Abstract: Climate researchers, especially modellers and scenario builders, are increasingly demanding justice, or at least an adequate understanding of what “justice” means. This presentation lays out an interdisciplinary account of some of the most important forms of justice: distributional, procedural, recognitional, corrective and transitional. Most of these take philosophical concepts and expand or adapt them for climate researchers (the key exception is transitional justice, which is a new meta-form of justice that we think especially important for just transition research).

After introducing this framework, the presentation shows a couple ways that it can be used. The goal here is less to prescribe specific outcomes as “more just” and more to (a) provide a unified, powerful and modular set of terms, (b) illustrate their power and usefulness and (c) allow for more precise engagement and interdisciplinary dialogue with justice in climate research.

Our hope is that this framework draws attention to the variety of justice assumptions one can make so that people are more explicit about the assumptions they are adopting and that they test robustness to alternative assumptions.

A published version of the work this talk is based on can be accessed here.