Eric Kemp-Benedict

The right to development in a climate constrained world: The Greenhouse Development Rights framework

The Bali roadmap and North-South cooperation : the right to development in a climate-constrained world

The Greenhouse Development Rights Framework

The vast majority of emission reductions required to prevent dangerous climate change must be made in the developing world. Yet the human development aspirations of developing countries requires expanded energy services, which has historically always been accompanied by rising carbon emissions. Developing countries have thus firmly asserted that a solution to climate change cannot come at the expense of their development. The Greenhouse Development Rights (GDR) framework is a climate regime architecture explicitly structured to safeguard a right to development, and thus make an ambitious global solution possible. It is a burden-sharing framework that defines national obligations, based on responsibility for the climate change problem and capacity to solve it. Both are defined with respect to a “development threshold” that serves to relieve from the costs and constraints of the climate crisis those individuals still striving for a decent standard of welfare. Highlighting the United States and China, we discuss implications in the context of an international funding mechanism and a global cap and trade system. The GDR approach is relevant to a next phase of the global climate regime negotiated in Copenhagen as a framework for principle-based commitments for industrialized countries, and a basis for future evolution toward a globally differentiated system.

Greenhouse Development Rights: A Proposal for a Fair Global Climate Treaty

One of the core debates concerning equity in the response to the threat of anthropogenic climate change is how the responsibility to reduce greenhouse gas emissions should be allocated, or, correspondingly, how the right to emit greenhouse gases should be allocated. Two alternative approaches that have been widely promoted are, first, to assign obligations to the industrialized countries on the basis of both their ability to pay (wealth) and their responsibility for the majority of prior emissions, or, second, to assign emissions rights on a (possibly modified) equal per capita basis. Both these proposals ignore intra-national distributional equity. Instead, we develop a policy framework we call ‘Greenhouse Development Rights’ (GDRs) which allocates obligations to pay for climate policies (both mitigation and adaptation) on the basis of an individually quantified metric of capacity (ability to pay) and responsibility (prior emissions). Crucially, the GDRs framework looks at the distribution of income within countries and treats people of equal wealth similarly, whatever country they live in. Thus even poor countries have obligations proportional to the size and wealth of their middle and upper classes, defined relative to a ‘development threshold’. While this method nominally identifies the ‘right to development’ as applying to people, not countries, as a proposal for a treaty among sovereign nations, there is no obvious way to give legal meaning to that right. In this paper, then, we raise some of the philosophical and political questions that arise in trying to quantify capacity and responsibility and to use the ‘right to development’ as a principle for allocating costs.* *The ‘Greenhouse Development Rights’ (GDRs) framework is a collective project. The core team includes the author, Tom Athanasiou, Sivan Kartha and Eric Kemp-Benedict; this is the ‘we’ that appears where the text refers to the project, as in ‘we intended this’, and so on. This paper, however, is primarily the authors own product and, beyond the description of GDRs, my collaborators have not read or approved it; thus much of the writing and philosophical speculation uses the first person singular. And, while credit for useful work goes to all team members, the blame for philosophical sloppiness remains with the author.

Connections between poverty, water and agriculture: evidence from 10 river basins

The authors analysed livelihood conditions in 10 river basins over three continents to identify generalizable links between water, agriculture and poverty. There were significant variations in hydrological conditions, livelihood strategies and institutions across basins, but also systematic patterns across levels of economic development. At all levels, access to water is influenced by local, regional or national institutions, while the importance of national versus local institutions and livelihood strategies vary with economic development. The cross-basin analysis suggests a framework for thinking about water–agriculture–poverty links that can inform future research and policy development.

The Mekong: a diverse basin facing the tensions of development.

Population is growing in the relatively unregulated Mekong River basin, and demands for hydropower and food are increasing. The basin has prospered but the poorest have not shared the benefits. Agricultural production is keeping up with rising food demand, but capture fisheries are unlikely to increase production, threatening the supply of animal protein in peoples diets. National governments decide water issues unilaterally, with weak transnational institutions and limited public participation. Growing pressures, exacerbated by climate change, will likely increase tensions over access to water, reinforcing perceptions of institutional failure and stimulating demands for improved governance.

Scenarios for the Baltic Sea region: a vision of sustainability

Summary This paper presents integrated scenarios of the Baltic Sea region to the year 2030. It summarises research conducted for Baltic 21, a region-wide process to Identify strategies for sustainable development The aim is to illuminate the requirements for a transition to sustainability. This includes a view of where the region is now, where it seems to be heading if conventional development patterns persist, and where alternatively it could aim – a sustainability vision.ln the sustainability vision, a high degree of economic equity and full employment are attained, greenhouse gas emissions are sharply reduced, the acidification of soils and waters are kept within safe tolerance levels and the Baltic Sea is restored to ecological health. Preconditions for realising this future include the diffusion of clean and efficient technologies, reorientation of consumer demand towards less resource-intensive products, public support for strong sustainability policies, and a cooperative climate between nations.

Going from Narrative to Number: Indicator-Driven Scenario Quantification

Scenario analysis has more than a half-century of history behind it (Glenn and The Futures Group International 2003), and a wide range of scenario methods and techniques are now available (Bishop et al. 2007). While the term “scenario” refers to a story about the future – that is, a narrative – many scenario exercises include a quantitative analysis. This is particularly true in the environmental realm, and recent important examples include the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Nakicenovic and Swart 2000), the United Nations Environment Programme’s Global Environment Outlook (UNEP 2007), the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (Carpenter et al. 2005) and the Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture (CA 2007).

Modelling impacts of development on water resources in the Huai Sai Bat sub-basin in north-eastern Thailand with a participatory approach

Abstract Little is done to connect hydrological modelling with stakeholder participation. This study incorporates agricultural development and climatic changes within the Water Evaluation and Planning hydrological model. This is done with a participatory approach involving four scenario workshops, 400 household surveys and two focus group discussions in the period of 2010–2012 for the ungauged Huai Sai Bat sub-basin as a case study in the Mekong region. The modelling results indicate future increased streamflow during the wet (monsoon) season in response to shifts in the regional climate. Modelled land-use and management changes brought about large unmet water demands, primarily in the dry season.

The Tightening Links Between Financial Systems and the Low-Carbon Transition

This chapter investigates the implications of the policy changes triggered by the Global Financial Crisis on the transition to a low-carbon society. The immediate effects have mostly been negative: national governments have retracted from public spending and fiscal support to clean technologies; new macroprudential regulation has discouraged banks from lending to low-carbon projects; monetary policies have perpetuated the high-carbon lock-in of the economic system. However, the transformed macroeconomic and institutional setting, together with the increased awareness of the links between financial dynamics and natural resources, has also created new space of opportunity for low-carbon investment and financing. New concepts and policy proposals have emerged, including the ‘green growth’ narrative, the idea of aligning macroprudential policy to climate objectives and the suggestion to use unconventional ‘Quantitative Easing’ monetary policies to support low-carbon investment.

Dynamic Stability of Post-Keynesian Pricing

Abstract Conventional economic theory assumes a Walrasian pricing mechanism that is known to pose theoretical difficulties. Less well-known is that conventional price theory conflicts with empirical studies of price-setting in industrial firms. Post-Keynesian theory, which assumes mark-up pricing on normal costs and infrequent price changes, is consistent with observation, and we show in this paper that post-Keynesian pricing, unlike conventional pricing, features stable dynamics. We focus on the short run, because post-Keynesian theory posits complex and historically-contingent long-term price dynamics. Specifically, we show that under very general conditions, prices converge to a unique equilibrium price vector.