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Sustainability, Capabilities and Human Security pp 103–134Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Where Are Criteria of Human Significance in Climate Change Assessment?

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Abstract

How important are humanistic principles in assessments of climate change? Do we judge in terms of all the valued impacts on all people? The chapter identifies how interests of vulnerable poor people are often marginalized, even when assessments are made by agencies supposedly accountable within the United Nations system with its commitments to universal human rights and human security. A major case considered is the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (2014). A second example taken is the debate on climate change’s impacts on human health. The burden of proof in climate change politics has been placed on the side of those who warn of dangers, and the precautionary principle often becomes configured in favour of not risking disturbance to the privileged. The chapter generates a typology of ways in which vulnerable poor people are marginalized or excluded in climate change analyses. It then discusses how this marginalization and exclusion might be countered, including looking at the 2015 Papal encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si’, and asks whether attention to the excluded requires ontological reorientations of sorts that are not yet standard in human development discourse. It concludes by pointing towards how human rights and human security frameworks can contribute here.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This section draws on work co-authored with Kjersti Fløttum of the University of Bergen and Asuncion Lera St.Clair (then) of the Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research (CICERO, Oslo) in a Norwegian Research Council funded research project on AR5 (see Fløttum et al. 2016).

  2. 2.

    The word count of the full text of each document is: WGI-SPM The Physical Science Basis (2013): 14,739 words; WGII-SPM Impacts, Adaptation & Vulnerability (2014): 12,735 words; WGIII-SPM Mitigation of Climate Change (2014): 14,512 words; SYR-SPM Climate Change 2014 Synthesis Report (2014): 14,894 words. Excluded here are the figures and tables, which were called ‘Supplementary Material’ in pre-final drafts.

  3. 3.

    As cited at: http://www.ipcc-wg3.de/assessment-reports/fifth-assessment-report/summary-for-policy-makers.

  4. 4.

    These exclusions are the norm in this paper. We focus on the topics and argumentation in the text proper of the SPMs.

  5. 5.

    For much fuller comparison of vocabularies, see Fløttum et al. (2016).

  6. 6.

    This contrast between the frequencies continues when we include not only cases of ‘human’ (as in Table 5.1) but also those of ‘Human’: it moves from 13-36-11-24 to 15-43-13-25, as we move through WGs I, II, III and the Synthesis Report. The less abstract term ‘people’ also occurs, but much less: 0-19-4-7 across the four SPMs.

  7. 7.

    WGII’s SPM went as far as saying: ‘People who are socially, economically, culturally, politically, institutionally, or otherwise marginalized are especially vulnerable to climate change and also to some adaptation and mitigation responses (medium evidence, high agreement). … [Causes] include, for example, discrimination on the basis of gender, class, ethnicity, age, and (dis)ability.” (IPCC 2014b: 6); but it did not proceed to specify and quantify this, for example the mortality impacts for low-income infants and old people, in contrast to its quantification of much else.

  8. 8.

    The same applies for the World Development Report 2010 on climate change (see Gasper et al. 2013).

  9. 9.

    Fløttum, Gasper, St.Clair (2016) notes: ‘P.16 in WGII’s SPM becomes specific about impacts on GDP of rising sea-levels but not about the impacts on poor people’s lives. Pages 18 and 19 on impacts in urban areas and rural areas mention poor people as more vulnerable, but without specifics about what will be the costs—in terms of lives, livelihoods, and health…’ A 2014 WHO report on climate change and health appeared too late for mention in AR5, which was itself a symptom of the distribution of funding between topics and organizations.

  10. 10.

    For example, “Risk is a combination of the likelihood of an occurrence of a work-related hazardous event or exposure(s) and the severity of injury or ill health that can be caused by the event or exposure(s)” (OHSAS 18001 [Occupational Health & Safety Advisory Services], definition 3.21, 2007).

  11. 11.

    ‘Impacts generally refer to effects on lives, livelihoods, health status, ecosystems, economic, social, and cultural assets, services (including environmental), and infrastructure due to the interaction of climate changes or hazardous climate events occurring within a specific time period and the vulnerability of an exposed society or system’ (WGIIAR5-Glossary).

  12. 12.

    The terms threshold, crisis and catastrophe are similarly virtually absent from all the SPMs.

  13. 13.

    Other greenhouse gases are converted into CO2 equivalents.

  14. 14.

    We are grateful to Andrew Crabtree for this example.

  15. 15.

    Some of the discussion is viewable at https://video.ku.dk/climate-congress-2009-closing-session-12.

  16. 16.

    Pope Francis quoted, first, Pope Benedict’s Address to the Bundestag, Berlin (22 September 2011) and, second, Patriarch Bartholomew’s Utstein lecture of 23 June 2003.

  17. 17.

    Klein (2015b) underlines this, quoting Cardinal Turkson at a Vatican event: ‘the Cardinal points out that “the word ‘stewardship’ only appears twice” in the encyclical. The word “care,” on the other hand, appears dozens of times. This is no accident, we are told. While stewardship speaks to a relationship based on duty, “when one cares for something it is something one does with passion and love.”’

  18. 18.

    An ‘apocryphal adaptation of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s account of many people’s response to the Nazis conveys the spirit of this eco-religious sentiment: ‘First they came for the trees and I said nothing. Then they came for the animals and I was quiet. Next they came for the blacks; I remained silent. Then they came for the poor and still I did not act. Eventually, when I was of no further use to them, they came for me too.’

  19. 19.

    For example: ‘Ecuador is constantly threatened by erupting volcanoes, melt-down of glaciers, floods and droughts, and is heavily exposed to the El Niño/La Niña phenomena.’ (Waldmueller 2015: 17).

  20. 20.

    See however Waldmueller (2015) for an account of work in Ecuador to meld buen vivir thought and the human rights indicators framework of the UN High Commission for Human Rights.

  21. 21.

    Possibly no human rights scholars were in the human security chapter team.

  22. 22.

    Human security is defined as: ‘when the vital core of human lives is protected, and when people have the freedom and capacity to live with dignity’ (IPCC Working Group II, p. 759).

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  1. International Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, Netherlands

    Des Gasper & Simone Rocca

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  1. Des Gasper
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Correspondence to Des Gasper .

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  1. Copenhagen Business School, Frederiksberg, Denmark

    Andrew Crabtree

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Gasper, D., Rocca, S. (2020). Where Are Criteria of Human Significance in Climate Change Assessment?. In: Crabtree, A. (eds) Sustainability, Capabilities and Human Security. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38905-5_5

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