2050: Theft of the Future?
Every semester, at the beginning of my Climate Crisis seminar, I ask my students how they feel about climate change. Unsurprisingly, they are all worried. They struggle to imagine what their lives will look like in the future. They fear that it will not be as safe, prosperous, or predictable as the lives their parents had. Many also feel frustrated and powerless because current politicians are failing to take their future seriously. There is always at least one student who suffers from climate anxiety, does not plan to have children, and wonders what she can do.
Let’s call her Anna. She is twenty-six years old. She is anxious, angry, and frustrated.
Anna is not alone. Across the world, many young people experience similar feelings of fear, grief, anger, and hopelessness about the future. Young people in Czechia and Slovakia are no exception. A 2021 survey conducted by Masaryk University and People in Need, together with a 2023 survey by Nesehnutí, found that many young people experience intense feelings of helplessness, fear, sadness, and even depression when thinking about climate change and their future. They worry about whether they will enjoy a decent standard of living, question whether it is responsible to bring children into an increasingly unstable world, and express anger and disappointment with political leaders whom they perceive as failing to respond adequately to the climate crisis.
2050: Imagining Net Zero
In climate science and policy, 2050 marks the year by which the global community should achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions. Reaching net zero—that is, balancing the amount of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere with the amount removed from it—is essential to preserve a realistic chance of limiting global warming to 1.5°C. The European Climate Law (2021), part of the Green Deal, made climate neutrality by 2050 a legally binding objective. Achieving this goal requires rapid and sustained emissions reductions throughout the 2020s and 2030s.
In 2050, Anna will be fifty.
Even if the world approximates carbon neutrality, Anna’s life in 2050 will be different from ours. Europe is warming twice as fast as the global average, and many of today’s weather extremes will become increasingly common. Summer temperatures around 40°C will be a new normal. Heatwaves, floods, heavy rainfall, droughts, and wildfires will regularly disrupt everyday life. Governments will devote growing shares of public budgets to climate adaptation and disaster recovery. Politics, probably no longer democratic, will be shaped by the challenge of managing water scarcity, agricultural pressures, public health risks, infrastructure damage, and climate-related migration. Economic growth will become constrained by environmental limits and global conflicts. Populist and illiberal movements will exploit anxieties over rising costs, migration, and instability and security. The European Climate Risk Assessment (2024) describes precisely such a future of combined risks to security, democracy, social cohesion, food production, public health, infrastructure, and financial stability.
What happens after 2050 depends on whether the world succeeds in reducing emissions and reaching carbon neutrality. Every election that brings into power populist, climate denialist governments, every prolonged global war, and every new geopolitical or economic crisis makes the 2050 target more difficult to achieve. The annual UNEP Emissions Gap Report paints a sobering picture. Like other reports (IEA, IPCC AR6, Production Gap Report 2025), it warns that current policies remain insufficient to achieve the Paris Agreement’s temperature goals, despite the availability of renewable energy and national emission reduction targets and other climate mitigation pledges. If existing national commitments are weakened or given up, global mean temperature is projected to rise by around 3°C by the end of the century.
Anna has little reason to believe the world will manage to stabilize the climate by 2050.
Anna may have children after all. In 2070, when Anna’s imaginary daughter would be thirty-five, the world may resemble what David Wallace-Wells vividly described in his popular essay-turned-book, The Uninhabitable Earth. In the hot world warmed by around 3°C, small island states like the Maldives, Bangladesh, coastal cities like Jakarta, Manila, Shanghai, Miami, New Orleans, Venice, London, and Hamburg will be drowning in the swelling seas. Large parts of the planet’s equatorial band and the tropics will be uninhabitable, especially the Middle East and Persian Gulf. Prolonged droughts will dramatically reshape Southern Europe, Australia, Africa, and parts of the Americas. Food production will become unstable, migration pressures will intensify, and conflicts over resources will be frequent and violent. Ocean warming and acidification will turn them into dead zones with no marine life. Climate change will be the defining condition of economic decline, political instability, and conflict.
Intergenerational Injustice
We have all the data, the models, the projections, and the scenarios. We know that every additional tonne of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere, and every fraction of a degree of warming, increases climate risks, adaptation costs, economic losses, food insecurity, and the likelihood of conflict. We also have international agreements, national pledges, and emissions reduction targets. Yet politics postpones the action.
Anna is right to be angry. We are baking destruction into the future. In fact, Anna should feel a profound sense of injustice at what the current adult generation is doing to her and future generations.
There is justice between generations. Intergenerational justice is based on moral common sense that human societies are connected across time. This continuity creates a sense of both national identity and a common human history. This continuity is not morally neutral. We, present generations, have to take responsibility for the actions of those who came before us and cannot ignore those who will come after us. Germany has recognized the colonial genocide committed against the Herero and Nama peoples in present-day Namibia and acknowledged responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi regime and has paid reparations to Holocaust survivors. Canada has apologized for the past forced assimilation of Indigenous children, and the Netherlands has acknowledged and apologized for its role in the transatlantic slave trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The same principle applies to the future, especially concerning the environment. Already in the 1970s, international environmental law recognized that present generations have obligations toward those not yet born. The Stockholm Declaration (1972) affirmed humanity’s “solemn responsibility to protect and improve the environment for present and future generations.” The Rio Declaration (1992), following the Earth Summit, defined sustainability as economic development that meets the environmental needs of both present and future generations. This ethical principle was developed further in UNESCO’s Declaration on the Responsibilities of Present Generations Towards Future Generations (1997), which states that present generations have a duty to preserve the conditions necessary for future generations to enjoy a dignified life and inherit an Earth that has not been irreversibly damaged by human activity.
Climate Change as an Intergenerational Moral Storm
Preserving livable climatic conditions for future generations is a clear demand of intergenerational justice. This demand of intergenerational climate justice is recognized in all climate treaties. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (1992) made intergenerational equity one of its guiding principles, stating in Article 3(1) that: “The Parties should protect the climate system for the benefit of present and future generations of humankind, on the basis of equity and in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities.” The Paris Agreement (2015) reaffirmed the importance of intergenerational equity alongside human rights, the rights of children, and the rights of Indigenous peoples when taking climate action.
The principle of intergenerational justice is also supported by a large body of climate justice scholarship. Climate justice scholars argue that current and past generations—especially wealthy states and social classes—have emitted vast amounts of greenhouse gases, thus depleting the common and limited ecological capacity of our atmosphere to absorb greenhouse gases and keep temperatures at levels favorable for human societies. Continuing to burn fossil fuels and benefiting from this cheap source of energy, past and current generations are leaving future generations with no space for additional emissions, instead leaving them with the burdens and costs of dealing with an unstable and dangerous climate. This is highly inequitable and unfair: while the present generation enjoys the benefits of fossil energy, it shifts the costs of mitigation and adaptation and ecological repair onto people who did not contribute to the problem and who have no voice – no possibility of voting, negotiating, protesting, or otherwise holding us accountable for creating the climatic conditions into which they will be born. The philosopher Stephen Gardiner described this problem as the “intergenerational storm” and argued that, together with other ethical challenges—global inequality of emissions, asymmetry of impacts, and the impossibility of collective action—climate change is “a perfect moral storm”.
Today, given what we know, choosing to do nothing—or to do too little—means consciously and deliberately shifting heavy burdens onto our children and their children. We are behaving as if we were the absolute owners of the Earth and its ecological capacities and resources. According to Edith Brown Weiss, the American environmental legal scholar, this is not intergenerational equity. In her seminal book In Fairness to Future Generations: International Law, Common Patrimony, and Intergenerational Equity (1988), she argued that we should regard ourselves not as owners but as trustees who hold the Earth in trust for those who will come after us. The trusteeship of the present generation implies not rights but primarily duties: to preserve the diversity of natural and cultural resources so that future generations retain meaningful choices, to maintain environmental quality and avoid irreversible degradation, and to ensure fair access to the Earth’s resources.
What Can Anna Do?
Is Anna powerless in the face of a future crisis she did not create but wants to avert?
She can make choices consistent with her values: consume less, reduce her carbon footprint, choose sustainable forms of mobility, and encourage others to take climate change seriously. Individual responsibility is a moral imperative if we care about a livable future. However, climate change is a global and structural problem that requires political decisions, institutional change, and coordinated collective action.
As a citizen in Germany, Anna can vote for political parties that support ambitious climate policies. The Greens and The Left support rapid socio-ecological transformation, renewable energy infrastructure, accelerated coal phase-out, higher carbon pricing, and enforcement of international and EU targets. Young people in Germany also turned to the courts. In the landmark case Neubauer et al. v. Germany (2021), the German Federal Constitutional Court held that the Climate Protection Act violated the constitutional rights and freedoms of younger generations because it requires insufficient emissions reduction effort, thereby shifting the burden of drastic future reductions onto future generations.
Young people in Czechia and Slovakia have more limited political options. In both countries, climate policy has become increasingly entangled in political polarization and culture wars. Governing parties in both countries have weakened or openly refused climate ambitions, while parties committed to ambitious climate action remain politically marginal. The option that remains is to organize and join climate movements and other ecological platforms and networks. Why climate movements are essential in democracy and why they deserve our support will be the subject of my next essay.
The text was produced with the support of the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Representation in the Slovak Republic.