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Chapter in brief:

In our activities involving ethics and ecology we are discussing and offering courses on the following issues:

• Equity and climate change
• Ethics and carbon emissions market
• Ethics and indicators of sustainable development
• Resilience and social-environment vulnerability
• Social responsibility and environmental ethics of enterprises
• The principles of the "Ethics standards": Ethics Officer Association (1992); Social Accountability International (2000); SA 8000; Accountability Organization; Ethics behavior standard — AA 1000
• Ethics and global environment

There is also a "Core on Sustainable Development" initializing in our institute (www.ivig.coppe.ufrj.br) by initiative of Márcia Cristina Espinheira and Luciana Paz, aiming to develop theoretical concepts and practical projects in this direction.

Chapter meetings are held on Wednesday mornings.

Report, December 2006 (from Co-Chair DSc Maria Silvia Muylaert de Araujo)

EEIU Rio de Janeiro 2006 Report

The Rio de Janeiro Chapter activities in 2006 were marked by the 30-31 August workshop on the Ethical Dimensions of Climate Change (EDCC) in Rio de Janeiro. The meeting was co-sponsored by the Brazilian Forum on Climate Change (www.forumclima.org.br); the International Virtual Institute on Climate Change and the Energy Planning Post-Graduation Program, both at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; and the Collaborative Program on the Ethical Dimensions of Climate Change coordinated by the Rock Ethics Institute (USA) at Penn State University. (http://rockethics.psu.edu/climate/index.htm).

The workshop led to the White Paper on the Ethical Dimensions of Climate Change, co-authored by Donald Brown, Nancy Tuana, Marilyn Averill, Paul Baer, Rubens Born, Carlos Eduardo Lessa Brandão, Robert Frodeman, Christiaan Hogenhuis, Thomas Heyd, John Lemons, Robert McKinstry, Mark Lutes, Benito Müller, José Domingos Gonzalez Miguez, Mohan Munasinghe, Maria Silvia Muylaert de Araujo, Carlos Nobre, Konrad Ott, Jouni Paavola, Christiano Pires de Campos, Luiz Pinguelli Rosa, Jon Rosales, Adam Rose, Edward Wells and Laura Westra. EEIU Brazilian members have also published others papers related to ethics, energy and the environment.

The CPEDCC group intends to "create a focus for initial inquiry and draw conclusions about ethical dimensions of several climate change issues". It builds on the ethical issues regarding climate change identified in the Buenos Aires Declaration (Buenos Aires, Argentina; December 2004), and was written for policy makers and environmental professionals participating in policy making. The group identified 8 main ethical issues: responsibility for damages, atmospheric targets, allocating global emissions among nations, scientific uncertainty in policy making, costs to national economies, independent responsibility to act, potential new technologies, and procedural fairness.

Authors argue that a number of ethical considerations should be included in post-Kyoto policies, in order to achieve a fair and humane consensus on reducing the threat of climate change and to provoke a broader discussion of who should be held responsible for climate change damages. Some governments have been taking unethical positions in climate change negotiations. For example, nations use scientific uncertainty, cost to their national economy alone, lack of action by other nations, or waiting for new, less costly technologies to be invented, as justifications for not reducing their emissions to a level that represents its fair share of safe total global emissions.

A report released at the Nairobi UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of Parties, November 2006, also asserts that many nations are taking positions that are ethically problematic. At the Conference, the EDCC's White Paper was considered the most forceful leveraging yet of ethics and considerations of justice into climate change negotiations. While governments normally approach climate change policy-making in terms of economics, science, and national self-interest, the Paper insists that only if nations begin to base their positions on ethical principles can comprehensive and fair resolutions be found.

Besides the workshop, DSc Luiz Pinguelli Rosa and DSc Maria Silvia Muylaert de Araujo, EEIU Rio de Janeiro Chapter's co-chairs, have promoted, with collaboration of MSc Ana Cludia Nioac de Salles, for the second time, the post-graduation discipline Energy, the Environment and Equity. It has been offered to MSc and DSc students by the Energy Planning Post-Graduation Program, at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Among a number of readings and class debates about equity, the discipline focuses on ethical issues under a conceptual point of view, and applied to energy affordability and to environmental aspects. The attendance has increased from 9 (2005) to 19 students (2006) with very interesting final reports with great potential to be published. One of them written by Helcio Blum, with the title A Multicriteria Approach to Assessing the Contributions of Energy Policies to Sustainable Development, was presented at the XI Brazilian Energy Conference, Rio de Janeiro, August 2006. Based on the very role of energy concerning sustainable development, the paper argues that energy policies should balance their focus regarding economic development, use of the environment (as a source and as a sink), and energy equity. The paper then presents a set of measures to evaluate the contribution of an energy policy to these three issues.

Update, September 2006 (Source: SciDev.Net, from Chair Luiz Pinguelli Rosa and Co-Chair Maria Silvia Muylaert de Araujo)

Climate change debates 'need ethical dimension'

Climate change policies should be fair, says Brown
Marina Ramalho
31 August 2006
Source: SciDev.Net

[RIO DE JANEIRO] Debates on climate change policy focus too much on science and economics and ignore important ethical issues, according to delegates at an international conference in Brazil.

The 30-31 August meeting is being co-sponsored by the Ethical Dimensions of Climate Change programme at Penn State University's Rock Ethics Institute, United States.

Don Brown, the programme's coordinator, said people worldwide must recognise the ethical aspects of climate change so they can urge governments to adopt equitable policies.

He said the United States has used scientific uncertainty about climate change to justify its policy of not reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and that economic arguments are also used as excuses for inaction.

But these approaches obscure major ethical issues such as the fact that many of those who will be worst affected by climate change have contributed little to the problem, said Brown.

He added that climate change could affect basic human rights to life and personal security by harming health, agriculture and water supplies.

The Ethical Dimensions of Climate Change programme and its partners [~] the International Virtual Institute on Climate Change, the Brazilian Forum on Climate Change and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro's energy planning programme [~] convened the meeting to seek advice from climate change experts from developing countries.

They will use this input to develop a policy paper on the ethical dimensions of climate change. It will be released at the next conference of parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Nairobi, Kenya in November.

Luiz Pinguelli Rosa, coordinator of the International Virtual Institute of Global Change, says Brazil has much to contribute to the paper.

He points out that Brazil promotes the use of cleaner alternatives to fossil fuels such as alcohol to power vehicles but that deforestation in Brazil releases large amounts of greenhouse gases.

He says Brazil's profound social inequality raises ethical questions about tackling climate change because, as a developing nation, Brazil is not required to cut its greenhouse gas emissions under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change's Kyoto Protocol.

"But around ten per cent of our population emits gases to the same extent Europeans do," he told SciDev.Net. "This is a question of ethics."

Current activities: We are developing a project of 2 books related to ethics with supervision of Prof. Pinguelli: one in Portuguese and one in English. We are also developing some papers for the Ethics group of the Conference of AWMA (Air and Waste Management Association) 2004
(http://www.awma.org/ACE2004).

This page was last updated on 29 December 2006.