Samantha Noll

Climate change is one of the most important and complex problems of the modern age. The sheer scale of the harm produced, coupled with the fact that the changes are human-induced, necessitates a duty to prevent climate-induced impacts. There is a growing literature exploring how costs and benefits should be shared at national, state and generational levels. This chapter adds to this literature by exploring how normatively guided plans could be hindered by barriers beyond distributive justice frameworks and their subsequent applications. Even if we recognise a prima face duty to mitigate climate change impacts, there are motivational barriers that could block people from making the requisite changes – motivational barriers that ultimately curtail the effectiveness of climate mitigation strategies. After outlining each of these barriers, this chapter then argues that insights from local food movements could provide novel strategies to potentially address each of the barriers above, as they have leveraged normative arguments to motivate individual and collective action. Lessons from food-focused activism, coupled with normatively guided strategies for sharing costs and benefits, has the potential to help communities work towards effectively addressing climate change.