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Introduction to Climate Ethics and Equity
Case Studies
Climate as an Ethical Issue
Discounting
Harm
Vulnerability
Responsibility (causality, attribution)
Morality
Humanitarian Aid
Practical Questions
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Introduction to Climate Ethics and Equity
- Opportunities to
integrate concerns of ethics and equity into climate research in general.
- How to make climate
ethics usable. Define “climate ethics.”
- Climate change
issue is a good ethical one: “someone is doing something to others.”
- What are the dangers
as well as benefits of participatory justice?
- What are the elements
of democracy and which dimensions are important for responding to climate-related
events?
- Highlight three
levels of uncertainty (lack of data [parameter uncertainty], systematic
uncertainty [uncertainty that arises from exposure to multiple stresses;
may not be eradicated with better science], politically induced uncertainty
[derives from political ignorance].
- Can Nature have
a “seat” at the environmental negotiating table? Who speaks
for Nature?
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Case
Studies
- Examine the notion
of differentiated impacts.
- Identify through
case studies how a climate related catastrophe has differential impacts
on society.
- Could Atlanta,
Georgia be used as a case study site?
- The Greenbelt Movement
case study as a gender issue.
- The petrochemical
complex is another side of the fossil fuel industry (and climate change
issues).
- Coalition-building
between units facing the same threat (AOSIS, Alliance of Small Island
States, and low-lying coastal urban areas).
- Shell Oil can do
a much better job in other countries (Louisiana and southern Nigeria),
because it does a better job in The Netherlands.
- Forecasting by
analogy case study for Honduras based on Hurricane Fifi (1974) and Hurricane
Mitch (1998).
- When people pay
attention to gender, some solutions are more successful than would otherwise
be the case.
- Do institutions
change rapidly when there is a crisis?
- Do we learn from
past mistakes?
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Climate
as an Ethical Issue
- Climate can be
seen as a hazard, resource, or boundary constraint. The question is
how do we live with this dimension of nature which is inherently variable,
changeable, given to extremes, and only modestly predicable.
- Are ethical issues
different for climate variability, change and extremes and fluctuations?
- Why focus on climate-related
poverty and not just focus on poverty?
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Discounting
- The issue of discounting;
how to handle future values.
- How societies and
individuals treat “time” factors.
- How to treat the
past. Is it as important as the future? Policy makers want to deal with
future issues not present difficult ones.
- How to engage in
risk trade-offs across cultural and political boundaries?
- The issue of time
scale is fundamental throughout all situations of Earth as a system.
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Harm
- There is a need
to define harm and how to measure it (absolutely or relatively) under
a predetermined baseline condition. Who are we talking about and how
are they being hurt?
- Does it matter
what the cause of harm is?
- What is harm?
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Vulnerability
- Define and identify
perceptions of vulnerability and resilience.
- The concept of
instability across time scales needs to be explored.
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Responsibility
(causality, attribution)
- What are the measures
for assigning responsibilities to the problem?
- Should there be
a “culture of responsibility” as opposed to a “culture
of impunity”?
- How to protect
people (often minorities or disenfranchised) when existing scientific
information cannot? Is causality important? Should we care which came
first, the population or the polluters if the end result, poor health,
is the same?
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Morality
- Poverty vs. Wealth:
who should take moral responsibility and why?
- How do you deal
with ethics when you have different moral points of view?
- What role does
morality play in climate-related decision making?
- Racism and other
“isms” need to be part of the moral discussions.
- How does the role
of property rights play in the climate issue?
- How does one get
others (governmental and environmental decision makers) to consider
morality?
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Humanitarian
Aid
- Who gives aid to
whom … and why? What is the “intention” of aid, and does
intention matter? The resources that go to the needy countries are not
based on altruism but on a “globalization of guilt.”
- What is the role
or obligation of the recipients of aid? What is the responsibility of
the donors?
- What are the reasons
for “donor burnout”?
- Gender does matter.
- Why will the poor
always be with us? (poverty and vulnerability).
- People in rich
countries are well adapted but are getting less well adapted. Some of
this is camouflaged by wealth.
- What is the role
of insurance companies vis-à-vis ethical and equity issues? The
same question can be asked for banks.
- Paternalism is
a major problem with regard to humanitarian aid.
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Practical
Questions
- What is the impact
of globalization on climate issues?
- What are the implications
of climate-induced environmental migration?
- Why do we attribute
to governments that their actions will be rational?
- There is a need
to clarify the distinction between equity payment and liability responsibilities.
- What criteria are
used to identify a climate-related disaster?
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Consortium for Capacity Building (CCB)
INSTAAR | University of Colorado
1560 30th St | Campus Box 450
Boulder, Colorado 80309-0450
Tel. 1-303-492-5957
ccb.colorado.edu
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