Objective
The issue of climate change is becoming more and more prominent in the public debate. It raises several ethical issues in terms of intergenerational equity and global justice. Standard cost-benefit analysis neglects inequalities, assuming that appropriate redistributions are possible, but such redistributions are unlikely at the large temporal and regional scales involved in climate change issues. Hence it is of particular importance to develop evaluation methods to assess the distributional impact of climate policies. There are several challenges that must be met to develop such methods. A first problem is the question of discounting. Standard discounting methods violate intergenerational equity. Deriving an index of intergenerational equity that accounts for discounting is therefore a theoretical challenge. A second issue is that the policies under consideration have uncertain consequences, because the exact value of the parameters in the climate model are not known for sure. Hence inequalities between regions are uncertain and uncertainties are unevenly distributed among regions. These phenomena, which have largely been overlooked so far, seem particularly relevant for policy-making. One aim of the proposed research project is to to develop new evaluation methods to assess intergenerational and risk inequalities. To do so, we can rely on recent developments in decision and welfare theories. At the same time, the project aims at showing the relevance of the proposed methods. For this purpose, we will rely on the CWS climate-economy integrated assessment model, that will have to be adapted to take into account risks and adaptation policies. This would be the occasion to deepen our knowledge of the relative merits of alternative policies aiming at reducing or mitigating the effects of greenhouse gas emissions, especially in terms of inequality. The wider long-term objective will be to improve policy evaluation and to help decision-making.
Fields of science
Topic(s)
Call for proposal
FP7-PEOPLE-2009-IEF
See other projects for this call
Funding Scheme
MC-IEF - Intra-European Fellowships (IEF)Coordinator
1348 Louvain La Neuve
Belgium