Recents debates within energy ethics have focused on the framework of energy justice. The justice framework is often linked to Western ethical ideas, especially the human rights framework and the ideas of Western individualism. The presentation ongoing debate between human rights and the rights of nature. The analysis highlights the frequent association of human rights with social contract theories, identifying both the strengths and limitations of contractualist individualism.

In this paper I will explore different notions of ‘environment’ to conduct an analysis of its current explanatory and descriptive power. By utilizing concepts from Philosophy of Technology, concretely from Postphenomenology (Ihde 1990; Verbeek 2006), I aim to illuminate the non-neutral role of everyday tools, media, infrastructure, and technological systems and to highlight their existential and pragmatic relevance for human-environment relations.

Technology today is increasingly global, in the double sense that it is to be found all around the globe, and that it increasingly depends on global networks of production and information exchange. But what exactly is this globe, and how does technology relate to it? Is the globe on which globalisation occurred in the twentieth century the same planet which geo-engineering and sustainable technologies mean to preserve in the twenty-first century? In this article, we first consider the conditions of possibility for technological globalisation.

We live in a time of rapid, global, and long-lasting environmental and technological changes. On the one hand, technological innovation is a major driver of environmental degradation, as illustrated by the pollution caused by agricultural pesticides, ozone layer depletion caused by chlorofluorocarbons, greenhouse gas emissions caused by fossil fuel combustion, and the radioactive waste of nuclear power plants.

The increased rationalisation of biotechnological engineering leads to a decontextualised production process of many well-known flavours and fragrances, such as vanillin, patchouli and stevia. A range of sophisticated production pathways decouples the production of ingredients from the original plant. This so-called biomanufacturing is fueled by technologies such large scale sequencing and metabolic engineering which allow for the precise design of micro-organisms.

Background: A hallmark of the Anthropocene is that planetary, regional and local ecosystems are facing human-induced irreversible changes. These phenomena of 'irreversible changes' include global warming, crossing climate tipping points or ecological thresholds, and extinction. In environmental ethics, conservation biology and restoration management, human intervention is largely based on the assumption that it is possible to restore an ecosystem to its previous, qualitatively higher state.

Anxiety has become a defining feature of our time. Rapid technological change, growing migration flows, war, and pandemics are all feeding into a growing feeling of uncertainty, insecurity, and powerlessness. This paper investigates a new but rapidly spreading form of anxiety: ecological anxiety. 

Under the looming specter of mass extinction and escalating climate change, life itself becomes the terrain of various justice struggles. As philosopher Eva von Redecker notes, many recent social justice movements, including climate (“Extinction Rebellion”), feminist (“Ni una menos”), anti-racist (“I can’t breathe”) and Indigenous (“Water is life”) mobilizations explicitly make reference to the politics of life. At the same time, technological developments in the life sciences challenge traditional philosophical accounts of the very meaning of life.

The integration of digital twin technology in agriculture presents a promise for enhancing animal welfare, particularly within livestock management. This article explores some ethical implications of employing digital twins in agriculture, guided by the established Five Freedoms for Animal Welfare framework.

If artificial intelligence agents are capable of being conscious or experiencing subjective well-being, it seems plausible that we should offer them moral consideration (Bostrom & Yudkowsky, 2014; Anthis & Harris, 2021). However, the hard problem of consciousness remains a major challenge in understanding the nature of genuine consciousness in AI (Chalmers, 1995).

In climate ethics, many have worried about the potential injustices arising from large-scale implementation of Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR). To date, most of this discussion has focused on one particular form of CDR, the bioenergy-based BECCS technique. However, the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report estimates that ‘nature-based’ forms of CDR such as afforestation and reforestation, soil carbon sequestration, and agroforestry have significant removal potentials, as well as potential co-benefits for local communities and biodiversity.

The planetary boundary framework defines a ‘safe operating space for humanity’ that requires staying within certain biophysical boundaries of the Earth system (Rockström et al., 2009). Recently, Earth system scientists and social scientists have proposed to complement these biophysical boundaries with ‘just Earth system boundaries’, which encompass three dimensions of justice – intragenerational justice, intergenerational justice, and interspecies justice (the ‘3I approach’) – that are brought together under the concept of ‘planetary justice’ (Gupta et al., 2023).

Agriculture is undergoing a great transformation, often pronounced the fourth agricultural revolution, driven by technologies such as robotics, variable rate chemical applicators, the Internet of Things, big data, drones and automation (Balafoutis et al. 2020). This transformation is marked by the double pressure of a burgeoning world population, on the one hand, and evermore strained life-support systems, on the other (Blok 2017, 133). Life-support systems include both wild ecosystems and human food production systems. Protecting wild ecosystems is a demanding imperative.

AI is being developed for many applications in the livestock industry to control the environmental impact of livestock and reduce inefficiency in the sector while also responding to some of the ethical concerns raised earlier about the welfare of farm animals (Bao & Xie, 2022).

In recent years, there has been an increasing number of calls for more inclusive local participation in decision-making on local energy infrastructures and projects. This also goes for energy technologies in the Netherlands, as the Dutch Climate policy includes a mandate for municipalities to organise participation in local energy projects. Including stakeholders (instead of shareholders) and their values is important for instrumental and intrinsic reasons. Still, there are important worries concerning local participation in decision-making in energy infrastructures.

Over the past two decades, citizen participation has emerged as a central component in governing energy transitions. The conceptualization of the roles citizens can and should play in these transitions has been defined through the concept of energy citizenship. However, since its first explication in 2007, the concept developed into a very narrow set of roles for citizen in energy transitions.

There is an increasing awareness that normative issues pervade the energy transition, testified by the popularity of concepts like ‘energy justice’ and the ‘just transition’. In spite of this awareness, experts and practitioners have difficulty relating to the moral implications of their work that are relatively new to them, for three reasons. First, there is a widely held conviction that moral issues are subjective expressions of preference and, as such, do not fit the objective outlook associated with professional expertise.

"Destination Earth", or in short "DestinE" is a project of the European Commission that aims to develop of a Digital Twin of planet Earth: a highly accurate data-driven digital representation that is expected to monitor and predict the interaction between natural phenomena and human activity. This Digital Twin is expected to inform and support Europe's environmental governance. However, every representation reflects a certain approach to reality, thereby giving certain actors power over claims to reality, materialising world-views, and opening up certain futures, while closing off others.

In our quest for human happiness and well-being we have taken the needs and wants of one biological species as the only frame of reference for a place that is inhabited by millions of species. Our super ability to collaborate, the strict or absolute separation between us and nature (Lent, 2022) and the dominance of the reductionist way of thinking have already closed off a pathway where we would focus on abundance and equality.

Scientists are adopting genetics and genomics technologies for wide-ranging conservation objectives, ranging from biodiversity monitoring, translocations, assisted evolution, gene drives and de-extinction. These data-driven technologies rely on the mass digitization of biodiversity data across the world and constitute the Fourth Paradigm of biodiversity science. While enhancing human understanding of biodiversity loss and capacities to deal with it, technologies have large ethical implications (Daño & Prato, 2019). 

Global warming and the consequent ecological crisis driving soil degradation and biodiversity loss are making painfully clear our lack of understanding and appreciation of the environmental costs of technological modernization. The current ecological predicament has encouraged the promotion of sustainable development and the rise of nature-based technologies and ecological design practices.

‘Proper function’ theories commit to the notion that artefacts possess functions that are ontologically ‘proper’ to them, and that these functions are assigned at artefact creation. According to these theories, proper functions play a crucial role in shaping our collective understanding of technological artefacts. Proper functions not only help us to determine what a given artefact is, but also offer normative benchmarks for whether artefacts are working ‘properly’.

The growing focus on repair and maintenance in philosophy of technology, urges, among other things, an attention to technologies through time, that is, how they persist, are worked on, are re-designed and reimagined over the duration of their use (Young, 2020; Steinert, forthcoming). It is the relevance that this perspective has for the built environment in times of climate change and environmental disruption that I develop in this presentation.

Since the publication of Winner’s influential article in 1980, the idea that artifacts have politics has remained a dominant theme in STS and the philosophy of technology. Yet despite exploring the political nature of artifacts from a variety of different perspectives, little of this work has paid attention to the activity of maintenance.

Dealing with anthropogenic climate change through climate and energy policy requires an apprehension of the moral complexity of this challenge. Whereas scholarship advances in bringing moral and ethical insights into climate and energy policy, there is limited reflection on the exploratory questions such as in what way can the environment become an object of moral concern? This research employs an agent-based modelling approach to investigate the process of an expanding circle of moral concern in response to environmental challenges.