Laura García-Portela wird für ihre Dissertation „Rectifying climate injustice. A backward-looking approach to reparations for climate change loss and damage“ ausgezeichnet.
In her dissertation, Laura García-Portela developed a backward-looking approach to reparations for climate change loss and damage, with the aim of shaping and influencing climate policies. Her dissertation starts from the assumption that there is a kind of justice, namely, rectificatory justice, which requires that reparations are provided by taking into consideration the sources of the injustice. In the case of climate change, this implies repairing loss and damage by using principles of justice that give normative significance to emissions-generating activities. In this line, her dissertation defends a principle of historical responsibility, the Polluter Pays Principle, to distribute rectificatory duties for loss and damage. She argues that human rights-related reasons against emitting greenhouse gas emissions remain active even after the infringement of human rights has already occurred due to those activities. Those reasons generate the duty on historical emitters to rectify the negative effects of their emissions-generating activities. Hence, emitters have a duty to repair loss and damage from climate change. Furthermore, her dissertation shows how recent developments of attribution science could help in establishing a connection between emissions and loss and damage, thereby identifying which environmental harms are due to climate change.
Laura García-Portela is an Assistant Professor in Environmental Philosophy at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam. Before that, she held postdoctoral positions at the PhilETAS (Philosophy of Engineering, Technology and Science) research group, based at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT, Germany) and the Environmental Sciences and Humanities Institute at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland).
She graduated in summer 2021 at the Department of Philosophy and the Doctoral Program in Climate Change at the University of Graz. Her dissertation was also awarded the Luis Díez del Corral Prize from the Center of Political and Constitutional Studies in Spain (research center attached to the Spanish Ministry of Presidency). Her book on justice for loss and damage will be published with Routledge in summer 2024.