News

Now published: Studies on Climate Ethics and Future Generations Vol 6

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 10:23:09 +0100

The sixth and final volume of working papers written as part of the Climate Ethics and Future Generations project is now available. This volume is edited by Julia Mosquera and Olle Torpman and distributed by the Institute for Futures Studies.

A pdf can be downloaded here:
https://www.iffs.se/media/24255/climateethics_vol6.pdf

Order the volume for 80 SEK within Sweden. Send us an e-mail with the name of the report and information about delivery and invoice addresses to .

Final report

Tue, 18 Jun 2024 10:00:47 +0200

The project is now completed. A short final scientific report is available here:

https://www.rj.se/en/grants/2017/climate-ethics-and-future-generations/

The results of the project is also being collected in a longer book, aimed at a wider audience. The book will be published by our funder (Riksbankens jubileumsfond) later this year.

Spin-off project: The Future of Disabilities

Wed, 06 Dec 2023 08:42:23 +0100

Julia Mosquera, who started as a postdoc in our Climate ethics and future generations programme, was recently awarded a grant for a three year project that will adress new questions regarding future generations.

The title of Mosquera's project is "The future of disabilities: The ethics and politics of disability and technology".

Her project will investigate how theories of equality and justice are affected by the fact that many disabilities are becoming a matter of choice as a consequence of the use of new technologies.

Special Climate Ethics Theme in Tidskrift för politisk filosofi

Mon, 18 Sep 2023 10:05:40 +0200

Now published: Studies on Climate Ethics and Future Generations Vol 5

Thu, 23 Mar 2023 11:26:00 +0100

The fifth volume of preprint papers written as part of the Climate Ethics and Future Generations project is now ready. The volume is edited by Tim Cambell and Olle Torpman and published by the Institute for Futures Studies.

Read more about the volume and download it here.

Order the volume for 80 SEK within Sweden. Send us an e-mail with the name of the report and information about delivery and invoice addresses to.

Four new spinn-off projects awarded funding

Thu, 10 Nov 2022 10:52:04 +0100

We are very happy to announce that our team has recently been awarded funding for four new research projects.

Riksbankens Jubileumsfond has awarded Krister Bykvist 11 MSEK for the project Ethics of Coordination. Krister will together with a large group of researchers work for three years on this project, with the aim “to formulate a new approach to addressing collective harm problems, an ethics of coordination that incorporates both direct individual duties and collective duties, and to apply this approach to climate change”. More info.

The Swedish Research Council has awarded Göran Duus-Otterström 1.9 MSEK to over three years work on Compensation for the Harms of Climate Change.

Anders Herlitz was awarded 4.1 MSEK by the Swedish Research Council for his project Claim-based distributive theories. Anders will over three years (i) conduct an in-depth analysis of how distributive theories that refer to individuals’ claims understand what a claim is and how the strengths of claims are fixed, (ii) present and analyze a new view of how one ought to respond to individuals’ claims, and (iii) explore whether a differentiation between claims of existing people and claims of merely possible people can provide the foundation of a plausible theory of what to do in cases involving future generations. The overarching purpose is to present a framework for claim-based distributive theories.

Joe Roussos was awarded 4.1 MSEK by the Swedish Research Council for his project Expertise in crises. Joe will over three years work together with Erik Angner to explore the role of experts in policymaking in times of crisis. In a crisis, decisions are urgent, stakes are high, uncertainties are deep, evidence is changing, and values are in conflict. How should decision makers in these situations make use of experts? The importance of expertise is widely acknowledged and expressed in slogans like “listen to experts!” But experts often disagree, they sometimes get it wrong, and their advice is value-laden. This project is framed around these challenges: disagreement, limitations, and objectivity.

Interview: PI Gustaf Arrhenius discusses the importance of future studies – its possibilities and its difficulties.

Wed, 14 Sep 2022 14:15:00 +0200

Interview with PI Gustaf Arrhenius in Dagens industri about the role of future studies in answering some of the most pressing questions of our time. The interview is in Swedish.

Link to Dagens industri: Så stoppas klimatkatastrofen: ”Det är extremt kontroversiellt”

In memory of Geoffrey Brennan

Fri, 15 Jul 2022 14:50:00 +0200

We are deeply saddened to learn that our friend, colleague, and core team member Geoffrey Brennan has recently passed away.

Geoff was a most distinguished scholar and a very valuable long-standing member of IFFS and of this program.

Podcast: Göran Duus-Otterström and Olle Torpman discuss political ideologies and climate change

Tue, 24 May 2022 15:33:49 +0200

Co-PI Göran Duus-Otterström and project member Olle Torpman were guests on the podcast Politiska rummet: Om miljön och klimatet to discuss political ideology in relation to climate change. Listen to the episode here.

New report: Kirsti Jylhä featured in the Youth Barometer 2021

Thu, 17 Mar 2022 15:21:48 +0100

"Young people believe climate change is a reality and they trust the science when it comes to climate issues: the number of young people who deny climate change adds up to only a few per cent. Young people also believe that globally sustainable solutions will be found for environmental problems. The proportion of respondents who agree with this statement has increased compared with 2016, when the question was asked previously in the Youth Barometer."

The Youth Barometer is an annual interview study by the Finnish Youth Research Society and State Youth Council. This years report features the scientific article Nuorten ilmastoahdistus ja ympäristötunteet (translation: Climate anxiety and environmental feelings of young people), co-written by Climate Ethics project member Kirsti Jylhä. An english introduction can be found here, where the report also can be ordered and downloaded (in Finnish).

Joint Workshop on Sustainable Population and Climate Ethics

Mon, 28 Feb 2022 17:38:33 +0100

A joint workshop for the “Climate ethics and Future Generations“ program and the project “Sustainable Population in the Time of Climate Change”. We will present ongoing research at IFFS that is relevant to both teams, with a focus on population growth and sustainability. This is an informal and internal workshop. Work in progress is welcome.

The workshop takes place on March 9-10 and is organised by Karim Jebari and Mats Ingelström. Read more here.

New book: Ethics and Existence - The Legacy of Derek Parfit

Mon, 24 Jan 2022 12:24:37 +0100

Ethics and Existence: The Legacy of Derek Parfit is a new book published by Oxford University Press and edited by project core member Tim Campbell, along with Jeff McMahan, James Goodrich and Ketan Ramakrishnan. The book consists of twenty essays in honour of and inspired by moral philosopher Derek Parfit, particularly his work on population ethics. Featured in the book are essays by project members Ralf M. Bader, M. A. Roberts, Hilary Greaves, Wlodek Rabinowicz, and principal investigator Gustaf Arrhenius. Associated researchers Julian Savulescu, Larry Temkin, William MacAskill and Simon Beard have also contributed with essays.

Read more about Ethics and Existence: The Legacy of Derek Parfit.

Now published: Studies on Climate Ethics and Future Generations Vol 4

Tue, 11 Jan 2022 13:24:03 +0100

The fourth volume of preprint papers written as part of the Climate Ethics and Future Generations project is now published. The volume is edited by Joe Roussos and Paul Bowman and published by the Institute for Futures Studies.

Read more about the volume and download it here.

Order the volume for 80 SEK within Sweden. Send us an e-mail with the name of the report and information about delivery and invoice addresses to .

Interim Report from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond

Tue, 11 Jan 2022 13:13:05 +0100

Read the report here.

New book: The New Corporate Climate Leadership

Tue, 23 Nov 2021 13:14:46 +0100

One of our associated researchers, Emilie Prattico, has co-written a book with Edward Cameron on the role of the private sector in sustainability transitions. The New Corporate Climate Leadership is published by Routledge and comes out December 6, 2021. Pre-order the book here.

Workshop: Unawareness and Awareness Growth

Mon, 04 Oct 2021 09:35:47 +0200

18-19 October, IFFS Stockholm and online. Read more here

2021 Annual Conference of the Climate Ethics and Future Generations program, 9-11 Sep 2021

Mon, 06 Sep 2021 17:04:47 +0200

9-11 September 2021, Institute for Futures Studies, Stockholm.

Organizer: Joe Roussos

Prelimenary agenda:

Thursday, September 9th

09.30 – 10.00 Coffee and intro

10.00 – 10.45 Johan Gustafsson & Dean Spears (I): “Person-affecting population ethics, consequentialism, and sequential rationality”

10.45 – 11.00 Break

11.00 – 11.45 Wolfgang Lutz (O): "Population and Sustainable Development: The Demographic Perspective”

11.45 – 12.00 Elizabeth Finneron Burns (I)

12.00 – 13.30 Lunch

13.30 – 14.15 Hilary Greaves (O): “On the desire to make a difference”

14.15 – 14.30 Orri Stefánsson (I): “Should I offset or should I instead do more good?”

14.30 – 14.45 Break

14.45 – 15.30 Darrell Moellendorf (O): “Adaptation, Justice, and Solidarity”

15.30 – 16.30 Coffee break (Airmeet)

19:00 Dinner

Friday, September 10th

09.30 – 10.00 Morning coffee

10.00 – 10.45 Simon Caney (O): “Power, Political Responsibility and Climate Change”

10.45 – 11.00 Break

11.00 – 11.45 Frida Bender (I)

11.45 – 12.00 Giulia Andrighetto (O)

12.00 – 13.30 Lunch

13.30 – 13.45 Karin Bäckstrand (I)

13.45 – 14.00 John Broome (O): “Loosening the betterness ordering of lives”

14.00 – 15.30 Social activity

15.30 – 16.00 Martin Kolk, Malcolm Fairbrother & Gustaf Arrhenius (H): “Sustainable Population in the Time of Climate Change”

16.00 – 16.45 Roundtable discussion: Progress so far and next steps for the Climate Ethics project

19.00 Dinner

Saturday, September 11th

09.30 – 10.00 Morning coffee

10.00 – 10.45 Emil Anderson (I)

10.45 – 11.00 Break

11.00 – 11.45 Kirsti Jylhä (I): “On the relation between populism, far-right support, and climate change denial”

11.45 – 12.00 Julia Mosquera (I)

12.00 – 13.30 Lunch

13.30 – 13.45 Tim Campbell (I)

13.45 – 14.30 Koen Decancq (O)

14.30 – Closing remarks

(I) – In person talk at IFFS

(O) – Online talk

(H) – Hybrid talk, one speaker at IFFS and one online

Please note that the conference is not a public event.

Open position: Postdoc on Climate Justice

Thu, 19 Aug 2021 16:34:19 +0200

We are looking for a two-year postdoc to conduct research on climate justice.

The postdoc will work in the work package focusing on climate justice, which is led by Göran Duus-Otterström. In this work package, the program seeks to answer questions such as: What is the appropriate pattern and currency of intergenerational justice? How much, if at all, should we discount future effects of climate change? How should the current generation divide the burdens of combatting climate change? How could we make democracies better at representing the interests of future generations? You can find a more detailed description of the research program at the program’s website. The successful candidate will have the freedom to choose his or her own research agenda so long as it fits thematically with the program.

Last day for applications is 30 September.

New book: Beyond Uncertainty

Thu, 19 Aug 2021 16:29:09 +0200

Two of the programme's core reserarchers, Katie Steele and Orri Stefánsson, have written a book on the philosophy of decision-making and uncertain reasoning. Their book, Beyond Uncertainty - Reasoning with Unknown Possibilities has now been published by Cambridge University Press. An electronic copy can be obtained for free until 31 August.

A book symposium for Beyond Uncertaininty will be held 8 Sept.

Special Section on population and ethics in The Journal of Development Studies

Mon, 05 Jul 2021 21:55:00 +0200

S. J. Beard, Partha Dasgupta and Natalie Jones have co-edited a special section in The Journal of Development Studies on population ethics and 21st-century demography. Many of the articles in this special issues are written by researchers involved in the Climate Ethics programme.

Our Self-Evaluation Report

Thu, 01 Jul 2021 11:56:25 +0200

We have been asked by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond to evaluate our achievements now that the programme has been running for three years and five months.

In this self-evaluation report, we describe the main achievements, activities, and developments in the programme so far.

Studies on Climate Ethics and Future Generations Vol 3

Tue, 04 May 2021 14:55:47 +0200

The third volume of preprint papers written as part of the Climate Ethics and Future Generations project is now published. The volume is edited by Joe Roussos and Paul Bowman and published by the Institute for Futures Studies.

Workshops autumn 2021

Tue, 20 Apr 2021 19:09:03 +0200

9–11 September 2021: Annual Conference of the research program Climate Ethics and Future Generations

6–7 December 2021: Workshop: Contractualism and future generations

Recent publications by team members

Sat, 06 Feb 2021 11:26:21 +0100

Gustaf Arrhenius, Mark Budolfson & Dean Spears, "Does Climate Change Policy Depend Importantly on Population Ethics?: Deflationary Responses to the Challenges of Population Ethics for Public Policy", in Philosophy and Climate Change. Edited by: Mark Budolfson, Tristram McPherson, and David Plunkett, Oxford University Press (2021)
In this chapter, we argue that the Worry is not obviously well-founded: we may already know enough to make good choices about climate policy even without further progress in population ethics, and further progress might not make much difference to the conclusions that are ultimately correct. More generally, we highlight some reasons—some philosophical, some empirical—why intergenerational policymaking might not be very sensitive to classic arguments from population ethics in the way that have often been assumed.

>>>Link to chapter

Joe Roussos, "Expert deference as a belief revision schema", In Synthese (2020).
When an agent learns of an expert’s credence in a proposition about which they are an expert, the agent should defer to the expert and adopt that credence as their own. This is a popular thought about how agents ought to respond to (ideal) experts. In a Bayesian framework, it is often modelled by endowing the agent with a set of priors that achieves this result. But this model faces a number of challenges, especially when applied to non-ideal agents (who nevertheless interact with ideal experts). I outline these problems, and use them as desiderata for the development of a new model. Taking inspiration from Richard Jeffrey’s development of Jeffrey conditioning, I develop a model in which expert reports are taken as exogenous constraints on the agent’s posterior probabilities. I show how this model can handle a much wider class of expert reports (for example reports of conditional probabilities), and can be naturally extended to cover propositions for which the agent has no prior.

>>>Link to article

Julia Mosquera "Måttet klimatavtryck missar viktiga etiska värden", In Expressen (2020) (Swedish article)
In this article on how to make better food choices if we care both about climate change and animal welfare, Julia Mosquera argues that carbon footprint per kilogram of meat is a good measure to calculate your climate impact, but it is disregards important ethical considerations.

>>>Link to article

For more Climate ethics and future generations publications click here.

Team members, please report your published work and other activities to project coordinator

Planned workshops this spring

Thu, 04 Feb 2021 00:12:57 +0100

4 February: Workshop on the book Moral Uncertainty (OUP, 2020) by MacAskill, Ord, Bykvist, co-organized with ANU

26-28 April: Empirical and theoretical perspectives on green growth and climate change

17-18 May: Values in science

16-18 June: Claims, distributive justice and future generations