Abstract
This paper suggests a way to elaborate the ethical implications of the Warsaw International Mechanism (WIM) as decided at COP 19 from the perspective of justice. It advocates three proposals. First, in order to fully understand the responsibilities and liabilities implied in the WIM, adaptation needs to be distinguished from loss and damage (L&D) on the basis of the different goals which should be attributed to adaptation and to L&D approaches. Second, the primary concern of the WIM should be compensatory justice. In case of climate L&D, three aspects of compensatory justice should be kept separate: corrective liability, remedial responsibility, and with regard to the resources available, fair remedy. Third, it is crucial to distinguish between recoverable damage and irrecoverable or at least not fully recoverable loss. This distinction is crucial because it informs the principles of fair remedy and because damage and loss may differ in their relevance for the stability and functioning of a human system.
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Notes
I agree with an anonymous reviewer that a fourth obvious way to distinguish between adaptation and L&D would be to differentiate them by the goals of both kinds of approaches. For instance, one could argue that whilst the goal of adaptation is to allow those facing climate impacts to cope with them, the goal of L&D approaches is to compensate for climate impacts that occur. However, although such a distinction seems straightforward and seems to eliminate the difficulties discussed in the following, I do not agree that no argument is needed to show why distinguishing adaptation from L&D by their different goals is the most plausible approach. Furthermore, even though it might be intuitively clear how to define these different goals, these definitions need justification as well. The following discussion aims to provide both.
I would like to thank Peter Burnell and an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this possible distinction between adaptation and L&D.
These labels are introduced here to give the three different aspects of compensatory justice a name. However, as they stand, they are not common in normative research on compensatory justice.
Since the parties at COP 19 established the WIM to address L&D especially “in developing countries that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change (…)” (UNFCCC 2014) considerations concerning global social-economic injustice could be understood as one of the background assumptions for this mechanism.
The literature on polluter-pays principles and their relation to historical justice is a long-standing concern in climate ethics. Due to space limits, however, it is not possible to discuss these issues in more detail here. For a very helpful collection of essential essays, consider Gardiner et al. (2010).
For a more detailed explanation of the three different scientific approaches mentioned here and in the following paragraph see the tandem paper to this article by Huggel et al. (2015).
For further discussion of these issues see for example Vanderheiden (2009).
For a more theoretical argument to similar conclusions see Meyer and Roser (2010).
This claim faces two challenges which cannot be discussed here. First, assisting someone to revise his valued objectives readily tends to be overly paternalistic since helping changing objectives involves directives by those who assist. Second, whilst the costs of monetizable L&D are clearly restricted by the amount of money lost in case of revising valued objectives the limit for resources to be spent for assistance is not as clear-cut as in the first case. I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for mentioning both these concerns.
I am heavily indebted to Edward Page for mentioning Goodin’s distinction between these two kinds of just compensation.
I would like to thank Olaf Corry for mentioning this objection.
For further discussion of how international law could play a role here see Huggel et al. (2015).
Abbreviations
- L&D:
-
Loss and Damage
- WIM:
-
Warsaw International Mechanism
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Acknowledgments
Earlier versions of this paper have been presented at the Annual Workshop of the UZH/ETH Zurich Network for Interdisciplinary Climate Change Research held in 2013 and a workshop entitled “New Debates in Climate Change Justice, Governance and Democracy” at the University of Warwick in 2014. I would like to thank the audiences of both these occasions as well as Hajo Eicken, Axel Gosseries, Gerrit Hansen, Christian Huggel, Simon Milligan, Edward Page, Fabian Schuppert, Daithi Stone, three anonymous reviewers, and especially Dominic Roser for very helpful and much needed comments, discussion and inspiration. I also would like to acknowledge the generous financial support of Stiftung Mercator Switzerland and the University of Zurich’s Research Priority Program for Ethics (URPP Ethics), without which the research for this paper would not have been possible.
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This article is part of a Special Issue on “Climate Justice in Interdisciplinary Research” edited by Christian Huggel, Markus Ohndorf, Dominic Roser, and Ivo Wallimann-Helmer.
This paper is linked to the following contribution of this special issue: Huggel et al., doi:10.1007/s10584-015–1441-z
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Wallimann-Helmer, I. Justice for climate loss and damage. Climatic Change 133, 469–480 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-015-1483-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-015-1483-2