Climate Equity Reference Project
Some recent notices should also be mentioned, like this fine article on GDRs that was recently published in Thailand’s national newspaper, The Nation.
And this notice, which showed up on the UK’s influential Open Democracy website in an article bemoaning the events of this summer’s G8 meeting.
We’d also like to note that Climate Code Red, a fine new book just published in Australia, contains an interesting and insightful commentary on Greenhouse Development Rights (see page 138).
On December 15, 2008, the Economist magazine published a formal debate on Carbon Offsets, centered on the proposition that “carbon offsets undermine the effort to tackle climate change. It’s a key debate, so we were happy to see Greenhouse Development Rights become a part of it (see the “Featured guest” section). The point of its inclusion must be clear – the sorts of rich to poor financial and technology transfers that GDRs demands are not “offsets,” but rather the second, international half of a “dual obligation” that has domestic reductions as its first component. It’s a critical difference, and one we’ll hear more about as the debate evolves.
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.
The 14th Conference of Parties in Poznan, Poland is a major event for Greenhouse Development Rights. The GDRs side event is a big deal, including the head of Mexican delegation, as well as representatives from Norwegian Finance Ministry and UNFCCC Secretariat. There are lots of other GDRs events as well. This is the first COP in which GDRs is actively promoted (see the Countdown to Copenhagen campaign) by a large number of campaign organizations, including not just Christian Aid but also many other members of the 17 member Aprodev network.
Bali was quite a milestone for the Greenhouse Development Rights project. Not only does the GDRs “book” look great, but our side event (the slides are here; the UN’s archived video, which may or may not work, is listed at 10:30 AM on this page) went very well indeed. And GDRs was also presented or discussed in six other side events, which may be some sort of record. It’s certainly a sign that, against a background of interminable “negotiations as usual,” there’s substantial interest in facing the real challenge — a principle-based burden sharing system designed to be fair, and thus viable, even under the stress of an emergency transition. [Read more…]
