Global Leadership and Followership on Climate Justice

This chapter addresses global leadership and followership on environmental justice with particular attention to global warming. Philosophical and ethical foundations capture a human natural drive toward fairness. Behavioral economics insights inform about humane incentives for an appreciation to protect the environment. Macro-economic modeling outlines global inequalities due to climate change in order to derive innovative global leadership and followership climate justice solutions within society, between countries and over time between generations. The chapter is structured as follows: The introduction opens with the philosophical roots of fairness and responsibility as a basis for distributive justice for global leadership and followership on climate stabilization. The first part concerns the roots of climate justice in intertemporal discounting and environmental influences on human decision-making and perception as prerequisites for justice in the environmental domain. Micro-economic empirical work offers behavioral insights on human-imbued cues and external influences to guide human behavior toward conscientious time use and environmental appreciation. The second part presents a concrete climate justice solution via climate bonds over time in-between overlapping generations. The third part pursues a future-oriented environmental justice implementation with a novel taxation and bonds transfer strategy. Macro-economic modeling maps international climate change-induced economic gain and loss perspectives in order to depict global leadership and followership schemes to determine the roles on universally fair climate stabilization strategies. Innovative redistribution schemes are proposed to share the burden of climate change more equally within society, between countries, as well as over time. Overall, the chapter offers economic behavioral insights how to nudge people toward conscientious time use and appreciation for the environment. The macro-economic analyses draw attention to global economic injustices arising from climate change to be remedied by leadership means taken on an individual agent level, within the social compound but also on the organizational level and the global governance stage. Elucidating how to allocate the benefits and burdens of climate change in a novel global leadership and followership strategy can ensure humankind to feel a fair solution was found to enjoy a favorable environment in today’s and tomorrow’s world.