Towards a moral compass to guide sustainability transformations in a high-end climate change world

Abstract

High-end climate change (HECC) raises unprecedented challenges for the transformation of society's governance arrangements. In such potentially dangerous situation, these challenges have profound moral-rather than only scientific, technical, or managerial-implications. Unfortunately, despite the growing recognition of the necessity for morally-grounded, urgent social-ecological reconfigurations in order to sustainably navigate the uncertain landscape derived from HECC, explicit moral guidance to support the transformation of governance arrangements is still lacking. This work, through the metaphor of a moral compass, proposes a normative tool to support an integrated assessment processes in order to confront the moral challenges and dilemmas in governance and thus favour sustainable transformations under conditions of HECC.