Rights to a Green Future, Uncertainty, Intergenerational Human Rights and Pathways to Realization (ENRI-Future)

Climate change, limited energy resources and population growth raise questions about moral and political obligations towards future generations. For several reasons, the current discussions in ethics, political philosophy, law, risk assessment and economy are insufficiently addressing these normative dimensions.
First, the uncertainty of the future forms a severe obstacle for a moral  assessment of political options while an ethics of risk and precaution is still missing.
Second, the plea for a sustainable politics has its foundation in obligations we have with regard to future generations. These obligations, however, easily  conflict with the established human rights-framework (see e.g. the conflict  between the aims ‘sustainability’and ‘poverty eradication’).
Third, all political strategies towards a sustainable politics have normative and contested implications. Without clarification of these normative dimensions the discourses about sustainability become rather meaningless. Collaborative research to identify the interrelationships between all dimensions and the development of a research agenda for a future-centred ethics of the environment is urgently needed.

The network aims to identify and analyze the questions that need to be addressed in order to determine what responsibilities we have to future generations and what the political consequences of carrying these out are.