Carbon Sink Conservation and Global Justice: Benefitting, Free Riding and Non-compliance

Abstract

It is often assumed that in order to avoid the most severe consequences of global anthropogenic climate change we have to preserve our existing carbon sinks, such as for instance tropical forests. Global carbon sink conservation raises a host of normative issues, though, since it is debatable who should pay the costs of carbon sink conservation, who has the duty to protect which sinks, and how far the duty to conserve one's carbon sinks actually extends, especially if it conflicts with other duties one might have. According to some, forested states like Ecuador have a duty to preserve their tropical forests while the rich states of the global North have a duty of fairness to compensate states like Ecuador for the costs they incur. My aim in this paper is to critically analyse this standard line of argument and to criticise its validity both internally (i.e. with regard to its normative conclusion based on its premises) and externally (i.e. with regard to the argument's underlying assumptions and its lack of contextualisation). As I will argue, the duty to conserve one's forests is only a particular instantiation of a wider, more general duty to contribute towards global climate justice for which the context in which one operates (e.g. whether other agents are complying with their duties of global climate justice or not) matters significantly.

Fairness and Justice in Natural Resource Politics

“…The question about the just allocation of costs for international environmental policies has sparked a huge debate among global climate justice scholars (e.g. Shue, 1993; Financing biodiversity conservation 257 Neumayer, 2000;Caney, 2006Caney, , 2010Page, 2016;Schuppert, 2016), but a similar discussion is still missing for other environmental policy fields. By singling out biodiversity conservation as a starting point, I hope to contribute to closing this gap.…”

Introduction

“…We are, it could be argued, now experiencing a second wave of theorising about territory, with justice theorists showing a new awareness of how place-related rights impact their arguments (see Armstrong, 2017;Kohn, 2016;Pellegrino, 2015;Schuppert, 2016), and numerous others incorporating insights from territorial rights scholars into a variety of different debates. The contributors to this Symposium exemplify this wave in their own work.…”