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Do future generations have rights over the climate we leave them?

Anand Kurup Fellow
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Justice#climate-justice#future-generations
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Around Hyderabad's lakes you can see the long-term effects of decisions made decades ago: dams, drained wetlands, groundwater extraction. The people most affected weren't born when the decisions were made.

Derek Parfit's "non-identity problem" (Reasons and Persons, 1984) makes this hard. Our choices about climate policy affect who will be born. If we choose a high-emissions path, the specific people who exist in 2150 will be different from those who'd exist on a low-emissions path. So those people can't complain that they were made worse off, since otherwise they wouldn't exist.

Is there a way to say future generations have rights, or that we wrong them, despite this?

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3 answers

  1. Deepa Kartha

    Fellow

    Germany's Constitutional Court in 2021 held that the national climate law was partly unconstitutional because it postponed too much of the burden of emissions reduction to after 2030, which would unfairly restrict the freedoms of young people later. It's a real legal attempt to give future people a claim.

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  2. Javier Ferrandis

    Fellow

    One response to Parfit is to shift from rights to impersonal value: a world with more suffering is worse, regardless of who in particular suffers. You don't need anyone to be "made worse off" to say a choice is wrong.

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  3. Nur Aisyah Rahman

    Fellow

    In Islamic ethics there's the idea that humans are khalifa, stewards of the earth, accountable for what they hand on. That's a duty to God and the earth rather than a right of specific future people. It sidesteps the non-identity problem entirely.

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