The Mitigation Action Plans and Scenarios project in South Africa recently organized an interesting workshop on “Equitable Access to Sustainable Development.” The public report of the workshop is here, and it’s worth spending some time with, particularly because of the depth and sophistication with which it engaged with the problem of ‘Equity Reference Frameworks.”
See especially the report from the workshop, Reflections on Operationalizing EASD, and in particular see the background paper on Equity Reference Frameworks and their operationalization, by Xolisa Ngwadla of the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. The paper is Equitable Access to Sustainable Development: Relevance to negotiations and actions on climate change, and in it Ngwadla introduces the idea of equity reference frameworks in this manner:
“The underlying philosophy for an ERF is the universal application of egalitarian principle to guide a distributive view that seeks to address historical, current, and potential inequities in respect of contribution to emissions, and as such is corrective in character, and distributive in approach. In respect of the metric/non-metric chasm, a stepwise consideration is proposed, where there is an ex ante assessment of fair effort in a non-binding framework, with binding commitments proposed by parties and therefore catering to national circumstances.
However, the process of inscribing such commitments includes a Party-driven process to assess the adequacy of proposed commitments against the computed fair efforts, and as such drive ambition whilst reconciling a top-down and bottom-up approach. An important characteristic of the output of the ERF is that it reflects a relative fair effort by a Party, without prescribing only a level of emission reduction, but expecting a total contribution that includes means of implementation, thereby providing flexibility in terms of the mix of commitments a Party can use to achieve its responsibility at any given temperature goal.”
There’s much to say here, but allow us for now to simply note that there’s a lot of unnecessary and unproductive complexity swirling around the notion of equity. As far as the negotiations, and in particular the imperative of finding a way forward in which the pursuit of equity and the pursuit of ambition buttress and strengthen each other, there are really only two relevant options — the Historical Responsibility approach and the Responsibility and Capacity Index approach. One of the reasons why this workshop was interesting is that this baseline political reality was recognized by the participants, who were thereby able to look forward and build upon it.
Also note this, which points to the role that Greenhouse Development Rights has played (and will continue to play) in the evolution of the Equity Reference Framework approach:
“The corrective justice metric-based approaches express a strong egalitarian bias, with Bolivia preferring a rights and obligations framework, which is more philosophical in nature. . . On the other hand, Switzerland espoused metric-related principles of “polluter pays” and ability to pay as central to equity, with Brazil making a case for historical responsibility as it is quantifiable and reflects capability and development. . . Metric-based approaches have received significant attention in the Convention, with the Greenhouse Development Rights (GDR) framework of per capita convergence of historical emissions and GDP influencing a number of subsequent approaches.
An element of CBDR&RC that has not found expression in a number of approaches is how the concept of sustainable development is built into equity metrics. Several metrics including GDR provide for the historical and capability components of responsibility, but fail to address the “needs” dimension of the equation. The concept of over-occupation of the carbon space, and the balance of climate response with sustainable development was mentioned by China in the EASD workshop, but with no express articulation of how to balance the quantitative aspect of “space” with sustainable development.”
From here, Ngwadla goes on to discuss the Oxford approach to operationalizing “respective capabilities,” which has emerged as another important reference point in the Equity Reference Framework debate.
