Recent debates concerning the ethical implications of climate change have concentrated on questions of fairness with respect to the distribution of burdens and shares to meet the challenges of climate changes. The concept of sustainability has been proclaimed specifically as a commitment to intergenerational justice with its explicit aim “to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. However, this still needs specification how exactly the interests of future generations are to be balanced against the interests of the present. The standard economic approach here brings in a discount rate. Prof. Ulrich Metschl will argue, however, that the idea of discounting the future is ethically doubtful. Justice between generations, in a sense related to sustainability, should rather be seen as the outcome of a fair process of preference aggregation, despite the obvious difficulties of hypothesizing about the needs, desires or preferences of future generations. The presentation of Prof. Ignazio Musu will focus on the ethical arguments in the problem of deciding the appropriate discount rate in climate change issues compared with other types of arguments. Recent theoretical developments on the factors leading to declining rates of discount will briefly discussed. Finally some concluding remarks will be presented on recent empirical findings on the role of the discount rate in choosing the appropriate temperature increase.

Speakers: Ulrich Metschl, University of Innsbruck and Ludwig Maximilians Universität Ignazio Musu, Ca' Foscari University of Venice and Venice International University

Introduced by Francesco Bosello - CMCC, FEEM and Università degli Studi di Milano