ABSTRACT
The spatial planning response to climate change needs to be seen in the wider context of the principles of sustainability. We suggested in Chapter 1 that this requires an understanding of society’s duties and obligations to both future and current generations. The costs of mitigating climate change might be justified on the grounds that we owe a duty of care to future generations not to expose them to the consequences of dangerous climate change in which tipping points (such as melting of ice caps and release of methane hydrates from the tundra or under the seabed) might trigger further irreversible climate change. Hence, it is argued, the current generation is morally obliged to take action to reduce the causes of climate change, and especially to limit the absolute amount of carbon in the atmosphere. But we must also consider the distributive impacts of the means used to achieve this on the present generation. Climate change adaptation also entails complex justifications, in that it can be argued that the impacts of climate change are already affecting more vulnerable groups, both globally (World Bank, 2009; Oxfam, 2008) and within countries. But adaptation is not a one-off set of actions, but a process of adaptation actions over time and building adaptive capacity over time (as explained in Chapter 2). Adaptation actions are therefore justified in terms of our obligations to the future as well as the current generation.
