The world needs to rapidly phase-out its reliance on fossil fuels. Although there are many policies aimed at creating greener infrastructure, arguably no country is currently doing as much as they should if we are to keep the global temperature rise limited to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels (the threshold projected relatively safe by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). To achieve this, the world has to reduce emissions by 45% from 2010 levels by 2030 and to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Despite these emission reduction targets being included in the Paris Agreement, how to actually reach them and avoid the potentially catastrophic consequences of unmitigated climate change is a problem that remains unresolved.
As an effective collective scheme to deal with climate change is still currently lacking, what should individuals do in the face of a collective failure to mitigate it? Moreover, how should we conceptualise the responsibility of an individual to a collectively caused structural harm that they did not intend to bring about?
Looked through the historical perspective, it could seem like we are implicated in mitigating climate change harms through circumstantial luck: we happened to be born into an era where climate change poses a huge threat to humankind and our science makes us aware of this. Circumstances can indeed throw us a curveball and make it so that we have to pull together to prevent some harm from being realised. An example is when two children have ventured too deep into water and a group of strangers on a beach need to work together to prevent them from drowning. In such cases, individuals who do not know each other should cooperate despite not having an established decision-making mechanism. The literature on circumstantial responsibility of such a random group has centred on the ability of the individuals to form a group agent capable of undertaking the action that the situation requires. Virginia Held has argued influentially that a random collective (like passengers in a train carriage) can be held responsible for failing to act in cases where the action called for “is obvious to the reasonable person and when the expected outcome of the action is clearly favourable.” A failure to cooperate to prevent the harm counts as a blameworthy omission.
What is common across cases of responsibility of random collectives is that the individuals find themselves in the situation due to bad luck: the composition of the collection of individuals is down to matters of geography and timing. This is not the case with human-induced climate change: the situation is fundamentally different from classic beach rescue scenarios. Climate change is not akin to cases where collectives consisting of strangers should act together to prevent some harm that will predictably happen otherwise. Rather, the situation is one where patterns of existing joint action, and collective structures and institutions, set the scene for the actions that in aggregate cause the harm. Although we inherited the problem from the previous generations, we did not just happen to come across it, nor are we some bystanders who should help the drowning victim just because we can. When the threat or the harm is structural, it is not enough that at the moment of danger we cooperate to prevent the harm. Instead, we need to fix the structures that create and facilitate the harm in the first place. If we, for example, approach the polluters responsible for fossil fuel emissions as just an unorganised group of individuals, we are failing to look into the structural issues that underpin climate harms.
Consider a large-scale threat of harm that is down purely to bad luck. Say that a giant asteroid is on a course to hit our planet in three years’ time. To prevent a catastrophe, humans must come up with some technological innovation, like utilising laser pulses to make the asteroid explodes before it hits the Earth. The group of scientists, engineers and politicians in a position to solve the asteroid problem do not have any causal linkages to the creation of the threat. The composition of the group tasked to meet the threat would be down to the skills they possess, but also to unlucky timing in history: the giant asteroid is coming. Luckily, a technological innovation (the laser pulses) is enough to solve the problem and to halt the threat.
Now, contrast the asteroid with anthropogenic climate change. First of all, everyone in a position to solve the problem has causal linkages to the creation of the threat. Although those alive today have inherited the infrastructure that is reliant on fossil fuels from past generations – partly created when the threat was not yet known or fully appreciated – this is not the whole story. The actions of our ancestors have raised global average temperatures, but the current generations have upheld, re-created, and expanded the problematic infrastructure and social practices. Second of all, there is no one-off technological invention to fix climate change. Even if there would be some sudden (and unfeasible) giant technological leap, like carbon-capture on a massive scale, a solution demands multiple innovations in not just technology, but also in how economies and institutions are organised, as well as changes across innumerable other social structures. These two features together make climate change a fundamentally different kind of a global harm or a threat than the bad luck threat of the giant asteroid.
Emissions that cause anthropogenic climate change take place within systems and are tied to structures. This is why we need to take a structural view whenever we discuss climate change. Such harms are more complicated for morality than actions that predictably cause harm in aggregation or group omissions to take action when the situation presents itself. Circumstances of climate harms do not just present themselves to us but are created and upheld by us. Our emitting actions take place in particular enduring collective contexts. Indeed, certain aspects of climate change can be conceptualised as a structural injustice. Structural injustices are consequences of social-structural processes that, in the words of Iris Marion Young, “put large groups of persons under systematic threat of domination or deprivation of the means to develop and exercise their capacities”. A general feature of structural injustices is that they are not necessarily traceable to actions of individual agents, at least in an obvious way. They also need not be intended; rather, they are a side-effect of some other action.
The primary structural injustice with climate change is, as Robyn Eckersley has pointed out, that the worst impacts will be felt by many of the least economically affluent communities, despite them contributing to the problem the least. The marginal social structural position of these communities in the economy and in the state system exposes them to most of the risks that are generated by the social structures, with only few of the benefits. The added injustice is that due to these structures, these communities are placed in a particularly weak position to coordinate the changes necessary to reduce their vulnerability. Future generations could also be added to this picture: their position is particularly vulnerable in relation to us. However, as there are somewhat different issues involved when discussing injustices between generations and within generations, I will concentrate only on the latter.
In particular, I will focus on communities of indigenous people who are already feeling impacts of climate change in their daily lives. Indigenous people often live in ways that are in tune with weather patterns. Rapidly changing weather conditions have led to unpredictable seasons which pose a threat to many such communities. For example, increasingly severe and less predictable weather and shrinking ice packs are already impacting Inuit livelihoods by making it harder to utilise traditional knowledge. Climate change has made travelling difficult and dangerous, isolating communities and cutting Inuits off from their traditional hunting lands. Not only do the changes brought about by climate change make it harder to hunt for food, it also disrupts hundreds of years old cultural traditions and can affect the mental wellbeing of the people.
Climate change can also pose a threat to the livelihood and culture of indigenous communities when they are settled and high mobility is not one of their adaptive strategies. Consider the Sámi people in Finland, Norway, Russia and Sweden, who have a long tradition of reindeer herding. Temperatures have been rising faster at Arctic than the global average and the resulting milder winters have changed the snow conditions. While snow used to last, it now melts and refreezes, preventing reindeer from smelling and digging for their favourite food lichen, a symbiosis of fungus and alga, now trapped under hard snow and ice. Another threat to reindeer herding is presented by the new parasites and diseases that expand towards the north as temperatures get warmer.
However, it is not the case that indigenous peoples are more at risk of climate change simply by choosing to live in certain places and in certain ways. Instead, the indigenous climate justice movement points out how ongoing, cyclical colonialism is often a major reason for the current vulnerability of these communities. If we do not include an assessment of historical injustices and how they have led to increased vulnerability to climate change harms, the reason that indigenous peoples face greater risks seems only a matter of happenstance. This position is labelled by Kyle Powys Whyte as “The Bad Luck View”. Legacies of colonialism include multi-faceted problems such as marginalisation and poverty, and the resulting socio-economic conditions are far from ideal for absorbing and withstanding climate change impacts. Still, climate change impacts should not be seen as a new problem that exacerbates old problems. Rather, the problems are related and form a continuum: the same institutions that facilitate carbon-intensive economic activities also interfere with indigenous peoples’ capacity to adapt to adverse climate impacts. As Lisa Herzog puts it, employing the notion of a structural injustice locates the focus on the “social positions that individuals can end up in, emphasizing that these should neither be understood as the result of personal failure nor as caused by unhappy circumstances for which no one is responsible.”
It is important to note that the marginalisation of indigenous people in politics is not due to passivity. In fact, the voices of indigenous people are among the most audible in the global climate justice social movement. To give an example, many delegates from indigenous communities attended the 2015 Conference of the Parties in Paris. In addition to indigenous representatives at the UN’s climate change talks, the communities also raise the issue through channels such as the Saami Council. There are also many grassroots campaigning organisations that actively campaign on climate change issues, like Idle No More and Land is Life.
Most emissions can be traced back to organised collectives, like nation-states, institutions, and corporations. The emissions need not be intended, but a side-effect of some action. Individuals can share responsibility for collectively caused harm through their membership in collective agents. For example, employees of companies operating in fossil fuel intensive fields can be implicated as members of collective agents with high emissions, or citizens of industrialised nations as members of a nation-state that could do something to address the issue. How we act in our various social roles is important and we should not forget responsibilities of collective agents in getting rid of structural harms. Organised, agential collectives are often in a much better position to take action that members of unorganised collectives.
However, while these collective agents bear the lion’s share of the burden to take meaningful mitigation action, it is also intelligible to discuss the responsibilities of unorganised collectives like polluters, where some shared feature, like a heavy carbon footprint, picks out individuals as components of the collective that causes the harm. Still, such responsibility should be conceptualised not as that of isolated individuals emitting in a social vacuum, but instead through the various structures and patterns that such emissions are part of in the network of interdependencies that connect us. The responsibility of those who participate in the practices and norms that upheld structural harms is to critically evaluate them together. This means engaging in political action: creating public debate and supporting and envisioning political action on these issues is crucial. We should together seek ways to assess and question the practices, norms, and institutions that have created climate change and to try to seek solutions to address and mitigate the harms.
Säde Hormio
Säde Hormio is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at Practical Philosophy in the University of Helsinki. Her research focuses on shared and collective responsibility. This includes questions such as what collectively caused structural harms we can be complicit in, what is the role of individuals in changing institutional practises, or what we mean by the responsibility of collective agents. She is also interested in questions of social epistemology, of knowledge and ignorance, especially related to institutions. You can find out more at shormio.wordpress.com
