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We all want to stop Climate Change, but how can we share the costs equitably? Who and how much should each person pay/sacrifice to ensure our common survival? The Global Development Rights (GDRs) framework sets out an approach to distributing costs based on responsibility (GHGs on a historical basis) and capacity (rich people can afford to pay more to mitigate and adapt to climate change).
More specifically, the GDRs framework quantifies the UN Framework
Convention on Climate Change’s official principles — which call for
“the widest possible cooperation by all countries and their
participation in an effective and appropriate international response, in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities”
— with the goal of providing a coherent, principle-based way to think
about national obligations to pay for both mitigation and adaptation.
The GDRs framework was developed and modeled by Paul Baer and Tom Athanasiou of EcoEquity and Sivan Kartha and Eric Kemp-Benedict of the Stockholm Environment Institute.
The GDRs are based on a combination of guts, idealism, hard-headedness and math. People who are poor today are not able nor is it fair to expect them to "focus their limited resources on averting climate change." People of rich-high-emissions countries like Canada, the United States and Europe, "must take on the bulk of the costs
of a global 'emergency program' of mitigation and adaptation."
Climate Change Emergency...you say?
The climate emergency facing policy makers, farmers, plain and coastal dwellers, and everyone else flows from the limited space for carbon emissions in our atmosphere. To avoid more than a 2ºC rise in temperature, the GDRs project a path that just does not have room for the continued delays of developed and developing countries bickering over who will do something first. Essentially, rich countries that have released a lot of GHGs will have to not only reduce their emissions to zero over the next 20 - 30 years, but they will also have to provide money and techology to developing countries.
We have to share this world, whether it is a pleasant one to live in or not. The GDRs set out a fair path to fighting climate change that gives us a chance at survival, together.
The current (May 27) version is available here the GDRs Executive Summary (pdf) is a great introduction.
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