Ethics, Environmental Justice and Climate Change

Paul G. Harris (ed.), Ethics, Environmental Justice and Climate Change (Edward Elgar, 2016). Climate change has started to affect communities and individuals adversely, sometimes causing extreme suffering and death. This has been manifested acutely in extreme weather events, but also chronically in prolonged droughts and associated adverse impacts on food production. The practical issues associated with climate change, for example those related to international negotiations and domestic economic and social policies, have been extensively addressed in scholarly literature. But climate change is also a normative problem: it presents individuals, communities and businesses with challenges and choices that raise profound questions of what is right and wrong, good and bad, just and unjust. Scholars have debated these normative issues. Arguably, effective long-term policies on climate change will never be realized if these debates are not understood by policymakers, diplomats and other government officials, as well as by those influencing climate policies outside governments. Importantly, the lessons arising from these debates will have to be integrated into international agreements, national regulations, local policies and individual human behaviors. With an original introduction by the editor, Ethics, Environmental Justice and Climate Change brings together articles written by eminent experts in the field to illuminate the ethics of climate change and the related questions of justice. It explores the themes of environmental philosophy, duties and responsibilities, intergenerational justice, international equity, cosmopolitanism, human rights, individual obligations and climate policy.