Eleventh International Conference on Climate Change: Impacts & Responses

Abstract

Many authors on climate justice, most notably Henry Shue, argue that citizens in each economically advanced country have moral responsibility for the emissions of greenhouse gasses that their ancestors have made since industrial revolution occurred in the country. It is claimed that these citizens bear the obligation to undertake the extra reduction of current emissions (mitigation debt) and the duty to pay for a substantial portion of the cost of adaptation policies enacted and implemented in less developed countries (adaptation debt). Some proponents of the idea of historical responsibility invoke the polluter pays principle, presupposing that the past large emitters were morally liable. However, the PPP-based argument encounters two objections: the excusable ignorance of these emitters and the non-identity problem. Others apply the beneficiary pays principle by saying that current citizens are responsible for the past emissions because of the benefits they receive from industrialization in their society. The BPP-based argument also appears to be subject to the non-identity problem, while circumventing the ignorance objection. Despite many studies that have referred to this well-known problem, few writers explored the scope of its validity by distinguishing between mitigation debt and adaptation debt of peoples in the North. This gap in the literature is what the present paper intends to fill. After reviewing the state of the art in the study on historical responsibility, the paper seeks to show that the BPP-based justification for mitigation debt can avoid the non-identity problem, whereas such justification for adaptation debt cannot.