This study examined the relative effect of diversity climate dimensions captured by two measures: Mor Barak et al.’s (Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 34:82–104, 1998 ) diversity climate scale and Chrobot-Mason’s (Journal of Managerial Psychology 18:22–45, 2003 ) diversity promise fulfillment scale on professional employee of color outcomes: organizational commitment (OC) and turnover intentions. We hypothesized that the two scales would measure different aspects of diversity climate. We further hypothesized that the different (...) class='Hi'>climate dimensions would interactively affect the employee of color outcomes. Third, we predicted that diversity climate would mediate between diversity promise fulfillment and employee of color outcomes. Finally, we hypothesized that organizational commitment would mediate the interactive effect of diversity climate dimensions on turnover intentions. Results indicated that the diversity scales each predicted unique variance in employee outcomes and that the climate dimensions interactively influenced professional of color organizational commitment and turnover intentions. We also found that the diversity climate dimension, as measured by the Mor Barak scale, mediated between diversity promise fulfillment and the outcomes. Finally, we found complete mediated moderation between the interaction of the two climate measures and turnover intentions by organizational commitment. Implications are discussed. (shrink)

Business ethics scholars have long viewed organizational diversity climate as a reflection of organizational ethics. Previous research on organizational diversity climate, for the most part, has neglected to consider the influence of community diversity climate on employment relations. In order to address this gap in the literature, we examined the relationship between organizational and community diversity climates in impacting employees’ intent to stay with their organization. In doing so, we tested two competing hypotheses. (...) First, we tested for the positive spillover of community diversity climate on employees’ intent to stay in their organization. Second, we tested for the compensation hypothesis, whereby community diversity climate moderated the organizational diversity climate-employee intent to stay relationship, with the above relationship being stronger for individuals hailing from communities with poor diversity climates. In addition, we also posited a three-way interaction model of community diversity climate, organizational diversity climate, and employee racial affiliations with the interaction between organizational and community diversity climates on intent to stay being stronger for the minority employees. The results of the study, which are based on a survey of 165 employees working in a Midwestern US organization, supported the compensation hypothesis with the interactive influence of organizational and community diversity climates on employee intent to stay being stronger for minorities, as opposed to White employees. (shrink)

Social enterprises are hybrid organizations that primarily pursue social missions while also seeking economic gains. Drawing on workplace diversity and conflict theories, this article addresses recent calls for further research to explore how employees within social enterprises experience internal conflicts arising from the organizational pursuit of dual, competing missions (i.e., social and economic), and how social enterprises manage, and potentially overcome, these challenges. In the context of Korean social enterprise, we conducted a quantitative study that built on an initial (...) explorative qualitative study. Our research examined whether perceived participatory human resource management practices and diversity climate increase employees’ affective commitment by reducing their relational conflict. We further explored a boundary condition, perceived social impact, which strengthened this mediation relationship. Our results offer significant insights into social enterprise, business ethics, and broader management literature. Implications for future research and practice are also discussed. (shrink)

Stakeholder theory has received greater scholarly and practitioner attention as organizations consider the interests of various groups affected by corporate operations, including employees. This study investigates two dimensions of psychological climate, specifically perceived pay equity and diversity climate, for one such stakeholder group: racioethnic minority professionals. We examined the main effect of U.S. professionals’ of color pay equity perceptions, and the influence of perceived internal and external pay equity on turnover intentions. We also investigated the interactive effect (...) of perceptions of pay equity and diversity climate on turnover intentions. Results indicated that pay equity perceptions were negatively associated with turnover intentions. Our findings showed that perceptions of internal pay equity influenced turnover intentions but perceptions of external equity did not. Further, perceptions of pay equity and the diversity climate interactively influenced turnover intentions. Participants who reported an unfavorable diversity climate and a low perceived pay equity were most likely to report turnover intentions. Simple slope analysis for moderate pay equity also was significant. When perceived pay equity was high, favorability of the diversity climate did not affect turnover intentions. The findings have useful practical implications. When pay was perceived as equitable, participants appeared to pay less attention to the diversity climate. Employee pay equity perceptions may be malleable; sharing information with employees about pay levels during performance reviews may enhance perceptions of pay equity. The findings suggest that, consistent with stakeholder theory, organizations should attend to perceptions of both pay equity and diversity climate when striving to minimize the turnover intentions of professionals of color. (shrink)

Efforts to identify antecedents of employee turnover are likely to offer value to organizations through money saved on recruitment and new-hire training. The authors utilized the stakeholder perspective to corporate social responsibility to examine the effects of a perceived climate for ethics on the relationship between diversity climate and voluntary turnover intentions. Specifically, they examined how ethics climate (employees' perceptions that their organization values and enforces ethically correct behavior) affected the diversity climate-turnover intentions relationship. (...) Results indicated that ethics climate moderated the diversity climateturnover intentions relationship. Turnover intentions were lowest among workers perceiving both a prodiversity and highly ethical climate. These results reinforce the need to communicate both diversity values and ethical standards to employees. (shrink)

Many examples of calibration in climate science raise no alarms regarding model reliability. We examine one example and show that, in employing Classical Hypothesis-testing, it involves calibrating a base model against data that is also used to confirm the model. This is counter to the "intuitive position". We argue, however, that aspects of the intuitive position are upheld by some methods, in particular, the general Cross-validation method. How Cross-validation relates to other prominent Classical methods such as the Akaike Information (...) Criterion and Bayesian Information Criterion is also discussed. (shrink)

Efforts to identify antecedents of employee turnover are likely to offer value to organizations through money saved on recruitment and new-hire training. The authors utilized the stakeholder perspective to corporate social responsibility to examine the effects of a perceived climate for ethics on the relationship between diversity climate and voluntary turnover intentions. Specifically, they examined how ethics climate affected the diversity climate–turnover intentions relationship. Results indicated that ethics climate moderated the diversity (...) class='Hi'>climate–turnover intentions relationship. Turnover intentions were lowest among workers perceiving both a pro-diversity and highly ethical climate. These results reinforce the need to communicate both diversity values and ethical standards to employees. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between psychological contract violations (PCVs) related to diversity climate and professional employee outcomes. We found that for our sample of US professionals of color including US-born African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans, employee perceptions of breach in diversity promise fulfillment (DPF), after controlling for more general organizational promise fulfillment (OPF), led to lower reported organizational commitment (OC) and higher turnover intentions (TI). Interactional justice partially mediated the relationship between DPF and outcomes. (...) Procedural justice and DPF interacted to influence OC of employees of color. For respondents who perceived a lack of DPF, moderate racial awareness was associated with greater PCV. We discuss the implications of the findings and provide directions for future research. (shrink)

Climate has a strong influence on urban planning and also plays a fundamental role in soil composition affecting the character of plants and animals. The climate is a combination of different meteorological factors that characterized a specific region over a specific time. The movement of the Sun and Earth inclination toward it is the most important factors which determine the characteristics of the climate. The global movement of the air from equator toward poles and vice versa influences (...) also drastically the climate change. In this section are also included breezes. Also air relative humidity plays an important role shaping the climate. It plays a very important role in cloud formation. The built environment can influence the urban climate of the city through height, form, and applied building materials. Building form and shape, building materials, openings in the façade, and their orientation often are determined by climate parameters. Urban density, directions, and street network and their shape are related to the climate change, apart from topography. Density of urban structures produces important effects on the microclimatic conditions in external spaces. The bioclimatic behavior of each type of outdoor spaces depends on the relationship with its surrounding elements. The city of Tirana is included in Mediterranean climate characterized by hot dry summers and mild cold wet winters with high daily thermal excursions. All of the countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea benefit from the Mediterranean climate. Specifically spotted, Tirana is part of Mediterranean coastal zone (<22 °C in temperature) with an annual temperature of 15.3 °C. In the inner city can be found areas with high pollution, which normally contain a high percentage of business and industry, settlements, and traffic, so-called “sealed” areas. They constitute “hyperthermic areas” or “heat islands”. The term “heat island” describes built-up areas which are hotter than nearby rural areas. Heat islands can affect communities by increasing summertime peak energy demand, air-conditioning costs, air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, heat-related illness and mortality, and water quality. The aim of the bioclimatic design is also the reduction of the heat-island phenomenon. The use of materials with different energy absorption capabilities and integration of green spaces into urban life is important. The vegetation effects on microclimate and in the built environment are present. Trees are necessary and indispensable to human life. They provide shelter for us, provide food, and their fibers cloth us. Implementation of the green belts in the city is one of the strategies in order to reduce heat-island effect. Vegetation also can provide a deep feeling of attachment to certain places and trees which are part of it. The use of trees avoids monotony and ensures diversification. They play a crucial role creating microclimates which influence the thermal comfort of people reducing heating or cooling loads. Vegetation also creates cooler microclimates around the building through evapotranspiration, reduces wind speed, regulates humidity, and reduces temperature. It is observed that tree species have a greater influence on humidity than on temperature. Trees can also absorb and reduce the reverberation time of the sound, behaving as sound buffers. The benefits of tree plantation in the inner city are enormous and they can’t be neglected. (shrink)

We argue that for scientists and science communicators to build usable knowledge for various publics, they require social and political capital, skills in boundary work, and ethical acuity. Drawing on the context of communicating seasonal climate predictions to farmers in Australia, we detail four key issues that scientists and science communicators would do well to reflect upon in order to become effective and ethical intermediaries. These issues relate to the boundary work used to link science and values and thereby (...) construct public identities, emplacement, that is, the importance of situating knowledge in relation to the places with which people identify, personal and organizational processes of reflexivity, and the challenges of developing and maintaining the social and political capital necessary to simultaneously represent people’s identities and lifeworlds and the climate systems that affect them. Through a discourse analysis of in-depth interviews with Australian agro-climatologists, we suggest that three distinct “modes of extension” are apparent, namely, discursive, conceptual, and contextual. Our participants used these three modes interdependently to create knowledge that has salience, credibility, and legitimacy. They thereby generated new narratives of place, practice, and identity for Australian agriculture. (shrink)

In our emerging climate future, devastation will not land evenly. “Climate apartheid” names a world where the rich insulate themselves from its most catastrophic effects, while the global poor stand increasingly subject to rising seas, failing crops, intensifying weather events (floods, hurricanes, wildfires) and thus to the necessity of movement: some project a billion climate refugees by 2050. Yet analyses often fail to link climate apartheid to the existing systems mobilized to execute it—policing, prisons, borders—and so (...) fail to connect climate politics to enduring racialized projects of carceral control, as well as to Black, Native, and Latinx struggles against them. A key task is to develop capacious conceptual frameworks for understanding how religious actors are addressing the deep entanglements of political ecology and racial violence. This paper pursues that task in four parts. Part 1 introduces climate apartheid and proposes “cross-border solidarity” as an organizing concept for response, while underscoring that solidarity's chief virtue—its being already in use across diverse moral communities—is also what requires rigorous specification. What is the shape of “solidarity” amid climate futures? Parts 2 and 3 critique two frameworks ethicists might employ in facing that question: anthropocene discourse obscures race, while mestizaje discourse addresses race but risks reproducing its deepest logics. Part 4 proposes an alternative I will call cimarronaje. Of Taíno-Arawak and Spanish origin, the word refers to the historical experience, across slaveholding societies of the Americas, whereby enslaved African people fled plantations, escaped to surrounding hills and swamps, and reimagined forms of life with Indigenous communities, forged new ecologies together and, in the shadows of colonial empire, prefigured the theory and practices of cross-border solidarity we need today. (shrink)

Using diversity climate theory and research, this paper examines the relationships among an organization’s actions which indicate a value for age diversity and potential applicants’ reactions toward that organization. Specifically, we investigate the interactive effects of an organization’s age diversity, an organization’s age diversity management practices, and potential applicants’ individual attitudes toward age diversity on two outcome variables, organizational attractiveness and expected age discrimination. We conducted an experimental survey study with a sample of 244 (...) German employees likely to be in the job market again in their careers. Organizational age diversity and age diversity management practices were positively related to organizational attractiveness and negatively related to expected age discrimination. Results also support a three-way interaction of an organization’s age diversity, an organization’s age diversity management practices, and potential applicants’ attitudes toward age diversity on both dependent variables. The findings demonstrate the importance of considering individual attitudes toward age diversity in assessing the effectiveness of an organization’s age diversity and age diversity management practices. (shrink)

Local seed systems remain the fundamental source of seeds for many crops in developing countries. Climate resilience for small holder farmers continues to depend largely on locally available seeds of traditional crop varieties. High rainfall events can have as significant an impact on crop production as increased temperatures and drought. This article analyzes the dynamics of maize diversity over 3 years in a farming community of Yucatán state, Mexico, where elevated levels of precipitation forced farmers in 2012 to (...) reduce maize diversity in their plots. We study how farmers maintained their agroecosystem resilience through seed networks, examining the drivers influencing maize diversity and seed provisioning in the year preceding and following the 2012 climatic disturbance. We found that, under these challenging circumstances, farmers focused their efforts on their most reliable landraces, disregarding hybrids. We show that farmers were able to recover and restore the diversity usually cultivated in the community in the year following the critical climate event. The maize dynamic assessed in this study demonstrates the importance of community level conservation of crop diversity. Understanding farmer management strategies of agrobiodiversity, especially during a challenging climatic period, is necessary to promote a more tailored response to climate change in traditional farming systems. (shrink)

To date, climate justice has been modeled on global justice, giving rise to such notions as ecological space, ecological debt and carbon debt. I worry that global justice fails to compel compliance and ignores hydrological systems’ role in cooling atmospheric temperatures. I thus opt to tie climate justice to hydrological justice, a form of global environmental justice that requires transparency and kinship, and proves more coercive since both burdens and targets are local. To demonstrate this view, I first (...) distinguish global justice from global environmental justice. I next show the limits of Simon Caney’s forward-looking approach to global justice, which commits diverse parties to just burdens to reach just targets in order to facilitate climate justice. I conclude by noting that modeling climate justice on hydrological justice proves compatible with the goals of the Katowice Climate Package, passed in 2018. (shrink)

In this paper I engage interdisciplinary conversation on inaction as the dominant response to climate change, and develop an analysis of the specific phenomenon of complacency through a critical-feminist lens. I suggest that Chris Cuomo's discussion of the “insufficiency” problem and Susan Sherwin's call for a “public ethics” jointly point toward particularly promising harm-reduction strategies. I draw upon and extend their work by arguing that extant philosophical accounts of complacency are inadequate to the task of sorting out what it (...) means to be complacent on climate change. I offer a sketch for an alternative account, which I take to be a start in the direction of mapping out a diverse array of “motivational vices” that need to be named, grappled with, and remedied. (shrink)

Background:In the past two decades, interest in the concept of ethical climate and in its research has increased in healthcare. Ethical climate is viewed as a type of organizational work climate, and defined as the shared perception of ethically correct behavior, and how ethical issues should be handled in the organization. Ethical climate as an important element of nursing environment has been the focus of several studies. However, scoping reviews of ethical climate research in nursing (...) have not been conducted to guide further research in this area.Objective:The purpose of this scoping review is to describe and analyze studies focusing on ethical climate in nursing environment to elicit an overall picture of the research in this field.Methods:A scoping review methodology guided by Arksey and O’Malley and Levac et al. was used. Studies were identified by conducting electronic searches on PubMed/MEDLINE, CINAHL, Web of Science Core Collection, PsycINFO, and Scopus and Philosophers’ Index databases. Of 1051 citations, 56 articles matched the inclusion criteria.Ethical considerations:This study was conducted according to good scientific guidelines.Findings:Ethical climate is a topical research area which has been explored with different methods and outcomes, in different environments, and has mainly been perceived positively. The focus of the studies was on finding associations between ethical climate and work-related factors such as job satisfaction, moral distress, and turnover intentions. Methodologically, research was rather homogeneous using quantitative, descriptive, and correlative research designs.Conclusion:Novel perspectives and more diverse methodological approaches paying attentions to issues affecting generalizability of the findings could expand our knowledge in this area. (shrink)

School climate is a multidimensional construct of the quality of a student’s academic environment, often subsuming dimensions such as safety, instructional practices, social relationships, school facilities, and school connectedness. Positive school climate has beneficial effects on a wide range of adjustment variables in youth, including academic achievement, mental health, school attendance and graduation, and school-based behavior. Studies regarding school climate assessment have burgeoned in recent years but remain marked by limited sample sizes, narrow developmental levels, restricted items, (...) unclear psychometric strength across multiple demographic groups, and lack of integration with key student education contextual factors such as academic mindset and social emotional learning. The present study evaluated a comprehensive measure of aspects of school climate, academic mindset, and social emotional learning in a sample of 105,379 diverse students (Mage = 13.47 years; SD = 2.47). The 9-factor structure of the School Climate and Academic Mindset Inventory was supported via confirmatory factor analysis. A trimmed model displayed adequate goodness-of-fit for males and females, younger age groups, and European American, biracial/multiracial, Hispanic, Native American, and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander students. The trimmed model was slightly less strong for older age groups as well as for African American and Asian American students. The scale may be useful for assessing school climate interventions, longitudinal climate patterns, and school-based algorithms of future performance, though additional validation of the scale remains necessary. (shrink)

There are two well-known truths about Japan: one is that Japan is one of the most advanced economies, which takes pride in its highly advanced technology, social infrastructure and system; the other is that Japan ranks lowest at women’s social participation among Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries. Even though the Japanese government has initiated programs to promote female participation and advancement in society, these initiatives have not yet borne remarkable fruit. This study intends to address this issue by (...) investigating the effectiveness of female leadership in Japan, specifically its effect on organizations’ gender diversity and inclusion climate and employees’ task-related positive attitudes. Synthesizing social information processing theory and social identity theory, the study examines 306 Japanese employees working with their female supervisors in medium- and large-sized manufacturing companies. The findings show that female ambidextrous leadership contributes to shape and strengthen a gender D&I climate and ultimately enhances employees’ hope on their work. In addition, the positive effect of a gender D&I climate on employees’ hope is the same for all employees regardless of gender. The findings clarify the role of female leadership and the underlying psychological mechanism through which female leadership influences employees’ positive work attitudes. This first empirical study in Japan contributes to the research on female leadership and D&I management. (shrink)

Accelerating global climate change drives new climate risks. People around the world are researching, designing, and implementing strategies to manage these risks. Identifying and implementing sound climate risk management strategies poses nontrivial challenges including (a) linking the required disciplines, (b) identifying relevant values and objectives, (c) identifying and quantifying important uncertainties, (d) resolving interactions between decision levers and the system dynamics, (e) quantifying the trade-offs between diverse values under deep and dynamic uncertainties, (f) communicating to inform decisions, (...) and (g) learning from the decision-making needs to inform research design. Here we review these challenges and avenues to overcome them. ▪ People and institutions are confronted with emerging and dynamic climate risks. ▪ Stakeholder values are central to defining the decision problem. ▪ Mission-oriented basic research helps to improve the design of climate risk management strategies. (shrink)

Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) has only lately included environmental sustainability as a key area for the social desirability of research and innovation. That is one of the reasons why just a few RRI projects and proposals include environmental sustainability, and Climate Change (CC) in particular. CC is one of the grand challenges of our time and, thus, this paper contributes to the operationalization of CC prevention in RRI. To this end, the tools employed against CC were identified. Tools (...) originated in corporate social responsibility and sustainable innovation which help to operationalize strategies against CC in RRI practice. Complementarily, the latest proposals by RRI projects and actors related to CC were reviewed. The findings of the document analysis and the web review were arranged in a framework intended for research and innovation that has an indirect but relevant negative impact due to CC. Thus, four main strategies for CC prevention in RRI were determined: a voluntary integration of the aims, a life cycle perspective, open access databases and key performance indicators, and stakeholder management. The article is finished acknowledging diverse barriers hindering the operationalization of CC prevention in RRI, and we introduce future avenues for research in this area. (shrink)

This Special Issue collects five articles that are located in the present global context, and draw on methods from across critical discourse studies (CDS) to examine the interaction between material realities of climate change and discursive communication between different Parties and non-Party stakeholders in multimodal ways and on multiple platforms. To this end, it draws on discourses such as the UN speeches, UN documents, EU green deal policy, official documents submitted by African countries to the United Nations Framework Convention (...) on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and news reports in China and Australia. In these studies, diverse social and linguistic concepts were utilized and revisited to better inform the use of linguistic and/or visual symbols in different types of public discourse. This Special Issue aims to take the field a step further by showing the importance of carrying out more international research to expand our knowledge of the global, regional, and local discourse and ideologies that shape what we come to know and understand as climate change and how it is to be addressed. We envisage it will bring significant theoretical, methodological, and empirical insights into the relations between language use, discursive practice, and social practice. (shrink)

Why does climate change continue to be a forceful idea which divides people? What does this tell us about science, about culture, and about the future? Despite disagreement, how might the idea of climate change nevertheless be used creatively? In this essay I develop my investigation of these questions using four lines of argument. First, the future risks associated with human-caused climate change are severely underdetermined by science. Scientific predictions of future climates are poorly constrained; even more (...) so the consequences of such climates for evolving human socio-technological and natural ecosystems. Second, I argue that to act politically in the world, people have to pass judgments on the facts of science; facts do not speak for themselves. Third, because these judgments are different, the strategic goals of policy interventions developed in response to risks associated with future climate change are inevitably multiple and conflicting. Finally, reconciling and achieving diverse goals requires political contestation. “Moving forward” on climate change then becomes a task of investing in the discursive and procedural preconditions for an agonistic politics to work constructively, to enable ways of implementing policies when people disagree. (shrink)

The prospect of climate change due to human activities has put the question of inter- and intragenerational justice or equity in matters of common concern on the global agenda. This article will focus on the question of intragenerational justice in relation to these issues. This involves three basic questions. Firstly, the question of which distributive criteria may be relevant in the distribution of the goods and bads related to the increasing greenhouse effect. A series of criteria are discussed in (...) relation to different understandings of the problem. The second question is which kind of relationship the global partnership is or should be considered to be in issues of common concern. It is argued that various understandings of the global partnership can be expected to result in the use of different criteria. This diversity leads us to the third question concerning the possibility of identifying an overall social ideal which can be used in cases where several different criteria may be useful. I shall discuss one such ideal in particular, namely the ideal of complex equality. In the concluding remarks it is argued that a distribution of emission quotas to countries in accordance with population size is a reasonable starting point for an equitable solution, although it involves various problems of application. (shrink)

Recently a number of scientists have proposed substantial changes to the practice of climate modeling, though they disagree over what those changes should be. We provide an overview and critical examination of three leading proposals: the unified approach, the hierarchy approach and the pluralist approach. The unified approach calls for an accelerated development of high-resolution models within a seamless prediction framework. The hierarchy approach calls for more attention to the development and systematic study of hierarchies of related models, with (...) the aim of advancing understanding. The pluralist approach calls for greater diversity in modeling efforts, including, on some of its variants, more attention to empirical modeling. After identifying some of the scientific and institutional challenges faced by these proposals, we consider their expected gains and costs, relative to a business-as-usual modeling scenario.We find the proposals to be complementary, having valuable synergies. But since resource limitations make it unlikely that all three will be pursued, we offer some reflections on more limited changes in climate modeling that seem well within reach and that can be expected to yield substantial benefits. (shrink)

I begin by providing some background to conceptions of responsibility. I note the extent of disagreement in this area, the diverse and cross-cutting distinctions that are deployed, and the relative neglect of some important problems. These facts make it difficult to attribute responsibility for climate change, but so do some features of climate change itself which I go on to illuminate. Attributions of responsibility are often contested sites because such attributions are fundamentally pragmatic, mobilized in the service of (...) a normative outlook. We should be pluralists about responsibility and shape whatever conceptions can help to explain, guide, and motivate our responses to climate change. I sketch one such notion, ‘intervention-responsibility’, and argue that it should be ascribed to international regimes and organizations, states and other jurisdictions, individuals, and firms. Each has different capacities and thus different intervention-responsibilities responsibilities, but these differences are not always mirrored in public discussion. In particular, the moral responsibility of firms has been greatly neglected. (shrink)

The urgent need to address climate change poses a range of complex moral and practical concerns, not least because rising to the challenge will require cooperation among countries that differ greatly in their wealth, the extent of their contributions to the problem, and their vulnerability to environmental and economic shocks. This thesis by publication in the field of climate ethics aims to characterise a range of national responsibilities associated with acting on climate change (Part I), and to (...) identify proposals for fulfilling those responsibilities through fair and feasible institutional arrangements (Part II). I aim not only to address substantive gaps in scholarly understanding of those responsibilities, but also to strengthen the ability of climate ethics to engage meaningfully with climate policy. Chapter 2 addresses the question of whether wealthy countries owe a “climate debt” to poor countries. It finds that even if climate debt (suitably interpreted) may provide a coherent and morally plausible concept, its political value as a discursive frame that can provide a basis for cooperation is limited. Chapter 3 investigates the role that equity may play in negotiations on a long-term climate change agreement. It argues that developed and developing countries may reach a “principled bargain” if both converge on a way of differentiating their responsibilities that places less emphasis on a rigid dichotomy between the two groups and more emphasis on objective criteria relating to their contribution to the problem and capacity to address it. Chapter 4 explores a question largely overlooked in climate ethics, namely whether wealthy countries owe compensation to those who are adversely affected by the climate policies which they enact. I find that enacting countries have responsibilities to compensate both domestic and foreign citizens who would suffer disproportionate losses from the effects of policies. Chapter 5 assesses whether wealthy countries may legitimately adopt unilateral (or “fragmented”) rather than multilaterally coordinated approaches to raising climate finance for developing countries. It finds that coordinated target-setting, effort sharing and oversight arrangements are essential, but that a mix of unilateral and coordinated approaches to raising funds will be necessary for securing legitimacy. In Chapter 6, through addressing the broader question of what should count as official aid, I consider whether wealthy countries may draw on aid budgets to support developing countries’ efforts to address climate change. I find that the current definition of official aid should be retained but supplemented by specified exclusions from eligibility in order to preserve the aid regime’s integrity. Nevertheless, some climate finance may justifiably be counted as aid provided that concerns relating to the diversion of aid funding are addressed. In addressing these research questions, the thesis seeks not only to make original theoretical contributions to climate ethics but also to strengthen broader scholarly understanding of the ways in which ethics and international public policy may inform one another, particularly by highlighting the role of framing considerations (Chapter 2), feasibility considerations (Chapter 3), and the ways in which principles of fairness and legitimacy map onto institutional functions (Chapters 4, 5 and 6). (shrink)

Psychologists have demonstrated the value of diversity – particularly diversity of viewpoints – for enhancing creativity, discovery, and problem solving. But one key type of viewpoint diversity is lacking in academic psychology in general and social psychology in particular: political diversity. This article reviews the available evidence and finds support for four claims: (1) Academic psychology once had considerable political diversity, but has lost nearly all of it in the last 50 years. (2) This lack (...) of political diversity can undermine the validity of social psychological science via mechanisms such as the embedding of liberal values into research questions and methods, steering researchers away from important but politically unpalatable research topics, and producing conclusions that mischaracterize liberals and conservatives alike. (3) Increased political diversity would improve social psychological science by reducing the impact of bias mechanisms such as confirmation bias, and by empowering dissenting minorities to improve the quality of the majority's thinking. (4) The underrepresentation of non-liberals in social psychology is most likely due to a combination of self-selection, hostile climate, and discrimination. We close with recommendations for increasing political diversity in social psychology. (shrink)

Robustness analysis (RA) is the prescription to consider a diverse range of evidence and only regard a hypothesis as well-supported if all the evidence agrees on it. In contexts like climate science, the evidence in support of a hypothesis often comes from scientific models. This leads to model-based RA (MBRA), whose core notion is that a hypothesis ought to be regarded as well-supported on grounds that a sufficiently diverse set of models agrees on the hypothesis. This chapter, which is (...) the second part of a two-part review of MBRA, addresses the thorny issue of justifying the inferential steps taking us from the premises to the conclusions. The chapter begins by making explicit what exactly the problem is. It then turns to a discussion of two broad families of justificatory strategies, namely top-down and bottom-up justifications. In the latter group, one can distinguish between the likelihood approach, independence approaches, and the explanatory approach. This discussion leads to the sober conclusion that multimodel situations raise issues that are not yet fully understood and that MBRA has not yet reached a stage of maturity. Important questions remain open, and these will have to be addressed in future research. (shrink)

Heartbreaking stories and pictures documenting the phenomenon of populations displaced by climate change—homes, neighborhoods, livelihoods, and cultures lost. "Our job is to tell stories we have heard and to bear witness to what we have seen. The science was already there when we started in 2004, but we wanted to emphasize the human dimension, especially for those most vulnerable." —Guy-Pierre Chomette, Collectif Argos We have all seen photographs of neighborhoods wrecked and abandoned after a hurricane, of dry, cracked terrain (...) that was once fertile farmland, of islands wiped out by a tsunami. But what happens to the people who live in these areas? According to the United Nations, some 150 million people will become climate refugees by 2050. The journalists and photographers of Collectif Argos have spent four years seeking out the first wave of people displaced by the consequences of climate change. Using the massive 2,500-page report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as their guide, these photographers and writers pinpointed nine locales around the world in which global warming has had a measureable impact. In Climate Refugees, they take us to these places—from the dust bowl that was once Lake Chad to the melting permafrost in Alaska—offering a first-hand look in words and photographs at the devastating effects of rising global temperatures on the daily lives of ordinary people. Climate Refugees shows us damage wrought to homes and livelihoods by rapid warming near the Arctic; rising sea levels that threaten the island nations of Tuvulu, the Maldives, and Halligen; farmers displaced by the desert's advance in Chad and China; floods that wash away life in Bangladesh; and Hurricane Katrina evacuees in shelters far away from their New Orleans neighborhoods. Added to the devastating environmental effect of climate change is the immeasurable and irretrievable loss of ethnic and cultural diversity that occurs when vulnerable local cultures disperse. It is this often forgotten and tragic consequence of global warming that Collectif Argos painstakingly documents. Collectif Argos Guy-Pierre Chomette Guillaume Collanges Hélène David Jérômine Derigny Cédric Faimali Donatien Garnier Eléonore Henry de Frahan Aude Raux Laurent Weyl Jacques Windenberger. (shrink)

The mental and emotional dimensions of climate change are increasingly concerning as extreme events become more frequent and severe, ecosystem destruction advances, and people become more aware of climate impacts and injustices. Research on climate emotions has rapidly advanced over the last decade with growing evidence illustrating that climate emotions can impact health, shape climate action, and ought to be considered in climate change communication, education, and engagement. This paper explores, describes, and discusses (...) class='Hi'>climate emotions in the context of Canada’s Provincial North: a vast region characterized by a vulnerability to climate change, remoteness, political marginalization, diverse Indigenous populations, and economies/livelihoods tied to resource extraction. Using postal survey data collected in two Provincial North communities, we aim to describe climate emotions experienced in the context of Canada’s Provincial North, including relationships among specific emotions; and examine if socio-demographic variables show a relationship with climate emotions. Results show high levels of emotional response to climate change overall, with worry and frustration as those emotions reported by the highest percentage of participants. We also find significant difference in climate emotions between men and women. A methodological result was noted in the usefulness of the Climate Emotion Scale, which showed high reliability and high inter-item correlation. A notable limitation of our data is its’ underrepresentation of Indigenous peoples. The findings contribute to a greater understanding of climate emotions with relevance to similar settings characterized by marginalization, vulnerability to climate change, urban islands within vast rural and remote landscapes, and economies and social identities tied to resource extraction. We discuss our findings in relation to the literature and outline future research directions and implications. (shrink)

This chapter investigates the varying stances of the great religions on climate change, their historical backgrounds, and reasons for the diversity to be found among their recent statements. It responds to criticisms of the stewardship interpretation of Christianity and considers the contrasting view that the roots of contemporary ecological problems including that of climate change lie in religious acquiescence in early modern economic individualism. The degree of lasting impact of these stances is held to depend on the (...) attitudes of the different religions to structural change and reform. (shrink)

This book examines from different perspectives the moral significance of non-human members of the biotic community and their omission from climate ethics literature. The complexity of life in an age of rapid climate change demands the development of moral frameworks that recognize and respect the dignity and agency of both human and non-human organisms. Despite decades of careful work in non-anthropocentric approaches to environmental ethics, recent anthologies on climate ethics have largely omitted non-anthropocentric approaches. This multidisciplinary volume (...) of international scholars tackles this lacuna by presenting novel work on non-anthropocentric approaches to climate ethics. Written in an accessible style, the text incorporates sentiocentric, biocentric, and ecocentric perspectives on climate change. With diverse perspectives from both leading and emerging scholars of environmental ethics, geography, religious studies, conservation ecology, and environmental studies, this book will offer a valuable reading for students and scholars of these fields. (shrink)

This is my translation of Gadamer's 1990 lecture "The Diversity of Languages and Understanding of the World." "In his lecture, Gadamer presents his views of language and world in a distinctively hermeneutical key. For example, he emphasizes language as that which 'belongs to conversation.' That is, language as conversation helps to bring about understanding and involves the play of dialogical exchange. 'Language is not proposition and judgment; rather, it is what it is, only when it is question and answer.' (...) Language involves another; it is on-the-way [unterwegs] to another. In fact, when addressing his question—what does world mean—Gadamer clarifies that humans and world are intimately connected; the world is that in which we are 'in the midst' and 'understanding is understanding oneself in the world.' But we are also in-the-world with others, and understanding ourselves in the world, means to understand ourselves with others. Gadamer goes so far as to say that our self-understanding as achieved in relation to others, as well as our understanding of others, should be taken in a moral and political sense. That is, the other is not there as merely a means to our ends or to exploit. Rather, 'the other indicates a principal limit to our self-love and self-centeredness. This is a general moral problem. It is also a political problem.' He goes on to emphasize the difficult task of achieving genuine solidarity with those from different cultures. Such a task requires language as conversation, the back-and-forth of dialogical exchange in which we come to understand the other and the other comes to understand us. Again and again, Gadamer underscores the task that each of has in light of our pluralistic world “to learn to bridge and reconcile the distances and differences between us and that means that we respect, look after, care for the other, and give one other a new hearing.” In contrast with the story of the Tower of Babel in which the people sought a pseudo-unity or 'oneness' driven by a will to dominate, Gadamer embraces both cultural and linguistic diversity and warns against reducing these multiple horizons 'by any special contrivance of unity [Einheitsmechanik].' He encourages us to seek out the open spaces that arise in our interactions with one another, to resist the levelling of language that information technology tends toward, and to 'cultivate language in its most distinctive possibilities.' In our present age of disinformation warfare, which threatens democracies worldwide and is a direct challenge to truth and the possibility of a meaningful dialogue with others, we would do well to linger with Gadamer’s hermeneutical and ethical insights and contemplate how we might bring these insights to bear on the global and political crises that we face today—Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, our climate catastrophe, and ever new forms of technical sophistry and disinformation that seek to erode our trust in truth, reality, and language itself.". (shrink)

Over the last century, the world's urban population increased from 224 million to over 3.5 billion, and advances in manufacturing, transportation, and communication technologies brought virtually limitless lifestyle and identity options, as well as the greatest inequalities of wealth, risk, and opportunity in history. Yet, as momentous as these changes are, they are dwarfed by the fact that human activity is now affecting planetary processes like climate. Justice concerns about future generations are no longer academic curiosities; they are global (...) ethical imperatives. This talk by Dr. Peter D. Hershock builds on recent efforts to craft an ethics of global justice around the "social emotion" of compassion, making use of Buddhist conceptual resources to de-link justice from fictions of equality and conceive it, instead, as a dynamic function of relationally-achieved equity and diversity. (shrink)

This paper investigates how people conceive and evaluate nature through language, in a climate change context. With material consisting of 1,200 answers to open-ended questions in nationally representative surveys in Norway, we explore what semantic roles and values the respondents attribute to nature as well as to how they interact with the public debate about climate change. We observe that different conceptions and valuations of nature are tied to different perspectives on the climate change issue: some address (...) the responsibilities of causing climate change, others its consequences, and others yet its potential solutions. The study provides knowledge about the variety of conceptions of nature that can be mobilised by individuals and suggests that policy measures and public communication could benefit by taking this diversity into account. (shrink)

Political liberals refuse that there are biophysical limits to human wealth accumulation. Coal fuelled the first liberal political economy — England’s — for 800 years before coal smoke was legally regulated in London. The English also have an enduring love for the diverse and scenic quality of their island nation, and a long history of commons governance that predates the acts of land theft which accompanied the emergence of political liberalism. By contrast the United States is a modern liberal polity (...) with little collective memory of commons. American political economists therefore refuse that commons can be collectively governed, or even that atmospheric pollution may be conceived as a problem of commons governance. The historically unsituated character of North American liberals — and liberalism more generally — also explains their inability adequately to describe moral connections between past, present and future generations implicated in anthropogenic climate change. The Christian account of the spiritual communion of saints remains a more powerful intergenerational narrative than political liberalism. As interpreted by Tolstoy, Gandhi and John Howard Yoder, true spiritual communion is characterised by the Christ-shaped refusal to render evil for evil. This refusal is an essential corrective to the realist and violent frame of international relations in which the international implications of climate change is conventionally conceived. (shrink)

Robustness with respect to climate models is often considered by philosophers of climate science to be a crucial issue in determining whether and to what extent the projections of the Earth’s future climate that models yield should be trusted. Parker (2011) and Lloyd (2009, 2015) have introduced influential accounts of robustness for climate models with seemingly conflicting conclusions. I argue that Parker and Lloyd are characterizing distinct notions of robustness and providing complementary insights. Confidence, if warranted, (...) need be by virtue of causally consistent climate models rather than by agreement upon projections by a diverse range of models. (shrink)

This paper aims at surveying the current philosophical issues concerning the climate change crisis in Latin America. The work attempts to analyze some central policies, particularly those that fostered economic progress in the region at the expense of human and environmental depletion. Historically, Latin America remained at the periphery of philosophical inquiry following the long standing multiple manifestations of colonialism. As a result, the systematic philosophical reflections about climate change in the region have been scarce at best. Here, (...) I have addressed three main topics: political ecology, economic development, and indigenous issues. Latin American political ecology generally seeks to identify the ontological schemes necessary to mitigate, cope, and adapt to the climatic crisis. In addition, developmentalism played a significant role in exacerbating the state of Latin American political, economic, and ecological systems. Environmentalists all throughout the region strive to find alternatives to replace the failures of developmentalist policies. Consequently, indigenous concepts such as Sumak Kawsay or ?good living? offer alternate philosophical modes for Latin Americans, with their complex ethnic diversity, to derive their ontological and epistemological foundations on the problems posed by climate change. My work represents a sketch reporting the various inception points of different eco-philosophical views portraying legitimate instances of Latin Americans thinking critically about their own reality and surroundings. These may serve as alternate methods to forge models that could potentially contribute to universal philosophical concepts endowing humanity with broader epistemic tools to tackle the crisis at hand. (shrink)

This paper investigates the effect of female representation on the board of directors on corporate response to stakeholders’ demands for increased public reporting about climate change-related risks. We rely on the Carbon Disclosure Project as a sustainability initiative supported by institutional investors. Greenhouse gas emissions measurement and its disclosure to investors can be thought of as a first step toward addressing climate change issues and reducing the firm’s carbon footprint. Based on a sample of publicly listed Canadian firms (...) over the period 2008–2014, we find that the likelihood of voluntary climate change disclosure increases with women percentage on boards. We also find evidence that supports critical mass theory with regard to board gender diversity. These findings reinforce initiatives being undertaken around the world to promote gender diversity in corporate governance while demonstrating board effectiveness in stakeholder management. (shrink)

Robustness analysis (RA) is the prescription to consider a diverse range of evidence and only regard a hypothesis as well-supported if all the evidence agrees on it. In contexts like climate science, the evidence in support of a hypothesis often comes in the form of model results. This leads to model-based RA (MBRA), whose core notion is that a hypothesis ought to be regarded as well-supported on grounds that a sufficiently diverse set of models agrees on the hypothesis. This (...) chapter, which is the first part of a two-part review of MBRA, begins by providing a detailed statement of the general structure of MBRA. This statement will make visible the various parts of MBRA and will structure the discussion in the remainder of the chapter. The chapter explicates the core concepts of independence and agreement, and it discusses what they mean in the context of climate modeling. The statement shows that MBRA is based on three premises, which concern robust properties, common structures, and so-called robust theorems. The chapter analyzes what these involve and what problems they raise in the context of climate science. In the next chapter, which is the second part of the review, an analysis of how the conclusions of MBRA can be justified is provided. (shrink)

Written both for general readers and college students, Dialogues on Climate Justice provides an engaging philosophical introduction to climate justice, and should be of interest to anyone wanting to think seriously about the climate crisis. -/- The story follows the life and conversations of Hope, a fictional protagonist whose life is shaped by a terrifyingly real problem: climate change. From the election of Donald Trump in 2016 until the 2060s, the book documents Hope’s discussions with a (...) diverse cast of characters. As she ages, her conversations move from establishing the nature of the problem, to engaging with climate skepticism, to exploring her own climate responsibilities, through managing contentious international negotiations, to considering big technological fixes, and finally, as an older woman, to reflecting with her granddaughter on what one generation owes another. Following a philosophical tradition established by Plato more than two thousand years ago, these dialogues are not only philosophically substantive and carefully argued, but also distinctly human. The differing perspectives on display mirror those involved in real-world climate dialogues going on today. (shrink)

This essay examines various contemporary artistic responses to climate change. These responses encompass multiple media and diverse philosophical and emotional forms, from grief and resignation to resistance, hope, and poignant celebration of spiritual value and natural beauty. Rejecting much of the terminology of current theory, the author considers the artworks in relation to interrelated and arguably unjustly discredited aesthetic and theological categories, namely, the sublime and the beautiful as well as the via negativa, the latter adapted from Thomas Aquinas (...) by theologian Matthew Fox. Art's power is seen largely as the ability to “humanize” the science by rendering it emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually relatable to individuals. The broken relationship between humanity and nature seems related to the need for a renewed religious sense of integration with, and belonging to, the cosmos. Art might play a pivotal role in bringing this about. (shrink)

Human migration has long been a type of adaptive response to climatic conditions and environmental pressures. However, anthropogenic climate change threatens to exacerbate vulnerabilities and impact adaptive capacity. Climate change impacts human mobility by way of long-term climate processes as well as sudden events whose intensity and frequency are exacerbated. Climate-related mobilities include the range of outcomes that result from climate change’s impacts on human mobility. The effects of climate change on human mobility are (...) diverse. They include various types of movement, including movement within borders as well as external or cross-border movement. Such mobility outcomes also include various degrees of agency in whether people can choose to move. Furthermore, climate change can impact whether humans will move more or will move less. Instances of immobility also vary with regards to agency in decision making, with some populations choosing to stay in vulnerable locations while others may be “trapped.” Vulnerability and adaptive capacity under conditions of climate change depends on the interaction of climate impacts with political social, cultural, economic, and additional factors. The heterogeneity of climate-related mobility outcomes and the difficulty in determining the scale and scope of the impact on human well-being raises a number of practical and normative challenges. The chapter examines and compares a range of normative frameworks that address the moral problem of climate change’s impacts on human mobility. These approaches articulate the nature of the moral problem, identify the rights that are violated and the associated harms of displacement, and identify correlative obligations to those who are vulnerable to climate-related impacts. The chapter concludes by suggesting further directions normative theorizing about climate-related mobilities can take considering the complex challenges the phenomena poses for the international state system. (shrink)

There is an urgent need for novel protection strategies to sustainably secure crop production under changing climates. Studying microbial effectors, defined as microbe‐derived proteins that alter signalling inside plant cells, has advanced our understanding of plant immunity and microbial plant colonisation strategies. Our understanding of effectors in the establishment and beneficial outcome of plant symbioses is less well known. Combining functional and comparative interaction assays uncovered specific symbiont effector targets in highly interconnected plant signalling networks and revealed the potential of (...) effectors in beneficially modulating plant traits. The diverse functionality of symbiont effectors differs from the paradigmatic immuno‐suppressive function of pathogen effectors. These effectors provide solutions for improving crop resilience against climate stress by their evolution‐driven specification in host protein targeting and modulation. Symbiont effectors represent stringent tools not only to identify genetic targets for crop breeding, but to serve as applicable agents in crop management strategies under changing environments. (shrink)

The urgency of climate change has never been greater, nor the moral case for responding to it more compelling. This review essay critically compares Darrel Moellendorf's Mobilizing Hope and Catriona McKinnon's Climate Change and Political Theory. Moellendorf's book defends the moral importance of poverty alleviation through sustainable economic growth and argues for a mass climate movement based on the promise of a more prosperous future. By contrast, McKinnon provides a political vocabulary to articulate the many faces of (...) climate injustice, and to critically examine proposed policy solutions—notably including the indefinite pursuit of economic growth. While both find reasons to be hopeful, their wide-ranging accounts reflect different visions of what a just and sustainable future might look like. They reflect different understandings of sustainable development and the significance of environmental values; the scope of permissible climate activism; and the ethics of geoengineering. Building upon them, I argue in favor of a more pluralistic vision of a just climate future, one that is capable of speaking to the range of moral interests bearing upon the climate and biodiversity crises, and that supports sustainable development that is inclusive of diverse human-nature relationships. (shrink)

While systems concepts had a tremendous impact on social thought in the1950s and 1960s, they are increasingly under attack in the current postmodem climate with its emphasis on particularity and difference. The idea of the system is associated with technocracy, hierarchical forms of social organization, and the suppression of individual difference. However, there is a significant body of work within the systems tradition that fosters an appreciation of diversity through its ecological orientation, and supports more participatory forms of (...) social organization based on its understanding of the self-organizing nature of living systems. While the issue of cultural diversity is often addressed in oppositional terms, I suggest that it might be more effectively served through an appreciation of the global interdependence between all peoples and between humans and nature that can only be sustained on a cooperative and participatory basis. (shrink)