Cascading biases against poorer countries

Kartha, Sivan; Athanasiou, Tom; Caney, Simon; Cripps, Elizabeth; Dooley, Kate; Dubash, Navroz K.; Teng, Fei; Harris, Paul G.; Holz, Christian; Lahn, Bård; Moellendorf, Darrel; Müller, Benito; Roberts, J. Timmons; Sagar, Ambuj; Shue, Henry; Singer, Peter; Winkler, Harald

doi:10.1038/s41558-018-0152-7

Cited by 59 publications

(48 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…Doing so is hence not a neutral scientific exercise but comes with strong assumptions about equity and countries' 'rights' to emit. If not accounted for, a direct GWP * application (Allen et al 2016, Allen et al 2018) equals a 'grandfathering' approach that favors countries with high historical emissions and which is commonly rejected as being morally unacceptable (Caney 2009, Peters et al 2015, Robiou du Pont et al 2016, Kartha et al 2018.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, when applying equation (2) at the level of a specific country this is equivalent to implementing a 'grandfathering' principle because GWP * takes a country's historic emissions level as its starting point. The grandfathering principle is often regarded as being inequitable and strongly criticized (Caney 2009, Peters et al 2015, Kartha et al 2018, because it reflects the view that a continuation of present-day emissions shares across countries is a fair distribution key for emissions in the future. Under this GWP * approach the highest historically polluting countries are thus rewarded for their past GHG pollution by receiving the right to continue to emit similar shares in the future.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…CO 2 -equivalent emissions are derived for various countries over the historical period using GWP * and also using GWP * adjusted with different equity concepts for distributing emissions. It is important to note that not all equity concepts are considered equally fair, or fair at all (Kartha et al 2018). They can simply describe different approaches that can be followed either implicitly or explicitly when distributing future emissions contributions amongst countries.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Unintentional unfairness when applying new greenhouse gas emissions metrics at country level

Rogelj

Schleußner

2019

Environ. Res. Lett.

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The 2015 Paris Agreement sets out that rapid reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are needed to keep global warming to safe levels. A new approach (known as GWP * ) has been suggested to compare contributions of long-and short-lived GHGs, providing a close link between cumulative CO 2 -equivalent emissions and total warming. However, comparison factors for non-CO 2 GHGs under the GWP * metric depend on past emissions, and hence raise questions of equity and fairness when applied at any but the global level. The use of GWP * would put most developing countries at a disadvantage compared to developed countries, because when using GWP * countries with high historical emissions of short-lived GHGs are exempted from accounting for avoidable future warming that is caused by sustaining these emissions. We show that when various established equity or fairness criteria are applied to GWP * (defined here as eGWP * ), perceived national non-CO 2 emissions vary by more than an order of magnitude, particularly in countries with high methane emissions like New Zealand. We show that national emission estimates that use GWP * are very sensitive to arbitrary choices made by countries and therewith facilitate the creation of loopholes when CO 2 -equivalent emissions based on the GWP * concept are traded between countries that use different approaches. In light of such equity-dependent accounting differences, GHG metrics like GWP * should only be used at the global level. A common, transparent and equity-neutral accounting metric is vital for the Paris Agreement's effectiveness and its environmental integrity.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Unintentional unfairness when applying new greenhouse gas emissions metrics at country level

Rogelj

Schleußner

2019

Environ. Res. Lett.

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“…However, there is no agreement between countries on what constitutes a fair differentiation of efforts, and some scholars disagree with some of the normative choices necessary to Robiou du Pont and Meinshausen's (2018) analysis. Their selection of principles is based on a categorization from the IPCC, but this is not universally accepted as an authoritative and ethically robust taxonomy (Kartha et al 2018). Normative choices are also needed to operationalize the principles.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, historical emissions are counted from 1990; an earlier start date would redistribute effort from developing to developed countries. Furthermore, the two other principles include a transition period until 2040, meaning that a large share of remaining emissions are allocated proportionally to current emissions (Kartha et al 2018). Due to this lack of consensus, we perform sensitivity analyses using alternative NDC assessments from Germanwatch (Burck et al 2018) and Climate Action Tracker (2019).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The domestic politics of international climate commitments: which factors explain cross-country variation in NDC ambition?

Tørstad

Sælen

Bøyum

2020

Environ. Res. Lett.

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Under the Paris Agreement, parties self-determine their mitigation ambition level by submitting Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). Extant assessments find that the collective ambition of current pledges is not line with the Agreement's goals and that individual ambition varies greatly across countries, but there have not been attempts at explaining this variation. This paper identifies several potential drivers of national climate ambition, and tests whether these can account for differences in the ambition level of countries' mitigation targets under the Paris Agreement. After outlining theorized relationships between a set of domestic political characteristics and climate policy ambition, regression analysis is used to assess the effects of different potential drivers across a dataset of 170 countries. We find that a country's level of democracy and vulnerability to climate change have positive effects on NDC ambition, while coal rent and GDP have negative effects. Our findings suggest that these objective factors are more important than subjective factors, while the most influential subjective factor is the cosmopolitanism-nativism value dimension.

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Enabling assessment of distributive justice through models for climate change planning: A review of recent advances and a research agenda

Jafino

Kwakkel

Taebi

2021

WIREs Climate Change

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Models for supporting climate adaptation and mitigation planning, mostly in the form of Integrated Assessment Models, are poorly equipped for aiding questions related to fairness of adaptation and mitigation strategies, because they often disregard distributional outcomes. When evaluating policies using such models, the costs and benefits are typically aggregated across all actors in the system, and over the entire planning horizon. While a policy may be beneficial when considering the aggregate outcome, it can be harmful to some people, somewhere, at some point in time. The practice of aggregating over all actors and over time thus gives rise to problems of justice; it could also exacerbate existing injustices. While the literature discusses some of these injustices in ad‐hoc and case specific manner, a systematic approach for considering distributive justice in model‐based climate change planning is lacking. This study aims to fill this gap by proposing 11 requirements that an Integrated Assessment Model should meet in order to enable the assessment of distributive justice in climate mitigation and adaptation policies. We derive the requirements from various ethical imperatives stemming from the theory of distributive justice. More specifically, we consider both intra‐generational (among people within one generation) and intergenerational (between generations) distributive justice. We investigate to what extent the 11 requirements are being met in recent model‐based climate planning studies, and highlight several directions for future research to advance the accounting for distributive justice in model‐based support for climate change planning. This article is categorized under: Climate, Nature, and Ethics > Climate Change and Global Justice

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Cascading biases against poorer countries

Cited by 59 publications

References 7 publications

Unintentional unfairness when applying new greenhouse gas emissions metrics at country level

Unintentional unfairness when applying new greenhouse gas emissions metrics at country level

The domestic politics of international climate commitments: which factors explain cross-country variation in NDC ambition?

Enabling assessment of distributive justice through models for climate change planning: A review of recent advances and a research agenda

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