MANCEPT Workshop on Ethical and Political Challenges in Climate Change Adaptation

Climate change adaptation is rapidly becoming one of the most urgent challenges of our time, one fraught with ethical and political issues. Failure to reduce emissions has led to significant global warming, and climate risks are likely to grow more extreme. We are hurtling toward a future where climate change threatens the health, lives, and livelihoods of millions, especially vulnerable populations in the Global South who already live with the worst consequences.  

However, adaptation remains under-prioritized in ethics, political philosophy, and policymaking, resulting in unanswered questions, underdeveloped plans, and costly maladaptation. Adaptation financing falls far short of need. No effective appeal mechanisms exist, and strict immigration policies undermine climate migration. Entrenched power imbalances distort decision-making, and poor adaptation governance amplifies existing injustices or creates new ones (Byskov et al. 2021).

This neglect persists despite growing recognition that adaptation raises distinctive questions of value, responsibility, justice, legitimacy, and power (Shue 2014; Jamieson 1996, 2014; Thompson 2020; Byskov et al. 2021; Byskov & Hyams 2022; Ferguson et al. 2026; Ferguson, forthcoming). Climate adaptation is no mere technical problem but a contested political domain pervaded by conflicting values, competing interests, resource-allocation dilemmas, and administrative confusion (Dolšak & Prakash 2018).

This workshop asks: How might moral, social, and political philosophers contribute to understanding what just, responsible, and effective adaptation is and how it ought to be achieved? 

Topic areas:

• Conceptual foundations: What is adaptation? When is it successful (Singh et al. 2022)? What constitutes mis- and maladaptation (Schipper 2020)? How should adaptation relate to other climate-action pathways (mitigation, geoengineering, L&D) and neighboring concepts (e.g., resilience)? What spatial and temporal scales are appropriate for adaptation planning and policy (Orlove 2022)?
• Goals and goods: What should adaptation protect—material interests, capabilities, cultural identity, place, nonhuman nature (Heyward 2017; Hourdequin 2021; Shockley 2023; Pepper 2018; Palmer 2021)? How ought we to navigate value pluralism, conflict, and incommensurability between adaptation means and ends? How might adaptation include transforming normative concepts (Thompson & Bendik-Keymar, eds. 2012)?  What roles do community authority and self-determination play in defining adaptation goals?
• Rights, duties, and responsibilities: Is there a right to adaptation (Byskov 2024)?  If so, what are its correlative duties, and how should they be allocated (Caney 2014)? What are adaptation responsibilities, who bears them, and on what grounds (Baer 2006; Hartzell-Nichols 2011; Jamieson 2015; Ferguson et al. 2026)?  Who are adaptation’s ‘agents of justice’ and how do they ‘realize justice’ (Hickey et al. 2021)?
• Varieties of justice: How should adaptation decision-making represent vulnerable groups—Indigenous peoples, women, and people of color? How does adaptation involve various forms of justice—distributive, corrective, procedural, recognitional, transitional, epistemic (Zimm et al. 2024; Buxton 2019)? How can feminist, anti-racist, decolonial, and non-ideal theories enhance understanding of adaptation justice?
• Governance and policy beyond legal mechanisms: What does responsible adaptation governance look like? What normative commitments should guide adaptation policy? How should authority be distributed across governance levels?

Format: 12 presenters allocated 1 hour each (30 mins., presentation; 30 mins., discussion); plus, 2 roundtables to identify and discuss emerging themes, future directions, and potential collaborations.

Session 1: Adaptation Responsibilities and Rights

Säde Hormio (University of Helsinki): Adaptation Responsibilities of Super-Polluters

Josep Recasens (Pompeu Fabra University): A Duty to Adapt? Victims’ Responsibilities in Climate Adaptation

Göran Duus-Otterström (University of Gothenburg): The Right to Climate Adaptation: Defending the Corrective Conception

Session 2: Knowledge, Power, and Epistemic Justice

Clare Heyward & Kerstin Reibold (UiT The Arctic University of Norway): Epistemic Injustices in Climate Adaptation

Futura Venuto & Sapna Kumar (University of Bern): A Feminist Perspective on Climate Change Adaptation Knowledge

Roundtable I

All Participants: Roundtable on Emerging Themes and Issues

Session 3: The Ends of Adaptation

Nils Wendler (Kiel University): Efficiency in Allocating Scarce Climate Adaptation Finance: Trivial Constraint, Substantive Demand, or Something Else?

Kyle Ferguson (Hunter College, CUNY): Objectivity, Intersubjectivity, and the Aims of Adaptation

Allen Thompson (Oregon State University): Ethical Adaptation Is Adapting Our Humanity

Session 4: The Limits of Adaptation

Morten Fibieger Byskov (Tilburg University): How Much Adaptation? The Right to Climate Adaptation and Its (Ecological) Limits

Ivo Wallimann-Helmer (University of Fribourg): Climate Adaptation, Overdemandingness, Emergency and the Epistemic Limits of Justice

Session 5: Beyond Human Interests

Arthur Obst (University of Chicago) & Linde De Vroey (University of Antwerp): Conservation as Climate Adaptation? Opportunities and Challenges 

Clare Palmer (Texas A&M University): Wild Animals, Ethics and Climate Adaptation: It’s Complicated 

Roundtable II

All Participants: Roundtable on Future Directions and Collaborations