Climate justice and global responsibility

Climate justice extends environmental justice globally: the countries that have contributed least to historical carbon emissions are, in most cases, the ones facing the most severe consequences — rising seas, intensifying drought, loss of the agricultural systems on which subsistence depends. This is a justice claim of the highest order, a case in which the causal chain from beneficiary to victim runs clearly across national lines and generations. The philosophical question is whether the existing international frameworks of obligation — built largely for voluntary cooperation between sovereign states — are adequate to the scale of the problem.