In general, Day 2 saw the conference participants listen to and engage in discussions on morals and ethics of climate change, distributive justice, governance of geoengineering, attitudes towards nature and issues related to participation and recognition.
Key take-aways from the key-note presentations were:
- Wealthy states are engaging in moral corruption by suggesting shadow solutions that would extort poor countries but still fail to address the problem of climate change;
- To achieve distributive justice, actions need to target participation and recognition as an important element, which would ensure that groups are not excluded from discussions regarding climate change adaptation and mitigation.
Stephen Gardiner from the University of Washington gave a keynote presentation about the moral corruption engaged in by developed states in addressing climate change. This, per Gardiner, had been exhibited through the forms of extortion that developed states were trying to impose towards developing countries for the developed states to engage in the cuts in greenhouse gas emissions that were required to avoid dangerous climate change. His question was: As in other examples of extortion, the victim must have something that the perpetrator of the extortion must desperately need for an exchange to occur. In this case, what would poor countries own that the wealthy states do not (or cannot get through other means)?
Gardiner’s talk also touched on the prevalence of shadow solutions proposed by developed countries (e.g. geoengineering), where he admitted that even though these solutions seemed to be able to work, they would not solve the problem – achieving reductions in anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.
Gardiner’s talk is linked to earlier work by Henry Shue (1999)[1], where Shue questions the effectiveness of incentives for developed states to engage in emission cuts. Shue asks: What types of incentives would be appropriate? What is the limit of providing incentives? Who provides these incentives and who pays?
Discussions panels were clustered under three themes:
- Distributive justice and climate change
Alex McLaughlin assessed the use of Simon Carney’s ‘Intergrationism’ approach in analysing the distribution of costs and benefits of climate change adaptation and mitigation.
Nimrod Kovner’s presentation looked at distributive justice in climate finance, where he discussed the implications of additionality of adaptation finance to development finance by developed states to developing countries, given the large overlap between the two.
- Contemplating governance of geoengineering
Joshua Wells presented on ‘Moral Schizophrenia’, which he referred to as a case where ethical considerations raised in geoengineering debates would be used to endorse other types of action before geoengineering is endorsed.
Daniel Callies on the other hand presented on legitimacy of institutions and governance of solar radiation management, where he sought to develop a broad framework of what these governance structures would look like.
- Attitudes towards nature
Samantha Earle discussed how imaginaries can affect how we engage in the climate change problem, and how these cut across attitudinal, moral and public spheres. Vera Van Gool talked about how green virtues may provide a framework for fostering new values that would create a society that is able to tackle climate change.
The last key-note speaker was Marion Hourdequin from Colorado College, who presented on Climate justice, recognition and participatory parity. Hourdequin discussed the important role of recognition and participation in ensuring that marginalized groups received climate justice. Giving case examples from the US and Mozambique, she demonstrated how people could be denied participation and recognition due to their social characteristics, which would eventually deny them distributive justice.
Hourdequin’s presentation placed recognition and participation as a key element for distributive justice, as compared to other works which see these as key for procedural justice. However, this presentation and that by Schlosberg on day 1 had one clear message: participation and recognition determine the extent to which adaptation or mitigation approaches are just.
By Jessica Omukuti and Lydia Messling, Leverhulme Doctoral Scholars
[1] Shue, 1999. Global environment and international inequality.