The Carbon Budget: Applied Normative Perspectives

Abstract

The carbon budget has become a central concept in contemporary climate justice research, generating extensive debate over its fair distribution. While a first generation of scholarship has focused primarily on identifying principles for allocating the remaining carbon budget, less attention has been devoted to the practical questions that arise once such principles are expected to guide collective action. Our contribution proposes a second generation of carbon budget studies that complements distributive concerns with a distinctly applied-philosophical focus on policy design, public reasoning, institutional implementation, and legal accountability. This article outlines the framework that the subsequent three contributions examine through the lenses of policy feasibility, philosophical expertise in public decision-making, and climate litigation. Shaping the symposium presented here, they argue that the future of carbon budget research lies not only in determining what justice requires in distributive terms, but also in understanding how normative commitments can be justified, translated into policy, contested, and enforced under conditions of increasing urgency, political disagreement, and institutional constraint.