In-Person | Human Mobilities and the Paris Agreement: Right to Livability Going Beyond Loss & Damage

Speaker: Dr Simona Capisani (Durham University)
Chair: Professor Kevin Toh (UCL)

About the talk

Climate-related mobility, that is the range of consequences that climate change has and will have on human mobility, is a complex and heterogenous phenomena. Depending on the context, climate change can either induce more movement – more likely within than across borders – or more immobility, with varying degrees of agency in the mobility outcome. Yet, despite this heterogeneity, in the current international policy landscape relevant for climate mobilities, key institutions predominantly focus on cross-border movement. While the global climate change regime is a bit more expansive in its consideration of the challenges climate-related mobilities pose, its focus is also narrow. It regards displacement as the central normative and practical problem requiring address and through the task force on displacement, climate-related mobilities have been consigned to the Warsaw international mechanism for Loss & Damage. Consequently, the current institutional setup is both normatively and practically limited in its capacity to address the whole range of mobility outcomes resulting from climate change.

In this paper Simona, and her co-author Hélène Benveniste (Harvard University), propose a novel normative framework for addressing climate mobilities justice grounded in a right to a livable space. They argue that this normative framework addresses the heterogeneity of mobility outcomes and provides justificatory grounds for utilizing the Paris Agreement on climate change as a key governance framework. They argue that the livability framework is advantageous in its capacity to allow for broader protection claims than competing normative paradigms - including L&D – and it circumnavigates problems of causality and responsibility introduced by these paradigms. In doing so, they critically examine the normative scope of Loss & Damage (L&D) and its newly prominent place in the Paris Agreement. They argue that considering L&D implementation through the lens of climate mobilities allows for a clearer understanding of the normative and practical potential of L&D as a governance mechanism for the climate mobilities issue. In their view, the livability framework offers a principled basis for doing so, highlighting another benefit of using it.

About the speaker

Simona is currently an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Durham University in the UK.  

Prior to joining the Philosophy Department at Durham University, she was a Research Associate at the Climate Futures Initiative in Science, Values, and Policy at Princeton University administered by the High Meadows Environmental Institute and the University Center for Human Values.  She is also an Associate of the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University where she was a Research Fellow in the Mahindra Humanities Center and part of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation research cohort on Migration and the Humanities. Simona earned her PhD in Philosophy from the University of California, Irvine in 2018 and her MA in Philosophy from San Francisco State University in 2012.

Simonas areas of research and teaching specialty are in Political Philosophy and Ethics (Normative and Applied) with a focus on issues that intersect matters of climate justice,  philosophy of immigration, gender, and global and social justice. Her current work addresses the moral and political challenges of  “climate mobilities” which refers to voluntary and forced immobility and migration including in-situ adaptation, external and internal displacement, refugee flows, managed retreat, and planned relocation that are influenced by climate variability, slow and rapid-onset climate impacts.  While her research is grounded in normative and philosophical theorizing, she engages with and contributes to interdisciplinary research and teaching programs in the social sciences.  She looks forward to continuing to develop resources which engage a wide audience on important ethical, political, social, and policy matters regarding climate justice and environmental philosophy.

Read more about Simona

This event is in-person only.

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