Call for Papers
What: Climate Change: A Conference on Politics, Policy, and Justice
Where: Bern University, Bern, Switzerland
When: August 19-21, 2009
Please send abstracts (500-800 words) for paper proposals to
climateandjustice@gmail.com no later than May 1st. Applicants will
know of their acceptance by May 15th. Quality papers will be invited
to contribute to an edited collection of the conference proceedings.
Graduate students are encouraged to submit proposals, as travel
funding has been set aside to aid exemplary graduate student
presenters. For more information, please see the conference website:
www.climateandjustice.org. The site will be continually updated with
travel and lodging information, the conference schedule, and other
useful information as it becomes available. If you have further
questions, please contact Sarah at sbkenehan@gmail.com.
Keynote speakers:
Simon Caney, Oxford
Lukas Meyer, Graz University
Stephen Gardiner, University of Washington
Conference Abstract
Since the late 1980s climate change has been centre-stage in the
international policy arena. However, as of yet, little has been done
to incorporate all global players while at the same time catalysing
the type of action that must be taken in order to combat this problem.
There are likely many reasons for this current inaction, including but
surely not limited to: questions surrounding climate science and
predictions; questions concerning the most effective way to cope with
the problem; and questions relating to the fair distribution of the
burden of dealing with climate change. The focus of this conference
will be to discuss the latter issue, i.e. the role of justice as it
arises in the context of climate change.
Justice related issues emerge in the debate over climate change policy
on many levels. First, and probably most obviously, it must be
determined what role each global actor will play in any coordinated
effort to mitigate climate change. The answer to this question is not
straightforward, as there are numerous factors that must be
considered, including whether rights to emit greenhouse gases (GHG)
should be divided equally among all nations, or whether rights to emit
should be a function of the geographical placement of a nation, the
population of a nation, the level of development of a nation, or even
perhaps some combination of these elements. Second, and intimately
related to the first issue, it has to be decided to what degree (if
any) a nation’s historical emissions ought to be considered. As with
the first issue, there is no clear-cut way to work through this
problem, since there are seemingly justifiable reasons for engaging in
all of the following: severely limiting the largest historical
emitters’ claims to present and future emissions, considering only the
historical record from the point in time in which a nation could
reasonably have known of the harm it was contributing to, or,
alternatively, agreeing that historical emissions should have no
weight in the discussion, but rather all nations should agree on a
fair emissions target from the present forward. Third, it must be
determined to what degree (if any) future people ought to be taken
into consideration when establishing climate change policy, since it
has been predicted that the effects of climate change will stretch far
into the future. Addressing this question requires having discussions
on how future people can have justice claims on current people, what
those justice claims might be, and how far into the future these
claims reach. Fourth, it must be determined what types of entities
have viable justice claims. Is it only individual persons that can
make coherent justice claims? Or can nations, industries, businesses,
non-human animals, species, ecosystems, and the like have and make
meaningful justice claims? Finally, we must determine the level of
responsibility individual actors have in mitigating and adapting to
climate change, since it is not evident whether this responsibility
falls only on nations, or whether it also rests with individuals,
businesses, and industries, as well. Clearly then, the issue of
justice and climate change is both complex and requires immediate
attention.
The highlight of this conference will be presentations by three
scholars, all of whom have published widely on the various concerns of
justice and their relation to climate change. These scholars include
Professor Simon Caney, Oxford; Professor Stephen Gardiner, University
of Washington; and Professor Lukas Meyer, Graz University.
