Abstract
Responding to climate change needs a global perspective that combines emphases on the dignity and worth of all people and co-membership in a finite, breakable socio-ecology. A philosophy that defends the victims of climate change must help counteract some major mirages: first, the nest of national identity conceived in such a way that we see ourselves as separate from, even immune and indifferent to, the misfortunes elsewhere in the world; second, the dream of endless growth, economic and technological, that will enable ‘us’—whether conceived as particular national islands or particular affluent groups and persons—to avoid shared planetary boundaries and the dangers of breaching them; and, third, our ability to screen out unpalatable information or questions, including about the fate of ‘marginal’ groups. Theorizing sustainable human development requires therefore more than the language of capabilities and freedoms to which human development analysis is sometimes reduced. It needs human rights ethical principles and a human security frame. The former asserts the value of each person and the wrongness of harm to others caused by careless production and heedless luxury consumption. Human security thinking directs attention to limits, interconnectedness, vulnerabilities and possible threats, and how what is ‘human’ includes dependence on each other and on a global ecology. Together they provide routes into reflecting on and counteracting toxic forms of nationalism, exclusivist group identity, consumerism and their drivers.
This chapter grows out of my earlier paper ‘Climate Change: The need for a human rights agenda within a framework of shared human security’, that appeared in Social Research: An International Quarterly of the Social Sciences [2012, vol. 79(4), pp. 983–1014]. The present version extends the discussion to cover human development thinking more fully and updates the arguments.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Is the danger real? In addition to the global consensus-building processes represented by the IPCC and UNFCCC, Brown (2012) cites two surveys of expert opinion. First: “a 2009 study—published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States—polled 1,372 climate researchers and resulted in the following two conclusions. (1) 97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of ACC (Anthropogenic Climate Change) outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (2) The relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers” (Anderegg et al. 2010). Second, Brown cites an even larger poll from 2009 which gave very similar results (reported in Doran and Zimmerman 2009). See also the statements from many national scientific associations, assembled by NASA at http://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/, and the yet more emphatic findings from the IPCC (2014)’s review of the subsequent scientific literature worldwide.
- 3.
For a picture of current temperature trends and projections, see Climate Action Tracker at http://climateactiontracker.org/global.html. Even the commitments made until now around the Paris 2015 Agreement are seriously insufficient to restrict temperature rise to 2°C above pre-industrial levels, the maximum supposedly safe increase. The 2°C figure is in reality demonstrably unsafe, in terms of normal criteria of reasonable risk for vulnerable groups (see e.g. Hansen et al. 2015).
- 4.
‘How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing’, said Chamberlain in reference to the dispute between Czechoslovakia and Nazi Germany (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neville_Chamberlain; consulted 1 January 2015).
- 5.
Simmel anticipated Hamilton’s insight: ‘money in its psychological form, as the absolute means and thus as the unifying point of innumerable sequences of purposes, possesses a significant relationship to the notion of God… The essence of the notion of God is that all diversities and contradictions in the world achieve a unity in him…’ (Simmel 1907: 254).
- 6.
Hamilton cited a survey reported in http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/climate-scientists-its-time-for-plan-b-1221092.html.
- 7.
See e.g. the websites of the Stockholm Environment Institute and CDM Watch, on maneuvers that were used to claim funds under the ‘Clean Development Mechanism’. Some projects, for example, deliberately included increased production of highly damaging emissions (e.g. HCFC-22 and HFC-23), to be able to then claim credits for also including components that countered those emissions.
- 8.
Similar exclusions typically arise in relation to cross-sector (/cross-disciplinary) and cross-national interactions. For example, the Stern Report had separate chapters on economic costs of climate change in rich countries and in poor countries, each based on an accumulation across different sectors of quantitative projections concerning impacts. It relatively neglected (1) the non-quantified effects such as political instability, (2) the interactions between sectors, such as the impacts of political instability, especially when that instability exceeds routine minor variation, and (3) the cross-over impacts on rich countries of instability in poor countries, especially outside the range that can be projected by quantitative analysis of past variation (Gasper 2013a).
- 9.
As of around 2010 an average U.S. resident was responsible for emissions of 22 tonnes of CO2 per year, about 180 times as much as an average resident of Ethiopia (Davis and Caldeira 2010).
- 10.
See e.g. Kasser et al. (2007).
- 11.
I have earlier suggested that we ‘adopt the name “Human Development Approach” for the encompassing system of policy analysis, within which the capability approach is just part of the valuation apparatus. … The Human Development Approach [forms] an approach to explanation and to policy which uses this widened range of criteria, including the capability approach, in evaluation and to identify what is important to attend to in a policy framework. It also incorporates entitlements analysis, human security discourse and much human rights analysis as further components’ (Gasper 2008: 251).
- 12.
‘Recognizing the centrality of empowerment will enable climate ethics to interact more significantly with human security approaches, in which discussion of empowerment has been more prominent’ (Drydyk 2012: 20).
- 13.
- 14.
The Global Environmental Change and Human Security research program (1999–2010) defined human security as where ‘individuals and communities have the options necessary to end, mitigate or [sufficiently] adapt to threats to their human, social and environmental rights; have the capacity and freedom to exercise these options; and actively participate in pursuing these options’ (http://www.gechs.org/human-security).
- 15.
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Gasper, D. (2020). Human Development Thinking About Climate Change Requires a Human Rights Agenda and an Ontology of Shared Human Security. In: Crabtree, A. (eds) Sustainability, Capabilities and Human Security. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38905-5_6
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