Essay The Many Injustices of Climate Change

These volumes constitute part of an emerging literature addressing thorny problems of fairness and justice associated with human-induced climate change. Going beyond simplistic characterizations of responsibility and suffering, the authors employ a variety of methods and approaches to explore issues of climate injustice, with a particular focus on developing countries and future generations. In doing so, they provide a rich array of arguments, evidence, and policy recommendations for those interested in achieving a more equitable and more effective climate change regime. All three works argue that greater attention to issues of fairness and justice is necessary to move beyond stalemates in international negotiations and improve national-level policy-making. Roberts and Parks’ A Climate of Injustice is a bold bid to situate climate injustice in enduring and emerging inequalities in the international political economy. They elaborate and test a set of causal mechanisms associated with globally unequal development that render developing countries vulnerable to climate impacts, limit options for less carbonintensive development paths, and constrain possibilities for North-South cooperation. The volume edited by Adger et al. presents a range of perspectives, both normative and positive, on how to incorporate procedural and distributive justice into adaptation policies. Page’s Climate Change, Justice, and Future Generations, is a work of analytic philosophy, showing how theories of distributive justice can provide compelling ethical rationales for present generations to take seriously the adverse impacts of climate change on future generations. Each of these works tackles broad inequalities associated with human-