Climate change and uncertainty: What is the role of values in Antarctic policy?

Abstract

Global change, and climate change in particular, have created an urgent need for effective decisions. However, these decisions involve assessing complex data and can generate high degrees of uncertainty about critical outcomes. Such a situation leaves greater scope in the decision-making process for influences other than what might be regarded as objective knowledge. This paper will give a critical review of one of the factors at play in decision-making in contexts of uncertainty – human values – and provides an overview of a current study that attempts to identify values in political discourses attached to Antarctica. Values are understood as internalized codes that affect human behavior and include the moral element of what is considered as good and right. The paper presents the first results of a document analysis on the basis of the more recent political discourse on climate change. The main sources of data are documents that were submitted by the participants and stakeholders in the 2010 Antarctic Treaty Meeting of Experts (ATME) in Svolvær, Norway. Several questions will be discussed: In what manner do decision-makers’ values influence their decisions? How is the phenomenon of climate change perceived and evaluated by the various parties? Are there different interpretations of the same situation, and is this due to different values? The tentative answers to these questions will be discussed in terms of their implications for decision-making in the near- and long-term.