Benito Müller and Lavan Mahadeva, under the auspices of the European Capacity Building Initiative, have released a very interesting proposal on operationalizing “respective capabilities.”  The Summary for Policy Makers is here, and the Technical Report is here.  Here’s the two-paragraph summary that Müller sent around:

“Whether or not the regime emerging from the current negotiations under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will be based on an explicit cost/burden sharing formula, the debate about (implied) costs/burdens will be central. Such a debate cannot be genuinely meaningful in the absence of an acceptable operationalisation of Article 3.1 in general, and of the concept of ‘respective capability’ in particular.

The Brief proposes a measure for national ‘differentiated economic capabilities (‘ability to pay’) as integral part of an operationalisation. The primary purpose of the measure is to define or assess climate change cost/burden sharing (schemes). To illustrate the potential use of this methodology the Brief considers two examples: assessing the fairness of a given cost distribution; and developing a (rule-based) ‘graduation scheme’ regarding obligations to pay.”

It’s encouraging to see serious work on this front, in the first instance because true success in the climate negotiations – the stabilization of the climate system before we cross irreversible tipping points– is more or less impossible to imagine without a broad turn towards an open and constructive discussion of Respective Capabilities (RC).  This is because Capacity is fundamental to any coherent treatment of global climate justice.  As noted long ago by Ringius, Torvanger and Underdal, Capacity is one of the three criteria of equity that are “frequently invoked and rarely disputed.”  The others, classically, are Responsibility and Need,[1] and to this list we would add Ambition itself.

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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. 

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Green Growth and Equity in the Context of Climate Change, a new paper by Jeffrey Sachs and Shiv Someshwar, both of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, was recently published as a working paper by the Asian Development Bank Institute. It has a bit of a cobbled-together feel, but it must nevertheless be commended. It puts key elements together, and it makes extremely important claims — that the global costs of the climate transition will be large, and they they should be equitably shared between countries.

The logic is transparent.  The first section of the paper is about equity, the second reviews climate-mobilization cost estimates, and the third discusses a UN assessments system that would fund the Green Climate Fund in a manner consistent with the Framework Convention’s overarching equity principle of “Common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities.”

The Greenhouse Development Rights framework comes up in the first part of the paper, which is a review of equity principles and approaches.  Sachs and Someshwar say that it is “the most widely discussed efforts sharing approach,” and while we’re pleased to hear them say so, our sense is that this is only the case within policy circles.  Among civilians, per-capita approaches are probably still more well known.  That said, policy circles are critically important, for it is within these circles that the battle for international climate governance will be fought.

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