S. Capisani, The Right to a Livable Locality & Climate Displacement in the Territorial State System
Channel: GRÉEA
Date: 2021-05-11

Speaker | Conférencière : Simona Capisani, Harvard University
Organization | Organisation : GRÉEA

Also available on | Également disponible sur
PeerTube, https://tube.tchncs.de/videos/watch/6afd740b-ccda-4961-9413-1a95643c41c4
Soundcloud, https://soundcloud.com/greea/s-capisani-winter2021

Abstract

People have primarily inhabited a restricted range of temperatures on the surface of the earth for most of human history. This “human climate niche” is now threatened due to anthropogenic climate change, and a significant portion of these areas is likely to become far less habitable. Many have and will continue to be forced to move within and across national borders. Those without the means to adaptive mobility face a myriad of challenges and intersecting injustices as the livability of the places they occupy continues to deteriorate.

This talk takes a “practice-based” approach to answering questions regarding the nature of our obligations to those displaced by climate change. The normative ground I defend can help identify what kinds of adaptive adjustments are both reasonable and necessary for meeting the demands of justice for climate-induced displacement and migration. Specifically, the talk identifies and explicates a basic right people at risk of displacement have a claim to– the right to a livable locality. I argue that such a right establishes a correlative moral “associative obligation” to climate displaced persons. A principle of protection thus emerges as a requirement of legitimacy for the international state system understood as a social practice. To more fully account for the right, this talk raises and aims to answer the following question: what is an embodied individual and community’s relation to its space in a territorial state system such that, if the qualities or the physical location changes, that space is still livable?

In answer to this question, I argue that we need a “dynamical” notion of a livable space, which allows us to assess what changes in location people can or cannot be reasonably asked to adapt to. Second, we need an account that explains why “basic needs” are related in a constitutive, rather than merely instrument way, to location. I argue that as embodied human beings within a territorial state system, the relationship to a livable space is not merely incidental. Rather, being under conditions where livable space can no longer be guaranteed is morally relevant for participants in a social practice which is territorially all-encompassing and territorially exclusive.