This is a quick notice of a brief “correspondence” piece, just published in Nature Climate Change.
Cascading biases against poorer countries (see the sharable link at https://rdcu.be/MMbA) was written by an ad-hoc group of analysts and philosophers who got together in 2017 to respond to Equitable mitigation to achieve the Paris Agreement goals (the sharable link is https://t.co/vXFWgLDBOV), which du Pont et. al. published in December of 2016 in Nature Climate Change.
Our published response to du Pont et. al., Cascading biases against poorer countries, is quite short, but we think it manages to make its core points. In a nutshell, our claim in that du Pont and his colleagues reach counter-intuitive conclusions (for example that the EU has made a more “equitable” pledge than either China or India) by way of a cascading series of decisions that, taken together, skew their approach towards various kinds of grandfathering, while, at the same time, appearing to be derived from a balanced and comprehensive set of high-level equity principles.
With the euphoria of the Paris breakthrough now in the rear-view mirror, and attention shifting to post-Paris action plans, it’s worth noting that all sorts of pledges – national NDCs, regional emissions caps, even the energy roadmaps of individual corporations – are being advertised as being “Paris compliant.”
In this context, with first-cut stocktake processes spinning up, remember that Paris lays out a “pledge and review” regime, and that the second term in this phrase must be taken as seriously as the first. There will, in particular, be no real ambition ratchet without real equity assessment. It won’t be easy to agree on a proper assessment process, but open dialog will certainly help. What else possibly could?
Paris’s Article 14, which lays out the terms of reference for the all-important Global Stocktake process, is quite explicit. This stocktake will be conducted “in a comprehensive and facilitative manner, considering mitigation, adaptation and the means of implementation and support, and in the light of equity and the best available science.”
What does this imply? What does it even mean? What, in particular, does it mean for the assessment of individual national pledges?
Hopefully, the debate will quickly evolve, and hopefully, too, it will henceforth be productive and illuminating. To that end, disagreements should be respectful, but they should also be clear. Transparency is critical, particularly if the “equity and ambition” debate is to be comprehensible to new people. And we should all remember that none of us knows how to best engage the equity challenge.
Moving forward with the equity debate, some heat is inevitable. But our goal should be to cast light.