A GCI paper produced for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group 3 workshop on "Equity and Social Considerations of climate change", Nairobi 18-23 July 1995.
(Note: this paper contains essential inline graphics. For ease of downloading the paper is split here into four parts)
We take as our starting point the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) judgement in 1990 that a minimum 60% cut in global CO2 emissions was necessary to achieve an immediate stabilisation of atmospheric CO2 levels (IPSO FACTO - see above). Not to comply with this requirement as rapidly as practicable would: - (a) take unnecessary risks with the planet's life-support systems and (b) threaten huge numbers of people present and future who have had no part in causing the problem. We also note (c) the "Constant Airborne Fraction" (CAF, c. 60% of any year's CO2 output is retained in the atmosphere - see IPCC First Assessment Report) (d) the 83% of industrial CO2 output accumulated by the industrial countries since 1860 (see GCI "GDP:CO2=BAU:IOU") (e) the global formal economy being still at least 90% dependent on energy from fossil fuel burning (for all of these see earlier sections) and (f) the close relationship between CO2 and GDP globally and regionally (see the two charts below)
We next make a judgement which is both ethical and practical - and we call on other analysts working in this field to make the ethical positions and values inherent in their work as explicit as we do. In our judgement, the most valid starting point in assessing how to minimise the adverse effects of global climate change is to recognise that each human individual has an equal entitlement to such carbon usage as can safely be allowed to continue. This does not reflect the current pattern of relationships between nations, as the assessments in this paper will show. However, we believe an unprecedented degree of co-operation will be required to realise any package of policies and procedures capable of fending off a climate disaster.
Equal rights to carbon usage, and to the GDP income that derives from it, is a principle that embodies in practical terms the right to the local enjoyment of shared and interdependent global ecosystems - in the worst case the right to personal survival. We know of no other guiding principle which would command the unprecedented level of agreement now required within the international community. This agreement will be essential if a common language is to be developed which can be used to describe the problem of global climate change in terms of it's socio-economic causes as well as its environmental symptoms, and address solutions on an urgent timescale. If an approach based on this principle is not adopted, the likely scenarios for the future range from environmental blackmail and counter-blackmail, to massive and cruel economic sanctions, through to the use of naked force. None of which preclude the possibility, or even the probability, of large-scale ecological dysfunction globally.
We believe that any proposed solutions to the problems [which both cause and proceed from global climate change] which are not equitable will not work. In a very real and fundamental way, equity is the solution - ie, properly valuing each other and the planet. A failure to understand and apply this is a failure to appreciate the double-jeopardy in which humanity is now situated. We face the actuality of scarce resources (sink capacity etc) and the increasing potential for conflict with each other over these scarce resources. We do not imagine the solutions that emerge will be based exclusively on the principle of rights to equal carbon usage. However, the analytical tools that we are developing and making available are based on the principle of equal rights to carbon usage, and the results our that our work reveal can be used as a network of reference points. Anyone who wishes to diverge from or ignore the principle can then describe what they propose, and this can be judged against our results. It would then be for the international community, through a reformed and better advised negotiating process, to decide whether or not the degree of divergence proposed was socially and ecologically viable.
The social, financial and ecological inter-relationships of equity should guide the route to global ecological recovery. Policy Instruments such as "Tradable Emissions Quotas", "Carbon Taxes" and "Joint Implementation" may well serve to make matters worse unless they are properly referenced to targets and time-tables for equitable emissions reductions overall. This means devising and implementing a programme for convergence at equitable and sustainable par values for consumption on a per capita basis globally. This means that rights to income are accompanied by responsibilities for the impacts associated with the generation of that income, which effectively rewards efficiency. It has always seemed of fundamental relevance to us that while the problems consequent on global climate changes will most probably affect everyone, the cause of global climate change has been the activities of a few. This is the political issue, central to global ecological recovery. The structural and restructuring implications of this are considerable, but the detail of this is beyond the scope of this paper. This paper simply presents a factual retrospective assessment of the relevant data ascertaining who - in the context of "equal per capita rights" - the "debitors" and "creditors" were, and the size and trends of their respective credits and debits..
The data which we take as a starting point for the calculations presented here are all publicly available.
For 189 countries and for the period 1950 - 1990 we used: -
The schematic diagram overleaf represents the basis of GCI conceptual thinking for the three assessments. Then, with the above data for input, we made a series of fundamentally simple calculations, for every nation and for every year from 1950 to 1990. We emphasise that these calculations are based on freely available and uncontentious data and are simple to make. If they appear complex, it is purely because of the volume of data being handled and the use of data-management computer software to group the results in various ways and to produce a variety of graphical "debitor/creditor" representations of consumption trends. The actual countries listed as creditors and debitors are listed out separately as well. In this paper we present three assessment regimes . The increasingly unequal consumption patterns between debitors and creditors are revealed as stark. In that this looks at the existing data for the past against the stated criteria for equitable and sustainable consumption, we regard this as a factual presentation of what actually happened over the last forty years. Some implications are drawn from this in the commentary on the quota regimes which follow and in the conclusions at the end of the paper.
Continue to next section: "GCI's conceptual model: the basis of equitable assessment"