GDRs News

BASIC experts: Equitable access to sustainable development

It’s unwise to predict the future, particularly the future of the climate negotiations.  But if you believe that their outcome is critical, and that it will bear heavily upon our common future, then you’ll hope that Equitable access to sustainable development, a long-in-the-making report by climate and climate-equity experts from India, China, Brazil and South Africa, will be taken seriously.

The EASD report was released on December 3rd in Durban, just about the time that the talks started hotting up, so it’s unlikely that most negotiators had time to read it with any care.  But if Durban goes at all well, if that is it manages to save the Kyoto Protocol and to otherwise open the door to serious consideration of a next-generation climate accord, one that’s actually fair enough to support real ambition, then this report will, eventually, be recognized as a turning point.

The South’s Ministers, at least, will take it seriously.  They know the problem of “equitable access to sustainable development,” and that it must be solved if there’s to be a successful global climate regime.   And, at this point, it may also be reasonable to hope that, after Durban, the environmental NGOs will finally begin to face the challenge of fair-shares global burden sharing.

The governments of the North are another matter.  The Europeans, certainly, do not imagine that the demands of sustainable development can be put aside, and even the United States, despite its political crisis, is in some kind of motion.  Not that the Obama team will welcome this reassertion of the equity agenda.  That would be too much to hope for from the “realists” that brought us the Copenhagen-era push for Pledge and Review.  But at the same time, it seems clear that the orthodoxies of traditional realism no longer charm as they once did.  They have become cover stories, and this no realism can survive.

This report, for its part, is a serious one.  It wastes no time pretending that the global carbon budget has not already been essentially exhausted, or that development-as-usual is still a viable option for the South.  Nor does it pretend that we can muddle through with bottom-up accounting and a bit of technological optimism.  These are all things that just can’t happen if we seriously intend to stabilize the climate system.  Developmental justice is a precondition for high ambition, and this report imagines that we’re serious enough to face this bottom-line fact.

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CAN effort-sharing discussion paper

The fair-shares discussion has long percolated though the climate movement.  The drafting of an official Climate Action Network discussion paper on effort-sharing frameworks is nevertheless a bit of milestone.

This paper was written cooperatively by people from a variety of CAN member groups — including people from Greenpeace, Oxfam, and Christian Aid, as well as CAN staff and members of the Greenhouse Development Rights team.  A much larger group is following its development.  It contains a nice concise introduction, but let us add that it’s particularly notable for its principles-first approach, with which it does a pretty good job.

Note especially that only a few of the frameworks that are analyzed herein — GDRs is among them — seem capable of actually supporting both the right to sustainable development (R2SD) and a high-ambition transition.  Which, when you come right down to it, the bottom line in all this.

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SEI report on Annex 1 vs. non-Annex 1 pledges

Someday, it will be easier to make judgments about which nations are doing their share to face up to the demands of the climate crisis, and which are free riding.  Before that fine day dawns, though, two things will have to happen.  First, the national pledges of action that countries – northern and southern, large and small – have committed to deliver to the UN Secretariat, the pledges in which they lay out their emission-reduction action plans, have to get a whole lot easier to read and compare and interpret.  Conditionalities have to be spelled out, and loopholes have to closed.  Second, we have to reach at least a rough international consensus on what different countries, at different levels of development, should do, in the light of historically-informed and principle-based comparisons that take, say, wealth and responsibility into account.

In the meanwhile, we’re stuck with overly-simple approaches based on problematic metrics like, say, per-capita emissions, or rates of decrease in carbon intensity.  Or we can just embrace simplicity and compare northern tons to southern tons.  The surprising thing is that even such a simple-minded analysis as this produces interesting results.

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One billion high emitters

We feature this, a pointer to Sharing global CO2 emission reductions among one billion high emitters,  since it is in certain ways quite parallel to our own  approach.  More precisely, the recent proposal by Chakravarty et al., just published in the Proceedings of the [US] National Academy of Sciences, as Greenwire notes, “loosely builds on the idea of ‘greenhouse development rights,’” which is does by by way of analytical machinery quite similar to our own.  There are of course differences, which we will note below, but above all we welcome this analysis as an important contribution to the debate.

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Second edition of the Greenhouse Development Rights book

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The second edition of the Greenhouse Development Rights book is now available.

Download  the entire second edition here.  Download a brief (6 pages) nicely laid-out version of the executive summary here.  Download the longer (10 pages) version of the executive summary here.

The second edition of the Greenhouse Development Rights book is quite similar to the first, which was published in November of 2007.  However, it contains a number of important changes. Many are localized matters of precision and style.  But others are more significant:

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