This chapter explores the normative issues raised by the environment. It starts by defining the environment and explaining why the environment raises ethical questions. The chapter is then structured around four sets of questions. First, it considers why the environment has value and explores whether environmental degradation is unjust, and, if so, when. Many environmental problems are caused by one generation, but the consequences are felt by later generations. For this reason, the second set of questions concerns what responsibilities we have to future generations. The chapter then turns, third, to consider the ethical problems that are raised by policies designed to protect the environment. Finally, the chapter examines debates about what kind of political system is best equipped to deal with the challenges raised by environmental change. The case study focuses on climate change, examining some of the ethical issues surrounding dangerous climate change.

Abstract Research on global justice often focusses on a narrow range of thinkers, topics, and arguments, and tends to ignore the contributions from thinkers and traditions from many parts of the world. This chapter argues that this exclusionary approach is deeply mistaken. It defends what I term the ‘inclusion of voices’. This holds that the failure to engage with thinkers from all over the world is disrespectful and stands in the way of a deeper understanding of global justice. It further argues that including more voices is not enough and that what is required is what I term the ‘inclusive agenda’. The ‘agenda’ of global justice, the chapter argues, should be inclusive in the sense that the topics selected reflect the concerns of all humanity and the concepts employed and questions posed are sensitive to the many different ways in which topics might be framed and different questions asked.

Axel Gosseries’s What is Intergenerational Justice? (2023) is a splendid book. It provides an introduction to the topic of intergenerational justice that is accessible and an excellent guide to someone unfamiliar with the issues. At the same time it has much of interest to those who are well versed in these debates. It has rich and illuminating discussions of, among other things, what principles of justice should govern how people treat future generations, environmental sustainability, climate change, and the implications of our impacts on future people for ideals of democratic legitimacy and normative theorizing about institutional design. In this article I want to focus on Gosseries’s analysis of climate change. His chapter on climate justice is rich and nuanced and covers a considerable amount of ground. I shall focus on one issue in particular. One key feature of climate change is that the problem has, in part, been caused by the actions of previous generations. Human beings emitted very low quantities of greenhouse gases for centuries. However, from the 19th century onwards emissions of greenhouse gases started to rise and increased dramatically throughout the 20th century and the first decades of this century. One question that arises is: When we are considering what duties current generations have to mitigate climate change, what normative significance should we attach to the climate-endangering activities of people in the past? Should those alive now pay for the ways in which past members of their country have harmed the climate system? Many climate campaigners appeal to an idea of historical responsibility. Are they right to do so? In this article I shall analyse Gosseries’s discussion of these questions.

Abstract: Many societies are now having to live with the impacts of climate change and are being confronted with heat waves, wildfires, droughts, and rising sea levels. Without radical action, future generations will inherit an even more degraded planet. This raises the question: How can political institutions be reformed to promote justice for future generations and to leave them an ecologically sustainable world? In this essay, I address a particular version of this question; namely: How can supra–state institutions and transnational political processes be transformed to realize climate justice for future generations? The essay seeks to make two contributions. First, it considers what criteria should guide the evaluation of proposals for reform. It proposes four criteria, and analyzes how they should be interpreted and applied. Second, it considers a raft of different proposals, commenting on their strengths and weaknesses. It presents ten proposals in all, including, among others, establishing a UN high commissioner for future generations, appointing a UN special envoy for future generations, creating a UN agency mandated to protect future generations, instituting representatives for the future in all key UN bodies, ensuring greater youth participation in transnational political decision-making processes, and further developing a global citizens’ assembly. In short, my aim is to outline some of the options available and to defend a normative framework that we can use to evaluate them.

The Parties to the UNFCCC and Paris Agreement agreed to act on the basis of equity to protect the climate system. Equitable effort sharing is an irreducibly normative matter, yet some influential studies have sought to create quantitative indicators of equitable effort that claim to be value-neutral (despite evident biases). Many of these studies fail to clarify the ethical principles underlying their indicators, some mislabel approaches that favour wealthy nations as ‘equity approaches’ and some combine contradictory indicators into composites we call derivative benchmarks. This Perspective reviews influential climate effort-sharing assessments and presents guidelines for developing and adjudicating policy-relevant (but not ethically neutral) equity research. Contributions to mitigate climate change should be equitable under the Paris Agreement, yet researchers take sharply diverging approaches to assessing national effort. This Perspective evaluates the literature and presents guidelines for policy-relevant—and ethically explicit—research on equity.

As experts predict that at least some irreversible climate change will occur with potentially disastrous effects on the lives and well-being of vulnerable communities around the world, it is paramount to ensure that these communities are resilient and have adaptive capacity to withstand the consequences. Adaptation and resilience planning present several ethical issues that need to be resolved if we are to achieve successful adaptation and resilience to climate change. In this paper, we present six core discussions that should be an integral part of adaptation and resilience planning: (i) Where does 'justice' feature in resilience and adaptation planning and what does it require in that regard?; (ii) How can it be ensured that adaptation and resilience strategies protect, take into consideration, and represent the interest of the most vulnerable individuals and communities?; (iii) How can different forms of knowledge be integrated within adaptation and resilience planning?; (iv) What trade-offs need to be made when focusing on resilience and adaptation and how can they be resolved?; (v) What roles and responsibilities do different actors have to build resilience and achieve adaptation?; (vi) Finally, what does the focus on ethics imply for the practice of adaptation and resilience planning?

This chapter explores the relationship between human rights, population and climate change. Some argue that to address climate change it is necessary to implement policies that reduce world population growth and perhaps also population size. This chapter examines two ways of approaching this issue, both of which focus on what human rights people have. One calls for limits on people's human right to reproductive choice. A second approach holds that respecting core human rights will be sufficient to tackle the demographic drivers of climate change. This chapter critically evaluates both accounts and proposes a third one that builds on the second approach but goes beyond it.

This chapter tries to motivate support for what it terms the Right of Resistance against Global Injustice, where this should be understood as a right to bring about greater global justice. More specifically it defends two conceptions of this core idea. Roughly stated, the first maintains that persons have the right to take direct action that will immediately and directly secure their rights or the rights of others (what is referred to as the Right of Resistance against Global Injusticei (RRGIi)). The second holds that persons have the right to engage in action that transforms the underlying social, economic, and political structures that perpetuate injustice in order to bring about greater justice in the future (what is referred to as the Right of Resistance against Global Injusticeii (RRGIii)). These formulations are approximate and need to be explicated more fully, but they express the key ideas. The chapter seeks to specify these more fully, and to address various questions about the meaning, content, grounding, and limits of these rights.

This concluding chapter addresses the normative issues raised by the environment. The environment includes the earth's crust, soil, and natural resources; the atmosphere; all the earth's water; and the biosphere. Human activity has a profound impact on the environment. Indeed, many of the activities that humans engage in — activities which often serve important human interests and goals — result in environmental degradation. Persons depend on the environment in many ways: for their food, health, and for many of their goals in life. As such, humans face a problem when people impact on the environment to such an extent that it undercuts people's capacity to enjoy the standard of living to which they are entitled. Thus, a just account of the environment will take into account both the fact that people have legitimate interests which involve using the environment and the fact that there must be limits on people's environmental impacts.

The article Whose carbon is burnable ? Equity considerations in the allocation of a “ right to extract ,” written by Sivan Kartha, Simon Caney, Navroz K. Dubash, and Greg Muttitt, was originally published electronically on the publisher’s internet portal (currently SpringerLink) on 24 May 2018.

We develop a new index which maps relative climate change contributions to relative emergent impacts of climate change. The index compares cumulative emissions data with patterns of signal-to-noise ratios (S/N) in regional temperature (Frame et al 2017 Nat. Clim. Change 7 407–11). The latter act as a proxy for a range of local climate impacts, so emergent patterns of this ratio provide an informative way of summarising the regional disparities of climate change impacts. Here we combine these with measures of regional/national contributions to climate change to develop an ‘emissions-emergence index’ (EEI) linking regions’/countries’ contributions to climate change with the emergent regional impacts of climate change. The EEI is a simple but robust indicator which captures relative contributions to and regional impacts from climate change. We demonstrate the applicability of the EEI both for discussions of historical contributions and impacts, and for considering future relative contributions and impacts, and examine its utility in the context of existing related metrics. Finally, we show how future emissions pathways can either imply a growth or reduction of regional climate change inequalities depending on the type and compositions of socioeconomic development strategies.

Economic Growth, Human Development, and Welfare" of the 2018 Report of the International Panel on Social Progress (IPSP). Mission of the IPSP: The International Panel on Social Progress (IPSP) will harness the competence of hundreds of experts about social issues and will deliver a report addressed to all social actors, movements, organizations, politicians and decision-makers, in order to provide them with the best expertise on questions that bear on social change. The Panel will seek consensus whenever possible but will not hide controversies and will honestly present up-to-date arguments and analyses, and debates about them, in an accessible way. The Panel will have no partisan political agenda, but will aim at restoring hope in social progress and stimulating intellectual and public debates. Different political and philosophical views may conceive of social progress in different ways, emphasizing values such as freedom, dignity, or equality. The Panel will retain full independence from political parties, governments, and organizations with a partisan agenda. While the Panel will primarily work for the dissemination of knowledge to all relevant actors in society, it will also foster research on the topics it will study and help to revive interest for research in social long-term prospective analysis

What kind of world should current generations bequeath to those who come after them? One appealing principle holds that those alive at any one time should leave future people with a standard of living that is at least as good as the one that they claim for themselves. Versions of this principle have been put forward by economists, philosophers, and legal scholars. However, while the principle is an attractive one, its meaning is also elusive. This chapter therefore explores how best to spell out the underlying principle. It then seeks to motivate support for this principle and to outline its implications for development, global inequalities, and addressing climate change.

Carbon emissions—and hence fossil fuel combustion—must decline rapidly if warming is to be held below 1.5 or 2 °C. Yet fossil fuels are so deeply entrenched in the broader economy that a rapid transition poses the challenge of significant transitional disruption. Fossil fuels must be phased out even as access to energy services for basic needs and for economic development expands, particularly in developing countries. Nations, communities, and workers that are economically dependent on fossil fuel extraction will need to find a new foundation for livelihoods and revenue. These challenges are surmountable. In principle, societies could undertake a decarbonization transition in which they anticipate the transitional disruption, and cooperate and contribute fairly to minimize and alleviate it. Indeed, if societies do not work to avoid that disruption, a decarbonization transition may not be possible at all. Too many people may conclude they will suffer undue hardship, and thus undermine the political consensus required to undertake an ambitious transition. The principles and framework laid out here are offered as a contribution to understanding the nature of the potential impacts of a transition, principles for equitably sharing the costs of avoiding them, and guidance for prioritizing which fossil resources can still be extracted.

* Introduction Simon Caney, David George, and Peter Jones. * National Identity and National Self-Determination D. George. * What Place for Nationalism in the Modern World? Neil MacCormick. * What Is Nationality and Is There a Right to National Self-Determination? John Charvet. * The Skeleton in the Cupboard: Nationhood, Patriotism and Limited Loyalties Margaret Canovan. * Reconstructing the Landscape of Imagination Yael Tamir. * National Obligations: Political, Cultural or Societal? Paul Gilbert. * Individuals, Nations and Obligations S. Caney. * Territorial Justice Hillel Steiner. * Environmental Rights and National Sovereignty Helen Batty and Tim Gray. * Cultural Pluralism, Universal Principles, and International Relations Theory Chris Brown. * International Human Rights: Philosophical or Political? P. Jones.

The recent article by Robiou du Pont et al makes counter-intuitive claims about the degree to which different countries’ pledged mitigation contributions under the Paris Agreement are “equitable”, i.e., whether they meet benchmarks associate with various equity approaches. The analysis is flawed however, in three ways, with a cascading and systematic bias against poorer and lower-emitting countries. Firstly, the methodology is heavily driven by “grandfathering” as an allocation approach, despite the absence of any ethical justification. Second, it omits “Responsibility” as a basis, without explanation, even though it is included in the set of categories (taken from the IPCC AR5) within which the authors claim to be working. And third, the IPCC raised several other ethical considerations not covered by the authors’ particular choice of categories. Each of these three analytical shortcomings biases the results in favor of the wealthier and higher-emitting countries.

Shue’s analysis of climate change makes very little use of the concept of rights in general, and basic rights in particular. This chapter suggests that a rights-centred approach provides a fruitful way of thinking about climate change, and argues that anthropogenic climate change jeopardizes fundamental human rights. This prompts the question ‘who is duty-bound to uphold these rights’? An account of the responsibilities generated by these rights is developed, which is then contrasted with the account defended by Shue.

Climate change is projected to have very severe impacts on future generations. Given this, any adequate response to it has to consider the nature of our obligations to future generations. This paper seeks to do that and to relate this to the way that inter-generational justice is often framed by economic analyses of climate change. To do this the paper considers three kinds of considerations that, it has been argued, should guide the kinds of actions that one generation should take if it is to treat both current and future people equitably. In particular it examines the case for what has been termed pure time discounting, growth discounting and opportunity cost discounting; and it assesses their implications for climate policy. It argues that none of these support the claims of those who think they give us reason to delay aggressive mitigation policies. It also finds, however, that the second kind of argument can, in certain circumstances, provide support for passing on some of the costs of mitigation to future generations.