Paul Baer

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.

Greenhouse Development Rights: towards an equitable framework for global climate policy

The assignment of obligations to pay for mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions and for adaptation to unavoidable climate change is a critical and controversial component of international negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. In this article we present a new framework called ‘Greenhouse Development Rights’ (GDRs): a formula for the calculation of national obligations on the basis of quantified capacity (wealth) and responsibility (contribution to climate change). GDRs seek to preserve the ‘right to development’ by exempting from obligation any income and emissions under a ‘development threshold’. By taking into account the distribution of income and emissions within countries, and calculating national obligations as if they were the aggregated obligations of individuals, the framework treats every global citizen identically, and allocates obligations even to poor countries that are proportional to their actual middle-class and wealthy populations. When coupled to a trajectory of rapid emissions reductions (for example, 80 per cent reduction below 1990 levels by 2050), the framework results in larger reduction obligations for both rich and poor countries than they currently seem prepared to accept. However, the formula may be ‘fair enough’ to break the impasse that currently separates rich and poor countries in the negotiations.

The situation of the most vulnerable countries after Copenhagen

In his speech to the opening of the High Level section of the recent Copenhagen climate negotiations last December, Prime Minister Tillman Thomas of Grenada, speaking for AOSIS (the Alliance of Small Island States) issued an impassioned call for ‘‘deep and immediate reductions’’ in greenhouse gas emissions, ‘‘in line with the requirements of the science.’’ Specifically he called for reductions by Annex I countries to 45% below 1990 levels by 2020 and a global emissions peak by 2015, in order to ‘‘proceed along a path that will restrict long-term temperature increases to well below 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels.’’ He noted further that ‘‘over 100 countries have committed to this,’’ and concluded with a catchy slogan: ‘‘One point five to stay alive.’’ The Grenadian PM was followed by the Prime Minister of Lesotho, speaking on behalf of the Least Developed Countries, who repeated the specific demands for emissions cuts based on ‘‘objective scientific analysis,’’ and added to the list a call to return CO2 concentrations to below 350 ppm. He also further emphasized the importance of the continuation of the Kyoto protocol and the ’’two track’’ negotiating process begun in Bali at COP 13 in 2007, and opposed any effort to replace the Kyoto protocol with ‘‘any new agreement.’’ Three days later, however, the lead delegate from Grenada, speaking on behalf of her Prime Minister, endorsed the Copenhagen Accord, as did the delegates from most developing nations, in spite of its transparent failure to deliver anything approaching the demands put forward by AOSIS and the LDCs. The accord, as we know, asserts an objective to keep global temperature increase below 2 C; yet the pledged emissions reductions by the Annex I nations fall far short of what would be required to meet this objective, no less to meet the more stringent requirement of a 1.5 C temperature target or a 350 ppm concentration target. Furthermore, though the last act remains, there could have been little doubt that the US intended the Copenhagen Accord to bury the Kyoto protocol and the ‘‘two track’’ negotiations stemming from Bali.