scholarly journals “YOU KANT DO THAT!”: AN ARGUMENT THAT KANT’S PRINCIPLES FOR PEACE MANDATE A FULLY SUSTAINABLE APPROACH TO THE CLIMATE CRISIS

Aletheia ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Abigail Mazurek
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Global Climate Change ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Future Generations ◽  
Present Climate ◽  
Perpetual Peace ◽  
The Social ◽  
Climate Crisis

This paper explores the work of Immanuel Kant in the context of the modern-day crisis of global climate change, to suggest principles that we should embrace as a global community to ensure a viable environment for future generations. Specifically, this paper focuses on three of Kant’s articles outlined in “Towards Perpetual Peace”, a treatise that proposes principles of conduct to ensure peaceable interactions between intrinsically opposed nations. In light of the certain trans-generational consequences of current climate inaction, this paper shifts the traditional geographical axis of Kant’s principles of coexistence, to examine their applications along a temporal axis. This method is paired with carefully researched evidence about the anticipated consequences of our present climate inaction to assert that we are not behaving peaceably towards future peoples. This paper concludes by suggesting three of Kant’s articles of peaceable conduct that can and should be embraced by the decision-makers of today to protect the autonomy and well-being of all future members of the social contract.

Building a Resilient Tomorrow

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alice C. Hill ◽  
Leonardo Martinez-Diaz
Keyword(s):  
Global Climate Change ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Climate Impacts ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Climate Scenarios ◽  
Related Disease ◽  
Climate Resilience ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
Financial Disincentives ◽  
Biological Solutions

Even under the most optimistic scenarios, significant global climate change is now inevitable. Although we cannot tell with certainty how much average global temperatures will rise, we do know that the warming we have experienced to date has already caused significant losses, and that the failure to prepare for the consequences of further warming may prove to be staggering. This book does not dwell on overhyped descriptions of apocalyptic climate scenarios, nor does it travel down well-trodden paths surrounding the politics of reducing carbon emissions. Instead, it starts with two central facts: there will be future climate impacts, and we can make changes now to buffer their effects. While squarely confronting the scale of the risks we face, this pragmatic guide focuses on solutions—some gradual and some more revolutionary—currently being deployed around the globe. Each chapter presents a thematic lesson for decision-makers and engaged citizens to consider, outlining replicable successes and identifying provocative recommendations to strengthen climate resilience. Between discussions of ideas as wide-ranging as managed retreat from coastal hot zones to biological solutions for resurgent climate-related disease threats, the authors draw on their personal experiences to tell behind-the-scenes stories of what it really takes to advance progress on these issues. The narrative is dotted with stories of on-the-ground citizenry, from small-town mayors and bankers to generals and engineers, who are chipping away at financial disincentives and bureaucratic hurdles to prepare for life on a warmer planet.

scholarly journals Climate crisis and social work: lack of climate crisis education in social work curriculum

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tasneem Zaman
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Transformative Learning ◽  
Code Of Ethics ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Address Climate Change ◽  
The Social ◽  
Climate Crisis ◽  
Natural Disaster Management

This paper argues that social work curriculum ignores the pressing matter of the ongoing global climate crisis. Using the theoretical frameworks of anti-racism and anti-colonialism, I propose four ways to deal with this curricular gap in social work, which are the following: 1) to insert ethical obligations on the part of social workers to address climate change and environmental justice within the social work code of ethics, 2) to expand the person-in-environment focus to include nature and environmental justice, 3) to embrace a transformative learning paradigm, and 4) to implement a mandatory course on natural disaster management.

scholarly journals Managing pandemics as super wicked problems: lessons from, and for, COVID-19 and the climate crisis

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graeme Auld ◽  
Steven Bernstein ◽  
Benjamin Cashore ◽  
Kelly Levin
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Global Climate Change ◽  
Multiple Scales ◽  
Policy Design ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Path Dependency ◽  
Wicked Problem ◽  
Forward Path ◽  
Resource Requirements ◽  
Climate Crisis

AbstractCOVID-19 has caused 100s of millions of infections and millions of deaths worldwide, overwhelming health and economic capacities in many countries and at multiple scales. The immediacy and magnitude of this crisis has resulted in government officials, practitioners and applied scholars turning to reflexive learning exercises to generate insights for managing the reverberating effects of this disease as well as the next inevitable pandemic. We contribute to both tasks by assessing COVID-19 as a “super wicked” problem denoted by four features we originally formulated to describe the climate crisis: time is running out, no central authority, those causing the problem also want to solve it, and policies irrationally discount the future (Levin et al. in Playing it forward: path dependency, progressive incrementalism, and the “super wicked” problem of global climate change, 2007; Levin et al. in Playing it forward: Path dependency, progressive incrementalism, and the "super wicked" problem of global climate change, 2009; Levin et al. in Policy Sci 45(2):123–152, 2012). Doing so leads us to identify three overarching imperatives critical for pandemic management. First, similar to requirements to address the climate crisis, policy makers must establish and maintain durable policy objectives. Second, in contrast to climate, management responses must always allow for swift changes in policy settings and calibrations given rapid and evolving knowledge about a particular disease’s epidemiology. Third, analogous to, but with swifter effects than climate, wide-ranging global efforts, if well designed, will dramatically reduce domestic costs and resource requirements by curbing the spread of the disease and/or fostering relevant knowledge for managing containment and eradication. Accomplishing these tasks requires building the analytic capacity for engaging in reflexive anticipatory policy design exercises aimed at maintaining, or building, life-saving thermostatic institutions at the global and domestic levels.

scholarly journals Climate crisis and social work: lack of climate crisis education in social work curriculum

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tasneem Zaman
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Transformative Learning ◽  
Code Of Ethics ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Address Climate Change ◽  
The Social ◽  
Climate Crisis ◽  
Natural Disaster Management

This paper argues that social work curriculum ignores the pressing matter of the ongoing global climate crisis. Using the theoretical frameworks of anti-racism and anti-colonialism, I propose four ways to deal with this curricular gap in social work, which are the following: 1) to insert ethical obligations on the part of social workers to address climate change and environmental justice within the social work code of ethics, 2) to expand the person-in-environment focus to include nature and environmental justice, 3) to embrace a transformative learning paradigm, and 4) to implement a mandatory course on natural disaster management.

Bridging Theory and Practice

2019 ◽  
pp. 93-116
Author(s):  
Alix Dietzel
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Global Climate Change ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Methodological Framework ◽  
Transnational Governance ◽  
The Social ◽  
Governance Processes ◽  
Change Problem ◽  
Climate Change Governance

Chapter Four sets out the parameters for the cosmopolitan assessment of climate governance. The chapter first provides overview of the processes involved in global climate change governance: multilateral (United Nations Framework for the Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC) and transnational (cities, corporations, NGOs, sub-state authorities). Following this, Chapter Four outlines why actors in the UNFCCC and actors involved in transnational governance processes can be held responsible for bringing about a just response to the climate change problem. The chapter grounds the responsibility of these actors in their capability to enable the three demands of justice set out in Chapter Three by restructuring the social and political context. Finally, Chapter Four outlines a methodological framework to clarify how current practice will be assessed. This framework is based on a four-point hierarchy that can be used to investigate to what extent global governance actors enable each demand of justice.

Climate Justice. A Contractualist Perspective

2010 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Rinderle
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Global Climate Change ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Future Generations ◽  
Climate Justice ◽  
General Welfare ◽  
Principle Of Justice

AbstractThe aim of this paper is to question the utilitarian hegemony in recent discussions about global climate change by defending the possibility of a contractualist alternative. More particularly, I will raise and try to answer two questions. First: How can we justify principles of climate justice? As opposed to the utilitarian concern with maximizing general welfare, a contractualist will look at the question whether certain principles are generally acceptable or could not reasonably be rejected. Second: What do we owe to future generations in these matters? Three principles of climate justice are suggested: a sufficiency principle securing basic human rights, a principle of justice giving each generation a right to realize its conception of justice, and a principle of reciprocity requiring us to take responsibility for the reception of benefits and the causation of harm.

Deviant and guilt-ridden: Computing within psychological limits

First Monday ◽  
2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bran Knowles ◽  
Elina Eriksson
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Global Climate Change ◽  
Behavioral Change ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Resource Scarcity ◽  
Position Paper ◽  
Current State ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social

In this position paper we discuss a set of problems particular to computing within limits that draws on psychological and sociological barriers. The enormity of the predicaments we are facing, global climate change and resource scarcity, together with the social, cultural and national settings in which we are facing these predicaments, are seriously hampering our possibility to address them. We argue that without confronting the underlying psychology that perpetuates our current state of un-sustainability, there is little computing can hope to achieve. Furthermore, we also argue that these psychological limits to computing do not only concern the users of our systems, often portrayed as the people in need of behavioral change, but also ourselves, as researchers within computing. In this paper we start exploring what these psychological limits could be, what ideas computing for sustainability has tried but should now retire, and start discussing a way forward.

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