes the conceptual problems that communitarian theory has with climate change and seeks a way from within communitarianism to engage with it specifically in terms of global justice. The intention is to show that, against the grain, ethical partiality can lead to global justice regarding climate change. If so, then populist and nationalist leaders face a harder task than they think when they try to justify their climate inaction on communitarian grounds (Kaul & Vajpeyi, 2020). The chapter is divided into seven sections. After a short introduction to communitarian thought, it discusses the challenge that communitarianism is facing regarding climate change. The most compelling conclusion is that only obligations toward a transgenerational community could indirectly ground obligations of global justice. However, the idea that a transgenerational community is a source of obligations turns out to be ultimately incoherent: only our present cultural identities could give rise to obligations toward future communities; but in our present cultural identities the wellbeing of future people actually does not take center stage. While cultural identity as a normative and moral notion fails to give rise to obligations toward future generations, cultural identity understood in moral psychological terms, according to which a community is based on love and sympathy and is itself a

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source of pride, may provide support for a systematic concern for future generations, as well as non-human nature, and for heightened care for the preservation of cultural and natural heritage. And that, in turn, may give raise to strong communitarian reasons supporting forms of global climate cooperation and redistribution. In short, the moral sentiments and social emotions that are characteristic of and define a community provide the psychological and motivational grounds to care about the future and instrumentally engage in climate justice.

Morality Has Its Origin in the Community With some crudity but not much inaccuracy, we can describe communitarianism as the opposite of globalism or cosmopolitanism. Where cosmopolitans argue that our moral obligations hold across borders and are owed to individuals in general, communitarians hold that obligations are exclusively due to community members. Communitarianism adds that we have those obligations only because of the community – without that, obligations cease to exist. One could come to believe that communitarians defend here some sociological or psychological thesis, given that it is often the case that community members have partial preferences for each other over foreigners. Yet communitarianism is, in fact, moral through and through. Despite many important contemporary reformulations of communitarianism (MacIntyre, 1981; Sandel, 1982; Taylor, 1989; Walzer, 1983), its deep roots and philosophically most coherent conception one can find in Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit (2018 [1808]), where the philosopher argues for the first time that the community is the very source of morality. Hegel makes the far-sweeping claim that without the reality of a community individuals would develop neither selfconsciousness nor freedom and moral agency – and would just float and indulge in a life of mere desires. Hegel thought that without the presence of others who hold us accountable, and on whose recognition we emotionally rely, we could never develop self-consciousness and the will to act on moral principles – as we would simply have no reason to do so. On this picture, morality has its origin in the claims that others make on us, attributing to us the authority to acknowledge certain responsibilities. We develop moral agency only when we acknowledge the normative statuses of authority and responsibility that others ascribe to us, and when we form a pro-attitude with regard to the claims that others make on us. Once we acknowledge our responsibilities, we gain the freedom to have and act on moral obligations (Brandom, 2019). Communitarians conceive partiality not as some psychological/motivational limitation, but as the very foundation of ethics. They criticize global obligations not only as conceptually impossible and empty, but also as morally dangerous (Miller, 1997). Forms of global governance that make governments accountable to global institutions undermine the social fabric and thus tend to disintegrate communities (Bayart, 2009). Such a profoundly critical attitude toward any form of global justice can be just problematic in some domains, such as the management of world poverty – but it

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seems entirely self-defeating when it comes to climate change. The latter puts at risk not only the livelihoods of many existing communities, for example, through sea levels rise and desertification (Lazrus, 2012), but also threatens the very survival of humanity as such. Given the historical responsibility of industrial countries for climate change, climate justice would require some form of global justice, namely that rich countries compensate emergent and developing countries financially, so that these countries need not forsake economic development in order to meet climate targets. The only way to effectively address climate change is through some scheme of global redistribution in which the global rich fulfill their climate justice obligations, which include compensating the global poor for fulfilling theirs.

The Failure of Communitarianism Regarding Climate Change The problem is that communitarianism has no conceptual grounds on which to construct, let alone meet, these moral obligations. On the communitarian picture, as long as the global rich and the global poor do not stand in a mutual relationship of recognition, by definition there cannot arise any kind of obligations between them. And self-interest, without any element of moral obligation or some form of sympathy that transcends narrow egoism, will not bring forth the strong and robust global redistributive mechanism that is needed to meet climate targets. Despite widespread and sufficient knowledge about the imminent dangers of climate change, the Paris Agreement foresaw only a weak financial compensation between rich and poorer countries, vividly demonstrating the insufficiency of realpolitik in this domain. Expectably, then, developing countries lag very much behind in their efforts to meet the Paris Agreement, whereas wealthier countries, while still very far from complying with their own commitments, come much closer to the agreed targets (See https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/ (accessed on March 13, 2023)). A well-meaning sympathizer of communitarianism could argue that after realizing that we live in one world (Singer, 2002), the logical consequence would be to progress toward a world community. Yet at present, with globalization on the retreat, the rise of populism, ubiquitous talk about energetic autarchy, and constructions of border walls, any cosmopolitan project of global democracy and governance seems politically impractical. The condition for the emergence of a world community would be that patterns of recognition are established across borders among individuals who are sensitive to the circumstances of remote others. Clearly, globalization, social media, and diasporas have contributed to the construction of new transnational communities (Appadurai, 1996), yet we are nowhere near a global community where, for example, the global poor can hold the global rich accountable. And the polarization of the world due to the Ukrainian war and the trade conflict between the West and China is only accelerating the deterioration of existing relationships. However, even in more ideal political circumstances, the different world communities still do incorporate and represent “spirits”, to use Hegel’s term, or ethical norms, that are often incompatible, making struggles of recognition in many cases impossible (Honneth, 1996). For a Chinese, for example, recognition implies that the

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other endorses certain Confucian or Taoist ideals, and it is quite hard to see how, say, Europeans could live up to such expectations. Given that it is rather difficult to imagine how incompatible value systems could somehow be hybridized into one culture, it would be much more probable that a unitary world culture is created through the imposition of one of the world cultures over others – something of which postcolonialism has accused the West all along (Said, 1978; Barber, 1995). Yet, colonialism and imperialism are without doubts incompatible with communitarianism, given that, as the historical experience extensively demonstrates, they do not lead to authentic relationships of recognition (See Homi Bhabha’s point on mimicry and sly civility in the relationship between colonizer and colonized (1994: 121–144)) and can never fully overcome the lord-bondsman dialectic. Accordingly, from a communitarian point of view, even a hypothetical world community would not give rise to proper moral obligations capable of addressing a challenge like climate change. As a matter of fact, communitarianism, contrary to cosmopolitanism, has mostly not been constructively involved in the debate on climate policy. On the contrary, nationalist and populist parties worldwide, who share with communitarianism a notion of morality according to which obligations are primarily, if not exclusively, owed to community members (a notion crystallized, in the past decade, by slogans like “America first”, or “Italians first”), have typically boycotted global climate policies. The prime example here is of course Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement the year after he was elected President of the United States, in 2016. For Trump, the environmentalist agenda puts “America last” (Mathiesen, 2022), given the necessity of a substantial global redistribution of wealth from richer to poorer countries. Climate skepticism may or may not have a role in this: as shown by an analysis of the political interventions on the topic of climate change by members of the far-right parties in the European Parliament between 2014 and 2019, populists and nationalists are not necessarily (or consistently) climate skeptics. They primarily and consistently reject not the science but the globalist policymaking process and policy responses that the science is taken to promote, and reject the notion that the locus of climate decision-making is not the nation-state. Therefore, many climate leaders hold that “reactionary populism is now the biggest obstacle to tackling climate change” (Mathiesen, 2022).

A New Communitarian Approach: The Transgenerational Community Grounds Obligations of Global Justice The communitarian position seems rather tragic. Communitarians agree that climate change is real, but they lack the conceptual tools to come to terms with it. The dilemma is that communitarians reject the justification of any moral claims that are made on communities from the outside, and block thereby any effective mechanism of global redistribution that could tackle climate change. The only possibility communitarians do have to address climate change, and the global redistributive schemes it necessitates, is that the community itself comes up with an ethics that

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endorses obligations of redistribution of the present community toward other, poorer communities. The obligation toward other communities can only come from within the community itself, fostered by reciprocal relationships of recognition internal to it. But if a communitarian ethics arises from the necessity of community members to hold each other accountable, how could such an ethics hold them accountable to others who belong to communities with which they do not stand in a relationship of recognition? Avner de-Shalit (1995) could be interpreted to have suggested an answer to this conundrum. He maintained that present communities stand in a moral relationship with their own future communities, and from this relationship one could hope to obtain present obligations toward other, poorer communities. The future members of a present community, being part of what de-Shalit calls a “transgenerational community”, may have the authority to attribute to the present members of that community responsibilities that include global redistribution. It is the accountability of communities to their future that may also hold them accountable to other, present, poorer communities. This would be a communitarian argument for global justice. Its steps are considered below. Before that, it is worth noting that the political implications of de-Shalit’s argument are certainly much less extensive in terms of global governance than those of cosmopolitanism (e.g., Pogge, 2002) – as they imply no establishment of global institutions yielding power over and above nation states. Yet the stakes are quite high nonetheless. If de-Shalit’s argument can be reconstructed in such a way that it justifies global redistribution from within a communitarian point of view, populism would lose much of its argumentative power; and communitarians could then constructively engage, without any feelings of guilt and betrayal, in the global climate justice debate. Therefore, this chapter will analyze de-Shalit’s theory of the transgenerational community to see if it can provide communities, particularly national communities, with moral and not purely prudential reasons to construct a framework of global climate-related redistribution. As it will emerge, in terms of obligations, it cannot. Yet an alternative argument, based not on obligations but on feelings of communitarian love and pride toward one’s community can derive reasons to redistribute wealth to climate-challenged poorer communities from that community’s concern for its own future and the preservation of its natural and cultural heritage. The main argument in favor of global justice, seen from the perspective of the transgenerational community, is that climate change harms future generations of the present community. But why should present communities care, given that future generations could never punish them for their alleged wrongdoing? De-Shalit claims that since future generations are the future communities of present communities, present people stand in a communitarian relationship with future people. Past, present, and future people build up a transgenerational community, which creates certain burdens of justice among several successive generations. This means that present community members have an obligation to assure a certain level of well-being of future community members. In our present historical context, given the nature of climate change and the differentials among countries

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in terms of historical responsibilities and development levels, this implies that present, richer communities, in order to protect their future communities, should engage in those forms of global justice that are necessary to mitigate climate change. On this view, it is the communitarian constitution of the self that grounds our obligations to future community members. Our embeddedness within a transgenerational community provides members with a moral identity, constituted by various communitarian commitments including those to future community members. And, since “to divest oneself of such commitments would be, in one important sense, to change one’s identity” (David Miller quoted in de-Shalit, 1995: 15) – what could be interpreted as psychological death or loss of integrity of a person (Korsgaard, 1996) – identity gains normative force in the transgenerational context. There exist communitarian obligations to future generations, since future people – as part of one’s extended community – are constitutive of self-understanding, “integral to ourselves and what constitutes our identities” (de-Shalit, 1995: 33). On these grounds, community members have a commitment to their future generations.

Why the Future Community Cannot Obligate the Present Community According to de-Shalit’s account, the existence of the transgenerational community grounds their members’ obligations to their future generations. This particular theory of communitarianism needs not only to show that a community actually does extend over time, but above all that past as well as future communities are constitutive of its present members’ self-understanding and identity – and to such a degree that a violation of their past and future norms might put at risk present members’ identity and personal integrity as much as would a violation of their own, present norms. In short, a defense is needed for the claim that “the constitutive community extends over several generations and into the future, and that [. . .] people [. . .] do and should regard the future as part of their ‘selves.’ These are the relations that form the transgenerational community, which is the source of our obligations to future generations” (de-Shalit, 1995: 15f.). The first problem that we encounter is how to make sense of the very idea of a transgenerational community. As Dennis Thompson puts it, “the further we look into the future, the less plausible it is to keep the question of foreign and future citizens separate” (Thompson, 2007). Our future communities will not only comprise our own descendants, but are just as likely to be constituted by descendants of some other present communities. Migrations and intercourse between communities will make future communities not mere reproductions of present ones over time. According to Thompson, it would therefore be an error to derive obligations to future generations from communitarian relations in which they could stand with us. However, it would be misleading to conceive the transgenerational community as merely the reproduction of communities over time (de-Shalit, 1995: 47). The basic

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conditions for a group of people to count as a constitutive community – that is, a community whose norms constitute the identity of its members – are forms of cultural interaction and moral similarity (de-Shalit, 1995: 22). The existence of a transgenerational community is thus not decided by genealogical descent. As Benedict Anderson has argued, communities are often entirely imagined and invented (Anderson, 1983; see also Hobsbawm & Ranger, 1992). It is cultural interaction that creates the grounds for common political, social, and cultural experiences, which in turn give rise to a shared identity. The constant interchange within a community generates a web of reciprocal debts and expectations – in brief, a moral system – by which individuals define themselves and from which they derive their ‘self.’ Through cultural interaction the community’s values become constitutive of the individual’s identity and a state of moral similarity among community members is achieved – “each member of the community shares these values, ideas, and norms with the other members” (de-Shalit, 1995: 28). As a consequence “people accept that they are governed by common values and principles” (de-Shalit, 1995: 25) as foundations for their common public life. It is thus ultimately reciprocity, not some commonly shared genealogical characteristics, that makes for a constitutive community. In this regard, it looks as if the existence of the transgenerational community, as well as our obligations to its members, depends on actual cultural interactions between present members and their past and future counterparts. These interactions build moral similarity. And indeed, de-Shalit (1995; but see also Care, 1982, and Golding, 1972) concentrate precisely on this point. According to these authors, the existence of a transgenerational community depends on the possibility for individuals to culturally interact with their past and future communities; and that interaction would make their community’s past and future integral to their present identity. It is suggested that all the difficulty lies in establishing this relationship with the transgenerational community. For how could not-yet-existent, unknown, and totally unidentified people be part of our community? More precisely, in what sense do present community members interact with a non-existing, faceless, impersonal, and non-particularized future community? Isn’t that future community just an anonymous aggregation of people, with whom present members will never have any actual contact? Clearly there is a sense, at times of global interconnectedness and instant communication, in which present members of any community stand in a far closer and intimate relationship with present members of foreign communities that are distant in space than they do with their own communities that are distant in time. And yet very few communitarians would accept that we now live in a global community that is interactive enough to generate the same sort of obligations that we have toward our own local community members. In addition to the problematic lack of direct interaction and acquaintance between present communities and their future communities, these future communities will most probably endorse moral and cultural values different from those of their present counterparts. Judging from the past two centuries, changes in technological, scientific, political, and economic circumstances promise values transformations every three generations, or less (de-Shalit, 1995: 46f.). Some of the most sustained criticisms of the concept of transgenerational community highlight precisely these two points: the lack of cultural interaction and the

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lack of moral similarity between generations. Norman Care makes it very clear that “we (current people) and they (future people) are not positioned in such a way as to be able to reciprocate with each other concerning the constituent ideas and controlling aims of any associations or enterprises which we jointly participate in or endure” (quoted in de-Shalit, 1995: 18). According to Martin Golding, obligations would be owed “to an unspecified, and perhaps unspecifiable, community of the future” (quoted in de-Shalit, 1995: 19). So, two important questions remain unsettled: In what cultural relationship, if any, do present members stand with future members of their communities? And how does this relationship ground transgenerational obligations if it does?

In Theory, Only Present Cultural Identities Can Be Sources of Obligations Toward Future Communities According to de-Shalit, “future selves relate to one’s present and past selves through the intentions, desires, etc., of the present self” (de-Shalit, 1995: 35). It is our personal identity that is the source of cultural interaction and obligation to the transgenerational community. The constitution and continuity of the self requires an intricate relationship between the self’s future experiences and its present intentions, and this relationship between our future selves and our present self makes us care about the future. De-Shalit adds that given our natural fear of death and oblivion, we try to ensure a post-mortem continuity of our creative selves through our deeds. This presupposes the existence of future persons potentially contemplating our deeds. So insofar as “a part of one’s personal identity during one’s life is the expectation of the fate of one’s acts and ideas after one’s death” (de-Shalit, 1995: 37), we may have obligations to future generations. What is striking in this account – leaving aside de-Shalit’s somewhat quick deduction of practical reasons from personal identity –, is the fact that it is personal identity that constitutes cultural interaction with future generations, and not the other way around, as is the case in standard communitarian accounts. Hence, an individual needs to already have an identity before she can enter into a relationship with the transgenerational community and have commitments toward it. This means that not our cultural interaction with the transgenerational community is constitutive of our identity and obligations, but that our identity presents the “normative demand for a state of genuine and positive cultural interaction, and hence for a genuine transgenerational community” (de-Shalit, 1995: 43). Without being already who we are, we can neither enter into contact with future generations, nor have any obligations toward them. But whom we already are is constituted by our present community. Why should we care and how could we even know of our past and future communities without having the cultural identity of the present community? How could we care about our Italian future community without being Italians at the outset? We stand in personal relationships with past and future communities only through membership in the current community. Hence, it seems, only our present cultural identity could provide us with obligations to the transgenerational community. The detour through personal

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identity seems either inconclusive or circular. For it should be clear that as long as it is the simple psychological need for “self-transcendence” (as de-Shalit puts it) that extends our cultural interaction to the future, obligations to future generations do not derive from any sense of community and are directed only fortuitously to the transgenerational community. And if there is more than that psychological need, then it will bring us back to cultural identity. If there could be any foundation of our climatic obligations to future communities, it could only arise from our present cultural identity. The real question, then, seems to be whether our present cultural identity provides us with reasons to take past and future communities into consideration.

Yet, Present Identities Are Not Sources of Obligations Toward Future Communities If we cannot stand in any communitarian relationship with future communities without our present cultural identity, then the question is if cultural identity per se entails commitments to the transgenerational community. Cultural identity does provide a commitment to the transgenerational community if and insofar as there are community norms that are concerned with the preservation and continuation of the community over time. The question, then, is if the first-order norms of a community are future-oriented. A communitarian might argue that communities are indeed constituted through their transgenerational context and owe their actual identity to past communities. Communities are grounded in traditions and the normative character of traditions extends communities over time (Scheffler, 2010); and most social practices demonstrate the transgenerational constitution of the present community (de-Shalit, 1995: 20). However, it might plausibly be argued that social reality is not normative in and of itself: the normativity of traditions depends, on the contrary, on the attitudes of present community members (Brandom, 2019). Although the content of a social practice is given by some tradition, the normative source is the authority of community members to acknowledge and commit to that particular tradition. Communities are not obligated by the will of their ancestors but only by the commitments they themselves make. It is the present community’s authority to endorse traditions that renders its transgenerational identity normative. Otherwise, our community would simply suffer and be ‘suffocated’ by partly conflicting transgenerational norms. And, as a matter of fact, most traditions tend to vanish over time. Some communitarians might then argue that communities have the freedom and authority to commit, over time, to some traditions and values that they consider as central to the community’s identity. Like Ulysses anticipating the Sirens, communities can bind themselves to values through their social, political, and legal institutions. This would make it impossible for future communities to shed a certain way of life, or at least its fundamental tenets, making those tenets permanent and immutable (Bilgrami, 2014: 241–259). Communities could thus compensate the dependence of

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the normativity of traditions on actual attitudes by establishing a constitutional and institutional framework that makes, as it were, certain traditions obligatory. Most liberal and more traditional communities indeed have such eternity clauses in their constitutions. The German constitution declares the democracy principle and the principle of human dignity to be unalienable. Some Muslim-majority countries establish Islam as the official religion of the state in a way that prevents Islam from ever being disestablished. And indeed it might be the entrenchment of these principles of democracy and human dignity in Germany, or of Islam in Iran, that may just necessitate these present communities to bring about a framework of global justice in matters of climate policy. For it is only the limitation of temperature increases within certain limits that guarantees that future communities will actually be in the position to live up to these values that present communities conceive as eternal, and to uphold them further into the future. In 2021, the German Constitutional Court ruled that the targets set by Germany’s Federal Climate Protection Act were insufficient, violating the fundamental right to a future consistent with human dignity (BVerfG, 2021) – an ostensibly fundamental tenet of what the German community stands for. Here, obligations of global justice regarding climate change arise not from the transgenerational community but from present commitments to some communitarian identity. Obligations are entirely based on present concerns for and commitments to present communities alone. It is a community’s conception of its own cultural identity that establishes a relationship with its own future communities. Without such a conception, communities would have no solid and constant grounds for policies sustaining their existence in the future. But now the question is whether communities can coherently make second-order commitments (though a constitution or other means) regarding first-order norms and values that they entertain. As noted these higher-order commitments should arguably be based on the felt necessity of rendering some traditions and values eternal and immutable. Yet if the normativity of traditions depends on peoples’ attitudes, as was also noted above, future communities will still retain the freedom and authority to shed the values, norms, and other identitarian tenets that present communities currently conceive as central and eternal. How could communitarianism justify second-order commitments that deprive future communities of that freedom? Self-reflective and self-conscious communities are morally required to concede the freedom to future communities to reflect upon their proper values (de-Shalit, 1995: 46–48). In this regard, communitarian self-consciousness can result only in a commitment to identity in general but not to a particular identity. The most a community could commit itself to is to have an identity, whatever that may be – and that can, of course, change over time. But once it gets to this, a community’s conception of its own identity cannot provide sufficient grounds for climate policies, given that a community does not have to ensure the present identity in the future, but just some identity. The communitarian argument can at most endorse climate policies that prevent the future extinction of a community. Yet, given that even in the bleakest scenarios most world communities will survive climate change somehow, communitarianism seems not in the position to really address climate change, and certainly not at the global level.

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The Psychology of Cultural Identity as Source of Global Justice It seems that, in a communitarian perspective, neither the world community nor present or future communities can give rise to moral obligations regarding climate change, and the global justice schemes that climate action necessitates. But it is worth asking a general question: are communitarians correct to ground the community as source of normativity and to depict cultural identity as a matter of morality and obligations? Is it not at least equally plausible to conceive cultural identity rather psychological, non-normative terms of attachments and emotions (Kaul, 2020: 79–122)? On the latter view, we care for our community, its history, traditions, and the well-being of its members, not because we are morally obliged to, but because of the moral sentiments of sympathy and love we have for our community, and the social emotions of pride, embarrassment, shame, and guilt that bind us to other members. Moral sentiments as well as social emotions, and not moralized recognition, are constitutive of a community. And climate justice arises precisely from within this communitarian moral psychology, if properly understood. Let us consider social emotions first. All that is related to the self affects our dignity and gives rise to either pride or embarrassment, depending upon the inherent quality of the affection (Hume, 1978 [1739]: 275–328). Like it or not, our cultural origins become integral to whom we are, and we are not personally indifferent to our culture. These emotions of pride and embarrassment make us willing to understand and engage with our culture, even if in critical terms. This justifies the study of national history, literature, and art, as exemplified by every country’s school curriculum. From these emotions derives also the importance we attribute to places of remembrance and to the location, excavation, restoration, preservation, and protection of cultural heritage (François & Schulze, 2003). These places include not just monument, artifacts, and documents but also natural sites that are in various ways important to self-understanding and cultural reflection. The protection of cultural and natural heritage requires, however, substantial economic development and climate policies, and in many cases, for many countries, these cannot be achieved without international cooperation. The protection of national heritage requires a large range of important local but also global climate policies. Take Italy as an example. Its large, costly underwater dam might protect Venice from rising sea levels for a few decades. But the protection of the many other beauties of Italy’s coastline might in the long run necessitate Italy to do more than construct dams – namely to engage with other countries, now all facing similar problems, against climate change. And concerns for national heritage seem to have the power to motivate global distributive schemes: after all, the “Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage”, adopted by UNESCO in 1972 and ratified by 185 states parties, established the World Heritage Fund and forms of economic, scientific, and technological assistance of poor countries by rich nations. Turn now to moral sentiments. In communitarianism, a community is conceived in terms of reciprocal relations of recognition (Hegel, 2018 [1808]); see also

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Brandom, 2019 and Honneth, 1996). Yet, it is rather implausible that the abstract relations of recognition pictured by Hegel could decisively contribute to the “production of the affect of community” that according to Sudipta Kaviraj (2021: 416) is constitutive of a community. Communities are not simply containers of traditions, values, and language, as it often emerges in contemporary nationalist thought and politics – but also political and indeed existential projects that fundamentally incorporate the hope of justice and fraternity, in a near-eschatological sense (Bloch, 1986[1959]; Gandhi, 1938[1909]). It is precisely on the grounds of this political project, even utopia, that a sense of community emerges and moral sentiments of love and sympathy develop among its members. It is in this sense that we should understand a national community as a daily plebiscite (Renan, 2018[1882]). These deep sentiments of love and sympathy provide two sorts of moral reasons (Frankfurt, 2006) why we should care about climate change. First, from the standpoint of love, instrumental rationality, responsible for the exploitation of nature in the name of the community’s progress and development, may give way to an attitude of care (Pulcini, 2016) that valorizes the intrinsic value of nature and the organic unity of community and nature (Bilgrami, 2020). Second, sympathetic moral sentiments, based on political ideals and hopes, make present members justifiably concerned about the future of the community and may motivate them to take care of future communities and not deprive them of their own opportunities to live up to these ideals and hopes (Nussbaum, 2013). The world community is currently in the process of setting up global distributive schemes needed to contrast climate change. The Paris Agreement established the Green Climate Fund (GCF), the world’s largest climate fund, in support of developing countries. The loss and damage fund, established at the COP27 in Cairo in 2022, provides funding for vulnerable countries hit hard by floods, droughts, and other climate disasters – and is, in the words of UN Secretary-General António Guterres, “an important step towards justice” (See https://unfccc.int/establishing-adedicated-fund-for-loss-and-damage (accessed on April 4, 2023)). These distributive schemes stay true to the communitarian ideal of the nation-state, avoiding the establishment of global institutions. However, these measures are drops in the ocean. More is needed, and this chapter has suggested that what is blocking that might also be a deep, fundamental conceptual misunderstanding of communitarianism. Communities are grounded in love, pride, and hope. They are not brought to us by history with obligations attached. They are constructed in the present through politics – through critique as much as ideals that require care for the future on the basis of partially global approaches.

Concluding Remarks There is a growing tendency in the global environmental movement, from Fridays for Future to Extinction Rebellion, to demonize opponents of environmentalism and to frame the fight against climate change in terms of moral obligations. Although the

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tones are understandable in view of the growing sense of emergency, this discussion of communitarianism has perhaps shown that an enlargement of perspective may be in order. Moralized blame and shame may not be the best ways to move communitarians. In fact, the risk is that of feeding a growing resentment toward environmentalism among them, which is likely to be weaponized by nationalist parties and populist movements. One way to minimize such risks would be to also appeal to a greater sensibility towards one’s own community and its Blochian ontology of not-yet-being. This is as far as morality might get. Acknowledgments The results of this project LL2106 were obtained with financial support from the Czech Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports under the ERC CZ program.

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Climate Change and Institutions for Future Generations: The Litigation Option Jasmina Nedevska

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Institutions for Future Generations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Climate Change Litigation as an Institution for Future Generations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Legitimacy in Future-Focused Climate Litigation: Three Dimensions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Source-Based Legitimacy in Future-Focused Climate Litigation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Process-Based Legitimacy in Future-Focused Climate Litigation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Outcome-Based Legitimacy in Future-Focused Climate Litigation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Concluding Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

While political philosophy is concerned with institutions for future generations, climate litigation has so far enjoyed little attention. However, legal scholarship on climate litigation and available data on recent cases show that these cases expound relevant future-beneficial and future-focused practices. Climate litigation should therefore be critically examined as an institution for future generations, including whether it is normatively legitimate as such an institution. With a view to the future-focused practices, the present chapter identifies the most contentious issues of legitimacy, using examples from recent climate litigation. Three dimensions of legitimacy are discussed: source-based, process-based, and outcome-based concerns. Relevant source-based questions are whether the future-focused practices are compatible with democratic decision-making or a concept of rights. Related process-based questions concern who, if anyone, should get to speak on behalf of future generations in litigation and whether contemporary and future persons with competing interests can and should enjoy J. Nedevska (*) Department of Philosophy, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden e-mail: jasmina.nedevska@filosofi.uu.se © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_132

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equal access to courts. Outcome-based questions include under what conditions future generations benefit from being included in climate litigation and whether these benefits conflict with requirements of a just transition to a fossil-free society. Keywords

Climate change · Litigation · Future generations · Institutions · Legitimacy

Introduction In principle, future generations are at the core of an ongoing global effort to meet human development without compromising the Earth’s natural systems. Not least, future people figure in the combat against climate change. There are many expressions of this in international cooperation. Since the United Nations (UN) “Earth Summit” in 1992, international agreements and domestic law have aimed at “sustainable development” defined as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), 1987: 2.1). The 2015 Paris Agreement can be considered a landmark; while it does not contain strong explicit obligations to future generations, it implies significant commitments by states to sustainable development through climate change mitigation and a transition away from fossil fuels for growth (Lewis, 2018). Recently, a report from the UN SecretaryGeneral suggested several measures – among them a UN Special Envoy – to achieve representation for future generations in this process (UN, 2021, pp. 38–45). Arguably, effective protection of future generations depends on a host of institutions, including public ones. This chapter maps different institutional practices for future generations, shedding particular light on the role of climate litigation. Climate litigation is a growing phenomenon that may cater to future generations in different ways. A paradigmatic climate case is State of the Netherlands v. Urgenda Foundation (2015) (climate-laws.org) (filing dates in parentheses). In December 2019, the Dutch Supreme Court laid down that the State’s inaction on climate change violated its citizens’ rights to life and privacy (European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), aa. 2; 8 (coe.int)) and a duty of care toward future generations. The State was ordered to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 25% by 2020, compared to levels in 1990. The case has inspired a wave of climate cases, many of which purport to redirect a society’s overarching climate policy. At the same time, litigation of this kind has been criticized for a lack of legitimacy. According to the critics, it is for governments – not courts – to set climate policies. Not least because democratically elected governments, as opposed to courts, can be held politically accountable for their decisions. In the end, this also amounts to an argument in favor of living electorates. The chapter proceeds as follows: First, it provides a brief overview of recent, philosophical research on institutions for future generations, modifying a typology by Iñigo González-Ricoy and Axel Gosseries (2016). The account highlights the

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significance of future-beneficial and future-focused practices in non-future-focused institutions. It entails a wider conception of institutions for future generations, which enables us to include climate litigation as an institution for future generations. So far, however, climate litigation enjoys little, if any, attention in political philosophy. Second, therefore, the chapter accounts for existing legal scholarship on climate litigation and available data on cases including future generations. It is concluded that there are categories of novel cases that expound relevant futurebeneficial and future-focused practices. This also implies that climate litigation should be critically examined as an institution for future generations. Third, such a discussion is delimited to future-focused practices in climate litigation. The chapter covers source-based, process-based, and outcome-based concerns of legitimacy, providing examples from recent cases. Relevant source-based questions are whether the future-focused practices are compatible with democratic decisionmaking or a concept of rights. Related process-based questions are who, if anyone, should get to speak on behalf of future generations in litigation and whether contemporary and future persons with competing interests can and should enjoy equal access to courts. Outcome-based questions include under what conditions future generations benefit from being included in climate litigation and whether providing these benefits conflict with requirements of a just transition to a fossil-free society. In the final section, general remarks and a provisional route forward are provided. One may argue that the litigation satisfies several legitimacy concerns due to a de facto deliberative relationship between climate litigation and other public institutions, including other institutions for future generations and democratic assemblies.

Institutions for Future Generations Climate change has been referred to as “a perfect moral storm,” bringing together global, intergenerational, and theoretical problems. Stephen Gardiner has here argued that “even if the difficult ethical questions could be answered, we might still find it difficult to act” as the storm makes us particularly vulnerable to moral corruption (Gardiner, 2006, p. 398). The project of sustainable development, on the other hand, relies on the assumption that environmental damage, including climate change, is built into our societal structures. On any of these views, an important role can be assigned to public institutions in altering the patterns of production and consumption (WCED, 1987). An institution is defined as a mechanism for rule enforcement by external, formal sanctions (Elster, 1989, p. 147). Even when sustainable development (or some other aim) is achieved by “social engineering,” there is a degree of external, formal sanctioning. Essentially, this differs from internalized rules as well as social norms, which imply informal sanctions. A public institution, furthermore – such as a court or tax system – is aimed at monopolized legal enforcement, which is difficult for individuals to opt out from without great costs. It is important that public institutions fulfill requirements of legitimacy, a topic mainly treated in the section “Legitimacy in Future-Focused Climate Litigation: Three Dimensions.”

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A principle of sustainable development reasonably implies that an institutional structure, while not designed for future generations by default, should be designed to take future needs into account. Specified purposes of institutions for future generations are mitigating “presentist bias” (Boston, 2016, p. 3; Lawrence, 2021, p. 22) or counteracting “wrongful short-termism” (Boston, 2016, p. 3; González-Ricoy & Gosseries, 2016, p. 4). While “bias” could be said to apply to individuals that populate institutions, “short-termism” may better describe the institutional output that results from bias, but the terms are often used interchangeably. Environmental sustainability is a domain that may require costly action in the short term, such as imposing taxes or other regulatory burdens, with benefits materializing only in the long run. While institutions are key to altering patterns, the same institutions may be tempted to pass costs on to the future and not adopt the necessary policies (González-Ricoy & Gosseries, 2016, p. 5; Jacobs, 2016). Such short-termism does not always have to be wrong – it may be justified by reference to uncertainty, a critical situation in the present, expected future growth, and so on. Wrongful short-termism can be defined as “wrongful . . . priority given to present net benefits at the cost of future ones” (González-Ricoy & Gosseries, 2016, p. 4). It is assumed, in the upcoming sections, that some relevant amount of wrongful shorttermism exists on the part of defendants in climate litigation. Wrongful short-termism seems to require a diversity of institutional responses. It has been argued that “given the variety of determinants of short-termism, it is unlikely that a single institutional proposal will be able to answer all causes at once” (González-Ricoy & Gosseries, 2016, pp. 20–21). At the mentioning of institutions for future generations, various commissioners, ombudspersons, or legislative committees may come to mind (see Lawrence, 2021, p. 22), such as the Israeli Commission for Future Generations and the Hungarian Ombudsman for Future Generations, the Finnish Committee for the Future, or the proposal for a UN High Commissioner for Future Generations. The examples above would belong to a first category of (1) specialized institutions, “set up with the promotion of future-oriented policies as their main or even exclusive purpose” (González-Ricoy & Gosseries, 2016, p. 6, emphases in original). Institutions with the explicit focus on future generations exist since 2001: the Israeli Commissioner, in function during the period 2001–2006, had as task to review legislation and identify areas important for future generations. Set up in 2008 and functioning independently until 2012, the Hungarian Ombudsman was to protect the constitutional right to a healthy environment and was, for this purpose, vested with powers to obtain information, enter property, and seek legal action. The Finnish Committee, which exists since 1993, has a mandate to investigate major long-term policy issues as well as holding the government accountable for a recurrent report for the future (Lawrence & Linehan, 2021, p. 3). Other proposals regarding ombudspersons for future generations (Beckman & Uggla, 2016), government manifestos for the future, parliamentary committees, thematic days in parliament, external councils for the future, and special performance indicators for future generations (Caney, 2016, pp. 136–137) are similarly “future-focused.” Notably, these proposals stress the importance of procedural

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justice. On Caney’s view, we should avoid a departure from “democratic decisionmaking” and not compromise “the procedural standards that we think should normally apply” (2016, p. 141). Beckman and Uggla similarly think that there is “a clear advantage in a proposal that does not conflict with any predominant conception of democratic legitimacy,” and the “non-binding nature of the ombudsman,” they argue, “makes it consistent with more demanding conceptions” (Beckman and Uggla, p. 131). Indeed, Thompson (2016) suggests an independent body of trustees with the sole purpose of protecting the future democratic capacity of the political system. The justification for this body would not rest on climate or distributive justice but rather on the “democratic value of making collective decisions” (Thompson, 2016, p. 184). Only proposals supporting new economic institutions seem to lack this emphasis on procedural justice. A common heritage fund for future generations (Szabó, 2016) would require the consent of participating states within an international law structure. The suggestion of a global climate bank (Broome & Foley, 2016) – compensating net losers from a shift to renewable energy – rather comes with the idea that it would be Pareto-improving both within and across generations, i.e., to the benefit of all. In Institutions for Future Generations (González-Ricoy & Gosseries, 2016), González-Ricoy and Gosseries also identify other kinds of institutions for future generations, including relevant “non-future-focused institutions.” The latter are institutions “for which promoting far-sightedness is not part of their core business” (González-Ricoy & Gosseries, 2016, p. 6, emphasis in original). These may further be distinguished into two subcategories: (2) future-beneficial practices in non-futurefocused institutions and (3) future-focused practices in non-future-focused institutions. (The term “proposals” has here been exchanged for “practices.”) Future-beneficial practices in non-future-focused institutions (2) are those that “while primarily justifiable on other grounds, are expected ‘merely’ to carry beneficial long-termist side effects” (González-Ricoy & Gosseries, 2016, p. 7). Several such proposals concern private or less political institutions. Institutions may be either public or private. Here, private institutions – such as a religious organization or a trade union – are excluded from the discussion (see Elster, 1989), but these entities also enforce rules by external, formal sanctions, e.g., by excluding members who do not follow the rules. For proposals of institutions for future generations that are more in this direction, to various degrees, see, for example, Cordelli and Reich (2016), Zwarthoed (2016), and Pérotin (2016). However, employing youth quotas in parliament, as suggested by Juliana Bidadanure (2016), would count among public practices in the present category. Her idea is that, in addition to representing their own age group, the young would be better trustees of posterity due to their higher stake in long-termism. Future-focused practices in non-future-focused institutions (3) are rather those that “primarily aim at increasing the long-termism of policies adopted by institutions that are not per se focused on the long term” (González-Ricoy & Gosseries, 2016, p. 7, emphasis in original). To set up minority powers in parliament to protect future generations, in accordance with a proposal by Kristian Skagen Ekeli (2016), would be an example of such a practice. On his solution, minorities of legislators, selected and held accountable through ordinary elections, are granted procedural rights to

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either demand a referendum or require delays of law enactments until a new election has been held. Another future-focused practice of this kind, suggested by Joakim Sandberg (2016), would be to assign social and environmental obligations to pension funds. The ultimate purpose of those obligations would be to steer corporate activities toward being more responsible to future generations. Finally, GonzálezRicoy’s (2016) account of intergenerational provisions in constitutions can be described as a practice in this category. While he mentions their significance in a number of environmental court cases, he emphasizes the effects of such provisions on the decisions of policy-makers and citizens. González-Ricoy and Gosseries argue that institutions in the latter two categories, while not obviously recognizable as institutions for future generations, may have more potential to achieve intergenerational purposes. The authors provide several possible reasons for this, indirectly or directly pointing to the implications for an institution’s effectiveness. An institution for future generations is likely to be more feasible and resilient if the institutional infrastructure is already there and justifiable for other reasons (González-Ricoy & Gosseries, 2016, p. 8; Shoham & Lamay, 2006, p. 250). Using existing (and more general) institutions may also prevent that future-focused institutions render the institutional landscape unnecessarily complex for citizens (González-Ricoy & Gosseries, 2016, p. 8; Jacobs & Matthews, 2012) or empty other fora of far-sighted initiatives (González-Ricoy & Gosseries, 2016, p. 8; Ekeli, 2016). So far, institutional proposals from political philosophers seem focused on the legislative and executive branches of government, if not civil society (consider Boston (2016, pp. 171–178), González-Ricoy and Gosseries (2016, pp. 6–8), and Lawrence and Linehan (2021, pp. 11–19), but see McCormack and Hansen-Lohrey (2021) on administrative review). Suggestions that involve the judicial branch seem mostly to be about constitutional provisions. Even here, the focus has been on how this instrument could interact with spheres outside the judiciary, e.g., in policymaking or value formation (e.g., Caney, 2016; González-Ricoy, 2016). There have been less proposals on whether and how to grant protection to future generations through courts. The section below accounts for relevant legal scholarship on climate litigation. It is found that climate lawsuits expound future-beneficial as well as future-focused practices in a non-future-focused institution, i.e., courts or court systems.

Climate Change Litigation as an Institution for Future Generations Climate litigation is not a new phenomenon, but it has boomed in recent years (Slobodian, 2020, p. 573; van Dijk, 2021). A recent report from the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment (GRI), using figures from 44 countries and 15 international courts and tribunals (Setzer & Higham, 2022, p. 9), finds that over 1200 climate-related court cases have been filed since 2015 (the year of the Paris Agreement), compared with just over 800 cases between 1986 and

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2014. Around one quarter of all cases were reportedly filed between 2020 and 2022 (Setzer & Higham, 2022, p. 1). While climate litigation cases have predominantly appeared in the United States (1426 of all cases) and more recently in the rest of the Global North, the number of cases in the Global South has now grown as well (88 are identified so far) (Setzer & Higham, 2022, pp. 1–2). While many climate cases are “routine” cases (Setzer & Vanhala, 2019), dealing with, for example, specific planning applications or allocation within an emission trading scheme, courts are facing more and more so-called “strategic” climate cases (Setzer & Higham, 2021). (Here, the label “strategic climate cases” is only used for cases brought in favor of stronger general commitments and regulation. This excludes a few cases about climate commitments, which include “anti-climate regulation” claims from companies (e.g., RWE v. Kingdom of the Netherlands (2021), West Cumbria Mining v. Cumbria County Council (2021) and IPC Petroleum v. France (2019) (climate-laws.org)).) These strategic cases come in different shapes. One broad category, comprising Urgenda-style cases, can be referred to as “framework” cases and target the absence of national or overarching climate commitments or general passivity in relation to such commitments (Setzer & Higham, 2022). While the paradigmatic defendant is a national government, corporations are also brought to court in these circumstances. In Milieudefensie et al. v. Royal Dutch Shell plc. (2019) (climate-laws.org), for example, the multinational oil and gas company Shell is facing charges for company-wide policies and strategies. Another broad category comprises cases that seek to integrate climate standards into government or corporate decision-making with the “dual goal of stopping specific harmful policies and projects” (Setzer & Higham, 2022, p. 19). One example is Greenpeace Norway v. Government of Norway (2016/2021) (climate-laws.org), known at the national level as “People v. Arctic oil,” now filed before the European Court of Human Rights. Greenpeace have argued that the oil and gas licenses for extractions in the Barents Sea, issued by the Norwegian Government, violate the Norwegian constitution and international law. Such cases have been referred to as “hit the target” cases (Bouwer & Setzer, 2020, p. 7) and “enforcing climate standard” cases (Setzer & Higham, 2022, p. 19). Here, they are referred to as “topical” cases. Strategic climate cases – comprising framework and topical cases – are cases that, if successful, can be said to have beneficial consequences for future generations. Courts may proceed to issue declarative judgments as well as injunctive orders in favor of climate action. Declarative judgments establish the existence of a duty or a breach of a duty on the part of the defendant, while injunctive orders determine an enforceable obligation (Eckes et al., forthcoming). The obligation may be procedural, which entails that the defendant needs to decide on climate matters according to a certain process, or substantive, and thus concern the content of climate policy (Eckes et al., forthcoming). Hence, there are several measures, weaker or stronger, that courts may take to push governments or other agents toward a transition to renewable energy, a transition from which future generations can be said to benefit. In addition, a number of climate cases contain explicit claims on behalf of future generations. (Neither is litigation for future generations an entirely new phenomenon. Already in 1993, in a noteworthy environmental law case, the Supreme Court of

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the Philippines granted standing to future generations in a “Children’s Case” brought by minors (Oposa v. Factoran (1993), https://leap.unep.org/countries/ph/nationalcase-law/minors-oposa-v-factoran). The main issue was shrinking rainforests.) Data collection on strategic climate cases is under development, and presenting data on future-focused cases is not straightforward (cf. Boston, 2016, p. 211). An open search on the term “future generations” in US case summaries in the US Climate Change Litigation database (climatecasechart.com) results in ten listed cases, of which five have been filed 2015 or later. One would probably be able to count more – including more recent – US future generation cases if all cases in the style of Juliana v. United States (2015) (climatecasechart.com), filed by Our Children’s Trust at sub-federal level, had been listed. Climate Change Laws of the World (climate-laws. org) lists 38 non-US future generation cases. 36 of these cases have been filed since 2015 and 29 of the cases since 2020. These figures include a number of sub-federal cases in Germany inspired by Neubauer v. Germany (2020) (climate-laws.org). Excluding German sub-federal cases, the total number of US and non-US cases listed as future generation cases amounts to 37 cases. (The figures reflect the content of the databases on 27 October 2022.) With some exceptions, the alleged interests of future generations are typically advanced by youth plaintiffs. These plaintiffs either claim that future generations should be granted legal standing or make some other claim that invokes special consideration for future generations by courts. In Urgenda, the Dutch foundation claimed to represent current and future generations of residents in the Netherlands. In Juliana, former NASA climatologist James Hansen is included among the plaintiffs as a designated “guardian” for future generations. In Future Generations v. Ministry of the Environment and Others (2018) (climate-laws.org), Colombian youth plaintiffs claimed to represent future generations. In Leghari v. Federation of Pakistan (2015) (climate-laws.org), lacking youth plaintiffs, the Lahore High Court itself determined that the constitutional rights to life and human dignity encompassed future as well as current generations. It has been argued that due to the nature of strategic climate cases, climate litigation has emerged as a powerful tool in climate governance (Lin, 2012; Setzer & Vanhala, 2019). That implies that courts are used to steer entire social systems toward (or away from) sustainable climate policies (see Jagers & Stripple, 2003, p. 385). Among non-US cases, most have been brought against governments, and among decided such cases, 54% (245) of the outcomes were favorable to climate action (Setzer & Higham, 2022, p. 3). However, even cases that never proceed to a full hearing may influence relevant decision-making processes, due to a gain in publicity. Sometimes, cases are brought against governments for not following policy set out in national statutes. Although this may raise questions on the discretion of governments to handle conflicting goals, these cases are less controversial, relatively speaking. Other times and more controversially, governments find themselves in court due to allegations of unjust – or a lack of required – legislation. The legal grounds for such lawsuits may be found in constitutional or international law. In response to this overall development, defendants, scholars, and public commentators question the overall legitimacy of transferring power over climate policy

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to courts. Indeed, some worry about a “perversion of the entire legal system” (Bergkamp & Hanekamp, 2015, p. 114). Claims on behalf of future generations – people that have not, do not, and may never exist – can be considered a particularly controversial element in the litigation. While an institutional design should take their needs into account, it should also ensure that the needs of the present are not thereby compromised on pain of illegitimacy. The central point of the critics is that “[g]overnments, not courts, should set climate policies” (Bergkamp & Hanekamp, 2015). While not explicitly or exclusively directed against the needs of future generations, this is an argument that clearly favors living electorates. The legitimacy of climate litigation – as an institution for future generations – is a moral matter in respect of the living as well as important in order to ensure compliance.

Legitimacy in Future-Focused Climate Litigation: Three Dimensions Put shortly, a legitimate institution is an institution that has a right to govern, beyond the mere exercise of power. There are two recognized dimensions of legitimacy – one empirical and one normative. One may be interested in the facts – whether the authority of an institution is accepted by the entities it purports to govern (e.g., individuals or states) (Bodansky, 1999, p. 601). That is a question for sociology or empirical political science, and not of central interest here. One may, furthermore, be interested in whether an institution’s authority is justified – whether there are good reasons it should have the right to make certain decisions (Bodansky, 1999, p. 601). That is a question of political philosophy and the ultimate concern in this section, with specific regard to future-focused climate litigation. (Of course, if future-focused practices in climate change litigation are normatively legitimate, that may contribute to people accepting them.) Are there good, general reasons to allow or promote future-focused practices in climate litigation? To what extent should courts allow or promote such practices in specific climate cases? These are examples of overarching normative questions in the present context. There are two broad, methodological approaches one may take to answering such questions: one may conduct ideal theory or nonideal theory, respectively (see, inter alia, Chahboun, 2019). The central ideal theoretical assumption is that there are no practical limitations, such as legal constraints, precedent or culture, to setting up or developing an institution, while nonideal theory takes seriously that there are such limitations. As mentioned, at least 37 filed cases worldwide can be identified as containing future-focused elements (see section “Climate Change Litigation as an Institution For Future Generations”). These appear in 14 jurisdictions across 6 continents and have been filed over the course of the recent decade or so. (The listed jurisdictions are Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Germany, Guyana, Italy, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Uganda, the USA, and international jurisdiction (a case before the UN Human Rights Committee). One can expect cases that actually exhibit future-focused practices to have appeared in even more jurisdictions (Urgenda in the Netherlands would be among the unlisted cases), but already a simple search

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shows a great variety of jurisdictions.) Each of these cases comes with its own constraints, in terms of legal provisions and jurisdictional context. Below, some of the cases are used to provide examples, while the discussions are general and thus on the ideal theoretical side. With such a perspective, one may discuss the general legitimacy of future-focused practices in climate change litigation, to the best of one’s ability. (However, the cases can also be discussed from a nonideal theory perspective, either in depth or comprehensively, bringing in more local context.) The discussion is organized along three dimensions of legitimacy, source-based, processbased, and outcome-based concerns, which may all have bearing on one’s moral judgment (Bodansky, 1999, see also Nasiritousi & Verhaegen, 2020).

Source-Based Legitimacy in Future-Focused Climate Litigation According to source-based theories, authority is legitimated by its source or origin. For example, kings have historically been legitimated by reference to a “divine right” to govern. In modern democracies, the legitimating source is often thought to be the consent of “the people” (Bodansky, 1999). Fundamental rights or duties, as expressed in constitutions or human rights treaties, may also be thought of as a legitimating source independently of whether people or states consent to them (Zakaria, 2000). Finally, fundamental rights or duties can be thought of as the upshot of a hypothetical consent of the governed (Rawls, 1971). With regard to future generations, source-based legitimacy can be problematic in different ways. Future people, of course, are not alive to give their actual consent (or dissent) to anything, including present legislative proposals. That may be a reason to grant more authority to courts over intergenerational matters. However, the critics of climate litigation likewise reason in line with a consent-oriented view. Court cases that may lead to substantive policy output on supra-legal grounds (such as constitutional or international law) are seen as questionable. Advocates of various institutions of future generations also tend to emphasize the importance of democratic procedure in producing intergenerational policy. On a consent-oriented view, future people’s well-being seems to depend on the consistent good will of electorates that went before them. Some advocates of climate litigation may argue that individuals should, nonetheless, be protected from rights violations by legislative assemblies. Such an argument could potentially extend to future generations and climate litigation. (Here, I do not further discuss whether intergenerational rights could result from a reasonable, hypothetical consent of the governed. Previous research shows how this may prove difficult to wrap one’s head around, as future people, given that they will exist, will probably outnumber us by far and be different persons depending on what we consent to (Parfit, 1984).) Arguably, however, restrictions of legislative power (by reference to individual rights) should be carried out cautiously, and it is not obvious that future generations fulfill requirements for such measures. An objection put forth by the defendants in Juliana was that, even if it were possible to show that there will be imminent climate impacts on future generations, they do not have

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constitutional or other rights. The Court here held that while fetuses may be ascribed rights from a certain point on, “nonpersons” cannot. In a different vein, some climate-aligned rulings have circumvented the traditional, individualistic rights paradigm. In Future Generations, the Court rather held that the rights of future generations are based on the “ethical duty of solidarity with the species and the intrinsic value of nature.” In Neubauer, the court concluded that while “future generations as a whole or as the sum of individuals not yet born do not yet carry any fundamental rights in the present,” there are nonetheless duties in relation to them. Specific, normative questions to pose from a source-based perspective are thus whether future-focused practices in climate litigation are compatible with democratic decision-making (Burgers, 2020; Hirschl, 2008) and to what extent the practices are permissible or required in light of fundamental rights or duties (Peel & Osofsky, 2017).

Process-Based Legitimacy in Future-Focused Climate Litigation According to process-based theories, authority can also be legitimated by a processbased principle characterized by, for example, transparency or equal treatment. This applies to judicial institutions, whose legitimacy depends on procedural rights to “access to justice” – such as the right to be heard (Hellner, 2019). In existing climate cases, a pressing issue concerns future generations’ legal standing. Without standing to bring a case, future generations cannot be considered plaintiffs in proceedings. It was a hurdle in Juliana, where future generations were put forth as a protected class for purposes of equal protection, while a former NASA scientist was their putative representative. Among the objections to the case, the defendant put forth that since future generations “do not presently exist,” they cannot possibly have suffered injury, and therefore should not be granted standing. Naturally, future people are not alive to be injured in the present or to be “heard” in any sort of institution. Yet, there is at least one external and one internal reason for granting future generations “quasi-access” to justice, given the strong judicial ideal to uphold neutrality. From an external point of view, courts can be seen as better fit than other institutions (such as democratic assemblies) to consider the perspective of the yet inexistent. For example, in Khan Cement Company v. Punjab (2021) (climate-laws.org), the question of standing rather assumed the character of a democratic issue and whether future generations should be given “a voice.” Further, from an internal point of view, courts may have a special imposition to give equal (or some) concern to future interests, next to that of others. In Mathur v. Ontario, (2019) (climate-laws.org) for example, the question was whether the applicants had standing “on behalf of” future generations. As further objections to standing for future generations, one may put forth that future generations will be a diverse lot and may have diverging interests, that environmental organizations (or others that feel called) may not represent them properly and that many contemporary stakeholders (who depend on traditional

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technologies or are vulnerable to new ones) risk remaining without representation in the courtroom. In addition, the law can evolve to protect future people’s interests, by incorporating principles of sustainable development (Abate, 2019), regardless of whether future people have standing. Relevant questions to pose are thus whether process-based considerations allow or require future-focused practices, such as granting standing to future generations or their designated guardians in climate litigation. Related concerns are who should get to speak on behalf of future generations in climate litigation and to what extent contemporary and future persons with competing (including “anticlimate”) interests can and should enjoy equal access to courts (Bergkamp & Hanekamp, 2015) and the role of legislation in protecting future people’s interests (Abate, 2019).

Outcome-Based Legitimacy in Future-Focused Climate Litigation According to outcome-based theories, authority is based on an institution’s effectiveness. With regard to future-focused practices in climate change litigation, the legitimacy of courts here depends on whether courts are, in fact, conducive to “longtermism” and intergenerational justice. In several climate cases, a source of uncertainty has been the difficulty to establish reliable future climate scenarios and the causal responsibility of defendants. The Court in Mathur brought up the difficulty to know how the present emission targets will affect future generations. The view of the Court in Neubauer was instead that the uncertainty itself warrants a duty of care, implying the protection of natural foundations of life for future generations through preservation. A different kind of uncertainty concerns preferences. In reality, one may not know what future generations want, as brought up by the Court in Mathur. It is also not known how well-off future people will be in relation to present generations, and it is therefore not obvious how their preferences should be weighed, an issue that came up in Neubauer as well as KEPCO v. Independent Planning Commission (2019) (climate-laws.org) in Australia. Furthermore, while one may expect to find fossil fuel companies or the like on the losing end of climate-aligned rulings, there are also present-day farmers, indigenous peoples, and other communities and individuals to consider, who may be vulnerable to (sudden) new value chains in the economy. A relevant question is thus under what conditions future generations benefit from being included in climate litigation. Uncertainty of future outcomes increases in proportion to the distance between present and future generations. This may render courts more or less fit to consider future needs. To the extent that judges are more informed by the facts and less prone to bias caused by uncertainty, courts may be more suitable fora. To the extent that judges lack the necessary expertise to establish the long-term risks, they may be considered less suitable than, for example, special committees or scientific advisors to popularly elected bodies.

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(For an example of when a group of scientists and attorneys provided a judge (Federal District Judge William H. Alsup) with “a crash course in climate science” at the judge’s request, see California v. BP (2017) (climatecasechart.com) treated by Seinfeld (2018).) Finally, a related question is to which extent benefiting future people conflicts with other requirements of a just transition to a fossil-free society (Carley & Konisky, 2020).

Concluding Remarks While political philosophy is concerned with institutions for future generations, climate litigation has so far enjoyed little attention in the field. However, legal scholarship on climate litigation and available data on recent cases show that climate litigation expounds important practices in relation to future generations. At least, climate litigation is theoretically future-beneficial, as rulings in favor of youth, causes of environmental organizations, and similar can be said to benefit future generations. To the extent that future generations themselves obtain some kind of legal status in litigation, through representatives or legal provisions, the litigation can also be considered to have future-focused elements. There is thus reason to start treating courts as relevant institutions for future generations, although courts are not themselves future-focused institutions. Climate litigation should also be critically examined as an institution for future generations, including whether it is normatively legitimate as such an institution. The present chapter has identified the most contentious legitimacy issues using examples from recent climate litigation. Three dimensions of legitimacy have been discussed: source-based, process-based, and outcome-based questions. Relevant source-based questions are whether the future-focused practices are compatible with democratic decision-making or a concept of rights. Related process-based questions are who, if anyone, should get to speak on behalf of future generations in litigation and whether contemporary and future persons with competing interests can and should enjoy equal access to courts. Outcome-based questions include under what conditions future generations benefit from being included in climate litigation and whether these benefits conflict with other requirements of a just transition to a fossil-free society. It has not been an aim to answer all the specific questions here, but some general remarks can be made. In evaluating institutions for future generations, Caney (2016, p. 150) argues that “we need to consider which proposals are the most promising and so must engage in a comparative assessment.” Beckman and Uggla (2016, p. 117) also ask us to consider how an “institution compares to other proposed institutional reforms aiming to promote the interests of future generations.” In both instances, a standard of evaluation is expressed in terms of “democratic legitimacy” or the like. Furthermore, the fundamental critique against climate litigation conveys the idea that the litigation lacks such legitimacy. It is

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seen as a problem that judges may determine enforceable substantive obligations – in matters that are subject to political debate – while judges cannot be held accountable in a political process. As long as judges “simply apply the law” according to the will of the legislator, climate litigation should be less of a problem. But to the extent that constitutional and international law is used to annul or impose climate policy, the power of judges is admittedly more controversial. It should be noted, however, that courts expound a wide array of rulings in climate litigation. When courts issue declarative judgments, they establish the existence of a duty or a breach of a duty on the part of the defendant, leaving to the democratic process to determine any subsequent steps. In cases where courts proceed to issue an injunctive order, it sometimes concerns procedural obligations to follow a particular (democratic) course of decision-making, and so thus not regard the content of policy. Finally, when courts do establish enforceable substantive obligations, these may constitute a lower limit to prevent warming (according to science and international agreement), as in the Urgenda case (Burgers, 2022). Even here, further political ambitions are left to the democratic process. Further, it is an open question how climate litigation should relate to other institutions for future generations. To name a few practices mentioned in this chapter, constitutional provisions are obviously relevant in climate litigation; one could look more extensively at judiciary roles for ombudsmen for future generations (see the Hungarian example) and appropriate tasks in climate lawsuits for civil society (see Zwarthoed, 2016), among other things. To conclude, there are several measures, weaker or stronger, that courts may take to push governments or other agents toward a transition to renewable energy. Many are of a weaker, deliberative kind – such as declarative judgments or rulings on procedural obligations. These may very well be compatible with “more demanding conceptions” of democratic legitimacy and an enhanced role for other institutions for future generations. Hence, rather than being considered as an alternative to traditional proposals on institutions for future generations, climate litigation should be evaluated as a complement.

Cross-References ▶ Climate Change and Democracy ▶ Climate Change and Distributive Justice ▶ Climate Change and Human Rights ▶ Climate Change, Uncertainty, and Policy Acknowledgments This contribution has received funding from the Swedish Research Council [registration number 2020-06345] and benefited from visiting positions at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science as well as PluriCourts - Centre for the Study of the Legitimate Roles of the Judiciary in the Global Order at the University of Oslo.

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Central Banks and Climate Justice: The Case for Green Quantitative Easing Josep Ferret Mas

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Normative Significance of Central Banks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What Can Central Banks Do to Fight Climate Change? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What Is Green QE and Why Is It Superior to Alternative Strategies? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Standard Green QE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Progressive Green QE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Climate Bad Bank . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Intergenerational Green QE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Principle of Borrowing from the Future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Concessive Arguments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Enthusiastic Arguments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Is Borrowing from the Future Morally Permissible? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Concluding Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

Philosophers distinguish between at least two kinds of intergenerational climate justice principles. There are principles that tell us to mitigate climate change, and principles that tell us how to share mitigation costs fairly. Some authors argue (a) that central banks can, and should, serve intergenerational climate justice by implementing policies that cut emissions and thereby reduce the climate burden on future generations. Others also argue (b) that some of these policies justly shift some of the financial costs of mitigation onto future generations. First, I will present the case for Green Quantitative Easing as a policy that serves both kinds

J. Ferret Mas (*) Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Reading, Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_126

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of principles of intergenerational climate justice. Secondly, I will review the normative issues raised by the move of “making our grandchildren pay.” Different economists have presented a range of policy options that a green central bank can implement to meet these principles. The first part of the chapter will offer these policy options, starting with milder proposals and ending with the more radical but realistic ones that are intergenerational in scope, and which should be seen as instances of borrowing from the future. Moreover, some claim that Green Quantitative Easing is superior to alternative strategies, such as a global carbon tax or a World Climate Bank, given the power of central banks to create money and buy bonds that can be kept in their balance sheet. Furthermore, in order to justify the moral acceptability of these policies, I will examine normative arguments for making our grandchildren pay. I will proceed by distinguishing between concessive and enthusiastic arguments in favor of borrowing from the future. Concessive arguments involve a normative claim: that making our grandchildren pay is unjust, and an empirical claim: that borrowing from the future is a more feasible way to take climate action now and avoid further harm to future generations. In contrast, enthusiastic defenses of borrowing from the future, as a guiding principle to share the burden of climate change mitigation and adaptation across generations, claim that it provides a better state of affairs or a more just world. I will start by analyzing the best-known concessive argument proposed by Broome and Foley, and their defense of efficiency without sacrifice, as well as various criticisms of that principle. Finally, I will critically examine an important objection raised by Gardiner: that making our grandchildren pay is a case of intergenerational extortion or moral corruption. Keywords

Green Quantitative Easing · Central Banks · Climate Justice · Borrowing from the Future

Introduction Mark Carney, former governor of the Bank of England and the United Nations Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance, has stressed recently that the global financial system is currently funding a 4  C rise in the planet’s temperature. This rise contravenes by more than double the pledge to limit increases to well below 1.5  C that was contained in the Paris Agreement (Carney, 2019). The financial system’s role in the economy and society is to facilitate the necessary financing and liquidity for human and economic activity to thrive, and financial markets therefore enable investment in fossil fuel resources. Suppose we want to reduce the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that derive from human and economic activities. In that case, we need to diminish investment in fossil fuels resources, and one option for doing this is to regulate the financial system and promote sustainable or green finance (Alexander & Fisher, 2019).

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Current climate change is man-made, and its potential effects on life on Earth make it one of the most challenging problems facing humanity today. Climate change is anthropogenic, it is caused by our GHG emissions, which have the effect of warming the surface of the planet. The IPCC report gives us less than a decade to reduce our GHG emissions to avoid an increase of the global temperature beyond 1.5 . We can still avoid further temperature increases, but in the worst-case scenarios, climate change, if not tackled, might cause human beings and many other species to go extinct. Moreover, the kind of dangerous climate change we are now facing threatens to harm future generations. The resultant increase of diseases, extreme weather events, droughts and famines, rising sea levels, and disruption in agriculture will likely produce major harms for the planet and those who live on it in the future (McKinnon, 2012). Therefore, climate change is one of the most critical problems for intergenerational justice. For intergenerational climate justice, climate change raises two major challenges. First, identifying the harms to future people and comparing them to other harms, in order to decide how much we should reduce our GHG emissions to mitigate the effects of climate change on future people. On the other hand, it is also within the scope of ethics and intergenerational climate justice to provide sound reasons to justify the distribution of the costs of mitigating and adapting to climate change between the members of the present generation and across generations (Caney, 2014, 2018). In this chapter, I will focus on the second of these issues, although, when necessary, I will also need to address the consequences of these debates for the first issue. To get a sense of the potential impact costs of climate change, we could make a rough division within this category of costs between (a) those stemming from the increase in the average global temperature, (b) those stemming from extreme weather events, and (c) those stemming from climate catastrophes, such as those costs that could arise if we were to pass so-called climate “tipping points” and set in chain massive and irreversible effects (McKinnon, 2012). There is therefore an imperative to stop some of these costs from coming about, and there are further costs associated with securing this moral imperative. These prevention costs can be divided between mitigation and adaptation costs, where the former is required to limit the amount of climatic change that will occur, and the latter to guard against the effects which do come about. Some authors claim that we should consider different principles for these two different kinds of costs. Vanderheiden (2008) argues that the question of who should bear the costs of mitigation is a question of distributive justice, while the question of who should bear the costs of adaptation is a matter of corrective justice. Caney (2018) rejects this view, and claims that both kinds of climate costs should be guided by the same principle. I’m not going to enter into these debates in this chapter since both types of burdens imply a financial cost, which is what Green Quantitative Easing can help us cope with, and, in this case, I don’t think there is any relevant normative reason to treat these financial costs separately.) The investment required to reduce GHG emissions and comply with the IPCC report is usually estimated at 1.5–2% of global gross domestic product (GDP). According to a 2008 study by the International Monetary Fund, the policies needed to reduce emissions by 60% from 2002 would leave the global economy about 2.6% smaller

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than it would otherwise be in 2040 (Visit http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/ 2008/03/tamirisa.htm). Thus here we are interested mainly in this cost for economic growth and how we should distribute it across generations. The present chapter connects recent debates about the social responsibility of central banks with more established theoretical work on intergenerational justice. This is important because debates about intergenerational justice have been neglected – with some welcome exceptions like Broome and Foley’s proposal for a World Climate Bank (2016) – despite these issues about finance being crucial to climate justice. On the other hand, the recent philosophy of financial politics has focused on central banks’ legitimacy and on distributive justice (Fontan et al., 2016; Diestch et al., 2018; Tucker, 2018; van’t Klooster, 2019, 2020; Fontan & van’t Klooster, 2020). However, these authors have not considered the influence of finance on intergenerational climate justice either. Instead, certain authors show that monetary policy is a powerful tool for transitioning to a sustainable economy and mitigating the effects of climate change. As we will see, Green Quantitative Easing offers us a range of policy options for transitioning to a sustainable economy and distributing the costs of mitigating and adapting to climate change across generations. Financial reform needs to be carried out by regulators and central banks, in order to influence investment and consumption and switch to a sustainable form of energy that does not threaten future generations. An optimal policy for transitioning to a low-carbon economy requires the coordination of monetary authorities greening the financial system with fiscal rules to implement a carbon tax (Schoenmaker, 2019). This chapter will focus on the recent literature on green monetary policy. Some think that, given the absence of regulation (e.g., a carbon tax), Green Quantitative Easing (Green QE) or green central banking is the second-best policy for greening the economy (Volz, 2017). Green central banking suggests (a) that central banks can, and should, serve intergenerational climate justice by implementing policies that cut emissions and thereby reduce the climate burden on future generations. Moreover, some also show (b) that some of these policies involve shifting some of the financial costs of mitigation onto future generations; and I will discuss different arguments made by prominent political philosophers in favor of or against this move. The chapter has two distinct parts. First, the empirical part argues that central banks are a powerful institution for transitioning to sustainable finance. I will then present the case for Green QE as a range of policies that serve both kinds of intergenerational climate justice principles. The rest of the chapter will defend Green QE as an instance of borrowing from the future (BFF) and will discuss the normative issues involved in this idea of making our grandchildren pay. Before entering this terrain, I will explain why central banks are important in general and also explain their normative significance. I will also show why they are important in the case of climate change, and what they are doing and what they could do. Baer et al. (2021) have distinguished between prudential and promotional green central banking, but, in addition to this, others demonstrate Green QE’s intergenerational role in distributing the mitigation and adaptation costs of climate change across generations, and claim that this strategy is superior to the alternatives

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that have been proposed as forms of BFF in the past. After the main financial part of the chapter, I will move on to the justification of Green QE, and will address the normative issues raised by the move to make future generations pay the mitigation costs. Here I examine the literature on BFF and making our grandchildren pay the mitigation and adaptation costs of climate change, discussing potential objections to BFF and, by extension, to Green QE.

The Normative Significance of Central Banks Independent central banks have general goals, such as controlling the money supply and fixing the interest rate through open market operations, securing price and financial stability, and, in some cases, other goals like high employment and sustainable growth. According to Goodhart (2010), the main role of central banks is threefold: to be in charge of the money supply through open market operations to adjust their balance sheet, to fix the interest rate, and to monitor the risks of strategic financial institutions. A helpful starting point for thinking about the normative standing of central banks is the Rawlsian notion of the basic structure. The financial system is part of the basic structure of society. It is important to note that this system contains private elements, such as commercial banks and investors, and public ones, such as the central banks and regulators (de Bruin et al., 2018). Central banks and regulators, being the public elements of the financial system, are part of the basic structure and connect the politics of finance with questions of legitimacy and justice (Fontan et al., 2016; Tucker, 2018; Dietsch et al., 2018; van’t Klooster, 2019, 2020; Fontan & van’t Klooster, 2020; Dietsch, 2020). To understand how a central bank works, we need to look at the most crucial feature of central banks: the fact that they have a monopoly on the issuance of currency. This unique power of the central bank makes it the best institution of our democracies for achieving price and financial stability. The main channel for monetary policy implementation consists of open market operations. These open market operations are used to fix the interest rate. If the bank wants to expand the amount of money in the economy, it buys bonds and pays for them by creating money. In contrast, if the bank wants to contract the money supply, it sells bonds and removes from circulation the money that it receives from the exchange of bonds. As the central bank buys bonds, the demand for bonds goes up, increasing their price while the interest rate on bonds goes down. In contrast, when the central bank makes a contractionary open market operation, it decreases the bonds’ price and increases interest rates on them. For decades, during what has been called “The Great Moderation Era” (Stock & Watson, 2002), central bankers were seen as apolitical bodies. The independence of central banks was instrumentally justified when their only goal was to fix inflation with a single instrument: the short-term interest rate. Time inconsistency problems caused by electoral pressures make governments less able to promote long-term stable inflation (Kydland & Prescott, 1977; Rogoff, 1985). Thus, delegating

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monetary policy to unelected experts was seen as a self-binding device for overcoming such electoral pressures and promoting long-term price stability. It is better for the government to tie its hands if it wants to achieve the target of price stability (Jon Elster (1979, 1994) famously defended this view). The central bank’s independence ensures this goal through the appointment of financial experts who are not subject to reelection, and who can’t easily be removed by the legislature. Insofar as this independence involves the delegation of powers by the government, it is similar to establishing constitutional constraints. The government acts in a manner illustrated by the case of Ulysses and the Sirens. It exercises its ability to bind itself, in order to achieve a target in the long term. (Delegation in favor of an independent central bank has similar features. The government defers its right to rule over monetary policy to the board of directors of the independent central bank. They act on behalf of the government for determinate purposes, adding financial expertise and avoiding the dilemmas and conflicts of interest that the government faces when handling monetary policy (see Elster, 1979: 61).) It is important to note that setting up an inflation target is a decision with distributional consequences. If the central bank raises the interest rate to fight inflation, this will result in less economic output and more unemployment. This decision is clearly a political choice with distributional consequences. We might well argue that unemployed people are among the worst-off members of society, so this contractionary monetary policy seems to contradict our standard view about distributive justice. That is, inequalities should serve to maximize the prospects of the least advantaged. However, throughout several decades, before the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–2009, it was normally thought that the fiscal authority had the tools needed to achieve distributive justice, despite the distributive effects of central banks’ decisions, and that they could compensate for such effects. After the 2008 global financial meltdown, central banks recovered, with tremendous energy, their interest in broader financial stability, and started using various instruments besides managing the short-term interest rate. Quantitative Easing (QE) has to be understood as an instrument for achieving financial stability in the financial system and the government’s debt markets after the 2007–2009 Global Financial Crisis. These new policies, like QE, and their distributional impact have attracted interest among central bankers themselves, economists, and political theorists. Some think it is less acceptable that independent experts can choose any unconventional means to achieve price and financial stability when these policies have profound distributional consequences (e.g., Fontan et al., 2016; Tucker, 2018; van’t Klooster, 2019, 2020). It is helpful for these purposes to distinguish between the central bank’s ends and its means. The central bank’s mandate establishes the ends or goals that the institution needs to achieve, namely price and financial stability, but the central bank has freedom of means to achieve these ends. Before the crisis, the central bank used just one instrument, the short-term interest rate, to achieve the ends established in its mandate by the legislature. Since the global financial crisis, central banks have started to use multiple instruments and means to provide price and financial stability. This new role of the central bank implies a much broader set of political choices, since each of these means has, for

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example, different distributive effects. (In 2000, Japan launched QE programs to fight deflation when nominal interest rates were close to their zero lower bound. In 2008, in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, the US Federal Reserve Bank and the Bank of England responded to the global financial meltdown with unconventional monetary policy such as QE. The European Central Bank (ECB) joined them a few years later. These central banks launched QE programs: the outright purchase of large amounts of financial assets on secondary markets. Through these programs, central banks have purchased a wide range of financial assets with varying maturities, including government bonds, asset-backed securities, and corporate bonds and stocks. QE implied a massive increase in the money supply – almost 3000 billion euros for the ECB before the pandemic – to purchase bonds and stocks, increasing the size of this central bank’s balance sheet five or six times (Fontan et al., 2016).) A growing number of political theorists have been examining the social responsibility of finance and the distributional consequences of QE programs. The central worry within the recent literature on the political philosophy of finance is that monetary policy implies that decisions made by independent nonelected officials have enormous distributional consequences. For instance, QE programs favor bondholders and stockholders who see their assets increase in value (Montecino & Epstein, 2015). Since these bondholders and stockholders are among society’s most advantaged members, some might claim that QE is unjust. These distributional consequences are problematic for two reasons. First, central banks make profound political choices, and some authors are concerned about whether these decisions serve distributive justice. Second, some question whether unelected officials can have such freedom of means to achieve price stability, and take these deeply political decisions, without undermining democratic or procedural legitimacy. These new policies like QE do not fit well with the traditional justification of the central bank’s independence as a self-binding device to achieve stable long-term inflation. Some authors claim that it is especially problematic that its current narrow mandate focused on price stability can include such profound political decisions, given central banks’ independence and weak democratic accountability. Fontan and van’t Klooster (2020) claim that environmental monetary policies are deeply political issues, and challenge central banks’ legitimacy. I will not respond here to such concerns about the legitimacy of green central banking. Rather, I’m primarily concerned with another kind of normative issue that arises from QE, namely the two intergenerational climate justice issues highlighted at the start of this chapter.

What Can Central Banks Do to Fight Climate Change? Even before becoming the United Nations Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance, the same Mark Carney, as governor of the Bank of England, declared openly in 2015, when the issue of sustainable finance was still marginal, that we need to break the “tragedy of the horizons.” Drawing an analogy with the tragedy of the commons (Hardin, 1968), Carney said that we are delaying our efforts to mitigate

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climate change, making it even more costly to do so, and that we might face the day when it is too expensive to tackle the problem. Even the most conservative central bankers agree that central banks should take climate change into consideration for prudential reasons. On this conservative view, central banks should only play a role that is subordinated to their governments regarding climate change. Central bankers in the Western economies often talk about the division of labor between delegated and political agencies, and claim that central banks should not be the primary actors in mitigating and adapting to climate change (Dietsch et al., 2022). However, this position has changed in Southeast Asia after the global financial crisis. Central banks in most countries in that region have long been playing a developmental role. They implement their monetary policies to target economic sectors prioritized by their governments, or work in close collaboration with government agencies (Volz, 2017), adding new green objectives for the central bank. For example, the Bank of Indonesia was at the vanguard of adopting promotional policy objectives. Other central banks, such as the Bank of Bangladesh and the People’s Bank of China, implemented similar measures and went even further. They were the first to implement credit refinancing lines at favorable terms for green activities and quotas for lending to carbon-intensive sectors (Dikau & Collins, 2017). Coming back to Quantitative Easing, under QE Programs, central banks have purchased a wide range of financial assets with varying maturities, including government bonds, asset-backed securities, and corporate bonds and stocks. To invoke some numbers, the European Central Bank (ECB) spent 2600 billion euros across four subprograms: the Corporate Sector Purchase Program (CSPP), the Public Sector Purchase Program (PSPP), the Asset-Backed Securities Purchase Program (ABSPP), and the Covered Bond Purchase Program (CBPP3). Let’s look at the CSPP, launched in June 2016. We can see that those businesses operating within the most carbon-emitting sectors, such as the extraction and distribution of fossil energy sources, car manufacturing and equipment, and most energy-consuming sectors, issued 63% of the assets bought by the ECB (Jourdan & Kalinowski, 2019). One first claim is that central banks should not implement QE without regard for the effects that the companies issuing the bonds and stocks they buy have on climate change. In buying bonds and stocks of carbon-intensive or brown companies, they prioritize the present generation by harming the future generations who will suffer from climate change. The role of central banks in the low-carbon transition has been studied and discussed in a series of recent academic papers, policy notes, and articles, particularly by Campiglio (2016) Matikainen et al. (2017), Volz et al. (2017), Battiston et al. (2017), Monasterolo et al. (2018), Monnin (2018a, b), Solana (2018), Battiston et al. (2019), De Grauwe (2019), and Schoenmaker (2019). Baer et al. (2021) distinguish between prudential and promotional interventions of central banks to favor the transition to a low-carbon economy. Prudential interventions concern the mitigation of risks caused by climate change, which can impact financial or price stability. Promotional interventions, in contrast, concern the enormous potential of using the social technology of money creation to promote a transition to a sustainable form of

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energy (Hockett & James, 2020). (According to Lael Brainard (2019), a member of the Board of Governors of the US Federal Reserve Bank, projected climate change will increase extreme weather events, create agricultural disruptions, and lead to other climate risks that will affect the economy and the financial system. Climate change will have negative consequences for productivity and economic growth. Thus, if the central bank aims at maintaining stable prices, it must take into account the impact of climate change on financial markets. Also, the transition to a low-carbon economy will undoubtedly affect food and energy prices, and it will therefore also have negative effects on price stability. Interventions of the central bank intended to correctly assess climate risks and their impact on price and financial stability are part of what Baer et al. (2021) call prudential interventions.) First, on prudential grounds, central banks can impact climate change mitigation and adaptation when launching QE programs. Central banks should correctly assess the climate risks associated with the bonds they buy. Secondly, the central bank could go a bit further and gradually change the eligibility criteria of the bonds it purchases through open market operations favoring climate or green bonds. Promotional interventions, on the other hand, can include imposing quotas on brown assets. Furthermore, the central bank could also buy bonds from a public investment bank (Anderson, 2015; De Grawe, 2019), or from the World Climate Bank envisaged by Broome and Foley (2016). These public banks, in turn, will invest in projects to reduce GHG emissions and support the development of sustainable forms of energy. However, there is a third category within Baer et al.’s classification of central banks’ interventions to mitigate and adapt to climate change. I will call these intergenerational interventions: intergenerational in the sense that if we set up a central bank that purchases climate bonds, we have an opportunity to design these bonds with very long maturity dates – let’s say 100 years – and divide the burden of mitigating and adapting to climate change between several generations.

What Is Green QE and Why Is It Superior to Alternative Strategies? Standard Green QE We can distinguish three kinds of Green QE policies. Even if this distinction is not so clear in practice, it is analytically useful to differentiate between Standard Green QE policies, which help us to transition to sustainable finance and mitigate climate change, and Progressive Green QE policies, which promote a long and stable demand for green bonds. These two kinds of Green QE are prudential and promotional in Baer’s sense. In contrast, what I call intergenerational interventions serve the purpose of distributing the financial burdens of mitigation more fairly across generations. Thus, if we come back to the two distinct kinds of intergenerational climate justice principles, both Standard and Progressive Green QE serve intergenerational climate justice by implementing policies that cut emissions and reduce the climate burden on future generations.

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On the other hand, Intergenerational Green QE justly shifts some of the financial costs of mitigation onto future generations. First, what we can call Standard Green QE requires central banks to buy bonds and stocks only from companies that are not “brown,” that is, which are not carbon-intensive companies. Implementing Standard Green QE will increase the financial costs for carbon-intensive industries while making cheaper credit available for green projects. (Extending Standard Green QE to all open market operations means that when intervening in the interbank lending market, the central bank will only accept as collateral a commercial bank’s assets from non-carbon-intensive industries, or, in short, green bonds. This approach can be extended to the entire interbank lending market. When commercial banks are lending to each other, they will only accept as collateral green assets. Standard Green QE in the whole financial system would provide liquidity and stable demand for green bonds. Also, since green assets would become safer assets than brown ones, investors would look for green assets as a form of secure investment.) Standard Green QE requires changing the central bank’s eligibility criteria when it buys bonds and stocks under QE programs (Matikainen et al., 2017; De Grauwe, 2019).

Progressive Green QE Standard Green QE shows the means through which central banks can, and should, promote mitigation. It promotes intergenerational climate justice, because we have a clear duty to ensure that future generations do not face severe climate harm. Under Progressive Green QE, the central bank goes further and “prints” money to buy bonds from a public investment bank (Anderson, 2015; Matikainen et al., 2017; De Grauwe, 2019), or an international climate bank (Broome & Foley, 2016), which in turn directs programs aimed at reducing CO2 and CH4 emissions. This implies that within the normal business cycle, inflation might not remain as low as it has been during the last decade of QE programs. Therefore, the central bank might need to apply a contractionary policy and sell these green climate bonds. To make Green QE programs compatible with the central bank’s primary role of securing price stability, they will only be in place during recessions and periods of low inflation within a sequence of business cycles. The central bank will sell the climate bonds when inflation surges.

A Climate Bad Bank Green bonds will be used to finance a transition to sustainable forms of energy that do not emit GHG, and which mitigate the effects of climate change. But they can be used for other purposes too. A transition to a sustainable economy will create winners and losers, and among the latter will be the shareholders and workers of carbon-intensive companies (Salin & Daumas, 2020). A just transition may have to invest in retraining these industries’ workers, since many will inevitably become unemployed. Furthermore, these companies’ capital value will eventually fall

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drastically, creating losses for their shareholders. Who should pay for these losses? As proposed by Salin and Daumas (2020), one economic response to that problem is to create a Climate Bad Bank that will buy all these assets from carbon-intensive industries, thus compensating their shareholders and former workers. The central bank is key because it can finance this Climate Bad Bank, either by financing debt issued by the Climate Bad Bank to buy these brown assets or by buying them directly in order to keep them on their balance sheet and depreciate their value. (There are big normative issues raised by this proposal too. For example, we might support investment in retraining for workers. But we might think that shareholders who have knowingly invested in carbon-intensive industries ought not to be compensated. These issues can be accommodated by concessive arguments in favor of BFF, such as Broome and Foley’s (2016) proposal of efficiency without sacrifice, which I will discuss later. Moreover, this Climate Bad Bank could create a moral hazard problem and favor companies that are “too brown to fail.” (Thanks to Karin Shields, who coined this term to point out the latter problem.))

Intergenerational Green QE Green QE can take yet another form. It can be used to design green bonds, either public or private, especially created to finance projects to switch to sustainable forms of energy and stop global warming and climate change. So, there is a window open to design these green bonds according to principles of intergenerational justice that fairly distribute the financial costs of mitigating and adapting to climate change across generations. Mihailov and Ferret (2021) suggest this kind of policy option, called Generation-Shared Green QE Bonds. This form of Green QE thus becomes intergenerational in scope. A proposal of Intergenerational Green QE could include climate bonds with different maturity dates, some of them very distant. Mihailov and Ferret (2021) also suggest another financial instrument that could complement the array of instruments already discussed, and which have by now gained some popularity, for inducing a quick and decisive shift toward nonpolluting technologies: what they call Greening Compensatory Transfers (GCTs). This novel financial instrument is envisaged as specializing in reimbursing cost differences, through cash transfers to consumers, workers, and shareholders. These GCTs have the sole purpose of compensating for the monetary (or market-valued) costs of switching from brown to green products, jobs and securities, respectively. For example, imagine that a consumer has the option of buying a brown product that is cheaper than a (complete or close) substitute that is produced using green technologies with no (or much less) pollution of the environment. Then such a consumer GCT will compensate for the monetary cost of switching to the more expensive green product. For instance, suppose a customer wants to buy an electric car that is 10% more expensive than a conventional gasoline-fueled car of the same range or category. Then GCT will compensate this consumer for the extra cost of buying the electric car. (The GCTs that Mihailov and Ferret (2021) propose are indeed similar to the old idea of helicopter money (Friedman, 1969), having regained

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popularity with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic (see, e.g., Benigno & Nisticó, 2020). However, the difference is that GCTs can be used for the prescribed special purpose only, and this needs to be verifiable and ascertained, in principle ex post (e.g., by purchase receipts or other accounting methods, which is feasible and easy with IT payment technologies everywhere), but perhaps ex ante too. Through such GCTs, central banks could play a key role in quickly implementing, at no harm for either the present generation or future generations, mitigation policies for cleaning up the global ecosystem.) In line with these developments, the range of policy options proposed by different authors should be understood as promotional and intergenerational, because they allow us to take climate action now, given the urgency of the problem, but shift some of these costs onto future generations. Prominent political philosophers have already discussed the idea of issuing climate bonds, and I will refer to these debates in the following sections. It is also important to note that Green QE is a better strategy than a global carbon tax and the traditional form of understanding BFF. This conventional view takes BFF to imply a government issuing debt that will be paid by future taxpayers (Sachs, 2015). However, once we introduce a central bank into the equation of BFF, new possibilities emerge. It is possible to replace Sachs’s (2015) focus on fiscal policy transfers and government debt with central bank monetary fiscal involvement in solving the intergenerational environmental conflict. Given the continued absence of a first-best carbon tax solution (and otherwise complementary to it), we can see the central bank, or rather the global network of central banks, as the institution that is best suited to implementing climate mitigation policy. Central banks offer the possibility that neither the present generation nor future generations need repay the GCTs. The latter will serve as one of central banks’ main financial instruments for triggering a decisive reversal of environmental deterioration now, in the current generation, given the urgency of the situation. Furthermore, including the central bank also offers the possibility of adapting to changes in future generations’ ability to pay. It is crucial to notice that a central bank can potentially buy all debt, wait for its maturity, and substitute it for new debt. There is no limit to the number of financial assets that the central bank can buy. In theory, the central bank could purchase all existing financial assets, but that would increase the money supply in such a way that inflation would increase dramatically, and the value of money would fall sharply (De Grawe, 2019). This is why Progressive or Intergenerational Green QE must be a countercyclical policy that is only in place during recessions and periods of low inflation within a sequence of business cycles. However, the central bank’s potential offers the possibility of partial or full nonrepayment of the climate debt if, for example, future people will not be better off than us due to the effects of severe climate change. (The point of this type of very-longterm bond issuance is that it allows the repayment burden to be shared across generations, with the option for future generations, or even the present generation, to pay only in part or not at all (in which case the remaining debts will be written off), as it does in a financial crisis, when financial assets are deemed bad assets with no actual value. This, of course, would have economic consequences that the future people would have to consider by themselves, as it is impossible to fully anticipate

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them. Writing off debts is an unusual and unproductive measure in normal times that would distort financial and economic incentives and will lead most likely to a social crash with tragic and long-term consequences. Nevertheless, Mihailov and Ferret (2021) believe that the costs of writing off some such green QE debts (or bond repayment to the central bank) will be justifiably minimal compared to the vital task of saving the life on our planet.) Therefore, green central banking is a better strategy than Broome and Foley’s proposal for a World Climate Bank, as well as the idea that governments should issue debt that future taxpayers should pay.

The Principle of Borrowing from the Future Green QE (a) should serve intergenerational climate justice by implementing policies that cut emissions and thereby reduce the climate burden on future generations. However, as explained above, some authors also argue that some of these policies, i.e., Intergenerational Green QE, (b) involve shifting some of the financial costs of mitigation onto future generations. The idea that we should issue climate or green bonds to finance mitigation is not entirely new in debates about intergenerational climate justice. This idea is instantiated in Broome and Foley’s (2016) proposal for a World Climate Bank, which would issue climate bonds with a long maturity paid by future generations. The idea is simple: we must mitigate climate change and take climate action now, but we might shift some of the costs of doing so to future generations. Some call this idea the principle of borrowing from the future (BFF), or making our grandchildren pay. As mentioned, this idea has already been discussed by notable political philosophers working on intergenerational climate justice (Foley, 2009; Rendall, 2011, 2019; Broome, 2012; Maltais, 2015; Broome & Foley, 2016; Gardiner, 2017). A starting point for understanding the importance of the principle of BFF in debates about intergenerational justice is Rawls’s just saving principle. In Rawls’s work, the just savings principle – his principle of intergenerational justice – requires that each generation saves for future generations; but Rawls distinguishes two stages. In the first stage, when justice has still not been achieved, each generation is required to save for the next one, in order for them to be able to uphold just institutions and a fair system of cooperation that protects basic liberties and ensures that inequalities are arranged to maximize the benefits of the worst-off members of that generation. In this sense, we might consider previous generations to be required to preserve resources such as a clean atmosphere for future generations; that is, the present generation must take climate action now. However, within Rawls’ conception of intergenerational justice, there is a second stage in which society has achieved justice and therefore is not required to save anymore for subsequent generations. These fortunate future generations will be required only to refrain from dis-saving, in order that the next generation can sustain and uphold just institutions and live in a just society over time. If we think about this idea optimistically, and if the present generation takes climate action and reduces GHG emissions, then better-off future generations will presumably not be

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required to save more “clean air,” because they will have inherited a more advanced technology that will not require GHG emissions. However, this seems to violate a principle of equality between generations. Rawls (1999 [1971]: 254) argues that it is not possible to apply the difference principle – or any egalitarian principle of justice – between generations, because there is no way in which presumably richer future generations can help the least fortunate earlier generations who are required to save more. We might consider BFF a form of cooperation across generations that permits us to save more resources like a clean atmosphere today, while distributing the financial costs of doing so across generations more fairly. BFF provides a way to transfer resources from presumably richer generations to poorer earlier ones who have a duty to reduce GHG emissions. It offers us the chance to apply an egalitarian principle between poorer earlier generations and future, presumably richer ones. This is something that Rawls apparently did not think about: the reason he gives for not applying a distributive principle between generations à la the difference principle is that there is no way that future people can help worse-off earlier generations. But there is a way to do this: BFF and Green QE give us tools for reversing the direction of financial transfers, tools that previously weren’t on the table, or at least weren’t recognized by Rawls. Nevertheless, as we will see, some claim that BFF is unjust even if it provides a more egalitarian distribution of resources across generations. Still, these authors favor this principle because it is more feasible to take climate action now with BFF than it is if the present generation has to shoulder all the costs of mitigating and adapting to climate change. Gardiner (2017) distinguishes two types of arguments for BFF. Concessive arguments claim that although BFF is unjust because the present generation should bear the costs of mitigating and adapting to climate change, it is defensible in light of the alternatives (Broome, 2012; Maltais, 2015). In contrast, enthusiastic arguments, like Rendall’s (2011), claim that “making the grandchildren pay brings about a moral improvement,” because it “can help create morally preferable distributions of resources across generations” (Gardiner, 2017: 377). The concessive argument seems to involve a normative claim: (i) BFF is less just than mitigation paid for by the current generation, plus an empirical claim; (ii) BFF is an effective tool for getting the current generation to engage in mitigation, when such mitigation efforts are not politically feasible if current people are required to bear the costs. Enthusiastic arguments, by contrast, reject the normative claim, but might still endorse the empirical claim that BFF is an effective way to get things done and take climate action.

Concessive Arguments The best-known concessive argument in favor of BFF is offered by Broome and Foley (2016: 159), while justifying their institutional proposal for a World Climate Bank. They claim that GHG emissions create an externality, and that this externality can always be eliminated by promoting efficiency. That GHG emissions create an externality means that the price of burning fossil fuels does not include the damage

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that these emissions do to other people who are harmed by the effects of climate change. It is always possible, according to economists, to eliminate an externality by promoting efficiency. A Pareto improvement means that the externality can be eliminated, making someone better off without making anyone worse off. To promote a Pareto improvement, Broome and Foley propose efficiency without sacrifice. This requires emitters to cut their emissions while being compensated for their sacrifice by the receivers of emissions (Broome, 2012: 44). If those harmed by GHG emissions pay a fee to the polluters, and the polluters reduce their pollution to the level that those harmed would be willing to pay in order to avoid that harm, then everyone would be made better off without making anyone worse off. This is a Pareto improvement because the reduction in climate damage compensates future generations who will be better off even if they have to pay compensation to the present generation. At the same time, the latter will not be worse off, precisely because future people pay them compensation for the financial costs of mitigating and adapting to climate change. (According to Broome and Foley (2016: 166), “it constitutes borrowing from future generations to pay for the improvements it makes for the sake of future generations,” and it must be part of climate policy in a capitalist economic order, in which the government cannot directly allocate resources but must instead influence private investment and production decisions.) Crucially, Broome and Foley believe that GHG emissions harm future people, and that this constitutes an injustice. Even if efficiency without sacrifice eliminates the externality created by GHG and promotes efficiency, it does not remedy the injustice. Emitting GHG harms other people; efficiency without sacrifice implies that emitters reduce their emissions because the victims pay a fee to them to cut the emissions. (Broome and Foley clearly make a concessive argument when they claim that “although there is a Pareto improvement, the injustice remains” (2016: 160).) However, Broome and Foley claim that BFF is a more feasible way of taking climate action, because all attempts made so far to deal with GHG emissions have failed due to the unwillingness of state representatives to assume the cost of reducing these emissions. Lawlor (2016), for example, raises a critical problem for the principle of efficiency without sacrifice. He asks whether enough goods are available for current consumption that will not exacerbate climate change. Therefore, even if the present generation is compensated for the costs of mitigating climate change, there will still be a cost if it has to make an economical substitution of some consumption goods that contribute to climate change. As Lawlor points out, not all of the mitigation costs are compensable in financial terms. Thus, meeting the first set of intergenerational climate justice duties requires the present generation to bear some of the costs. There is no “no sacrifice” option, or at least not one that does enough on mitigation, and this applies both to concessive and enthusiastic arguments in favor of BFF.

Enthusiastic Arguments Others, though, contrary to Broome and Foley, defend BFF both in concessive terms and in enthusiastic ones. Lawlor’s objection does not speak against the principle of

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BFF, or using Green QE to institutionalize our duty to refrain from harming future people and cut our GHG emissions, while distributing the costs across generations fairly. Some might endorse BFF without relying on efficiency without sacrifice. Like Rendall (2011), when he says that BFF constitutes a fair distribution of the costs of mitigating and adapting to climate change across generations. It is useful here to look at Caney’s (2014) response to the claim that BFF is unjust. Such an argument, he claims, starts with the plausible assumption (P) that justice requires that the polluters should not engage in harmful activities. Broome (2012: 46), according to Caney, then appears to infer from this the conclusion (C) that justice requires that the wouldbe polluters should absorb the cost of not engaging in this harmful behavior. But this conclusion does not necessarily follow, according to Caney: One can hold that in a just world A would not do X whilst also thinking that in a just world the sacrifice involved in A not doing X should not be borne solely (or indeed at all) by A. (P) does not entail (C). (2014: 337).

The idea is that those who consider BFF to be unjust rely on an unqualified version of the polluter pays principle (PPP). The fact that future generations will presumably be richer than us justifies BFF as a principle for achieving intergenerational distributive justice. Still, this justification relies on the application of burden-sharing principles between generations, not only between present wealthy and poor states. This opens the discussion of burden-sharing principles from a different angle, appealing to an intergenerational application of the ability to pay principle (IGAPP). However, one major caveat to applying the IGAPP for deferring these costs is that it depends on there being economic growth in the future. (Shue (2016: 65) claims that it is “not reasonable simply to assume that human well-being, however it is measured, is either certain or highly likely to improve generally with each generation.”) For this reason, one important advantage of introducing Green QE is that it thus allows the option of partial or full nonrepayment of the climate debt. Green QE is thus a better strategy than a government or the World Climate Bank issuing debt that will be paid by future taxpayers, as it allows us to borrow from the future, but also permits adapting to changes in the ability to pay across time. For instance, future generations might opt for nonrepayment if they in fact suffer severe living conditions due to climate change or aren’t, at the end of the day, better off than the present generation.

Is Borrowing from the Future Morally Permissible? One important objection to the argument in favor of BFF claims that the principle of borrowing from the future, also known as the principle of making our grandchildren pay, constitutes a case of intergenerational extortion. For Gardiner (2017), there is a natural presumption that the polluting present generation should pay and ought not to expose future generations to the threats of catastrophic climate change. These threats are precisely created by those who, according to the principle of BFF, must be

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paid (again, the present generation). This, according to Gardiner (2017: 377), is “money for menaces, a clear case of intergenerational extortion”. However, Gardiner’s account of intergenerational extortion turns out to be inadequate. First, the gang (the current generation) cannot ask the shopkeeper (future people) for a tribute payment, because future people do not exist yet. Second, for the same reason, future shopkeepers cannot decide whether or not to pay, because they do not exist yet. Gardiner’s case against intergenerational extortion fails due to the problem of the nonexistence of future people and the lack of communication between distant generations. Nevertheless, Gardiner’s argument points to other problems of BFF that are worth mentioning. He presents a second objection – about theft, not extortion – which I take to be an objection to the procedural unfairness of BFF. Third, he gives a consequentialist argument: that opening the door to BFF for climate action could lead to further unjustified shifts of costs into the future. Finally, Gardiner also argues that BFF involves a wrongful exercise of power by present people over future generations (the “tyranny of the contemporary” worry), and that this amounts to either extortion or theft. It would still seem morally inappropriate to borrow money from the future if this were considered a form of theft. Gardiner seems to claim that even if BFF reduces welfare inequalities between future richer generations and the present poorer ones, it is procedurally unfair because it constitutes a form of theft. To illustrate this point, Gardiner adduces Robin Hood’s case and the justice of his actions. Even if Robin Hood redistributes money from the rich to the poor, there is something objectionable to his actions. The way he accomplishes the purpose of justice is procedurally unfair, because it violates the entitlements of the rich people from whom he steals money in order to distribute it among the poorer members of society. One might respond to Gardiner that the rich people from whom Robin Hood steals money would not be entitled to this money if a fair distribution of resources were in place, and this is the line of response to Gardiner’s argument that I offer here. The idea is that it is possible to see intergenerational justice as a cooperative venture for the mutual advantage of all generations. In that case, each generation plays its part in building and upholding just institutions like a World Climate Bank, or a green central bank, and in achieving a just society over time. Let’s imagine a succession of cooperative generations. The conclusion is that each generation is not entitled to their productive entitlements. But, as we usually calculate in GDP or welfare, each generation’s disposable income is partly due to the cooperation of all the previous generations, who have been building and upholding just institutions and saving for the future. In this case, some might argue that each generation is only entitled to the benefits inherited from previous generations, and to its fair share of the surplus created by mutual cooperation between generations, once it has assumed its part of the costs of building and upholding just institutions. (To understand this view, we can draw on Murphy and Nagel’s view of taxation. Against the position that taxation is immoral because it is a form of theft, they argue: “[T]axation does not take from people what they already own. Property rights are the product of a set of laws and conventions, of which the tax system forms a central part, so the fairness of taxes can’t be evaluated by their impact on preexisting entitlements. Pretax income has no

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independent moral significance. Standards of justice should be applied not to the distribution of tax burdens but to the operation and results of the entire framework of economic institutions” (Murphy & Nagel, 2002: 34). Similarly, future generations are not entitled to their welfare, and standards of justice should not be applied to the GDP that each generation has before sharing the costs of building and upholding just intergenerational institutions. That is, they are not entitled to any level of GDP prior to the distribution across generations of the costs of sustaining just economic institutions, which must include institutions to mitigate climate change and reduce GHG emissions.) Gardiner, indeed, has two other important objections to BFF: the tyranny of the contemporary worry and the consequentialist argument. First, according to Gardiner, once applying the principle of BFF it is not clear that the present generation will stop at any given point. If we allow the present generation to act like this, the latter might impose all kinds of burdens on future generations in order to solve problems faced by the current generation. The different policy schemes proposed here can legitimately restrict future generations’ choices. However, they leave enough space for future generations to exercise their generational sovereignty (Gosseries, 2016). Thus, Green QE enhances generational sovereignty in two ways. First, it helps us to take climate action now and leave enough resources for a clean atmosphere to future generations. Secondly, once the central bank enters the BFF equation, the proposals made allow the generational sovereignty of future generations to be preserved, with the option for nonrepayment or partial repayment of public debt across generations. (More generally, from a normative point of view, there is a way in which we can argue that BFF can be implemented without violating generational sovereignty. The idea can be called the zipper argument (Gosseries, 2001; Gheaus, 2016), and can be explained as follows. We take again the model of four generations. It is clear that generation one and four do not overlap, but generation one (which issues climate debt) will overlap with generation two. If the latter wants to withdraw the climate debt, it can reach an agreement with generation one: the only thing they need to do is achieve a political majority that approves the withdrawal of the debt. The same holds for generation three in relation to generation two, and again between generations three and four. The zipper argument shows that there is a sequence of overlapping generations who cooperate for the mutual advantage of all generations.) Concerning the consequentialist argument, that is, the idea that BFF opens the door to new and creative ways to transfer any costs to future generations: it is possible to expand enthusiastic arguments as a response to this worry. In this case, the present generation can shift costs other than mitigating and adapting to climate change if and only if they are agent-neutral. Caney (2010, 2014) argues that the scope of the polluters pays principle is limited because there are emissions for which the present generation is not responsible (e.g., those made by the dead). Moreover, other emissions are causally attributable to the present generation, but that does not mean that it should pay their costs. So, I think that Gardiner’s consequentialist worry is only justified by those costs that are attributable to the present generation. Still, suppose there are other costs not related to climate change, for which the present generation is not causally

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responsible, or for which, for other reasons, responsibility can’t be attributed to us. In that case, it is morally permissible to shift some of these costs onto the future if they benefit all generations that are part of a cooperative scheme.

Concluding Remarks This chapter has argued that financial markets enable investment in fossil fuel resources. The moral duty to mitigate climate change might be accomplished by greening the financial system. This reform needs to be carried out by regulators and central banks in order to influence investment and consumption, and switch to a sustainable form of energy that does not threaten future generations. Monetary policy and central banks can serve intergenerational climate justice by implementing policies that cut emissions and reduce the climate burden on future generations. Some of these policies involve shifting part of the financial cost of mitigation onto future generations. Green Quantitative Easing is a policy that serves both kinds of intergenerational climate justice principles, and it is superior to alternative strategies. Finally, the chapter addressed the normative issues raised by this move to “make our grandchildren pay.” I have examined reasons to favor the principle of borrowing from the future as an effective tool for getting current generations to engage in mitigation. These mitigation efforts are not politically feasible if current generations must bear all the costs. However, some claim that the case for BFF shouldn’t be made exclusively on this concessive terrain. Cost-shifting also serves intergenerational justice because it represents a more just distribution of the costs of mitigating and adapting to climate change between present and future generations.

Cross-References ▶ Adaptation Duties ▶ Climate Change and Distributive Justice ▶ Climate Change and Institutions for Future Generations: The Litigation Option ▶ Climate Change and Intergenerational Justice ▶ Mitigation Duties

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Climate Change and Security in the Anthropocene: Existential Threats, Ethics, and Futures Judith Nora Hardt

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chronology and Debates: Security and the Nexus with Climate Change in Research . . . . . . . Climate Security in Practice: The United Nations Security Council . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Climate Security in the Anthropocene: Security for Whom and How? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Futures of Climate Security Research in the Anthropocene . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Concluding Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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The quest for achieving security is a core concern that shapes individual behavior, state politics, and the agendas of international organizations. While the traditional security conception focuses on the nation-state, violence, power, and war-logics, and relies on the military to defend territorial borders, climate change has pushed a re-assessment of the meanings and practices of security. As a result, the climate security nexus holds several interpretations, and attracts fears and hopes being described either as a panacea, as being ineffective or as reinforcing the climate crises. This chapter traces how the field of climate security has developed in theory and practice and contextualizes the ethical implications in the new geological era, the Anthropocene. The manifold interconnections, and multiple meanings and perceptions of climate security, challenge the theory but also traditional security politics and institutions, such as the United Nations Security Council. This chapter also assesses the shortcomings of climate security and provides some recommendations for further developing the field. J. N. Hardt (*) Franco-German Research Centre for Social Sciences, Centre Marc Bloch, Berlin, Germany Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the Hamburg University, Hamburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_93

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Keywords

Climate Change and Security · Climate Security · Conflict · Peace · Ethics · Anthropocene · United Nations Security Council

Introduction This chapter offers an overview of the intersection of climate change and security and sets a particular focus on the ethical implications with respect to the existential threat dimension in the context of the Anthropocene. In 2023 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) once again described the necessity for urgent and effective action against climate change: “Climate change is a threat to human wellbeing and planetary health (very high confidence). There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all (very high confidence) [. . .] The choices and actions implemented in this decade will have impacts now and for thousands of years (high confidence)” (Lee et al., 2023: 25). As the political efforts “have largely failed to initiate the necessary systemic changes and cooperation at a global level” (Hardt et al., 2023) the time pressure is mounting. The IPCC report stressed that “Rapid and far-reaching transitions across all sectors and systems are necessary to achieve deep and sustained emissions reductions” and ensure a habitable and sustainable future for all (Lee et al., 2023: 30). In this light, climate security is often seen as a promising pathway to trigger necessary action and heads of states and representatives from international organizations have expressed the necessity to deal explicitly with the security threats that emanate from climate change. The German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas proclaimed at a 2021 session of the UNSC that “[. . .] climate change is the existential threat of our times” (Maas, 2021), and in December 2021 UN Secretary-General António Guterres (2021) warned: “Climate change is not the source of all ills, but it has a multiplier effect and is an aggravating factor for instability, conflict and terrorism. We must address these challenges in an integrated manner and create a virtuous circle of peace, resilience and sustainable development”. It is with this hope in mind that the nexus between climate change and security is often described as a panacea in confronting the existential threat of climate change and at the same time dealing with the secondary effects that are attributed to climate change, for example, violent conflict, instability, and vulnerability. But there is also criticism that linking climate change to security has adverse effects, such as serving geopolitical and power interests or leading to the militarization of climate change (Trombetta, 2008; Chaturvedi & Doyle, 2016). It must be stated that the literature on climate security is not easily accessible because it spreads over several disciplines and different topics, research angles, and approaches. In summary, the field could be described as reaching over different aspects. These range from peace and conflict, power, violence, development, and justice, and survival in the context of the descriptions from climate sciences and the Earth System Sciences, to questioning the very concepts, tools, methods, and approaches of human-nature relations and the world we live in.

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The studies on climate and security go back to the literature on the links between environment and security, which can be traced back more than 50 years. The main body of research deals with climate change more specifically in reference to the year 2007, during which the IPCC published its fourth assessment report and the first debate on the interconnections/effects of climate change on security took place in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). These were key events that led to a variety of responses in academia and by practitioners. This chapter provides an overview of the chronology and debates, and investigates different approaches, framings, and evaluations. In particular, the chapter contextualizes climate security in the Anthropocene – the new geological era. It starts from the assumption that the scientific descriptions of the Planetary Boundaries (PB) (Rockström et al., 2009) and Hothouse Earth (Steffen et al., 2018), that portray climate change as one out of several processes of humans’ biophysical footprint on Earth, present new challenges to how security is conceptualized and practiced. This is especially the case because the Anthropocene carries two important notions that deeply challenge security in profound ways. The first is the narrative of threat, fear, and apocalypse. The second major challenge is that the Anthropocene can be described as a moral container that makes us re-think our basic sets of morally good and morally wrong behavior, and implicitly carries the notion of responsibility. The necessity to redefine Security Studies with a special focus on ethical implications in the context of the Anthropocene is described by Burke (2016: 145): “[A]nalytically, we need to change the way we understand and define security and insecurity; ontologically, we need to challenge and reform our picture of the key actors, institutions and structures that make up the landscape (or reality) of security; and, ethically, we need to change our understanding of which moral goods we seek in the name of security”. The structure of this chapter is as follows: after this introduction, the second section looks into the chronology of and debates on climate and security. The third section differentiates three main concepts of climate security, which are detected by using security as an analytical lens for revealing the referent objects and normative grounds. The fourth section reveals contemporary limitations and ethical implications and presents some pathways to further develop the field. The final section contains concluding remarks.

Chronology and Debates: Security and the Nexus with Climate Change in Research In order to assess the field of climate security, a preliminary introduction to the study of security is important, because it heavily influences the debates and conceptions. Security has been approached and handled as determining and ordering the visions and the choices of people (ranging from individuals to state leaders and to representatives of international organizations) and is a key pillar of International Relations. The traditional security concept secures the nation-state bound to territorial demarcations with military means.

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A key characteristic in Security Studies is that security is concerned with a main value and a so-called referent object that is of utmost priority and fundamental importance, decisive in structuring and holding the very system together, and critical for survival. Therefore, this fundamental value needs protection from existential threats. As a consequence, the security responses “break free of rules” (Buzan et al., 1998: 26) and allow for any recurrence of violence or any other measure of emergency action in order to secure the value or object. Any possible security threat needs to be banned because the loss of this existential element is unimaginable and “it is characterized by a whole range of negative, mortal and destructive imaginations” (Hardt, 2018a: 15). As these responses fulfill such a fundamental role of protecting the security object, these security measures are ground-laying for the social structure and system (Hardt, 2018a: 15). In the words of Peoples and Vaughan-Williams (2010: 2), “security results in embracing the central values of the conception of the world with powerful effects”. Different approaches to security exist, and Security Studies has evolved significantly to also include Peace and Conflict Studies, Development Studies, and Strategic Studies (see Buzan & Hansen, 2009). Especially in the 1990s, the security concept further evolved from traditional notions to including several critical approaches and tools and opening up the meaning of security, moving from a positive value-laden, human-centered focus to also including ecological aspects (Buzan et al., 1998). The concept of human security that was defined in the Human Development Report of the United Nation Development Program (UNDP, 1994) is often described as a result of the security evolution process. In contrast to the traditional state security concept, which is inherently based on a negative value of defense and threat, human security holds a positive value. It is based on the pillars of freedom from fear, freedom from want and freedom from hazard impacts (UNDP, 1994; CHS, 2003) and is established on the basis of seven defining and interrelated dimensions – one of which is the environmental dimension termed environmental security. Next to human security, the concept of environmental security received increasing attention from several researchers in the context of the growing ecological deterrence. Since the 1990s, environment and security has been recognized as its own research strand and it still covers a variety of topics. In particular, the existential threat narrative of the end of humankind, that has gained prominence since the perception of the consequences and magnitude of global environmental change, is a major motive and underlying concern of environmental security – and now climate security – literature. Next to the threat description, the assumption is often that via the securitization of the environment, urgent, effective, and extraordinary measures will be taken to secure the survival of the human species and upscale sustainability to a basic principle. Gleditsch (2015: 150) describes three goals that are formulated in the literature on environmental security, which are: “To prevent war and armed conflict as a result of resource scarcity and environmental stress; To prevent disasters other than war resulting from scarcity and degradation; To prevent the erosion of the carrying capacity of the Earth, resulting in the loss of environmental sustainability in the future”. Similar goals and descriptions of a multiple win-win situation are also found in the climate security literature (Hardt & Scheffran, 2020).

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The specific phenomenon of climate change entered research and the political sphere and gradually took over a significant share of the literature by the year 2007 – the year of the first debate at the UNSC on whether climate change should be included in the agenda, and which therefore marks an important milestone. Table 1 shows the research phases and the main debates on environment and security, with a specific focus on climate security. Important to note is that the chronological presentation of the table aims to put an emphasis on the approximated start of the research strands, but they do not end, as they all continue in parallel and are still valid today. Table 1 contains several topics that will not be treated exhaustively here, but it shows how broad (and also how contested) the field is. An important observation in overviewing the field is that three main research strands stand out in the research on climate and security. These are the dominant focus on conflict and wars (a) on cooperation, peace and peacebuilding (b) and on critical approaches that differentiate between framings and discourses, and the crucial implications of these (c). The focus on conflict is the dominant approach in the research. It rests on the links between resource scarcity and/or climate change as a cause for violent conflict (see Homer-Dixon, 1994; Zhang et al., 2007; Sharifi et al., 2021; Gleditsch, 2015; Mach et al., 2019; Scheffran et al., 2019). Within this literature, climate change is often perceived as a new security threat and/or cause of instability, which threatens the state. A slight differentiation is when climate change is described as being a threat multiplier in the sense that it is a complex phenomenon that aggravates existing tensions (see Remling & Barnhoorn, 2021). The second research strand focuses on development, peace, and environmental peacebuilding. This research resulted from the strong criticism, especially from Conca and Dabelko (2002) of the narrowed view on environment and conflict. Several authors argued that shifting the focus to peace would be an important step to take, and they highlight how climate change provides an opportunity for peacebuilding (e.g., Matthew, 2014; Ide, 2020; Hardt & Scheffran, 2019), cooperation, and common management (see, e.g., Conca et al., 2005; Wappner, 2013; Matthew, 2014; Söjendal & Swain, 2018). These approaches are also often linked to the concept of human security and focus on the individual. Here, environmental threats and climate change are conceived in relation to increasing vulnerability, and seen as causing conflicts, illnesses, food insecurity, energy poverty, and injustice and as an obstacle for human development in terms of overcoming the strong NorthSouth divide (see O’Brian et al., 2010; Barnett et al., 2010; Floyd & Matthew, 2013). Additional research on climate security has focused on transformation (e.g., Brauch et al., 2016), development, and humanitarian studies (e.g., Barnett, 2001, 2007a, b, c; Barnett & Adger, 2007; Dalby, 2002a, b, 2009; Floyd, 2007; Floyd & Matthew, 2013). This research has evolved over the years and today is often discussed in reference to environmental peacebuilding (see Ide et al., 2023). The third research strand is concerned with discourse and framing analysis and assesses how climate security is understood and perceived. A main question is the contestedness of security and the debate on the meaning of security and its implications in a world of climate change. As outlined above, this question has been

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Table 1 Major research phases and debates in the environment and climate security nexus literature Phases (start) 1960s–70s

1989

1994

2003 2007

2009

2017

Key research phases Nuclear winter hypothesis First mentions of environmental issues as security threats (1950s) First wave of more detailed research on the interrelation between environment and conflict: empirical case studies, mostly focused on national security Second wave of research on the links between environment and conflict: focused on different methods and empirical case studies Research on the links between environment and peace Direct focus on the link between climate change and security (as opposed to a broader focus on the environment) Link to or inclusion of environmental security in the concept of human security Environment and energy security/ independence Climate change, security, and migration Gender, marginalization, environment, and security Introduction of complexity theory and a critical focus on the de-politicization of climate change through discourses of resilience, risks, adaptation, and mitigation Foci on the Anthropocene as a new geological era and context for the environment/climate security link and human security Influence of Earth System Sciences (planetary boundaries) and Climate Sciences on the research Emergence of Ethical security Studies Focus on various institutions and on how the link between climate change and security is included/addressed or institutionalized Environmental peacebuilding and climate change

Main debates Legitimization and critique of the link between environment and security; environment in relation to conflict and national security Theoretical debate about the nature of security itself in political debates (broadening and deepening of security) Discussion on the link between environment and conflict; first attempts to include new conceptions of security Questioning of the dominant approach of environmental security literature focused on conflict and peace Discussion of climate change in relation to conflict and of its ability to induce changes in global environmental politics in order to address climate change Discussion of climate change in relation to conflict and energy security independence Discussion of climate change in relation to conflict and migration Critical approach to environmental security literature with focus on women and on marginalized groups Discussion on legitimization of linking environment/climate and security, and on how to conceptualize the literature and the study field Discussion on the climate security link, focus on planetary boundaries and ethical questions

Discussion on how actors address the link and in what terms, and what future activities, risks, and potentials might be Discussion of the limitations of the securitization framework and elaboration of other analytical lenses and tools (continued)

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Table 1 (continued) Phases (start) 2020

Key research phases Emergence of a new research phase on topics such as the Anthropocene, complex crises, tipping points, compound risks, how different actors (ranging from global governance and states to civil society) address the climate-security nexus, the merging of research communities, and a focus on the science-policy interface The interconnections between health and climate change and security in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic Analysis by different case studies of international organizations and states

Main debates Disciplinary questions of how Earth System Sciences, Philosophy, Peace, and Conflict Studies stand alongside each other Claims concerning missing data on the local context and case-by-case analysis on the links between climate change and conflict, and environmental peacebuilding, missing focus on peace Broadening the debate to climate mitigation and adaption programs and on youth and activists’ protests

Source: Elaborated by the author on the bases of Hardt (2018a: 45) and Hardt et al. (2023)

especially debated since the critical security study schools have opened up the traditional concept of security interpretation via analytical tools and the possibility of value attribution. In this branch of research, several methods and analytical tools have been developed, one of which is the securitization framework that helps to grasp the underlying values of security conception (Buzan et al., 1998) and to which I will refer later on. In the literature, there is a divide between researchers who value securitization in negative terms, because of the possible implications of antidemocratic effects and militarization (Oels & von Lucke, 2015; Wagner, 2008; Cousins, 2013) and others who give a positive value to a different kind of securitization that explicitly overcomes the national and military approach with the aim of legitimizing much-needed policies (von Lucke et al., 2014; Diez et al., 2016; Rothe, 2015; Floyd, 2007, 2010; Trombetta, 2011, 2012. These evaluations also depart from different political visions of the meaning of security (e.g., Chaturvedi & Doyle, 2016). Other researchers developed proposals on how to include ethical considerations on human-nature relations in security thinking (e.g., Dalby, 2013; Nyman & Burke, 2016, McDonald, 2021; Hardt, 2018a). The Ethical Security Studies (Nyman & Burke, 2016) also have a special reference to the Anthropocene, and several researchers adopt the Earth System Sciences and complexity theory as a context for research (Hardt, 2021c). Next to the little-developed ethical questions (see later sections) several researchers within this strand analyze how climate security is addressed in practice and assess the activities of different actors, such as states (von Lucke, 2020; Hardt et al., 2023) and international organizations (see Delmuth et al., 2018; Maertens & Hardt, 2021). A main focus of researchers is to observe how traditional security institutions, such as the UNSC, refer to and/or include and address climate change. The debates in the field turn mostly between skeptics and advocates. The advocates who claim to link environment and climate change with security follow the goal of identifying effective solutions and ensuring peace and sustainable futures.

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The climate security nexus is then seen as providing positive impulses (von Lucke, 2020) with regard to encouraging societal transformation (Brauch et al., 2016) and/or including ethical considerations on human-nature relations in security thinking (see Dalby, 2013; Nyman & Burke, 2016). In contrast, the critics of environmental/climate security highlight the implications and negative consequences. These are often described as the eventual militarization of environmental or climate politics, the misuse of the climate and security agenda for geopolitical interests, and its ineffectiveness (see, e.g., Floyd, 2008; Trombetta, 2008; Chaturvedi & Doyle, 2016). Based on these concerns, several scholars pleaded for caution on including climate change in traditional security institutions, such as in the UNSC (see, e.g., Detraz & Betsill, 2009; Cousins, 2013; Scott, 2015). Meanwhile, it can be observed that these evaluations have slightly changed over time, especially with regard to the UNSC. Today most researchers advocate for the official recognition of climate change in the UNSC context (Brock et al., 2020 Lövbrand & Mobjörk, 2021). Based on the argument that climate change cannot be ignored any longer, several proposals have been developed on how the UNSC could/should include climate change (Maertens, 2021; Conca, 2019; Scott & Ku, 2018; Vivekananda et al., 2019; Dröge, 2020; Parker & Burke, 2017; Born et al., 2019). Over time it can be noted that the linking of climate and security in Security Studies theory has become ever more accepted. Instead of the fierce discussions and fundamental questioning, most of today’s debates are concerned with different methods and issues.

Climate Security in Practice: The United Nations Security Council After exploring the different approaches in theory, it is interesting to turn to practice and to specifically look into how climate security is discussed at the UNSC, “the world’s most consequential security institution and the only international body officially charged with maintaining international peace and security” (Hardt et al., 2023: 3). The first key issue is that to date the UNSC has not officially recognized the linkages between climate change and security. The debates on whether to include climate change in the agenda of the UNSC have been taking place since 2007. The UNSC has indirectly acknowledged adverse impacts on stability through climate change in some specific cases in some of its Resolutions (the first UNSC [2017] Resolution 2349 on Niger) and in some field mission mandates (see, e.g., MINUSMA [Mali]). However, several attempts to present resolutions that officially recognize climate change as a threat to security (e.g., that by Niger in December 2021) have been vetoed – by Russia, among others. The debate on climate security in the UNSC is similar to the debates on theory mentioned in section “Chronology and Debates: Security and the Nexus with Climate Change in Research”. The advocates in the UNSC context claim urgent and effective action that addresses the existential threat. The United Nations Secretary General António Gutteres described the released IPCC report “as a ‘code red’ for humankind” (Gutteres, 2021). Several states organized a coalition in 2020 to

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include the climate-security-nexus into the UNSC agenda: among others the UK, France, Vietnam, Germany, Belgium, Tunisia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG), Niger, the Dominican Republic, Indonesia, and Estonia. They claimed that the effects and massive security implications of climate change, that act as a threat multiplier, can no longer be ignored. They argued that the prevention of climateinduced conflicts and crises, the need to address an existential threat, and climate change as having cross-cutting effects needed to be tackled throughout all the UN institutions (Ten UNSC Member States, 2020). Additional arguments were put forward, for example, by the representative of Belgium, who stated that: The very first article of the Charter of the United Nations is clear. We, as signatory States, bind ourselves to ‘take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace’. Over the past 75 years, we have focused too often on immediate crises. We have failed to take robust preventive action. Faced with climate change as our most existential challenge yet, can we—the United Nations—afford to tell future and even current generations that even though we knew, even though vast research was available, we did not act? (UNSC debate, 2020: 10)

Also, St. Vincent and the Grenadines – a small island developing state – asserted that: We are all aware that climate change is a global, multidimensional and cross-cutting reality and a threat of existential proportions. Drought, desertification, erratic rainfall, sea-level rise, flooding, hurricanes and other climatic hazards endanger lives and livelihoods, increasing displacement and competition over scarce resources. The impact on countries is already evident, and will only worsen if we do not address this crisis. We need leadership and the political will to drastically change our planet’s trajectory and to address the climate and security challenges already in existence. To that end, it is clear that the Security Council must work within its mandate to address the grave consequences of the climate. (UNSC debate, 2020: 25)

Opponents of this advocacy deny the official recognition of the climate-security nexus with the main argument that climate change is treated within the UN system by the UNFCCC and the mandates and resources of the UNFCCC for combatting climate change should not be mixed with the work of the UNSC. The Russian representative at the UN stated in 2020 that climate is not a generic security issue and the activities of the UNSC on the matter would “result in diverting time and resources from addressing the root causes of conflicts”, and would put into doubt the different mandates of the institutions. He added that “dubious and vague interpretation of risk factors could only lead to false conclusions and, as a result, failure to provide effective solutions” (PM Russia, 2020). Another counter-argument is the missing scientific evidence to prove the links between climate change and conflict, especially in a region-specific and local context, and that while climate change might be one of the factors, conflicts are much too complex to single out climate change as the main cause (Hardt, 2021a). In spite of these ongoing debates at the UNSC, attention is drawn to the fact that at state level there is a relatively broad recognition of the links between climate change and security. A recent study has also showed that the nexus between climate change

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and security has spread and entered a number of very different state agencies and ministries in the 15 member-state countries of the UNSC in many different ways (Hardt et al., 2023). This indicates how contested the topic is, especially at the UNSC. Several additional examples of institutional agreements on climate security exist at the UN, such as, for example, the 2018 creation of the UN Climate Security Mechanism and the Group of Friends of Climate Security. Outside of the UNSC, other activities are noted. In 2022 a European Parliament Resolution on the Climate Change and Defence Roadmap was adopted, which is seen as a “wake-up call for the security and defense community to anticipate, prepare and prevent the security challenges of a warming planet and more extreme weather events” (EU External Action, 2020). Furthermore, the interest of military institutions in the issues seems to grow: the International Military Council on Climate Security was established in 2019, and in 2023 a NATO Climate Change and Security Centre of Excellence will be set up in Montreal, Canada. All three examples enumerated here carry a clear conflict and militarized focus on climate change and they call attention to the fact that most policies – including those at state level – that address climate security exclude the existential threat dimension and the Anthropocene (Hardt et al., 2023). The references to climate science are mostly absent and the term Anthropocene has not even been mentioned in the UNSC documents and debates (Maertens & Hardt, 2021: 53). Another important key issue for the practice of climate security is that – in contrast to what is stated by the climate security skeptics in the UNSC – the UNFCCC, which deals with climate change, does not contend with the existential security threats associated with it. Therefore, it is clear that this fundamental threat aspect that climate change poses to humanity has no institutional fit. The scientific descriptions and the normative implications and questions of securing current and future generations have not yet reached the UN decision-making process.

Climate Security in the Anthropocene: Security for Whom and How? A main obstacle to climate security is that several understandings exist, and the identification of the most central value that requires securing and the means to do this are becoming mixed. The debates in theory and practice are often characterized by confusion and misunderstanding. In order to provide more clarity and give a critical insight into the normative basis of climate and security in the Anthropocene, Hardt (2018a) developed an analytical framework called Critical Environmental Security Studies (CESS) that combines the analytical tools of securitization and Anthropocene thinking (see Hardt, 2018a). The first set of securitization questions, presented by Buzan et al. (1998), helps to reveal the referent object (security for what/whom?), the threat (security from what threats?), and the response (security by what means?). The last question of the CESS framework focuses on the human-nature relation and an acknowledgment of the Anthropocene. This analytical lens relies to an important degree on the work of Cudworth and Hobden (2011). It enables one to assess whether

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the environment is described as a background for human activity (Holocene thinking) or as a dynamic interrelation of threat and response and the deeply intertwined relations of the socio-ecological reality (Anthropocene thinking). Based on this analytical framework, three dominant political concepts are characterized, holding relatively closed visions of the world with a set of central agents and objects to be secured and measures to be taken. These are detected in the literature and critically analyzed with reference to acknowledging the existential threat and the normative basis. The detected concepts in the literature are statecentered climate security, the environmental dimension of human security, and eco-centered climate security (see Table 2). They clearly show the traditional focus on the state system, the development- and peace-focused agenda and the influences from the Earth System Sciences. The categories show the content of the main concerns that have been described in section “Chronology and Debates: Security and the Nexus with Climate Change in Research” of this chapter. This calls attention to the issue that the state-centered and the human securityfocused perceptions are based on climate change as a so-called “add-on” to the traditional security conceptions and dimensions. These aim to maintain the traditional ideas of security in the sense of being based on the Holocene view of a differentiation between humans and the environment, and are mainly focused on securing the state and the stability of the contemporary system by following the peace and development agenda (see, e.g., Burguess & Tadjbakhsh, 2010; Ryerson, 2010; Hardt, 2018a). Both concepts substantially ignore the socio-ecological reality and its intertwinement with the Earth System and also draw notice to the fact that the literature mostly does not refer to the Anthropocene (see also Hardt, 2021a). Eco-centered climate security, in contrast, is strongly informed by the destruction of our habitat and references Earth System Sciences research (Dalby, 2013; Burke et al., 2016). As well-described by McDonald (2021) in his contiguous work on ecological security, this approach puts ecosystem resilience and the rights and needs of the most vulnerable across space (populations of the developing world), time (future generations), and species (other living beings) at the center of concern. At the same time, the major response of the so-called eco-centered concept consists in steering human activity along the Planetary Boundaries descriptions and in technological, scientific, policy, or institutional fixes by the Earth System Sciences (Hardt, 2018a, b). Nevertheless, this approach also carries pitfalls. One is that it induces a false image of the idea that “top-down steering by governments and intergovernmental organizations alone can address global problems” (Hajer et al., 2015: 1652). Furthermore, it considers the goal to be holding the contemporary system stable with reference to the environmental conditions and therefore parts from steerable Earth System conditions. Therefore, even though it refers to the Anthropocene, it is anchored in an understanding of “Holocene security” (Harrington & Shearing, 2017: 92). Another problematic implication from this literature is the simplification of humans and humanity into a “universal we or global us” (Chaturvedi & Doyle, 2016: 206, emphasis in original) and neglecting to account for “the multiplicity and unequal social values, relations, and practices of power that accompany actual humans” (Baskin, 2014: 8).

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Table 2 Overview of three dominant security concepts in relation to environment and climate change

Questionnaire Security for whom?

State-centered climate security State, specific territory, the military

Security from what threats?

Second-order socioeconomic effects of climate change, political instability, fragile states, violent conflicts, partly climate-induced migration, partly also direct effects of climate change, direct or indirect threats from other states

Security by whom?

Primarily by the state and its agencies, armed forces, defense, foreign ministries, intelligence services

Security by which means?

Primarily by military means, to a lesser extent by diplomatic and economic means

Environmental dimensions of human security focused on climate change Primarily people, groups, and individuals Direct physical effects of climate change (extreme weather, resource scarcity, e.g., water and food, spread of diseases, sea level rise), as well as state, non-state and global actors, physical violence, underdevelopment and poverty, environmental hazards

State agencies (often the development sector), non-state actors, civil society, NGOs (local, national, and international), the UN, international/ multilateral organizations, and concerted action Development cooperation/human development, conflict prevention, educational activity, peace-building, democratization, capacity building, sustainable resource management, risk management. In extreme cases also military intervention i.e., in the case of responsibility to protect (R2P) measures

Eco-centered climate security Nature, Earth System, ecosystems Abrupt changes to the status quo and the resilience of biophysical and geophysical environments that sustain life, climate change, different socio-ecological processes such as species extinction, biodiversity loss, tipping points, environmental degradation Earth System Science, Climate Science, and other natural sciences; states, international organizations, and collective action; environmental organizations and advocacy; individual action Nature-based solutions that seek a reduction in biodiversity loss, CO2 emissions reduction, reforestation, environmental protection measures, a promotion of sustainable development, or other more radical policy interventions

(continued)

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Table 2 (continued)

Questionnaire Human-nature relationship and acknowledgment of the Anthropocene

State-centered climate security Environment as use value, management, mostly not related to the Anthropocene. Climate change, resource scarcity, and environmental degradation are included

Environmental dimensions of human security focused on climate change Right to a healthy environment as one security dimension, mostly not related to the Anthropocene

Eco-centered climate security Humans can and have to control, manage, steer the Earth system. The Anthropocene as the geological era of insecurity

Source: Elaborated by the author on the basis of Hardt (2018a) and Hardt et al. (2023)

From this overview, it can be concluded that, in spite of the initial aspirations, most of the contemporary climate and environmental security literature falls short on the existential threats to humanity and the implicated ethics in the context of the Anthropocene.

Futures of Climate Security Research in the Anthropocene In the above sections I showed that neither in theory nor in practice do the climate security conceptions measure up to the expectations that they carry, these being to find responses to the existential threats articulated in the context of the Anthropocene. In order to further develop the theory, I propose some recommendations here that could help further enrich and extend the research to deal more explicitly with these fundamental challenges for humankind. An important pathway would be to integrate different disciplines more explicitly into the field (see Hardt, 2021a). The Earth System Sciences and Philosophy in particular should play a more central and critical role, as they are currently only merely included as a context of research, but little integrated with climate security research in the sense of a redefinition of security (Hardt, 2021c). A crucial step would be to integrate the Earth System Sciences research findings of the irreversible effects and life-threating implications of exceeding the Planetary Boundaries and the “hothouse Earth” trajectory (e.g., Steffen et al., 2015, 2018; Rockström et al., 2009; Ripple et al., 2019) with critical philosophical approaches to developing an existential security concept (see attempts by, e.g., Dalby, 2009, 2020; Harrington, 2016; Hardt, 2018a, b, and Sears 2020). In this way the different existing approaches on how the Anthropocene has important security ramifications, both in theory and practice, could serve as an important basis by questioning core assumptions about governance, causality and justice (Harrington & Shearing, 2017; Dalby, 2020; Fagan, 2017). Also, Ethical Security Studies should be further

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developed in this context (Browning & McDonald, 2021; Burke, 2016; Burke et al., 2014; Nyman & Burke, 2016). Burke, Lee-Koo, and McDonald highlight the deeply intertwined nature of security and ethics with the words: “Whether people live or die, whether they suffer or prosper – which people live and prosper and where they are able to do so – are ethical questions” (2014: 4, italics in original). Other critical security Studies scholars, such as Booth (2005, 2007), also provide promising conceptualizations for this concern: he perceived security as the impossibility of absence of threat and therefore as becoming aware of being profoundly vulnerable. On this basis, security could consist in a normative project that carries a positive value and follows the aim of changing and improving the situation by conceptualizing security as a process toward a better state of being/a better world (Booth, 2007: 251). The aim would then be not to build “. . .security against others but promote security reciprocally, as a part of the invention of a more inclusive humanity” (Booth, 2007: 2, italics in the original). Another approach that could be further developed with regard to security is to conceive of the Anthropocene as a “particular way of understanding the world and a normative guide to action” (Baskin, 2014: 3). Climate security could be considered for this purpose as an analytical tool not to reveal the worldview and the ethical perspectives of the implicated actors, such as the core values of security (as was carried out in section “Climate Security in the Anthropocene: Security for Whom and How?”), but instead to re-think and re-assess these. In other words, the CESS framework (see questionnaire in Table 2) can be seen as an empty shell to be re-filled with normative aims (Hardt, 2018a). Instead of the political concepts described in section “Climate Security in the Anthropocene: Security for Whom and How?”, a regularized concept of climate security could be created in the sense of using the questionnaire as a blank slate to re-think the basic values of security in the context of the Anthropocene. The necessity to re-fill the questionnaire of “What/who is to be secured?” “What are the threats?”, “What are the responses?” with normative content requires active thinking about what it is centrally important to “secure” and to “fear” in the context of the Anthropocene (see Hardt, 2018a: 116–120). In addition to these recommendations, another pathway lies in focusing on the practice-theory nexus of the field. The fact that, at this stage, neither the UNFCCC nor the UNSC covers the structural or conceptual conditions necessary to address the fundamental existential threats is especially worrying. As Hardt et al. (2023:. . .) describe, “the building of a deeper socio-ecological consciousness – seems perilously absent at the official level [. . .] Securing something akin to the Earth System would need a totally different kind of politics and a much deeper understanding of the intertwined socio-ecological consciousness and the contextdepending political nature of climate change”. Another necessary and very important research path to take will be looking at the several obstacles to the theorypractice nexus, and the disconnect between the existing literature of climate security and the Earth System and Climate Sciences and practitioners at, for example, the UN (Hardt, 2021b).

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Concluding Remarks The nexus between climate change and security touches on many fundamental questions and issues. Several interpretations and approaches exist in theory and in practice, and hopes are high for climate security as a possible strategy to effectively face the existential threats described by Climate and Earth System Sciences. I showed in this chapter, however, that, importantly, the current theory and practice of climate security lack a systematic treatment of philosophical questions and a re-orientation and definition of security that measures up to the existential threats that characterize the Anthropocene. So, while the central motivation of the securitization of climate change is the imagining of the end of humankind, I agree with Braidotti’s (2006: 258) assumption that “[T]he specter of global extinction is very much on the agenda of both individuals and institutions”, but I add that this specter remains a mere ghost that has not yet been explicitly tackled and spelled out. Nor are these concerns present in the practice of the UNFCCC, and “the existential security threats [. . .] and new meanings of security as yet remain largely ignored by the only institution that has the mandate to deal with security threats” (Hardt, 2021b: 13) – the United Nations Security Council. In addition, since the years of 2020, marked by the Covid-19 pandemic, and 2022, which saw the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the climate-security nexus is likely to fall even more into the limited approaches and conceptions of militarized conflict and the traditional and Holocene world. It is furthermore dangerous and misleading to presume that the climate security approach carries a one-size-fits-all solution to all problems – including war and solving the climate crises. Instead, the research should engage more particularly with the question of how we define security in the new living contexts, “which moral goods we seek in the name of security” (Burke, 2016: 145), and what can be regarded as responsible actions, especially when future generations and questions of justice are at stake. Developing the field further, with reference to including other disciplines and to re-thinking security in normative terms measured in relation to existential threats in the Anthropocene, such as, in particular, addressing the theorypractice gap and nexus, are therefore crucial tasks.

Cross-References ▶ Climate Change and Intergenerational Justice ▶ Philosophical Perspectives on Climate Anxiety

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Part VII Conclusion

Conclusion Marcello Di Paola

Abstract

This short chapter brings the Handbook to a close. It gathers basic takeaways from the volume and offers some general reflections on climate change, the philosophy of climate change and its futures, and the experience of editing a Handbook on the Philosophy of Climate Change. Keywords

Climate change · Philosophy

There is a good as well as a bad side to writing a conclusion to a Handbook such as this, and they are both the same: what matters most has already been said in previous pages, so there is both little pressure and great difficulty when trying to add anything of interest in the few lines that salute the reader. The overall attempt of this Handbook has been to elucidate global anthropogenic climate change as a general philosophical problem while also representing its many modifications across theoretical and practical domains. Accordingly, the volume has brought together over 60 scholars who, in their different styles but with equal depth and competence, have mapped many of the challenges inherent both in understanding and in coping with this unprecedented planetary phenomenon of potentially pan-generational consequence. For all that, the volume has surely not exhausted its topic. There are themes and methodologies – spanning over a multiplicity of philosophical domains and activating and interrogating a wide range of perspectives and debates – that have not found their way into the book or have found it only obliquely. These would be enough to animate a second, perhaps even a third volume. M. Di Paola (*) Department of Humanities, University of Palermo, Palermo, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Pellegrino, M. Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_2

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The absent have not just been discounted. Most of these missing topics, perspectives, and methodologies were originally scheduled for inclusion, but as the book was being composed the COVID19 virus entered the bloodstream of our globally interconnected world. The pandemic only lasted two years but gave everyone a taste of, and a crash-course in, what it is like to be in trouble as a species, and just how complex it can be to cope as individuals when the species is in trouble. As the pandemic unfolded, some of those who were involved in this book found unexpected time for writing, and thus had a chance to complete their chapters within weeks. Others, however, had to take urgent care of themselves and their loved ones; some left their towns or countries; others yet changed their areas of academic concentration, or even careers. All that has affected the editing of this volume in many ways, making it slower and harder overall, but also turning it into something more than a mere scholarly enterprise. As editors, we have had the chance to participate, however briefly and mostly digitally, in the very lives and not just the technical expertise of both those who stayed on and those who had to abandon ship during these challenging times. Our gratitude goes to all. The late comedian Bill Hicks once lamented that rather than being divided into tribes and castes transacting bits of Earth, we could be united as a species to garden the planet and explore outer space together. Of course, comedians tend to expect far too much from humanity – that is one reason why many things they say sound like jokes. But in this case Hicks was not doing social critique, nor was this remark colored by his characteristic cynicism. It was rather a sincere, straightforward expression of regret. The exasperation of today’s younger generations in the face of climate inaction, denialism, and most of all the concrete badness and injustices that climate change is and will keep on mobilizing, and not for humans only, probably feeds on this same basic regret Hicks had. We could do so much better on climate. To explain the ecological phenomenon, a bathtub analogy is often used: anthropogenic greenhouse gases are like extra flowing water being added to the greenhouse gas concentrations that already fill the tub. The tub has a fixed rate of discharge (Earth’s capacity to sequester greenhouse gases) and thus eventually ends up overflowing. To characterize our cultural, social, and political responses to climate change, on the other hand, a more adequate analogy would be a sink full of dishes left unwashed. It would have been easier, cheaper, and less timeconsuming to start the washing right after the first meal and keep washing consistently after every meal. In addition, with the dirty dishes cumulating, problems emerge that were not originally contained in the dishes themselves, such as a bug infestation. A clean-up becomes an uglier, longer, more complex, and more costly enterprise then. With climate change, we have let the sink fill up with dirty dishes for decades. Our cultural, social, and political systems have largely ignored, or at least failed to fully represent, process, and engage with the challenge, its causes, and its probable effects. And with each passing day of inaction, doing so becomes an increasingly uglier, longer, more complex, and more costly enterprise. Each chapter in this Handbook has offered a picture of how things look now and how the clean-up could go, with respect to this or that mode or aspect of climate change, be it conceptual or practical. Each chapter has described as well as

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prescribed: scientific practices and methodologies, interpretative frameworks, conceptual orderings and connections, normative principles, policy options. A wealth of information and perspectives, from both established and emerging scholars, to serve as a reasoned (albeit mutilated by circumstances) guide across the ever-expanding field of climate philosophy. For surely what has been missing so far, when it comes to climate change and other defining problems of the Anthropocene, is not scholarly but rather political engagement. Looking at the historical record and the current state of international affairs, there is little reason for optimism. The globalist struggle against climate change failed in 2009, in Copenhagen. Its nation-based surrogate, inaugurated by the Paris Agreement in 2015, has not really gotten off the ground yet. As of 2023, achieving its goal of keeping the planet’s average temperature from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above its preindustrial level is still technically possible – but there are no real signs of the fast energy transition, institutional changes, and multilevel forms of cooperation that are required to do so. To the contrary, militarized nationalism is on the rise, and wars feed GDP’s at the conclusion of the richest business cycle in human history, which has left Earth depleted of most of its non-renewable resources. This seems not too good a climate for effective climate action. Yet it is also true that awareness and concern with regard to climate change and the badness and injustices that it mobilizes has in recent years insinuated itself into the cultural fabric and public debate of virtually every country in the world; and that climate change has been made into a policy issue even by extremely recalcitrant actors such as the United States and China. The lives and well-being of billions of present as well as future people are now widely known to be on the line, along with the preservation of large chunks of Earth’s and sapiens’ past, the stability of eco-systems and institutions at various scales, and the survival of uncounted species and endangered cultures. This has led to increased questioning of dominant value systems and social, economic, and political structures whose rationality, sustainability, legitimacy, and justice are all now, in the face of a global anthropogenic climate crisis, being re-examined and indeed contested by growing numbers of people across the world. Whether that will be enough, and quick enough, to avert the worst implications of this crisis – which, like any other crisis, is more critical for some than it is for others – is of course another matter. The causes, both physical and ideational, of climate change are integral to our present, constitutively fossil-fueled form of life, baked into its daily practices and dominant narratives. The philosophy of climate change thus questions this form of life’s very basics: how many of us there are, what we eat, the way we dwell, the ways we move around, the ways in which we make and sell and transport things, the sorts of things we buy and want, how we study phenomena, how we relate to the nonhuman, how science speaks to politics and vice versa, how we make decisions, how we develop and use and diffuse our technologies, and even how we die, and let die, and whom and what and why. These are all fundamental dimensions of contemporary human existence that are explored in climate change philosophy – although climate change philosophy is no

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core undergrad course in virtually any philosophy department yet. But if it is plausible to think that anything approximating an adequate understanding and management of this unprecedented phenomenon is premised on its clarification, if not on the configuration of the very ways in which we should be thinking about it, then philosophizing about climate change today is, indeed, core. It amounts to reasoning about the overall feasibility of our current political, economic, and cultural infrastructures – including the very philosophical infrastructures through or in reference to which we will be doing the reasoning. What the contributions to this Handbook should have made kaleidoscopically clear is that climate change is a phenomenon open to multiple ways of framing, each of which finds different resources relevant to its understanding and management and counts different responses as successes and failures. If climate change is a geopolitical problem, then new agreements and institutions are needed. If the problem is market failure, then we need effective carbon taxes, or a functional cap and trade system, or perhaps new roles for central banks, or one world climate bank. If the problem primarily reflects a technological failure, then we need a better program for clean energy or perhaps geo-engineering and even human engineering. If the problem is inextricably bound up with dominant worldviews and imaginations, then a radical rethinking of some cultural constructions may be necessary. If climate change is just the latest way for the global rich to exploit the global poor, then we need to renew the struggle for global justice. The phenomenon of multiple frames, each of which is plausible, is characteristic of what are called “wicked problems,” which are notoriously difficult for political systems to address successfully. And climate change is not just wicked – it is weird, too. Not just our political institutions, but also our psychologies and moral systems are not particularly sensitive to, or indeed fit to engage, persistently problematic global conditions whose sources and impacts are dispersed across wide spatiotemporal stretches. Our scientific models, too, chase rather than anticipate the complexities of climate change, whose reality and sources are clear but whose modalities and temporalities still mostly escape us in detail; and while our growing computing powers will help us deal with climate uncertainties increasingly better, these powers are themselves still fossil fueled and thus worsen the problem just as they explain it. And finally, the meaning of our concepts, and indeed the meaning of our very lives – now that these contribute to remaking planets – will have to be reconsidered in many respects. As the planet warms, we will need to continue to make sense of our lives, and help the lives of others, in a world that is increasingly different from the one in which humanity has hitherto run its show. We will lose pieces, of both the past and the future, and will be compelled to configure new visions of the human station within the wider workings of things. From this perspective, climate change is as much a clumsy reconfiguration of the climate by humans as it is a catalyst for the reconfiguration of our own humanity – an interrogation as to what really matters and we want to strive for, as individuals and communities. Future Earth will mostly be shaped by what policies and practices and institutions and incentives and narratives we humans – so industrious, creative, and persevering,

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but also so bewildered, inexperienced, impatient, and divided – will choose (or just manage) to adopt. From a cosmic point of view, such starring role of ours will not last long; but from our own point of view, it will be the greatest gig the cosmos will ever offer us, and we may want to put up a brilliant and graceful human comedy rather than an awkward, farcical tragedy. Part of what makes a tragedy into a farce is characters wandering around the scene ignoring, misreading, or trivializing the complexity of their circumstances. With climate change, this tends to happen indeed. A Handbook such as this one – which gathers much of that complexity together in one place – has some modest ambition of contributing to averting the farce. Behind the professorial language of the chapters in this volume, and their rambunctious intricacies, stands a simple, straightforward invitation to reasoning things through, clearly and afresh, as we enter the warmest and riskiest times sapiens has ever known.

Index

A Aas, S., 805 Ability to pay principle (APP), 734, 766, 781, 785, 786, 794, 1096–1098, 1107 Abortion politics, 327 Abrahamic stewardship, 441 Abram, D., 469, 476, 477, 486 Abrupt climate changes, 107–110 Absorption strategy, 814 Act consequentialism, 542 Action, 708 Act-utilitarianism, 813 Adaptation, 648, 780, 781, 788, 790, 793, 794, 872 funding, 769, 771 policies, 213–214 Adaptive aesthetic preferences environmental degradation, 422–424 growing gap between aesthetic needs and, 424–427 Adaptive decision-making, 996 Aesthetic(s), 9, 421, 423, 426 appreciation, 396, 397, 399–401, 409–411 experience, 396–398, 401, 402, 404–410 goods, 417, 420–422 judgment, 396, 400, 408 needs, 417, 425–428 optimists, 409, 410 pessimists, 409 preferences, 417, 421–428 response, 396, 400, 402 texture, 410 value, 526, 527, 529, 531–535, 537 Air pollution, 803 Albrecht, G., 471, 472, 485 Aleatory uncertainty, 982, 987 Alternative spirituality, 493, 496, 498

Ambiguity, 980, 981, 983, 984, 991, 992, 997 American environmental law, 419 Ancient Egyptian culture, 173 Animal ethics climate change, wildlife and conservation, 893–895 contemporary, 887, 888 ecological perspective, 891–893 environmental ethics, 890–891 before modern age, 886–887 for philosophical ethics, 888–890 Anthropocene, 118, 119, 121, 193, 196, 362, 369, 370, 379, 381–384, 386, 391, 490, 839 CESS framework, 1282 climate security, 1270 conflict, 1270, 1272, 1273, 1277, 1283 dominant political concepts, 1279 eco-centered concept, 1279 ethics, 1281, 1282 IPCC, 1270, 1271 Nexus, security, 1271–1275 peace, 1270, 1273, 1276, 1277 security/insecurity, 1271 security ramifications, 1281 UNSC, 1270, 1273, 1275–1277, 1282 Anthropocentric values, 813 Anthropocentrism, 432 climate change, 368–370 critiques of, 364–366 limitation, 371 non-anthropocentric alternatives, 366 and non-anthropocentrism in environmental philosophy, 363 Anthropogenic climate change, 801 Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, 688 Anthropology, 7

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1298 Antinatalism, 649, 656, 657 Anxiety apocalyptic climate, 469 by climate change, 468 Tillich’s definition of, 471 Apocalyptic climate anxiety, 472 A posteriori approaches, 74, 75, 77 A priori approaches, 74, 77 Aquatic ecosystem, 155 Argument analysis, 141 Arousal model, 400 Art, 396, 397, 399, 402, 404–406, 408 Artificial capital, 418 Artificial intelligence (AI), 959 uses of, 54 Ash Wednesday Declaration, 433 Athleisure, 534 Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), 110–112 Atmospheric gases, 822 Attribution of anthropogenic climate change, 49 climate change, 46 of extreme events, 49 science, 768 studies of extreme events, 49 types of, 50 understanding and prediction of climate extremes, 57 Autonomous ground vehicles (AGVs), 157 Autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), 154 Autonomy, 807 Average utilitarianism, 654 Averagism, 671, 672 B Backward-looking compensation methods and institutions, 792 Bacon, F., 435, 437, 440 Bali Action Plan (BAP), 616 Bali principles of climate justice, 613–616 Bayesian methods, 75 Beneficiary pays principle (BPP), 734, 766, 781, 783–786, 789, 794, 1096, 1106–1107 Benefit asymmetry, 1071 Benevolence, 594 Beran, Ondřej, 478 Bifurcations, 109–110 Big data, 126, 127, 129, 134, 140, 144 Biocentric consequentialism, 544

Index Biocentrism, 362, 366, 367, 902 Bio-economy, 311 Bio-enhancement, 642 Biofuels projects, 1059 Biophysical sciences, 168 Blamelessly or excusable ignorant, 782 Boundary problem, 1005, 1007 Brazilian Proposal, 1113 Break free of rules, 1272 B-tipping, 112 Buddhist Climate Change Statement to World Leaders, 433 Burden, 761 sharing, 780, 781, 1110–1111 Business as usual (basu), 626 Butterfly effect, 275, 277 C Cairo Conference, 691 Capitalism, 363, 371, 374 Carbon capture and storage (CCS), 983 Carbon dioxide removal (CDR), 921–922, 990, 1087 Carbon economy, 209 Carbon emissions, 436 Carbon footprint, 729, 730, 733 Carbon lock-in, 230 Carbon majors, 747–751 Carbon offset(ting), 207–210, 580 Carbon pricing, 789, 790 Carbon reductions, 207 Carbon taxes, 789 Care, 457–460, 1029, 1030, 1032, 1039 Carson, R., 588 Catastrophic disruptions, 872 Catastrophic risk, 251, 254 Catastrophist narratives, 348, 351, 354 Causal decision theory, 274, 275 Causal responsibility, 1129–1130 Central banks climate change, 1253–1255 significance of, 1251–1253 Certain variation of the match of gametes (CVMG), 666 Chemtrails conspiracy theory, 1164 Christian existential philosophy, 471 Christianity, 438 Chronic hunger, 803 Church of Scotland, 432 Circular Innovation Challenge, 528 Cities, 743–745 Citizen engagement, 1015, 1016

Index Citizenship, 453, 458, 460, 1136, 1203 Civic environmentalism, 1154 Civil disobedience, 1154, 1155 Civil society, 1148 participation, 1014 Classic utilitarianism, 543 Clean development mechanism (CDM), 207–209 Clean hands, 576 Clean trade policies, 746 Cli-fi, 405 counterarguing reduction in, 515 emotion and identification, 517, 518 in literary studies, 505, 507 narrative transportation, 514 open questions, 510, 514, 518, 519 in philosophy, 507, 508, 510 proximity to real life experiences, 516 real-world consequences, 513 set-up scenarios, 511, 512 thought experiment, 510, 511 use of imagination, 512 Climate, 527, 531, 535 agreement, 1067–1068, 1073 blame, 347 catastrophes, 281, 282 collectivists, 563 communication, 114, 120 crisis, 1146 denialism, 1008 domination, 1195–1198 dynamics, 175 emergency, 1028, 1029, 1031, 1035, 1038, 1039, 1041, 1043 engineering, 958, 959, 965, 969–971 ethnography, 188 goals, 1184–1187, 1189, 1190 harms, 276, 563, 568, 569, 571, 580 impacts, 54 individualists, 563 litigation, 1230, 1234 mitigation, 230, 1073, 1183, 1185 mobility, 1121 movements, 1155–1157 narratives, 344, 348–350 negotiations, 736, 739 orthodoxy, 760 policy, 120 refugees, 1121, 1123, 1125, 1134 temporalities, 350–351 thresholds, 276–278, 570 tipping points, 106, 110, 116 transition, 1075

1299 Climate action, 152, 154–156, 158 ecobots, 154–156 robots-for-ecology for, 156–157 robots-in-ecology for, 157–158 Climate anxiety, 485 apocalyptic, 472, 473 categories of, 480 Christian existential perspectives on, 479 climate emotions and, 468 definition of, 468, 471 earth emotions and, 471 existential manifestation of, 481 features of, 480 first wave of, 474, 475 form of, 475 interconnectedness of, 478 of Kierkegaard’s proto-existentialist philosophy, 482 and lifeworld, 482 and modern forms of animism, 476 perception of, 474 phenomenological perspectives, 482 philosophical accounts of, 468, 485 philosophical approaches to, 471 Robert Stolorow’s work on, 472 second-wave, 475 Tillich’s analysis of existential anxiety, 480 ubiquity of, 468 waves of, 474 Climate change, 4, 5, 11, 166, 170, 172, 268, 378, 379, 416–419, 423–428, 504–510, 512–520, 565, 568, 572, 577, 624, 625, 627, 629–634, 636, 638–641, 643, 760, 761, 781–793, 978, 979, 983, 986, 987, 989, 991, 994–996, 1002–1008, 1010–1019, 1230 absence of, 49 adaptation, 5, 36, 831, 832 aesthetics (see Environmental aesthetics) AI, 965–968 anthropocentrism and, 368–370 anthropogenic, 27, 49, 50 assertive policymaking on, 237–238 attribution of, 46 benefit asymmetry, 1071 colonialism, and role of Indigenous knowledges, 611–613 commodity exporters, 1074 complexity of, 235 connections to, 47 consequences of, 180–183 cost asymmetry, 1070–1071

1300 Climate change (cont.) cost–benefit analysis, 964 disproportionate impacts of, 608–609 and distributional justice, 606–607 emergence of World, 380–383 engineering ethics, 961 engineering processes, 959, 960 engineering technologies, 958 environmental justice to responses to, 613 epistemological challenge, 6 ethical challenge, 451–455 final ethical values, 969–971 financial risks, 1074 fossil energy, fossil capitalism and sociology of energy, 176–179 givenness of Earth and world, 386–390 and global warming, 458 and harm, 761–765 and human engineering (see Human engineering) injustice and inequality, 179–183 intergenerational climate conflicts, 1072–1073 knowledge of, 46 legal framework on, 238–240 litigation, 240–241, 309, 1234–1237 local migrations, 1074 mitigation, 36, 872 model for, 34 nature-based solutions to, 830–835 and nature conservation, 822–824 ontology, 170–172 and participative justice, 609 philosophy, 1291–1295 planting trees, 908–910 plant migration, 910–913 political challenge, 6 political philosophy of, 241–244 and population ethics (see Population ethics and climate change) preservation of plants and forests, 905–908 projections of, 27, 47 and public health, 453 role of cities in, 233–235 roles of plants, 904 serious effect of, 905 solidarity, 461 technological risk assessment, 963 traditional risk assessment, 964 types of solution, 958 value-sensitive design, 962, 963 world-interest to Earth-interest, 383–386

Index Climate change and decision theory expected harm, 276, 277 expected utility, 272–275 extreme uncertainty, 281–283 imperceptible difference, 278–280 prisoner’s dilemma, 269–272 Climate change and ethics of agriculture adaptation/mitigation, 875–876 farmer and consumer responsibilities, 876–877 gender inequalities, 874 global inequalities, 873 innovation and social justice, 878–879 landscape changes and social justice, 879 land use changes and social justice, 880 local inequalities, 873–874 nutritional inequalities, 874–875 relational inequalities, 874 resilience, 877–878 Climate change and psychology autonomy/efficacy, 295 denialism/scepticism, 295–296 direct psychological effects, 297 distance/discounting, 294–295 habits, 293 indirect psychological effects, 297–298 loss aversion, 293–294 rationalisation, 296 Climate change conspiracy theories, 1163 aims, 1163 definition, 1165–1168 empirical studies, 1165 ethical issues, 1168–1171 policy options, 1171–1174 Climate change, health effects, 800–801 air pollution, 803 global health inequalities, 804 heat-related illnesses, 802–803 infectious diseases, 801–802 strain on vital infrastructure, 803–804 Climate Change Program, 432 Climate change social movements, 1150–1154 content of contestation, 1154 Climate cooperation, 1067, 1186–1188 as joint climate action, 1188–1189 Climate economics and ethics future institutions, 990 future populations, 991 future technologies, 989 Climate emotions, 469 vs. anxiety, 470 climate anxiety and, 478

Index Landmann’s and Pihkala’s taxonomies of, 485 study of, 469 taxonomical approach to, 478 threat-related, 471 use of, 469 Climategate conspiracy theory, 1163 Climate justice, 10, 171, 180, 182, 183, 344, 346, 607, 614, 615, 728–730, 742, 747 building blocks of, 1086–1089 implementation of, 1098–1099 intergenerational justice, 1089–1092 intragenerational justice (see Intragenerational justice) movement, 1151–1152 Climate justice circumstances, 1068–1069 co-benefits of climate action, 1075 future generations, 1075–1078 global vulnerability, 1073–1075 Climate Justice Now! (CJN), 1152 Climate models, 127 components, 26 contemporary, 24 definition, 24 initial state of system, 37 model evaluation, 28–30 parameter uncertainty, 31, 34 running model simulations, 27–28 scenario uncertainty, 36 structural uncertainty, 31 structure, 25 uncertainty in, 30, 38 Climate-related displacement, 1120, 1123, 1125, 1127, 1130, 1132, 1135 Climate research big-data elements in, 127–129 data-driven modeling in, 134–144 modeling, adequacy and uncertainty of climate datasets, 131–134 traditional climate data and new developments, 130–131 Climate science, uncertainties impact uncertainties, 988 observational uncertainties, 985, 986 simulation uncertainties, 986–988 Clothes, 529–531, 533–536 Cloud-resolving models, 61 CO2 emissions, 641 Cognitive diversity, 1172 Cognitive enhancement, 944–945 Collaborative governance, 236–237

1301 Collective action, 574, 1180, 1183, 1185 free riding, 1183–1184 scoop-the-poop, 1184 virtuous-as-the-fool problem, 1184–1185 Common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities (CBDR-RC), 323, 736–739 Common ownership rights, 1132 Common structure, 90 Communitarianism climate skepticism, 1217 communitarians, 1215, 1216 cultural identities, 1221, 1222 democracy principle, 1223 future communities, present members, 1219–1221 global justice, 1214 global populism, 1214 global redistributive mechanism, 1216 postcolonialism, 1217 self-consciousness, 1215 transgenerational community, 1214, 1217–1219 world community, 1216 Community-centred ethnographies, 189 Compensation, 648, 651, 658, 660, 764, 765, 767, 768, 1139 Compensation duties, 780 ability to pay principle, 785, 786 backward-looking compensation methods and institutions, 792–794 beneficiary pays principle, 783, 784 forward-looking compensation methods and institutions, 789, 792 polluter pays, then receives principle, 786, 787, 789 polluter pays principle, 781, 783 Computer aided design (CAD), 529 Conceptual engineering, 848 Concrete abstraction, 171 Conditional antinatalism, 656 Conferences of the Parties (COPs), 308 Confidence, 141, 989, 992, 993 Confirmational independence, 98 Consequentialism, 10, 542, 728, 729 Conservationism motives for, 824–827 targets of, 827–830 Constant relative risk aversion (CRRA), 252, 256, 257, 259 Constitutional republican approach, 1205 Constitutivist position, 902 Consumer goods, 422

1302 Consumerism, 527, 529, 535, 1010, 1013 Consumptagenic lifestyles, 311 Consumption, 176, 177 Contemporary climate models, 24 Contestation, 1149 Contextualism, 715 Contingent valuing, 421 Contrastive motivations, 709, 711, 712 Contribution-based responsibility, 764 Copenhagen Fashion Summit, 528 Cornwall Alliance, 433, 435, 437, 443, 445 Corporations, 744, 746, 747 Corrective justice principles, 1057 Corruption, 1015 Cosmological prophecy, 435 Cosmopolitanism, 1157 Cost asymmetry, 1070–1071, 1075 Cost–benefit analysis (CBA), 281, 424, 964 Costs of climate mitigation, 1066 COTSbot, 154 Counterarguing reduction in Cli-fi, 515 Counterfactual comparative account of harm (CCAH), 650, 651 Coupled model intercomparison project (CMIP6), 48, 82 COVID19-19 pandemic, 527, 529, 535, 801, 804, 1013, 1283 Crichton thesis, 496 Critical Environmental Security Studies (CESS), 1278 Critical level view, 654 Critical range view, 654 Crowdsensing, 129 Crowdsourcing, 129 Crown-of-thorn starfish (COTS), 154 Cultural anthropology adaptive strategies, 192 Anthropocene, 193–196 capitalist system, 200 community-centred research, 199 ethnography, 189–192 geophysical disaster, 188 lack of professional engagement, 188 more-than-human relations, 196–198 socio-cultural models, 188 Cultural-interpretive approach, 610 Cultural theory, 390 Culture of nature, 345, 346, 354 Curbing emissions (curb), 626 Currency of justice, 633

Index D Darwin’s revolution, 887–888 Data, 126 Data-driven modeling, in climate research and machine learning, 134–135 predictions and uncertainty, 139–142 representational accuracy, 136–139 understanding, 142–144 Data-driven science, 127 Data-intensive science, 127 Dataset uncertainty, 132 Dead polluters objection, 782, 785 Decision-maker, 274, 275 Decision-making under risk, 995 Decision problem, 269, 270 Decision theory, 268, 274, 275, 284 Decisive slippery slope argument (DSSA), 926 Decompositional strategy, 83 Deep ecology, 372 Deep uncertainty, 113, 115, 117, 120, 984, 992, 994, 995, 997 Degrowth, 1018 Delhi Climate Justice Declaration, 1152 Deliberative democracy, 1004, 1010, 1016 Demandingness, 722 constraints, 579 Democracy, 452, 456, 1001, 1002, 1012, 1014 climate-related problems in, 1005–1011 definition, 1003–1005 deliberative, 1004 environmental critics, 1014 radical-agonistic interpretations, 1004 republican, 1004 supranational, 1016 Democratic agencies, 1009 Democratic civic rights, 1005 Democratic decision-making, 1008 Democratic deliberation, 1003 Democratic legitimacy, 1007, 1233, 1241, 1242 Demographic transition, 692 Denialism, 1163, 1165 Description-based perception, 703 Descriptive aesthetics, 405 de-Shalit’s theory, 1218 Designer biofilms, 155 Detection of change, 768 Determinants of adaptation, 761 Diachronic indifference, 709 Diachronic solidarity, 714, 716 Diarrheal disease, 802 Dignity, 807–808

Index Direct or indirect reciprocity, 706 Disability-adjusted life years (DALYs), 806 Disaster risk reduction, 994 Discount factor, 1089 Discounting, 250, 253 Discourse-mythological approach, 492 Disgorgement, 767, 768 Dismal theorem, 281 Distancing, 707, 708 Distributional (Distributive) justice, 606–607, 794, 880 Distributive justice, 794, 880 Dome-world, 634, 635 Do no harm principle, 763 Douglas’s fine-tuning argument, 950 Drone ecology, 157 Drones, 153, 157, 158 Dualism, 365 Dunbar’s number, 943 Durban Declaration on Carbon Trading (2004), 1152 Dutch Supreme Court, 1230 Duties, 666, 674, 679, 680, 727 of climate justice, 728–730 individual climate, 730–732 mitigation, 732–733, 752 Duty bearers, 761, 766, 767, 1057, 1058, 1061 Duty of adaptation, 760 climate change and harm, 761–765 currency and magnitude, 771 duty bearers, 766 duty recipients, 769 forms, 766, 768 scope, 768 second-order agents and duty, 771–774 structure, 769–771 Duty of compensation, 764 Duty recipients, 761, 767 Dynamical systems theory, 107, 109–110 E Earth emotions, 471 Earth First!, Earth Liberation Front, 1155 Earth system models, 24, 25, 33, 51 Earth system science, 113, 114, 118–121 ECEGADMAT, 478 Ecoanxiety, 297, 298, 469, 472, 479 phenomenon of, 479 Eco-anxiety, 707 Eco-authoritarianism, 1013, 1014, 1019

1303 Ecobots, 153–156, 158 Eco-centered climate security, 1279 Ecocentrism, 362, 366, 367 Ecocide, 642 Ecocyborgs, 155 Ecofeminism, 365, 1031 Ecofundamentalism, 495 Ecological anxiety, 469 Ecological ethics, 459, 461 Ecological humanities, 342 Ecological intensification, 875 Ecological robots, 153, 156 Economical/decision-theoretical conceptualization, 980 Economic growth, 1018 Eco-socialism, 1019 Ecosystem-based adaptation, 831 Ecosystems, 831 Ecoterrorism, 1155 Ecotheological apologism, 494 Eco-therapist, 298 Effectivity uncertainty, 702 Egalitarianism, 631, 632, 635, 638 Electrification, 230 El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), 111, 987 Emission reduction policies, 1086 Emotions, 396, 397, 400–402, 406, 407, 411 Encyclopédie, 713 End of nature (EN), 835–839 Energy, 730, 733, 740, 744, 746, 750 production systems, 310 transition, 179 Enforcement, 1055, 1056, 1061 Environment, 469 Environmental aesthetics emotions and knowledge, 400, 401 and loss, 404–406 multisensory sympathetic attention and immersion, 397, 399 negative aesthetic values, 406, 407, 409 temporality and imagination, 401–404 Environmental anxiety, 479 Environmental awareness, 1014 Environmental citizenship, 409 Environmental degradation, 1014 Environmental ethics, 5 Environmental governance, 1003 Environmental humanities approach, 340–341 and climate change, 343–345

1304 Environmental humanities (cont.) concerns, 342, 343 functions, 343 outlook characteristics, 342 Environmental justice, 10, 602 components of, 604–606 origins of, 602–604 responses to climate change, 613 Environmental philosophy, 289, 291, 299, 300, 391, 846 catastrophism, 348, 350 climate narratives, catastrophism, alternatives, 348 climate temporalities, human becoming, present times, 350–351 culture, nature as adversary, societal inadequacies, 351 future people, systemic injustices, responsibilities, 346–348 Environmental programs, 1014 Environmental psychology, 288–291, 297, 299, 300 Environmental regulation, 416, 419, 420, 424, 427 Environmental robotics, 152, 153, 158 Environmental Schwartz Value Survey (E-SVS), 290 Environmental sustainability, 1232 Epistemic extractivism, 312 Equality or sufficiency, 633 Equal liberty, 1004 Equal per capita distribution, 1108–1109 Equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS), 47 Equity, 252–255, 259, 814–816 Ereshefsky, M., 805 Ethical importance of health, 804–805 autonomy, 807 dignity, 807–808 normal functioning, 805–806 well-being, 806–807 Ethical values, 409 Ethics, 4, 5, 9–11, 13, 14, 397, 401, 526, 527, 531, 535, 564–565, 723, 724, 728, 732, 735, 780, 781, 1085, 1168, 1169 for a broken world, 636 Evaluation, 27 climate, 28 models, 28 Evaluative uncertainty, 555–557 Evidential decision theory, 274, 275 Evolutionary biology, 895 Ex-ante egalitarianism, 255–257 Existential guilt, 482 Existential isolation, 482

Index Existentialist philosophy, 349 Existential philosophy, 479 Expected Act Consequentialism, 543 Expected harm, 271, 276–279, 569 Expected utility, 268, 269, 272, 273, 275, 279, 281–284, 995, 996 maximization, 995 Experience-based perception, 703 Experimental philosophy, 299–300 Expertocracy, 1019 Explanatory approach, 98–101 Explicative reasons, 713 Ex-post egalitarianism welfare function, 256 External forcings, 987 Externalism, 710, 711 Externalistic approach, 712 Externalities, 780, 781, 786–789 External vs. internal reasons, 711 Extra-parliamentary institutions, 642 Extremes, climate, 47, 50 Extreme uncertainty, 281–283 F Factor attribution, 768 Fair shares, 577 Fair terms of inclusion, 928 Farming, 874–878, 881, 891–893 Fashion, 526–537 Feasibility, 735, 736, 1112–1114 Feminism, 1030, 1038, 1039, 1042 Feminist philosophies ecofeminisms, 1035–1038 ecofeminist praxis, 1042 gender hierarchy, 1041 heteronormativity of climate change, 1038, 1039 of Science, 1032, 1034, 1035 stereotyping, 1040, 1041 Ferrarello, S., 484 Fictional narratives, 509, 511, 514, 515 Financial rectification, 765, 766, 769–771 First law of ecology, 329 Fitness-for-purpose, 131 Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 368 Food and climate change food biodiversity, 853–856 food sovereignty, 861, 862 food waste, 858, 859 frameworks, 847–849 geographical indications, 851, 852 global hunger, 852, 853 philosophical analysis, 849–851, 856–858 sustainable diet, 860 Food biodiversity, 853–856

Index Food ethics, 850 Food production, 872, 873, 876–878, 880, 893 Food shortages, 872 Food sovereignty, 861, 862 Food waste, 858, 859 Forward-looking compensation methods and institutions, 789 Fossil, 634 capitalism, 167, 168, 175, 178, 179 energy, 168, 178, 179 Fossil Age, 490 Framing, 1149 Frankfurt School, 1008 Free-market capitalism, 434 Fridays for Future (FFF) movement, 1153 Future-focused climate litigation outcome-based legitimacy in, 1240–1241 process-based legitimacy in, 1239–1240 source-based legitimacy in, 1238–1239 Future generations, 555, 624–636, 639, 641–643, 1075–1078, 1089–1092, 1109, 1230 Future populations, 991 G Gas-guzzling, 270, 273–275, 284 Gender, 1029, 1031 equality, 1030 inequalities, 874 Genocide, 1005 Geoengineering, 1164 carbon dioxide removal, 921–922 cessation, 933–934 ethics of research, 924–925 nature and naturalness, 931–933 procedural justice, 927–929 solar radiation management, 923–924 substantive justice, 929–931 Geographical indications (GIs), 851, 852 Geographical Information Systems (GIS), 212 Geography, 7 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), 834 Global capitalism, 174, 1007 Global climate, 7 Global climate change, 648 law, 228 Global climate justice, 171 Global climate models (GCMs), 25, 51, 986 Global constitutional convention, 1017 Global Deal for Nature (GDN), 832, 833 Global dread, 472 Global heating, 1002 Global History, 310 Global inequalities, 873

1305 Global justice, 629, 630, 638, 743, 746 Global justice, climate change ability to pay principle, 1107 beneficiaries pay principle, 1106–1107 burden sharing vs. harm aviodance, 1110–1111 challenges in achieving international justice, 1112–1114 equal per capita distribution, 1108–1109 future generations, 1109 global poor, 1110 polluter pays principle, 1106 sufficientarianism, 1110 Global Parliament of Mayors (GPM), 231 Global poor, 1110 Global redistributive mechanism, 1216 Global republican institutions, 1207 Global surface temperature, 801 Global tipping point, 114 Global warming, 174, 178, 184, 271, 380–382, 396, 400, 402, 411, 1008, 1073 Grandfathering, 1093 Graspability, 143 Green Climate Fund (GCF), 773, 789, 790 Greenhouse gas (GHG), 658–659, 1292 GHG emissions, 209, 229, 436, 607–608, 891–893, 965, 1002, 1007, 1014, 1018 GHG inventory, 210 Greenhouse-gas-emitting activity, 268, 270, 273, 275, 280, 284 Greening compensatory transfers (GCTs), 1257 Green New Deal, 1200 Green psychologists, 426 Green Quantitative Easing (Green QE) climate bad bank, 1256–1257 intergenerational, 1257–1259 progressive Green QE, 1256 Standard Green QE, 1255–1256 Green republicanism, 1195 Grieving, 707 Group rights, 1134–1135 Group uncertainty, 702 H HadCM3, 81 Hardin, G., 564 Harm, 627, 629–631, 637, 642, 643, 762 avoidance, 1110 avoidance justice, 764 non-consequentialist accounts of, 670 Harmful impacts, 760 Health, 181, 183 equity, 811 psychology, 296

1306 Heat-related illnesses, 802–803 Hedonic surveys, 421 Hegel’s skepticism, 1147 Heidegger, S., 469, 471, 473, 474, 482, 483 Hermit paradox, 682 Higher-income countries (HICs), 606 Hindu Declaration on Climate Change, 433 Historical emissions, 782, 784, 789 The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis, 438 Historic racism, 347 Holocene, 381, 382 security, 1279 Homeomorphism, 109 Human-animal relationships, 893 Human chauvinism, 363 Human engineering autonomy violation, 949–950 biological constraints, 943–944 cognitive enhancement, 944–945 dietary preference modification, 945–946 disrespect for human nature, 952 ethical concerns, 947–952 evolutionary lag, 941 feasibility, 947–948 moral bioenhancement, 945 moral rigidity, 950–951 next generation design, 951 physiology modification, 946 psychological constraints, 942 resources allocation, 948 safety, 947 social injustice, 951 unpredictability, 948–949 Human exceptionalism, 363 Human existence, 387 Human history, 169 Humanitarian obligations, 1130 Human migration, 1120 Human-natural relationships, 352, 353 Human population, 632 Human psychology, 1010 Human rights, 630, 631, 1084, 1090 approach to climate change, 1053–1055 climate change as threat to, 1050–1053 environment, climate change and, 1048–1050 limits of, 1055–1060 Human rights-based accounts, 631 Human supremacy, 363 Humility, 595 Hunger, 872, 874 Husserl, E., 379, 471, 482, 483 Hybrid ecobots, 155

Index I Ice Memory Foundation, 404 Ideal theory, 1237 Immobility, 1120, 1131, 1139 Impact uncertainties, 988 Imperceptible harm, 278–280 Impersonal consequentialism, 626, 627 Implementation, 1056 Implicit religion, 494 Inconsequentialism, 545, 566–567 Independence approach, 97–98 Indifference, 708 Indifference ideal type, 708 Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN), 209, 1006 Indigenous people, 347, 349, 352–354 Indirect reciprocity, 714 Individual causal inefficiency, 702, 703 Individual denialists, 271, 275 Individual responsibility, 563 Individual rights, 1135 Industrial capitalism, 438 Inequalities, 167, 170, 181 aversion, 252, 253, 255–259 gender, 874 global, 873 local, 873–874 nutritional, 874–875 relational, 874 Infectious diseases, 801–802 Information and communications technology (ICT), 959 Inhomogeneities, 39 Injustice and global health inequalities, 808 direct approach, 808–809 health equity and climate change, 811–812 indirect approach, 809–811 Innocent bystander, 764 Innovation, 743, 745 In situ adaptation, 1125, 1137 Institutional gap, 1017 Institutional reform, 735, 746, 747, 1015, 1016 Institutions and citizens for intergenerational justice, 641 Institutions for future generations, 1231–1234 Insufficiency problem, 578 Integrated assessment models (IAMs), 250–255, 258–262, 989 Interdisciplinary approach, 309, 959 Interfaith Climate Statement, 433 Intergenerational climate conflicts, 1072–1073 Intergenerational climate justice, 1249 Intergenerational distributive justice, 635

Index Intergenerational domination, 635 Intergenerational equity, 259 Intergenerational indifference, 709, 712, 714, 715, 717 Intergenerational justice, 624, 625, 628–632, 634, 635, 639–643, 666, 1012, 1089–1092 Intergenerational solidarity, 716 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 106, 107, 369, 372, 545, 688, 986, 993, 994, 997, 1146, 1270 Internalism, 710, 711 Internal variability, 24, 33, 37, 40 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), 690 International justice, 1112–1114 International Paretianism (IP), 1113 International state system, 1131 Intertemporal elasticity of substitution, 259 Intragenerational contractualist/ intergenerational utilitarian, 671 Intragenerational justice ability to pay principle, 1096–1098 beneficiary pays principle, 1096 equal per capita principle, 1093–1094 grandfathering, 1093 Intrinsic value, 364, 366, 367, 374 IPAT equation, 739–742 IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), 220 IPCC Mitigation Report, 229 IPCC perspectives, 207, 215, 216, 220, 221 Islamic Conference on Climate Change, 432 Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change, 432, 437 J Joint climate action, 1181, 1188–1189 Judaism, 438 Judeo-Christian stewardship, 443 Justice, 5, 8, 10, 12, 13 Justice-generating relationships, 627 Justificative reasons, 713, 716 vs. explanatory reasons, 711 vs. operative reasons, 711 Just Savings Principle, 631, 636, 1259 K Kantian theory, 715 Kavka, G., 670 Kierkegaard, S., 469 proto-existentialist philosophy, 482 revolutionary insight, 479 treatment of, 469

1307 Knowledge, 400, 403–407, 409, 410 deficit, 298 Kumar, R., 669 Kyoto Protocol, 207, 210, 211 L Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change, 802 Land use, 873, 880 Legal obligations, 716 Legal theory climate system, 313–315 COPs, 308 democracy, 324, 326 epistemological character, 309 formal perspective, 308 human community, 328 human rights, 322–324 metabolic rift, 320–322 natural resources/law, 310–312 sovereignty/planetary boundaries, 316–319 tornado/abortion politics, 326–328 weather-world, 328 Legitimacy, in future-focused climate litigation, 1237–1241 Leopold, A., 588 Liberalism, 762, 1003, 1004 Liberal justice, 762 Life-style adaptation, 638 Likelihood, 95–96, 986, 993, 994 Limon reports, 1049 Lionfish Project AUV, 156 Literary genre, 505, 506 Livable locality, 1132–1133 Living machines, 155 Local inequalities, 873–874 Localized adaptation, 767 Locke, J., 435–437, 440 Loss & Damage, 780, 789, 790, 792–794 Lotka-Volterra model, 70 Low-carbon technologies, 1086 Low-emissions technology, 230 Luxury emissions, 578, 1155 M The Machiavellian Moment, 1194 Machine learning application of, 46, 62 in climate models, 61 and data-driven models, 134–135 models, 966 use of, 54

1308 Malnutrition, 803 The Margarita Declaration on Climate Change, 1153 Marine cloud brightening (MCB), 923 Market thresholds, 276 Marx, K., 177 McGrath, S., 474 Mermerosity, 472 Meteoranxiety, 407, 472 Metrological threshold, 275 Micro-aggression, 1197 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), 691 Minilateral decision-making process, 928 Mining, 372, 373 Minor premise, 710 Misalignment, 701 Mitigation, 5, 338, 347, 353, 354, 648, 656, 658–660, 723–724, 780, 781, 786, 790–794, 872, 875 duties, 732–733, 752 duties of states, 733–742 policies, 746 Mitigation policies, 207 carbon offsets, 207–210 GHG inventory, 207–210 unburnable carbon, 211 Model-based robustness analysis (MBRA) agreement, 79–81 bottom-up justifications, 95–101 climate models, 71 common structure, 83–84 description, 70 explanatory approach, 98–101 independence, 74–79, 97–98 inference pattern of, 71 issues, 73 justificatory challenge, 91 likelihood approach, 95–96 robust property, 81–83 robust theorem, 84–85 top-down justifications, 92–95 Model ensembles, 54, 100 Model intercomparison projects (MIPs), 46 Model response, 987 Modern capitalism, 437 Modern political economy, 436 Modest slippery slope argument (MSSA), 926 Monetary value, 633 Money (debt), 633 Monkeywrenching, 1155 Moral anthropology, 441 Moral bioenhancement, 945 Moral considerability, 364, 366

Index Moral corruption, 704, 705 Moral mathematics, 549–552 Moral psychology, 288, 289, 291 Moral standing, 366–368 Moral status, 901 Moral uncertainty contestation, 984 epistemic uncertainty, 983 moral inquiry, 983 scientific and, 981 variability, 984 Motivation acceptance of a rule, 701 adoption of a rule, 701 application of a rule, 701 contrastive motivations, 709, 711 definition, 700 diachronic solidarity, 714 individual causal inefficiency, 702, 703 intergenerational indifference, 709 Kantian theory, 715, 717 misalignment, 701 moral corruption, 705 motivational impasse, 707, 709 preference management, 704 procrastination, 706 reciprocity, 705 risk perception, 703 solidarity versus indifference, 712 uncertainty, 702 Motivational impasse, 707 Multiplayer prisoner’s dilemma, 1070 Multisensory sympathetic attention, 397–399 Multispecies ethnography, 197, 199 Myers, C., 482 N Narrative transportation, 514 Nash equilibrium, 269 Nationally determined contributions (NDCs), 210 Nation-states, 723, 733 Natural aesthetics, 426 Natural contract, 352 Natural fibers, 527 Natural language processing (NLP) models, 966 Natural variability, 987 Nature, 475 collapse of, 475 inherent in, 475 Nature-based solutions (NbS), 830–835

Index Nature conservation, 822–824 Nature-deficit disorder, 417, 425, 426 ND-GAIN index, 931 Negative aesthetic experience, 406, 408, 409 Negative coupling, 70 Negative emissions technologies, 922 Neoliberal expertocracy, 1019 Neo-Malthusians, 1014 Neo-republicanism, 1195, 1202, 1206 New Environmental/Ecological Paradigm Scale (NEP), 289, 291 New York City Panel on Climate Change (NPCC), 244 No-difference problem, 545–547 No-harm principle, 565 Non-Abrahamic stewardship, 441 Non-Anthropocentric alternatives, 366 Non-anthropocentric values, 813 Non-cognitivism, 400 Non-cooperative behavior, 1186, 1187 Non-cooperative drift, 1067 Non-fossil economy, 989 Non-future-focused institutions future-beneficial practices in, 1233 future-focused practices in, 1233 Non-ideal theory, 1237 Non-identity paradox impersonal approach, 671, 672 laissez-faire attitude, 668, 669 non-consequentialist/threshold-based accounts harm, 669–671 Non-identity problem, 649–652, 665, 782, 783, 785 Non-market damages, 251, 261 Non-refoulement, 1123 Non-renewable energy sources, 633, 634 Normal functioning, 805–806 Normative decision theory, 275 Normative presuppositions of the state system, 1129 Northcott, M., 434–438, 440, 444 Novel ecosystems, 838 N-tipping, 112 Nutritional inequalities, 874–875 Nylon, 527 O Obligations, 563, 579 Observation, 980, 981, 983, 985, 986, 993 Observational climate data, 129 Observational uncertainties, 985, 986 Occasionalism, 715

1309 1.5 Report, 221 One Health approach, 183, 185 Ontological phenomenon, 387 Ontology, 848 of Earth, 390 of World, 390 Operation Noah, 433, 435 OP, see Overpopulation Opportunities, 633 Ordinal utilities, 270 Organization for Economic Co-operation Development (OECD), 368 Orientedness, 596 Outcome-based legitimacy, 1240–1241 Overfitting, 142 Overpopulation, 1014 and climate change, 687–689 debate on, 689–693 P Parameterizations, 26, 30, 35 Pareto improvement, 1261 Parfit, D., 567, 665, 682 Paris Agreement, 208, 216, 617–620, 790, 1084, 1230, 1293 Parliament of the living, 1007 Participative justice, 609 Passmore, J., 438–440 Passport for the territorially dispossessed, 1136 Patriotism, 595 Perceived equivalence, 706 Perfectionism, 902 Person affecting restriction, 626 Person-affecting view, 655 Petitio pincipii fallacy, 424 Phenomenology, 482 Philantro-capitalism, 530 Philosophy of climate change, 1293, 1294 Pigouvian tax, 251, 262 Pihkala, P., 470, 478 Planetary boundaries (PB), 1271 Planetary health, 812–817 Plantation economy, 195 Plant ethics, 901–902 and climate change, 905–913 instrumentalist and relational theories, 903–904 intrinsic value, 902–903 Pluralism in climate science, 57 model, 58 ontic competitive, 57

1310 Pluralism (cont.) pragmatic integrative, 57 reconceptualization of, 59 value of, 58 Policy detail, 261, 262 Policy relevant tipping elements (PRTE), 114 Political and social philosophy, 1147 Political economy, 436 Political equality, 635 Political feasibility, 1084 Political morality, 452, 456 Political philosophy, 12 Politics of Climate Change, 1012 Polluter pays principle (PPP), 608, 734, 766, 781–787, 794, 1094–1095, 1106, 1262, 1264 Polluter pays, then receives principle, 781, 786–789 Population control, 745 Population ethics and climate change antinatalism and procreative limitarianism, 656–658 nonidentity problem, 649–652 population size and total greenhouse gas emissions, 658–659 theoretical outlooks, 652–655 Population growth, 653, 658, 659 Population momentum, 686 Positive externalities, 787–789 Positive rights, 631 Post-carbon sociology, 168 Postericide, 642 Post-reformation attitudes, 436 Poverty, 875 Power/responsibility principle (P/RP), 1111 Practical anxiety, 707 Precautionary principle, 638, 984, 996, 1090 Predictions, 139, 141 Present generations, 1075, 1076 Presentism, 1009 Preservationism, 824–826, 835, 839 Price instruments, 790 Primitive accumulation, 1018 Principle of borrowing from the future (BFF), 1259–1260 concessive arguments, 1260–1261 enthusiastic arguments, 1261–1262 Principle of historical responsibility, 1094 Principles of climate justice, 734, 735 Prioritization, 912, 913 Prisoner’s dilemma, 268–270, 284, 1073 Private climate decisions, 268–273, 275, 278, 279, 281, 283, 284

Index Probability, 984, 991–995 density functions, 75 Probable variation of the match of gametes (PVMG), 666 Procedural justice, 927–929 Process-based legitimacy, 1239–1240 Process-based models, 136 Procrastination, 706, 707 Procreative limitarianism, 657, 658, 660 Productionist logic, 391, 392 Pro-environmental behaviour, 294 Programmable robot swarms, 154 Progressive Green QE, 1256 Projections, 27–29, 32, 36, 37 Promotional duty, 571 Promotional interventions, 1254 Prudential interventions, 1254 Psychological research, 288, 294 Psychology, 8, 13 Public health, 812, 817 Pure rate of time preference, 258

Q Quality adjusted life-years (QALYs), 806 Quality of life, 809 Quantity instruments, 790 “Quasi-observational” attitude, 512

R Rabbinic Letter on the Climate Crisis, 432 Radical democracy, 1016 Radical democrats, 1004 Radical inequality, 181 Rationalisation, 296 Rationality, 283, 364, 365 Realized consumption inequalities, 255 Reanalysis, 130 Reasonable environmentalism, 495 Reciprocity, 705 Recycling, 528, 530, 533 Refraction, 171 1951 Refugee Convention, 1122 Relational ethics, 455 Relational inequalities, 874 Reliability independence, 98 Religion and climate change implications of White’s and Passmore’s stances, 438–440 Northcott’s interpretation of statements and attitudes, 434–438

Index religious declarations on climate change, 432–434 stewardship, 440–444 Religious stewardship, 443 Remote sensing technologies, 212 Renaissance Humanism, 340 Renewable energy, 363, 372–374 Reparation, 1139 Reparative framework, 1138 Representational accuracy, 136–139 Representational depth, 143 Representative democracy, 1009 Republican democracy, 1004 Republican economics, 1198–1201 Republicanism, 1194–1195 Republican theory of liberty, 1200 Repugnant conclusion, 652–655, 671, 682 Rescaling, 206, 217–220 Resilience, 877–878 Resourcism, 824–826, 839 Responsibility, 726–728 Responsibility-based approach, 606 Restitution, 767 Reuters Foundation, 834 Risk, 276, 277, 280, 282, 636, 637, 641, 979, 980, 984, 989–992, 994–997 Risk aversion, 259 Rival theories, 1167 Robot ethics, 152, 158 Robots-for-ecology, 153, 156, 157 Robots-in-ecology, 153, 156–158 Robot swarms, 154, 156, 157 Robust decision making, 995 Robust theorem, 84–85 Rovers, 158 R-tipping, 112 Rule consequentialism, 542, 552–553 S Sadistic Conclusion, 655 Savings principle, 631 Scales, 217, 218 Scenarios, 986, 987, 994, 995 Schelling, 469 Scheme of cooperation, 1189 Scientific cognitivism, 400 Scientific models, 24, 29, 31 Scientific research, 126 Scientific uncertainty, 24, 57, 980 contestation, 982 variability, 982–983 Scientific understanding, 142 Scientists’ Warning, 320

1311 Sci-fi, 504, 506–509 Scope of justice, 629 Scrutability, 84 Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, 1155 Second-order agents, 772 Second-order duty, 761, 772–774 Second Treatise of Civil Government, 436 Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), 943 Self-determination, 1134 Senses, 396, 398, 400, 403, 407 Sensitivity analysis, 81 Sentience-based consequentialism, 544 Serotonin, 950 Set-up scenario, 511 Shallow ecology, 372 Short-termism, 1007, 1009–1011 Simulation of climate, 24, 33 model, 31 Simulation uncertainties external forcings, 987 model response, 987, 988 natural variability, 987 Sinking fund, 770 Skepticism, 437, 1050, 1055 responses to, 1060–1062 Slave trade, 1018 Smith, B., 473 Snowpiercer, 512 Social contract, 352 Social cost of carbon (SCC), 250, 251, 253, 254, 260–263 Social injustice, 951 Social justice, 627, 744, 751 and innovation, 878–879 and land use changes, 879–880 Social metabolism, 311 Social movements, 1148–1149, 1156 Social myths cosmologies, 491 discourse-mythological approach, 492 emotions and ethos, 490 environmentalism, 493, 494, 496–499 environmental religion, 495 Social practices, 450, 458 Social psychological studies, 1173 Social science, 118–120, 166, 167, 169, 177, 180, 183–185, 390 Social theory, 1008 Social tipping points, 118–120 Social vulnerability, 769, 771 Social welfare, 418, 424

1312 Socio-cultural models, 188 Sociological operationalization, 494 Sociology, 7 of climate change, 166, 168–170 Socio-material traits, 166 Solar energy, 178, 634 Solar radiation management (SRM), 923–924, 990 Solastalgia, 471, 485 Solidarity, 460–463, 708, 713 Solidity, 713 Source attribution, 768 Source-based legitimacy, 1238–1239 Sovereignty, 1138 Soylent Green, 511 Spatial planning, 230 Special pleading, 581 Standard Green QE, 1255–1256 State law, 233 Status oecologicus, 324 Stewardship, 440–444 Stock vs. flow measures, 261 Stoicism, 438 Storylines, 116, 117, 120, 993, 994 Structural domination, 1196 Structural emissions, 578 Structural injustice, 563 St. Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG), 1277 Subsistence emissions, 578 Subsistence exemptions, 1096 Substantive justice, 929–931 Subterranean forest, 310 Sufficientarianism, 631, 672, 673, 771 Sufficientarians, 1110 Supply Chain Act, 530 Sustainability, 251, 260, 261, 391, 527–529, 531, 533, 534, 536, 537, 626, 1012, 1013, 1015 Sustainable Apparel Coalition, 528 Sustainable development, 1232 Sustainable diet, 860 Sustainable fashion, 526, 527, 529, 532, 534–536 Sustainable politics, 1205 System consequentialism, 544 Systemic injustices, 354 Systemic racism, 606 Systemic value, 367 T Taxation, 1199 Taxonomy, 470, 479 Technologies, 172

Index (Techno)optimism, 476 Temperance, 595 Temporality, 401–403 Termination shock, 933 Territorial rights, 1134 The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis, 438 Theories of justice, 624–626, 632, 641 Theory of demographic transition, 689 Theory of planned behaviour, 294 Theory of polycentric governance, 235 Thoreau, H.D., 588, 595 Thought experiments, 505, 510–514, 520 Thresholds, 276–278 Tillich, P., 469, 471, 480–482 Time, 397, 402, 406, 408, 411 Tipping points, 106, 107, 110 in Anthropocene, 118–120 in climate and Earth systems, 111–113 communicating about, 116–118 scientific relevance and uncertainties, 113–116 Top-down justifications, 92–95 Tornado politics, 327 Total utilitarianism, 652–654 Trade, 745, 746 Traditional expected utility, 282 Traditional risk assessment approaches, 964 Tragedy of the Commons, 271, 564, 1180–1183, 1186 Tragedy of the Horizon, 321, 322 Transcendentalism, 498 Transformation, 207, 213, 215–217, 220, 221 Transgenerational actions, metaphysics argument, 674–676 climate change, 667, 668 collective climate actions, 667 future generations, 677, 678, 682 individual climate actions, 667 inhabited, future generations, 674 intra-generational level, 664 mitigation actions, 664 non-identity objection, 665–667 non-identity paradox, 673 non-identity problem, 665, 676, 677, 679–681 personal identity, 673 pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, 665 PVMG, 666 reductionist approach, Parfit, 674 relevant specific interests, 682 rights, 664, 671, 674 social actions, 678, 679 social objects, 678, 679

Index Transgenerational community, 1218, 1221, 1222 Transgenerational responsibility, 680 Transient climate response (TCR), 47 Transparency, 138 Tree spiking, 1155 Trust strategy, 1173 Truth plus error hypothesis, 74 Twin Earth experiment, 510 U UN Brundtland Commission, 1012 Unburnable fossil fuels, 211 Uncertainty, 6, 7, 13, 141, 636, 637, 641, 702, 1090, 1091 adaptive decision making, 996 definition, 979 expected utility maximization, 995 ground