New European programme ‘Rights to a Green Future’ establishes future research agenda

Prof. Marcus Düwell (Department of Philosophy/Ethics Institute/ Zeno Research Institute) is to chair a new European Networking Programme: ‘Rights to a Green Future’. This network, funded by the European Science Foundation (ESF), brings together leading experts from various disciplines and countries who work on climate change and other aspects of sustainability. The network aims to establish a common future research agenda about these urgent themes.

The state of affairs in climate change research

Current discussions in ethics, law, economics, and other disciplines, do not sufficiently address a number of questions concerning moral and political obligations towards future generations, questions which arise because of climate change, limited energy resources and population growth. For example, the openness of the future is a serious obstacle for assessing political options, yet an ethics of risk and precaution is still missing. Furthermore, a sustainable politics must take obligations towards future generations into account, but these obligations easily conflict with the established human rights-framework – as in the conflict between the aims of sustainability and poverty eradication. Also, strategies towards a sustainable politics can run into psychological and institutional barriers which require further research. As long as such issues are unresolved, discourses about sustainability will run into serious problems. Collaborative research is urgently needed to identify the interrelationships between all dimensions, and in order to develop a research agenda for a future-centred ethics of the environment.

The ESF-network ‘Rights to a Green Future’

The ESF-network ‘Rights to a Green Future’ aims to identify and analyse the questions that need to be answered to determine our responsibilities towards future generations, and to clarify the political consequences of carrying out these responsibilities. The programme has a number of focal points. It aims to gain knowledge of future climate developments and of the methods to predict them; to critically assess moral and legal frameworks – especially that of human rights – in an intergenerational perspective; to work towards a concept of moral and political responsibility that does justice to the unpredictable openness of the future; and to investigate the main psychological and institutional obstacles for a sustainable politics. Through these foci, the programme will develop a research agenda of the ethics of sustainability.

Multidisciplinary collaboration

The challenges that this programme seeks to address require an approach that utilises and synthesises methodologies and knowledge from many disciplines. Accordingly, the network includes climate scientists, economists, philosophers, social scientists and lawyers. These scientists will organise joint workshops and prepare joint publications. The programme will run from 2011 to 2015, and its main participating countries, besides the Netherlands, are Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Norway, Romania, and Switzerland.