Understanding and Assessing Climate Change

Normative and non-normative approaches to justice in the development of targeted scenarios for climate and biodiversity modelling

Climate change and the process of decarbonization raise a number of important and well discussed justice questions, that it is necessary for researchers, modelers, and policy makers to address. Moreover, it is increasingly recognized that a failure to address questions of justice is an impediment to creating effective climate policy (Martin et al., 2020; Thaller et al., 2023). Within this context, it is imperative that climate and ecosystem services modelers find ways to incorporate justice considerations into their work.

A key challenge in modelling (distributive) justice considerations is that there is no settled agreement on what a just distributive pattern is. Where frameworks for incorporating justice considerations into models (e.g. OECD 2021) have been developed, these frameworks are frequently normative, and define a specific pattern (e.g. an egalitarian distribution) as just. While there is not necessarily a problem with taking a normative stance per se, these approaches run the risk of flattening the discussion of justice by only recognizing a single interpretation of what a fair outcome would be, and also run the risk of being procedurally or epistemically unjust (Fricker 2007) if they reflect only the opinions/values of the authors, rather than representing the full diversity of views on what a just world might look like. This situation is compounded when these models are used to guide policy development and make decisions which ultimately impact upon people’s lives. By contrast, a normatively agnostic approach to incorporating justice into modelling scenarios prompts scenario developers to consider multiple theories of justice, and to compare and contrast how they influence scenario designs. Recent development of an environmental ‘Justice Framework’ at IIASA (Hanger-Kopp et al, 2024; Zimm et al, 2023), and notably preceded by work from Gardiner et al., (2011); Sovacool et al., (2017); and (Gupta et al., (2023), provides a non-normative tool for modelers wishing to incorporate justice considerations into their work. This justice framework has been used to develop targeted scenarios for biodiversity (Leclère et al 2024), as well as a tool for co-designing emissions mitigation scenarios (Scheifinger et al, in preparation).

Taking a normatively-agnostic approach does not entail, I argue, a retreat from normativity into a full moral relativism. Instead, the value of taking this approach is the ability to develop value-explicit scenarios, where modelers are able to identify the values implicit in their work and where it shapes their modelling outcomes, and these assumptions are then able to be scrutinized alongside empirical factors which shape modelling outcomes. Approaching modelling justice in this way can therefore be a form of epistemic humility (Kidd 2016), where modelers remain open to the fact that ethical differences are likely to remain unresolved, and that they can neither assume or presume to have knowledge of justice which supersedes dissenting opinions, or should not be subject to scrutiny.