Climate change goals and actions are often discussed with reference to their feasibility. However, in the climate change literature, there is no agreed upon understanding of what feasibility means. In this paper, insights from political philosophy are used to address this problem in a two-fold way. First, different uses of the term feasibility in the climate change context are critically analyzed, surfacing problematic uses that can have severe consequences for what goals or actions are considered. Second, the ‘conditional probability account of feasibility’ is presented as a positive account of how feasibility should be understood in the climate change context, and applied to the case of managed retreat as an approach for adaptation to sea level rise. Together, the critical analysis and the positive proposal furthers a necessary discussion on feasibility in the context of climate change.

Value sensitive design (VSD) aims at creating better technology based on social and ethical values. However, VSD has not been applied to long-term and uncertain future developments, such as societal planning for climate change. This paper describes a new method that combines elements from VSD with scenario planning. The method was developed for and applied to a case study of adaptation to sea level rise (SLR) in southern Sweden in a series of workshops. The participants of the workshops found that the method provided a framework for discussing long-term planning, enabled identification of essential values, challenged established planning practices, helped find creative solutions, and served as a reminder that we do not know what will happen in the future. Finally, we reflect on the limitations of the method and suggest further research on how it can be improved for value sensitive design of adaptation measures to manage uncertain future sea level rise.

This thesis addresses local adaptation to climate change-induced sea level rise, taking an ethical perspective and focusing at the role of planning and the planner. The research, which has been conducted within a transdisciplinary research project, takes a bottom-up approach to applied ethics, and relies to a great extent on empirical data. In doing this, it contributes to the growing field of ethics of climate change adaptation, with results that can be of interest to both ethicists and planners. The thesis consists of an introductory chapter and three articles. 

Article 1: Departing from an interview study with planners working with adaptation to sea level rise in Sweden, a typology of ethical issues is presented. It is shown that planners have to deal with input-oriented, process-oriented, and outcome-oriented ethical issues, and that knowledge of these can contribute to ethical adaptation policy. 

Article 2: A method building on Value Sensitive Design (VSD) and scenario planning is developed and applied to address the challenge of integrating ethics when planning for uncertainty over long time- horizons, in the context of adaptation to sea level rise. The method consists of three steps for scenario development and three steps for value investigations. The application resulted in insights on aspects important for an ethical long-term adaptation to sea-level rise. 

Article 3: Responsibility of adaptation to sea level rise is often assigned to local planners. But what does it mean to be responsible? Departing from the idea of professional virtues, three codes of ethics for planners are analysed to extract aspirational characteristics for planners. The identified virtues are put in relation to central challenges of adaptation, where five virtues stand out as central to the understanding of what it means to be responsible in adaptation to sea level rise. 

Den har avhandlingen behandlar etiska aspekter i anpassning till stigan­de havsnivåer. Som en följd av klimatforändringarna stiger havsnivåer­na, vilket utsätter kustnära samhällen for stora risker. För att minimera dessa risker kan vi antingen minska våra utslapp och begransa klimatförändringarna (detta kallas på engelska for mitigation), eller så kan vi anpassa oss till förandringarna vi star inför. Anpassning till stigande hav­snivåer kan bland annat ta form av hårda skydd som murar mot havet, ekosystembaserade skydd som mangroveskogar, eller genom att flytta samhällen och människor från riskzoner, en sa kallad planerad reträtt. Det som är karakteristiskt för anpassning till stigande havsnivåer är att det i stor utsträckning handlar om ingrepp i den byggda miljön, vilket gör att anpassning till stigande havsnivåer på många sätt kan betraktas som en sorts fysisk planering. I de flesta samhällen kommer anpassning innebära en kombina­tion av insatser, och när anpassningsstrategier formuleras kommer det behövas tas hänsyn till mål- och värdekonflikter. I och med detta kan an­passning till klimatförandringarna och till stigande havsnivåer uppfattas som etisk till sin natur. En etisk analys kan bidra med att systematisera rätt och fel och bistå med verktyg for att fatta välmotiverade beslut. Trots detta har förhallandevis lite forskning inriktat sig på just etisk an­passning till stigande havsnivåer. Denna avhandling bidrar med etiska analyser av anpassning till stigande havsnivåer, med särskild inrikt­ning på lokal anpassning och planerarens roll i anpassningsprocessen. Forskningen som presenteras har genomförts inom det tvärvetenskapli­ga forskningsprojektet Sea-rims (Sustainable and ethical adaptation to rising mean sea levels) som drivs av filosofiska avdelningen på KTH till­sammans med Statens Geotekniska Institut (SGI). Projektgruppen har tillsammans med ett antal projektpartners från sydsvenska kommuner och länsstyrelser, samt en referensgrupp med representanter från myn­digheter som arbetar med anpassning till stigande havsnivåer, utforskat etiska dimensioner av de problem som projektmedlemmarna står infor. Avhandlingen kan därmed ses som ett exempel på tillampad etik, med ett tydligt nedifrån-perspektiv på de etiska frågeställningarna.

Sea level rise (SLR) caused by climate change presents challenges for public planners all over the world. In this study, practical challenges and ethical factors in adaptation to SLR were identified based on interviews with planners in Sweden. Six challenges were identified: lack of knowledge and human resources, lacking integration and coordination, lacking or insufficient frameworks for dealing with long-time-horizons, responsibility for implementation and financing, and goal conflicts in the process of implementing adaptation policy. These challenges are then developed into a typology of ethical factors that are of particular importance for adaptation to SLR, categorised as input-oriented, process-oriented and outcome-oriented ethical factors. The challenges and ethical factors identified in this paper are the first step taken towards answering the question of what a sustainable and ethical adaptation to SLR in the context of local and regional policy-making could look like.

In the field of responsibility and climate change, much attention has been paid to actions and what we need to do in order to take responsibility. This paper shifts the perspective from what we should do to how we should be in order to be responsible. Looking at the case of local adaptation to sea level rise, the question of what characterizes a responsible planner is addressed. Departing from the idea of professional virtues, aspirational characteristics are extrapolated from three codes of ethics for planners. The identified virtues are discussed in relation to the central challenges of adaptation to sea level rise, giving an indication of which virtues are most important in this given context. When placing the responsible planner in an institutional context, it is evident that while a virtue perspective should not replace a system analysis, it provides a valuable complement to the traditional action-focused discourse on responsible adaptation.

Food security can be defined in terms of availability, access, and use of food. The study assesses whether the measures taken by Addax Bioenergy in the Makeni community in Sierra Leone are effective and sufficient to ensure food security locally as well as regionally. Land and water availability, agricultural intensification and infrastructure, self-sufficiency/market dependency and alternative income options have been identified as the main factors affecting food security in the project area. The main measures employed by Addax involve the use of an 'environmental, social and health impact assessment' (ESHIA) to identify and propose measures to mitigate any impacts that would adversely affect the food security of the region. The results show that the proposed measures for mitigating negative impacts on food security are in some instances inappropriate and inadequate, leaving the affected communities exposed to risks and shocks of food insecurity. It is also found that the insufficiency of mitigation measures is a result of weak governance and lack of oversight that may leave the community at the mercy of Addax Bioenergy.

Climate change and adaptation to climate change tend tohave disproportionally negative impacts on women. Given that existing vulnerabilities and inequalities commonly are reproduced through adaptation, adaptation planning should be considered a political process. Justice as well as pragmatic reasons require that gender concernsare addressed in adaptation planning, but currently there are few suggestions for how this should be done in practice. In this paper, it issuggested that three objectives that need to be fulfilled to achieve agender-sensitive adaptation are: inclusive processes, just outcomes, and transformational change. Gender impact assessments (GIA) offer an established approach for evaluating policy and planning but falls shortwhen it comes to accounting for uncertain future developments thatadaptation policy ought to consider. A method called value-sensitive scenario planning (VSSP) is proposed as a possible approach for addressing gender concerns in long-term adaptation planning. It is argued that VSSP has potential to further inclusive processes and just outcomes, but does not necessarily facilitate much-needed transformational change. However, it is a promising start towards a gender-sensitive adaptation planning. 

Value sensitive design (VSD) aims at creating better technology based on social and ethical values. VSD has until now not been applied to design for long-term and uncertain future developments, such as societal planning impacted by climate change. This paper proposes a method that combines scenario planning with elements from VSD and applies it to a case study of adaptation to sea level rise (SLR) in southern Sweden. We have labelled it Value Sensitive Scenario Planning. The suitability of combining VSD and scenario planning and the potential to use this approach to study ethical issues in adaptation to SLR is discussed. Combining VSD with future scenarios is a promising new method to take social and ethical values seriously when planning for uncertain futures.