Climate Justice: Lessons from the Global South

UNESCO Climate Change

Target Audience

There are no special requirements for this course, but an interest in climate change and global justice might be useful.

Description

Climate change is a global problem we all must face. This course will deal with some of the key issues related to the ethical dimensions implied by climate change – learning especially from the problems faced as well as the resilience models formulated by the marginalized sectors of society or the so-called “Global South”.

Following the recommendation of UNESCO’s World Commission for the Ethics of Science and Technology (COMEST) in the promotion of Biological and Cultural Diversity as starting point of Climate Change Ethics, UNESCO is currently pioneering a worldwide reflection on the ‘ethical principles in relation to climate change’. Along the same line, within its philosophy programme, in 2014 UNESCO published the “Manual of Philosophy – A South-South Perspective”. This Manual sheds a new light on the singularity of some major philosophical texts and traditions from the Global South.

This course has been built upon these two major undertakings. It will propose a notion of climate justice that balances the ecological integrity of nature, on the one hand, while supporting the biological and economic needs of human populations, on the other hand. Human needs and ecological integrity, therefore, need not be opposing but more supportive of one another in so far as human beings allow nature to regenerate herself by regulating their excessive consumption of natural resources.

Learning Objectives

At the end of the course, you’ll learn about the various practices of frugality in the global south and enable you to adapt these practices to your own circumstances in view of contributing to the needs of the most vulnerable populations of society.

You will also be able to imagine different ways of extracting natural resources without compromising the regenerating capacity of nature to sustain herself and thus continuously support the needs of all human beings.