Clare Heyward & Edward Page 2024
In: Mosquera, J. & O. Torpman (ed.), Studies on Climate Ethics and Future Generations vol. 6. Working Paper Series 2024:10–17
Due to faulty planning or unforeseeable contingencies, policies undertaken to manage climate change may succeed in reducing one source of disruption in peoples’ lives only to introduce a new source of disruption. Where these disruptions would be intolerable without further intervention to ameliorate them, we can say that a ‘secondary climatic injustice’ has arisen. Secondary climatic injustices can usefully be distinguished from ‘primary climatic injustices’, which concern unjustified disruptions of peoples’ lives that arise due to the absence of policies designed to manage climate change. In this paper, we show how secondary climatic injustices arise from multiple pathways of policymaking and then set out an account of how these injustices can be rectified by compensating the victims so that, even if they do bear some additional costs, they share the costs of tackling climate change equitably with other users of the climate system. This basic level of compensation, we argue, may be enhanced if one or both of two exacerbating features arise on the part of the policymakers who cause a secondary injustice. These are (i) how avoidable the secondary injustice was from the policymaker’s perspective, and (ii) how excusably ignorant the policymaker was for not selecting the most just policy.
