Literature Review

In recent years, lawyers have begun to join ecologists in debating whether there are—or should be—obligations to protect the interests of future generations. This legal debate was preceded by a philosophical one, dating back to the early 1970s, on the emergence of a new or “ecological” ethic redefining the relationship between man and nature in such a way as to ensure the survival of the human species on earth. The background to the various ethical approaches has been the indisputable fact that humanity has accumulated a monstrous potential to destroy life on earth, and that it is using natural resources and the environment in a way that threatens the survival of future generations—at least, at a standard that we today consider worthy of human beings.

Many people believe that we have obligations with respect to future generations concerning the state of the environment that we pass on to them. Apart from the practical problem of people not really acting on such beliefs, there are also conceptual or philosophical issues that make these obligations problematic. The so-called non-identity problem is especially difficult: depending on which courses of action we adopt, different people will be born in the future, which means that even future people who due to our behavior will live under fairly poor circumstances might not have any ground for complaint. Had we not behaved as we did, they would not even have existed. It is argued here that, at least within a rights-theoretical approach, the non-identity problem can be solved by moving from considering individual rights to generational rights, rights which future generations hold qua generations.

In recognition of the intrinsic links between climate change and human rights, many have argued that human rights should play a leading role in guiding state responses to climate change. A group whose human rights will inevitably be affected by climate action (or inaction) today are the members of future generations. Yet, despite their particular vulnerability, future generations so far have gone largely unnoticed in human rights analyses. An adequate response to climate change requires that we recognize and address the human rights consequences for future generations, and consider the legal, practical and theoretical questions involved. This article attempts to answer these questions with a particular focus on the Paris Agreement. It argues that the recognition of state obligations towards future generations is compatible with human rights theory, and that these obligations must be balanced against the duties owed to current generations. The article concludes with a number of suggestions for how this balance could be pursued.

The Niger Delta region of Nigeria has been inundated with oil pollution since the beginning of oil exploitation in the 1960s. The pollution has led to environmental degradation, which has adversely affected the lives of the inhabitants and ruined the local economy of the region. This Article discusses the condition of the Niger Delta environment and its inhabitants from the perspective of intergenerational rights, equity, and justice. It analyzes the role of domestic and foreign legal norms—both statutory and case law—in the quest to balance economic development with environmental sustainability, equity, and justice in Nigeria’s petroleum sector. This Article argues that while Nigeria has enacted much legislation to protect the Niger Delta environment and its inhabitants from the impact of petroleum exploitation, the legislation remained largely unenforced until the recent decisions of courts at the domestic, foreign, and subregional levels that moved to enforce the laws. It concludes that these judicial decisions and more recent legislation have unlocked new ways of enforcing intergenerational rights and ensuring environmental justice and equity in the Niger Delta.

Due to the increasing rate of human’s economic activity and rapid population growth, twenty first century has seen an unprecedented environmental change. These changes have an unprecedented impact on climate, life-sustaining systems on the earth. Future generations are exposed to great harm by the way in which humans exploit environmental resources of the earth. There is a call among environmental ethicists to review human ethical relationship with the environment as to attain sustainable development for the now and the future generations. Hence, the essence of this paper is to discuss the anthropoholistic environmental ethics, sustainable development and the future Generations. This paper argues that humans need to strive for a new and more respectful relationship with the natural environment in other to attain sustainable development. Also, human obligations towards sustainable development for the future must find a firm basis in social ethics: those obligations have to do with our conception of a just society. Keywords: Environnemental Ethics, Environnent, S

In recent decades, concern has been mounting over whether democratic governments have the necessary incentives and capabilities to protect the long-term interests of their citizens, particularly their future citizens. Both the academic literature on governance and everyday political discourse are replete with talk of ‘short-termism’, ‘political myopia’, ‘policy short-sightedness’, a ‘presentist bias’ and weak ‘anticipatory governance. Such concerns have been intensified by the growing capacity of humanity to cause ‘severe, pervasive and irreversible’ damage to critical biophysical systems at a planetary level, for example via anthropogenic climate change3. But flawed environmental stewardship is not the only problem.

A growing global wave of climate change litigation is led by minors, relying on their human rights, as well as those of future generations against governments and their failure to take action on climate change. Such litigation is emerging also before the Court of Justice of the European Union, where the ambitiousness of the EU’s climate change policies, embodied in the 2030 Climate and Energy Policy Framework, is challenged. This may suggest a possible ‘rights turn’ in EU climate change litigation, where the use of rights claims intensifies and allows stakeholders traditionally excluded from decision making to raise their concerns in a judicial forum. This article explains why this trend has failed to materialize in the EU through an analysis of EU environmental law particularities. From this view, it shows the shortcomings of the 2030 Framework, and by drawing inspiration from successful enforcement of statutory obligations in EU air quality legislation, the article suggests how these may be remedied in future legislative action.

In this article I argue that governments are justified in addressing the potential for human induced climate damages on the basis of future generations' rights to bodily integrity and personal property. First, although future generations' entitlements to property originate in our present entitlements, the principle of self-ownership requires us to take 'reasonable care' of the products of future labour. Second, while Parfit's non-identity problem has as yet no satisfactory solution, the present absence of an equilibrium between theory and intuitions justifies a precautionary approach, i.e. treating climate damage as a wrongful harm. In addition, a supplementary consideration is described as arising from transcendental needs.

Representing unborn generations to more suitably include future interests in today's climate policymaking has sparked much interest in recent years. In this review we survey the main proposed instruments to achieve this effect, some of which have been attempted in polities such as Israel, Philippines, Wales, Finland, and Chile. We first review recent normative work on the idea of representing future people in climate governance: The grounds on which it has been advocated, and the main difficulties that traditional forms of representation have encountered when applied to this particular case. We then survey existing institutional means to represent generations to come. We separate out representation in courts, in parliament, and by independent bodies, and review specific instruments including climate litigation, parliamentary commissions, future representatives, youth quotas, and independent offices for future generations. We examine the particular forms whereby each of these may suitably represent future people, including audience representation, surrogate representation, and indicative representation, and discuss the main challenges they encounter in so doing.

Given that future generations are right-bearing citizens of tomorrow, legislative systems should secure these rights through appropriate institutions. In the case of the European Union, reference to intergenerational justice can be found in various fundamental legal texts, but, paradoxically, no institutions exist to defend it. The structural short-termism inscribed into representative democracies means that present interests easily trump future concerns. We argue that the best way to overcome this problem is a system of temporal checks and balances. By comparing a selection of existing instruments with regards to their impact on the legislative process, we propose the creation of a European Guardian for Future Generations as the most effective measure to protect the rights of future generations and provide an overview of recent developments in this direction.

A central issue in environmental ethics is characterization of our “moral relationship” to future generations. What, if any, obligations do we owe to the future? How should our present actions be influenced by their impact on the future? The purpose of this article is to characterize and hopefully clarify certain aspects of this “moral relationship.” First, the article identifies those distinctive qualities that distinguish a moral analysis of our relationship to future generations from the moral analysis that will apply to an assessment of our actions on our own generation. It suggests that the issue of our moral relationship to future generations has a distinct component only for those actions that have irreversible consequences that will be experienced more than two generations in the future. Actions with shorter term consequences may be properly seen as raising the same concerns that apply to disputes among existing humans. Second, the article evaluates our moral relationship to future generations in terms that are familiar in Western ethical thought. For many, this moral relationship should be analyzed in terms of “rights” and “obligations” - moral claims that the future somehow makes on us. There are substantial conceptual and technical problems in evaluating our moral relationship to the future in rights-based terms. Furthermore, the outcome of a rights-based approach can be a set of proposed rights and obligations that are not meaningful guides for present decisions. Finally, and most importantly, the article suggests that our moral relationship to future generations may best be viewed, not in terms of rights and obligations, but through reliance on “virtue ethics.” Our concern for the future can be seen as an expression of the principle of benevolence and a recognition of the dignity and worth of all life. Through virtue theory, the morality of our actions are to be evaluated, not from the perspective of demands or claims that the future might be said to make on us, but rather from the recognition that our concern for the future is an expression of our best virtue. This shift in perspective has direct consequences. A focus on present virtue leads to the recognition that we must evaluate the morality of our actions in terms of our own vision of the well-being and the quality of life that we wish to see experienced in the future. It anchors the analysis of actions in the moral framework that we hold today without presuming to predict the moral and non-moral preferences of an infinite stream of future generations.

This paper analyses the main challenges (particularly those deriving from the non-identity problem and epistemic uncertainty concerning the preferences of future persons) to the idea that we should and can represent future generations in our present policymaking. It argues that these challenges can and should be approached from the perspective of human rights. To this end it introduces and sketches the main features of a human rights framework derived from the moral theory of Alan Gewirth. It indicates how this framework can be grounded philosophically, sketches the main features and open questions of the framework and its grounding, and shows how it can be used to deal with the challenges to the idea that future generations have rights that can be represented in our policymaking.