The Relationship between Intragenerational and Intergenerational Ecological Justice

Abstract

The principle of sustainability contains two objectives of justice regarding the conservation and use of ecosystems and their services: (1) global justice between different people of the present generation ('intragenerational justice');(2) justice between people of different generations ('intergenerational justice'). Three hypotheses about their relationship -independency, facilitation and rivalry -are held in the political and scientific sustainability discourse. Applying the method of qualitative content analysis to important political documents and the scientific literature, we reveal six determinants underlying the different hypotheses: quantity and quality of ecosystem services, population development, substitutability of ecosystem services, technological progress, institutions and political restrictions.

Political Parties' Rhetoric Signaling of Sustainable Development

“…Refining the concept further, an abundant strand of literature agrees that sustainable development comprises at the very least an economic, an environmental and a social dimension (see Dempsey et al, 2011;Giddings et al, 2002). Further definitional extensions refer to the spatial dimension (local versus global level; see Liu, 2009;Moran and Rau, 2016) or intertemporal aspects (current versus future generations; see Glotzbach and Baumgärtner, 2012;Moldavanova, 2016) of sustainability. Of the three key dimensions, the ideas underlying social sustainability appear to be even less clearly defined than those of environmental and economic sustainability (Zaidi et al, 2012).…”

The Justice Dimension of Sustainability: A Systematic and General Conceptual Framework

“…Moreover, potential conflicts and trade-offs between different relationships (e.g., between intra-and intergenerational relationships) also lead to questions of justice (see e.g., [83,130]). Sustainability actually requires an integrated conception of sustainability justice with regard to all three sustainability relations.…”

“…[26]). As another example, instruments geared to fulfil intragenerational claims (e.g., to satisfy the basic needs of all current humans), may have positive or negative consequences on the environment, and therefore on claims within the relationship between humans and nature (see [130,152] for different possible relationships-rivalry, facilitation (win-win), or independence-in attaining inter-and intragenerational justice, and [26] for a critical view on the "win-win" hypothesis between poverty reduction and environmental protection).…”

Adoption Gaps of Environmental Adaptation Technologies with Public Effects

“…Firstly, many mitigation strategies require long-term investments to pay off, with a time scale that may exceed the average life expectancy of a person before they become effective (Hallegatte, 2009). The incapacity of humans to make long-term investments and their preference for the present are additional threats to our capacity to make long-term commitments to stop environmental degradation (Warburton et al, 2018), leading to issues of intergenerational equity (Glotzbach and Baumgartner, 2012), which is a characterising feature of maladaptation (UNEP, 2019). We remark that the existence of mitigation solutions is not a sufficient condition for the abatement of environmental damage.…”