The Ethics of Carbon Sink Conservation: National Sovereignty over Natural Resources, Fairness and Duties of Justice

Transcription

1 The Ethics of Carbon Sink Conservation: National Sovereignty over Natural Resources, Fairness and Duties of Justice Fabian Schuppert, Institute for Collaborative Research in the Humanities, Queen's University Belfast First draft. Unfortunately unfinished, hence very short. This truly is a work in progress and a sandpit full of half- baked ideas, so comments definitely needed and very welcome! Introduction In order to successfully tackle existing pressing problems such as environmental degeneration, anthropogenic climate change and increasing biodiversity loss we have to among other things govern and manage our available stock of natural resources differently. With regard to the dangers of climate change, it seems particularly important to conserve and protect major carbon sinks, such as for instance tropical rainforests. As the title of the paper suggests when we want to determine how carbon sinks should be conserved, philosophers working on the issue usually focus on two aspects, namely duties of justice (and other moral duties) relevant to the discussion and the fact that within the current system most natural resources are under the control of sovereign states. Recently, some philosophers have written on the issue of natural resource governance/carbon sink preservation focusing on the question of whether national sovereignty over natural resources is at all normatively justifiable, including papers by Chris Armstrong (forthcoming; n.d.1) and myself (Schuppert 2014). While there are many good reasons to question the idea of national sovereignty over natural resources, for the purposes of this paper, I will take the idea that states control most of the resources found in their territory in a (more or less) sovereign fashion for granted. 1 Instead of questioning one of the most basic parameters of the current system, i.e. the so- called national resource privilege, I want to focus on the question of whether states with significant terrestrial carbon sinks have a duty to conserve these sinks for people far away in other countries and in the future, and how the burdens of carrying out such conservation should be distributed. At this point, some readers might wonder whether this is indeed an exercise worth engaging in, considering that Chris Armstrong (n.d.1; n.d.2) has already discussed the issue and found a plausible solution; according to Chris (n.d.1: 10-11), even if we assume that states enjoy sovereign rights over their resources, we have good reasons to hold that forested states ought to conserve 1 By taking the national resource privilege for granted, some will fear that I have committed myself to a viewpoint which either has to take all state actions regarding their resources as legitimate, or I will have to arbitrarily distinguish between ways of interpreting and re- imagining the resource privilege which I deem to be politically realistic/feasible and normatively justified, and a realist interpretation of the resource privilege, which takes its bearing from past and present resource governance practices. Alas, there is some truth to this objection. However, since I firmly believe that normative analysis of competing claims under non- ideal circumstances is important, I take this objection not to be a deal- breaker. 1 P age

2 their resources and that benefitting states have duties of fairness to share the financial burden of doing so, at least if we assume that rainforest protection goes hand in hand with fewer opportunities for forested states. So is there anything this paper can add or challenge? My aim in this short paper is not so much to challenge Chris's argument in particular but rather to add a couple of wrinkles to and raise some potential issues for the general argument as such and to see whether taking some additional factors into consideration changes our overall assessment of the relevant duties and responsibilities involved. In so doing, I hope to show that the ethics of carbon sink conservation not only is a tricky issue, but also that our answer might need to be embedded in a wider analysis of what climate justice requires and how duties change (or not) under non- ideal circumstances. I. Setting the Scene Since I do not want to misrepresent Chris's arguments, let me briefly sketch the main contours of the general argument I want to further investigate. 2 The basic argument goes as follows: states with rainforest have a duty to protect these rainforest as part of the earth's carbon sinks. This duty is a duty not only towards the citizens of the state in question but a duty also to all other people on the planet. However, rainforest protection comes with costs, both direct (i.e. the actual costs of preserving the forests) and indirect (e.g. opportunity costs through not commercially exploiting the rainforests). Considering that citizens in the so- called developed world need large amounts of the absorptive capacity offered by rainforests and considering that forested states cannot exclude others from using their carbon sinks, there seems to exist a duty of fairness to share the costs of rainforest preservation. In short, developing forested states ought to preserve their rainforests but the costs of doing so should (at least to some significant degree) be taken up by benefitting developing states. This is the stage on which my arguments take place. Needless to say, the stage operates with some simplifications and abstractions, which are only intended to make the arguments involved clearer, even if reality might be more complex. For instance, I assume that the forested states in question are developing states with low to medium GHG footprint. For reasons of clarity and simplicity I will focus on two examples, Ecuador and Papua New Guinea, both of which have significant rainforest cover and low to medium GHG footprints. 3 Moreover, I assume (at least initially) that the biggest benefiters of carbon sink conservation are high emitting developed 2 For the remainder of the paper I will use this general argument as my starting point, rather than dealing in- depth with Chris's arguments. 3 Papua New Guinea's annual per capita emissions of CO 2 are around 0.6 metric tons, while Ecuador's annual per capita emissions of CO 2 are around 2.2 metric tons. 2 P age

3 countries. Using these assumptions as the background, I now want to discuss some possible challenges to and wrinkles of the original argument. II. Wrinkles, Twists and Challenges II.I. Historical Responsibility and Benefitting As stated above, normative arguments about who should compensate whom for climate injustice are based on abstractions. However, with regard to the argument presented above, namely that the developed countries benefit and thus should pay, there are some obvious issues: first, the people who will benefit from rainforest protection are first and foremost people who aren't even born, yet; second, the reason why we currently face anthropogenic climate change has a lot to do with historical emissions and long- standing practices of overconsumption, which raises the question if the reason why some should pay for rainforest protection is not their historical responsibility rather than that they benefit. Let me briefly expand on both these points. First, the problem with basing one's argument for carbon sink conservation on benefits from that very conservation is the obvious time- lag involved. If Ecuador and Papua New Guinea decide not to exploit their rainforests and to actively preserve them for the benefit of higher GHG absorption, it is rather questionable whether the main beneficiaries of this policy are currently living people from the global North. In fact, considering the fact that the effects of climate change are and will continue to be most severe for extremely vulnerable people in developing countries, one could argue that the people who will most benefit from carbon sink conservation are future people in the developing world in poor and vulnerable circumstances. If the argument for paying for Ecuador's and Papua New Guinea's efforts to maintain their carbon sinks and to forgo development opportunities is based on benefits, then, it seems odd to assume that currently living people in the global North are the obvious payees. Moreover, if we really focus only on the benefits from carbon sink preservation it looks as if quickly developing and highly populated countries such as China should shoulder more of the burden than countries with smaller populations and decreasing emissions, despite their historical responsibility. Again, this might seem odd. Second, as already implicitly alluded to above, one could think that what does the normative work here is the idea of historical responsibility rather than benefitting. 4 It is fairly uncontroversial to 4 Another alternative would be to base the argument on a country's ability to pay. This is an option I will not discuss here. The reason for this is that I take the most convincing forms of the ability to pay principle (APP) to be second order forms, meaning that the APP would operate on a lower level, for instance within the group of historically responsible states in order to determine which country has to pay how much. 3 P age

4 claim that anthropogenic climate change was largely caused by countries of the global North. 5 Hence, it would seem logical that if some countries, such as Ecuador and Papua New Guinea, have to forgo certain benefits now and thus make sacrifices, that the countries which were largely responsible for bringing this situation about should pay. Why should the beneficiaries pay if the benefits they accrue are nor directly connected to a form of unjust enrichment or wrongful advantage? 6 One answer to this question is the idea of freeriding: we have an issue with somebody freeriding on somebody else's costly efforts, for instance, if the developed countries reap large part of the benefits of the developing countries' costly preservation measures. While this rings true, the issue I want to get at is that not all forms of freeriding on somebody else's costly efforts call for compensation or burden- sharing. Imagine you spend a lot of time and money on maintaining the flowerbeds in our inner courtyard. While I truly enjoy looking at the beautiful flowers and I even value your efforts, it seems that I don't owe you compensation for your work, since it was your free decision to maintain the flowerbeds. What seems different in the carbon sink protection case is that a) Ecuador and Papua New Guinea do not freely decide to maintain their sinks but they do so out of a sense of justice (let's assume that is true), and b) the only reason why Ecuador and Papua New Guinea at all have to preserve all these sinks is that the global North caused anthropogenic climate change. Thus, the issue here does not really seem to be the benefitting but the fact that developing states are historically responsible and that the benefits they will gain were not voluntarily or accidentally created but because actions by the developed countries imposed obligations of justice onto Ecuador and Papua New Guinea in a form they would not have had without these actions, which implies that any benefits for the developed countries without compensation could be considered cases of wrongful freeriding. In light of both these reasons it seems that we should change the justification for burden- sharing in the original argument: instead of benefitting it should either be historical responsibility or wrongful freeriding. Otherwise, if we were to focus on the beneficiaries only, we might end up with a paradoxical situation of the following kind: A caused climate change, B has to sacrifice development in favour of carbon sink conservation and the vulnerable and poor future people of populous country C have to pay for the costs incurred by B. 5 The statement regarding causation is indeed rather uncontroversial, whether normatively anything follows from such historical responsibility is much debated, since theorists disagree whether the responsibility in question is merely causal or a form of outcome responsibility or even moral responsibility. 6 See recent papers by Ed Page (2012) and Dan Butt (forthcoming) for defending the idea that the beneficiary pays principle is most convincing in cases in which the benefits stem from unjust enrichment or wrongful advantage. 4 P age

5 II.II. Isolationism and Buying- Out The second issue I want to raise is the argument's isolationism and its potential consequences for supporting a buy- out argument. In its original form the argument for carbon sink conservation in general and rainforest protection in particular seems somewhat isolationist, meaning that it focuses on analysing relevant principles of justice and fairness for a small(- ish) issue within a much broader context, to wit, global and intergenerational (climate) justice. While there are good reasons not to deal with the issue of global and intergenerational (climate) justice all in one go, the question arises of whether singling out the issue of rainforest protection and carbon sink conservation is not overly isolationist. Why might this be the case? The basic argument I introduced above holds that forested developing states have duties of justice to conserve their terrestrial carbon sinks, while benefitting developed states have a duty of fairness to pay for the costs incurred by the forested developing nations. This way of framing the argument, though, specifies two duties without taking the wider context into consideration. On the one hand, forested developing states are simply assumed to have duties of justice to countries which are both historically responsible for the precarious situation we're in and non- complying with regard to drastically lowering their GHG emissions. In a certain way, then, it seems as if the duty of states such as Ecuador and Papua New Guinea is assumed to be independent of the overall context (a point I will return to in section II.III.), which does indeed strike me as being quite isolationist. Moreover, precisely because of this isolationism the original argument might even be considered to be a kind of buying- out argument for the developed high emitting nations of the global North. Let me explain. The original argument claims that Ecuador and Papua New Guinea have a duty to preserve their carbon sinks independently of what other states do. In exchange, because states like the US and the UK benefit from Ecuador's and Papua New Guinea's costly efforts, the US and the UK have to pay Ecuador and Papua New Guinea. One possible interpretation of this way of reasoning is with a slight ironic twist - that the US and the UK thus seem to have paid Ecuador and Papua New Guinea for conserving their carbon sinks so that the US and the UK do not have to mitigate themselves. While this condition is obviously not explicitly part of the argument, and while this interpretation might very much go against the intentions of the people who use the original argument, there is nothing to suggest in this isolationist argument that the US and the UK would have to take on any mitigation commitments as part of the deal. In that way, the original argument can due to its isolationism- be seen as an implicit buying- out argument, meaning that 5 P age

6 states such as the UK and the US simply buy their way out of mitigation obligations by paying states like Ecuador and Papua New Guinea for their conservation efforts. 7 In order to avoid such a conclusion, it seems that the original argument needs to be contextualised within a wider discussion of duties of climate justice. Instead of focusing on sharing the costs of the discharging of one particular duty, we should rather see how this duty stands in relation to other duties and what kind of commitments other states must make in order to fulfil the conditions of fairness. II.III. Which Duties? Whose Duties? And Who Owes Whom What? Following on from the conclusion of the previous paragraph, I briefly want to highlight some potential issues with regard to contextualizing the argument. In particular, I want to flag up some questions concerning the different duties, duty bearers and duty addressees which frame the original argument. From the viewpoint of states such as Ecuador and Papua New Guinea the question is what the relevant duties in the case of carbon sink preservation are. One relevant duty is, at least if one follows recent functionalist accounts of state legitimacy, every state's duty to meet its citizens basic needs and to realise its citizens' fundamental interests (Stilz 2009). On top of that, in order to claim legitimacy for their territorial possessions we could, following Lea (Ypi forthcoming), argue that states have a duty to advance globally just reciprocal relations. In addition, we could argue for global and intergenerational duties of (climate) justice, for instance, that states and individuals should aim to avoid significant future harm if doing so is not overly costly. While it is due to issues of uncertainty and fragmentation of cause and effect certainly difficult to precisely specify what kinds of actions are ruled out by one's global and intergenerational duties of (climate) justice, even such a vague formulation will give us a useful normative yardstick to operate with. 8 What is interesting to notice is that all three of these duties obviously also apply to states like the US and the UK. So how does the developing states' duty to conserve their carbon sinks follow from this set of duties and which aspects might have been missing from the original argument? 7 To be fair, there is no indication in the original argument that paying states like Ecuador and Papua New Guinea should be seen as sufficient commitment, or as a way of buying themselves out, by states like the UK and the US. However, the isolationism of the original argument does seem to raise that worry. 8 This is not to say that such a vague formulation would be without controversy, not at all. However, for the purpose of this paper I want to assume that certain duties of global and intergenerational (climate) justice exist and that they rule out certain trivial well- being gains in light of the risk of future suffering, even though such assessments across time and space are notoriously difficult to make. In other words, what I want to avoid is moving this discussion into the direction of global and intergenerational justice scepticism. My aim here is not to challenge the underlying justice discourse but to point out potential flaws in too quickly reaching wide- ranging conclusions. 6 P age

7 Again, from the viewpoint of states such as Ecuador and Papua New Guinea the obvious place to start is the duty to meet their citizens' needs and realise their fundamental interests. This obviously implies providing a safe and sustainable environment, which in turn includes carbon sink preservation. However, if it were only about the citizens of Ecuador and Papua New Guinea, neither state would need to conserve all of their terrestrial carbon sinks, as long as their GHG footprints stay within reasonable limits. In fact, Papua New Guinea's annual per capita GHG footprint is so small that the state could easily be carbon neutral and still exploit the majority of its rainforest resources. The only reason why this is not the case is that other countries have a) emitted too much in the past, b) continue to emit too much and c) that Ecuador and Papua New Guinea have neither a way of excluding others from using their carbon sinks, nor a away of protecting themselves against the negative consequences of climate change (which was caused by others). 9 Thus, in order to protect their citizens as well as they can, Ecuador and Papua New Guinea might have indeed strong reasons to maintain all their carbon sinks. At the same time this conclusion seems deeply unfair and it only seems to come about because other states fail to discharge all three of their abovementioned duties: i) state like the US and UK fail to adequately protect their citizens' needs and interests by advancing utterly unsustainable policies, ii) states like the UK and the US undermine the idea of globally just reciprocal relations by overconsuming and imposing severe risks on other people, as well as by forcing states such as Ecuador and Papua New Guinea to adopt policies they would not have otherwise had to adopt; iii) states like the UK and the US obviously also jeopardise future people's survival and well- being, even though not doing so would in many cases not be overly costly. Even if we were to hold that states like the US do possibly fulfil the first duty (i.e. meet their citizens' basic needs and fundamental interests), it seems that there is something normatively quite objectionable about Ecuador and Papua New Guinea having to discharge a certain duty (i.e. carbon sink conservation) and incur some costs because the UK and the US fail to adequately discharge their duties. In this particular case it seems that Ecuador and Papua New Guinea are forced to take up the slack because of the US and the UK (and other nations) not doing their part. However, this obviously raises the question of whether states such as Ecuador and Papua New Guinea do indeed have an obligation to take up the slack, considering that a) other states are non- complying and b) the only reason why we are in the current situation is other states' overconsumption (Hohl and Roser 2011). On top of that the states mentioned in sub- clause a) and b) are largely the same states (though not necessarily so), meaning that the one's responsible for the mess are also the one's who do not help 9 To this you can add d) that Papua New Guinea might want to raise its emissions, as part of its further development. Still, even if Papua New Guinea tripled its annual GHG emissions, it could easily use large parts of its terrestrial carbon sinks for other purposes. 7 P age

8 to clean it up (or at least they do not help as much as they should). It does seem to be a perfectly feasible response by forested developing countries to call for major mitigation commitments by the historically responsible and thus far non- complying developed countries, before committing to any sort of costly carbon sink conservation program. The reason why such a position would also not necessarily conflict with developed states' duty to care for their own citizens is that in the current regime, states like Ecuador and Papua New Guinea are simply unable to protect their citizens adequately. If the global North causes runaway climate change, it might be for countries like Ecuador and Papua New Guinea much wiser to exploit part of their resources and preserve only parts of their carbon sinks, since the additional funds can be used to advance adaptation measures and reduce overall vulnerability to climate change induced harms. If these arguments are sound, it seems clear that a scheme which simply offers financial compensation for the incurred costs is inadequate. Instead of truly addressing the question of who has which duties of justice and what fairness requires, it takes one global duty for granted (namely the duty of developing states to protect their carbon sinks) and introduces a less than adequate fairness mechanism (namely that benefitting states should share the costs of carbon sink protection). In the absence of globally reciprocal duties of justice, though, it seems at least questionable that Ecuador and Papua New Guinea have duties vis à vis people in other countries to protect their carbon sinks, and even if such duties exist their extent might be limited. In the first place it seems each and every state's responsibility to take care of its own citizens. Then it is every state's duty to advance globally just reciprocal relations. Considering only these two duties the onus clearly seems to lie on non- complying developed states and not on forested developing states. On top of that the question of global and intergenerational justice also seems to call for fair burden sharing and compliance in mitigation efforts by all affected parties. Again, it is unclear that in its absence developing states have a duty to others to conserve their carbon sinks. Possibly they do, especially to future generations, but we need further arguments to properly establish this case. In addition to the arguments just rehearsed, there is another important consideration which seems to play an important role for Ecuador's and Papua New Guinea's ability to discharge duty one and two (i.e. providing for their citizens and advance global just reciprocity), namely, self- determination. 10 As I have argued elsewhere, both in order to provide for their citizens and in order to be free from unhealthy forms of global domination states do seem to require a right to self- determination (Schuppert 2013). 10 This is obviously an en- vogue topic, see the papers at this workshop as well as the recent symposium in International Theory (2014). 8 P age

9 This right to self- determination might, under non- ideal circumstances, provide us with a further reason to assume that under conditions of non- compliance, that is, in situations in which developed countries fail to commit to substantial mitigation commitments, Ecuador and Papua New Guinea do not have a duty of justice to others to conserve their carbon sinks (but they probably owe conservation to their own citizens, present and future). However, one could also argue that 'unilaterally' imposed climate change (i.e. climate change caused by developed states but affecting all states) undermines the right to self- determination of developing countries and that this is another strong reason why first the developed states have to do their fair share (i.e. mitigate radically and work towards fulfilling their three aforementioned duties) before states like Ecuador and Papua New Guinea have to make any sacrifices or incur any costs. On such a reading, tacking up the slack would be out of the question. Overall then, the duties involved in settling the issue of carbon sink conservation might be more complex and diverse than first anticipated. Considering the fact that many developed states seem to be not only historically responsible but also non- complying and thus imposing burdens on others, raises the question of whether we should not start by asking the question of what these states owe others as a duty of justice, prior to moving onto the question whether self- determining states such as Ecuador and Papua New Guinea owe others the conservation of their carbon sinks. This is not to say that such duties do not exist at all, but to start with these duties seems somewhat premature. III. Summary While there is obviously a lot one can add, I think the discussion thus far has already shown that the duties the original argument alluded to are not as clear cut as initially assumed. In fact, I think I have given several (hopefully good) reasons why we might want to further contextualise our analysis of the ethics of carbon sink conservation, even if that does not make the analysis any easier. Whether states such as Ecuador and Papua New Guinea really do have a duty of justice towards people in the developed world to protect their terrestrial carbon sinks is questionable, and so is the extent of these duties of justice (if they exist). Moreover the assumption that fairness simply demands that benefitting states share the burden of carbon sink conservation is also questionable. Bibliography Armstrong, Chris (forthcoming): 'Against "Permanent Sovereignty" over natural resources', Politics, Philosophy & Economics. 9 P age

10 Armstrong, Chris (n.d.1): 'Climate justice and territorial rights', Unpublished Manuscript. Available at: (accessed 23 March 2014). Armstrong, Chris (n.d.2): 'Sharing the costs of rainforest protection', Unpublished Manuscript. Butt Daniel (forthcoming): 'A doctrine quite new and altogether untenable : defending the beneficiary pays principle', Journal of Applied Philosophy. Hohl, Sabine and Dominic Roser (2011): 'Stepping in for the polluters? Climate justice under partial compliance', Analyse & Kritik 33 (2): Page, Edward (2012): 'Give it up for climate change: a defence of the beneficiary pays principle', International Theory 4 (2): Schuppert, Fabian (2013): 'Collective agency and global non- domination', In: Cosmopolitanism versus non- cosmopolitanism: critiques, defenses, reconceptualizations, ed. by Gillian Brock (Oxford: Oxford University Press), Schuppert, Fabian (2014): 'Beyond the national resource privilege: towards an International Court of the Environment', International Theory 6 (1): Stilz, Anna (2009): 'Why do states have territorial rights?', International Theory 1(2): Ypi, Lea (forthcoming): 'A permissive theory of territorial rights', European Journal of Philosophy doi: /j x 10 P age