Intergenerational Climate Justice in the Courtroom

<i>The Pivotal Generation: Why We Have a Moral Responsibility to Slow Climate Change Right Now</i> by Henry Shue

SUMMARY This article explores the manner in which climate action at the African regional level protects and promotes children's rights with considerations being had to the principle of intergenerational equity. It establishes that while the concept of intergenerational equity is entrenched in the international and African regional climate change framework for the protection of children, neither the Convention on the Rights of the Child nor the African Children's Charter mentions the concept. However, CRC and the African Children's Charter oblige states to take into consideration the views of children and protect their best interests in climate action (to ensure intergenerational equity) and in achieving a sustainable future. Using a doctrinal research method, the article examines the regional legal and institutional responses to the cascading impacts of climate change and how they safeguard children's rights to a sustainable future. It proceeds to critically analyse child rights-responsive provisions in the African Children's Charter that could potentially enhance the utility of the principle of intergenerational equity in the context of climate action in Africa. The article argues that the principle of intergenerational equity could, in theory, be used as a useful tool for the protection and promotion of the rights and interests of children from climate change impacts. Key words: children's rights; climate change; climate justice; future generations; intergenerational equity

&lt;p&gt;Human-induced climate change is already having an acute impact on many lives and livelihoods. This is expected to escalate, especially for “disadvantaged people and communities in countries at all levels of development” (Pachauri et al., 2014, p. 13). This thesis is situated within post- and critical development, enabling critique of mainstream development alongside the exploration of alternative, bottom-up forms of development, such as social movements. Following a social constructionist epistemology, it utilises qualitative methodologies (in-person and virtual in-depth interviews) to navigate the complex, fluid, and subjective field of climate justice. This research situates the emerging climate justice movements in Aotearoa as key to understanding how radical, progressive societal change is articulated in the contemporary era to mitigate and adapt to anthropogenic climate change. Several core themes emerge as part of the research, including how various actors (organisations, sub-movements, and individuals) relate to each other and the world around them. This research asks and addresses not only what climate justice is in Aotearoa and who is involved, but also which theories of change operate within these emerging social movements? The data in this research outlines that climate justice movements in Aotearoa are accessible, inclusive, relational, accountable and frontline community-led, the antithesis of the current dominant structures and systems of society. These movements build upon other rights and justice movements, notably: Indigenous justice, disability justice, intersectional feminism, workers’ rights, and intergenerational justice. The development and negotiation of a collective climate justice identity is shaped by several interconnected tensions: partisanship versus non-partisanship, internal conformity versus diversity, and ecosystem versus ‘egosystem’. These tensions can also impede connection and understanding, at times leading to substantial harm to individuals, communities, and climate justice more broadly. This thesis outlines multiple forces shaping the actualisation of justice in an Aotearoa experiencing climate change. Fundamentally, this thesis highlights that climate justice is an ongoing journey of relationships and negotiations that “move at the speed of trust”.&lt;/p&gt;

Inter-generational equity (IGE) could be a powerful normative principle to achieve climate justice for present and future generations of human and nonhuman nature in the activities of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate change (FCCC). However, until the FCCC moves beyond exploitative discourses of ecological modernization and sustainable development, any policy to address IGE will not reconcile tensions between present and future generations of humans and nonhuman nature. Using the FCCC’s Gender Action Plan as a focal point, this chapter examines how the climate change regime seeks to achieve IGE for women and girls. Drawing on ecofeminist philosophy, it argues that rather than recognizing the interrelationships between humans and nature, and including future generations of nonhuman nature in policy development, the FCCC approaches IGE as an anthropocentric distributive justice issue. This inhibits the normative power of the principle and limits the potential for policy making to achieve gender equality for present and future generations.

The interests of children in a climate-challenged future are under-represented within UK policy-making and public discourse. Debates on intergenerational equity have centred on economic logic rather than the moral issue of harms to the next generation, or the responsibilities of today’s generation. Civil movements play an important role in changing public and political thinking on this issue; however, research on intergenerational climate justice activism has so far been confined to the youth movement. This study uses an in-depth diary and interview dataset of 20 UK-based activist mothers and fathers to explore the emotional spaces of parenting and campaigning for intergenerational climate justice. Attention was paid to the role of parenthood in the framing and motivation for action, and the way that campaigning was sustained or impeded by activist parents’ personal relationships. The study found that the emotional spaces of activist parenting were managed and demarcated through moral boundary work that was used to define, distinguish and legitimise a collective representation. These boundaries were relational and drawn selectively to include similar others and to form bridges with politicians; boundaries also functioned to delegitimise the role of adults without children, and to exclude and excuse younger children and older relatives from playing a part in justice activism. The paper concludes by considering how these processes might impede the movement and have implications for wider social justice.

This article discusses the societal multiplicity proposition as a welcome conceptual proposition for IR. First, it argues that against the background of the discipline’s trajectory and especially Adler’s call for a turn towards ‘the social’ in the 1990s, Rosenberg’s proposition offers a nudge towards scrutinising concepts for a more concise and systematic appreciation of societal multiplicity as a source of knowledge production in a globalised world. Second, this is illustrated with reference to the challenge of building global governance from below as the international liberal order stands contested and alliances are re-negotiated. Third, it demonstrates why during this period of global change it is key to diversify sources of meaning-making and the conceptual categories to reflect this diversification. And fourth, it turns to practices of contestation as drivers of inter-societal negotiations that target both established fundamental norms of global governance (e.g. the rule of law, human rights, and democracy) and more recently, negotiated fundamental norms (e.g. climate justice, gender justice, or intergenerational justice). The article concludes that a conceptual shift from the agency of states and their representatives as carriers of knowledge and mediators of normative change towards engaging societal agency represents a welcome contribution.

This chapter clarifies the place that natural resources should have within an egalitarian theory, as one important set of advantages and disadvantages amongst many which drive access to wellbeing. It rejects some rival views which suggest that natural resources are the only things that matter from the point of view of distributive justice, or that natural resources or their value are the only thing we should distribute so as to bring us closer to equality. It claims instead that natural resources are, in a slogan, ‘tremendously important but nothing special’ as drivers of human wellbeing. It then draws out the implications of this view for important questions about natural resource appropriation, climate justice, and intergenerational justice.

Generational tensions are often invoked in discussions about climate change, framing the crisis as a failure of older generations to safeguard the future of younger and upcoming ones. While this rhetoric can mobilize youth, it risks overshadowing deeper structural inequalities—such as economic, racial, and geopolitical disparities—that shape both accountability for and vulnerability to climate change. An intergenerational climate imaginary, built on solidarity and intersectionality, offers a more unifying and effective framework for addressing the crisis and fostering collective action. This article explores the possibilities and limitations of such an imaginary by analyzing Jan Terlouw’s children’s book Het hebzuchtgas. The story presents a vision of intergenerational collaboration, where younger and older characters work together to confront environmental collapse, emphasizing the value of long-term thinking over short-term profit motives. However, the narrative also exhibits significant shortcomings, including problematic colonial and heteronormative tropes and an underdeveloped portrayal of youth emotions. We argue that a robust intergenerational climate imaginary must integrate insights from intersectionality, decoloniality, queer theory, and affect studies to produce more inclusive and transformative narratives. Through a critical reading of Het hebzuchtgas, this article offers pathways for reimagining intergenerational solidarity in climate activism.

Climate change is a major issue in environmental law. It is also an inherently intergenerational problem, with extremely serious implications for equity (justice) between present and future generations and among communities in the present and the future. Africa is one of the regions of the world most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change owing to its high exposure and poor adaptive capacity. The scourge of climate change in Africa is hitting the most vulnerable hardest, and contributing to food insecurity, population displacement and stress on water resources. The 2021 report of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) confirms that African children are most at risk of climate change. The report ranked Nigeria second among the countries classified as extremely high-risk countries where children are most at risk of climate change, together with Chad, and after the Central African Republic, which ranked first. Nigerian children are found to be highly exposed to air pollution and coastal floods, which adversely affect their rights to life, survival and development, health and education, thus amplifying existing inequalities. Consequently, there is a need to invest in the services that children depend on to survive. This article examines the impact of climate change on the rights of children in Nigeria and proposes measures for intergenerational climate justice. It recommends, inter alia, the adoption of a children’s rights-based approach to climate change mitigation and adaptation and integrating children’s rights into Nigerian climate change responses.

Despite being on the front lines of climate catastrophe, the voices and actions of critically affected groups are often overlooked. The present research partnered with Haitian youth—who are marginalized from climate decision-making on the basis of nationality and age—to explore and address sustainability challenges in their coastal community. Specifically, this study explored processes of individual and collective empowerment made possible through a community-based arts center course that integrated the arts and sciences to position youth as change agents for a more sustainable Haiti. Through interviews conducted with arts center staff and students, we found that the arts were critical in facilitating collective empowerment, particularly towards resisting and rewriting dominant cultural narratives that marginalize Haiti on the world stage and marginalize youth as critical actors for sustainability in their communities. Moreover, we found that integrating the arts and sciences had the potential to empower individual youth by supporting their critical awareness of environmental problems, their capacity to communicate with adults—including decision-makers—and by encouraging their active participation in transforming their communities. Findings of the present study have implications for youth-centered educational programs, collaborative research, and community organizing for intergenerational and climate justice.

Young people are increasingly taking governments to court for their failure to meaningfully abate climate change. They argue that states have a responsibility under domestic and international law to protect, respect and fulfil the rights of children against worsening climate change. Such cases form a unique subset of rights-based climate change litigation due to their emphasis on intergenerational equity. Young people are disproportionately affected by the climate crisis and face distinct age-related vulnerabilities and adverse discrimination linked to the impacts of climate change. The unequal burden that young people bear in this context is also shaped by the social, legal, political and economic structures that marginalize their interests and voices in societies around the world. To reclaim their agency in the face of the crisis, young people are increasingly mobilizing against policies and actions that perpetuate the status quo. They do so through participation in activist efforts, and as we discuss in this paper, litigation cases. As of May 2021, the Sabin Centre for Climate Change Law’s database of climate litigation included 32 youth-focused cases in 14 countries. Our article takes stock of this wave of climate litigation and offers both a typology for and analysis of the types of claims in this jurisprudence. We identify three types of youth-focused cases, including those focused on: (1) insufficient efforts to reduce carbon emissions and meet climate commitments; (2) insufficient efforts to implement mitigation and adaptation measures; and (3) specific regulatory approvals that are expected to have dramatic climate impacts. We also identify a worrisome trend in which youth-focused cases are dismissed due to a lack of justiciability or standing at a procedural stage. We suggest that courts’ refusal to deal with the merits of these claims undermines not just the agency of young people, but also constitutes a denial of their rights to redress for human rights infringements resulting from worsening climate change.

The issue of climate change has become a central point of attention the world community on this century. In scientists view says that if we fail to make significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions for ten to twenty years ahead, we face the possibility of harmful environmental disaster at the end of this century. Legal instruments at international level which is present as a step to mitigate climate change were felt only in the interests of developing countries alone that puts the asymmetric advantage. The concept of climate justice is felt not touched so that the regime to combat climate change often fail in the fulfillment of justice for present and future.Keywords: climate change, intergenerational equity, intra generational equity

Climate change drives internal displacement in Nigeria, severely impacting children’s rights. This article examines the legal and human rights challenges faced by displaced children, critically evaluating Nigeria’s response through international, regional and domestic legal frameworks. It analyses key instruments, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (ACRWC), and Nigerian laws such as the Child Rights Act (CRA) and Climate Change Act 2021 (CCA). The study identifies substantial enforcement and accountability gaps that undermine protections for these vulnerable children. Grounded in intergenerational equity, the best interests of the child, and a domestic (intra-Nigerian) conception of climate justice, the analysis advocates a rights-based, child-centered approach. The article concludes with specific policy and legal recommendations to strengthen safeguards for children affected by climate-induced displacement, emphasising the urgent need to protect future generations.

This research investigates the philosophical contributions of existentialism to understanding and addressing the global climate crisis. Drawing on the foundational ideas of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, and de Beauvoir, the study explores how existential themes - freedom, responsibility, and authenticity - offer tools for grappling with the ethical and existential dilemmas posed by ecological destruction. Existentialism’s emphasis on human agency is juxtaposed against the collective nature of environmental responsibility, revealing tensions between individual actions and systemic change. Central existential concepts, including the absurd and alienation, are analyzed to uncover their relevance in fostering ethical resilience and guiding action amidst the uncertainties of the Anthropocene. The study argues that existentialism challenges humanity to confront the climate crisis authentically, rejecting nihilism and embracing responsibility for the self and future generations. Through the lens of existential thought, the research underscores the imperative of aligning personal values with environmental ethics while advocating for systemic transformations that address the climate emergency. Existentialism’s focus on the individual’s ability to create meaning through deliberate choices provides a philosophical foundation for engaging with the moral complexities of climate justice and sustainability. The research concludes that existentialist philosophy not only critiques humanity’s historical failures but also offers a hopeful framework for constructing a meaningful response to the climate crisis. It calls for embracing the freedom to act in ways that promote sustainability and intergenerational justice, transforming despair into purposeful action amid an indifferent universe.

En este artículo se analiza el movimiento por la justicia climática y la importancia que tienen los jóvenes dentro del movimiento. A día de hoy, los jóvenes son una pieza fundamental en la lucha por el clima y su voz está muy presente en el movimiento. Las marchas más multitudinarias en los últimos años han sido lideradas por jóvenes de todo el mundo. El marco discursivo de las huelgas estudiantiles y los “viernes por el futuro” se fundamenta. en la justicia intergeneracional y la necesidad de llevar a cabo políticas sobre el clima a largo plazo. En este artículo doy cuenta del movimiento por la justicia climática y el ascendente rol de los jóvenes y la justicia intergeneracional en su discurso.