ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the problem of climate change and its implications for future people, suggesting that climate change poses a difficult intergenerational challenge. It explains the importance of determining whether we owe duties of climate justice to future people, and if so why, in a way that meets the intergenerational challenge. This is the question of scope that is central to the book’s investigation. After introducing the problem and relevant concepts, this chapter lays out two important objections that have been raised against our duties of climate justice being intergenerational – the non-identity problem and the non-existence challenge – to which the proposed account of scope is going to provide an answer. It gives a brief overview of what other theorists have written about intergenerational climate justice to show that the question of scope has received little attention so far. It concludes with an overview of the structure of the book and brief synopses of the following chapters.
