About Greenhouse Development Rights

Greenhouse Development Rights (GDRs) is a Equity Reference Framework that is designed to support an emergency global climate mobilization while, at the same time, preserving the rights of all people to reach a dignified level of sustainable human development free of the privations of poverty.

GDRs, more specifically, is an effort-sharing framework. It does not attempt to divide up a physical resource like, say, “atmospheric space.” Rather, it proceeds from the recognition that this space is, for all intents and purposes, already exhausted. Thus it seeks a fair way of dividing up the effort – on both the mitigation and adaptation sides – needed to establish human civilization on a new path.

GDRs proceeds by quantifying the equity principles in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. More precisely, it proceeds by extracting three core equity principles from the UNFCCC, and then defining indicators that operationalize those principles in a manner appropriate to a global, climate-oriented, equity reference framework. For the record, those three core equity principles are:

• A precautionary approach to adequacy, referring to the collective obligations of countries to take urgent and adequate action to prevent dangerous impacts of climate change and provide effective adaptation to unavoidable impacts, without which there can be no justice. (Article 3.3: “The Parties should take precautionary measures to anticipate, prevent and minimize the causes of climate change and mitigate its adverse effects.”)
• Common but differentiated responsibility and capability, in which obligations are accepted as functions of both historical and current emissions, and of capacity to act. (Article 3.1: “The Parties should protect the climate system for the benefit of present and future generations of humankind, on the basis of equity and in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities.”)
• The right to sustainable development, which we understand as the right of all countries to not just lift their people out of poverty, but also to provide their citizens with sustainable living standards equivalent to those available to the citizens of any other country. (Article 3.4: “The Parties have a right to, and should, promote sustainable development.”)

More particularly, GDRs lays out an effort-sharing framework that is based upon a straightforward accounting of national responsibility and capacity, an accounting that takes explicit care to define both responsibility and capacity with respect to a “development threshold” that excludes the poor, wherever they may live, from any responsibility to bear the burdens of the climate transition.  Another way of saying this is that GDRs provides a coherent, principle-based way to calculate and compare national obligations to pay for both mitigation and adaptation.

The premise behind GDRs is that the climate crisis can only be understood against the backdrop of an ongoing and debilitating development crisis, and that it is both unacceptable and unrealistic to expect those who are still struggling against poverty to focus their resources on averting climate change. GDRs goes on from this premise to argue that those who are wealthier and have produced higher levels of emissions must accept the bulk of the costs of a global “emergency program” of mitigation and adaptation. If we’re lucky, and mitigation and adaptation turn out to be cheap and easy, these costs will not be particularly daunting. If we’re not lucky, and in truth it doesn’t seem that we will be, then it’s all the more important to divide the “obligation to pay” fairly. This because, as the slogan goes, “equity is the pathway to ambition.”

Because GDRs is intended to be useful – because it is intended to model an “equity spectrum” approach in which there are no static Annexes – it is based on dynamic indicators of responsibility, and capacity, and development, indicators that change as the global economy evolves. To be blunt: the climate regime that goes into effect in 2020 must focus pressure on those countries that are not doing their fair share, and it must promise to continue to do so in 2030 and beyond, even as the structure of the global economy changes. If it does not do so, it will not be effective.

None of this is simple. The road ahead is not and cannot be straightforward. But one thing at least is clear.  As long as there is no serious effort-sharing architecture on the table, one that can be used in the critical short term as an equity reference framework, one that carries the long-term promise of a global accord in which emergency climate mobilization explicitly does not threaten to curtail their development, the countries of the South will fear to seriously engage the climate mobilization. This has always been the premise of the GDRs work, and nothing about the drift of the negotiations leads us to think it wrong.

Think of it this way: even if emissions from industrialized countries were suddenly and magically halted, the dramatic emissions reductions demanded by the climate crisis would still require developing countries to urgently decarbonize their economies, and to do while major fractions of their populations are still mired in poverty. Nor is combating poverty a sufficient goal. As noted above, we take “the right to sustainable development” to mean that developing countries have the right to provide their citizens with sustainable living standards, equivalent to those available to the citizens of any other country. And, to be complete, we also take it to mean that all countries – wealthy countries first of all – have the obligation to provide paths to sustainable prosperity that are open to all their citizens.

This adds to quite a challenge, but we believe that it is the real challenge. In the short term, economic justice is not an absolute precondition of climate mobilization. A solar revolution does not in itself demand developmental justice for all. But step back to see the global position, and allow yourself to look beyond the short term, and the picture changes. The challenge of developmental justice must be faced.  It’s the crux of the political impasse that now stymies the negotiations, and indeed it’s the largest obstacle to the global solidarity we need to face down the fossil-fuel cartel and launch an emergency global decarbonization.

• The main Greenhouse Development Rights website.
• The Greenhouse Development Rights book is getting a bit long in the tooth (the 2nd edition was released in 2008) so if you’re looking for a solid textual overview of the framework and its implications (about 10,000 words, and some key graphs) see The North-South divide, equity and development – The need for trust-building for emergency mobilization.
• For a more-or-less comprehensive listing of GDRs-related publications, see the Publications page of this website. Other ways to catch up on the history and impact of the project include the Accomplishments page of this website and this summary of GDRs notices and reviews. Note that while we try to keep these pages up to date, we don’t always succeed.
• For the Greenhouse Development Rights Calculator, which is a fairly impressive web-application that implements the entire framework, and allows users to experiment with a number of parameterizations, see the Calculator gateway page, which contains a link to the current public version of the Calculator, links to its code, and other similarly wonkish items.
• And don’t miss the Climate Equity Scorecards, which evaluates national pledges on the basis of GDRs-derived fair shares. Note that the Scorecards system does its best to be accessible and user friendly, but that it nevertheless allows the user to experiment with a few key parameters. Note also that the scoring process involves assumptions that are not absolutely core to GDRs. That core status is reserved for the responsibility and capacity index alone.
• For more a brief and focused discussion of the political background here, and the problem of global climate equity more generally, see A few notes on the politics of equitable global effort sharing.
• For a detailed specification of the three global mitigation pathways that we have chosen to represent the choices before us, see the Mitigation pathway overview.
• Finally, and inevitably, see the Greenhouse Development Rights technical documentation.

The Greenhouse Development Rights framework was developed by Paul Baer and Tom Athanasiou of EcoEquity and Sivan Kartha and Eric Kemp-Benedict of the Stockholm Environment Institute. Collectively, they are “the GDRs authors’ group,” and they can be reached at gdrs@ecoequity.org.

Most of the programming on the Climate Equity Scorecards and Greenhouse Development Rights Calculator was also done by Eric, with the assistance of Douglas Wang. Tyler Kemp-Benedict did most of the user-interface design and implementation.

Continued funding for the Greenhouse Development Rights project has been provided by the Stockholm Environment Institute, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and Christian Aid. Major funding for Climate Equity Scorecards was provided by the Minor Foundation for Major Challenges.

We’d also like to thank Kirk Smith, who as far as we can tell invented the Responsibility and Capacity Index, or at least the general approach that it embodies. (We thought that we had done so, but in fact Kirk beat us by over a decade!) See Kirk R. Smith, Joel Swisher, and Dilip R. Ahuja, ”Who pays (to solve the problem and how much)?,” in Peter Hayes and Kirk Smith (eds.), The global greenhouse regime: Who pays?, United Nations University Press/Earthscan, London, 1993.