Second Workshop on Ethics and Adaptation: Loss, Damage, and Harm

Second Workshop on Ethics and Adaptation: Loss, Damage, and Harm

An increasingly significant theme of climate change negotiations is loss and damage. While loss and damage has constituted a very specific track of climate negotiations, there are larger issues, conceptual and practical, in need of clarification. Given this need the theme of the second workshop on ethics and adaptation will be loss, damage, and harm.

Inside and outside of negotiations, loss and damage seem to be tied quite closely to the idea of harm. But are they really so closely related? As loss and damage might be construed more broadly than matters of economics, or even more broadly than distinctively human well-being, a more expansive notion of harm may be required, one not easily captured either in the language of current climate negotiations or even in our common understanding of loss and damage outside of those negotiations. It is not entirely clear the extent to which there is a difference between harm, on the one hand, and loss and damage, on the other. For example,

Should we recognize harms that do not register as loss or damage, say, an increase in vulnerability or the loss of opportunity? 

How should this be integrated into climate negotiations, development efforts, and responses to environmental catastrophe?

More generally, what is the relation between loss, damage, and harm?

Adding clarity to the relation between harm and loss and damage, and to our understanding of the normative significance of harm, and will be crucially important for making the difficult choices involved with addressing the inevitable loss and damage resulting from our changing world.

Recognizing that moving forward on these issues will require a broad and inclusive conversation, the second workshop on ethics and adaptation will bring together philosophers, policy scholars, and other researchers and practitioners working on issues related to ethics, adaptation, and sustainability. Contributions from non-traditional and diverse perspectives are particularly welcome as are contributions from those who bring diversity and divergent viewpoints to the discussion.

Suggested topics include:

·       Loss and damage in the UNFCCC climate negotiations

·       Environmental justice challenges to loss and damage discourse

·       Implementing a development agenda into climate negotiations

·       Alternative conceptualizations of harm, risk, and damage

·       The relation between environmental value and harm

·       The limits of individual and collective adaptation

·       Vulnerability of individuals and communities

·       Existential threats caused by climate change

·       Disaster ethics and normal ethics

·       Disaster, risk reduction, and specific policy responses (e.g. Hyoga Framework for Action)