In Search of Coherency in Negotiating Post-2015 International Climate, Development and Disaster Risk Reduction Agreements

This article argues for legitimizing and realizing a coherent normative and principled approach to negotiating post-2015 agreements for climate justice, sustainable development and disaster risk reduction. A principled approach, rather than a relative transformative or chaotic approach, is just as essential for outcome responsibility as it is for input responsibility. Responses to human suffering (injustices related to climate change, poverty and “natural” disasters) not only involve individual concerns, the environment or policy: they concern a law of people founded on human dignity and oriented toward fraternity. The article frames the linkages between climate justice, development and disaster risk reduction around a common purpose (how to guarantee and give effect to our duty to protect present and future generations). It considers the normative aspects of negotiating a collective response when dynamic norms link intrinsically, have no precise static causal link and no legal chain of causation, but require consideration in a cohesive context if there is to be coherency between otherwise diverse and disparate human rights approaches to negotiating post-2015 accords with legal force that apply to all. This paper was accepted in July 2013 for presentation to the ISCH COST Action IS1101, Climate Change and Migration: Knowledge, Law and Policy, and Theory: Working Group II: Law and Policy Second Workshop on “Climate Migrants”, held 18 October 2013, University of Macedonia/University of Aristotle, Thessaloniki, Greece