Adapting to Climate Change: What We Owe to Other Animals

Abstract

In this article, I expand the existing discourse on climate justice by drawing out the implications of taking animal rights seriously in the context of human‐induced climate change. More specifically, I argue that nonhuman animals are owed adaptive assistance to help them cope with the ill‐effects of climate change, and I advance and defend four principles of climate justice that derive from a general duty of adaptation. Lastly, I suggest that even if one can successfully argue that the protection of human interests in adaptation ought to be prioritised, nonhuman animal rights will continue to place significant constraints on climate change action.

Is there a convincing case for climate veganism?

“…32 'Rights First'-type responses are also relevant for human-centred discourses concerning acceptable climate action (e.g., Roht-Arriaza 2009). The Rights First argument coheres with the argument of animal rights in the context of climate change adaptation: animal rights may set an action-restricting negative duty not to violate nonhuman rights by adaptation measures (Pepper 2019). Rights are so fundamental that climate mitigation and adaptation, important as they are, cannot be taken at the cost of violating rights.…”

“…Reasoning about climatic duties is generally based on human self-concern and is also prudential; human-centredness manifests in much of the public discussion on climate change and in the IPCC and UN statements (McShane 2016). Some (but not many) ethicists have recently brought non-anthropocentric tones to the climate ethics discussion by addressing the suffering of nonhumans due to climate change (Henning and Walsh 2020;Pepper 2019). 12 Structurally, the CAV can be assumed to resemble other ecologically concerned arguments for veg*nism (Wenz 1984;Taylor 1986;Sandler 2015) that are mainly consequentialist and grounded on concerns for the impacts of human food production on ecosystem health (Wenz 1984) and land use (cf.…”

Should We Provide the Bear Necessities? Climate Change, Polar Bears and the Ethics of Supplemental Feeding

“…Caney (2010), for instance, maintains that climate change violates basic (negative) human rights not to be deprived of life, of food and water, or of health. If sentient animals have similar basic negative rights, then climate change can violate animals' rights too (an argument specifically made by Pepper [2018]). The polar bear case, after all, is exactly a case about deprivation of access to something very basic-food: a deprivation that leads to a decline in bear health and ultimately to death; exactly the concerns of negative rights theories.…”

“…Milburn (2016) maintains that on Nozick's entitlement theory of justice, since climate change arises as a result of human appropriation, it violates animals' rights, creating a state of injustice that can only be remedied if every individual animal negatively affected by climate change were compensated in ways that leave them no worse off. Pepper (2018) argues that, in the context of climate change, moral agents have a "general duty to facilitate adaptation" where climate change threatens wild animals' basic rights. On all these arguments, we have reasons or duties to assist polar bears in this situation.…”

Positive Duties to Wild Animals: Introduction

“…In addition, a number of authors have argued that we owe rectification to wild animals for anthropogenic harms (Pepper, 2019;Palmer, 2021;Sebo, 2021Sebo, , 2022. Clare Palmer, for example, highlights various anthropogenic harms that she thinks ground duties of rectification, but among the most significant harms are those associated with anthropogenic climate change.…”