Department of Philosophy & Cognitive Science

All living organisms, both wild and domesticated, are adapted to a certain climate. Some species have a larger tolerance range than others but all have limits. A changing climate will therefore affect the living world in different ways and to different degrees. This in turn will affect the systems the organisms are parts of.
For our future supply of food and other resources we are depending on both agriculture and forestry. They in turn depend on both biodiversity and the climate, directly as well as indirectly via the ecosystems they are parts of and interact with. Land can be used in many different ways. In this discussion ‘land use’ is the name for the sector that uses land for growing plants or trees, i.e. agriculture and forestry. ‘Land use change’ denotes an activity where land is converted from a particular type of land use (in the meaning above) to another type of land use or to something completely different. Land use change thus includes for instance converting forestland to agricultural land, converting one kind of forest to a significantly different kind of forest, or converting agricultural land to a residential area.
Both agriculture and forestry are among the activities that are hardest hit by the effects of climate change. At the same time, they are significant contributors to climate change, but have also the capacity to play significant parts in the solutions.
In both cases biodiversity is the key. Unfortunately, some activities used for mitigation of or adaptation to climate change might have negative effects on biodiversity. The trick is to get out of the frying pan without landing in the fire.

The effects of our actions do not always come immediately. Sometimes the time lag between cause and effect is substantial. This is for instance the case with climate change. When we emit greenhouse gases, the effect on the climate will come several decennia later. The effect will also last for centuries. This means that by emitting greenhouse gases we are in effect harming people who were not even born at the time of the emission.
This fact has discernable effects on how decisions are made. In practice, distance is often an important factor for deciding if, and to what degree, it is necessary to consider a particular effect.
The distance can be of different kinds. It can be geographical, temporal, cultural, biological, economical, etc. On the personal level we tend to find more immediate effects more motivating. On an interpersonal level we tend to pay more attention to the interests of those who are closer to us in some way. This seems to be true even if the more distant effect is to some degree more severe.
The practical effect of this is that we tend to discount effects and values based on their distance from the cause or the decision maker. This can be done formally and explicitly as in economic decision models, or intuitively and sometimes unconsciously as is done in many situations both at the personal level and in international policy making, and everywhere in between.
Ethically this is a controversial habit. In modern ethical theories impartiality in some form is often an important component. Letting the distance (of some kind) between the decision maker and those affected influence the decision on how much concern should be paid to the interests of different persons can be seen as improper prejudice. To downplay the interest of someone only because she happens to live far away from the decision maker is in general not considered acceptable.
In intergenerational relations, the distance is accompanied with an asymmetry in power due to the fact that we can affect future generations but they cannot affect us. There is asymmetry in power also between people in different parts of the world, people belonging to different cultures, people with different income levels, and clearly between individuals of different species. None of these asymmetries are however as definitive as the asymmetry between generations.
In spite of these things, there seems to be consensus that future generations matter, and that we do have obligations to consider them. In fact, concern for future generations seems to be one of the major motives behind many people’s concern with both climate change and other environmental problems.  The probably most well known instantiation of this is the Brundtland report that urges us to strive for a more sustainable form for development defined as a development that “ensures that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
What this demands from us in practice is however something that is still to be worked out. One rather common way of dealing with the ethical demands to consider future generations is discounting. By doing that we do consider future generations, but the consideration decreases over time. This is supposedly a very practical way of handling the responsibilities and it seems to be in accordance with both the intuition that future generations matter, and the intuition that distance matters. As indicated above however there are some ethical question marks. In this text I will take a closer look at the idea of discounting future generations, and as we will see, there are several serious problems with this idea. I will start with a few basic explanations, and then go through the most common arguments for discounting future generations.

Grunden för mänsklig civilisation utgörs av växterna och deras produkter. Alla idag odlade växter kommer en gång från  det vilda. Vår framtid står och faller med hur vi  förvaltar dessa livsviktiga resurser. Vi som har skrivit artikeln representerar olika myndigheter och organisationer och menar att det är dags för Sverige att utarbeta en hållbar strategi för kultur - växternas vilda släktingar. Detta är ett första steg i den processen.