Environmental scientists and engineers have been exploring research and monitoring applications of robotics, as well as exploring ways of integrating robotics into ecosystems to aid in responses to accelerating environmental, climatic, and biodiversity changes. These emerging applications of robots and other autonomous technologies present novel ethical and practical challenges. Yet, the critical applications of robots for environmental research, engineering, protection and remediation have received next to no attention in the ethics of robotics literature to date. This paper seeks to fill that void, and promote the study of environmental robotics. It provides key resources for further critical examination of the issues environmental robots present by explaining and differentiating the sorts of environmental robotics that exist to date and identifying unique conceptual, ethical, and practical issues they present.
While many recognise that rigid historical and compositional goals are inadequate in a world where climate and other global systems are undergoing unprecedented changes, others contend that promoting ecosystem services and functions encourages practices that can ultimately lower the bar of ecological management. These worries are foregrounded in discussions about 'novel ecosystems' (NEs), where some researchers and conservationists claim that NEs provide a license to trash nature as long as certain ecosystem services are provided. This criticism arises from what we call the 'anything goes problem' created by the release of historical conditions. After explaining the notion of NEs, we identify numerous substantive motivations for worrying about the 'anything goes problem' and then go on to show that the problem can be solved by correcting two mistaken assumptions. In short, we argue that the problem is a product of adopting an overly sparse functional perspective that assumes an unrealistically high degree of convergence in the trajectories of natural processes; our analysis illuminates why such assumptions are unwarranted. Further, we argue that adopting an appropriate ethical framework is essential to overcoming the 'anything goes problem', and suggest that a certain virtue-ethics conception of ecological management provides useful resources for framing and resolving the problem.
This essay furthers debate about the burgeoning science of Probabilistic Event Attribution (PEA) and its relevance to imminent climate policy decisions. It critically examines Allen Thompson and Friederike Otto's recent arguments concerning the implications of PEA studies for how the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) policy framework should be revised during the 2016 'review and decision.' I show that their contention that PEA studies cannot usefully inform decision-making about adaptation policies and strategies is misguided and argue that the current UNFCCC treaty, the "Paris Agreement," supersedes their proposed revision.There has been a lot of recent debate about whether and how Probabilistic Event Attribution studies (PEAs) can inform climate policy decision-making (see James et al. 2014;Hulme et al. 2011;Hulme 2014; Pall et al. 2011;Stott et al. 2013;Thompson & Otto 2015). PEAs use super-ensemble climate models and statistical analyses to attribute the occurrence of specific extreme weather events and their impacts (e.g. a drought) to human drivers of climate change (Allen 2003;Stott et al. 2004; Pall et al. 2011;Otto et al. 2012;Bindoff et al. 2013;Stone et al. 2013). PEA researchers make such "attributions" by establishing that a selected climate change driver played a significant role in bringing about a specific extreme weather event. They do this by comparing super-ensemble data models in which the event occurs with possible scenario simulations where selected climate drivers are removed and that weather event does not occur. Through such comparative analyses, they show that an event's likelihood of occurrence would have been substantially lower had the relevant driver not been present (e.g. had U.S. emissions been much lower). This paper pushes forward discussion of the methods used in PEAs and the relevance of PEAs to imminent and immensely important decisions about the UNFCCC policy framework via critical response to philosopher Allen Thompson and climate scientist Friederike Otto's arguments in a recent paper (2015). One simple reason I critically respond to their paper to advance the The value of weather event science for pending climate policy decisions 2 discussion about PEAs and pending UNFCCC decisions is that it is the most recent major installment in the published literature about PEAs and UNFCCC policy. Their paper is also distinctive in presenting explicit arguments regarding the capabilities and limitations of PEAs for making different sorts of inferences relevant to climate policy and in presenting systematic justification for very specific recommendations for revising the UNFCCC framework. Where numerous authors have drawn conclusions about the potential uses of PEAs and their implications for climate policy, Thompson & Otto (2015) give these issues a more prolonged and systematic philosophical treatment than one finds elsewhere in the literature.At the core of Thompson & Otto's overall argument is the contention that PEA researchers can successf...
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