The basis of an obligation towards future generations in justice and ethics in the context of climate change

2014 ◽  
pp. 29-66
2021 ◽  
pp. 108602662110316
Author(s):  
Tiziana Russo-Spena ◽  
Nadia Di Paola ◽  
Aidan O’Driscoll

An effective climate change action involves the critical role that companies must play in assuring the long-term human and social well-being of future generations. In our study, we offer a more holistic, inclusive, both–and approach to the challenge of environmental innovation (EI) that uses a novel methodology to identify relevant configurations for firms engaging in a superior EI strategy. A conceptual framework is proposed that identifies six sets of driving characteristics of EI and two sets of beneficial outcomes, all inherently tensional. Our analysis utilizes a complementary rather than an oppositional point of view. A data set of 65 companies in the ICT value chain is analyzed via fuzzy-set comparative analysis (fsQCA) and a post-QCA procedure. The results reveal that achieving a superior EI strategy is possible in several scenarios. Specifically, after close examination, two main configuration groups emerge, referred to as technological environmental innovators and organizational environmental innovators.


2014 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 359-363 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas E. Lovejoy

One of the fundamental challenges of climate change is that we contribute to it increment by increment, and experience it increment by increment after a considerable time lag. As a consequence, it is very difficult to see what we are doing to ourselves, to future generations, and to the living planet as a whole. There are monumental ethical issues involved, but they are obscured by the incremental nature of the process and the long time frame before reaching the concentration of greenhouse gases and the ensuing accumulation of radiant heat—and consequent climate change—that ensues.


Eos ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randy Showstack

“No challenge poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change,” the president said.


2019 ◽  
Vol 88 (2) ◽  
pp. 29-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dirk Heine ◽  
Willi Semmler ◽  
Mariana Mazzucato ◽  
João Paulo Braga ◽  
Michael Flaherty ◽  
...  

Summary: To finance the transition to low-carbon economies required to mitigate climate change, countries are increasingly using a combination of carbon pricing and green bonds. This paper studies the reasoning behind such policy mixes and the economic interaction effects that result from these different policy instruments. We model these interactions using an intertemporal model, related to Sachs (2015), which proposes a burden sharing between current and future generations. The issuance of green bonds helps to enable immediate investment in climate change mitigation and adaptation, and the bonds would be repaid by future generations in such a way that those who benefit from reduced future environmental damage share in the burden of financing mitigation efforts undertaken today. We examine the effects of combining green bonds and carbon pricing in a three-phase model. We are using a numerical solution procedure which allows for finite-horizon solutions and phase changes. We show that green bonds perform better when they are combined with carbon pricing. Our proposed policy option appears to be politically more feasible than a green transition based only on carbon pricing and is more prudent for debt sustainability than a green transition that relies overly on green bonds.


2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Diane Williamson

AbstractWhile climate change involves spatial, epistemological, social, and temporal remoteness, each type of distance can be bridged with strategies unique to it that can be borrowed from analogous moral problems. Temporal, or intergenerational, distance may actually be a motivational resource if we look at our natural feelings of hope for the future of the world, via Kant’s theory of political history, and for our children. Kant’s theory of hope also provides some basis for including future generations in a theory of justice.


2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 154-161
Author(s):  
Михаил Елизаров

Over the decades, attempts were made to elaborate a legally binding single document on ocean resource management that would be acceptable to all countries. The culmination of this process was the adoption of the 1982 UN Convention on the law of sea. Since its entry into force, the Convention has become an important legal basis for ensuring the rational use of the world's ocean resources and their long-term conservation on behalf of future generations. At the same time, there remains the very acute challenge associated with finding a balance between reaching a global consensus on issues that are common to all and identifying topics that can be addressed and resolved by leaders at the global level. As humankind continues to postpone the adoption of urgent measures to prevent the effects of climate change, the environment deteriorates, while measures to mitigate these effects get more expensive and complex.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (19) ◽  
pp. 8135
Author(s):  
Chad W. Higgins ◽  
Majdi Abou Najm

The nexus between water, energy, and food has recently evolved as a resource-management concept to deal with this intimately interwoven set of resources, their complex interactions, and the growing and continuously changing internal and external set of influencing factors, including climate change, population growth, habits and lifestyles alternations, and the dynamic prices of water, energy, and food. While an intriguing concept, the global research community is yet to identify a unifying conceptual and mathematical framework capable of adapting to integrate gathered knowledge and ensuring inclusivity by accounting for all significant interactions and feedbacks (including natural processes and anthropogenic inputs) within all nexus domains. We present an organizing roadmap for a conceptual and mathematical representation of the nexus. Our hope is that this representation will organize the nexus research and formalize a way for a generalizable framework that can be used to advance our understanding of those complex interactions, with hope that such an approach will lead to a more resilient future with sustained resources for the future generations.


Author(s):  
William Abel ◽  
Elizabeth Kahn ◽  
Tom Parr ◽  
Andrew Walton

This chapter evaluates environmental taxes as part of a set of policies to address the threats that climate change poses. These taxes increase the price of activities that are environmentally harmful. In doing so, they discourage such behaviour and raise revenue that the state can use to redress its effects. The chapter embeds these considerations in an account of intergenerational justice, arguing that the current generation has a duty to provide future generations with prospects at least equal to its own. It also examines the objection that the proposed approach allows historical emitters off of the moral hook, showing that the state can adjust environmental taxes to take account of this. Finally, the chapter explores how to amend these taxes so that they are not regressive and that they do not present undue barriers to particularly valuable activities.


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