Journal articles on the topic 'Intergenerational climate justice'

This article explores the opportunities to use international human rights law to protect one’s right to life against the effects of climate change. It discusses four legal avenues: greening the existing human rights paradigm, formulating a new substantive right to the environment, public interest litigation and intergenerational justice. This is illustrated with case law from the European Court of Human Rights and various national jurisdictions. The main finding is that the human rights system should become more open towards public interest litigation and intergenerational justice, complemented by a broadening of the standing requirements.

Recently, attention has been drawn to the sustainability of artificial intelligence (AI) in terms of environmental costs. However, sustainability is not tantamount to the reduction of environmental costs. By shifting the focus to intergenerational justice as one of the constitutive normative pillars of sustainability, the paper identifies a reductionist view on the sustainability of AI and constructively contributes a conceptual extension. It further develops a framework that establishes normative issues of intergenerational justice raised by the uses of AI. The framework reveals how using AI for decision support to policies with long-term impacts can negatively affect future persons. In particular, the analysis demonstrates that uses of AI for decision support to policies of environmental protection or climate mitigation include assumptions about social discounting and future persons’ preferences. These assumptions are highly controversial and have a significant influence on the weight assigned to the potentially detrimental impacts of a policy on future persons. Furthermore, these underlying assumptions are seldom transparent within AI. Subsequently, the analysis provides a list of assessment questions that constitutes a guideline for the revision of AI techniques in this regard. In so doing, insights about how AI can be made more sustainable become apparent.

Climate justice is conceived as the intertemporal climate equity and equality exchange amongst generations. Sustainability—intended as the interplay amongst the economy, the society, the environment, and the governance—is essential to forge the climate justice theoretical framework. On this base, the study attempts to model the intertemporal choice of the status quo amongst generations in these four domains, making use of an overlapping generations (OLG) model making use of an intertemporal choice framework. The proxies detected are GDP growth (economy), environmental quality (environment), and labor growth, and environmental investment (society) as assumptions. The governance dimension is captured by the difference in wealth between young and old generations. The work aims at replying to the following research question: Which are the conditions for sustainable development such that climate justice holds? The intra-intergenerational exchange is defined in two periods, while the individual provides their preferred economic and environmental choice mix as consumption-saving. This study shows that keeping the business-as-usual scenario, young generations will have to bear the brunt of sustainable development. Additionally, reduced emissions are only achievable with increased efforts by the youth by reducing their leisure and consumption. These facts call for enhanced intergenerational sustainability and climate justice policies.

Abstract This article inhabits an interdisciplinary space between ecological economics and public theology. After the publication of the 2007 Stern report a debate ensued about the way the economic tool of time discounting is applied as a means to assess the cost of climate change. In this article, the debate is reviewed and the notions of intergenerational justice, sacrifice, stewardship and servant leadership in the Christian tradition are subsequently identified as valuable resources that are recognized by a growing number of philosophers, economists and business leaders, as being of benefit to the conversation on the present generation’s responsibilities to future generations. Time discounting is regarded in this article as a morally questionable economic method to weigh the costs of climate change.

AbstractIn this paper, I argue that a new principle of background justice should be added to Rawls’s Law of Peoples because climate change is an international and intergenerational problem that can destabilize the Society of Peoples and the well-ordered peoples therein. I start with explaining the nature of my project and Rawls’s conception of stability. I argue that climate change poses a realistic threat to the stability of climate-vulnerable liberal peoples and as a result undermines international peace and security. Despite the uncertainties due to the complexity of the climate system and about the resilience of liberal societies, liberal peoples’ fundamental interests in just basic institutions and national security call for the adoption of a precautionary principle. Rawls’s own principles are, I argue, inadequate to solve the stability problem from climate change. Still, his framework provides the theoretical resources to develop a new extension. I propose a new Rawlsian principle of international, intergenerational justice that guarantees the environmental background conditions under which well-ordered peoples can sustain their basic structure over generations and sketch the principle’s institutional implementation. I conclude with the theoretical and practical significance of this extension of Rawls’s theory.

Since the 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, a global shift in consciousness has taken place around the urgency of the Earth’s climate crisis. Amidst growing panic, teenagers are emerging as key leaders and mobilizers, demanding intergenerational justice and immediate action. They are, however, often depicted as lone revolutionaries or as pawns of adult organizations. These representations obscure the complex and important ways in which climate justice movements are operating, and particularly the ways in which dynamics of age intersect with other axes of power within solidarity efforts in specific contexts. This article explores these dynamics, building on analyses of intersectional and intergenerational solidarity practices. Specifically, it delves into detailed analysis of how the Seattle group of the Raging Grannies, a network of older activists, engaged in Seattle’s ShellNo Action Coalition, mobilizing their age, whiteness, and gender to support racialized and youth activists involved in the coalition, and thus to block Shell Oil’s rigs from travelling through the Seattle harbour en route to the Arctic. Drawing from a pivotal group discussion between Grannies and other coalition members, as well as participant observation and media analysis, it examines the Grannies’ practices of solidarity during frontline protests and well beyond. The article thus offers an analysis of solidarity that is both intergenerational and intersectional in approach, while contributing to ongoing work to extend understandings of the temporal, spatial, cognitive, and relational dimensions of solidarity praxis.

Globalization leveraged pressure on contemporary society. Today’s most pressing social dilemmas regarding climate change, overindebtedness and aging Western world populations demand rethinking capitalism. Understanding the bounds of capitalism to avoid ethical downfalls beyond the control of singular nation states infringing on intergenerational equity – the fairness to provide an at least as favorable standard of living to future generations as enjoyed today – has become a blatant demand. This article captures the human natural drive towards intergenerational fairness in order to retrieve information on how to implement intergenerational justice. Based on the idea of intergenerational equity as a natural behavioral law, the following paper theoretically outlines the current societal demand for eternal equity and proposes intergenerational justice theories. Intertemporal connectedness and interaction of overlapping generations enables intergenerational benefits transfers and burden sharing. Social mobility within networks comprised of different generations is enhanced through social upward movement opportunities. In addition, meritocracy helps alleviate intergenerational inequality. Describing intergenerational care as something natural that has been practiced ever since helps spearhead interdisciplinary endeavours to solve contemporary predicaments between overlapping generations. Exploring intergenerational opportunities is targeted at innovatively guiding the implementation of justice over time and between generations. Strengthening financial social responsibility, social welfare and environmental protection through future-oriented and socially responsible economic market approaches of capitalism in the 21st century is aimed at alleviating predictable economic, social and environmental crises to ensure a future sustainable humankind for this generation and the following.

Environmentalism has long placed heavy emphasis on strategies that seek to ensure the environment of today and the future roughly mirror the past. Yet while past-oriented approaches have come under increased scrutiny, environmental ethics in the time of climate change is still largely conceptualized as that which could pull humanity back from the brink of disaster or, at least, prevent the worst of it. As a result, practical and conceptual tools for grappling with what is owed to the dead and dying victims of environmental injustice have been and continue to be woefully underdeveloped. This paper advances scaffolding for robust environmental death ethics that are temporally pluralistic and at home within intergenerational climate justice.

AbstractThis paper argues that extortion is a clear threat in intergenerational relations, and that the threat is manifest in some existing proposals in climate policy and latent in some background tendencies in mainstream moral and political philosophy. The paper also claims that although some central aspects of the concern about extortion might be pursued in terms of the entitlements of future generations, this approach is likely to be incomplete. In particular, intergenerational extortion raises issues about the appropriate limits to the sway of central values such as welfare and distributive justice. We should be wary of ways in which such values invite us to buy off, or perhaps to join, an intergenerational climate Mafia.

International climate litigation is an important supplement to the global United Nations negotiating process. Establishing a normative basis for such litigation is important in terms of its legitimacy. Rehfeld’s concept of representation is used in this article to argue that it is coherent to talk about representation of future generations in relation to climate change-related claims brought by States on behalf of their citizens and future generations before international tribunals. The article argues that international law ought to promote justice (following Buchanan and Ratner) – but extended to include intergenerational justice defined as an obligation on current generations to ensure subsistence enjoyment of core human rights by future generations. It is further argued that international tribunals ought to represent future generations as a vehicle for promoting intergenerational justice, given the massive bias against future generations in current law-making and institutions. How this would translate into a concrete case is illustrated by discussion of a potential advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice. The normative framework is utilised to illustrate how the Court should 1) interpret some selected general principles of international environmental law in relation to the Paris Climate Agreement and 2) take a liberal interpretation of its procedural rules to allow amicus curiae briefs by international organisations purporting to represent or highlight the interests of future generations in the climate context.

This study investigates the representation of the Fridays for Future strikes in the German online newspapers Bild.de, Zeit Online and FAZ.net. Through a qualitative and quantitative content analysis over the time period August 2018 to March 2019, eight frames have been identified. Whereas Zeit Online shows a framing towards intergenerational justice, the coverage of FAZ.net and Bild.de strongly adheres to the protest paradigm. The majority of all articles guarantees protesters a voice, but this voice is often reduced to apolitical testimonies and the protesters’ self-agency is undermined through disparagement. German media coverage thus tends to reproduce existing power structures by marginalizing and depoliticizing the political agenda of a system critical protest. Although this framing feeds into the shift of the climate change discourse towards adaptation, the study shows that the idea of climate change as an issue of intergenerational justice and children’s rights has become part of the media’s agenda.

Global-scale solar geoengineering raises critical ethical questions, including questions of distributive, procedural, and intergenerational justice. Although geoengineering is sometimes framed as a response to injustice, insofar as it might benefit those most vulnerable to climate-related harms, geoengineering also has the potential to exacerbate climate injustice, especially if control of research, governance, and potential plans for deployment remains concentrated in the hands of a few. The scope and scale of solar geoengineering, the diverse concerns it raises, and the lack of consensus surrounding it pose particular challenges for justice. I argue that addressing these challenges requires an inclusive, dialogical approach that takes seriously diverse perspectives, particularly the perspectives of those who are most affected by climate change and those who have had the least voice in decisions surrounding it. The concept of recognition––as developed in the work of Nancy Fraser, David Schlosberg, and others––offers a normative ground for this approach and can help guide the development of institutions and practices directed toward geoengineering justice.

In the face of the ever-growing effect the actions of the present may have upon future people, most conspicuously around climate change, democracy has been accused, with good justification, of a presentist bias: of systemically favouring the presently living. By contrast, this paper will argue that the intimate relation, both quasi-ontological and normative, that Derrida's work establishes between temporality and justice insists upon another, more future-regarding aspect of democracy. We can get at this aspect by arguing for two consequences of the deconstructive affirmation of sur-vivre, of the alterity of death in life. Firstly, justice is not first of all justice for the living, but intergenerational from the start. This is so because no generation coincides with itself; rather, it dies and is reborn at every moment, and so – and this is the second consequence – consists in taking turns. Affirming life as living-on means affirming that it involves exchanging life's stations, as the young become the old, and the unborn become the dead. In this sense, the justice of living-on, I will argue, shares an essential feature with democracy, whose principle of exchanging the rulers with the ruled led Derrida to characterize it in terms of the wheel. Democracy consists in the principled assent to power changing hands, a switchover life demands of every generation at every turn. This assent further requires an acceptance of the gift of inheritance without which no life can survive. But as the gift can also never be fully acknowledged or appropriated, it must be passed on to the indefinite, unknown future, in a turning that is the time of life.

Climate change is projected to have very severe impacts on future generations. Given this, any adequate response to it has to consider the nature of our obligations to future generations. This paper seeks to do that and to relate this to the way that inter-generational justice is often framed by economic analyses of climate change. To do this the paper considers three kinds of considerations that, it has been argued, should guide the kinds of actions that one generation should take if it is to treat both current and future people equitably. In particular it examines the case for what has been termed pure time discounting, growth discounting and opportunity cost discounting; and it assesses their implications for climate policy. It argues that none of these support the claims of those who think they give us reason to delay aggressive mitigation policies. It also finds, however, that the second kind of argument can, in certain circumstances, provide support for passing on some of the costs of mitigation to future generations.

This article examines the question of whether international markets in allowances conferring the right to emit greenhouse gases are consistent with a cosmopolitan approach to global and intergenerational justice. After placing emissions trading within the context of both climate change policy and cosmopolitan political theory, three normative objections are examined to the use of emissions trading to mitigate the threat of dangerous climate change. Each objection arises from a different application of cosmopolitan thinking: (i) the potentially corrosive impact of greater use of emissions allowances markets on the environmental values of successive generations of atmospheric users; (ii) the awkward relationship between emissions markets and the norms of procedural justice endorsed by all prominent cosmopolitans; and (iii) the injustice expressed by policy instruments that commodify the atmosphere. It is argued that, while each objection should prompt some care in the construction and implementation of emissions trading schemes to guarantee their legitimacy among existing and future users of the atmosphere, they do not generate a decisive normative challenge to the use of markets, properly defined and regulated, to slow global warming.

Climate change impacts island communities all over the world. Sea-level rise, an increase in the frequency and intensity of severe weather events, and changes in distribution and health of marine organisms are among the most significant processes affecting island communities worldwide. On islands of the Caribbean and southwestern Indian Ocean (SWIO), however, today’s climate change impacts are magnified by historical environmental injustice and colonial legacies, which have heightened the vulnerability of human and other biotic communities. For some islands, archaeological and paleoecological research offers an important record of precolonial climate change and its interplay with human lives and landscapes. The archaeological record suggests strategies and mechanisms that can inform discussions of resilience in the face of climate change. We detail climate-related challenges facing island Caribbean and SWIO communities using archaeological and paleoecological evidence for past climate change and human response and argue that these cannot be successfully addressed without an understanding of the processes that have, over time, disrupted livelihoods, reshaped land- and seascapes, threatened intergenerational ecological knowledge transfer, and led to increased inequality and climate vulnerability.

Given popular music’s impact and its tradition in environmental activism, popular music education seems suited to contribute to a societal transformation towards sustainability in which the arts are increasingly considered to play an important role. The article proposes goals and methods of a climate-conscious popular music education, illustrated with examples from the author’s experience in music education. Drawing from and adding to eco-literate music pedagogy and activist music education, the article suggests that a climate-conscious popular music education should include: reducing the carbon footprint of educational practices; cultivating ecological consciousness, i.e. a connection to and appreciation of local nature; understanding climate change as a complex issue of intergenerational and global justice; using the specific potential of music to help overcome barriers to climate action, in particular its sensory, imaginative, creative, emotional, expressive and communal character.

The aim of this paper is to examine systematically the intergenerational justice and solidarity on sustainability in China, which is fundamental for achieving social/cultural change, whereas this is threatened by environmental unsustainability. A questionnaire survey with a sample size of 752 was carried out in Nanjing, Yangtze River Delta, China, with different age groups, and in the meantime, a series of qualitative studies was carried out through in-depth interviews and focus groups. It is shown that: with increasing age, people are more concerned about general and large-scale sustainability issue, whereas for smaller scale and immediate sustainability issues, there is no clear tendency with increasing age; older generations are more concerned about the causes of climate changes; in terms of responsibility for environmental problems, there are statistically-significant view changes with increasing age; for priority considerations in sustainability, among age groups, at the personal level, there is generally no statistically-significant difference, whereas at the public level, there are some statistically-significant differences; for preserving the future, there is generally no statistically-significant difference among age groups. Overall, there are considerable differences in intergenerational justice on sustainability, although there are still indications of solidarity among generations.

This paper presents data and analyses from our Planetary Health Film Lab (PHFL) and its sister project the Youth Climate Report. Qualitative data include semi-structured interviews with youth and their educators and content analysis of films produced by young people (ages 19–25) from six countries (Australia, Columbia, Ecuador, Italy, India, Canada). The educative processes designed for the Planetary Health Film Lab are illustrative of our work to build the field of planetary health education that is with/for young people whose educative projects are mobilized in turn to educate wider audiences and for policy change. The analyses show how youth document and record planetary health concerns alongside responsive projects that are embedded in awareness of climate justice and their interconnected ecological systems. The qualitative content analyses of selected films resulted in three themes: (1) Anthropogenic footprints, (2) Ecological and climate justice, and (3) Collective local/global solutions. Data also illustrates how young people’s participation in educative film projects contribute to the education of others and address related intergenerational justice issues. Implications for the knowledge, ethics and practices of youth-centred planetary health education are discussed as they augment the Framework for Planetary Health. Youth are crucial but overlooked collaborators in redressing planetary health education, an error we begin to correct through transdisciplinary approaches with/for young people who could help define the field.

AbstractDemocratic societies such as the United Kingdom have come to fail their young citizens, often sacrificing their interests in a political process that gives much greater weight to the preferences and interests of older citizens. Against this background of intergenerational injustice, this article presents the case for a shift in the political system in the direction of radical democratic inclusion of younger citizens, through reducing the voting age to 12. This change in the voting age can be justified directly, with reference to the status, interests, and capacities of younger citizens, and it can also be justified as a remedy to existing forms of intergenerational injustice. This change in the voting age would require a parallel transformation in the role of secondary schools as part of the ‘critical infrastructure' of a democratic society, which would be part of a broader shift towards a more genuinely democratic political culture. The proposal is defended against less radical alternatives (such as votes at 16) and more radical alternatives (such as votes for younger children). The article concludes with some reflections on democracy and intergenerational justice in light of the Covid pandemic and the climate emergency.

A social movement, which unites people around the idea of caring about the future of the Earth, climate and intergenerational justice is called climate activism. It has been on the rise due to the involvement of an increasing number of children and the youth. The aim of the study was to carry out an in-depth review of the phenomenon of children’s climate activism. The collective case study served as the main method. 15 cases of young climate activists from all around the world were analysed. The study sample consisted of young activists aged 7–12. The study revealed that the fight for a better tomorrow for all people and the whole planet is the essential conviction, which lies behind actions of young climate activists. By becoming public actors they demand appropriate actions to be taken by adults. The voice of children can be heard through petitions, open letters, campaigns, protests and speeches. Children’s climate activism is a form of children’s disagreement towards the passiveness of adults in the light of the growing environmental crisis. The causative power of children is seen as a phenomenon emerging from the network of relations established between various social actors.

Over the past year, the world has experienced colliding pandemics of viral outbreaks and injustice - social and health inequities, gender-based violence, marginalisation of immigrant populations, racial discrimination. All of this was superimposed on an ever - worsening climate crisis. This is not the first viral pandemic neither will it be the last. The collective moral injury experienced by the global community requires recalibrating for life in an interpandemic world, moving beyond self-interest and building trust as an ethical imperative. Central to this recalibration is assumption of responsibility to future generations - intergenerational justice. Not only does such an ethics of responsibility enhance mutuality and reciprocity, it is also synchronous with African philosophical thinking, which supports interdependence in this world and is firmly rooted in ancestral worlds and future worlds.

Freedom is considered one of America’s most cherished values. Most Americans agree that freedom requires order, justice, security, opportunity, fairness, absence of harm, absence of undue interference, and a variety of rights. But while Americans may agree on these things in broad, abstract terms, they are often divided over their precise definitions. In this article, the authors emphasize how a variety of societal problems—including climate change, racial inequality, poverty and economic inequality, concentrated disadvantage, intergenerational transmission of privilege and disadvantage, and the undermining of truth and expertise—are issues of freedom. The authors discuss the connection between these issues and freedom, and the need to demand action from elected representatives in order to enact true freedom for all Americans.

Purpose: First, the article offers a critical examination of the Deweyan conception of “common faith” in the context of climate change. Second, the article explores the conceptual linkages among the Confucian conception of the human–nature unity, the Buddhist doctrine of “no-self,” and the Deweyan conception of common faith. Third, the article proposes a transformative pedagogical praxis that welcomes and embraces the pursuit of the intra- and intergenerational justice in this Anthropocene Age of climate change. Design/Approach/Methods: This study is based on a philosophical inquiry into interrelated issues concerning the cultivation of common faith in the age of climate change. Findings: The Confucian conception of a human–nature unity, the Buddhist doctrine of “no-self,” and the Deweyan “common faith,” collectively in recognition of a coterminous coexistence of humans and the universe, can shed light on the development of a transformative climate pedagogy. Further, embracing a dialogical pluriversality, recognizing human fallibility, can cultivate a shared agency and ecological identity. Originality/Value: Grounded in the coterminous coexistence of humans and the universe, the conceptual linkages among the Confucian conception of the unity of humans and nature, the Buddhist doctrine of “no-self,” and the Deweyan common faith reveal the possibility of cross-cultural collaboration for our interdependent future.

AbstractIn the political debate, calls for regulation of energy efficiency are usually based on environmental or resource economic arguments. This paper analyses the case for energy efficiency regulation as a policy to curb excessive resource consumption, to protect the climate and to achieve energy security. The economic rationale for regulation on these grounds is market failure due to externalities and asymmetric information as well as intergenerational distributive justice. We show, however, that most instruments used in energy efficiency regulation, such as standards, subsidies and white certificates, do not meet the criterion of cost efficiency. Tradable emission permits and specific energy taxes are more effective in achieving the policy goals and less costly. Energy efficiency is shown to be a result, not a means of sound environmental and resource policy.

Industrialisation, urbanisation and economic development have produced unprecedented (if unevenly distributed) improvements in human health. They have also produced unprecedented exploitation of Earth’s life support systems, moving the planet into a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene—one defined by human influence on natural systems. The health sector has been complicit in this influence. Bioethics, too, must acknowledge its role—the environmental threats that will shape human health in this century represent a ‘perfect moral storm’ challenging the ethical theories of the last. The US conservationist Aldo Leopold saw this gathering storm more clearly than many, and in his Land Ethic describes the beginnings of a route to safe passage. Its starting point is a reinterpretation of the ethical relationship between humanity and the ‘land community’, the ecosystems we live within and depend upon; moving us from ‘conqueror’ to ‘plain member and citizen’ of that community. The justice of the Land Ethic questions many presuppositions implicit to discussions of the topic in biomedical ethics. By valuing the community in itself—in a way irreducible to the welfare of its members—it steps away from the individualism axiomatic in contemporary bioethics. Viewing ourselves as citizens of the land community also extends the moral horizons of healthcare from a solely human focus. Taking into account the ‘stability’ of the community requires intergenerational justice. The resulting vision of justice in healthcare—one that takes climate and environmental justice seriously—could offer health workers an ethic fit for the future.

The impacts of climate change are not equally distributed globally. We examined the global distribution of CO2 emissions and the ensuing distribution of increases in the risk of zinc and protein deficiency resulting from elevated atmospheric CO2 concentrations. We estimated cumulative per capita (2011–2050) CO2 emissions for 146 countries using existing measurement data and by apportioning regional emissions projections. We tested the relationship between cumulative per capita CO2 emissions and the risk of additional zinc and protein deficiency at the population-level and country-level. At the population-level (i.e., population-weighted), we observed a significant inverse association between CO2 emissions and the percentage of the population placed at additional risk of zinc (p-value: <0.001) and protein (p-value: <0.01) deficiencies. Country-level (i.e., unweighted) analyses produced significant but less strong associations. Populations with lower per capita CO2 emissions between 2011 and 2050 will experience a disproportionately high nutritional burden, highlighting socioeconomic, geospatial, and intergenerational injustices.

AbstractBritish playwright Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children (2016) tackles the imaginative challenge of depicting environmental crisis, in particular the risks of nuclear destruction and climate change. With questions of intra- and intergenerational justice being at the heart of the dramatic text, this article draws on conceptions and insights from cultural risk theory to argue that human risk behaviour and decision-making is the play’s main focus and determines characterisation as well as structure. Interrogating the tension between aesthetic form and content, it shows how The Children naturalizes the (post-)apocalyptic condition and strives for a balance of scales with regard to collective and personal crisis. Characteristic of the rapidly growing corpus of contemporary “cli-fi” drama, and in accordance with many of the strategies proclaimed by climate communication theory, the play stages the catastrophic implications of environmental destruction predominantly as collective risk management and in a predominantly realist manner, discarding formal experimentation as well as futurist setting. Yet this article argues that it remains ambiguous what kind of risk management is proposed and whether we should read it as a call for action or as an imaginative means of accepting finitude.

Addressing past and present injustices in order to create more just futures is the central premise of most social movements. How activists conceptualise and relate to time affects 1 how they articulate their vision, the actions they take and how they imagine intergenerational justice. Two social movements for change are emblematic of different relationships with time: the struggle to resolve and repair past injustices against Indigenous peoples and the struggle to avert environmental disaster, which haunt the future of the planet. We report ethnographic research (interviews and participant observation) with young activists in these two social movements in New Zealand: Protect Ihumātao seeks to protect Indigenous land from a housing development, and Generation Zero is lobbying for a zero-carbon future. We argue that analysing activists’ articulations and sensations of time is fundamental to understanding the ways they see themselves in relation to other generations, their ethical imperatives for action and beliefs about how best to achieve social change. Protect Ihumātao participants spoke of time as though past, present and future were intertwined and attributed their responsibility to protect the land to past and future generations. Generation Zero participants spoke of time as a linear trajectory to a climate-altered future, often laying blame for the current crises on previous generations and attributing the responsibility for averting the crisis to younger generations. How activists conceptualise time and generational relations therefore has consequences for the attribution of responsibility for creating social change. Understanding and learning about temporal diversity across social movements is instructive for expanding our thinking about intergenerational responsibility which might inform ways of living more respectfully with the planet.

There is urgent need for a new model to address the housing crisis in remote Australian Indigenous communities. Decades of major government expenditure have not significantly improved the endemic problems, which include homelessness, overcrowding, substandard dwellings, and unemployment. Between 2017–2020, Foundation for Indigenous Sustainable Health (FISH) worked with the remote Kimberley Aboriginal community, Bawoorrooga, by facilitating the co-design and co-build of a culturally and climatically appropriate home with community members. This housing model incorporates a program of education, health, governance, justice system programs, and land tenure reforms. Build features incorporate sustainable local/recycled materials and earth construction, and ‘Solar Passive Design’. The project faced challenges, including limited funding, extreme climate and remoteness, cultural barriers, and mental health issues. Nevertheless, the program was ultimately successful, producing a house which is culturally designed, climatically/thermally effective, comparatively cheap to build, and efficient to run. The project produced improvements in mental health, schooling outcomes, reduced youth incarceration, and other spheres of community development, including enterprise and community governance. Co-design and co-build projects are slower and more complex than the conventional model of external contracting, but the outcomes can be far superior across broad areas of social and emotional wellbeing, house quality and comfort, energy consumption, long-term maintenance, community physical and mental health, pride, and ownership. These factors are essential in breaking intergenerational cycles of poverty, trauma, and engagement with the justice system. This paper provides a narrative case study of the project and outlines the core principles applied and the lessons learned.

As a result of increasing awareness of the implications of global climate change, shifts are becoming necessary and apparent in the assumptions, concepts, goals and methods of urban environmental planning. This review will present the argument that these changes represent a genuine paradigm shift in urban environmental planning. Reflection and action to develop this paradigm shift is critical now and in the next decades, because environmental planning for cities will only become more urgent as we enter a new climate period. The concepts, methods and assumptions that urban environmental planners have relied on in previous decades to protect people, ecosystems and physical structures are inadequate if they do not explicitly account for a rapidly changing regional climate context, specifically from a hydrological and ecological perspective. The over-arching concept of spatial suitability that guided planning in most of the 20th century has already given way to concepts that address sustainability, recognizing the importance of temporality. Quite rapidly, the concept of sustainability has been replaced in many planning contexts by the priority of establishing resilience in the face of extreme disturbance events. Now even this concept of resilience is being incorporated into a novel concept of urban planning as a process of adaptation to permanent, incremental environmental changes. This adaptation concept recognizes the necessity for continued resilience to extreme events, while acknowledging that permanent changes are also occurring as a result of trends that have a clear direction over time, such as rising sea levels. Similarly, the methods of urban environmental planning have relied on statistical data about hydrological and ecological systems that will not adequately describe these systems under a new climate regime. These methods are beginning to be replaced by methods that make use of early warning systems for regime shifts, and process-based quantitative models of regional system behavior that may soon be used to determine acceptable land uses. Finally, the philosophical assumptions that underlie urban environmental planning are changing to address new epistemological, ontological and ethical assumptions that support new methods and goals. The inability to use the past as a guide to the future, new prioritizations of values for adaptation, and renewed efforts to focus on intergenerational justice are provided as examples. In order to represent a genuine paradigm shift, this review argues that changes must begin to be evident across the underlying assumptions, conceptual frameworks, and methods of urban environmental planning, and be attributable to the same root cause. The examples presented here represent the early stages of a change in the overall paradigm of the discipline.

Can investing in women’s agriculture increase productivity? This paper argues that it can. We assess climate and gender bias impacts on women’s production in the global South and North and challenge the male model of agricultural development to argue further that women’s farming approaches can be more sustainable. Level-based analysis (global, regional, local) draws on a literature review, including the authors’ published longitudinal field research in Ghana and the United States. Women farmers are shown to be undervalued and to work harder, with fewer resources, for less compensation; gender bias challenges are shared globally while economic disparities differentiate; breaches of distributive, gender, and intergenerational justices as well as compromise of food sovereignty affect women everywhere. We conclude that investing in women’s agriculture needs more than standard approaches of capital and technology investment. Effective ‘investment’ would include systemic interventions into agricultural policy, governance, education, and industry; be directed at men as well as women; and use gender metrics, for example, quotas, budgets, vulnerability and impacts assessments, to generate assessment reports and track gender parity in agriculture. Increasing women’s access, capacity, and productivity cannot succeed without men’s awareness and proactivity. Systemic change can increase productivity and sustainability.

In my postgraduate formation during the last years of the 80’s, we had close to thirty hospital beds in a pavilion called “sépticas” (1). In Colombia, where abortion was completely penalized, the pavilion was mostly filled with women with insecure, complicated abortions. The focus we received was technical: management of intensive care; performance of hysterectomies, colostomies, bowel resection, etc. In those times, some nurses were nuns and limited themselves to interrogating the patients to get them to “confess” what they had done to themselves in order to abort. It always disturbed me that the women who left alive, left without any advice or contraceptive method. Having asked a professor of mine, he responded with disdain: “This is a third level hospital, those things are done by nurses of the first level”. Seeing so much pain and death, I decided to talk to patients, and I began to understand their decision. I still remember so many deaths with sadness, but one case in particular pains me: it was a woman close to being fifty who arrived with a uterine perforation in a state of advanced sepsis. Despite the surgery and the intensive care, she passed away. I had talked to her, and she told me she was a widow, had two adult kids and had aborted because of “embarrassment towards them” because they were going to find out that she had an active sexual life. A few days after her passing, the pathology professor called me, surprised, to tell me that the uterus we had sent for pathological examination showed no pregnancy. She was a woman in a perimenopausal state with a pregnancy exam that gave a false positive due to the high levels of FSH/LH typical of her age. SHE WAS NOT PREGNANT!!! She didn’t have menstruation because she was premenopausal and a false positive led her to an unsafe abortion. Of course, the injuries caused in the attempted abortion caused the fatal conclusion, but the real underlying cause was the social taboo in respect to sexuality. I had to watch many adolescents and young women leave the hospital alive, but without a uterus, sometime without ovaries and with colostomies, to be looked down on by a society that blamed them for deciding to not be mothers. I had to see situation of women that arrived with their intestines protruding from their vaginas because of unsafe abortions. I saw women, who in their despair, self-inflicted injuries attempting to abort with elements such as stick, branches, onion wedges, alum bars and clothing hooks among others. Among so many deaths, it was hard not having at least one woman per day in the morgue due to an unsafe abortion. During those time, healthcare was not handled from the biopsychosocial, but only from the technical (2); nonetheless, in the academic evaluations that were performed, when asked about the definition of health, we had to recite the text from the International Organization of Health that included these three aspects. How contradictory! To give response to the health need of women and guarantee their right when I was already a professor, I began an obstetric contraceptive service in that third level hospital. There was resistance from the directors, but fortunately I was able to acquire international donations for the institution, which facilitated its acceptance. I decided to undertake a teaching career with the hope of being able to sensitize health professionals towards an integral focus of health and illness. When the International Conference of Population and Development (ICPD) was held in Cairo in 1994, I had already spent various years in teaching, and when I read their Action Program, I found a name for what I was working on: Sexual and Reproductive Rights. I began to incorporate the tools given by this document into my professional and teaching life. I was able to sensitize people at my countries Health Ministry, and we worked together moving it to an approach of human rights in areas of sexual and reproductive health (SRH). This new viewpoint, in addition to being integral, sought to give answers to old problems like maternal mortality, adolescent pregnancy, low contraceptive prevalence, unplanned or unwanted pregnancy or violence against women. With other sensitized people, we began with these SRH issues to permeate the Colombian Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology, some universities, and university hospitals. We are still fighting in a country that despite many difficulties has improved its indicators of SRH. With the experience of having labored in all sphere of these topics, we manage to create, with a handful of colleagues and friend at the Universidad El Bosque, a Master’s Program in Sexual and Reproductive Health, open to all professions, in which we broke several paradigms. A program was initiated in which the qualitative and quantitative investigation had the same weight, and some alumni of the program are now in positions of leadership in governmental and international institutions, replicating integral models. In the Latin American Federation of Obstetrics and Gynecology (FLASOG, English acronym) and in the International Federation of Obstetrics and Gynecology (FIGO), I was able to apply my experience for many years in the SRH committees of these association to benefit women and girls in the regional and global environments. When I think of who has inspired me in these fights, I should highlight the great feminist who have taught me and been with me in so many fights. I cannot mention them all, but I have admired the story of the life of Margaret Sanger with her persistence and visionary outlook. She fought throughout her whole life to help the women of the 20th century to be able to obtain the right to decide when and whether or not they wanted to have children (3). Of current feminist, I have had the privilege of sharing experiences with Carmen Barroso, Giselle Carino, Debora Diniz and Alejandra Meglioli, leaders of the International Planned Parenthood Federation – Western Hemisphere Region (IPPF-RHO). From my country, I want to mention my countrywoman Florence Thomas, psychologist, columnist, writer and Colombo-French feminist. She is one of the most influential and important voices in the movement for women rights in Colombia and the region. She arrived from France in the 1960’s, in the years of counterculture, the Beatles, hippies, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre, a time in which capitalism and consumer culture began to be criticized (4). It was then when they began to talk about the female body, female sexuality and when the contraceptive pill arrived like a total revolution for women. Upon its arrival in 1967, she experimented a shock because she had just assisted in a revolution and only found a country of mothers, not women (5). That was the only destiny for a woman, to be quiet and submissive. Then she realized that this could not continue, speaking of “revolutionary vanguards” in such a patriarchal environment. In 1986 with the North American and European feminism waves and with her academic team, they created the group “Mujer y Sociedad de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia”, incubator of great initiatives and achievements for the country (6). She has led great changes with her courage, the strength of her arguments, and a simultaneously passionate and agreeable discourse. Among her multiple books, I highlight “Conversaciones con Violeta” (7), motivated by the disdain towards feminism of some young women. She writes it as a dialogue with an imaginary daughter in which, in an intimate manner, she reconstructs the history of women throughout the centuries and gives new light of the fundamental role of feminism in the life of modern women. Another book that shows her bravery is “Había que decirlo” (8), in which she narrates the experience of her own abortion at age twenty-two in sixty’s France. My work experience in the IPPF-RHO has allowed me to meet leaders of all ages in diverse countries of the region, who with great mysticism and dedication, voluntarily, work to achieve a more equal and just society. I have been particularly impressed by the appropriation of the concept of sexual and reproductive rights by young people, and this has given me great hope for the future of the planet. We continue to have an incomplete agenda of the action plan of the ICPD of Cairo but seeing how the youth bravely confront the challenges motivates me to continue ahead and give my years of experience in an intergenerational work. In their policies and programs, the IPPF-RHO evidences great commitment for the rights and the SRH of adolescent, that are consistent with what the organization promotes, for example, 20% of the places for decision making are in hands of the young. Member organizations, that base their labor on volunteers, are true incubators of youth that will make that unassailable and necessary change of generations. In contrast to what many of us experienced, working in this complicated agenda of sexual and reproductive health without theoretical bases, today we see committed people with a solid formation to replace us. In the college of medicine at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and the College of Nursing at the Universidad El Bosque, the new generations are more motivated and empowered, with great desire to change the strict underlying structures. Our great worry is the onslaught of the ultra-right, a lot of times better organized than us who do support rights, that supports anti-rights group and are truly pro-life (9). Faced with this scenario, we should organize ourselves better, giving battle to guarantee the rights of women in the local, regional, and global level, aggregating the efforts of all pro-right organizations. We are now committed to the Objectives of Sustainable Development (10), understood as those that satisfy the necessities of the current generation without jeopardizing the capacity of future generations to satisfy their own necessities. This new agenda is based on: - The unfinished work of the Millennium Development Goals - Pending commitments (international environmental conventions) - The emergent topics of the three dimensions of sustainable development: social, economic, and environmental. We now have 17 objectives of sustainable development and 169 goals (11). These goals mention “universal access to reproductive health” many times. In objective 3 of this list is included guaranteeing, before the year 2030, “universal access to sexual and reproductive health services, including those of family planning, information, and education.” Likewise, objective 5, “obtain gender equality and empower all women and girls”, establishes the goal of “assuring the universal access to sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights in conformity with the action program of the International Conference on Population and Development, the Action Platform of Beijing”. It cannot be forgotten that the term universal access to sexual and reproductive health includes universal access to abortion and contraception. Currently, 830 women die every day through preventable maternal causes; of these deaths, 99% occur in developing countries, more than half in fragile environments and in humanitarian contexts (12). 216 million women cannot access modern contraception methods and the majority live in the nine poorest countries in the world and in a cultural environment proper to the decades of the seventies (13). This number only includes women from 15 to 49 years in any marital state, that is to say, the number that takes all women into account is much greater. Achieving the proposed objectives would entail preventing 67 million unwanted pregnancies and reducing maternal deaths by two thirds. We currently have a high, unsatisfied demand for modern contraceptives, with extremely low use of reversible, long term methods (intrauterine devices and subdermal implants) which are the most effect ones with best adherence (14). There is not a single objective among the 17 Objectives of Sustainable Development where contraception does not have a prominent role: from the first one that refers to ending poverty, going through the fifth one about gender equality, the tenth of inequality reduction among countries and within the same country, until the sixteenth related with peace and justice. If we want to change the world, we should procure universal access to contraception without myths or barriers. We have the moral obligation of achieving the irradiation of extreme poverty and advancing the construction of more equal, just, and happy societies. In emergency contraception (EC), we are very far from reaching expectations. If in reversible, long-term methods we have low prevalence, in EC the situation gets worse. Not all faculties in the region look at this topic, and where it is looked at, there is no homogeneity in content, not even within the same country. There are still myths about their real action mechanisms. There are countries, like Honduras, where it is prohibited and there is no specific medicine, the same case as in Haiti. Where it is available, access is dismal, particularly among girls, adolescents, youth, migrants, afro-descendent, and indigenous. The multiple barriers for the effective use of emergency contraceptives must be knocked down, and to work toward that we have to destroy myths and erroneous perceptions, taboos and cultural norms; achieve changes in laws and restrictive rules within countries, achieve access without barriers to the EC; work in union with other sectors; train health personnel and the community. It is necessary to transform the attitude of health personal to a service above personal opinion. Reflecting on what has occurred after the ICPD in Cairo, their Action Program changed how we look at the dynamics of population from an emphasis on demographics to a focus on the people and human rights. The governments agreed that, in this new focus, success was the empowerment of women and the possibility of choice through expanded access to education, health, services, and employment among others. Nonetheless, there have been unequal advances and inequality persists in our region, all the goals were not met, the sexual and reproductive goals continue beyond the reach of many women (15). There is a long road ahead until women and girls of the world can claim their rights and liberty of deciding. Globally, maternal deaths have been reduced, there is more qualified assistance of births, more contraception prevalence, integral sexuality education, and access to SRH services for adolescents are now recognized rights with great advances, and additionally there have been concrete gains in terms of more favorable legal frameworks, particularly in our region; nonetheless, although it’s true that the access condition have improved, the restrictive laws of the region expose the most vulnerable women to insecure abortions. There are great challenges for governments to recognize SRH and the DSR as integral parts of health systems, there is an ample agenda against women. In that sense, access to SRH is threatened and oppressed, it requires multi-sector mobilization and litigation strategies, investigation and support for the support of women’s rights as a multi-sector agenda. Looking forward, we must make an effort to work more with youth to advance not only the Action Program of the ICPD, but also all social movements. They are one of the most vulnerable groups, and the biggest catalyzers for change. The young population still faces many challenges, especially women and girls; young girls are in particularly high risk due to lack of friendly and confidential services related with sexual and reproductive health, gender violence, and lack of access to services. In addition, access to abortion must be improved; it is the responsibility of states to guarantee the quality and security of this access. In our region there still exist countries with completely restrictive frameworks. New technologies facilitate self-care (16), which will allow expansion of universal access, but governments cannot detach themselves from their responsibility. Self-care is expanding in the world and can be strategic for reaching the most vulnerable populations. There are new challenges for the same problems, that require a re-interpretation of the measures necessary to guaranty the DSR of all people, in particular women, girls, and in general, marginalized and vulnerable populations. It is necessary to take into account migrations, climate change, the impact of digital media, the resurgence of hate discourse, oppression, violence, xenophobia, homo/transphobia, and other emergent problems, as SRH should be seen within a framework of justice, not isolated. We should demand accountability of the 179 governments that participate in the ICPD 25 years ago and the 193 countries that signed the Sustainable Development Objectives. They should reaffirm their commitments and expand their agenda to topics not considered at that time. Our region has given the world an example with the Agreement of Montevideo, that becomes a blueprint for achieving the action plan of the CIPD and we should not allow retreat. This agreement puts people at the center, especially women, and includes the topic of abortion, inviting the state to consider the possibility of legalizing it, which opens the doors for all governments of the world to recognize that women have the right to choose on maternity. This agreement is much more inclusive: Considering that the gaps in health continue to abound in the region and the average statistics hide the high levels of maternal mortality, of sexually transmitted diseases, of infection by HIV/AIDS, and the unsatisfied demand for contraception in the population that lives in poverty and rural areas, among indigenous communities, and afro-descendants and groups in conditions of vulnerability like women, adolescents and incapacitated people, it is agreed: 33- To promote, protect, and guarantee the health and the sexual and reproductive rights that contribute to the complete fulfillment of people and social justice in a society free of any form of discrimination and violence. 37- Guarantee universal access to quality sexual and reproductive health services, taking into consideration the specific needs of men and women, adolescents and young, LGBT people, older people and people with incapacity, paying particular attention to people in a condition of vulnerability and people who live in rural and remote zone, promoting citizen participation in the completing of these commitments. 42- To guarantee, in cases in which abortion is legal or decriminalized in the national legislation, the existence of safe and quality abortion for non-desired or non-accepted pregnancies and instigate the other States to consider the possibility of modifying public laws, norms, strategies, and public policy on the voluntary interruption of pregnancy to save the life and health of pregnant adolescent women, improving their quality of life and decreasing the number of abortions (17).

AbstractSome key political challenges today, e.g. climate change, are future oriented. The intergenerational setting differs in some notable ways from the intragenerational one, creating obstacles to theorizing about intergenerational justice. One concern is that as the circumstances of justice do not pertain intergenerationally, intergenerational justice is not meaningful. In this paper, I scrutinize this worry by analysing the presentations of the doctrine of the circumstances of justice by David Hume and John Rawls. I argue that we should accept the upshot of their idea, that justice is context sensitive, even if this at first sight seems to invalidate intergenerational justice. On the basis of moral constructivism, I subsequently provide a fresh reading of the doctrine according to which it conveys the idea that justice is the solution to a practical problem. However, as the problem background is evolving, we need to properly characterize the relevant practical problem in order to make ethical theorizing relevant. Contrary to what has been claimed, the circumstances of justice do not then clash with intergenerational justice, but are the necessary presuppositions for its advancement.

AbstractTo adapt to a changing climate, decision-makers design, evaluate, and implement measures that have an implication of justice on citizens in the present and well into the future. Decision-makers are often required to make decisions without certainty of the consequences and understanding their effects on intergenerational justice. Thus, managing the impacts of climate change requires novel decision-aiding approaches that consider climate impacts’ temporal and spatial heterogeneity and the uncertainty in climate predictions, preferences, and values. We reviewed the literature on the extent to which principles of intergenerational justice—conservation of options and resources for future generations—have been integrated to traditional approaches in climate resilience decision-making. We explore the extent to which flexibility, i.e., the conservation and expansion of options in subsequent decision periods, can contribute to upholding the principles of intergenerational justice under uncertainty. We illustrate the approach in the case of the Delta Programme in the Netherlands, a complex system designed to protect against sea-level rise (SLR). Designing adaptation strategies to SLR with flexibility as a core concept brings significant advantages in circumstances of uncertainty. The conservation of options in flexible pathways, in this case, contributes to the principles of intergenerational justice. Our civilization’s long-term sustainability and survival may depend on the extent to which individuals can see beyond their gains and toward the gains of the collective society at an intergenerational scale.