This volume brings together a collection of ten original essays which present new analyses of social and relational equality in philosophy and political theory. The essays analyze the nature of social equality and its relationship with justice and with politics.

An examination of the role that inequality plays in shaping post-Kyoto prospects for a North-South global climate pact; with statistical and theoretical analysis and case studies of recent climate-related disasters.

Climate change may cause most harm to countries that have historically contributed the least to greenhouse gas emissions and land-use change. This paper identifies consequentialist and non-consequentialist ethical principles to guide a fair international burden-sharing scheme of climate change adaptation costs. We use these ethical principles to derive political principles – historical responsibility and capacity to pay – that can be applied in assigning a share of the financial burden to individual countries. We then propose a hybrid ‘common but differentiated (...) responsibilities and respective capabilities’ approach as a promising starting point for international negotiations on the design of burden-sharing schemes. A numerical assessment of seven scenarios shows that the countries of Annex I of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change would bear the bulk of the costs of adaptation, but contributions differ substantially subject to the choice of a capacity to pay indicator. The contributions are less sensitive to choices related to responsibility calculations, apart from those associated with land-use-related emissions. Assuming costs of climate adaptation of USD 100 billion per year, the total financial contribution by the Annex I countries would be in the range of USD 65–70 billion per year. Expressed as a per capita basis, this gives a range of USD 43–82 per capita per year. (shrink)

This article develops a framework of procedural and distributive justice specifically tailored to the international-level funding of adaptation based on the assumptions that the ethical contents of such funding should consist of a fair process which involves all relevant parties, that adaptation funds should be raised according to the responsibility for climate impacts, and that the funds raised should be allocated by putting the most vulnerable first. In particular, after underlining the usefulness and possibilities of an ethical approach to climate (...) adaptation finance, the article, in defining the framework of justice, first explores and justifies principles of procedural and distributive justice, and on their basis advances fairness and equity criteria that serve as benchmarks for assessing the ethical contents of international adaptation funding. Then, in order to test the robustness and investigative potential of the framework of justice developed, the article uses its fairness and equity criteria to evaluate the procedural and distributive justness of some climate adaptation finance architectures. (shrink)