The Ethics of Environmental Upgrading in the Aftermath of the European Green Deal

Tuesday, 12 November 2024

14.00 - 15.30

Abstract:

Climate change ethics is not a new field, yet its increasing translation into policy debates, notably with the presence of Just Transition on the European Union’s legislative agenda suggests its growing relevance for the EU’s implementation of the European Green Deal. Calls from the international community for the EU to enable a global just transition further underline the expectations triggered by the European Green Deal. Simultaneously, recent research by Weinhardt & De Ville identify trade-offs between the EU’s newfound geo-economic agenda and development priorities, especially when it comes to the EU’s unilateral environmental policies. It is well established that the EU’s European Green Deal will have significant extra-territorial effects, and the mechanisms by which such extra-territorial impacts occur across supply and value chains are the object of a growing literature. One such mechanism, is the environmental upgrading of global value chains and supply chains especially driven by the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, and the EU’s Deforestation Regulation. However, no research thus far provides a transversal climate change ethics analysis of the expected environmental upgrading of supply and value chains covered by such policies. This paper uses the modular climate justice framework developed by Zimm, C., Mintz-Woo, K., Brutschin, E. et al. as a heuristic tool to investigate the different ethical considerations stemming from the environmental upgrading entailed by the European Green Deal. Mapping the ethical saliences of environmental upgrading acts as a first step in equipping the EU to improve the implementation of some of its unilateral environmental policies in a way that avoids exacerbating international fragmentation and responds to calls for a global just transition. 

Keywords: 

Applied Ethics, European Green Deal, environmental upgrading, supply chains, external relations

Speaker:

Kevin Le Merle is a FWO PhD Fellow at UNU-CRIS and at Ghent University - Department of Political Sciences.
 

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