Elisa Paiusco

The ethical analysis of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) has developed within climate ethics, where distributive justice has assumed centre stage. As a result, CDR debates have inherited a similar focus on the allocation of burdens and benefits of deployment, leaving recognition-related issues comparatively underexplored. These issues concern how identity, culture, and social standing influence both who benefits from climate solutions and how these benefits are realised. For example, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage may displace local communities to make way for bioenergy crops. This is a pressing concern in regions such as Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, where institutional safeguards may be insufficient to prevent land-grabbing and where Indigenous populations often reside. This article addresses this research gap by reframing the ethics of CDR through Simon Caney's integrationist perspective, extending it beyond distribution to include procedural and recognitional justice. Recognition is developed here through Nancy Fraser's status-based model, which conceives justice as requiring institutionalised respect and equal social standing. Building on the work of Marion Hourdequin, Christopher Preston and Wylie Carr on status-based recognition and climate engineering, this article applies Fraser's account to land-based CDR techniques. It argues that existing approaches risk overlooking the values, worldviews and knowledge systems of affected individuals and communities, and contends that recognition justice is indispensable to assessing the ethical acceptability of CDR deployment. Ultimately, land-based CDR serves as a concrete case for advancing a broader argument about recognition in climate ethics.

Although concerns about large-scale implementation of Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) are well known, the ethical implications of ‘nature-based’ forms remain underexplored. Depending upon their implementation, these projects may benefit or harm local communities and biodiversity, risks that may be obscured by framing them as ‘natural’. We examine ‘nature-based’ CDR by contrasting three conceptions of the capabilities approach that may be extended to nonhumans. While two of these conceptions face justificatory challenges arising from widespread environmental pluralism, we build upon Amartya Sen’s conception to propose a deliberative model of climate justice. This model calls for participatory processes to determine which nonhuman entities are recognized as subjects of justice, ensuring that CDR decisions reflect the full range of environmental values at stake in each context.

This chapter discusses the societal and ethical challenges of climate engineering or large-scale intentional intervention in the climate system. Climate engineering is highly controversial, and raises many questions about the values of human societies and the desirability of technological visions of the future. Yet existing ethical theories and concepts may not be equipped to deal with the resulting ethical issues. To understand the potential social and political disruptiveness of climate engineering, we argue it must be placed in the context of global environmental changes caused by human activity. Yet climate engineering is also accompanied with a high degree of uncertainty and risk in terms of potential and actual unintended impacts on natural processes and society. An important challenge stems from epistemic and normative uncertainties about the reversibility and variability in spatial and temporal scales of deployment. Epistemic uncertainties arise in the methodological framework of climate science, while normative uncertainties arise faced with the challenge of reconciling a plurality of values. A key question is how forms of climate engineering enforce or hinder disruption in social practices and institutional settings in the direction of a sustainable future. Climate engineering technologies can affect and potentially disrupt existing conceptions of climate and environmental justice, due to the scale and scope of impacts upon people currently alive, future generations, and non-human species and ecosystems. The availability of climate engineering may also require rethinking the responsibility for mitigation, as well as applications of the precautionary principle. Climate engineering also raises the question of how the perspectives of affected communities can be adequately represented. While it remains unclear whether climate engineering techniques can genuinely assist in lessening the impacts of climate change, the question is whether and to what extent it should be used as a complementary approach to systemic changes in social, economic and political practices.