|
To
download this report in PDF, click here
The
South’s dilemma.
6
Greenhouse
Development Rights, in brief.
10
The
EU’s proposed commitments vs. its GDRs obligations
12
The
European Union, in the world..
17
Final
Observations..
20
Appendix:
Greenhouse Development Rights, in detail
22
Appendix:
EU and selected country details..
31
References..
34
An
impasse threatens the international climate negotiations.
This impasse – and its implications for the European Union – derives
from the fundamental fact that the climate crisis confronts us in a
profoundly unequal world. Moreover, the climate crisis is
extremely grave; it actually requires that, somehow, we launch a global
emergency mobilization to stabilize the climate. Yet such a
mobilization, which would be daunting under the best of circumstances,
must come while billions of people, overwhelmingly but not exclusively
in the South, are still struggling to escape poverty.
This
is a critical complication, greater even than those engendered by the
crashing waves of financial and geo-political instability that, alas,
seem to characterize our times. Its importance cannot be
overstated. Nor can its most obvious implication: despite the
progress that has been made since Bali – most visibly in the various
financing proposals which have now been formally tabled – a further
effort, and a bold one, will be needed if the impasse is to be broken
in time. And this effort will have to originate in the
wealthy world. It will, almost certainly, and against all
odds, have to originate in Europe.
There
are two big problems here. The first is that, despite helpful proposals
for global funds and global auctions, they are not enough.
The North / South impasse will not be broken without a fair global
burden sharing architecture, one that promises a way forward that does
not threaten the development of the South. The
second is that the northern countries have, by and large, failed to
honor their climate commitments; in particular, the financial and
technological s that was promised in Rio, in Kyoto, and on many
occasions since, has simply not arrived.
The
first of these, the burden sharing problem, demands a major step beyond
the ad hocism of the Kyoto targets, and toward a transparent,
principle-based system that holds the right to development at its
structural core. This is where the Greenhouse Development
Rights framework comes in. GDRs (explained briefly below and
in greater length in the appendices) is a burden sharing system
designed to be as simple as possible while still capturing the
intention behind the UNFCCC’s famous principles of “common but
differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities.”
By incorporating responsibility, it captures the necessities of the
polluter pays principle and establishes incentives for low-carbon
development. By incorporating capacity, it respects the
obvious truth that climate is an overarching civilizational challenge
that will demand major financial resources. By defining both
responsibility and capacity with respect to a development threshold, it
safeguards a meaningful right to development. And,
critically, by accounting for intra-national disparities in wealth, it
recognizes that that this right adheres to individuals, not countries,
and that the relatively wealthy people in poor countries, like their
compatriots in the North, quite properly share the common obligation to
stabilize and protect the global climate.
As
with every country, the EU’s mitigation obligations under the GDRs
framework are calculated as a share of the global mitigation
requirement, based on a combined indicator of its responsibility and
capacity – a Responsibility and Capacity Index.
By 2020, the EU’s share (~23%) of the global total mitigation
requirement (~3700 MtC) reaches roughly 850 MtC. (Under the
GDRs framework, the EU would also have an obligation to accept 23% of
the global adaptation burden, though adaptation is not discussed in
detail in this brief memo.)
Figure 1: The EU’s mitigation
obligations, as
calculated by the Greenhouse Development Rights framework under a 2ºC
emergency stabilization pathway (shown in red).
Figure
1 shows (the red line) the EU’s mitigation obligations (its share of an
emergency emissions reduction pathway that is stringent enough to
support a high probability of holding the 2ºC line), relative to the
EU’s reference pathway. As is strikingly clear (the size of
the blue wedge) the EU’s GDRs allocation plummets to almost 80% below
1990 levels by 2020, and passes below zero in about 2023.
This seems radical indeed when compared to the European Commission’s
proposed targets. The default EC target of 20% reduction below 1990
levels is shown in dashed orange, and the EC’s proposed target under an
international agreement is a slightly more ambitious 30% reduction,
shown in dashed blue. Clearly, a reduction obligation this
large is only meaningful if it is understood as a composite, two-fold
obligation to, on the one hand, make reductions domestically
and, on the other, invest in reductions internationally. The
EU, like other northern countries, has such a two-fold obligation, and
under a trajectory that’s actually consistent with a 2ºC target, both
sides of it are quite demanding indeed.
Indeed,
this two-fold obligation is large enough to seem entirely implausible
by today’s standards of political realism. Nevertheless,
obligations of this scale for countries with high capacity and
responsibility are in the final analysis, quite unavoidable.
It is only by way of such large obligations that a climate regime can
effectively bring about two vital outcomes. First, by driving
ambitious domestic reductions, ensuring that the wealthier countries
free up sufficient environmental space for the poorer countries to
develop. Second, by driving equally ambitious international
reductions – enabled by technological and financial support from the
wealthier countries – ensuring that this development occurs along a
decarbonized path.
In
other words, it is only by accepting this two-fold obligation
that the wealthy countries can make the climate regime genuinely
consistent with a right to development.
Europe,
of course, plays and will continue to play a critical role in the
global effort to create a viable climate regime. Moreover, it
will do so even after the US presidential election, regardless of the
winner. For despite the prospect of extremely important
short-term political changes in the US, substantial
policy shifts cannot really be expected to materialize before
Copenhagen. In this context, the EU will have to rise to the
demands of the moment, in two ways. First, even in the face
of the manifest temptation to declare the 2ºC target out of reach, it
must reaffirm its commitment to that target, and to the explicitly
fair accord that will be necessary if we’re to meet
it. Second, and even more importantly, the EU must remain, at
least for the immediate future, the North’s most courageous
negotiator.
In
particular, the EU must soon table a proposal with a level of ambition
that is explicitly consistent with the 2ºC target, and it must do so in
a manner that helps to break the international impasse. To
that end, the EU must somehow push beyond the frozen system defined by
the Kyoto Annexes, even as it recognizes the impossibility of
immediately escaping them. And it must do so no matter how
difficult, indeed heroic, such an effort seems.
The
problem is not just the EU’s internal disputes. It is also
that bitter international disputes, long deferred, must now finally be
faced, if there’s to be any real chance of success in
Copenhagen. The two big issues are “differentiation” (how, in
the face of vast international economic disparities, can a global
system of stringent commitments be fair?), and “sequencing” (what steps
must be taken – and by whom – to lead us through the current impasse
and toward that fair system?). Which is not to say that the
EU must rise to impossible demands, but that it must, somehow, signal a
willingness, even a unilateral willingness, to carry its proper share
of the global burden of meeting the 2ºC target.
In
this regard, the GDRs approach is both inconvenient and useful, and for
exactly the same reason: it makes plain both the size of the necessary
global effort and the share of that effort that, by a straightforward
and transparent accounting of capacity and responsibility, the EU would
be obliged to fulfill. By so doing, it suggests a path
forward, and, in the short-term, it clarifies the requirements of
genuine EU leadership. There couldn’t be a better time to do
so. For, frankly, there are worrying signs that, instead of
finding its way to leadership, the EU is balking in the face of
stiffening headwinds.
The
bottom line in all this is easily stated – today’s policies will not
meet the 2ºC target. This will not do, but neither will it do
for the EU to pretend that it is pursuing policies that are consistent
with 2ºC when, in fact, it is falling short.
A
warming of 2°C over pre-industrial has been widely endorsed as the
maximum that can be tolerated or even managed. Indeed, the EU
is largely responsible for establishing 2°C as the “line in the sand”
that must not be crossed. It has also acknowledge, though,
that even 2ºC is by no means safe, as is clearly articulated by the
IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report. There is a significant if
not readily quantifiable risk that a warming of even less than 2ºC
could trigger the irreversible melting of the Greenland and West
Antarctic Ice Sheets. And, quite disturbingly, with a
manifest warming of only 0.8ºC, we are already seeing effects − such as
the precipitous receding of the Arctic sea ice − that are not only
dangerous in themselves but also producing positive feedbacks that
accelerate the warming. Moreover, and significantly, the fact
that they are already doing so is strong evidence that the overall
sensitivity of the climate system is quite high, and that stabilization
concentrations that were even recently considered to be manageably safe
– 450 ppmCO2eq for example – are in fact quite
dangerous.[i]
Yet
even as the emerging science increasingly underscores how extremely
dangerous it would be to exceed 2°C, many people are losing all
confidence that we will be able to prevent such a warming.
Our very different conclusion is that the 2ºC line can indeed be held,
but that doing so demands courageous initiatives and a robust policy
architecture, both of which go beyond politics as usual.
Moreover, and critically, we argue that the honest recognition of how
bad the situation really is, now, is a precondition to putting that
architecture into place.
Accordingly,
we follow the science to identifying a suitably precautionary climate
objective. We do not argue for a temperature target that is
lower than 2°C, though we would like to, because under current
circumstances such a target would not be accepted as being policy
relevant. But we do define a global emissions objective – a
“2ºC emergency pathway” – that preserves a real chance of keeping
warming below 2ºC, and then set out to straightforwardly articulate the
key elements of a climate architecture that can make that pathway
politically viable.
More
precisely, since carbon-based growth is no longer a viable option in
either the North or the South, we frame the problem as one of urgently
needed decarbonization in a twice-divided world, one sharply polarized
between the nations of the North and the nations of the South and, on
both sides, between the rich and the poor people within those nations.
A
word, here, on Box 13.7 from AR4’s Working Group III volume, which
formed the basis of much of the discussion about burden-sharing at
COP-13 in Bali, and which was cited in the Bali Action Plan.
Specifically, we focus on the most stringent of the scenario families
that were evaluated by the IPCC and termed the Category A scenarios:
There’s
a lot to say about this table, but the key point is that, in
constructing such a table as this, all the IPCC was able to do was to
inventory scenarios that were already found in the scientific
literature. And that the literature, as is now widely
recognized, is embarrassingly thin on truly precautionary
scenarios. This is reflected in the fact that the Category A
scenarios summarized here, don’t actually give a high likelihood of
staying below 2ºC. (On balance, they give somewhat less than
a 50/50 chance). In spite of this, the table has been widely
reported as “What the IPCC says the science requires,” and while this
was helpful in Bali, it has also helped to establish some potentially
dangerous misunderstandings.
In
particular, there is now a vague but widespread sense that the entire
range of 25-40% for reductions in Annex I countries range is
acceptable, and that “significant deviation from the baseline”
might be attained by very modest developing country action.
But this is not at all the case. In fact, keeping 2ºC within
reach means that even if Annex I emissions drop at a rate that’s steep
enough to bring them to the stringent edge of the 25-40% range (that
is, 40% below 1990 levels in 2020), then non-Annex I emissions will
need to have peaked and begun to decline by 2020. It’s not
just “deviations” that are at issue if we want to hold the 2ºC line; by
2020, absolute reductions will need to have begun in earnest.
All
of which needs to be closely noted as we head into the Copenhagen
negotiations. For while the Bali Box, in its rollup of 450 CO2-equivalent
scenarios, can be said to be an honest first draft of the emergency
emissions pathway we so badly need, Copenhagen will require a second
draft, and it should take major steps forward in at least two ways:
First,
the next-generation emergency pathway should not be calculated with
respect to a temperature objective (less than 50% chance of keeping
warming below 2ºc) that is now widely recognized as being unacceptably
dangerous. James Hansen and his team, in particular, have set
out to make this very clear, with important recent contributions to the
science of climate protection (e.g. Target Atmospheric CO2:
Where Should Humanity Aim) that show that the IPCC’s current
definition of a “low-emissions target” (the 450 ppm CO2-equivalent
featured in the Bali Box under Category A) would fail to leave us a
planet “similar to that on which civilization developed.” In
particular, it would fail to stabilize the major continental ice
sheets, and thus would not prevent a catastrophic rise in sea
levels. The temperature implications of a “low-emission
target” must, at a minimum, allow the stabilization of the Greenland
and West Antarctic Ice Sheets. At this late date in the negotiations,
we must adopt the discipline of making the temperature and impact
consequences of proposals explicit and visible.
Second,
a reference emergency pathway should not be so vague when it comes to
defining overall global emissions allowances, or indeed in specifying
what “substantial deviation from baseline” in the “non-Annex I”
developing world actually means. The ambiguity here allows
far too much slippage and bad-faith negotiation, and it is not
helpful. What is needed is enough specificity to allow a
clear understanding of the effort needed, in terms of the time
available before global emissions need to peak, and the rate at which
they will have to decline thereafter.
If
these ambiguities are left unresolved in the timeframe of the
Copenhagen negotiations, we may well end up giving up on strategies
that can limit total warming to 2ºC. In particular, proposals promising
only a post-2020 global emissions peak would dramatically diminish
society’s ability to gain a 2ºc pathway. Indeed, it would
condemn us, and our children, to a bitter choice between catastrophic
warming on the one hand and, on the other, an extremely disruptive, 11th-hour
infrastructural and economic transition with near-zero odds of gaining
political acceptance and being implemented in time.
A
simple thought experiment, illustrated in this figure, illustrates the
scope of the political challenge. Here, we show a
scientifically realistic assessment of the size of the remaining global
carbon budget, defined by a pathway ambitious enough to be considered a
true 2ºC emergency pathway, shown in red. We also show the portion of
that budget that the wealthy Annex I countries would consume even if
they undertake bold efforts to virtually eliminate their emissions by
2050 (as shown in blue). Doing so reveals, by subtraction,
the alarmingly small size of the carbon budget (shown in green) that
would remain to support the South’s development.
Figure 2: The South’s
Dilemma. The red line shows a 2°C emergency
stabilization pathway, in which global CO2 emissions peak in 2013 and
fall to 80% below 1990 levels in 2050. The blue line shows
Annex 1 emissions declining to 90% below 1990 levels in 2050.
The green line shows, by subtraction, the emissions space that would
remain for the developing countries.
A
few details only make the picture starker:
The
efforts implied by this 2ºC emergency pathway are heroic
indeed. Global emissions peak before 2015 and decline to 80%
below 1990 levels by 2050, such that CO2 concentrations can peak below
420 ppm and then start to fall very rapidly. Yet even this
would hardly mean that we were “safe.” We would
still suffer considerable climate impacts and risks, as well as an
approximately 15-30% probability of overshooting the 2°C line[ii].
Thus, this is what the IPCC would refer to as a trajectory that was
“likely”, but not “very likely” to keep warming below 2ºC.
The
Annex I emission path shown here is more aggressive than even the most
ambitious of current EU and US proposals. It has emissions
declining at more than 5% annually from 2012 onwards, and ultimately
dropping to a near-zero level. It’s a tough prospect, and if
it can be considered politically plausible today, it is just barely so.
And,
still, the atmospheric space remaining for the developing world would
be extremely constrained. In fact, developing country
emissions would have to peak only a few years later than those in the
North – still before 2020 – and then decline by more than 5% annually
through 2050. And this would have to take place while most of
the South’s citizens were still struggling out of poverty and
desperately seeking a meaningful improvement in their living standards
It
is this last point that makes the climate challenge truly
daunting. For the only proven routes to development – to
water and food security, improved health care and education, secure
livelihoods – involve expanding access to energy services, and,
consequently, a seemingly inevitable increase in fossil fuel use and
thus carbon emissions. From the standpoint of developing countries,
this pits development squarely against climate protection.
And for this reason, developing countries have been unambiguous in
their insistence that, as important as it is to deal with climate
change, a solution cannot come at the expense of their
development. And while things don’t have to be this way –
after all, clean energy alternatives exist – the point is that they
exist only as hypothetical alternatives. They are not yet
real, not at least for the poor. Moreover, with even the
minimal Millennium Development Goals being treated as second-order
priorities, with little demonstrated interest in meeting them on the
part of the North, the level of international trust is very low
indeed.
That
this is foremost in the minds of southern negotiators should surprise
no one. First, the development crisis has shown itself to be not merely
a challenge but an intractable crisis, badly in need of an expansion of
resources and political attention. Second, the impacts of
climate change, which the wealthy nations are largely responsible for,
are beginning to come down hard, and this will only make the crisis
more acute. And now, third, the South’s negotiators have to
face the very real possibility that the imperatives of climate
stabilization will deprive their countries of access to the cheap
fossil energy sources that helped make the wealthy countries wealthy in
the first place. Both China and India, as we all know, are
counting on their vast coal reserves to fuel their long-awaited growth.
The
situation, to put it gently, invites political impasse.
The
Greenhouse Development Rights framework, in brief
The
Greenhouse Developments Rights approach was designed to highlight the
challenges of the extremely stringent emissions reductions pathway that
is needed to stabilize the climate, and to demonstrate the sort of
principle-based burden sharing system that will be needed before we can
seriously commit to such a pathway. It seeks to squarely
face, in particular, this fundamental problem: The vast majority of the
emission reductions required to “prevent anthropogenic interference
with the climate system” must be in the developing world, where most
emissions now occur and where emissions are growing most
rapidly. At the same time, the development crisis, and beyond
it the fundamental aspirations of the developing world, demand a vast
expansion of energy services to finally eliminate endemic “energy
poverty,” a goal that, in turn, seems inexorably to imply increased
carbon emissions.
This
is the core of the climate predicament, and the reason why the
developing countries insist that, as important as climate stabilization
may be, it cannot come at the expense of their development.
This, precisely, is the problem that must be solved before any
emergency mobilization can possibly begin.
Although
the Greenhouse Development Rights approach does not begin with a
realpolitik-style assessment of negotiating power, it ultimately charts
out an extremely pragmatic approach. Beginning with the
structural logical of the climate impasse, it asserts that a “right to
sustainable development” is not only ethically justifiable, but also,
fundamentally, a non-negotiable foundation of greenhouse-age
geopolitical realism. Its key claim is that, unless the
climate regime explicitly preserves such a right, developing country
negotiators may quite justifiably conclude[iii]
that they have more to lose than to gain from any truly earnest
engagement with a global climate regime that, after all, significantly
curtails access to the energy sources and technologies that
historically enabled growth in the industrialized world.
There’s
more than this to justice, of course, much more, but the core of the
GDRs approach is the simple proposition that the poor must, at a
minimum, be excused from the burdens of the climate transition.
This simple concept is then built up into a demonstrably
robust burden-sharing framework based on responsibility and capacity –
the principles at the core of the UNFCCC’s “common but differentiated
responsibilities and respective capabilities”. Critically,
GDRs defines both responsibility and capacity in terms of a development
threshold – a level of well-being that is modestly
above a global poverty line, a threshold below which individuals are
not required to bear the costs of addressing the climate problem, and
are instead allowed simply to prioritize development.
In
turn, the GDRs approach defines and then quantifies the burdens
appropriate to the world’s comparatively wealthy population, those
living above this development threshold — both in the developing
countries and industrialized countries. It is this minority,
after all, that has both the responsibility for the climate crisis and
the capacity to solve it. Whether they live in the
industrialized or the developing world, they’re the ones who must bear
the costs of the transition, not only by curbing the emissions
associated with their own consumption, but also by ensuring that, as
people in the “underdeveloped world” rise into the global middle class,
they are able to do so along sustainable, low-emission paths.
Within
the international climate regime, this implies that those of us above
the development threshold must bear a strict, legally binding, two-fold
obligation. First, we must commit to deep reductions in our
own domestic emissions, and if these seem “unrealistically” stringent,
we must realize that it is climate science itself and not the logic of
fair burden sharing that requires such stringency. Second, we
must support (through finance and technology) a rapid clean energy
transition in the developing world, and, of course, the adaptation
necessary to minimize, insofar as we still can, greenhouse-related
damages and suffering. Such obligations, follow from our
outsized historical responsibility and wealth – and, to generalize just
a bit, everybody knows it. A great deal will depend of our
willingness to recognize that – at the end of the day – fulfilling
these obligations is in our own self-interest.
The
EU’s proposed commitments vs. its GDRs obligations
The
GDRs framework provides a basis for explicitly and transparently
quantifying national mitigation obligations for every country,
developed or not. And we do so (see the Appendix) for a
global emergency emissions reduction pathway that is stringent enough
to provide a high probability of holding the 2ºC line. By
2020, the EU’s share (~23%) of the global total (approximately 3700
MtC) reaches roughly 850 MtC. (Under the GDRs framework, EU
would also have an obligation to accept 23% of the global adaptation
burden, however large or small it finally turns out to be.
With estimates of the global adaptation need in the range of tens of
billions to more than one hundred billion annually, the EU’s current
commitments fall well short of the necessary order of magnitude.)
Figure 3: The EU’s mitigation
obligations, as
calculated by the Greenhouse Development Rights framework under a 2ºC
emergency stabilization pathway (shown in red).
Figure
3 shows the EU’s emissions reduction obligations (the blue
wedge),relative to its reference pathway. As is strikingly
clear the EU’s emission allocation plummets to almost 80% below 1990
levels by 2020, and passes below zero in about 2023.
As
radical as this reduction obligation seems (and it seems radical indeed
when compared to the two EU policy scenarios – dashed yellow for a 20%
below 1990 by 2020 reduction and dashed blue for a 30% by 1990 by 2020
reduction) it is necessary nonetheless. It is especially so
if the EU is to remain consistent with its 2ºC objective, and to do so
in a manner that is also consistent with preserving a meaningful global
right to development.
Clearly,
a reduction target of this magnitude is meaningful only if it is taken
to signify a combined obligation to, on the one hand, make reductions
domestically and, on the other, invest in international
reductions. The implied two-fold obligation, in the context
of a 2ºC emergency mobilization, is extremely ambitious on both sides,
as is shown in Figure 4.
Figure 4: The EU’s mitigation
obligations, as
calculated by the Greenhouse Development Rights framework under a 2ºC
emergency stabilization pathway (shown in red). An indicative
domestic reduction effort is shown for comparison purposes.
Figure
4 presents an indicative division of this reduction obligation, into a
domestic mitigation effort (light blue), and an international
mitigation effort (blue, hatched). In this example, the
domestic mitigation effort is defined as matching the rapid decline
needed to put the EU on course toward a target of 90% reductions
relative to 1990 levels by 2050. By 2020, domestic emissions
are roughly 40% below 1990 levels. The international
obligation, which is over and above this ambitious domestic effort,
reflects an additional mitigation effort in 2020 of nearly another 40%,
relative to 1990 levels. This international effort would be
undertaken in countries with mitigation potential in excess of that
needed to meet their own domestic mitigation obligations. As
with the US, and indeed with all countries or regions with high
capacity and responsibility, the EU has a two-fold obligation, to
ensure deep domestic reductions and to catalyze rapid reductions in
developing countries through financial and technological support.
Figure 5: The EU’s mitigation
obligations, as
calculated by the Greenhouse Development Rights framework, under a 2ºC
emergency stabilization pathway, compared to the current European
Commission reduction proposal.
Figure
5 compares this same GDRs allocation to the reduction targets contained
in the European Commission’s burden-sharing
proposal. The EC proposes a “firm independent commitment to
achieve at least a 20% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2020
compared to 1990”, and a 30% reduction “provided that other developed
countries commit themselves to comparable emission reductions and
economically more advanced developing countries commit themselves to
contributing adequately according to their responsibilities and
capabilities.”
The
dashed lines show, for both cases, the portion of the EU commitment
that could be offset using international sources (e.g., CDM credits),
which amount to about one-third of the required reduction in the 20%
case, and two-fifths in the 30% case. Clearly, these targets
entail a significant deviation from the EU’s baseline emissions, and
would require a level of effort that will be hard for the EU, with its
consensus decision making, to decide to support. Just as
clearly, however, this level of effort falls far short of the GDRs view
of the EU’s mitigation obligations.
An
effort to strengthen the European Commission’s proposed targets was
mounted by Member of the European Parliament Satu Hassi, vice-chair of
it’s Environment Committee. As Rapporteur for the
effort-sharing decisions of the Parliament, Hassi proposed amendments
to the European Commission proposal that would have, in several
respects, brought European climate efforts more closely into line with
the expectations of a GDRs allocation. The proposed
amendments would have established the 30% reduction requirement as the
EU default target (only to be weakened to 20% in the absence of a
comprehensive international agreement), and then defined this reduction
as a target to be met wholly domestically. In addition to
this domestic effort, the proposal required a further international
effort amounting to 850 MtCO2 in 2020, which
would have been divided among EU Member States in an equitable way that
took their relative per capita GDP into account. The combined
effort significantly exceeds the original EC proposal, and while it
does not match the ambition of the GDRs approach, it does achieve
nearly two-thirds of the GDRs-required reduction, and firmly
establishes the principle of a two-fold obligation.
The
Environment Committee did not pass Hassi’s specific proposal in its
original form, but did preserve the notion of a specific international
obligation. Europe’s investment in international mitigation
is to be funded by one quarter of EU ETS auction revenues, which will
be allocated to REDD activities, other mitigation activities, and
technology transfer. This can be expected to yield roughly
one half of the international reductions that Hassi’s original proposal
called for. (In addition, the Environment Committee has
accepted that one quarter of auction revenues, plus an additional 10
billion euros, be allocated to adaptation in developing countries.)
Figure 7: The EC’s burden-sharing
proposal,
for a reduction target of 2°C below 1990 levels by 2020. The
approach is extrapolated to include India, China, and the US, which
would have reduction obligations, relative to their 2020 emissions
baselines, of approximately 2%, 4%, and 31% respectively.
The
above figures show the obligation of the EU27, undifferentiated by
country or even to the level of EU 15 vs. new Member States.
However, the effort sharing between EU Member States is interesting in
its own right, and incidentally sets an important precedent.
The
EU’s burden-sharing proposal is complex and detailed, in large part
because it is designed to explicitly introduce equity into the
burden-sharing system through special provisions for Member States with
lower per capita incomes. These equity provisions include a
reallocation of allowances under the European Emissions Trading System
(ETS), and more generous targets for the non-ETS sectors.
Figure 7 illustrates their significance.
Each
Member State is represented by a light blue diamond, positioned so as
to indicate its PPP-adjusted income and its reduction obligation
relative to its 2020 baseline (including both ETS and non-ETS sectors).
Figure
7 also shows that the aggregate obligation of the New Member States
(13%) is quite a bit less demanding than that of the EU15 (23%) (see
the dark blue circles). In fact, New Member State targets
actually allow for growth in absolute emissions relative to current
levels. This is because the EC burden-sharing proposal is
explicitly designed to accommodate the inequality within the EU, where
the average income in the EU15 Member States ($31,000) is more than
twice that in the New Member States ($15,000).
Consider
the implications of taking the EU effort sharing approach as a basis
for global differentiation. So that, if we assume that the
simple linear relationship between PPP-adjusted per-capita income and
emissions-reduction obligations that maintains within the EU continues,
then India’s implied obligation (with its income of less than $2,400
per capita) would amount to barely a 2% reduction below its 2020
baseline. China (with a per capita income of $4,700), for its
part, would have a target of slightly less than 4%, and the United
States’ ($42,600) obligation would be roughly 31%.
The
EC burden-sharing framework, unfortunately, is complex and somewhat ad
hoc, and even if it worked internationally – even if it demonstrably
protected the South’s right to development – its lack of transparency
would prevent it from being acceptable as a principle-based, global
burden-sharing framework. Still, it at least
approaches the burden sharing problem in a reasonable way, and for this
it deserves our admiration. And there’s not much further to
go before you have an approach that can be applied to the even more
diverse array of countries around the
globe.
Such
a system, we claim, will look a great deal like Greenhouse Development
Rights, a framework that, as explained below, is designed to be as
simple as possible while still capturing the intention behind the
UNFCCC’s famous principles of “common but differentiated
responsibilities and respective capabilities.” For GDRs, by
incorporating responsibility, captures the necessities of the polluter
pays principle and establishes incentives for low-carbon
development. By incorporating capacity, it respects the
obvious truth that climate is an overarching civilizational challenge
that will demand major financial resources. By defining both
responsibility and capacity with respect to a development threshold, it
safeguards a meaningful right to development. And,
critically, by accounting for intra-national disparities in wealth, it
recognizes that that right to development adheres to individuals, not
countries, and that the relatively wealthy in poor countries, like
their compatriots in the North, quite properly share the common
obligation to stabilize and protect the global climate.
Where
the EU burden-sharing proposal is most glaringly lacking is in its
overall level of ambition. This is illustrated in Figure 8, below,
which compares national allocations under the EU’s “30% below” scenario
with Greenhouse Development Rights allocations under the 2ºC emergency
pathway. In both cases the allocation is shown relative to
1990.
In
the emergency pathway case, mitigation requirements for all EU Member
States are vastly more ambitious. This, it must be stressed,
is much more a consequence of the pathway that of the GDRs
burden-sharing system itself.
Figure 8: The EC’s 2020 reduction
obligations compared to the GDRs reduction obligations. The EC reductions shown are those
consistent with the 30% reduction target for the EU27 below 1990
levels. The GDRs obligations are consistent with the emergency 2ºC
pathway shown in Figure 3, which in aggregate amount to a 77% reduction
target for the EU27.
Nevertheless,
we have conducted this analysis in the unforgiving terms of the 2ºC
emergency pathway, for it is exactly the sort of extremely stringent
target that the GDRs framework is designed to support. A more
forgiving temperature target, like those implied by the EU’s 20% and
even its 30% aggregate emissions reduction goal, would not yield such
daunting numbers. This would be a virtue were it not for one
small detail – such targets would also fail to prevent a climate
catastrophe.
The
European Union, in the world
The
Greenhouse Development Rights framework doesn’t in and of itself
specify the portion of any national or regional obligation that should
be met domestically. As is clear from the sheer scale of
Europe’s obligation, however, some significant fraction of it would
have to be met internationally. And this is as it should be –
the climate problem can not be solved without extensive financial and
technological support for a low-carbon transition in the South.
But
can this option be abused? Here we should immediately admit
the obvious truth, that it clearly can be.[iv] Not that all the
many criticisms of “offsets” are unassailable, but many are entirely
justified, and two, in particular, demand review. The first
is that international offsets are often not backed up by real
mitigation. These “non-additional” offsets are
environmentally valueless, if not fraudulent. The second is
that even entirely genuine, fully additional international offsets can
potentially allow wealthy countries to “buy their way out” of the
pressures of the climate transition, by pursuing most or even all of
their reductions outside their own
borders.
The
first of these points does not require much comment.
Fraudulent and low-quality offsets are not going to stabilize the
climate, and if we’re at all serious they must be purged from the
system as soon as possible. But the second is more
challenging. Any rapid climate stabilization program will
demand significant structural and socio-cultural adjustments.
Might not wealthy northerners be willing to pay quite a
premium to avoid the discord associated with such adjustments and
preserve their high-carbon lifestyles?
In
principle, that answer, again, is yes. But we’d like to first
reiterate that the climate problem demands that the industrialized
countries invest intensely in mitigation in developing
countries. And the “purchase” of additional mitigation
potential from developing countries is precisely the sort of
measurable, reportable, and verifiable transfers of finance and
technology that will be needed to drive such investment, and thus a
rapid deviation from baseline emissions growth in the developing world.
Investment in mitigation in developing world can no longer be
seen merely as an “offset” to mitigation efforts that would otherwise
take place domestically. It is critical in and of itself.
Given
this, the question is whether the rich could use investment in
international mitigation to “buy their way out” of the need to make
difficult domestic efforts. Our answer is that this danger is
far smaller with the stringent sorts of targets that today’s science
indicates are necessary than it would be with weak, Kyoto-style
targets. Scale makes a difference, and in the context of a
true global emergency transition, domestic reductions within wealthy
countries, even difficult reductions, would become extremely difficult
to pass up as the pressures of stringency increase and mitigation
opportunities in the South become as costly as those at home, as they
eventually would under any even plausibly adequate target.
So, all told, it seems to us that the threat of the “rich
buying their way out” is not particularly pressing.
Having
said this, though, we would add two provisos.
The
first is that the international transfers associated with the climate
regime will prove politically toxic if they are of dubious
environmental integrity, or if they threaten local
livelihoods. Significant evidence of either tendency will
delegitimize the regime’s financial mechanisms, and, by so doing,
threaten their collapse. Towards that end, and as a minimum,
we must cease to imagine that high quality international reductions are
going to be available on the cheap.
The
second is even more difficult. It is that the risk of the
North overusing southern mitigation opportunities is overshadowed by
the vastly greater risk that the North will balk altogether.
In particular, there is little reason to believe that technological and
financial support of the necessary scale will be
delivered by a regime that sees only the countries that inhabit Annex I
(a far from perfect rendering of world’s high-responsibility and
high-capacity nations) as having quantified commitments, and the rest
of the world as a mere source of “offsets” designed to reduce the cost
of meeting those commitments.
Indeed,
it’s extremely difficult to imagine an effort of the necessary scale until
we’ve escaped the Kyoto annexes and established a global regime that
assigns properly differentiated commitments around the world.
Far more likely, we believe, that the well-off citizens of the North,
faced with demanding obligations and adjustments, will demand in turn
that their Southern counterparts face parallel, “fair share” burdens of
their own.
In
this context, Greenhouse Development Rights can help, for it provides a
coherent, transparent framework for defining, debating, and
negotiating what those “fair shares” would be. But valuable
though such a framework may be, the real problem is that the South is
simply not going to embrace its “fair share” of the burden, at least
not as matters stand today.
Hence
the need for an impasse-breaking transition strategy. One
that, in particular, addresses the deep distrust that pervades the
South, a distrust rooted in the North’s demonstrated failure to meet
its UNFCCC and Kyoto commitments to provide technological and financial
support for both mitigation and adaptation in the South. So
while, in principle, the South could end the international impasse by
heroically offering to meet its “fair share” commitments, provided only
that the North did the same, it is unlikely to do so, not while it
remains convinced that the North would simply take unfair advantage of
such an opening, holding the South to its newly-made commitments while
continuing to dodge its own. Which is exactly why a
meaningful global regime, one that has a decent chance of mobilizing a
real emergency climate response, can only emerge if the North takes a
big step first.
What
might such a step consist of? There are various
possibilities, but all of them have one thing in common – they move
beyond the confines of realism-as-usual to at least prefigure a world
of properly differentiated commitments; commitments that are
principle-based and demonstrably consistent with a right to
development.
At
one end of the spectrum are incremental but meaningful steps forward. One
possibility, as suggested above, is represented by the EU’s Environment
Committee decision that evolved from Satu Hassi’s proposed amendments
to the European Commission proposal. To be sure, the weakened
version that passed the Environment Committee isn’t likely to occasion
any breakthrough in North / South relations, but it did establish the
concept of a two-fold obligation, and a strengthened version could
support real confidence in the EU’s commitment to meeting its 2ºC
objective under conditions of fair global differentiation. A
closely related option, and probably a better one at this point, has
surfaced with the broadening debate over the potential and uses of the
Norwegian auctioning proposal.[v]
It is to auction a significant fraction of allowances (under
as strict a target as possible) for all of Annex 1, with the resulting
revenues going into a UNFCCC fund to support adaptation and
REDD. If Norway were to follow the lead of the European
Parliament’s Environment Committee, and propose to allocate 50% of
auction revenues to action in developing countries, the resulting
dedicated international fund might well be large enough to be perceived
as an meaningful political overture.
These
two options would be especially useful, from the standpoint of
trust-building, if done in the context of a new set of Annex I targets
that were set not in the opaque manner of the Kyoto targets, but rather
by means of transparent and equitable rules, á la a GDRs-style burden
sharing framework.
But
at the other end of the spectrum lies the possibility of a much bolder
move. A forceful statement of leadership would be made if the EU were
to simply and unilaterally commit to carrying its proper share of the
global 2ºC burden. It could, in doing so, draw upon the GDRs
analysis to improve its internal burden sharing proposal, transforming
it into a proposal that would be transparent, principle-based, and
extendable to a future phase of global participation on a fair
basis. And it could challenge the rest of the world – the US
in particular but the South as well – to follow its lead.
Other
variations on these themes are also possible, and some of them –
obviously – are more likely than others, at least in the short
term. But the key point is that, were the EU to choose to
rise to the climate challenge, it could certainly devise a proposal
sufficient to its purposes.
In
any case, something new must happen in Copenhagen, and if it fails to
do so, then none of us should feign surprise at the despair that will
follow. And, given the bitter history that has led to the
North / South impasse, this “something new” can only be something in
which the North acts, bravely, to establish a new momentum.
And whatever happens, it must be understood to define a transitional
regime, one in which the wealthy countries – once again and perhaps for
the last time – accept the opportunity to prove their commitment to
earnest action and just burden sharing. It would have to be
followed by openness on the part of the South, and we believe that it
would be.
The
European Commission, in tabling its current targets and burden-sharing
proposal, has sought to walk a fine line between competing
priorities. The proposal represents a clear step beyond Kyoto
that must be seen as both meaningful and substantive, especially given
that the EU still lacks a negotiating partner in the US.
Indeed the EC proposal may even imply commitments beyond what popular
opinion (particularly in the new Member States) will bear. By
normal standards, it is ambitious indeed.
But,
reckoned against the uncompromising reality of the climate science, the
EC proposal is simply inadequate. In fact, it would lock us
into a trajectory in which it becomes progressively more difficult to
meet the EU’s own 2ºC target, and it would do so even as the science
indicates, in increasingly uncertain terms, that we should be raising,
not lowering, our ambitions.
The
EC proposal is especially inadequate in a world where the majority of
the population still lives in poverty, and for whom the expansion of
energy services is a desperate priority. In particular, there
is little in the EC proposal that acknowledges the critical role that
Europe must play in ensuring that development globally can happen along
a low-GHG path.
It
is imperative that the demands of the linked climate and development
predicament be recognized, soon and particularly in the EU, where bold
leadership can make a global difference. Whatever happens
during the upcoming US election, there is no path to the necessary
Copenhagen breakthrough that does not involve a bit of heroism on the
part of the EU. The precise framing of Europe’s leadership,
obviously, will differ depending on whether John McCain or Barack Obama
becomes the American President elect. But even with Obama in
office, policy changes in the US will take time, and changes
on the necessary scale are far more likely to occur if the EU has set
the stage.
The
next move is Europe’s to make. In
particular, it is time for the EU to table a serious proposal that
achieves two ends. It must clearly signal a level of ambition
appropriate to the scale of the climate challenge, and indeed to the
EU’s own 2ºC objective. Just as importantly, it must help to
break the North / South negotiating impasse. To that purpose,
the EU must take two seemingly contradictory steps. It must
accept its proper share of the global burden of meeting the 2ºC target.
And, at the same time, it must resist the temptation to
pressure the South into taking corresponding commitments, which – in
the short term at least – it will be quite unable to agree to.
Which is to say that the South will sternly resist such
pressure unless and until the North has demonstrated a transparent and
principle-based burden-sharing scheme that the South can trust,
confident that its right to development is not being put at
risk. Moreover, the North will need to finally demonstrate
it’s willingness and ability to invest in the substantial financial and
technological assistance that, despite the promises of Rio and Kyoto,
has not yet been forthcoming.
If
the EU were to take such bold steps, it wouldn’t be surprising of the
result broadly resembled the Greenhouse Development Rights approach.
GDRs, after all, is only a straightforward implementation of
the UN’s official principles of responsibility, capacity, and
sustainable development, and it is these underlying principles that are
at issue in the negotiations. In any case, the
point is that the EU, by unilaterally committing to carry its proper
share of the global burden of meeting the 2ºC target, would not only
reaffirm its commitment to that target, but also prefigure the
principle-based differentiation system that is necessary to support and
sustain an emergency emissions reduction program in a profoundly
unequal world.
Finally,
it must be remembered that the G77, and in particular the G5, have made
a number of recent overtures, all of them apparently designed to signal
flexibility in the face of the Copenhagen deadline. This is a
remarkable development, and one that should be celebrated.
For, difficult though the EU’s position may be, it is critical that EU
negotiators clearly recognize that the positions of the developing
countries are appreciably worse. Yet, clearly, they
are trying to negotiate.
The
question is who they will negotiate with. And the answer,
alas, is that it will not be the United States, not yet. The
next step will have to be taken with Europe.
Tom
Athanasiou (EcoEquity), Sivan Kartha (Stockholm Environment Institute),
Paul Baer (EcoEquity), and Eric Kemp-Benedict (Stockholm Environment
Institute).
Contact
the authors at authors@ecoequity.org. For more information on
the Greenhouse Development Rights framework, see
http://www.ecoequity.org/GDRs.
Appendix:
The Greenhouse Development Rights
Framework, in detail
The
climate crisis confronts us in the midst of an ongoing development
crisis. Given this, for any global climate accord to have even a hope
of being politically viable, it must acknowledge and explicitly
preserve a right to development. The bottom line in this very
complicated tale is that the South is neither willing nor able to
prioritize emissions reductions above the development of its
people. And that, therefore, the key to climate protection is
the establishment of a global burden-sharing regime in which it is not
required to do so.
The
Greenhouse Development Rights framework
is, accordingly, designed to protect the right to sustainable human
development, even as it drives rapid global emissions
reductions. It proceeds in the only possible way, by
concretely interpreting the official principles of the UN’s Framework
Convention on Climate Change, according to which Parties
commit themselves to “protect the climate system … on the basis of
equity and in accordance with their common but differentiated
responsibilities and respective capabilities.”
As
a first step, the GDRs framework codifies the right to development as a
“development threshold” − a level of welfare below which people are not
expected to share the costs of the climate transition. People
below this threshold have development as their proper
priority. As they struggle for better lives, they are not
obligated to expend their limited resources to keep society as a whole
within its sharply limited global carbon budget. They have, in any
case, little responsibility for the climate problem and little capacity
to invest in solving it.
People
with incomes that exceed the threshold, on the other hand, are taken as
having realized their right to development and as bearing the
responsibility to preserve that right for others. They must,
as their incomes rise, assume a steadily rising share of the costs of
curbing the emissions associated with their own consumption, as well as
the costs of ensuring that, as those below the threshold rise toward
and then cross it, they are able to do so along sustainable,
low-emission paths. These obligations, critically, are taken
to belong to all people with incomes above the
development threshold, whether they live in the North or in the South.
The
level where a development threshold would best be set is clearly a
matter for debate, one that we would welcome. It is, however,
emphatically not an “extreme poverty” line, which is typically defined
to be so low ($1 or $2 a day) as to be more properly called a
“destitution line.” For a development threshold to reasonably
capture the principle of a right to development, it should be set at
least modestly higher than a global poverty line that reflects a level
of welfare that is beyond basic needs, though well short of today’s
levels of “affluent” consumption.
For
the purposes of our indicative quantification here, we draw upon recent
empirical analyses of the individual income levels and their
correlation with indicators of poverty. As it turns out, it is at an
income of approximately $16 per day (PPP adjusted) that the classic
plagues of poverty – malnutrition, high infant mortality, low
educational attainment, high relative food expenditures – begin to
disappear, or at least become exceptions to the rule. Taking
a figure 25% above this global poverty line, we illustrate the
implications of the Greenhouse Development Rights approach based on
calculations relative to a development threshold of $20 per person per
day ($7,500 per person per year). Not coincidentally, this
income correlates well with the level at which the southern “middle
class” begins to emerge.
Once
a development threshold has been defined, logical and usefully precise
definitions of capacity and responsibility
naturally follow, and these can be built upon to specify and calculate
national obligations for shouldering the climate challenge.
Capacity, which we take to mean income that is not demanded by the
basic necessities of everyday life, is income that is hypothetically
available to be ”taxed” for investment in a global emergency climate
program without compromising a fundamental level of welfare.
Honoring a right to development thus means that an individual’s
capacity must be defined not as all of his or her
income, but as their income excluding income below
the development threshold. And, in turn, a nation’s
aggregate capacity is defined as the sum of all individual income,
excluding income below the threshold. Responsibility, by
which we mean contribution to the climate problem, is similarly defined
as cumulative emissions (since some agreed starting year) excluding
emissions that correspond to consumption below the development
threshold. “Development emissions,” like “development
income,” do not contribute to a country’s obligation to act to address
the climate problem.
Thus,
both capacity and responsibility are defined in individual terms, and
in a manner that takes explicit account of the unequal distribution of
income within countries. This is a critical and long-overdue
move, because the usual practice of relying on national per-capita
averages fails to capture either the true depth of a country’s
development urgency or the actual extent of its wealth. If
one looks only as far as a national average, then the richer,
higher-emitting minority lies hidden behind the poorer, lower-emitting
majority.
Figure
9. The development threshold. These
curves approximate income distributions within India, China, and the
US. Thus, the green areas represent national incomes above
the ($20 per person per day, PPP) development threshold, our definition
of national capacity. (Chart widths are scaled to population,
so these capacity areas are correctly sized in relation to each other.)
These
measures of capacity and responsibility can be straightforwardly
combined into a single indicator of obligation: a “Responsibility
Capacity Index” (RCI). This calculation is done for all
Parties to the UNFCCC, based on country-specific income, income
distribution, and emissions data. The precise numerical results depend,
of course, on the particular values chosen for key parameters, such as
the year in which national emissions begin to count towards
responsibility (we use 1990, but a different starting date can be
defended) and, especially, the development threshold.
What’s
most important is that the GDRs framework lays out a straightforward
operationalization of the UN’s official differentiation principles, and
that it does so in a way that protects the poor from the burdens of
climate mobilization. Beyond that, the values of specific
parameters can be easily adjusted and should certainly be debated; all
of them, of course, would have to be negotiated.
Still,
for all that, our indicative calculations are well chosen and
interesting. Looking at just the 2010 numbers, for example,
they show that the United States, with its exceptionally large share of
the global population of people with incomes above the $20 per day
development threshold (capacity), as well as the world’s largest share
of cumulative emissions since 1990 (responsibility), is the nation with
the largest share (33.1 percent) of the global RCI. And that
the EU follows with a 25.7 percent share. And that China,
despite being relatively poor, is large enough to have a rather
significant 5.5 percent share, which is still less than that of the
much smaller but much richer country of Japan (7.8%). And
that India, also large but much poorer, falls far behind China with a
mere 0.5 percent share of the global obligation to act.
As
Table 1 shows, the global balance of obligation changes over time, as
differing rates of national growth change the global income
structure. The results are most evident in the projected
change in China’s share of the total RCI, which nearly triples (from
5.5% to 15.2%), reflecting China’s rapid economic growth and the large
number of its citizens whose incomes are projected to rise above the
development threshold in the coming two decades.
These
figures, again, illustrate the application of the GDRs framework by way
of an particular choice of key parameters. Note that for this
indicative calculation, the RCI is defined such that all income (and
all emissions) above the development threshold count equally.
This amounts to a “flat tax” on capacity and responsibility.
However, it might well be more consistent with widely shared notions of
fairness if the RCI were defined in a more progressive manner.
Which is to say that a strong case can be made for a capacity
calculation in which an individual’s millionth dollar of income
contributed far more to their RCI than his or her ten-thousandth dollar
of income. A more progressive formulation of RCI would even
be more consistent with the “tax schedules” by which the income tax
codes of most countries are structured. It would also,
naturally, shift more of the global burden to wealthy individuals and
wealthy countries.
However,
regardless of the particulars of any example quantification, the GDRs
framework, or any approach to differentiating national obligations that
is designed to ensure a meaningful right to development, could
potentially reframe the entire debate. For one thing, it
would allow us to objectively and quantitatively estimate national
obligations to bear the burdens of climate protection (obligations to
support adaptation as well as obligations to mitigate) and to
meaningfully compare obligations even between wealthy and developing
countries. Using the terminology of the Bali Roadmap, it
would allow us to gauge the “comparability of effort” across
countries. Another way of putting this is that it would allow
us to escape the Annex I / Non-Annex I divide, which has become a
significant obstacle to the progress of the negotiations. For
example, in a GDRs style system, debates about whether Saudi Arabia or
Singapore should “graduate to Annex I” would be entirely unnecessary;
both would simply be countries with obligations of an appropriate
scale, as specified by their RCIs.
But
the real value of this approach is that it defines and quantifies
national obligations in a way that explicitly safeguards a meaningful
right to development. It takes at face value the developing country
negotiators’ claim that they can only accept a regime that protects
development, and just as importantly it tests the willingness of the
industrialized countries to step forward and offer such a regime.
How
might such obligations be operationalized? Consider two
complementary examples, each a stylized version of the more complex
mechanisms that would emerge in real negotiations. The first
is a single grand international fund through which all mitigation and
adaptation would be financed − such as, say, a greatly expanded version
of the Multinational Climate Change Fund proposed by Mexico.
Here, the RCI could serve as the basis for determining each nation’s
obligatory financial contribution to the fund. So, for
instance, if in 2020 the annual funding requirement amounted to one
trillion dollars (about 1% of the projected Gross World Product, which
is well within the range of published estimates of the cost of a global
climate transition), the US, with 29.1% of the global RCI, would be
obligated to pay about $291 billion. Similarly, the EU’s
share would be about $228 billion (22.8% of the global RCI).
China’s share would be $104 billion (10.4%), India’s about $12 billion
(1.2%), and so on, as shown in Table 2, below. The RCI, in
effect, would serve as the basis of a progressive global “climate tax”
– not a carbon tax, per se, but a responsibility and capacity tax.
|
|
National
Income
(Billion
$ )
|
National
Capacity
(Billion
$)
|
National
Capacity
%
GDP
|
National
Obligation
(Billion
$)
|
National
Obligation
%
GDP
|
|
EU
27
|
$19,327
|
$15,563
|
80.5%
|
$
216
|
1.12%
|
|
EU 15
|
$16,752
|
$13,723
|
81.9%
|
$
188
|
1.12%
|
|
EU +12
|
$
2,574
|
$
1,840
|
71.5%
|
$
28
|
1.09%
|
|
United
States
|
$18,177
|
$15,661
|
86.2%
|
$
275
|
1.51%
|
|
Japan
|
$
5,071
|
$
4,139
|
81.6%
|
$
62
|
1.23%
|
|
Russia
|
$
2,905
|
$
1,927
|
66.3%
|
$
41
|
1.40%
|
|
China
|
$13,439
|
$
5,932
|
44.1%
|
$
98
|
0.73%
|
|
India
|
$
5,814
|
$
972
|
16.7%
|
$
11
|
0.19%
|
|
Brazil
|
$
2,535
|
$
1,376
|
54.3%
|
$
16
|
0.64%
|
|
South
Africa
|
$
706
|
$
422
|
59.8%
|
$
10
|
1.42%
|
|
Mexico
|
$
1,744
|
$
1,009
|
57.9%
|
$
15
|
0.84%
|
|
LDCs
|
$
1,549
|
$
82
|
5.3%
|
$
1
|
0.06%
|
|
Annex
I
|
$50,368
|
$40,722
|
80.8%
|
$
652
|
1.29%
|
|
Non-Annex
I
|
$44,037
|
$18,667
|
42.4%
|
$
292
|
0.66%
|
|
High
Income
|
$49,279
|
$40,993
|
83.2%
|
$
655
|
1.33%
|
|
Middle
Income
|
$41,546
|
$18,190
|
43.8%
|
$
286
|
0.69%
|
|
Low
Income
|
$
3,579
|
$
206
|
5.8%
|
$
3
|
0.08%
|
|
World
|
$94,405
|
$59,388
|
62.9%
|
$
944
|
1.00%
|
Table
2. GDP, capacity, and obligation, projected to 2020. These
figures assume that the total cost of the global climate program is 1%
of GWP, or about $1 trillion in 2020.
These
figures (their values for key counties and regions are given in Table
2) are, again, based on the assumption of a total annual global cost,
for both mitigation and adaptation, of one trillion dollars a
year. If it turned out that these costs were instead, say,
two trillion dollars (about 2% of projected 2020 GWP), national
obligations would come to twice the figures shown.
We
can make the scale of these obligations – and their equity implications
– more tangible by considering them in terms of an implied average
annual “tax,” for individuals at various levels of income in the year
2020. In Table 3, for three levels of total global cost
(0.5%, 1%, and 2% of GWP), we express the GDRs allocation in terms of
tax rates, as they would be seen by individuals with annual incomes
ranging from $7500 to $120,000. Critically, in calculating
these bills, we assume that national obligations are passed down to
taxpayers according to their individual RCIs, thus ensuring
that burden sharing within nations exactly parallels burden sharing
among nations.
Under
such circumstances, individuals below the development threshold, who
contribute nothing to their nation’s obligation, would similarly pay
nothing toward fulfilling that obligation. In effect, their
“climate tax” would be zero. Which is to say that, in 2020,
the roughly two-thirds of the world’s population that falls below the
development threshold (assuming that intranational income distributions
remain as they are today, though of course they will change) would be
exempt from paying any climate tax, enabling them to prioritizing the
attainment of a basic level of welfare. The remaining
population (the top third of the global population), which is projected
to control 85% of the world’s income in 2020, would cover the global
mitigation and adaptation costs.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Total
costs:
0.5%
of GWP
|
Total
costs:
1.0%
of GWP
|
Total
costs:
2.0%
of GWP
|
|
|
|
|
|
Country
|
income
|
marginal
tax
rate
|
average
tax
rate
|
annual
tax
|
marginal
tax
rate
|
average
tax
rate
|
annual
tax
|
marginal
tax
rate
|
average
tax
rate
|
annual
tax
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
US
|
$7,500
|
0.00%
|
0.00%
|
$0
|
0.00%
|
0.00%
|
$0
|
0.00%
|
0.00%
|
$0
|
|
US
|
$15,000
|
1.75%
|
0.44%
|
$66
|
1.75%
|
0.88%
|
$132
|
1.75%
|
1.75%
|
$263
|
|
US
|
$30,000
|
1.75%
|
0.66%
|
$198
|
1.75%
|
1.32%
|
$396
|
1.75%
|
2.64%
|
$792
|
|
US
|
$60,000
|
1.75%
|
0.77%
|
$462
|
1.75%
|
1.54%
|
$924
|
1.75%
|
3.08%
|
$1,848
|
|
US
|
$120,000
|
1.75%
|
0.83%
|
$990
|
1.75%
|
1.65%
|
$1,980
|
1.75%
|
3.30%
|
$3,960
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Sweden
|
$7,500
|
0.00%
|
0.00%
|
$0
|
0.00%
|
0.00%
|
$0
|
0.00%
|
0.00%
|
$0
|
|
Sweden
|
$15,000
|
0.79%
|
0.20%
|
$30
|
0.79%
|
0.39%
|
$59
|
0.79%
|
0.79%
|
$118
|
|
Sweden
|
$30,000
|
0.79%
|
0.30%
|
$89
|
0.79%
|
0.59%
|
$177
|
0.79%
|
1.18%
|
$354
|
|
Sweden
|
$60,000
|
0.79%
|
0.35%
|
$207
|
0.79%
|
0.69%
|
$414
|
0.79%
|
1.38%
|
$828
|
|
Sweden
|
$120,000
|
0.79%
|
0.37%
|
$444
|
0.79%
|
0.74%
|
$888
|
0.79%
|
1.48%
|
$1,776
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
World
Avg
|
$7,500
|
0.00%
|
0.00%
|
$0
|
0.00%
|
0.00%
|
$0
|
0.00%
|
0.00%
|
$0
|
|
World
Avg
|
$15,000
|
1.38%
|
0.34%
|
$52
|
1.38%
|
0.69%
|
$103
|
1.38%
|
1.38%
|
$206
|
|
World
Avg
|
$30,000
|
1.38%
|
0.52%
|
$155
|
1.38%
|
1.03%
|
$309
|
1.38%
|
2.06%
|
$618
|
|
World
Avg
|
$60,000
|
1.38%
|
0.60%
|
$360
|
1.38%
|
1.20%
|
$720
|
1.38%
|
2.40%
|
$1,440
|
|
World
Avg
|
$120,000
|
1.38%
|
0.75%
|
$894
|
1.38%
|
1.49%
|
$1,788
|
1.38%
|
2.98%
|
$1,788
|
Table
3. “Climate tax” for various income levels. The marginal tax
rate, average tax rate, and total annual bill are shown, under three
different assumptions about the total costs of the emergency climate
mitigation and adaptation costs (0.5%, 1.0%, and 2.0% of Gross World
Product).
We
show three representative cases: a country with high responsibility
relative to its capacity (the US), a country with low responsibility
relative to its capacity (Sweden), and world average
responsibility. Note that, although each incremental dollar
of income or ton of emissions is taxed at the same rate (as in a “flat
tax”), income and emissions below the development threshold are
explicitly excluded, and therefore the whole system is modestly
progressive. Note too that when you compare individuals with
the same level of income, across countries with different levels of
responsibility, their overall “tax” is not the same. The tax
for individuals at the same income level varies (being highest for the
US and lowest for Sweden), reflecting the fact that this is a capacity-
and responsibility-based climate
tax, not simply an income tax, nor a carbon tax.
This
analysis, we claim, has two clear implications, that fair burden
sharing is of great pragmatic significance, and, by definition, any
fair burden sharing system must take intra-national income distribution
into proper account. Even if the costs of a rapid climate
transition are assumed to be quite high (even higher than the case of
2% of GWP shown in the above table), and even if
these costs are deemed to be solely the obligation of the minority of
people with incomes above a $7,500/year development threshold (less
than one third of the global population today) they would still be
quite bearable. The rich and the relatively well-off can
afford to shield the poor from the costs of combating climate
change. They can, in other words, afford to honor a
meaningful right to development.
Another
perspective on burden sharing, one that is central to the ongoing
negotiations, expresses post-2012 obligations in terms of emission
reduction obligations and Kyoto-style national targets. We
start by comparing a global “business-as-usual” trajectory to the
rapidly dropping 2ºC emergency pathway, a comparison that allows us to
straight-forwardly calculate the total amount of mitigation needed
globally in any given year.
Figure 10: Total global mitigation
requirement. The
BAU scenario, minus no-regrets mitigation options, yields the global
reference scenario.
Figure
10 shows this rapidly growing gap divided between (green) “no regrets”
reductions, which have zero or net negative costs, and the much larger
“global mitigation requirement” (blue). As shown, the calculated
global mitigation requirement, excluding the no-regrets opportunities,
grows to approximately 3.7 GtC in 2020.
Figure 11: Total global mitigation
requirement divided into “national obligation wedges”. The global mitigation requirement is
divided into national obligations wedges that show the shares
of the global mitigation requirement that would be borne by particular
nations (or groupings of nations) in proportion to their share of the
total global RCI.
Applying
the GDRs framework, national emission reduction obligations are defined
as shares of the global mitigation requirement, which is allocated
among countries in proportion to their RCI. This is
illustrated in Figure 11, which shows this allocation into national
obligations with, to give a few prominent examples, the US’s share
(29.1%) of the total mitigation requirement appearing as the large red
wedge, the EU’s share (22.8%) as the large purple wedge, and China’s
share (10.4%) appearing as the smaller but still significant blue
wedge. Thus, for example, the EU’s mitigation obligation is (22.8% of
the 3.7 GtC global mitigation requirement in 2020) is about 850
GtC.
If
this reduction obligation were interpreted literally and achieved
entirely through domestic mitigation, it would imply reductions of
nearly 140% below 1990 levels – and an EU emission
level of minus 500 MtC – by 2030.
Obviously, for a mitigation obligation of this magnitude to make sense,
the EU must not be expected to meet its entire obligation through
domestic reductions. Whatever is not accomplished domestically, the EU
would need to fulfill internationally, by way of reductions in other
countries that are “supported and enabled by technology, financing and
capacity-building, in a measurable, reportable and verifiable manner.” [vi]
Figure 12: GDRs Obligations for EU
and China. Domestic reductions in are shown in
light blue, and are consistent with a path toward 90% reductions
domestically by 2050. The EU’s remaining obligation is
fulfilled by mitigation in other countries (dark blue hatching, left
panel). Conversely, additional mitigation takes place in
China but is enabled by other countries through technology and
financial support (dark blue stripes, right panel).
Figure
12 shows the total EU reduction obligation with an indicative division
into a domestic mitigation effort (light blue) and an international
mitigation effort (dark blue hatched). The domestic mitigation effort
is defined so as to match the rapid decline needed to put the EU on
course toward 90% reductions relative to 1990 levels by 2050,
consistent with the emission trajectory for Annex I countries presented
in Figure 3 above. It achieves physical domestic reductions
by 2030 of more than 60% below 1990 levels. Even this ambitious rate of
reductions satisfies well less than half of the EU’s total
obligation. The remainder must be made in other countries,
and amounts to nearly 900 MtC of reductions in 2030. This means, above
and beyond its domestic reductions of more than 60%, the EU is
obligated to make additional reductions internationally that amount to
more than 70% of 1990 EU emissions.
This
very demanding GDRs allocation for the EU is by no means an anomaly or
methodological quirk, but rather a direct outcome of the principles
underlying the framework. Like any country with high capacity
and responsibility, the EU is assigned a very large obligation − large
enough to necessitate extremely ambitious reductions both domestically
and internationally.
China,
in contrast, is obligated to reductions of about 1100 MtC in 2030
(light blue shading), all of which could be made
domestically. At the same time, another substantial quantity
of reductions within China, about 750 MtC in 2030 using our estimate,
(blue striped shading), would be enabled and supported by other
countries, those with higher capacity and responsibility.
The
examples of the EU and China illustrate a robust and striking
conclusion. The national mitigation obligations of the
countries with high capacity and responsibility greatly exceed the
reductions they could conceivably make at home. In fact, their
mitigation obligations will typically come to exceed even their total
domestic emissions. Which is to say that, under a GDRs burden
sharing framework, countries with high capacity and responsibility
ultimately receive “negative allocations” [vii].
Obligations
of this scale may seem simply implausible by today’s standards of
political realism, even for countries with high capacity and
responsibility. Nevertheless, they are, in the final analysis, quite
unavoidable. It is only through explicit obligations of this
magnitude that a climate regime can effectively bring about its two
essential outcomes. First, by driving ambitious domestic reductions,
these obligations ensure that the wealthier countries free up
sufficient environmental space for the poorer countries to
develop. Second, by driving equally ambitious international
reductions, enabled by technological and financial support from the
wealthier countries, they ensure this development occurs along a
decarbonized path.
These
examples thus show, with startling clarity, that a major commitment to
North-South cooperation – including financial and technological
transfers – is an inevitable part of any viable climate stabilization
architecture. This situation reflects the actual nature of
national obligations and the obvious truth of the greenhouse world:
even if the wealthy countries reduce their domestic emissions to zero
or near-zero levels, they must still, in addition, enable large
emissions reductions in countries that lack the capacity (and
responsibility) to reduce emissions as much as an emergency 2ºC
mitigation pathway requires, without significant assistance from
others.
It
is only by accepting their two-fold obligation that
the wealthy countries can enable a climate regime that is genuinely
consistent with the right to development.
Appendix: EU and selected country
details
|
|
income
|
population
above dev’t threshold
|
capacity
|
responsibility
share
|
capacity
share
|
RCI
share
|
national
obligation to pay
|
Average
obligation to pay
|
reference
emissions
|
GDR
allocation
|
|
Country
|
$PPP
per capita
|
%
of national population
|
%
of
GDP
|
%
of
global
total
|
%
of
global
total
|
%
of
global
total
|
%
of
GDP
|
$
per person above dev’t threshold
|
%
relative to 1990
|
%
relative to 1990
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
EU
15
|
41,424
|
99
|
82
|
16.70
|
23.11
|
19.91
|
1.12
|
468
|
96
|
16
|
|
EU
+12
|
25,981
|
95
|
71
|
2.85
|
3.10
|
2.97
|
1.09
|
300
|
82
|
45
|
|
Austria
|
46,728
|
100
|
84
|
0.36
|
0.56
|
0.46
|
1.10
|
514
|
118
|
17
|
|
Belgium
|
43,689
|
100
|
83
|
0.61
|
0.66
|
0.64
|
1.27
|
556
|
95
|
23
|
|
Bulgaria
|
23,601
|
96
|
68
|
0.18
|
0.19
|
0.18
|
1.05
|
259
|
104
|
75
|
|
Cyprus
|
37,089
|
100
|
80
|
0.04
|
0.04
|
0.04
|
1.21
|
450
|
214
|
99
|
|
Czech
Republic
|
36,386
|
100
|
79
|
0.57
|
0.49
|
0.53
|
1.36
|
495
|
82
|
38
|
|
Denmark
|
46,639
|
100
|
84
|
0.28
|
0.37
|
0.32
|
1.18
|
549
|
88
|
7
|
|
Estonia
|
31,107
|
98
|
76
|
0.07
|
0.05
|
0.06
|
1.44
|
459
|
52
|
30
|
|
Finland
|
41,757
|
100
|
82
|
0.28
|
0.31
|
0.30
|
1.24
|
518
|
93
|
21
|
|
France
|
40,850
|
100
|
82
|
1.97
|
3.64
|
2.80
|
1.00
|
409
|
97
|
1
|
|
Germany
|
44,082
|
100
|
83
|
4.43
|
4.99
|
4.71
|
1.25
|
551
|
78
|
16
|
|
Greece
|
40,870
|
99
|
82
|
0.49
|
0.63
|
0.56
|
1.15
|
471
|
121
|
30
|
|
Hungary
|
31,625
|
100
|
76
|
0.24
|
0.39
|
0.31
|
0.97
|
309
|
91
|
33
|
|
Ireland
|
43,799
|
100
|
83
|
0.21
|
0.31
|
0.26
|
1.11
|
486
|
134
|
24
|
|
Italy
|
39,361
|
99
|
81
|
2.26
|
3.15
|
2.70
|
1.10
|
438
|
105
|
20
|
|
Latvia
|
25,313
|
93
|
71
|
0.02
|
0.06
|
0.04
|
0.78
|
212
|
43
|
11
|
|
Lithuania
|
26,869
|
95
|
72
|
0.05
|
0.10
|
0.08
|
0.86
|
246
|
43
|
13
|
|
Luxembourg
|
84,236
|
100
|
91
|
0.06
|
0.07
|
0.07
|
1.38
|
1160
|
91
|
16
|
|
Malta
|
34,312
|
99
|
78
|
0.01
|
0.02
|
0.02
|
1.05
|
364
|
152
|
59
|
|
Netherlands
|
47,798
|
100
|
84
|
0.87
|
1.14
|
1.00
|
1.18
|
566
|
102
|
16
|
|
Poland
|
24,796
|
93
|
70
|
1.17
|
1.09
|
1.13
|
1.16
|
309
|
89
|
50
|
|
Portugal
|
27,672
|
91
|
74
|
0.26
|
0.37
|
0.32
|
1.00
|
305
|
144
|
45
|
|
Romania
|
17,864
|
90
|
59
|
0.27
|
0.36
|
0.32
|
0.83
|
165
|
69
|
44
|
|
Slovakia
|
28,286
|
100
|
74
|
0.15
|
0.19
|
0.17
|
1.05
|
300
|
71
|
33
|
|
Slovenia
|
41,273
|
100
|
82
|
0.07
|
0.11
|
0.09
|
1.07
|
441
|
122
|
37
|
|
Spain
|
35,781
|
99
|
79
|
1.49
|
2.23
|
1.86
|
1.05
|
378
|
148
|
38
|
|
Sweden
|
42,517
|
100
|
82
|
0.26
|
0.57
|
0.41
|
0.95
|
404
|
86
|
-14
|
|
United
Kingdom
|
41,899
|
99
|
82
|
2.71
|
3.71
|
3.21
|
1.13
|
476
|
87
|
13
|
|
United
States
|
53,671
|
96
|
86
|
31.85
|
26.37
|
29.11
|
1.51
|
841
|
119
|
41
|
|
Japan
|
40,771
|
100
|
82
|
6.24
|
6.97
|
6.61
|
1.23
|
504
|
104
|
26
|
|
Russia
|
22,052
|
95
|
66
|
5.38
|
3.24
|
4.31
|
1.40
|
326
|
77
|
53
|
|
China
|
9,468
|
41
|
44
|
10.74
|
9.99
|
10.36
|
0.73
|
169
|
443
|
381
|
|
India
|
4,374
|
14
|
17
|
0.72
|
1.64
|
1.18
|
0.19
|
58
|
391
|
363
|
|
South
Africa
|
14,010
|
51
|
60
|
1.42
|
0.71
|
1.07
|
1.42
|
395
|
188
|
139
|
|
Brazil
|
11,519
|
44
|
54
|
1.15
|
2.32
|
1.73
|
0.64
|
| |
