Assessing risk management interventions from the perspective of intergenerational justice: preserving options and avoiding irreversible planetary loss

Many of today’s societal challenges involve temporal risk-risk tradeoffs. Given the bias toward short-term safety, these temporal risk-risk tradeoffs pose intergenerational justice concerns. There are currently no risk management frameworks that adequately include these concerns. This paper aims to fill this gap by exploring what intergenerational justice entails in the context of large-scale physical risk management interventions and to see to what extent intergenerational justice can be included in two existing frameworks: the Planetary Boundaries framework and the Dynamic Adaptive Policy Pathways approach. By examining common currencies from intragenerational justice, the paper argues that intergenerational justice requires preserving resources that maintain choice and option space. Applying these frameworks to the Northern European Enclosure Dam case suggests that the two frameworks together provide a comprehensive assessment of large-scale risk management interventions, balancing capability and resource-based justice while safeguarding adaptive capacity and ecological integrity. The paper also discusses the limits to the right to safety. Two fundamental open questions that require further research are the scope of intergenerational justice (or: how far in the future does intergenerational justice extend?) and how to deal with tradeoffs between different planetary boundaries.