Special Issue "Ethics of Climate Adaptation"

A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Air, Climate Change and Sustainability".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 September 2021.

Special Issue Editors

Prof. Dr. Neelke Doorn
E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Values, Technology and Innovation, Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management, Delft University of Technology, PO Box 5015, 2600 GA Delft, Netherlands
Interests: water ethics; climate change; resilience; water governance; water engineering; philosophy of engineering; ethics of technology
Dr. Udo Pesch
E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Values, Technology and Innovation, Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management, Delft University of Technology, PO Box 5015, 2600 GA Delft, Netherlands
Interests: responsible innovation; environmental politics; sustainable innovation; participatory politics; ethics of technology

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

It is now widely accepted by climate scientists that climate change requires both mitigation actions to reduce climate change and adaptation to cope with its effects, such as increased droughts, heat waves, and flooding. In recent years, resilience has emerged as one of the leading paradigms for adaptation policies. These policies prompt important ethical questions.

First, climate adaptation and resilience policies establish a role division in terms of who has to do what, with that settling questions about which parties are included and excluded, and which parties are beneficiaries, victimized, and forgotten. These policies confront us with strong queries about social justice and responsibility, necessitating critical reflection.

Second, addressing the different effects of climate change may require conflicting interventions. For example, strategies to prevent flooding may conflict with drought strategies or ecological objectives. This prompts questions about how to reconcile or prioritize these different interventions and about whose claims to acknowledge. Additionally, addressing issues of climate change involves a long-term planning orientation taking place at different territorial scales. This may shift the focus away from the everyday environmental justice struggles that local communities are currently struggling with.

Third, climate adaptation policies demand new kinds of solutions, which to a large extent are informed by scientific expertise. The way these science-based activities affect matters of social justice often seem to focus mainly on the effectiveness of policies instead of their legitimacy. This calls for critical analysis of the interwoven character of scientific knowledge development, policy-making, and societal impacts, and particularly the epistemic injustices that emerge when local knowledge is dismissed.

This Special Issue aims to address the different ethical questions raised by climate adaptation from a multidisciplinary angle. We especially welcome papers on the following topics:

  • The inclusion and exclusion of specific social groups in climate politics;
  • The designation of responsibilities to actors regarding climate adaptation and resilience policies;
  • Scalar politics in climate adaptation policy, as climate change issues transcend geographical, administrative, and temporal scales;
  • The conceptual and/or empirical influence of resilience studies on climate adaptation policies and the impact of social justice;
  • Questions of epistemic justice and the role of local knowledge in climate adaptation and resilience policies;
  • Quantitative approaches that allow for modelling ethical considerations in climate adaptation and resilience policies.

Prof. Dr. Neelke Doorn
Dr. Udo Pesch
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1900 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • climate adaptation
  • ethics
  • delta planning
  • distributive justice
  • drought
  • environmental justice
  • epistemic justice
  • flooding
  • resilience

Published Papers (4 papers)

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Research

Article
Universal Metrics for Climate Change Adaptation Finance? A Cautionary Tale
Sustainability 2021, 13(16), 9428; https://doi.org/10.3390/su13169428 - 22 Aug 2021
Viewed by 373
Abstract
Climate change adaptation is receiving ever more attention in the literature and in practice. Since available funds are not meeting adaptation needs, the question of how to allocate scarce resources becomes pressing. Universal adaptation metrics promise to facilitate the allocation process ex ante [...] Read more.
Climate change adaptation is receiving ever more attention in the literature and in practice. Since available funds are not meeting adaptation needs, the question of how to allocate scarce resources becomes pressing. Universal adaptation metrics promise to facilitate the allocation process ex ante and the evaluation of projects ex post. Two such metrics have been proposed recently: Saved Wealth (SW), measured in terms of money, and Saved Health (SH), gauged in terms of disability adjusted life-years (DALYs). The paper analyzes this SWSH approach and shows that it is replete with unresolved conceptual and normative-ethical problems, which are exemplary for universal metrics seeking to combine concerns for equity and efficiency at once. The paper’s aim is to uncover these issues, and its conclusion is modest: universal metrics such as SW and the DALY have to be designed and used with great caution and further research is necessary. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Ethics of Climate Adaptation)
Article
Displacement Induced by Climate Change Adaptation: The Case of ‘Climate Buffer’ Infrastructure
Sustainability 2021, 13(16), 9160; https://doi.org/10.3390/su13169160 - 16 Aug 2021
Viewed by 292
Abstract
Climate buffer infrastructure is on the rise as a promising ‘green’ climate adaptation strategy. More often than not, such infrastructure building is legitimized as an urgent technical intervention—while less attention is paid to the distribution of costs and benefits among the affected population. [...] Read more.
Climate buffer infrastructure is on the rise as a promising ‘green’ climate adaptation strategy. More often than not, such infrastructure building is legitimized as an urgent technical intervention—while less attention is paid to the distribution of costs and benefits among the affected population. However, as this article shows, adaptation interventions may directly or indirectly result in the relocation or even eviction of households or communities, thereby increasing vulnerabilities for some while intending to reduce long-term climate vulnerabilities for all. We argue that this raises serious, if underappreciated, ethical issues that need to be more explicitly addressed in adaptation policy making. We illustrate our conceptual argument with the help of three examples of infrastructural ‘climate buffers’: Space for the River projects in the Netherlands, the Diamer–Bhasha dam in Pakistan and the coastal protection plan in Jakarta, Indonesia. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Ethics of Climate Adaptation)
Article
Making Sense of Resilience
Sustainability 2021, 13(15), 8538; https://doi.org/10.3390/su13158538 - 30 Jul 2021
Viewed by 593
Abstract
While resilience is a major concept in development, climate adaptation, and related domains, many doubts remain about how to interpret this term, its relationship with closely overlapping terms, or its normativity. One major view is that, while resilience originally was a descriptive concept [...] Read more.
While resilience is a major concept in development, climate adaptation, and related domains, many doubts remain about how to interpret this term, its relationship with closely overlapping terms, or its normativity. One major view is that, while resilience originally was a descriptive concept denoting some adaptive property of ecosystems, subsequent applications to social contexts distorted its meaning and purpose by framing it as a transformative and normative quality. This article advances an alternative philosophical account based on the scrutiny of C.S. Holling’s original work on resilience. We show that resilience had a central role among Holling’s proposals for reforming environmental science and management, and that Holling framed resilience as an ecosystem’s capacity of absorbing change and exploiting it for adapting or evolving, but also as the social ability of maintaining and opportunistically exploiting that natural capacity. Resilience therefore appears as a transformative social-ecological property that is normative in three ways: as an intrinsic ecological value, as a virtue of organizations or management styles, and as a virtuous understanding of human–nature relations. This interpretation accounts for the practical relevance of resilience, clarifies the relations between resilience and related terms, and is a firm ground for further normative work on resilience. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Ethics of Climate Adaptation)
Article
Distributing Responsibilities for Climate Adaptation: Examples from the Water Domain
Sustainability 2021, 13(7), 3676; https://doi.org/10.3390/su13073676 - 25 Mar 2021
Viewed by 561
Abstract
It is often assumed that climate adaptation policy asks for new responsibility arrangements between central government and citizens, with citizens getting a more prominent role. This prompts the question under which conditions these new responsibility arrangements can be justified as they may raise [...] Read more.
It is often assumed that climate adaptation policy asks for new responsibility arrangements between central government and citizens, with citizens getting a more prominent role. This prompts the question under which conditions these new responsibility arrangements can be justified as they may raise serious ethical concerns. Without paying due attention to these ethical concerns, climate adaptation policy may be unsuccessful and even be considered illegitimate. This paper aims to address this topic by exploring some examples of climate adaptation responses and their associated ethical challenges. The examples from the water domain differ in terms of their primary beneficiaries and the extent to which they are prone to collective action problems. Discussion of the examples shows that any shift of responsibilities towards citizens should be accompanied by a governmental responsibility to make sure that citizens are indeed able to assume these responsibilities and a responsibility to see to it that the greater involvement of responsibilities does not create disproportional inequalities. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Ethics of Climate Adaptation)
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