What are the ethics of climate change? This paper offers an overview of the emerging field of climate ethics. It argues that ethical analysis can contribute to five central concerns of climate policy: the treatment of scientific uncertainty, responsibility for past emissions, the setting of mitigation targets, and the places of adaptation and geo-engineering in the policy portfolio.
Significant values are incorporated into the foundations of international climate policy, and necessarily so. Ethical concepts play a leading role in the way the issue is set out in the foundational legal document, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change of 1992. This treaty states as its motivation the ‘protection of current and future generations of mankind’, declares as its major objective the prevention of ‘dangerous anthropogenic interference’ with the climate system, and announces that this objective must be achieved while also protecting ecological, subsistence, and economic values.
There is no doubt that ethical concerns are central to climate policy. Still, important questions arise concerning how to interpret, reconcile, and implement the relevant values, and whether the legal account of them should be challenged or extended. Ethical analysis can contribute to:
- The treatment of scientific uncertainty: The claim that climate change poses a real threat that justifies serious action is supported by a broad scientific consensus, but it faces strong scepticism from those who question the validity of climate change science
- Responsibility for past emissions: One proposal for addressing climate changes asserts that responsibility should be assigned in light of past emissions, but this faces stiff opposition
- The setting of mitigation targets: Most people accept that something should be done to limit future emissions, but such a limit raises profound ethical questions, especially of procedural and distributive justice.
- The place of adaptation in policy: Adaptation measures must be part of any sensible climate policy, because we are already committed to some warming due to past emissions, but questions remain over the extent to which they can be incorporated into policy
- The place of geo-engineering in policy: ‘Geo-engineering’ solutions to climate change have been proposed for decades, but have recently gained some prominence, raising concerns as to the risks associated with such actions.
Of special interest is the place of climate policy within wider approaches to global justice, environmental ethics, and the ethics of human wellbeing. In particular, much of the current discussion tends to assume that we must work more-or-less within the constraints of the current geopolitical system. But, of course, climate change might be thought to pose a practical and philosophical challenge to that system. Lessons for the international community include:
- Climate change and the world’s response to it remains an emerging field. As such, current practical and theoretical work is merely engaged in delineating the ‘ethics of the transition’, helping us to bridge the gap between what is and what should be.
- While the ethics of this transitional phase of climate change research are important, it is equally important to determine global aims, in terms of institutions and ways of life that create a more equitable and sustainable future.
- Ethics are not just relevant to the transitional phase; they should be a central part of this ‘ideal’ project.
