Introduction

As discussed in Part 1, there are a lot of injustices that exacerbate the climate change crisis and make the planet’s survival a challenging endeavour. With everything mentioned in Part 1, we may conclude that humans seem to have full reign over the planet inhabited by millions of other species, while those species’ interests are not being considered at all, even though their survival is crucial for our own survival. Part 2 introduces us to the concept of Intergenerational Justice and how it overlaps with considerations for the integrity of the Earth Systems.

Ethical Considerations Related to Intergenerational Justice

There is another question that climate change studies urge us to consider. If people currently in charge already dismiss the considerations of the current generations and species, and act only in the interests of their own needs for capital accumulation, what gives them the right to make decisions for future generations that have not even been born, but will inevitably be affected by the consequences of those actions too? If the world around us is Anthropocentric and human need is already at the centre of all decisions, why is it only this generation’s needs that are dictating the rules, and the interests of future generations are seemingly dismissed? Can this be the leverage to reason with humankind for the sake of the planet’s survival? This is how the intergenerational justice discourse comes into this discussion.

General Understanding of Intergenerational Justice

Intergenerational justice within the field of climate change is seemingly a simple idea - we need to act fairly for the current generation’s needs, but also fairly according to the needs of future generations. In general, it’s intertwined with ideas that:

1. Planet’s ecosystems and health are vulnerable to the perturbations that human economic activity is causing, and we are already not sure if we’ll ever be able to recover the state of our planet to how it used to be before the Industrial Revolution, if we could limit the rise in temperatures and subsequently decrease the occurrence of climate disaster events.
2. Not all planets’ natural resources are renewable, and if we extract them excessively and rely on the fossil fuels extraction, we may not only postpone a long-needed energy transition to renewable sources of energy, but also not leave the natural resources that may be necessary for the survival of future generations. We need to consider the concept of a fair intragenerational split of resources to avoid causing full resource depletion, as resource scarcity is already our reality. Earlier this year, the UN University’s UNU-INWEH Report announced that we are in a state of water bankruptcy, meaning that we’re “withdrawing and polluting water beyond renewable inflows and safe depletion limits”. (Madani 2026)
3. Excessive resource extraction causes potentially irreversible environmental damage and the degradation of nature now, but in future it may lead to the extinction of the whole ecosystems and natural areas as we know them. This will surely affect humans’ health, well-being and threaten the survival of future generations as a whole.

It is all intertwined with the understanding that Earth has its natural limits of capacity when it comes to resource production and extraction. And some resources, for example, water, are constantly circulating and without the proper balance between the consumption and regeneration, may be fully depleted. 

The consideration of whether it is “just” to use all the natural resources of the planet only for the needs of the current generations was also addressed in the proposal for the Earth Just Planetary boundaries. Within this framework, its authors attempt to identify the limits where we act in accordance with Earth’s natural capacities, and where we cross the lines with our consumption when it comes to the future generations' comfort.

Intergenerational Justice as a Component of Earth System Boundaries

In this part, we’ll start to discuss what our existence on this planet means for the planet itself, from the perspective of environmental sciences that have already started to incorporate the aforementioned concerns related to intergenerational justice when talking about Earth systems.

The multidisciplinary framework mentioned earlier is a proposal of Rockström, J. et al. (2023), where scientists who study Earth systems identify a “set of safe and just Earth system boundaries (ESBs) for climate, the biosphere, fresh water, nutrients and air pollution at global and subglobal scales” (Rockström et al. 2023, 2) that is based on existing proposed methods and indicators, such as Agenda 2030, etc.

In Figure 1 (Rockström et al. 2023), they provide a concise summary of how the proposed 2 sets of safe and just boundaries would look, where they overlap and where we are currently at. The principle of “safe” boundaries at subglobal and global scales implies boundaries for  “maintaining and enhancing the stability and resilience of the Earth system over time, thereby safeguarding its functions and ability to support humans and all other living organisms.” (Rockström et al. 2023, 2) And if we cross it, we would subsequently cause significant perturbations to the stability and natural resilience of Earth, risking exposure to the unwanted consequences of such perturbations. As shown in the figure, it is already happening in the areas of functional integrity, natural ecosystem areas, surface water, groundwater, nitrogen and phosphorus, far beyond the safe boundaries indicated. 

The principle of “just” boundaries in this framework means “ESBs that minimise human exposure to significant harm (no significant harm (NSH)) from Earth system change” (Rockström et al. 2023, 2), mirroring the principles of international law and corrective justice, and attempt to identify “the levels of Earth system change leading to widespread exposure to significant harm, which will lead to greater impacts when vulnerable populations are exposed”. (Rockström et al. 2023, 2) It combines several considerations related to the Interspecies justice and Earth system stability, Intergenerational justice and Intragenerational justice: between countries, communities and individuals. Following the proposed “just” boundaries would “enable access to resources for all and distributional and procedural fairness” (Rockström et al. 2023, 2) when dealing with the climate crisis and changes on our planet. As we can see in the Figure 1 (Rockström et al. 2023), just boundaries are smaller than the safe boundaries, and we are past the identified just boundary thresholds for the sectors of climate, functional integrity, natural ecosystem area, surface water, groundwater, nitrogen and phosphorus. 

In fact, there is a high probability that we are past any threshold for any of the proposed just thresholds, as the only one that doesn’t identify the current state of our planet is the one on aerosols, and only due to the different methodology approaches in the field. Their research demonstrates not only the interconnection between various Earth systems that form our “bubble of life”, but also shows that the considerations for future generations should be something of our active concern. As of now, we currently trespass most of the proposed ESBs in a lot of parts of the world, see their Figure 3 (Rockström et al. 2023), which will inevitably cause perturbations that may render a lot of regions of the world unlivable in the future.

Intergenerational Justice as a Philosophy

From the previous chapters, we learned how the intergenerational justice concerns are integrated into the discourse about the climate change crisis we live in now. This last part attempts to offer the deeper a deeper insight into the internal dilemmas that accompany this concept from a rather philosophical perspective.

As discussed by Tremmel (2009), the concept of Intergenerational Justice comes from several ideas. First of all, it is about temporality. Maybe in the past, humanity was not able to cause major perturbations to nature and the planet, but with the invention of new technologies, everything changed. He demonstrates it on the example of nuclear waste we produce currently, which is still a major question for humanity and ecologists. On the one hand, we consider nuclear energy more ‘clean’ in the sense of the non-renewable resources extraction, but its waste is substantial, and even if buried, it stays a burden for future generations and only keeps on accumulating.

‘Plutonium has a half-life period of 24,110 years. So, according to our present state of knowledge, 1 gram (g) of our present waste plutonium will still be left in 310,608 years, and 1g can be lethal for a human being.’ (Tremmel 2009, 2)

The issue of temporality is a big one when we discuss human impact on the planet. Our life span is limited, but the modifications to the environment we make now leave a mark on the future of the planet.

He believes that one of the reasons for this short-sight is that our ‘ethics have dealt with future generations with the confidence that the future is likely to resemble the past’ (Tremmel 2009, 3), and that this assumption has also led us into the world of natural resource scarcity, conflicts for resources and even land-occupation and resource-appropriation wars we experience nowadays. 

For a human, it seems hard to imagine the world being different from what we experience now; we seem to be clinging desperately to our past experiences when imagining the future. Yet the world has always been ever-changing. Even within our family line, the past of our grandparents is not what we live through and experience now, and most probably, future generations will experience even more instability, even if we cannot fully comprehend it now.

Tremmel (2009, 4-5) differentiates between several types of justice:

1. Intergenerational justice - the justice between generations. Depending on the temporal idea implied by generations, it could be temporal (between young and old), intertemporal (between present and future generations), or between the generations of the family. (Tremmel 2009, 4-5)
2. Intragenerational justice - justice within the generations. It could be social justice (between the poor and the rich within a country), international justice (different countries, independently from the revenue repartition in those countries), gender justice (between men and women), or any other justice that relates to persons of the same age – be they of a different social standing, sex, race, sexual orientation or nationality. (Tremmel 2009, 4-5)

Intergenerational justice in the common discourse can be manifested in the conversations that relate to the environmental burden, as mentioned earlier, and the question of the national debt; and ultimately seem to be intertwined with the idea of sustainability, thereby being referred to as ecological sustainability and financial (economic) sustainability. (Tremmel 2009, 8) 

He acknowledges that ‘environmental sciences, history, jurisprudence, economics, sociology or political science also deal with aspects of generational justice.’ (Tremmel 2009, 9) And before elaborating in greater detail on the philosophical aspects of intergenerational justice, Tremmel (2009) provides an important insight into the complexity of comprehending intergenerational justice:

“The question of generational relations reaches far. It actually involves all aspects of life within a society. It deals with the basic relations within a society that are normally taken for granted and therefore hardly reflected. It inevitably touches on the most fundamental ethical questions, for example, regarding the obligations of each individual or even of mankind altogether. This brings us to the second special philosophical approach to the subject: philosophy tries to focus on the entire issue, thereby distinguishing itself from the individual sciences. Economics may determine financial bequests, but only philosophy asks: what will actually be important for future generations? Can we recognise the needs and preferences of future generations? How can the entire bequest that a generation will pass on  to its successors be determined?” (Tremmel 2009, 9)

We could conclude that though we already have clear examples of how intergenerational justice is related to our considerations related to Anthropocentrism, how it is incorporated into the studies of climate change, into the framework on Safe and Just EBSs, yet the core to its incorporation lies in our own comprehension of what is “fair”, what is “just”, and what we want to leave behind. 

If there is anything we’ll eventually leave behind at all. 

[1]We can see this tendency on a several real-life examples, such as Russian and USA manipulation of international laws to appropriate other countries’ resources. First example is Russian illegal occupation of the eastern part of Ukraine in 2014, where the major part of natural resources of Ukraine are concentrated (We Build Ukraine Fund 2025, 2) and occupation of Crimea for the strategical defence points; and Russian subsequent full-scale invasion in 2022, which aims to occupy and appropriate the rest of Ukraine’s lands and its natural resources. Another recent example is USA kidnapping of the president of Venezuela, and then making sure that wast oil reserves of Venezuela are “safeguarded by US”; which earlier this month have resulted in Venezuela changing their laws to allow more foreign investments into the sector and signing new mining and extraction deals with USA. 

Bibliografia

Madani, K. (2026). UNU-INWEH Report, Global Water Bankruptcy: Living Beyond Our Hydrological Means in the Post-Crisis Era. United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH), Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada. doi: 10.53328/INR26KAM001  

Nature Conservancy. (n.d). Carbon Footprint Calculator. Retrieved March 16, 2026, from: https://www.nature.org/en-us/get-involved/how-to-help/carbon-footprint-calculator/ 

Rockström, J., Gupta, J., Qin, D. et al. (2023). Safe and just Earth system boundaries. Nature 619, 102–111. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06083-8 

Tremmel, J.C. (2009). A Theory of Intergenerational Justice (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781849774369 

We Build Ukraine Fund. (2025) General Analysis of the Critical Materials Sector Based on the Results of the Conference “Strategic Resources of Ukraine: Scenarios for the Development of the Subsoil Use Industry”. Published at Webuildukrainefund.org. Retrieved March 18, 2026, from: https://www.webuildukrainefund.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Analysis-of-the-critical-materials-sector-_-think-tank-We-build-Ukraine.pdf 

Winter, C. (2021). Subjects of Intergenerational Justice: Indigenous Philosophy, the Environment and Relationships. Routledge Environmental Humanities. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003097457