Here, Paul Baer, one of the core members of the GDRs authors group reflects on the principles and prospects for the framework, and does so in the manner of the modern academy.  Here’s the abstract:

“The Greenhouse Development Rights (GDRs) Framework is a proposal for a global climate agreement in which the obligations assigned to nations are based on a combination of responsibility (contribution to the problem) and capacity (ability to pay). A key feature of the GDRs framework is that it is modeled on the assignment of a ‘right to development’ to individuals, such that individuals with incomes below a ‘development threshold’ are nominally exempted from obligations to pay for mitigation and adaptation. Obligations for those ‘over the threshold’ are calculated in the same way for rich persons in poor countries and rich persons in rich countries. As income distribution within countries is taken into account and all countries have some wealthy people, all countries have a positive obligation to contribute to global mitigation and adaptation requirements, eliminating the sharp distinction between Annex I and non-Annex I countries. In the last few years, GDRs has become one of the most widely known of the many so-called burden-sharing frameworks that have been proposed. In this essay, one of the co-authors of the GDRs framework presents the framework’s fundamental principles, describes its place in the larger discussion of burden-sharing and climate justice, and reflects on its prospects in the next phase of the global climate negotiations. Hopefully it will be helpful both to readers new to GDRs and to our existing supporters and critics.”

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Someday, it will be easier to make judgments about which nations are doing their share to face up to the demands of the climate crisis, and which are free riding.  Before that fine day dawns, though, two things will have to happen.  First, the national pledges of action that countries – northern and southern, large and small – have committed to deliver to the UN Secretariat, the pledges in which they lay out their emission-reduction action plans, have to get a whole lot easier to read and compare and interpret.  Conditionalities have to be spelled out, and loopholes have to closed.  Second, we have to reach at least a rough international consensus on what different countries, at different levels of development, should do, in the light of historically-informed and principle-based comparisons that take, say, wealth and responsibility into account.

In the meanwhile, we’re stuck with overly-simple approaches based on problematic metrics like, say, per-capita emissions, or rates of decrease in carbon intensity.  Or we can just embrace simplicity and compare northern tons to southern tons.  The surprising thing is that even such a simple-minded analysis as this produces interesting results.

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An analysis of Luxembourg’s climate obligations, in the context of a global emergency mobilization to stabilize the climate system, as informed by the Greenhouse Development Rights approach