The new GDRs paper

Since you’re here, you’re probably looking for The right to development in a climate constrained world, the first complete explication of the Greenhouse Development Rights framework.  You can download the low-resolution (706 kb) version here.  Or, if you prefer, you’ll find a high-resolution version (3.8 Mb) with somewhat clearer graphics here.

The right to development in a climate constrained world was written by Paul Baer and Tom Athanasiou of EcoEquity and Sivan Kartha of the Stockholm Environment Institute, with the support of Christian Aid and, recently, the Heinrich Böll Foundation.

By the way, this paper may seem a bit long.  But you can skip the technical appendix!

What is The Greenhouse Development Rights framework?

GDRs is a “Climate protection framework designed to support an emergency climate stabilization program while, at the same time, preserving the right of all people to reach a dignified level of sustainable human development free of the privations of poverty.”

More specifically, the GDRs framework quantifies national responsibility and capacity, with the goal of providing a coherent, principle-based way to think about national obligations to pay for both mitigation and adaptation.  

As we put this in the abstract:

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 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.  This standard of living, which we might say is that of a ‘global middle class,’ is higher than the global poverty line, but lower than the northern middle-class standard.

To be explicit, we see this right to development, and the corresponding right to be exempt from global climate obligations, as belonging to poor people, not poor countries.  And, indeed, the GDRs framework proceeds transparently from this premise, first defining an emergency stabilization pathway, then quantifying national responsibility and capacity to act, and finally calculating national obligations to pay the costs of both an emergency mitigation program and strenuous adaptation efforts.  Moreover, it does this for all countries, and in a manner that takes income disparities within nations into explicit account.  By so doing, it seeks to secure for the world’s poor the environmental space and resources needed for low-carbon development.

Given this goal, the GDRs framework inevitably allocates to the wealthy and high-emitting, in both the North and the South, the costs of the necessary mitigation and adaptation, and does so no matter how large (or small) these costs turn out to be.  Such an approach may appear improbably ambitious, but we nevertheless see GDRs as being ‘realist,’ albeit in a new way.  Rather than treating short-term political constraints as immutable, we’ve sought to construct a transparent framework capable of catalyzing and then supporting an emergency climate program that could actually meet the long-term challenge before us.

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. 

A little bit of history

The Greenhouse Development Rights framework is the culmination of many years of work.  Some of you will have seen earlier versions of it, as the ideas were first presented at COP 10 in Buenos Aires in 2004, and a brief draft – [Greenhouse Development Rights: An approach to the global climate regime that takes climate protection seriously while also preserving the right to human development] – was circulated in November of 2006.  This paper, however, is different.  It attempts to explain itself completely, and to make the GDRs framework concrete.  To that end, it includes calculations of a “Responsibility and Capacity Indicator” for all countries, and then goes on show that, for any given estimate of the total cost of an emergency mitigation and adaptation program, these RCIs can be used to estimate national obligations – bills,” actually.

For more of the history behind GDRs, see below.

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 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

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May 2007

Our recent study for the Heinrich Boell Foundation, with the snappy title of A Brief, Adequacy and Equity-Based Evaluation of Some Prominent Climate Policy Frameworks and Proposals, briefly compares six approaches to a post-Kyoto climate regime, all of which claim to be fair. One of them, unsurprisingly, is Greenhouse Development Rights. Another, and please note this if you're a fan, is Contraction and Convergence. We evaluate each on its own terms, and also in terms of its ability, or potential ability, to deliver the all-important quality that we call "developmental equity." (June 2007)

A recent Oxfam report, Adapting to climate change: What's needed in poor countries, and who should pay?, is a major step in the evolution and diffusion of the GDRs approach.  Not that Oxfam's "Adaptation Financing Index" is exactly the same as our "Responsibility and Capacity Index."  For one thing, we apply the RCI to mitigation as well as adaptation obligations.  But the two systems share both a common DNA and a common vision.  Most imposrtantly, they point in the same direction.  (May 2007)

The Nairobi Overview of the Greenhouse Development Rights approach: Greenhouse Development Rights: An approach to the global climate regime that takes climate protection seriously while also preserving the right to human development. (Nov 2006)