According to the Environmental Justice Foundation (http://www.ejfoundation.org/), every year climate change is attributable for the deaths of over 300,000 people, seriously affects a further 325 million people, and causes economic losses of US $125 billion. Four billion people are vulnerable to the effects of climate change and 500-600 million people – around 10% of the planet’s human population – are at extreme risk. Who bears responsibility for protecting those whose basic rights are threatened by climate change? What constitutes an ethically justifiable response? These are just a few of the urgent questions raised by climate change.
Climate change poses historically unprecedented challenges and profound ethical questions – but also new opportunities for global innovation and cooperation
Throughout the world, at all levels of government, decision makers are facing unprecedented challenges in developing appropriate climate strategies for their constituents. Their decisions raise profound economic and ethical concerns. Should developing countries be required to “balance” development with climate-change mitigation, given that rapid economic and social development offer the only hope of adapting to the effects of climate change? What constitutes a reasonable and ethically responsible climate/development “balance” for poorer countries? What about for industrialized nations? Now and in future generations, who is responsible for responding to the unavoidable consequences of climate change?
Climate change by itself raises a wide range of ethical issues due to the anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases that directly cause climate change. People are already losing their homes, their livelihoods, and even their lives as a result of the climate change we are causing. Any action on climate change confronts serious ethical issues of fairness and responsibility across individuals, nations, generations, and the rest of nature. In that sense, sustainability without ethics is an empty husk. It thus, climate change poses an ‘ethical problem’ for humanity to respond.
Although, ethics is difficult to define precisely, in a general sense, it is the code of moral principles and values that governs people’s behaviors with respect to what is right or wrong. Values related to sustainable development that are largely discussed in the international literature include:
- Equity – addressing the injustice of poverty and lack of opportunities afflicting so many people in the world
- Environmental justice – closely related to equity but defined as equal access to a clean environment and equal protection from possible environmental harm, irrespective of race, income, class or any other differentiating feature of socio-economic status
- Intergenerational equity – being sure that what we do today leaves a world that is in a good state to support our children, and their children
- Stewardship – taking responsibility for the rest of life on Earth, remembering we depend on the millions of other species for the maintenance of the Earth’s ecological systems.
When revising a course or designing a new course for CLIMASP, you should start to think about ethics and values. Climate change and sustainability raises the question of how one ought to live within the threefold relationship with current and future generations, and nature. What way of acting and living would adequately respect the rights of contemporaries, future generations, and nature? What would be just in this threefold relationship? What kind of responsibilities do we have? Etc.
Similarly, when you are going to implement the revised course, it is suggested to integrate the process of learning to clarify one’s own ethics and values.
The students at the University of Crete taking the course “Curriculum and Hypermedia” undertake an exercise at the beginning of their course called ” Envisioning Preferred Futures”, based on the following questions:
- What would you like society to look like in the future?
- What do you want the course to do, to enable you to make a contribution to making that preferred future a reality?
- What are the values that we can incorporate into the way we teach this course that will enable us to achieve this goal?
It is also suggested to use the Earth Charter, an inspiring declaration of shared ethical principles. The four main ideas behind the Earth Charter are:
- Respect Earth and life in all its diversity.
- Care for the community of life with understanding, compassion, and love.
- Build democratic societies that are just, participatory, sustainable, and peaceful.
- Secure Earth’s bounty and beauty for present and future generations.
An adequate recognition and analysis of the ethical meaning of the concept of climate change and sustainability is necessary in order to generate encompassing and adequate analyses and solutions of climate change issues. In this context, culture has always played a role in informing human practices connected with climate change. The anthropogenic cause of climate change implies that learning to clarify ones own values is a very critical learning process.
When examining climate change through a ‘cultural lens’, rather than through an environmental, economic, social or political lens, a number of specific questions come to mind. Here are a few of them:
- How do values, including non-material values, affect decisions and actions about climate change?
- What role does culture play in strategies for adapting to climate change, and in overcoming barriers to change?
- How might climate change impact on aspects of cultural rights within the debate of the impact of climate change on broader human rights issues?
- What do the irreversible losses of cultural and natural heritage caused by climate change mean to societies?
- How does the impact of climate change on the culture of a society differ from other impacts and changes (technological, demographic, social)?
- What can cultural practitioners, such as artists, designers and architects, contribute to the search for creative solutions to the negative impacts of climate change?
- Can art offer a way of communicating more powerfully the effects of climate change, and is the role of art and artists wider than communication?
- What might alliances between scientists, political leaders, economists and artists achieve that none of these groups would be able to achieve individually?
- What are the opportunities for working across the boundaries of culture, education, identity and geography to create alliances and collaborations?