Abiodun Paul Afolabi

In this article, I contend that despite the high-level scholarly interest in the ethical implications of climate change, a comprehensive understanding of the impacts of climate change on cultural heritage values, particularly in Africa, has not been sufficiently addressed in climate ethics literature. What has been missing is the nature and significance of climate-induced cultural heritage devastation in Africa and the implications for climate justice. Through the method of philosophical argumentation, I show three important ways in which climate change threatens tangible and intangible cultural heritage values, particularly in Africa. I argue that climate change (a) damages, (b) denies and (c) ultimately contributes to the destruction of cultural heritage in subtle ways that need to be widely known. I further propose ways to address these three dimensions of climate impact on cultural heritage values, aiming to create an inclusive global climate treaty that is sensitive to the devastation of cultural heritage in Africa and beyond. I conclude that if there is reason to be concerned about the loss of cultural heritage values, as there plausibly is, then the negative impact of climate change on cultural heritage values should be taken seriously in climate ethics and policy discourse. Not doing this would amount to cultural injustice.

There has been relatively little reflection from African environmental philosophers on the specific contributions that eco-phenomenology, insofar as it constitutes a distinctive philosophical approach, might make to their field. In this article, I critically evaluate key approaches in African environmental philosophy and argue that the implicit aim of early African environmental philosophers appears limited to employing analytic and hermeneutic methods to rethink anthropocentric attitudes—those largely responsible for upsetting the balance of the natural environment—without any explicit engagement with eco-phenomenological principles or methods. I discuss possible reasons for this neglect and show how African environmental philosophy could benefit from adopting an eco-phenomenological perspective, particularly in revealing the problematic assumptions embedded in the ontological ideal of the interdependence of all things in nature. I conclude that eco-phenomenology has the potential to advance environmental thinking in Africa, provided its method­ological insights are adequately taken up.

A large and important part of social relations is gender relations between men and women. Over time, the manifestation of such relations has often been one of violence, particularly violence against women. Different approaches have been deployed to deal with the experience of gender-based violence (GBV). One popular approach is the human rights framework that suggest that GBV can be addressed by granting certain rights to women. We argue that while a human rights framework holds some promise in resolving GBV, it is limited in some ways because it does not take the cultural perceptions of gender relations that envision gender duties into account. As part of our argument, we show that social relations in African communities ought to be primarily based on the principle of duty to the other, rather than an emphasis on rights. We conclude that there is a need to complement the rights-based approach with a duty-based approach to effectively address GBV.