Climate Justice for Philosophers, Practitioners and Policymakers
Wednesday, 1 April 2026 at 4PM
A seminar by Kian Mintz-Woo
with replies from Ph.D. students Amy Taggart & Jomilin John
Download a copy of the poster here Environmental Ethics Seminar April 2026 (PDF 871.2 KB)
Kian Mintz-Woo is a Senior Lecturer at University College Cork (Ireland) and a Visiting Guest Scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (Austria). His work covers a wide variety of topics in the ethics and justice of climate change, such as carbon dioxide removal, the social cost of carbon (especially the ethics of discounting), climate as a driver of societal collapse, and climate Loss & Damage. He has been to multiple COPs and led University College Cork's delegation to COP28. He serves as part of the Irish Government's expert Carbon Budgets Working Group, helping to recommend sectoral carbon budgets. He was awarded the 2021 Andrew Light Award for Public Philosophy by the International Society for Environmental Ethics and in 2025 was named an Early-Stage Researcher of the Year at University College Cork.
Abstract:
Climate researchers and policymakers are increasingly demanding justice--or at least an adequate understanding of what "justice" means. This presentation lays out a philosophical account of some of the most important forms of justice: distributional, procedural, recognitional, corrective and transitional. Most of these take philosophical concepts and expand or adapt them for climate researchers and policymakers (the key exception is transitional justice, which is a new meta-form of justice may be especially important for just transition research). My hope is that this framework draws attention to the variety of justice assumptions one can make so that people are more explicit about the assumptions they are adopting and that they test robustness to alternative assumptions.