The Ethical Implications of Sea-Level Rise Due to Climate Change

Abstract

D oes humanity have a moral obligation toward the estimated millions of individuals who will be displaced from their homes over the course of this century primarily due to sea-level rise (SLR) as the earth's climate warms? If there are indeed sound reasons for the world to act on their behalf, what form should these actions take?As scientific evidence for the adverse effects of human-induced climate change grows stronger, it is becoming increasingly clear that these questions are of urgent practical interest and require concerted international political action. In the course of this century and the next, the earth's climate will almost surely get warmer as a direct result of the emissions accumulated in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution. This warming will very likely result in heat waves, heavy precipitation in some areas, extreme droughts in others, increased hurricane intensity, and sea-level rise of about one meter-although recent findings suggest this rise could quite plausibly be greater than that by century's end. 1 Forecasts of how many people will be displaced by 2050 by climate change vary widely, from about 25 million to 1 billion. The difficulty in accurate forecasting lies not only in the uncertainty regarding future climate change impacts and adaptation measures but also in estimating the outcome of the several complex factors driving migration. 2 * The authors are singularly grateful to the Rockefeller Foundation for having supported them for a residential fellowship at the Bellagio Center, Italy, in 2007, where some of the initial ideas for this paper were developed. They are also most thankful to the reviewers and the editors of this journal for their close reading of earlier versions and for offering substantial suggestions for improvement, as well as to other colleagues too numerous to be named.

Atoll Island States and International Law

“…268 Territorial claims are also an issue for the intertemporal doctrine, such as in the Island of Palmas Arbitration, a dispute between the United States and Netherlands over the sovereignty of a small Pacific island. 270 These points are discussed in the IPCC 4AR and in Byravan and Rajan (2010), p. 245. 269 That established principle was applied to other cases of the International Court of Justice such as Minquiers and Ecrehos Case, The Western Sahara case, The North Sea Continental Shelf Case and the Aegean Sea Continental Shelf Case. The problem of climate-change displaced people encompasses both international human rights and environmental law, which means that from a temporal perspective it can focus on both past and future contexts.…”

“…269 That established principle was applied to other cases of the International Court of Justice such as Minquiers and Ecrehos Case, The Western Sahara case, The North Sea Continental Shelf Case and the Aegean Sea Continental Shelf Case. The problem of climate-change displaced people encompasses both international human rights and environmental law, which means that from a temporal perspective it can focus on both past and future contexts. 272 These points are discussed in the IPCC 4AR and in Byravan and Rajan (2010), p. 245. Byravan and Rajan 270 highlight the delayed nature of the effects of greenhouse gases, since climate has a slow-onset character and it takes many decades for the impacts of past greenhouse gases 271 to be felt.…”

Evaluating climate justice – attitudes and opinions of individual stakeholders in the United Nations Framework Climate Change Convention Conference of the Parties

“…A distributive environmental justice perspective would argue that environmental ills such as pollution and the impacts of climate change have been inequitably distributed. Predominantly marginalized people experience disadvantage through the contamination of their environments and their possession of a lower capacity to adapt to the effects of climate change without having access to the benefits of development through an equitable share of resource revenues (Dobson 1998;Parry et al 2007;Byravan and Rajan 2010). Marginalized groups are generally the most vulnerable to climate impacts given their reduced access to adaptive capacity (Few 2003;Westra 2007;Patt et al 2010, p. 12).…”

How to Save a Disappearing Nation? Discourses on How to Address the Consequences of Climate Change Induced Migration and Examples from Kiribati

“…The implications of climate change induced migration against the people take a vast place in the literature. For example, there are concerns over the self-identity of the people (Kolers 2012) as well as on people's capabilities and functioning who has to relocate (Byravan & Rajan 2010). Many scholars highlight the human rights implications of CCIM (Corendea 2017;Corendea 2018;Knox 2009).…”