Sixteenth International Conference on Climate Change: Impacts & Responses

Abstract

Climate change is a wicked problem that societies are facing. Several organizations at a global level are driving their purposes to transform their practices into strategies that foster capacity building for adaptation to climate change. Change agents leading transformations in ecosystems and technosystems are crucial in this multidimensional and complex context. Transformations expected in human technological systems (such as transportation and energy sectors) must include climate justice that stops these inequalities. One way to address the vulnerability of affected societies is the inclusion of ethical dimensions of human rights and of the rest of nature in the adaptation strategies implemented by communities and states. Such ethics, integrating the rights of nature and life with humans, allow us to move from the predominant anthropocentric paradigm towards an ecocentric and even a biocentric one (an ethics centered on life). This approach focuses on all levels of life and its change agents (individuals, communities, organizations, etc.) so that socio-ecological systems are articulated with technological systems to achieve what Ostrom called “a governance of the commons”. By integrating biocentric ethics in climate justice, this proposal shows the influences of ethics of life in expanding decision-makers’ discourse to formulate adaptation strategies that foster systemic protection of life. A judgment from Atrato and real cases from field trips in Amazonas and Cauca, that address conservation from more inclusive ethics, are exposed, demonstrating the potential of a new ethical paradigm for climate conflict resolution generated in the Anthropocene era.