How Fairness Principles in the Climate Debate Relate to Theories of Distributive Justice

Marc David Davidson
Additional contact information
Marc David Davidson: Department of Ethics and Political Philosophy, Faculty of Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies, Radboud University, 6525 HT Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 13, 1-16

Abstract: A central question in international climate policy making is how to distribute the burdens of keeping global average temperature increase to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels. In particular, there are four distributional issues: how to allocate the total amount of greenhouse gases that can still be emitted, who should bear the costs of mitigation, who should bear the costs of adaptation to unavoidable climate change, and who should bear the costs of residual climate damage. Regarding these distributional issues the academic literature offers a plethora of fairness principles, such as ‘polluter pays’, ‘beneficiary pays’, ‘equal per capita rights’, ‘grandfathering’, ‘ability to pay’, ‘historical responsibility’ and ‘cost effectiveness’. Remarkably, there is a theoretical gap between these principles and the central theories of distributive justice in moral and political philosophy. As a consequence, it is unclear how these principles are related, whether they can be combined or are mutually exclusive, and what the fundamental underlying values are. This paper aims to elucidate that debate. Understanding the different underlying values may facilitate bridge-building and movement in negotiation positions.

Keywords: carbon budget; distributive justice; climate negotiations; mitigation; fairness; burden-sharing; CBDR (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/13/7302/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/13/7302/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:13:y:2021:i:13:p:7302-:d:585161

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().