“Climate Change Adaptation through the Feminist Kaleidoscope – Toward a Feminist Philosophy of Climate Science” is a SNSF project that aims to employ relevant frameworks from feminist epistemology to investigate how climate adaptation information can meet the needs and values of stakeholders in a reliable but also fair way.
Adaptation to climate change is inevitable and pressing, whatever mitigation efforts societies are prepared to make. This is true for all areas of the world, wealthy or not. However, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC) has pointed out, populations who have contributed the least to global warming are currently most vulnerable to its impacts. This, in our view, constitutes an injustice and one that research on climate change ought to recon with.
Our project explores how research on climate change can be made both reliable and fair. Indeed, climate research ought to be reliable, aiming not only at accuracy but also relevancy and trustworthiness, and fair because it addresses the unjust context in which it finds itself. In particular we assume that this must involve the production of adaptation knowledge that is useful also for those who are most vulnerable to climate impacts.
We believe that feminist epistemology has resources to help meet this demand. Feminist epistemology is a field of philosophy which has for decades reflected on the way power imbalances shape knowledge production. Feminists have put forward normative recommendations regarding the formulation of aims of research and the ways the scientific community should look like in order to ensure critical reflexivity and diversity of points of view.