Warrender Lecture 2023/24: Global Justice and the Biodiversity Crisis

With Professor Chris Armstrong

There have been extensive normative debates on the climate crisis, which have clarified why we should care about climate change, what just responses to it might look like, and who should bear the costs of the transition away from carbon. Theorists of global justice have played a significant role in these discussions. But the same cannot be said for the biodiversity crisis, which has not generated a comparable normative literature, or commanded such sustained attention from theorists of global justice. This lecture represents a call to arms. It will show why the biodiversity crisis matters, and how it raises major challenges of global justice - in the belief that a sustained debate on these challenges will be better late than never.

--

Chris Armstrong is Professor in Political Theory in the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Southampton. He works in normative political theory, and is the author of A Blue New Deal: Why We Need A New Politics for the Ocean (Yale University Press, 2022), Why Global Justice Matters (Polity 2019), Justice and Natural Resources (Oxford University Press, 2017), and Global Distributive Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2012). His current research ranges across issues of conservation justice, natural resource justice, global justice, climate justice, and territorial rights.