Climate Justice: Integrating Economics and Philosophy

Climate justice requires sharing the burdens and benefits of climate change and its resolution equitably and fairly. It brings together justice between generations and justice within generations. In particular it requires that attempts to address justice between generations through various interventions designed to curb greenhouse emissions today do not end up creating injustice in our time by hurting the currently poor and vulnerable. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) summit in September 2015, and the Conference of Parties (COP) to the Framework Convention on Climate Change in Paris in December 2015, brought climate change and its development impact centre stage in global discussions.

In the run up to Paris, Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland and UN Secretary General's Special Envoy for Climate Change, instituted the Climate Justice Dialogue "to mobilize political will and creative thinking to shape an ambitious and just international climate agreement in 2015". The editors of this volume, an economist and a philosopher, served on the High Level Advisory Committee of the Climate Justice Dialogue. They noted the overlap and mutual enforcement between the economic and philosophical discourses on climate justice. But they also noted the great need for these strands to come together to support the public and policy discourse. Climate Justice: Integrating Economics and Philosophy is the result.

Bringing together contributions from economists and philosophers, Climate Justice illustrates the different approaches, how they overlap and interact, and what they have already learned from each other and might still have to learn.

Ravi Kanbur is T.H. Lee Professor of World Affairs, International Professor of Applied Economics and Management, and Professor of Economics at Cornell University. He has served on the senior staff of the World Bank including as Chief Economist for Africa. He has published in the leading economics journals, including Journal of Political Economy, American Economic Review, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Economic Theory and Economic Journal.

He is President of the Human Development and Capabilities Association, Chair of the Board of United Nations University-World Institute for Development Economics Research, Co-Chair of the Scientific Council of the International Panel on Social Progress, and Past-President of the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality.

Henry Shue is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for International Studies, Department of Politics and International Relations and a Senior Research Fellow Emeritus, Merton College, both University of Oxford. He was the co-founder of the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy at the University of Maryland, the inaugural Hutchinson Professor of Ethics & Public Life at Cornell University (1987-2002), and Professor of International Relations, University of Oxford (2002-2007). Best known for Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence, and U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton University Press 1980), he published his first two decades of writings on climate change as Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection (OUP 2014). His articles on the morality of violence appeared as Fighting Hurt: Rule and Exception in Torture and War (OUP 2016). He is currently writing a series of articles on the urgency of action on climate change in light of duties of justice to future generations.