Publications

Zero Carbon, Zero Poverty – The Climate Justice Way

February 18, 2015

Zero Carbon, Zero Poverty – The Climate Justice Way, a major new report written for the Mary Robinson Foundation: Climate Justice by Sivan Kartha and Paul Baer of the Climate Equity Reference Project, breaks new ground in global climate justice theory and analysis. Here, from the executive summary, are its main conclusions:

• There is strong evidence that a rapid and total or nearly-total carbon phase-out will be technically feasible, both for developed and developing countries.

• Economic analyses suggest that a rapid carbon phase-out can be achieved at an aggregate global cost that is affordable, and much less than the potential costs of climate impacts.

• Nonetheless, a rapid carbon phase-out will be very demanding for all countries, especially developing countries, and presents potential risks to human rights.

• Even greater risks to human rights than the risks posed by aggressive mitigation action arise from the profound impacts of climate change, especially if temperature increase exceeds 2°C, which becomes increasingly likely if mitigation is delayed.

• There is good reason to believe that risks posed by mitigation can be dealt with, provided there is an ambitious and fairly shared global effort to achieve a rapid carbon phase-out while preserving human rights, and a commitment to integrating human rights and equity in all national climate policies.

Is all of this already clear? Perhaps it is, or perhaps not. In any case, these points are rarely made as clearly, or defended as well, as they are here.

National Fair Shares: The Mitigation Gap – Domestic Action and International Support

November 12, 2014

Our new report, National Fair Shares, summarizes the analysis embodied in the Climate Equity Reference Calculator, a generalized approach to considering equitable effort-sharing in an international climate agreement. This approach is designed to preserve “equitable access to sustainable development” even as it drives an extremely ambitious global mitigation program, and is particularly timely as countries prepare to submit their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) to the UNFCCC.

In particular, this analysis finds that a nation’s fair share of the global mitigation effort can be quite different from its domestic mitigation potential. Countries with relatively high capacity and responsibility are generally found to have fair shares that greatly exceed their own domestic mitigation potential; therefore, if they are to fulfill their entire fair share, they are required to contribute financial and technological support to other countries. Conversely, countries with relatively low capacity and responsibility are able to act entirely within their own borders. It is assumed that they use international support to undertake mitigation in excess of their own fair shares of the global mitigation effort, and by so doing exploit their full national mitigation potentials. As such, this analysis is informative not only for assessing countries’ INDCs with respect to domestic mitigation action, but international support as well.

From the abstract:

In this report, we systematically apply a generalized and transparent equity reference framework, with the goal of quantitatively examining the problem of national fair shares in a global effort to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This framework is based upon an effort-sharing approach, uses flexibly-defined national “responsibility and capacity indicators,” and is explicitly designed to reflect the UNFCCC’s core equity principles. It can be applied using a range of possible assumptions, and whatever values are chosen, they are applied to all countries, in a dynamic fashion that reflects the changing global economy. In this report, we present results for twelve representative countries and a selected set of illustrative “cases.”

The quantitative analysis in this report is based upon the Climate Equity Reference Calculator, an online tool and database that allows the user to select “equity settings” relating to key equity-related parameters, including responsibility, capacity, and development need. These settings are then used, together with standard demographic and macroeconomic indicators (e.g., national population, GDP and carbon-intensity) to calculate implied national fair shares of the global mitigation effort. Importantly, this fair share is expressed as a sum of domestically- and internationally-supported mitigation.

We provide illustrative results for various alternative levels of ambition, for various equity settings, and for various estimates of national emissions reductions. We also show that the differences between the cases are much less significant than the similarities, and that a great deal of the detail can therefore be set aside in favor of an “equity band” that is bound by “High Equity Settings” on one side and “Low Equity Settings” on the other. We have defined this equity band to span a wide range of perspectives on fairness, though it is easier to argue that the “Low Equity Settings” are “too low” than it is that the “High Equity Settings” are “too high.”

For a short summary of the report (6 pages) see here.

Climatefairshares.org

September 26, 2014

Check out http://www.climatefairshares.org/

This elegant system, put together by Friends of the Earth EWNI and Jubilee South Asia Pacific Movement on Debt and Development, is based on the “responsibility and capacity index” analysis embodied in the Climate Equity Reference Calculator. Its map interface is very cool, and simple to use, for it presents only a single Equity Settings profile. This is, for the record, a “high equity” profile defined by the Strong 2C pathway, high progressivity settings (including a $50,000 luxury threshold), a 1850 historical responsibility start date, a 50/50 responsibility/capacity weighting and “capacity adjusted” domestic emissions.

Norway’s fair share of an ambitious climate effort

August 26, 2014

The first of our “next generation” of country reports was just done, for Norway, together with Norwegian Church Aid and the ACT Alliance.

The report — Norway’s fair share of an ambitious climate effort — is the firs major report that we have done since we updated and generalized the Greenhouse Development Rights system, and re-released our calculator as the Climate Equity Reference Calculator.

This report is also notable for restricting itself to the “Strong 2C mitigation pathway.” In other words, the very challenging numbers in this report are associated with an extremely ambitious global mitigation transition, one that would actually have a good chance of stabilizing the climate system.

Three salient global mitigation pathways, assessed in light of the IPCC carbon budgets

January 14, 2014

In the course of preparing the new Greenhouse Development Rights web applications, we had to come up with a set of reference mitigation pathways which represented the choices before humanity, albeit in a simplified and schematic fashion. In this paper — for this post is actually a paper — we present these three pathways — a Strong 2ºC pathway, a Weak 2°C pathway, and a G8 pathway — and their levels of risk, in a fairly precise and technical manner.

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This paper examines the levels of risk associated with three widely discussed global mitigation pathways: a Strong 2ºC pathway, a Weak 2°C pathway, and a G8 pathway. A very large number of analyses and debates refer to these or quite similar pathways. This paper assesses the three pathways in the light of Working Group I’s recently released contribution to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report (IPCC 2013), which provided three specific global carbon dioxide (CO₂) budgets, and associated them with specific risks of a global surface temperature increase of more than 2°C by the end of this century, relative to the 1850–1900 average.

Figure 1 presents the three pathways.

Figure 1. Three politically salient mitigation pathways: G8 (red), Weak 2°C (blue), and Strong 2°C (green). Also shown (dotted lines) are three pathways consistent with the carbon budgets given by the IPCC, consistent with limiting warming to 2°C with 66%, 50%, and 33% probability, given non-CO₂ emissions as per RCP2.6.[1]

The key features of these pathways and the findings of our analysis can be summarized as follows:

The Strong 2°C pathway is defined to be an extremely ambitious mitigation pathway that can still be defended as being techno-economically achievable (Höhne et. al. 2013). Emissions peak in 2014 and reach an annual peak reduction rate of about 6.1% per year (6.0% for fossil CO₂ only). Cumulative carbon dioxide emissions after 2012 are 780 gigatonnes CO₂ (Gt CO₂), which is well within the IPCC’s budget of 1,010 GtCO₂ for maintaining a 66% likelihood of keeping warming below 2°C.

The Weak 2°C pathway is fashioned after well-known and often-cited emissions pathways that are typically presented as having a “likely” (greater than 66%, in the IPCC’s terminology) chance of keeping warming below 2°C.[2] Emissions peak in 2014 and reach a maximum annual reduction rate of 3.3% per year (4.4% for fossil CO₂ only). Cumulative carbon dioxide emissions from 2012 onward are 1,270 Gt CO₂. This exceeds the IPCC’s budget of 1,120 GtCO₂ for maintaining a 50% chance of keeping warming below 2°C, suggesting that this pathway carries substantially higher risks than previously believed.

The G8 pathway, a marker of the high-level political consensus in developed countries, is based on emissions targets given in an official declaration of the Group of Eight industrialized countries at its 2009 Summit in L’Aquila, Italy (G8 2009). This pathway is not precisely specified in this declaration, but is sufficiently well-defined that we can compare it with the IPCC budgets. Emissions peak in 2020, decline by a maximum of 4.9% per year (6.0% for fossil CO₂ only). Its cumulative carbon dioxide budget of 1,610Gt CO₂ considerably exceeds the IPCC’s budget of 1,410 GtCO₂ for maintaining a 33% chance of keeping warming below 2°C[3]. We thus find that its chance of keeping warming below 2°C is far less than 33%.

Table 1. Key data for the three pathways, and the IPCC carbon dioxide budgets against which to compare them.

Decision-makers face a choice among future pathways – a choice that will reflect political, economic and ethical considerations as much as science. This paper shows the consequences of choosing a less-ambitious pathway: a marked increase in climate risk. More specifically, according to the IPCC’s budget numbers, it shows that among the three politically salient pathways assessed here only the very ambitious Strong 2°C pathway is likely to hold warming below 2°C.

For the rest of this paper, click over to its longer version.

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