Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. Perhaps the ethics of climate change is such a tough issue to face exactly because it asks us to rethink a moral order that we thought to be self-evident and to wonder how we can understand our moral commitments in a more consistent and coherent way. This book tries to take a step in this direction. The book discusses the implications of the historical and current situation of developing countries for the future-oriented policies that they ought to adopt. It aims at analysing governance-related problems with regard to our topic on a structural level and illustrates those problems in light of a couple of concrete case studies. If human rights provisions are to take future people into account, this implies that it is not just up to the discretionary power of current political institutions to care about the future.