Uppsala Interfaith Climate Manifesto 2008, Church of Sweden, 2008.   Discusses GDRs and contains an full appendix: “Greenhouse Development Rights – A Possible Model for Equity in Reducing Greenhouse Gases.”   This is a very thoughtful and, by all accounts, influential text.   For the short version, see: Hope for the Future.

Grasping the climate crisis: A Provocation from the Tällberg Foundation, by Bo Ekman, Johan Rockström, and Anders Wijkman, is heavily based on GDRs framework, not only in terms of the demands of the climate crisis and the ethical issues that it raises, but also (most pointedly in section 3, “Imperatives for climate leadership”) in its explicit endorsement of the GDRs framework.   And for a sense of how the Tällberg Provocation, and through it the GDRs approach itself, has affected the politics of the European Parliament, see MEPs to push development agenda at UN climate talks.

Eliot Whittington of Christian Aid gave GDRs his backing in this article on www.inthenews.co.uk.

“The purpose is fairness – GDRs show those who should take on the biggest share of the bill,” he summed up.

This great little book — which you can either buy or download here — by the International Council for Human Rights, deserves a whole lot more attention than it has gotten.   This is true for a general reason and for a specific one.

The general reason — this should be obvious but needs to be stated — is the global warming is a massively important human rights issues, though only recently has it been recognized as such.  To this day, human rights conferences tend to focus on what we might call the “classical” rights agenda — immigrants rights, prisoners rights, minority rights, women’s rights,and in general individual and civil rights.

The challenge, now, is to build upon this classical agenda, to find space for environmental rights and more particularly the  rights of climate-affected peoples.  For development rights, and more particularly the right to sustainable development as we must win it, in a world of climate crisis.   More generally, the challenge is a proper exploration of rights-based approaches to global climate protection.

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Just before the UN climate talks in Poznan, Tom Athanasiou, director of EcoEquity and one of the GDRs authors, went on the 300 to 350 Show in England to explain GDRs, which they subsequently described, correctly, as “a proposal that seeks to break the current deadlock and lead to a fair deal which both delivers climate safety and protects the poor.”