Welcome to the Paris year! After Lima, it’s definitely time for an update.
But first we want to alert you to two documents that we published just before the Lima COP:
National Fair Shares: The Mitigation Gap - Domestic Action and International Support, a new report from EcoEquity and the Stockholm Environment Institute that generalizes and advances our previous work on equity and effort sharing. A short versionof the full report is also available; and…
Climate Crossroads: Toward a Just Deal in Paris, a viewpoint piece I authored for the Great Transition Initiative.
More information about both of these reports is below. But first a comment about Lima, and "The Paris Year.'
What will happen in Paris? After Lima, we know at least that Paris isn’t going to be a scripted affair in which a minimal accord – now almost universally known as “pledge and chat” – can be taken as the given result of the inevitable late-session showdown. Rather, there will either be some sort of breakthrough – on the structure of a “balanced” accord that includes adaptation, on international financial and technological support for developing countries, on the all-important “differentiation” battle – or there will be a real chance of a delegitimizing train wreck.
This is because – as we stress in both these reports – climate change is a global commons problem, and as such it can be addressed only if each actor sees the others to be doing their best to achieve their fair shares of emission reductions. Only then will countries have the motivation necessary to increase their ambition at the necessary pace, and as such it can be addressed only if each actor sees the others to be doing their best to achieve their fair shares of emission reductions. Only then will countries have the motivation necessary to increase their ambition at the necessary pace, without the fear of being suckered by “free riders.”
The situation demands systematic ways of comparing nations’ pledges or, as they have become known, “Indicative Nationally Determined Contributions” or INDCs. Yet, most large emitting countries have refused to allow any such comparison to be legally sanctioned under the UNFCCC. In this context, the role of carrying out “equity reviews” of the INDCs falls to civil society organizations North and South, to scholars, and to progressive Parties (that is, governments) that are determined to raise global ambition.
Momentum is building among civil-society organizations to step in, and methods capable of meaningfully comparing national INDCs are being developed – indeed our National Fair Shares report is a major contribution to this common project. A key concern is that because the “fair shares” of rich countries under plausible equity principles inevitably require them to finance a large share of mitigation in developing countries, and such “finance pledges” are being excluded from INDCs, it is very hard to have a fair comparison of effort. Our ongoing work under the banner of the “Climate Equity Reference Project” directly addresses this concern.
Now, back to those two reports.
The first is the new report that the Climate Equity Reference Project released just before Lima. This project is a joint initiative of EcoEquity and the Stockholm Environment Institute, and this, its first major report, is called National Fair Shares: The Mitigation Gap - Domestic Action and International Support. It presents the type of analysis that will be necessary for a systematic comparison of national pledges of action, and is particularly timely as countries submit their INDCs to the UNFCCC.
From the abstract:
In this report, we systematically apply a generalized and transparent equity reference framework, with the goal of quantitatively examining the problem of national fair shares in a global effort to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This framework is based upon an effort-sharing approach, uses flexibly-defined national “responsibility and capacity indicators,” and is explicitly designed to reflect the UNFCCC’s core equity principles. It can be applied using a range of possible assumptions, and whatever values are chosen, they are applied to all countries, in a dynamic fashion that reflects the changing global economy. In this report, we present results for twelve representative countries and a selected set of illustrative “cases.”
The quantitative analysis in this report is based upon the Climate Equity Reference Calculator, an online tool and database that allows the user to select “equity settings” relating to key equity-related parameters, including responsibility, capacity, and development need. These settings are then used, together with standard demographic and macroeconomic indicators (e.g., national population, GDP and carbon-intensity) to calculate implied national fair shares of the global mitigation effort. Importantly, this fair share is expressed as a sum of domestically- and internationally-supported mitigation.
We provide illustrative results for various alternative levels of ambition, for various equity settings, and for various estimates of national emissions reductions. We also show that the differences between the cases are much less significant than the similarities, and that a great deal of the detail can therefore be set aside in favor of an “equity band” that is bound by “High Equity Settings” on one side and “Low Equity Settings” on the other. We have defined this equity band to span a wide range of perspectives on fairness, though it is easier to argue that the “Low Equity Settings” are “too low” than it is that the “High Equity Settings” are “too high.”
In particular, this analysis finds that a nation’s fair share of the global mitigation effort can be quite different from its domestic mitigation potential. Countries with relatively high capacity and responsibility are generally found to have fair shares that greatly exceed their own domestic mitigation potential; therefore, if they are to fulfill their entire fair share, they would do so by contributing financial and technological support to other countries. Conversely, countries with relatively low capacity and responsibility are able to act entirely within their own borders. It is assumed that they use international support to undertake mitigation in excess of their own fair shares of the global mitigation effort, and by so doing exploit their full national mitigation potentials. As such, this analysis is informative not only for assessing countries’ INDCs with respect to domestic mitigation action, but international support as well.
The second is a “viewpoint” doc that I wrote for the Great Transition Initiative just before Lima. It’s called Climate Crossroads: Toward a Just Deal in Paris, and it takes the long view, and as far as we can tell nothing happened in Lima to prove its core argument incorrect.
A global commons problem can be addressed only if each actor sees the others doing their best to achieve their fair shares of emission reductions. But before such mutual recognition is possible, there must be a means for comparing one country’s effort to another’s. But how? By what norms and indicators shall we judge individual contributions? How will we discriminate between the leader and laggard nations? What can we do when we fall collectively short? And how can any of this knowledge be used to push forward into a new regime where an effective majority of the world’s states moves to act, decisively, on a global scale? If, after the last late night of the upcoming Paris negotiations, befuddled by an agreement that will certainly fall far short of any ideal, we want to know if the effort was nevertheless a success, these are the questions that we will have to ask.
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