At the “Harvard side event,” as it was called – more formally Architectures for agreement: interim report of the Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements – there was a very interesting development. For at that side event, Jing Cao, a researcher from the School of Economics and Management at Tsinghua University, presented what she called “Greenhouse Development Rights with Chinese Characteristics.”
Her presentation was particularly interesting for the way that is situated the GDRs effort-sharing framework within a multi-stage context that explicitly addressed the problem of negotiating a phased transition to a principle-based regime.
Her paper, Reconciling Human Development and Climate Protection: Perspectives from Developing Countries on Post-2012 International Climate Change Policy, is one of the official Belfer Center discussion papers, though it’s marred by a bit of confusion – the paper calls the framework “Global Development Rights.” This was a mistake that was fixed in her presentation and will also, we are told, be fixed in future publications.
Jing Cao also has a longer paper (written with Fan Gang, Yang Hongwei, Li Lailai and Su Ming), entitled Toward a Low Carbon Economy: China and the World, written for the “China Economics of Climate Change” conference in Beijng.
