"This paper argues that an emergency climate program is needed, that such a program is only possible if the international climate policy impasse is broken, and that this impasse arises from the inherent − but surmountable − conflict between the climate crisis and the development crisis.  It argues that the best way to break this impasse is, perhaps counter-intuitively, by expanding the climate protection agenda to include the protection of developmental equity.  To that end, the Greenhouse Development Rights (GDRs) framework is designed to hold global warming below 2ºC while, with equal deliberateness, safeguarding the right of all people everywhere to reach a dignified level of sustainable human development.  We present in this paper an exposition of the GDRs framework and indicative quantification of its implications." 

At its heart, GDRs is a response to an unfortunate fact: given the extraordinarily rapid emissions reductions that are now necessary (and, to be complete, the state of today’s technology) even equal per capita emissions rights wouldn’t give the South enough “developmental space” to escape its historically subordinate role in the global economy.  This is among the many grim truths of the climate crisis, but, as we’ve found ourselves saying with some regularity, “the math is implacable.”  In a sense, what we’ve done in this paper is follow the implications of this implacability, as straightforwardly and as transparently as we were able.

Executive Summary

Climate science tells us that we’ve pushed beyond ‘dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system,’ and are on the verge of committing to catastrophic interference.  In this context, it’s necessary to raise our heads, if only for a moment, from the tactical scrum, and to consider brute necessity.  To that end, we argue for a stringent mitigation pathway (one that can only be achieved by way of an international emergency program) that would give us a reasonable probability of keeping global warming below 2ºC.  This implies a pathway that would have global emissions peak in 2015 and then drop at a resolute six percent per year, to reach a level of 80 percent below 1990 levels in 2050.  Along the way, CO2 concentrations would peak near 425 ppm (with CO2-equivalent levels reaching about 470 ppm) before they began to fall.  

Such an emergency pathway is, to be sure, a technical challenge; but it’s even more a political challenge.  After all, the defining political reality of the climate crisis is that we confront it within a profoundly and bitterly divided world characterized by staggering levels of poverty amid enormous (and growing) wealth.  And while the usual path from poverty to prosperity is via a development process that entails dramatic increases in the per capita use of fossil fuel energy, this path must be closed.  Any future in which it’s taken by even a significant fraction of the world’s poor is a future in which dramatically rising carbon emissions make a mockery of emergency rhetoric.  
This leads us, inevitably, to the intersection of the climate crisis and the development crisis, and to the core of the climate challenge: The world’s wealthy minority has left precious little atmospheric space for the poor majority.  Indeed, it has left so little space that, even if industrialized country emissions were to be suddenly and magically halted, the dramatic emissions reduction demanded by the climate crisis would require the developing countries to urgently decarbonize their economies, and to do so while they are still combating endemic poverty.  Which is not only the core of the physical challenge, but also the crux of the international political impasse that now stymies the negotiations.

If an emergency program is to have any hope of being embraced, we must take care that it does not threaten to lock in today’s vast disparities of wealth and income.  Just the contrary: It must drive down emissions, globally, even while the lives of the poor are improving and ambitious development goals are being met and surpassed.  To this end, it must slash the emissions of the already wealthy and, at the same time, prevent the unbounded emissions growth of those rising out of poverty.  And it must do so without stifling their development aspirations.

The problem, of course, is that the world’s wealthier citizens will not at present agree to pay more than a trivial amount for climate change, and even less if the payments go to people and projects in ‘other countries’.  Given this, southern negotiators can be forgiven if they fear that a stringent global climate agreement would wind up saddling them with unacceptable costs and permanently constraining their development.  In any case, poor countries, if they see mitigation as drawing resources from development and poverty alleviation, will balk at it.  Which is why, before finally throwing their support behind any emergency program, southern negotiators will need to see a proposal that, above all else, explicitly safeguards the right to development.

Thus, the political impasse.  As long as there is no serious burden sharing proposal on the table, one that ensures that an emergency program can be executed without stifling development in the South, developing country negotiators will conclude that their countries have more to lose than to gain from earnest engagement.  In this context, we offer ‘Greenhouse Development Rights’ as a reference burden sharing framework for a regime that could break the impasse.  

The GDRs framework seeks to not only acknowledge the right to development but to actually place that right at its structural core.  It seeks to secure for the developing nations a viable portion of the scant remaining atmospheric space, and to do so in a manner that allows them to prosper within it.  It does this by codifying the right to development in terms of a development threshold, an income level below which individuals are not required to help shoulder the burden of solving the climate problem.  This development threshold is defined to reflect a level of welfare beyond basic needs, but well short of today’s levels of ‘affluent’ consumption, which is to say that people below it have little responsibility for the climate problem and relatively little capacity to invest in solving it.  Indeed, they have development as their proper priority, and as they struggle toward a viable level of social wellbeing, they cannot reasonably be saddled with the costs of keeping society as a whole within the starkly limited global carbon budget.  

People above the development threshold, on the other had, are taken as having realized their right to development, and as bearing the responsibility to preserve that right for others.  It’s they who must share the burden – in accordance with the UNFCCC’s broad principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibility and respective capabilities’ – of funding the global emergency program.  It’s they who must bear the costs of not only curbing the emissions associated with their own consumption, but also of ensuring that, as those below the threshold rise towards and then above it, they are able to do so along sustainable, low-emission paths. 

In all this, responsibility and capacity are not mere pretty words, repeated here because they’re prominently featured in the Framework Convention.  Rather, they’re built deeply into the GDRs burden sharing system, and this for the very pragmatic reason that they specify a viable and defensible foundation for a true emergency program.  Indeed, the GDRs burden sharing system is progressive with respect to both responsibility and capacity, in that it defines both with respect to the development threshold.

We suggest here a development threshold set at an income level of $9,000/year (PPP).  This figure, while certainly subject to discussion, is a reasonable reflection of a level at which one has largely overcome the struggle against privation and become a bona fide member of the global consuming class.  (And it’s much more relevant to the problems here than the oft-cited figures of $1/day or $2/day for a global “poverty line”.)  It’s above the global average income (of about $8,500), and might reasonably be called a ‘global middle class’ income level (not to be confused with the significantly higher rich-world middle-class standard.)  In terms of the trade-off that we actually face – at what point should poorer people help bear the burden, so that wealthier people would bear less? – it draws the line in just about the right place.

We define capacity as income, excluding all income below the development threshold.  We similarly define responsibility as cumulative carbon emissions, excluding all emissions deriving from consumption below the development threshold.  The logic here is that any burden sharing framework designed to protect the right to development must necessarily exclude such “survival income” and “survival emissions.”  Also, it’s important to note that capacity and responsibility are defined in individual terms, in a manner that takes explicit account of the distribution of income and emissions – inequality – within countries.  This is critical.  Relying merely on national per capita averages would fail to capture either the true depth of the development need or the actual extent of the national wealth.  

Below, we estimate capacity and responsibility for all countries. We then combine those estimates (into a national “Responsibility and Capacity Indicator” − RCI) to quantify national mitigation and adaptation obligations corresponding to a global emergency program.  The allocation of the burden along these lines would see the United States bearing slightly more than one-third of the global burden, and the EU bearing roughly one quarter, whereas China bears less than one-fifteenth, and India less than one three-hundredth. (See Table  below.)

Table ES-1.  Global percentage shares of population, income, capacity, cumulative emissions, responsibility, and RCI for selected countriesand groups of countries. 

If, for example, it turns out that the total costs of the emergency program are one percent of gross world product, then the implied annual obligations average $780 for the people above the development threshold in the United States, and, similarly, $372 in the EU, $142 in China, and $51 in India.  (If the total costs turn out to be three percent of GWP, then triple these figures.)  

Our conclusion is that if costs are shared within a progressive framework based on capacity and responsibility, then they’ll be shared in a manner that’s both fair and fairly painless.  We stress that, the higher these costs turn out to be, the more important it is to share them equitably, and note that, thankfully, the situation is not (yet) so dire that we’re forced to consider truly heavy burdens and genuinely draconian decisions.  Which is to say that it’s still possible to avert climate catastrophe while pursuing sustainable human development, in good faith and on a global scale.  Our world is a rich one in which, despite the climate crisis and even the broader environmental crisis, viable options remain. 

The bad news is “merely” political, and amounts to two tasks.  First, we must build the political will necessary to allocate a significant fraction of the gross world product (GWP) – one percent or perhaps even three – to implement a true emergency program.  Second, we must ensure that the burden of that program is shared more or less along the lines of the “progressive global carbon tax” presented here.  Both of these tasks are, admittedly, daunting, but it’s time to recognize them for what they are – the necessary foundations of a viable global climate regime.  Only if the relatively wealthy and relatively responsible (in both wealthier and poorer countries) pay the incremental costs of adapation and clean-energy leapfrogging will those who need to prioritize development be able to do so.  

In a world as bitterly divided as ours, a viable climate regime must at least do no harm, and this means that it must not erect further barriers to the progress of the poor.  The key virtue of the Greenhouse Development Rights approach is that it does not do so.  Indeed, it’s because it doesn’t do so that we can claim that the GDRs approach is in fact realistic.  If the cost of meeting this condition is that, in the end, both mitigation and adaptation must be financed via a (fairly modest) tax on the luxury consumption of the relatively wealthy – for this is, finally, what GDRs proposes – well, what is this but realism about our actual conditions of life on this shared, finite planet?

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November 2007

An “open source” policy framework

The Greenhouse Development Rights framework is based on a simple idea, that there are only a small number of reasonable ways in which the UNFCCC’s famous “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capacities” can be quantified. We’ve proposed a specific method for making such a quantification, but we do not presume to have the last word on the matter. 

Accordingly, we’d like to see Greenhouse Development Rights develop into an open source policy framework. That is, we want people who are sympathetic (or even unsympathetic) to our basic idea to be able to work with our analysis, our data, our assumptions, and our models, and to develop their own versions, variations and extensions of the GDRs approach.  Accordingly, we’ve put our database, along  with some of the computer code used in our calculations, into a public repository at http://gdrs.sourceforge.net.  It needs more work, but the basics are already there, and we invite the nerds among you to visit, download the “GDRs Calculator,” and give us your feedback.  We’ll take it seriously, because this is very much a work in progress.
Address correspondence to GDRs@ecoequity.org

Years ago, when we first spun up EcoEquity, we saw equal per-capita emissions rights as the essential foundation of a just and effective global climate regime. It's been a long trip since then, and for better or for worse this has changed. Our goal remains the same -- the proper marriage of justice and realism -- but we've come to take the diversity of "national circumstances" very seriously indeed when trying to understand what such a marriage implies.

And when we say that national circumstances have to be taken into account, we don't simply mean that some countries are hotter that others. We also mean that some have a great deal more responsibility for the climate crisis, and that some are a good deal richer than others. The bottom line is that we still see per-capita rights as crucial, but no longer see them as emissions rights per se. In fact, we think that the best way forward, for those of us who still see rights-based approaches as critical, might well be the entirely different terms of "rights to sustainable development."

Such rights are asserted by the Berlin Mandate, though working out what they mean in practice isn't easy. One thing that seems pretty clear is that sustainable development rights must be animated by a system that leverages the Polluter Pays Principle to fund a rapid global clean-energy transition. Beyond that matters get less clear, though we think we've worked out a useful approach to the problem, one which we intend to be taken as both a proposal and a reference framework by which other proposals can be judged. We call it Greenhouse Development Rights.

The Greenhouse Development Rights approach is very much a work in progress. Given this, we've decided to set up this page to make it easier for interested parties to follow its evolution.

First, the people behind the curtain. The original "Greenhouse Development Rights" group, which evolved from the group that, after the Climate Action Network's 2002 "Equity Summit," set out to further develop the "Per Capita Plus National Circumstances" approach. There are three of us: Tom Athanasiou and Paul Baer of EcoEquity and Sivan Kartha of the Stockholm Environment Institute, all doing business, at least as far as GDRs is concerned, as EcoEquity. There was a forth in our ranks, Steven Bernow of the Tellus Institute, but Steve died just as we really picking up steam. Still, his name belongs here.

The Greenhouse Development Rights approach debuted at a side event at COP 10 in Argentina, with a paper and presentation by Siv, Paul, and Tom that was introduced by Deborah Cornland of Sweden's Mistra, an early supporter of the GDRs project. This paper was called Cutting the Gordian Knot, but this, alas, did not translate well. The final, reworked version was published on April 15 2005, under the title Cutting the Knot: Climate Protection, Political Realism, and Equity as Requirements of a Post-Kyoto Regime.

There followed a long pause in the development of approach, during which we bemoaned our lack of funding, debated the feedback which we had received at COP10, and pursued other projects. Recently, however, things have picked up speed. For one thing, a number of people and organizations have become interested in the Greenhouse Development Rights approach, most notably the estimable British development group Christian Aid. For another, we have completed and published two relevant new papers.

The first is a brief, well-focused new paper, with the snappy title of Greenhouse Development Rights: An approach to the global climate regime that takes climate protection seriously while also preserving the right to human development. We call it "the Nairobi draft" because, while it's ready for COP12/MOP2 in Kenya, it's hardly the last word on Greenhouse Development Rights.

The Nairobi draft does, however, mark real progress since we debuted the GDRs approach at COP10. Since then we've been grinding slowly through the issues and improvements needed to make it really useful. For one thing, we're no longer treating countries as monolithic, but rather calculating their "responsibility and capacity indexes" in a manner that is sensitive to intra-national income disparities. Not to say class. For another, and just as importantly, adaptation, and obligation to pay for adaptation, are now fully integrated into the GDRs framework.

And we're happy to say that the GDRs drafting group is not alone in trundling the Nairobi draft around the halls of the conference center. Christian Aid is now a full partner, and some other prospective partners are also in the wings. Our hope is to put our core point onto the political agenda as quickly as possible - that if we actually intend to build a climate regime that can hold the warming to 2C or less, we had best think very clearly indeed about how that regime can preserve, and actively promote, the right to human development.

Finally, and only a bit tangentially, we'd like to mention second report, this on precautionary emissions pathways, published by the UK's Institute for Public Policy Rese and authored by EcoEquity's Research Director, Paul Baer. It's called High Stakes: Designing emissions pathways to reduce the risk of dangerous climate change , and it was written by Paul Baer of EcoEquity and co-authored with Michael Mastrandrea of Stanford University.

"High Stakes" has already gotten a bit of high level attention, and it's a key contribution to the intensifying debate over precaution and long-term objectives. This is because it shows, by way of fairly robust but transparent risk calculations, that even if we could orchestrate an extremely steep and nearly immediate decline in global emissions, we would still face a risk on the order of 10-20% or more of exceeding the 2ºC threshold, the most broadly endorsed "precautionary" target.

The relevance of this work should probably be pointed out -- the GDRs approach begins with an explicit calculation of the "mitigation shortfall" that has to be filled by any viable global climate regime. That shortfall can only be calculate with respect to a true "soft landing" emissions pathway. Which is where "High Stakes" comes in.