Ethics of Financing Adaptation to Climate Change

Online Course

Mondays, 4:15 pm

The public debate in the Global North on the climate crisis is often framed as the avoidance of future adverse effects of climate change. The debate focusses on mitigation measures to reduce anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases, to improve the earth’s capability to absorb carbon from the atmosphere or to sequestrate carbon with technical measures. However, already today, mainly persons in the Global South suffer from negative effects of climate change. For example, persons living in small island developing states (SIDS) have to cope with a rising sea level, threatening their live, property and basis of existence. Affected local persons implement adaptation measures to reduce adverse effects of climate change, like constructing dams or move to higher situated areas. Often, local governments and persons are not able to pay for the costs of the necessary adaptation measures.

Climate science provides evidence that greenhouse gas emissions emitted by the Global North cause adverse effects of climate change in the Global South today. However, international political efforts to provide adaptation finance are limited. The amount of adaptation finance provided by international donors is currently too low to meet the local needs to adapt to climate change. Even though the available amount of adaptation finance increases, the adaptation finance gap is expected not to decrease, as the pace of climate change and its impacts are expected to increase. A possibility to deal with the adaptation finance gap is to prioritise between different countries when distributing scarce financial means for adaptation. The prioritisation of the distribution of scarce adaptation finance to the Global South raises several normative questions. Criteria for prioritisation of adaptation finance in the debate are vulnerability and efficiency or cost-effectiveness and recently the degree of democratisation of a country.

The seminar introduces the relevant ethical aspects of the distribution of scarce adaptation finance and discusses the criterion of vulnerability as it appeals to the moral intuition that it is right to help those first who are in greatest need, and the criterion of efficiency as it appeals to the moral intuition to maximise adaptation benefits. Also, the seminar deals with the criterion of the degree of democratisation of a country to allocate scarce adaptation finance. In the context of democracy and adaptation, the democratization of local responses to climate change will also be considered as will be special vulnerabilities of small island developing states.

The readings will be provided to the students. An optional source for reading in philosophy and ethics in general is the excellent online reference Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (https://plato.stanford.edu/).