If ethical and justice arguments about why climate change policies are necessary are taken off the table in the climate change debate, it is like a baseball pitcher unilaterally agreeing to not throw any fast balls or breaking balls during a World Series game. Yet, as we will explain, there is almost a complete absence of ethical arguments for climate change policies in the US debate about proposed approaches to climate change. This failure to expressly examine the ethical issues entailed by arguments made by opponents of climate change action has important practical consequences.

This post first looks at how climate change policies are usually debated. Next, the post looks at why these controversies must be understood to raise ethical questions. And finally, this post lists ten practical reasons why climate change policies must be examined through an ethical lens.

II. Common Climate Change Policy Arguments

Arguments against climate change policies are usually of two types. By far the most frequent arguments made in opposition to climate change policies are assertions of various kinds of adverse economic impacts that will flow if climate change policies are adopted. Examples of this are claims that proposed climate change legislation will destroy jobs, reduce GDP, damage US businesses such as the coal and petroleum industries, increase the cost of fuel, or will destroy the recovery from a recession. The second most frequent argument made by opponents of climate change policies are assertions that adverse climate change impacts have not been sufficiently scientifically proven.

The responses of advocates of US climate change policies to these arguments are almost always to take issue with the factual economic and scientific conclusions of these arguments by making counter economic and scientific claims. For instance, in response to economic arguments opposing climate change legislation or policies, proponents of climate change action usually argue that climate change policies will create jobs or are necessary to develop new energy technologies that are vital to the health of the US economy in the future. In responses to the lack of scientific proof arguments, climate change advocates usually stress the harsh environmental impacts to people and ecosystems that climate change will cause if action is not taken or argue that climate change science is settled. In other words, advocates of climate change action, respond to claims of opponents to climate change programs by denying the factual claims of the opponents.

Although these alternative economic and scientific arguments are relevant to whether climate change policies should be adopted, noticeably missing from the US debate are ethical and justice arguments for action on climate change. In fact, there is a hardly a murmur in US press coverage of climate change controversies about the ethical and justice reasons for adopting climate change policies when arguments against adopting climate change policies are made. This failure of the press to examine these issues is because advocates of climate change policies are rarely racing these issues.

III. Why Climate Change Policy Issues Must Be Understood to Raise Ethical Questions.

What distinguishes ethical issues from economic and scientific arguments about climate change is that ethics is about duties, obligations, and responsibilities to others while economic and scientific arguments are usually understood to be about “value-neutral” “facts” which once established are often deployed in arguments about self-interest.

Climate change is a problem that clearly creates civilization challenging ethical issues. This is so because several distinct features of climate change call for its recognition as creating ethical responsibilities that limit a nation’s ability to look at narrow economic self interest alone when developing responsive policies.

First, climate change creates duties because those most responsible for causing this problem are the richer developed countries, yet those who are most vulnerable to the problem’s harshest impacts are some of the world’s poorest people in developing countries. That is, climate change is an ethical problem because its biggest victims are people who can do little to reduce its threat.

Second, climate-change impacts are potentially catastrophic for many of the poorest people around the world. Climate change, for instance, directly threatens human life and health and resources to sustain life, as well as species of plants and animals and ecosystems around the world.

Climate change harms include deaths from disease, droughts, floods, heat, and intense storms and damage to homes and villages from rising oceans, adverse impacts on agriculture, social disputes caused by diminishing natural resources, the inability to rely upon traditional sources of food, and the destruction of water supplies. Climate change threatens the very existence of some small island nations. Clearly these impacts are catastrophic. In fact, there is growing evidence that climate change is already causing great harm to many outside the United States while threatening hundreds of millions of others in the years ahead.

The third reason why climate change is a moral problem stems from its global scope. At the local, regional or national scale, citizens can petition their governments to protect them from serious harms. But at the global level, no government exists whose jurisdiction matches the scale of climate change. And so, although national, regional and local governments have the ability and responsibility to protect citizens within their boarders, they have no responsibility to foreigners in the absence of international law.
For this reason, ethical appeals are necessary to get governments to take steps to prevent their citizens from seriously harming foreigners.
Despite the fact that climate change creates obligations, the U.S. continues to debate climate change issues as if the only legitimate considerations are how our economy might be affected or whether adverse climate change impacts have been proven. ClimateEthics previously looked at the failure of the media to cover the ethical dimensions of climate change in The Crucial Missing Element in Media Coverage of the US Climate Change Debate: the Ethical Duty to Reduce GHG Emissions. Next we identify practical consequences of the failure to examine ethical questions of climate change policy proposals.

IV. Ten Practical Reasons Why Climate Change Policy Controversies Must Be Examined Through an Ethical Lens

Because climate change raises civilization challenging ethical and justice issues, the failure to examine arguments opposing climate change policies trough an ethical lens guarantees that:

1. Those opposing climate change policies on ethically dubious grounds will not be challenged on the basis of their ethically weak positions
2. Those making economic arguments based upon short-term narrow self interest will not be forced to admit that those causing climate change have duties, responsibilities, and obligations to others who can do little to reduce climate change’s threat but who are most vulnerable to climate change’s consequences.
3. The ethical dimensions of economic arguments will remain hidden in public debate in cases where economic arguments against climate change policies appear to based upon “value-neutral” economic “facts” although the calculations of the “facts” contain ethically dubious calculation procedures such as: (a) discounting future benefits that make benefits to others experienced in the middle to long-term virtually worthless as a matter of present value. (b) economic arguments usually only calculate the value of things harmed by climate change on the basis of market-value thus translating all things including human life, plants, animals, and ecological systems into commodity value, or (c) the economic calculations often ignore distributive justice issues including the fact that some people and places will be much more harshly impacted by climate change than others.
4. Important ethical issues entailed by decision-making in the face of scientific uncertainty will remain hidden including: (a) Who should have the burden of proof?, (b) What quantity of proof should satisfy the burden of proof when decisions must be made in the face of scientific uncertainty? (c) Whether the victims of climate change have a right to participate in decisions that must be made in the face of uncertainty?, and (d) Whether those causing climate change have obligations to act now because if the world waits to act until all uncertainties are resolved it will likely be too late prevent catastrophic impacts to others and to stabilize greenhouse gas atmospheric concentrations at safe levels.
5. Because no national, regional, local, business, organization, or individual climate change strategy makes sense unless it is understood to be implicitly a position on its duties and obligations to others to prevent climate change, whether the strategy is just or fair in relationship to the entity’s obligations to others will go unexamined.
6. Given that the world needs a global solution to climate change, and that only just solutions to climate change are likely to be embraced by most governments, barriers to finding an acceptable global solution will continue.
7. Unjust climate change policies will be pursued that exacerbate existing injustices in the world.
8. Because those who cause climate change are ethically responsible for damages caused by them, funding for adaptation projects needed by those most vulnerable to climate change will not be generated.
9. Because no nation may ethically use as an excuse for non-action on climate change that it need not reduce its greenhouse gases to its fair share of safe global emissions until other nations act, nations will continue to inappropriately refuse to act on the basis that other nations have not acted.
10. Because the amount of reductions that nations should achieve should be based upon principles of distributive justice and not-self interest, nations will continue to make commitments to reduce their emissions based upon self-interest rather than what is their fair share of safe global emissions.

By:

Donald A Brown
Associate Professor, Environmental Ethics, Science, and Law
Penn State University
Dab57@psu.edu.

If climate change must be understood as a civilization challenging ethical problem, what can be said about the positions taken by governments and results achieved at the recently concluded Copenhagen conference?

To evaluate what happened in Copenhagen one must understand that the Copenhagen meeting was only the last in  almost two decades of meetings that have failed to achieve a global solution to climate change. Copenhagen was the 19th meeting of governments from around the world that have been meeting every year since 1990 to forge a comprehensive climate change regime. Copenhagen was also the 15th conference of the parties (COP-15) since the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) came into effect in 1994. (UN, 1992)

For more than twenty years some nations have been taking positions on climate change that raise serious ethical concerns. Copenhagen meeting was no exception. However, as we saw in a prior ClimateEthics post, there were two issues that arose with a new force in Copenhagen. They were the intensity and frequency of calls for: (a) global justice, and (b) increased funding for adaptation programs in vulnerable developing countries. See, ClimateEthics, Two Climate Change Matters Move To Center Stage In Copenhagen With Profound Implications for Developed Nations: Ethics and Adaptation, http://climateethics.org/?p=331.

Yet, at the conclusion of the Copenhagen conference, as we shall see, little was accomplished in response to these issues or the other climate change disputes that have now plagued climate negotiations for almost two decades. Although, as we shall see, some have pointed to a few positive Copenhagen outcomes, most observers have judged COP-15 to be a disaster.

This post begins with an analysis of what actually happened in Copenhagen and contains the following sections:

• The path to the Copenhagen Accord
• Arguments about whether Copenhagen was a disaster or a positive step forward.
• Analysis of the “disaster-step forward” controversy
• Ethical analyses of the Copenhagen Accord
• Climate change ethics after Copenhagen

II. The Path To The Copenhagen Accord

The Copenhagen conference took place from December 7-19, 2009. Copenhagen was intended to be the culmination of a two-year negotiating process that was agreed to in Bali, Indonesia, in December 2007.
In 1990 negotiations began that led in 1992 to opening for signature and ratification of the UNFCCC. This treaty itself does not contain binding greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions limitations for countries but nevertheless includes numerous other binding national climate change obligations.
To understand the significance of what happened in Copenhagen, it is necessary to understand the goals and objectives for an international climate regime that were originally set out in the UNFCCC. Among other things, for instance, the parties to the UNFCCC agreed that: (a) They would adopt policies and measures to prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system, (b) Developed countries should take the first steps to do this, and (c) Nations have common but differentiated responsibilities to prevent climate change, (d) Nations may not use scientific uncertainty as an excuse for not taking action, and (e) Nations should reduce their GHG emissions based upon “equity.” (UN, 1992) As we shall see, some national proposals in Copenhagen, seventeen years after the UNFCCC was agreed upon, failed to abide by many promises made by governments in the UNFCCC.

As of December 2009, the UNFCCC had 192 parties, a number that includes almost all countries in the world including the United States which ratified the UNFCCC in 1994.

The UNFCC is a “framework” convention because it has always been expected that additional requirements would be added to the framework in updates that are known as “protocols” or in annual decisions of the conferences of the parties.

The first major addition to the UNFCCC was the Kyoto Protocol which was negotiated in 1997 because the international community had been convinced by emerging climate change science that developed nations needed to be bound by numerical emissions reductions targets. The Kyoto Protocol entered into force on February 16, 2005 and currently has 190 parties. The United States is the only developed country that never ratified the Kyoto Protocol.

Under the Kyoto, Protocol, the developed countries agreed to reduce their overall emissions of six greenhouse gases by an average of 5.2% below 1990 levels between 2008-2012. The developing countries had no binding emissions reductions obligations under Kyoto.

The Copenhagen negotiations were necessary because the emissions reductions obligations of developed countries set out in the Kyoto Protocol expire in 2012.

At climate negotiations at COP-13 in Bali, Indonesia in 2007, parties to the UNFCCC agreed to replace the Kyoto Protocol with an agreement that would create a second commitment period under the UNFCCC and would include binding emissions reductions for developed countries and new programs on adaptation for developing countries, deforestation, finance, technology transfer, and capacity building. This agreement is referred to as the Bali Roadmap which also called for articulating a “shared vision for long-term cooperative action,” including a long-term global goal for emission reductions.

The Bali decision also recognized that developing countries could make contributions to solving the climate change through the development of Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions (NAMAs), that is climate change strategies for developing countries. The NAMAs, however, would not constitute binding emissions reduction requirements for developing countries in contrast to the binding obligations of developed countries in the Kyoto Protocol that would be further developed in Copenhagen.

At Bali the parties also agreed on a two-year negotiating process to achieve the objectives of the Bali Roadmap. Under this action plan, nations would proceed on two negotiation tracks. One under the UNFCCC and the other under the Kyoto Protocol. The first track was know by the acronym “AWG-KP,” standing for the Ad hoc Working Group on the Kyoto Protocol. The second track was referred to as “AWG-LCA,” standing for the Ad hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action. The Bali agreement also included a deadline for concluding these negotiations in Copenhagen in December of 2009.

Intense negotiations in preparation for Copenhagen took place during the two years between Bali and Copenhagen including four separate meetings in 2009 alone. In these deliberations, many contentious issues surfaced. Among other things, these disputes included particularly strong disagreements about the magnitude of developed country emissions reduction commitments and institutional arrangements and funding amounts for financing developing country needs for technology cooperation, adaptation, reducing emissions from deforestation, and capacity building.

Although some progress was made on a few issues in the two year lead-up to Copenhagen, little progress was made on the major issues and particularly on commitments for GHG emissions reductions and funding for adaptation, deforestation programs, and technology transfer.

As Copenhagen approached, optimism about a Copenhagen deal faded although there was a short spurt of renewed hope several weeks before the conference started as the US, China, and a few other nations publicly made commitments on emissions reductions.

The Copenhagen meeting was attended by 110 heads of state, hundreds of ministers from every part of the world, as well as thousands of registrants from nongovernmental organizations, the media, UN agencies – more than 40,000 people in a facility with a capacity of 15,000. During most of the two weeks, little progress was made with many sessions memorable for acrimonious exchanges between developing and developed countries.

Throughout the two weeks in Copenhagen, attendees from poor, at-risk countries could be heard despairingly describing killer droughts and growing deserts in Africa, loss of glacier-fed water supplies on which their agriculture depends for millions in Central Asia and South America, and rising seas that are now threatening the very existence of small island states. Suffering caused by the human-induced warming that that the Earth has already experienced is now visible around the world although mostly in poor developing countries. Because warming is expected to accelerate in the years ahead, for many poor countries climate change is now understood to be an urgent matter of life and death.

As ClimateEthics explained in an earlier post, the Copenhagen meeting was different than previous COPs for the noticeable increase in attention paid to the ethics and justice dimensions of climate change and adaptation needs. See, ClimateEthics, Two Climate Change Matters Move To Center Stage In Copenhagen With Profound Implications for Developed Nations: Ethics and Adaptation, http://climateethics.org/?p=331.

Yet, as we shall see, none of this appeared to motivate developed nations to make commitments to reduce GHG emissions consistent with what science claims  necessary to protect those most vulnerable to climate change.

During the Copenhagen conference representatives from poor vulnerable nations begged developed countries to: (a)  commit to reduce GHG emissions to levels necessary to prevent dangerous climate change. and (b) to  fund adaptation programs in developing countries that are necessary to protect the most vulnerable from climate change impacts that could be avoided and compensate for damages that could not be avoided.

Despite these pleas, not much happened during the conference to resolve the most contentious issues until US President Obama appeared on the morning of the last day, Friday, December 18, 2009. For much of that day, President Obama negotiated with Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and South African President Jacob Zuma.(Lerer, 2009) Yet, a large part of this time of these negotiations was focused on a dispute between the United States and China on whether China would agree to monitoring and verification of Chinese climate change commitments.

President Obama could not commit to anything in Copenhagen that he could not get through the US congress. Because a climate change bill that had passed the US House was very weak compared to what science says was necessary to protect the world’s poorest people, the United States took a position in the lead-up to Copenhagen that continued to be the weakest of all the developed countries on emissions reductions.

Because none of the developed countries were willing to make emissions reduction commitments congruent with what science was saying was necessary to protect them, some of the most vulnerable developing countries saw the developed countries’ positions as ominous, perhaps a death sentence.

The United States was not alone among developed countries in refusing to make emissions reductions commitments consistent with what science was saying was necessary to prevent dangerous climate change. In fact as ClimatEthics has explained in a previous post, no developed country made such a commitment in the lead-up to Copenhagen. See,  Ethical Failures of National GHG Emissions Reduction Proposals Approaching Copenhagen,http://climateethics.org/?p=147.

A notable example of the acrimony between developed and developing countries during the pre-Copenhagen period were a provision that had been inserted in the negotiating text that claimed that developed countries were responsible for “ecological debt.” As we shall see, this assertion was strongly rejected by Todd Stern, lead US climate negotiator, who said: “I actually completely reject the notion of a debt or reparations or anything of the like.’(Roberts, 2009) In addition, US negotiator Jonathan Pershing further said, “The donor countries have only so much largesse.” This statement appeared to be premised on the idea that the United States has no obligations to developing countries for past pollution and that payments to developing countries for adaptation are simply a mater of charity.

In response to this denial of historical responsibility for climate change, Vandana Shiva, a prominent social activist for developing countries, said: “I think it is time for the United States to stop seeing itself as a donor and recognizing itself as a polluter, a polluter who must pay for its pollution and its ecological debt. This is not about charity. This is about justice.” (Roberts, 2009)

President Obama personally negotiated the Copenhagen Accord during last hours of the conference. Yet, to get this deal, President Obama had to ignore many of the positions of the most vulnerable nations that were unresolved in the two negotiating documents that had been created in the lead-up to Copenhagen, the documents known as AWG-KP and AWG-LCA.

Although the United States was unwilling to acknowledge financial responsibility for climate change, President Obama was at least willing to recognize that the United States should make commitments on emissions reductions and funding, a profound change from the prior US administration. Most likely because of a potential future, but yet unrealized, new US direction, President Obama managed to obtain support from many nations including some prominent developing countries on the Copenhagen Accord, the non-binding, political statement that emerged from the Obama-led negotiations.

Despite growing scientific evidence that the world is running out of time to protect the poorest people in the world from the harsh impacts of climate change, the best the international community could do in Copenhagen was to agree on the weak, compared to what was hoped for, non-binding document, the Copenhagen Accord.

Politically President Obama’s hands were tied in the negotiations because of domestic political constraints.

For domestic political reasons, the US President also wanted agreement from China and other large developing countries on transparent procedures for verifying their non-binding emissions reduction commitments.

Most observers believed that there was little hope of getting meaningful US domestic climate change legislation through the US congress without being able to argue that China was on track to make GHG emissions reductions also. And so, for domestic political reasons, moving China on climate change in Copenhagen was important.

Those opposing climate change legislation in the United States often have argued that it would be unfair to the United States if it was bound to reduce GHG emissions and China was not required to do the same. In fact, a decade earlier, when the Kyoto Accord was under consideration in the United States, opponents of the Kyoto deal frequently ran TV commercials that argued that the Kyoto Protocol was unfair to the United States because China was excluded from emissions limitations. This argument was often made without visible critical comment in the United States even though the United States had committed itself to take the first steps to reduce emissions along with other developed countries under the UNFCCC.  For instance, the Heritage Foundation argued that the Kyoto Protocol should not be ratified because the Protocol excluded developing countries from binding emissions reductions including China. (Coon, 2001).

When China became the world’s largest emitter in terms of total tons of GHGs in the fall of 2008, this fact was widely publicized in the United States as if China had moved into first place in terms of global responsibility.  The US press frequently announced that China had become the largest polluter, a fact that ignored that the United States emits more than four times the amount of GHG than China on a per capita basis.

Although President Obama originally negotiated the Accord with just four other countries, in the last few hours of the Copenhagen conference the United States successfully convinced most large emitting countries to support the Accord including China, India, Brazil, South Africa, U.K., France, Australia, Germany, the E.U., Japan, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Russia, Mexico, Spain, South Korea, Norway, the Maldives, Columbia, and Indonesia.

As a result, in the wee hours of Saturday mourning, the Copenhagen parties agreed to reference the Copenhagen Accord in a COP decision that “took note” of the Copenhagen. The COP “took note” of the Copenhagen Accord rather than adopting it because a consensus was not possible and decisions by a COP require a consensus. At least 25 countries that were asked by the COP President to participate in a high level meeting of the “friends of the President” eventually accepted the Accord, at least four Parties spoke out against it (Tuvalu, Sudan, Bolivia, and Venezuela). (Werksman, 2009)

The Copenhagen Accord will not solve the climate change crisis as even President Obama acknowledged because it does not contain commitments necessary to avoid dangerous climate change nor deal adequately with other issues including GHG gases coming from deforestation and adaptation issues.

The Copenhagen Accords is a three page document whose most significant elements are:

o Long-Term Goals: The parties agreed that deep cuts in global emissions are required according to science and as documented by the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, with a view to reducing global emissions in order to limit the increase in global temperature to below 2°C. The agreement also calls for an assessment of the implementation of the Accord to be completed by 2015 including examining whether the long-term goal should be a temperature rise of 1.5°C.

o Adaptation: The document states that adaptation to the adverse effects of climate change and the potential impacts of response measures is a challenge faced by all countries, and that enhanced action and international cooperation on adaptation are urgently required in developing countries, especially in the least developed countries, the small island states, and Africa. The parties to the Accord also agree that developed countries shall provide adequate, predictable and sustainable financial resources, technology and capacity building to support adaptation.

o Financing For Poor Nations: The document provides that developed countries shall set a goal of mobilizing jointly $100 billion a year by 2020 to address the needs of developing countries and that the funds will come from a wide variety of sources, public and private, bilateral and multilateral. An annex carries the following short-term financing pledges from developed countries for 2010-2012: EU – $10.6 billion. Japan – $11 billion. United States – $3.6 billion

o Emissions Reductions: The document provides for countries to voluntarily commit to GHG mitigation plans in two separate annexes, one for developed country targets and the other for the voluntary pledges of major developing countries. The developed countries committed to implement individually or jointly quantified emissions reductions targets for 2020 to be submitted by 31 January 2010. The developing countries may identify commitments that will be included in the annex to the Copenhagen Accord. Neither developed nor developing country commitments under the Accord are legally binding.

o Verification of Climate Change Promises. A sticking point for a deal, largely because China refused to accept international controls, the section on monitoring of developing nation pledges is one of the the agreement’s most significant provisions. The document provides that emerging economies must monitor their efforts and report the results to the United Nations every two years, with some international checks to meet Western transparency concerns but “to ensure that national sovereignty is respected.”

o Forest Protection. The accord “recognizes the importance of reducing emission from deforestation and forest degradation and the need to enhance removals or greenhouse gas emission by forests,” and agrees to provide “positive incentives” to fund such action with financial resources from the developed world.

III. Arguments For and Against Conclusions That Copenhagen Was A Disaster or A Positive Step Forward.

The Copenhagen Accord has triggered serious disputes among world leaders, academicians, journalists, and participants as to whether it was an unmitigated disaster or a positive step toward finally dealing with climate change.

For instance, sharply negative assessment of the Copenhagen has been made by John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace UK, who said at the conclusion of Copenhagen: “The city of Copenhagen is a crime scene tonight, with the guilty men and women fleeing to the airport. (BBC, 2009).

James Curran, the director of science at the one of the Scottish government’s top advisors on climate change said “It really couldn’t be any more serious,” and “It’s staggeringly frightening and deeply disappointing that Copenhagen has failed. This is extremely dangerous for Scotland and the world.” (Herald Scotland, 2009)

Yet, even though almost all commentators that have drawn positive conclusions about the Accord have also expressed some reservations about this agreement, some have concluded that on balance it was a positive step.

For instance, Andrew Light of the Center for American Progress said about the Copenhagen Accord: “ The truth right now is that this agreement is not only meaningful but potentially groundbreaking.” (Light, 2009)

Similarly Robert Stavins from the Harvard Environmental Economics Programs concluded that the Copenhagen Accord was probably a good thing because “leaders took the reins of the procedures and brought the negotiations to a fruitful conclusion, and because the foundation was laid for a broad-based coalition of the willing to address effectively the threat of global climate change.” (Stavins, 2009)

In a like manner, David Doniger, policy director NRDC climate center, said that the Copenhagen Accord was a big step forward.

And so some environmental NGOs are split about whether the Copenhagen Accord was a disaster or a positive step forward.

On the one hand, a strong case cane be made that Copenhagen was an immense global catastrophe because the two week meeting:
o Did not produce any legally binding, enforceable global deal that met the objectives of the meeting including.

o Did not achieve greenhouse gas reductions commitments congruent with what science is now saying is necessary to protect the most vulnerable people in the world and avoid dangerous climate change.

o Allowed big countries to block a 1.5 oC atmospheric stabilization target desired by the most vulnerable developing countries. Although the text sets an unenforceable goal of 2 oC and allows for a review of whether a 1.5 oC target is necessary, this review does not take place for 5 years and most scientists argue that global emissions must peak before this to avoid catastrophic climate change..

o Abandoned much of the UNFCCC approach to climate change set process out in the architecture of the Kyoto Protocol.

o Reached no agreement on an emissions baseline year so that some nations including the United States were able to make reductions commitments from 2005 despite the fact that most of the world had agreed to 1990 as the baseline year under the Kyoto Protocol.

o Produced the Accord, an outcome that angered many developing countries whose positions were set out in detail in the texts that had been under negotiation for two years before Copenhagen.

o Did not significantly move forward on the institutional issues related to deforestation programs, technology transfer, or capacity building. Many issues in the negotiating text on these issues were ignored.

o Ignored hundreds of pages of negotiating text through the production of a three-page Accord without consulting most of the parties that had been negotiating the text.

o Put into jeopardy, the international trading flexibility mechanisms that had come into existence under the Kyoto Protocol.

o Dropped the objective of finalizing a legally binding treaty in 2010 in Mexico City

o Produced a final document, the Accord that contains no rules on how it will be governed.

o Did not achieve specific commitments for adaptation or other financing needs of developing countries.

o Made no progress on the UNFCCC promise that developed countries should reduce their emissions based “equity’ to prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.

Arguments that have been made that Copenhagen Accord was a positive step forward have noted that the agreement:

o Broke through years of negotiating gridlock to achieve critical goals of a needed an international climate change agreement.

o Provides real cuts in heat-trapping carbon pollution by all of the world’s big emitters.

o Establishes a transparent framework for evaluating countries’ performance against their commitments.

o Starts a new flow of financial resources to help poor and vulnerable nations cope with climate impacts, protect their forests, and adopt clean energy technologies.

o Binds emission pathways to halt warming over 2 oC. In fact, the Accord is the first international agreement to promise consideration of limiting warming to 1.5 oC.

o Achieved targets and policy announcements from big developing countries that would have been unthinkable a year ago.

o Provides a transparent way of assessing the progress of developing countries GHG commitments.

o By bringing in developing countries, enhanced the US congress’s prospects to pass domestic climate change legislation.

o Made movement on a global agreement that would not have happened without the Accord because the UNFCCC process was unworkable and if the parties continued to follow it, deadlock was inevitable.

o Managed to isolate several obstructionist countries including Saudi Arabia and Venezuela who are oil producing countries.

o Made China into a major world player and made this country accountable.

o Elevated India, Brazil and South Africa to the climate change world stage.

o Although it did not get all nations to agree to an international climate regime, provided an agreement among the largest emitters.

IV.  Analysis of the “Disaster or Step Forward” Controversy

It would appear that the strongest reasons given for concluding that the Copenhagen Accord was a positive step forward are most firmly grounded on the notions that: (1) following the normal international negotiation process under UNFCCC would have led to political deadlock, and (2) the Accord brought high-emitting developing countries into an international climate change process thus helping the US with pending domestic climate change legislation.

Yet the deadlock that was evident in the lead-up to Copenhagen was largely caused by huge gaps between developed and developing world positions. Many vulnerable developing countries, for instance, called on developed countries to make aggressive, legally binding commitments to reduce their GHG emissions based upon equity and capped at levels that would protect the most vulnerable poor countries from climate change effects.

Developing countries also wanted developed countries to commit to hundreds of billions of dollars a year in new, predictable funding for adaptation, prevention of deforestation programs, and technology transfer.

In fact, as ClimateEthics has explained in a prior post, developing country demands for adaptation funding were noticeably stronger in Copenhagen than in prior COPs. See, Two Climate Change Matters Move To Center Stage In Copenhagen With Profound Implications for Developed Nations: Ethcs and Adaptation, http://climateethics.org/?p=331 As we noted in this prior post, the two-week Copenhagen negotiations were marked by many meetings and speeches devoted to the justice dimensions of climate change, particularly regarding the need for developed countries to make emissions reductions commitments congruent with what science was saying was necessary to avoid dangerous climate change and to contribute significant amount of funding for adaptation in developing countries.

It was also true that in the lead-up to Copenhagen the developing nations’ positions had become more sophisticated, specific, and strongly articulated than in previous COPs. Of course, this does not necessarily mean that all positions of developing countries were justified.

However, the reluctance of developed countries to make commitments for GHG emissions reductions at levels necessary to protect the most vulnerable indicated that the developing country demands in the lead-up to and during Copenhagen were in great conflict with developed countries’ ability or political willingness to act.

Consequently, since the negotiations in the two years leading up to Copenhagen made little progress in resolving huge conflicts between developed and developing countries it was not likely that the two weeks that had been set out in Copenhagen would lead to a global climate change deal and finding another approach to breaking the deadlock became an attractive option.

Yet, if developed nations were willing to follow the normal negotiating procedures and make additional commitments on emissions reductions and funding for adaptation, deforestation programs, and technology transfer, some progress greater than achieved in the Copenhagen Accord might have been achieved. As a result, since developed countries were unwilling to make binding commitments sufficient to protect vulnerable developing countries, it is disingenuous for some developed countries to assert that the Copenhagen Accord was practically necessary because of the magnitude of the gaps between developed and developing countries as the size of these gaps have been caused to a great extent by the developed countries themselves.

That is, the appeal to practical necessity to justify the Accord must be seen in light of the unwillingness of developed countries to commit to do things that would be required of them if they agreed to be bound by duties and responsibilities to developing countries and not just narrow economic self-interest.

It is also clear that because of the nineteen year failure in the UNFCCC negotiations to produce significant GHG emissions commitments, the gaps between what is needed to protect poor developing countries and the ability of developed countries to make these commitments have grown. This is so because each time a global solution to climate change is delayed, atmospheric concentrations of GHG continue to rise and the time for preventing dangerous climate change continues to get shorter. And so as delays in achieving a meaningful global solution to climate change have continued, promises from developed countries to take steps to protect developing countries have become more difficult to make because over time the commitments need to be more ambitious after each delay. Therefore the failure to reduce emissions in the past is making gaps between developed and developing countries’ positions on climate change more intractable, a fact that should be seen as an ominous development for both developed and developing countries.

In negotiating the Accord, the United States pushed issues that it needed to resolve to pass pending US climate change legislation at the expense of issues that were important to protecting the poorest developing countries from climate change. For instance,

o The US commitments on GHG emissions reductions leading up to Copenhagen had been 17% below 2005 emissions levels, which was only 4% below 1990 levels, a baseline supported by most other countries and the baseline endorsed by the Kyoto Protocol. This made the US proposal on reductions commitments the weakest among developed countries, yet consistent with a bill passesd by the United States House of Representatives. In Copenhagen, as noted above, President Obama’s hands were tied by his inability to make commitments that were not likely to be enacted by US domestic legislation and therefore President Obama could not practically go beyond the commitments in the US House climate change bill. As a result of this practical constraint, when President Obama negotiated the Accord, he successfully pushed for making emissions reductions commitments from developed countries completely voluntary.

o When President Obama addressed the Copenhagen high-level segment he asserted that the US’s two main requirements for Copenhagen were to: (a) set emissions reductions by large emitters; and (b) that these emissions reductions were internationally verifiable. (Guérin and Wemaere. 2009) The United States insisted on getting large developing countries to make further commitments despite the fact that it had been previously decided in Bali that developing countries could develop non-binding NAMAs. As we have seen, this US interest in additional developing country commitments was motivated by US domestic pressure to avoid emissions reductions commitments in Copenhagen unless large developing countries commit to reduce their emissions. As we shall see in the next section, the position that the United States need not reduce its emissions to its fair share of safe global emissions until others make such commitments is ethically dubious even if it reflects political reality in the United States. In addition, even if one assumes that President Obama’s hands were tied by domestic political considerations, a case can be made the failure of the US president to make the case to the American people that in addition to US economic interests in climate change policies the United States has ethical obligations, duties, and responsibilities to other nations can be understood to be an ethical failure or a failure of leadership.
o Even though the United States demanded that China commit to a verification process, the United States conceded to China’s demands to remove from the Copenhagen Accord provisions requiring all parties to achieve a 50% reduction by 2050, developed countries to reduce by 80% by 2050, and the 1.5 C warming target of great interest to small island states and low-lying nations that have the most to lose from rising seas. (Milliband, 2009). As we shall see in the next section, these omissions are ethically dubious.

o The Accord did not resolve an issue that put the United States at odds with many developed countries, namely whether the developed countries commitments would be integrated into an extension of the Kyoto Protocol. The United States had resisted proposals from other developed countries to build the second commitment period on the architecture of the Kyoto Protocol during the entire two year lead-up to Copenhagen because the United States had never ratified the Kyoto Protocol and saw little domestic political support for doing so.

From these considerations it can be argued that the United States got essentially what it wanted in the Copenhagen Accord including the following:

• The Accord sets no additional obligations for the US other than what it plans to do domestically.

• The United States obtained verification of developing countries’ actions and especially China, an achievement which should help the United States with its domestic legislation in light of the fact that many opposed to the US legislation objected to the lack of commitments by China.

• The United States obviated the need to join the Kyoto Protocol, a step that was politically impossible in the United States.

From the US point of view, the Copenhagen Accord was a good deal. This result is not insignificant even to other members of the international community if the concessions in the Accord from large developing countries leads to US domestic legislation because the world needs the United States to join the community of nations working to reduce the threat of climate change. For this reason, even though the Copenhagen Accord was seen as a very weak outcome by many EU countries, if the United States can now move to pass domestic climate change legislation allowing it to make legally binding commitments, then international negotiations can regroup in Mexico City to achieve some of the goals originally hoped for in Copenhagen and laid out in the Bali Action Plan.

However, from the standpoint of developing countries that are particularly vulnerable to climate change, the Accord is a potential disaster because the Accord:

• Makes no reference to a future legally binding instrument.

• Allows developed countries to commit to both emissions reduction levels and funding for developing country needs for adaptation, deforestation prevention programs, and technology transfer at any level politically acceptable to the developed country.

• Will likely lead to a 3°C or even 3.5°C increase based on current pledges from the developed countries, putting many developing countries at a very high risk, despite its 2°C long-term temperature limit as a goal of the UNFCCC.

• Does not take a decision on the future of the Kyoto Protocol. The Kyoto Protocol includes many provisions that benefit developing countries including the Clean Development Mechanisms, a baseline year for emissions reduction of 1990, and legally binding commitments of developed countries.

• Makes no progress on the requirement in the UNFCCC, that nations reduce their emissions based upon “equity.”

• Gives control over future climate change policy to large emitters which is good if these big emitters reduce their emissions to levels required by justice and responsibility to developing countries. Yet because these big emitters now have more control over their emissions reductions commitment levels under the approach taken by the Accord that allows pledging of commitments without the pressure to satisfy the developing countries in a negotiated process, the large emitters are more than ever likely to adopt climate change emissions policies guided by national economic interest, not at levels that duties and obligations to developing countries would require. For this reason, the good news is that the Copenhagen Accord made the large emitters larger players in the international approach to climate change, yet the bad news is that the Accord makes the large emitters key players in the international approach to climate change, an outcome that also diminishes the power of the poor, most vulnerable nations.

All of this makes the United States domestic climate change legislation enormously important for the international community. Many nations finally agreed to the Copenhagen Accord because they were hopeful that the United States might soon pass meaningful domestic climate change legislation before the next meeting of international negotiations in November in Mexico City. An so, after over twenty years of international climate change negotiations, the world is still waiting for the United States.

What happened in Copenhagen makes US action on climate change a key to any hope that the world will finally adopt a global solution to climate change. Although bi-lateral and more regional solutions to climate change can continue, these negotiations will take place without the need to satisfy the demands of the most vulnerable developing countries. Since there is no reason to believe that in the absence of pressure from developing countries, the developed countries will reduce their emissions based upon “equity,” a change in the locus of international climate change negotiations to bi-lateral or regional levels almost guarantees that economic interests of nations will loom even larger in the future in determining their future climate change positions .

Unfortunately there is little evidence that the United States is on a track to adopt climate change policies and programs that would represent its fair share of safe global emissions. In addition, as we shall see, the US approach to the Copenhagen Accord was based on several ethically dubious assumptions.

In summary, the Copenhagen Accord must be seen as a disaster for developing countries if developed countries continue to make commitments insufficient to prevent dangerous climate change. As we shall see in the next section, there is little reason to believe that developed countries are willing to commit to actions that represent what ethics and justice would require of them. .

V. Ethical Analysis of Copenhagen Accord

In the lead-up to Copenhagen, ClimateEthics identified ethical criteria that any Copenhagen agreement would have to satisfy, see Minimum Ethical Criteria For All Post-Kyoto Regime Proposals: What Does Ethics Require of A Copenhagen Outcome http://climateethics.org/?p=50,
In this prior analysis, ClimateEthics concluded that any proposed post-Kyoto regime must as a matter of at a minimum:

• Require sufficient greenhouse emissions reductions to assure that the international community is on a greenhouse gas emissions reduction pathway that will prevent dangerous climate change harm. This is sometimes referred to as the environmental sufficiency criteria.
• Begin to base differences among national allocations on the basis of equity and justice. This is sometimes referred to as the equity criteria.

In addition to these criteria previously identified to guide ethical analysis of a post-Kyoto regime, the rise in importance in the adaptation agenda and the almost certain fact that it is too late to protect poor countries from the need to cope with adaptation issues, there is clearly a need to add additional ethical criteria for evaluating second commitment period regimes under the UNFCCC. That is, any proposed post-Kyoto regime must:

• Assure that those responsible for climate change provide adequate, predictable adaptation funding to enable developing countries and in particular the most vulnerable developing countries to do what is necessary to avoid climate change damages in cases where it is possible to take action and to prevent damages, or be compensated for climate change damages in cases where it is impossible to take protective action. We will refer to this as the just adaptation criteria

These three criteria, that is environmental sufficiency, equity, and just adaptation constitute the minimum ethical considerations that any climate regime must satisfy, they don’t capture all ethical questions raised by climate change. In fact ClimateEthics has identified many civilization challenging ethical questions that the need be considered in adopting climate change policies. Yet these criteria are the minimum ethical considerations that any new climate change regime must meet.

As the world approached the Copenhagen negotiations in late summer of 2009, ClimateEthics examined the specific positions of nations and concluded that some nations were taking positions on the Copenhagen agenda as if GHG emissions reduction commitments can be guided by national interest alone and not responses to international ethical duties and obligations. For this reason, ClimateEthics concluded that the major emitters were approaching Copenhagen in a way that appeared to be avoiding their ethical obligations and acting as if narrow national economic interest is a valid justification for their climate change positions. Yet, ethics would require these nations to act in accordance with duties and responsibilities to other vulnerable nations, not self-interest alone.

The Copenhagen Accord and the way it was negotiated does nothing to change the conclusion that most nations failed to live up to their ethical obligations in approaching Copenhagen. In fact, as we shall see, many of the considerations that seemed to be the driving forces behind the content of the Copenhagen Accord are based upon ethically problematic assumptions and premises.

a. Environmental Sufficiency Criteria.

Not only does the Copenhagen Accord fail to require sufficient GHG emissions reductions to assure that the international community is on a GHG emissions reduction pathway that will prevent dangerous climate change harm, the emissions reductions commitments that have been identified under the Accord almost guarantee that millions of poor people, plants, animals, an ecosystems will be harmed by climate change if the consensus science position turns out to be correct.

Although it is still possible that nations in the next few years will revise upward their GHG emissions reductions commitments to levels that will protect the most vulnerable people and countries, very recent science has concluded that the world is running out of time to do this.

As we have seen, the Copenhagen Accord does set a target that nations should work together to limit human caused additional heating to 2°C. There are, however, several ethical problems with this target. They include the following:

• Any additional warming from current levels is ethically problematic because current temperatures are already dangerous for some vulnerable people around the world and an additional 1 °C temperature rise is already locked in by prior emissions. Because any additional warming from current levels could have serious consequences to those most vulnerable to climate change, those who are most vulnerable should have as a matter of procedural justice rights to consent to put at risk by the additional 2°C goal adopted in the Accord. Yet, some of the most vulnerable nations in Copenhagen wanted the Copenhagen outcome to adopt a 1.5 °C goal. Although the Copenhagen Accord specifies that the 1.5 °C can be reconsidered in five years, many scientists would argue that since global peaking of GHG emissions must take place in the next few years and therefore waiting five years virtually guarantees that the 1. 5°C is unachievable.

• The Copenhagen Accord appeared to reject an idea that was under consideration in the negotiating text that world needed to set not just a temperature limit goal but needed to commit to an atmospheric GHG concentration level that would give any temperature goal practical significance. To give the warming target practical meaning it is necessary to identify an atmospheric GHG concentration goal because there is scientific uncertainty about how much warming will be produced by different levels of atmospheric GHG concentrations, a scientific issue usually referred to as the “climate sensitivity” problem. Therefore, if the international community is serious about protecting vulnerable people it must take a position on climate sensitivity by adopting a atmospheric GHG concentration goal. The negotiating text under consideration before the Copenhagen Accord contained unresolved alternative atmospheric GHG concentration goals such as 350 and 450 parts per million of CO2. Only by adopting an atmospheric GHG concentration target, can anyone analyze the sufficiency of national commitments. And so the 2°C warming limit adopted by the Accord is virtually worthless in determining whether national emissions reductions commitments are adequate to protect human health and the environment from climate change.

• There is substantial scientific evidence that even the 1.5 °C temperature limit would not be sufficient to protect those most vulnerable to climate change. For instance, a recent paper by Jim Hansen and seven other authors concluded that additional warming should be limited to 1°C warming and to do this existing atmospheric concentrations of CO2 must not only not be allowed to rise the small amount to 450 ppm of carbon equivalent but must be reduced from existing levels of 385 ppm to 350 ppm CO2. (Hansen et al 2008) According to this paper, the world has likely already shot past the level of atmospheric concentrations that will lead to dangerous climate change for many. Under this view, the world has already used up all of the assimilative capacity of the atmosphere and biosphere that has been available to buffer against dangerous climate change. Given this, a strong ethical argument can be made that all nations have a duty to try to prevent additional warming of almost any amount, while the Copenhagen Accord legitimizes an additional 2°C warming. Given that the Copenhagen Accord can also be understood to legitimize any national GHG emissions target that is proposed voluntarily, even if it is insufficient to achieve the 2°C temperature limit goal adopted by the Accord, let alone the duty to try and prevent any additional warming, the Accord is ethically problematic. Given that a case can be made that current levels atmospheric GHG concentrations are already harming or putting people and ecosystems at risk, it is difficult to make an ethically acceptable case that atmospheric GHG concentration targets higher than current levels are justified unless consent is given by those who are already being harmed by warming. Yet the Copenhagen Accord assumes that an additional 2°C warming is acceptable.The national GHG emissions reduction commitments that have been identified to be included in the Annex to the Copenhagen Accord are not sufficient to even achieve the 2°C temperature limit goal. As one commentator has explained:

1. As a group, the Copenhagen commitments for the biggest emitters, if confirmed, would imply a 28% increase of emissions above the 1990 level.
2. Compared with the business-as-usual scenario for those countries, emissions would be reduced by 21%.
3. Assuming that the rest of the world continues on a business-as-usual path, global emissions would increase to about 48 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent (GT CO2-eq) by 2020. This represents a 29% increase with respect to 1990, a 5% increase with respect to 2005 and a 16% reduction with respect to business-as-usual
4. The Copenhagen declarations are clearly insufficient to control global warming below 2°C – even if they are substantial when compared with the business-as-usual scenario. What at first glance seemed like good news – the emission-reduction declarations – turns out to be bad news. The declarations are inconsistent with the 2°C temperature target, even though the target is reiterated in the Copenhagen Accord itself. (Carraro and Massetti, 2010)

For this reason, the Copenhagen Accord is ethically problematic because it appears to legitimize emissions reductions commitments that are inconsistent with its temperature limit goal.

We have also seen that the United States approached negotiations of the Copenhagen Accord as if the United States need not make emissions reductions commitments unless it could secure commitments to reduce GHG emissions from high-emitting developing countries.

A prior ClimateEthics post examined in detail whether one nation may make its emissions reduction commitments contingent upon other nations’ promises to do so. See, Ethical Issues Raised By US Blue Dog Democratic Senators’ Opposition to Climate Legislation – When May a Nation Make Domestic GHG Reduction Commitments Contingent on Other Nations’ Actions, http://climateethics.org/?p=206. In that post, ClimateEthics concluded that no nation may deny its duty to reduce its emissions to its fair share of safe global emissions on the basis that others who are contributing to the harm have failed to cease harmful behavior. This is so because no nation or person has a right to continue destructive behavior on the basis that others who are contributing to the harm have not ceased their destructive behavior.

And so, if some nations are not willing to reduce their emissions to levels consistent with what justice requires of them, no nation, including the United States, can refuse to reduce its emissions to its fair share of safe global emissions levels on the basis that others won’t act.

Although the United States is well within its rights to obtain promises of other nations to contribute to solving the climate change problem, it may not as a matter of ethics condition its willingness to reduce its emissions to levels required by justice on other nations’ behavior. That is, although it may be in everyone’s interest if the United States encourages others to make GHG emissions reductions commitments, the United States may not refuse to reduce its emissions to its fair share of safe global emissions on the basis that others have not acted. The United States could ethically link non-obligatory climate change actions on other’s participation in climate change solutions but must agree to do what ethics requires of it in reducing emissions without regard to the actions of others.

Therefore, from the standpoint of the environmental sufficiency goal, the Accord fails to satisfy the requirement that any post-Kyoto regime must assure that the international community is on a greenhouse gas emissions reduction pathway that will prevent dangerous climate change harm.

b. Equity Criteria

The second minimum ethical criteria that all Copenhagen proposals must meet is the requirement that emissions reduction proposals must be consistent with what “equity” and “justice” demands of them. In a prior post on this matter, ClimateEthics explored in detail what the equity criteria would require of nations in any second commitment period climate regime. See, Nations Must Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions To Their Fair Share of Safe Global Emissions Without Regard To What Other Nations Do,http://climateethics.org/?p=37.  Summarizing a much longer analysis on equity in this prior post, equity requires that each nation reduce its emissions to its fair share of safe global emissions. And so, each nation’s emissions reduction levels should be based upon what distributive and retributive justice demands, not on national self-interest. Although there are different theories of distributive justice that lead to different national allocations, many justifications for national GHG emissions allocations fail to satisfy any ethical scrutiny. In other words, it is not necessary to know what perfect justice requires to conclude that some proposals for national GHG allocations are unjust. One such common approach to national GHG emissions reductions commitments that fails to satisfy any ethical scrutiny is the claim that all nations must reduce emissions by the same amount without regard to whether a nation is a large or small contributor to the climate change problem, an approach often referred to as ‘grandfathering’ or equal reductions from existing emissions levels. It would appear that some of the national commitments that will be included in the Accord are based upon grandfathering emissions reductions from existing levels.

Since most nations entered the Copenhagen negotiations as if national interest rather than global responsibility to others was an adequate basis for national climate change policies, the Copenhagen Accord has failed to satisfy equity criteria. In fact, in the lead-up to Copenhagen, most of the justifications for national commitments that had been announced by countries to reduce emissions were exclusively focused on whether they met global goals to reduce GHG emissions unadjusted by equity considerations

There have been several proposals discussed by the international community about second commitment period frameworks that would expressly incorporate equity into future GHG emissions reductions pathways. Two such frameworks are known as “Contraction and Convergence” (C&C, 2009) and “Greenhouse Development Rights” (GDR) (Bear and Athanasiou, 2009) frameworks. In the lead-up to Copenhagen, all major GHG emitting nations ignored the C&C or GDR frameworks or any other comprehensive framework that took equity into account. In fact, the Copenhagen Accord allows each nation to identify its emissions reduction commitment based upon voluntary national considerations without regard to equity.

Therefore, the Copenhagen Accord is a complete failure in satisfying equity criteria.

c. Just Adaptation Criteria

The third minimum ethical criteria for judging any second commitment period under the UNFCCC is that it must provide adequate funding to support adaptation programs in developing countries given that some developing countries have done nothing to cause climate change and must take steps to avoid harsh impacts.

As ClimateEthics reported previously, in Copenhagen there was a huge blossoming of interest in adaptation to climate change and the linking of the adaptation agenda to everything else. All of a sudden the world has awoken to specific adaptation questions such as: (a) Who is going to pay for climate change damages?, (b) How should these monies be administered?, (c) To whom should they go?, (d) How to set priorities among adaptation needs, and (e) How much money will be made available for growing adaptation needs? From the standpoint of the poorest developing countries, adaptation issues have been a high priority for some time but now these issues are high on the negotiating agenda for all because every day it is becoming more difficult to prevent climate change damages. In fact, for some parts of the world adverse climate change impacts are not a future threat but a present reality

Over the last several years, developing countries have pushed the adaptation agenda to center stage in international climate change negotiations. In Bali, a decision was made to create a new adaptation fund as part of the UNFCCC climate change architecture and to put adaptation on an equal footing with mitigation. For the last few years, adaptation has been growing in importance in international climate change negotiations, yet the energy, force, manner, and specificity with which the adaptation agenda is being negotiated is new.
For instance, for the first time some developing countries succeeded in getting the words “ecological debt” into the negotiating text. One proposed paragraph provides:

The guiding principles of the Convention should support subparagraphs (b) and (c) above, in terms of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, historical responsibilities in greenhouse gas emissions and the related historical ecological debt generated by the cumulative greenhouse gas emissions since 1750 and the most recent scientific information. (UNFCCC, doc 14, page 17)

The negotiating text leading up to Copenhangen called adaptation “urgent” and provides that the “polluters shall pay” through “mandatory” contributions for “new, predictable, and additional sources of funding” for:
• vulnerability assessments,
• adaptation planning,
• adaptation implementation,
• short-term shocks and long-term climate shifts,
• special funding amounts for particularly vulnerable countries including small island states and African countries affected by desertification, droughts and floods,
• disaster readiness and relief,
• creation of a new international body under the UNFCCC to monitor and determine adaptation needs, assess capacity building needs of developing countries, oversee the creation of adaptation funds, and creation of national adaptation funding,
• creation of regional adaptation centers, and
• creation of new international adaptation committees that collect, analyze, and disseminate information on adaptation.

Yet, it was the amount of the adaptation funding agenda identified in the negotiating text that has profound historical significance for developed countries. According to one provision in the proposed negotiation text, funding for adaptation should be in the range of $70 to $140 billion per year until 2020 and then updated after. Another proposal calls for mandatory adaptation in the amount of 0.5 % of GDP for developed countries.

As we have seen, the Accord acknowledges that enhanced action and international cooperation on adaptation are urgently required in developing countries, especially in the least developed countries, the small island states, and Africa. The Accord also states that that developed countries shall provide adequate, predictable and sustainable financial resources, technology and capacity building to support adaptation. Yet, as we have also seen, the United States expressly denied that this funding is a duty or responsibility but a matter of “largess.”

Although short- and long-term funding amounts for a variety of developing country climate change needs are also recognized in the Accord, this document does not acknowledge that this funding is in fulfillment of national responsibilities and in fact may be satisfied from ‘public and private’ sources.

In the Accord, the developed nations only promised to take steps to mobilize funding from a variety of sources, not provide dedicated funding sources.

As we have seen above, the assertion that the United States has no duties for adaptation was made by US chief negotiator Todd Stern who said:
I actually completely reject the notion of a debt or reparations or anything of the like. For most of the 200 years since the Industrial Revolution, people were blissfully ignorant of the fact that emissions caused a greenhouse effect. It’s a relatively recent phenomenon. (Revkin and Zeller, 2009)

And so, the United States’s denial of responsibility for adaptation appears to be based upon lack of knowledge of harm. Although there are some interesting ethical questions about when this responsibility should start, the international community could have been put on notice of potential climate change harms on the following dates:
o In 1824, Joseph Fourier described the greenhouse effect for the first time
o In 1894, Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius calculated that a doubling of CO2 would increase global temperatures by 5 0 C.
o In the late 1950s, direct measurements of atmospheric CO2 demonstrated rising levels in direct proportion to fossil fuel use around the world,
o In 1965, President Johnson’s Scientific Advisory Committee warned that climate change was a “real concern.”
o In the 1970s computer model based studies were warning the world that climate change would create adverse climate change impacts.
o In 1981, Albert Gore organized a climate change hearing on Capitol Hill.
o In 1985, scientists at Villach, Austria conference reached consensus that global warming was happening and international treaties were needed to curb emissions.
o In 1988. the UN-led Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established to assess state of knowledge on climate change.
o 1990, IPCC issued its first report concluding that climate change was a serious problem.

And so the United States cannot deny that it was on notice about the harms of climate change for many decades and certainly at the very latest by 1990. Therefore, if responsibility for harms starts upon notice of potential harm, a strong claim can be made that all developed countries have been on notice for many decades.

Because the Copenhagen Accord made no binding commitments on the part of developed countries for adaptation and provides no reliable adaptation funding mechanism, The Copenhagen Accord must be understood to fail the just adaptation criteria.

VI. Conclusions-Climate Change Ethics after Copenhagen.

The Copenhagen Accord is ethically problematic for reasons stated in this post among other reasons. In summary, the commitments made by nations in the Accord are not environmentally sufficient, distributively just, nor provide for just adaptation responses for vulnerable developing countries.

The next climate change negotiations will take place in Mexico City in November 2010. Although it is possible that developed nations will take more ethically responsible positions on an urgently needed global climate change solution, the world is running out of time to do this according to the consensus scientific view

The longer the world waits to reduce its GHG emissions, the more important and expensive will be the adaptation agenda and the steeper emissions reductions commitments will need to be to protect vulnerable developing countries. Each failure to develop a global solution to a climate change regime will make it more difficult to forge a just climate change regime.

It would appear that US domestic action on climate change is a key to success at the international level. In the months ahead there are sure to be many arguments made against US climate change legislation in the United States. If these arguments follow past patterns, they will predominantly be claims based on narrow, short-term national economic self-interest devoid of any recognition of duties, responsibilities, and obligations to others to prevent climate change If this is the case, those interested in an ethically justifiable global solution to climate change need to turn up the volume on the ethical problems with US climate change responses.

As ClimateEthics has previously pointed out, the US press has utterly failed to emphasize the ethical dimensions of climate change and as a result most Americans see little problem with judging national climate change policies on the basis of national economic interest. As a result, ethics and justice are the crucial missing elements in the US national conversation about climate change policies.

By:

Donald A. Brown, dab57@psu.edu

Associate Professor, Environmental Ethics, Science, and Law
The Pennsylvania State University
Program on Science, Technology, and Society

References:
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What happened? Is it a good deal? Who wins and who loses? What is next?, Institut Du Développement Durable Et Des Relations Internationals, December 2009, http://www.iddri.org/Publications/Collections/Idees-pour-le-debat/Id_082009_guerin_wemaere_accord_copenhague.pdf.

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http://www.reuters.com/article/idUKTRE5BI0ID20091219

Revkin, Andrew, and Tom Zeller, U.S. Negotiator Dismisses Reparations for Climate , New York Times, Dec. 9, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/10/science/earth/10climate.html

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I. Introduction.

There is something new in the air here in the Copenhagen climate change negotiations.

These new developments have profound implications for the international community but particularly for developed nations such as the United States, Australia, Canada, and the European Union countries.

I have been participating in international climate change negotiating sessions since the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit in 1992 including seven conference of the parties (COPs) under the United States Framework Convention on Climate Change. I also negotiated climate change and other environmental issues for the United States EPA at the United Nations from 1995 to 1998. This experience leads me to conclude that there are two new big stories here in the Copenhagen that have implications far beyond those generated by the perennial climate change debates about whether nations should make meaningful commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Of course, the world is still watching which nations will make significant greenhouse gas reduction commitments. Yet other climate change issues are pushing to be the central focus in  Copenhagen.

II. Ethics and Climate Change.
The first is the frequency and centrality in which the claim that climate change is an ethical problem, that is responses to climate change must be guided by ethical, justice, and human rights considerations. Unlike previous years, the agenda in Copenhagen has included dozens of meetings and side-events expressly devoted to the ethical dimensions of climate change. In addition claims that climate change raises ethical issues have also been frequently heard in other Copenhagen meetings and events devoted to other topics. Clearly, developing countries and NGOs have been successful in turning up the volume on the ethical dimensions of climate change.

Of course, one occasionally heard that climate change triggers ethical issues at prior climate change COPs, yet here in Copenhagen it is as if the ethical, justice, and human rights dimensions of climate change has become the central organizing principle for resolving climate change disputes. As we shall see, this development has important practical consequences.

However, despite the apparent growing recognition that climate change is an ethical, justice, and human rights issue, many nations continue to negotiate as if national economic interest alone is a sufficient justification for domestic climate change policies on the slate of Copenhagen issues under consideration including greenhouse gas emissions reduction commitments, and funding adaptation, technological transfer, and programs that will prevent deforestation. Yet, if climate change is an ethical issue, several practical consequences follow.

The Collaborative Program on the Ethical Dimensions of Climate Change (EDCC), a program comprised of 17 ethics institutes around the world whose Secretariat is the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State University, convened several events in Copenhagen that focused on how the negotiations must practically change if nations take seriously the idea that climate change triggers ethical, justice, or human rights issues.

The practical consequences of this new acknowledgment that climate change triggers ethics, justice, and human rights issues, is that nations have duties, obligations, and responsibilities to others and therefore may not justify their national climate change policies on narrow economic self-interest. And so, EDCC in Copenhagen has urged citizens and the press to demand that nations that base their negotiating positions upon narrow economic self-interest explain whether they deny that they have duties and responsibilities to poor people most vulnerable to climate change or if they do not deny such obligations to explain how their positions protect those most at risk.

This new recognition that climate change is an ethical issue has huge consequences for those who have been causing the problem, mostly the developed nations. For once the ethical, justice, and human rights dimensions of climate change are acknowledged, nations may no longer justify their positions on climate change issues on national interest alone, but must make national policies conform to what ethics, justice, and human rights demand of them. That is, for instance, each nation would be required to make domestic climate change policy conform to what is its fair share of safe global emissions and adaptation, deforestation, and technology transfer funding responsibilities.

Although, different theories of distributive justice might come to different conclusions about what is fair, a framing of climate change as an ethical, justice, and human rights issue would remove from consideration positions often taken by some governments such as that climate change policies would impose new costs on them or put certain domestic industries at financial risk. In the United States, for instance, we often hear opposition to climate change legislation on the basis that a proposed bill will hurt the coal industry in a coal state, a position that seems to ignore the responsibility of people in coal states to protect poor people in Africa from climate change. Although domestic economic impacts of climate change policies are still arguably relevant to how domestic policy is formed, no nation can ignore the need to fulfill their obligations to others around the world in developing domestic climate change policies if climate change is an ethical responsibility.

On specific climate change issues in contention in Copenhagen, the practical consequences of nations having responsibilities to others leads to eliminating many options now on the table. For instance, one of the issues under consideration is an atmospheric greenhouse gas stabilization target. On the table are 350, 450, and 550 parts per million CO2. Only a stabilization level toward the 350 ppm level is protective of the most vulnerable. And so on this issue, if nations have obligations to the most vulnerable they must explain how higher atmospheric concentrations will protect those most at risk, something that the current most scientists would not agree with.

Here in Copenhagen because millions of people in poor countries are now already experiencing harsh effects of climate change and because developing countries have been continuing to learn about and organize around the justice implications of climate change, ethics has broken through as the central metaphor for arguing about climate change responses. The world appears to be waking up to the fact that millions of people are very vulnerable to climate change, a problem which the vulnerable have had little to do with causing and about which they can do almost nothing fix. In turn the vulnerable have turned up the volume on the ethical dimensions of climate change.

The profound historical significance of an acknowledgment that climate change is an ethical issue is particularly significant in regard to the second Copenhagen development, the new importance of the adaptation agenda.

III. Adaptation
The second major development in Copenhagen is that there has been a huge blossoming of interest in adaptation to climate change and the linking of the adaptation agenda to everything else. All of a sudden the world has woken up to specific adaptation questions such as who is going to pay for climate change damages, how should these monies by administered, to whom should they go, how to set priorities among adaptation needs, and how much money will be made available for growing adaptation needs? From the standpoint of the poorest developing countries, questions of adaptation to climate change have been a high priority for some time but now they are high in the negotiating agenda for all.

Over the last several years, developing countries have pushed the adaptation agenda to center stage in international climate change negotiations. In Bali, Indonesia in 2007, a decision was made to create a new adaptation fund as part of the UNFCCC climate change architecture and to put adaptation on an equal footing with mitigation. For the last few years, adaptation has been growing in importance in international climate change negotiations. And so like ethics, adaptation is not new idea in climate change negotiations. However the energy, force, manner, and specificity with which the adaptation agenda is being negotiated is new.

For instance, for the first time developing countries have succeeded in getting the words “ecological debt” into the negotiating text. One proposed paragraph provides:

The guiding principles of the Convention should support subparagraphs (b) and (c) above, in terms of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, historical responsibilities in greenhouse gas emissions and the related historical ecological debt generated by the cumulative greenhouse gas emissions since 1750 and the most recent scientific information. (UNFCCC, doc 14, page 17)

Proposed adaptation text calls adaptation “urgent” and provides that the “polluters shall pay” through “mandatory” contributions for “new, predictable, and additional sources of funding” for:

• vulnerability assessments,
• adaptation planning,
• adaptation implementation,
• short-term shocks and long-term climate shifts,
• special funding amounts for particularly vulnerable countries including small island states and Africa affected by desertification, droughts and floods,
• disaster readiness and relief,
• creation of a new international body under the UNFCCC to monitor and determine adaptation needs, assess capacity building needs of developing countries, oversee the creation of adaptation funds, and creation of national adaptation funding,
• creation of regional adaptation centers, and
• creation of new international adaptation committees that collect, analyze, and disseminate information on adaptation,

Yet, it is the amount of the adaptation funding agenda that has profound historical significance for developed countries. According to one provision in the proposed negotiation text, funding for adaptation should be in the range of 70 to 140 billion per year until 2020 and then updated after. Another proposal calls for mandatory adaptation in the amount of 0.5 % of GDP for developed countries.

The proposed text also provides that funding for these adaptation costs could come from

(a) assessed funding amount

(b) emissions allowances,

(c) levies on carbon emissions,

(d) taxes on carbon intensive products,

(e) taxes on international aviation,

(f) fines for non-compliance with emissions commitments, and

(g) taxes on capital transfers between developed and developing countries

The proposed text also states t hat contributions for adaptation should be based on the following principles:
(a) total emissions – polluter pays;

(b) per capita emissions – Equity;

(c) emissions per unit of GDP,

(d) size of economy, or

(e) capacity to pay

All of these formula put the developed nations on the hook for adaptation funding. In addition, ethics would make those responsible for the climate change problem pay for the damages from climate change, although there are some interesting ethical questions about when this responsibility should start. In any event, the costs to developed nations for adaptation could far exceed costs of reducing emissions. In addition, since future emissions reduction amounts will likely determine how much adaptation is necessary, the failure to assume costs now of reducing emissions will most likely increase costs of adapting later. Not to mention that some adaptation costs may be so great that no amount of funding will likely compensate those who have been damaged.

As of now, the developed nations have not yet made adaptation commitments.

By:

Donald A. Brown
Associate Professor, Environmental Ethics, Science, and Law
Penn State University
Dab57@psu.edu.

Ethics: Crucial Missing Element in Negotiations: Duties and Responsibilities, Not Just Narrow National Economic Interest

Preamble
Climate justice is a welcome theme at the Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and its related instruments, including those being discussed at Copenhagen, include ethical principles that are meant to guide the implementation of the treaty framework. What we see instead is that too many Parties are ignoring climate justice, and even the ethical principles embedded in the treaty and acting instead out of narrow self interest.

If parties recognized and acted on their ethical duties, obligations, and responsibilities when negotiating the Copenhagen text certain issues still under negotiation could be more easily resolved.

Long-term vision and national commitments
If parties acted on ethical principles in the negotiations on long-term vision and national commitments, we contend they would:
• Take a position based not only on their domestic economic interests, but acknowledge their duties and obligations to those most vulnerable to climate change including future generations. Given this, nations that do not support limiting additional warming to the lowest achievable target should be required to justify their position.
• Acknowledge that the principles of common but differentiated responsibilities and protection of the climate system for the benefit of present and future generations should guide mitigation commitments.
• Recognize that an atmospheric stabilization goal will affect not only health and the environment but also, the availability of natural resources on which life depends, and the very existence of some counties. Given this, national economic interest alone is an ethically bankrupt justification for national positions on long-term vision and national emissions reduction targets.
• Make commitments on national emissions targets that would represent their fair share of total global emissions necessary to achieve the atmospheric concentration goals mindful of the fact that scientists now believe that global emissions must peak in the next few years and be reduced by 25% to 40% by 2020.
• Furthermore, mitigation commitments must consider the biosphere as a whole – what has been called the commonwealth of life.

Adaptation
Ethical considerations should also guide the way adaptation issues are being debated. For example:
• Ethical considerations argue for the development of a process for overseeing adaptation efforts that is participatory, that is, represented by individuals from all geographic areas, and include the active input from all interested parties, especially the most vulnerable parties experiencing the most severe impacts of climate change, as well as transparent. Furthermore, distributive justice concerns must structure decisions as to which countries are eligible for funding for adaptation projects and how much funding can be so requested.
• The current text being negotiated leaves unresolved the status of ethical principles that are well established in the UNFCCC such as the precautionary principle; the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities; and the polluter pays principle, leaving it uncertain whether the obligations are binding (shall) or voluntary (should). Also included in this section and still up for negotiation is the status of the claims that the adaptation decisions be guided by the best available science and traditional knowledge, and include all relevant stakeholders in a participatory and gender-sensitive manner. Ethical considerations would require that all of these principles become binding obligations.
• Also currently up for debate is the strength of the commitment that financial support for adaptation be in addition to resources provided by developed country parties to meet their official development assistance (ODA) targets. Ethics would demand that the adaptation funds are in addition to the ODA funding.
• We commend the ethical integrity of the negotiating text for adaptation in upholding the polluter pays principle. This principle implies distinct and essential duties and responsibilities for both mitigation and adaptation. In regard to adaptation, it maintains that polluters compensate those affected by unavoidable and unavoided harms and. However, the fact that adaptation has been elevated to the position of importance that it has in the current negotiations is an indication of the failure to date to mitigate climate change as well as a clear expression of the fact that developing nations have demanded that justice concerns be an essential element of the negotiating text and taken on such importance.

REDD
Negotiations on REDD should also be guided by the demands of justice. For example:
• REDD protects forests in order to reduce greenhouse gases. Justice demands that developed countries support programs that effectively reduce deforestation.
• The draft REDD text contains promising ethical language, including obligations to “respect the knowledge and rights of indigenous peoples and members of local communities” and promote “the full and effective participation of all relevant stakeholders.” Some positions on REDD could lead to practices that endanger the livelihoods and traditions of indigenous peoples who depend upon forest resources. Procedural justice therefore requires that the REDD process be participatory and transparent and equitable in terms of how burdens and benefits are distributed.
• Some positions on REDD could undermine biodiversity though the support of such practices as monoculture plantations. This raises ethical issues regarding our duties to future generations as well as to the biosphere as a whole.
• Many ethical questions remain about accountability, implementation, measurements, and funding. In addition, timely and appropriate support for capacity building is essential to ensuring that a broad range of developing countries can participate in the REDD mechanism. These principles need to be articulated in a clearer and more compelling fashion if they are to inspire the trust and confidence of the peoples of the world and help to propel the changes in behaviour that all citizens must embrace. Difficult as the necessary ethical choices may be, a consensus can be achieved if principles that have already been agreed to are strengthened and deepened.

Conclusion

Although there is growing acceptance that the issues issue being debated in Copenhagen must be understood as raising profound moral and ethical issues, it is clear that some parties continue to base their decisions on national economic interest.

The time has come to demand that nations be required to formulate policies in response to the climate change crisis on the basis of what justice requires. Therefore, we call on citizens around the world to demand that all nations accept their obligations and responsibilities to not harm others or the natural resources on which they depend. The press can play an important role in transforming how issues such as these we have discussed today are debated by asking those nations who appear to support their position based on national economic interest to justify their failure to accept their duties and responsibilities to others.

The Collaborative Program on the Ethical Dimensions of Climate Change (EDCC) is comprised of seventeen institutions around the world working on climate change ethics, with secretariat at the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State University. For further information contact Don Brown dab57@psu.edu or Nancy Tuana ntuana@psu.edu

A few days before Copenhagen, ClimateEthics.org sees the following civilization challenging ethical issues raised by the Copenhagen Agenda.  References to “non-papers” in the following are documents that have been developed by preparatory meetings leading up to Copenhagen.

ClimateEthics.org will be expanding on this preliminary analysis as the Copenhagen agenda moves along in the next two weeks.

A. Long -term Share Vision (See non-paper 52):

1. Should developing countries contribute to moving the world to a low carbon emissions pathway through nationally appropriate mitigation actions (NAMAs)?
2. Should the long-term global goal for emissions reductions include a stabilization of CO2 at 350 ppm, 400ppm, 450ppm?
3. Will nations commit to do their fair share of ghg emissions reductions  necessary to avoid dangerous anthropocentric interference with the climate system?
4. Should there be global goal for emissions ghg reductions at 2020 and 2050? What should the percentage reductions be by these dates?
5. Should the UNFCCC financial mechanism include: (a) an adaptation window, (b) a compensation window, (c) a technology window, (d) a REDD window.
6. Should the international community agree to limit global warming to 2⁰ C, or 1.5 ⁰ C?
7. Should the international community agree to reduce average global emissions to 2 tons per capita?
8. Should developed nations agree that further delay in reducing ghg emissions will increase their climate debt/
9. How quickly are parties willing to act to achieve the lowest possible ghg atmospheric  stabilization target.
10. Whose interests are considered by nations when they adopted a climate change strategy? Have they considered duties and responsibilities to those most vulnerable to climate change including many of the world’s poorest people and particularly vulnerable subgroups?
11. Do nations that have adopted a national ghg targets looked at their international responsibilities or only national self-interest?
12. What are the ethical issues raised by cost-benefit analyses of proposed international climate change regimes?

B. Allocation and acceptance of national ghg national targets to replace the Kyoto Protocol. (non-paper 28)

1. What is each nation’s willingness to accept their fair share of global emissions that will achieve a just and safe ghg atmospheric stabilization level?
2. To what extent is the right to development limited by obligations to reduce ghg emissions??
3. Should adaptation and mitigation efforts under the UNFCCC be given equal consideration?
4. Should developed countries commitments be legally binding while developing country commitments are voluntary?
5. Should ghg stabilization levels be less than 350 ppm?
6. Should aggregate ghg emissions by developed countries be reduced by 25-to 40 percent by 2020 compared to 1990.
7. Is each nation’s ghg reduction commitment ethically justified given the urgency of most-recent science conclusions that rapid peaking of global emissions followed by very steep global ghg emissions are necessary to prevent possibly catastrophic warming.
8. What is each nations justification for not reducing ghg emissions as quickly as possible to their fair share of safe global emissions given the longer the international community waits to reduce ghg emissions the more difficult it will be to stabilize ghg at safe levels?
9. What are the duties of those nations that have caused most of the increases in ghg to take responsibility for past emissions?
10. To what extent are economic arguments made by nations in support of their national ghg strategy  ethically justifiable?

C. Adaptation To Climate Change (non-paper 53)

1. Who is responsible for paying for  climate change damages that are already being experienced, could be avoided if action is now taken, or are unavoidable because there is no way of protecting from some kind of damages?
2. Must financial support for adaptation be substantially scaled-up, adequate, predictable, sustainable, stable, timely, sufficient, commensurate, country and demand driven and additional to ODA?
3. Should adaptation funding  be prioritized so that least developed countries, small island developing states, and countries in Africa affected by drought, desertification, and floods get a preference?
4. How much money should be  made available for adaptation in any post-Kyoto regime?
5. How to ethically order priorities for likely scarce adaptation funds?
6. Who gets to decide how adaptation funds will be spent?
7. How to fund adaptation in a way that is distributively and procedurally just.
8. Should adaptation funding go to nations, sub-national governments. regions,  groups, or  individuals?
9. How should historic responsibility be considered in assigning adaptation responsibility   given : (a) developed nations have contributed most to recent increases atmospheric ghg concentrations, (b) some countries that are often classified as developing countries are arguably already or soon will exceed their fair share of safe ghg emissions (b)  different arguments can be made when historical reasonability should be assigned given the need to consider when nations should have been aware that emissions from their territories where putting people and ecological systems at risk; (c) within all nations there are great differences among peoples and organizations in amounts of ghg that have been emitted, and (d) humans have been affecting the concentrations of ghg in the atmosphere for thousands of years by  such activities as forest clearing and agriculture.

D. Technology Transfer (see, non-paper 47)

1. What are the ethical obligations of developed nations to fund technology transfer to developing nations?
2. Is technology transfer from developed to developing countries obligated by climate debt?
3. Do developed nations have a duty to remove barriers to transfer sustainable technology to developing countries?
4. Do developing countries have the right to identify their technology needs in a way that is nationally determined?
5. Do developed nations have a duty to establish a Technology Mechanism that is supported by predictable funding?
6. What amount of funding should be made available for technology transfer
7. To what extent should intellectual property rights be amended to facilitate technology transfer?
8. What institutional structures need to be created to assure adequate and appropriate technology transfer to developing countries?.

E. Deforestation and REDD. (see, non-paper 39)

1. How much funding should be made available by developed nations to prevent deforestation through REDD?
2. What goals should be set for halting forest cove loss in developing countries by 2020 and at late stages?
3. Should REDD be part of the flexibility mechanisms under the UNFCCC given problems with environmental effectiveness, leakage, permanence, measurement, monitoring, and enforcement of forest projects?
4. Should REDD projects be consistent with nationally appropriate mitigation actions (NAMAs)?
5. Who should be funded for deforestation projects?
6. To whom should funding go?- nations, regional and local governments, people?
7. How should baselines be set for REDD projects?
8. Should those who have not acted responsibly to protect forest resources now receive benefits of REDD funding?
9. Who should decide on the acceptability of REDD projects?
10. What types of activities should be funded?
11. Should tree plantations be funded under REDD?
12. Who should be responsible for enforcement of REDD projects?
13. How should rights of indigenous people be protected from REDD projects?
14. Should actions under REDD be undertaken in phases including national action plans, policies and measures, capacity building, and technology transfer?
15. Should specialized funds be developed under REDD?
16. Should all REDD funding be additional to ODA?
17. How should measurement, reporting, and verification of REDD projects be managed?
18. Should all REDD projects accounting of carbon stocks be in accordance with methodological guidance adopted by the COP?

F. Ethical Issues Raised By Trading Carbon

1. Is it ethically supportable to give entities property rights to the atmosphere when issuing climate permits?
2. Should allowances to emit carbon be auctioned or given away?
3. Should off-sets from caps be allowed given problems with environmental effectiveness, leakage, permanence, and enforceability of off-set projects?
4. Should any entity be able to avoid reducing their emissions because they can afford to buy permits from someone else?
5. Should developing countries give up their ability to find cheaper carbon reductions when they allow someone to fund a CMD project in their country?
6. Who in any developing country should have the right to approve a CDM project?
7. What would distributive justice issues are raised by how carbon emission allowances are awarded.?

G. Other Cross-Cutting Ethical Issues

1. What are the ethical issues raised by cost-benefit analyses and other cost arguments made in support of slower responses to climate change?
2. Can a nation wait until new technologies become affordable before making a commitment to reduce the threat of climate change?
3. What are the responsibilities of developing countries to reduce the threat of climate change?
4. What are the responsibilities of sub- national governments, organizations, businesses and individuals to reduce the threat of climate change?
5. What ethical issues are raised by scientific uncertainty about climate change impacts?
6. What ethical issues are raised by economic uncertainty about climate change costs and impacts?
7. How to assure that potential victims of climate change have an opportunity to give or withhold fully informed consent to be put at risk by others?
8. What gender considerations should be taken into account in formulating climate change?

By:
Donald A. Brown.
Associate Professor, Environmental Ethics, Science, and Law
Penn State University
Dab57@psu.edu

II. The Duties Of Regional And Local Governments, Organizations, Businesses, And Individuals To Reduce GHG Emissions.
Do regional and local governments, organizations, businesses, and individuals have duties along with nations to reduce GHG emissions?

Because regional and local governments, organizations, businesses, and individuals are responsible for GHG emissions that have caused and will continue to cause harm to others, all have responsibilities to limit their harmful emissions to their fair share of safe global emissions without regard to whether their nation has acted. Yet, as was the case for nations, different theories of retributive and distributive justice would reach different conclusions about each entity’s fair share of safe global emissions. However, as was also the case for national governments, some high emitting groups and individuals cannot reasonably argue that they are not currently exceeding their fair share of safe global emissions. The reasons are several and include: (a) Their emissions levels are very high compared to others; (b) Huge reductions in emissions from existing emissions levels are necessary to achieve safe atmospheric stabilization levels; and (c) Climate change damages to some people, not to mention plants, animals, and ecological systems, are already occurring. Under these facts, it is simply inconceivable that those emitting high levels of greenhouse gases compared to others are not exceeding their fair share of safe global emissions given the enormity of reductions that are needed globally to return total global emissions to levels that are not already causing harm.

Theories of distributive justice require anyone causing serious harms to others to limit their behavior to levels that in combination of with levels from others no longer cause harm to others where the magnitude of the levels of reductions are guided by principles of distributive justice. Distributive justice theories require that people shoulder burdens equally unless there are morally relevant criteria for being treated differently. For this reason, high-emitting regional and local governments, organizations, businesses, and individuals that cannot make the case that their emissions levels are justified by morally relevant criteria are exceeding their fair share of safe global GHG emissions and have an immediate duty to reduce their emission to their fair share of safe global emissions.

One might ask who are the high emitting regional and local governments, organizations, businesses, and individuals that are exceeding their fair share of safe global emissions given differences in distributive justice theories. Although different theories of distributive justice would lead to different allocations of responsibility (a matter to be considered in detail by future posts, but a matter beyond the scope of this post), it is safe to say that most governments, organizations, businesses, and individuals in developed nations far exceed any conceivably just global allocation of safe GHG emissions. This is so because of the huge differences in per capita emissions between developed and developing countries and the need to reduce total global emissions by 60 to 80% from global total emissions to prevent dangerous climate change. For instance, US citizens in 2006 were emitting 19 tons CO2 equivalent per capita compared to 1.9 tons for Brazil, 0.8 tons for the Philippines, and 0.3 tons for Kenya. (UN Millennium Development Goals, 2009)

In addition, given that responsibility for past emissions is arguably a factor that should be considered in determining fair allocations and given that people in most developed countries have historically emitted much higher levels than people in developing countries, it is quite clear that the vast majority of regional and local governments, organizations, and businesses cannot reasonably argue that they are not exceeding their fair share of safe global emissions. For instance, if responsibility for reducing GHG emissions is allocated in part on historic emissions, the largest portion of historic responsibility has to be attributed to the United States with 25.6% of historic emissions, followed by the 15 European Union Countries at 15.9%, OPEC countries at 7.4%, Russia at 7.3%, China at 6.4%, Brazil at 5.2%, the 76 countries of AOSIS (Association of Small Island States) and the LDC (Least Developed Countries) at 4.1%, Japan at 2.8%, and finally India with next to no responsibility at 0.3%. (Müller, Höhne, Ellermann, 2009) Although there are interesting philosophical questions about when a nation should be presumed to have had enough knowledge about likely climate change harm to make them responsible for past emissions, even if the developed nations are only assumed to have responsibility after 1990, the year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) wrote its first report to the world concluding that climate change was a huge threat, the developed nations still are responsible for the vast majority of the historical emissions since 1990. (Müller, Höhne, Ellermann, 2009)

Given the comparatively large per capita and historical emissions in developed countries and the need to make hard-to-imagine large reductions from existing global GHG emissions levels to prevent catastrophic climate change, it is extremely unlikely that regional and local governments, organizations, or businesses in developed countries can make any serious argument that they are not currently emitting in excess of their fair share of safe global emissions.
However, there may be some in developed countries that are emitting very small amounts of GHGs who can make a credible argument that they are already emitting at levels below their fair share of safe global emissions. Yet, since the world averages 6.5 CO2 tons of per capita emissions while countries like the United States are emitting 19 tons per capita, and the world must reduce per capita emissions to perhaps less than 2.0 tons per capita to prevent dangerous climate change, it is very unlikely that many groups or people in developed countries can make a respectable argument that they are already below their fair share of safe global emissions. If entities believe that they are already below their fair share of safe global emissions, they have a duty to articulate the theories of distributive justice they are relying on to justify that belief.

There also may be regional and local governments, organizations, businesses, and individuals in developing countries that are exceeding their fair share of safe global emissions. In fact there are very likely to be groups and individuals exceeding their fair share of safe global emission in developing countries because wealth differences in many developing countries are great and there are wealthy and middle classes in most countries even in countries where the vast majority of the people are very poor. Those groups and individuals in developing countries who are exceeding their fair share of safe global emissions have a duty to reduce their emissions to levels required by retributive and distributive justice notwithstanding that they are in developing countries.

To precisely figure out the obligation of groups or individuals below the national level, one must examine theories of distributive justice and retributive justice. Distributive justice is concerned with how benefits and burdens of social policies should be distributed throughout society. Retributive justice is concerned with how responsibility for harms should be allocated among those who have caused harm.

Climate change raises questions of both distributive and retributive justice because: (a) Climate change is a problem caused by some people that inflicts harm on others; (b) Some of the poorest people in the world are extremely vulnerable to its impacts and can do little to protect themselves from those impacts; (c) The adverse impacts to some of the world’s poorest people are likely to be catastrophic; and (d) Huge reductions from status quo emissions are necessary to prevent catastrophic warming. Because some people more than others have caused the problem, questions of retributive justice arise about how to allocate responsibility for past behavior and the harm that it has caused. Because the world needs to allocate acceptable levels of future GHG emissions among all peoples, climate change is a problem of distributive justice.

Retributive justice would require all people who cause harm to others to take responsibility to right the wrong they are responsible for in proportion to their contribution to the harm. Distributive justice requires that all people who are causing harm to others reduce their emissions to their fair share of safe global emission where fairness is determined either on the basis of equality or other ethically relevant criteria. There are several different respectable theories about what distributive justice requires concerning how duties and burdens should be distributed. The theories proposing respectable criteria for distributive justice include distributions on the basis of equality, need, or a Rawlsian basis where allocations must benefit poor people first, just to name a few. ClimateEthics cannot say unequivocally what distributive and retributive justice requires in determining fair GHG reductions obligations for groups and individuals. However, since many arguments about what levels of GHG emissions should be required of groups and individuals fail to conform to any respectable theory of just distributions, it is possible to conclude that some levels of GHG emissions levels are unjust without being able to state unambiguously what justice requires. For this reason, an examination of the ethical obligations of non-national governments, organizations, businesses, and individuals may not lead to a clear consensus of what ethics requires although it would reflect the universal ethical condemnation of status quo emissions levels. Given this consensus, all groups and individuals have a burden of demonstrating what justice would require of them in terms of emissions levels mindful that, as a starting point, all human beings should be entitled to equal per capita shares of safe emissions unless some higher level can be justified on moral grounds.

III. How Do National Targets Affect The Ethical Obligations of Domestic Groups and Individuals?
Because nations have the authority and responsibility to allocate national GHG emissions responsibilities among local and regional governments, organizations, businesses, and individuals within the nation, national governments can create climate change obligations for groups and individuals. If nations create emissions targets in line with their fair share of safe global emissions and if sub-national entities comply with national targets, these entities could make an ethically respectable argument that they are complying with their ethical obligations. In other words, higher level governments can affect the climate change obligations of lower governments, groups, and individuals. Once a national government assigns its constituents the responsibility to reduce GHG emissions to levels sufficient to achieve a national target that is a fair share of safe global emissions, the sub-national entities may argue that they have satisfied their duty to reduce GHG emissions. However, since nations also have a responsibility to allocate emissions to sub-national entities in conformity with principles of distributive justice, an ethical case can be made that sub-national entities should do more if they receive preferential allocations which are not fair to others.
Without doubt, in the absence of a national allocation, groups and individuals within nations have a duty to limit their GHG emissions to their fair share of safe global emissions despite legitimate differences about what fairness requires. Because principles of distributive justice require that differences in allocations from equal per capita shares to use the atmosphere be justified on the basis of morally relevant criteria, at a minimum, sub-national governments and groups should be required to explain how their emissions levels are just if they assert that they are already below what justice requires of them.

Although groups and individuals have respectable ethical arguments to make that they are complying with their ethical duties if they are meeting nationally imposed obligations, ethical arguments remain that they should do more if: (a) the national target does not move as quickly as possible to reduce the nation’s emissions to its fair share of safe global emissions, or (b) the group or individual could do more to reduce GHG emissions without imposing great hardship on themselves because they are wasting GHG emitting energy on unnecessary activities.

There are several ethical arguments that can be made that those who have the ability to reduce the great suffering of others, have an obligation to do so even if they are complying with a target assigned to them by governments. One such argument for this conclusion is that what is often is described as charity is actually a matter of obligation to others in cases where the action of a collective is necessary to restore the basic conditions necessary for the enjoyment of rights. Climate change will put into jeopardy the very lives, health, and indispensible natural resources upon which lives of hundreds of millions of people around the world depend, threatening the poorest and most vulnerable people in particular. Climate change is a threat to things that are the material conditions for human life and it is interference with the dignity of human life that is usually the predicate for recognizing specifiable human rights. In fact, climate change is currently threatening the very existence of nations like the Maldives and Kiribati. Since we have no problem acknowledging an ethical obligation to avoid trampling the specifiable rights of others, we may easily extend this principle to the conditions underlying those rights to say that we have an ethical obligation to promote and preserve the unspecified conditions that ground specifiable rights. Like charity, these “imperfect obligations” constitute an unbounded ethical constraint to go beyond specified duties in order to prevent harm when possible. (O’Neill 1989, 224) In the case of national and sub-national emissions targets, this would entail voluntary emissions reductions beyond legal restrictions on occasions when legal frameworks prescribe goals inadequate for distributive and retributive justice criteria.

Regardless of the unbounded ethical duties derived from imperfect obligations, if the climate change causing activities of some people are violating the human rights of others by interfering with life, health, or basic security, among other things, protected by human rights, a case can be made that those who can make reductions in GHG emissions targets that are nevertheless interfering with the rights of others should take steps to prevent human rights violations even if they are complying with just allocations. (For a discussion of human rights and climate change, see “The Significance of Understanding Inadequate National Climate Change Programs as Human Rights Violations.”) In other words, if climate change causing activities are violating the human rights of others, and if governments, businesses, and individuals have the power to restore these rights, they should act without regard to GHG targets and allocations.

By:
Donald A. Brown
Associate Professor, Environmental Ethics, Science, and Law
The Pennsylvania State University
Program on Science, Technology, and Society
dab57@psu.edu

Joshua Kurdys
Graduate Student in Philosophy
The Pennsylvania State University
jjk312@psu.edu

References:
Müller, Benito, Niklas Höhne, Christian Ellermann. “Differentiating (Historic), Responsibilities for Climate Change.” Summary Report, October 2007, http://www.oxfordclimatepolicy.org/publications/DifferentiatingResponsibility.pdf

O’Neill, Onora. Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant’s Practical Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

UN Millennium Development Goals, http://mdgs.un.org/unsd/mdg/Data.aspx2009 .

I. Introduction
Currently two frameworks for allocation of greenhouse gas targets among nations are supported by different proponents of an equitable post-2012 agreement: Contraction & Convergence (C&C) and Greenhouse Development Rights (GDRs). Proponents of these frameworks claim that their concept more realistically captures the structure of the climate change problem and provides a better way to solve it. The main points of contention between these two frameworks concern the questions of whether the two frameworks are “fair or feasible?” and “how fair is fair enough?” Given that there are no other national greenhouse gas allocation frameworks likely to secure support of most nations and achieve global greenhouse gas emissions reductions at a rate consistent with the urgency of the global climate change threat, it has been argued that failure to adopt one of two frameworks is ethically unacceptable (Attfield, 2008).

This post describes the advantages and disadvantages of both frameworks. Section II briefly describes the main features of both concepts. Then in Section III, this post identifies four criteria for evaluating these frameworks. Then, in Section IV both concepts are contrasted by reference to the criteria identified in Section III. Given this, the conclusion identifies the most preferable framework for solving the climate change problem.

II. Brief description of both concepts

Contraction & Convergence
C&C was first proposed in 1990 by the London-based non-governmental Global Commons Institute (GCI) (Meyer, 2000). The following will not go into details of possible variations of the C&C approach, but limit itself to the basic concept promoted by the GCI, as it is described in “GCI Briefing: “CONTRACTION & CONVERGENCE” (GCI, 2009).

Basically, Contraction and Convergence is not a prescription per se, but rather a way of demonstrating how a global prescription could be negotiated and organised (Meyer, 1999:305). Implementing C&C in its original form involves two steps. As a first step, countries need to specify Article 2 of the UNFCCC in terms of a long-term global stabilization level for atmospheric GHG concentrations (“contraction”). Effectively, this would create a global budget of GHG emissions which could be adjusted in the future to respond to improved scientific information. As a second step, countries need to stipulate a convergence date, at which time the emissions allocated to each country should complete a linear transition from status quo to equal per-capita entitlements (“convergence”). During the transition period, a yearly global carbon budget is devised which contracts gradually over time whereby the per-capita entitlements of developed countries decrease while those of most developing countries increase. After reaching convergence, all countries would contract their emissions entitlements equally until the requisite global emissions budget is reached. As promoted by the GCI, negotiations should principally take place between regions of the world with further negotiations held within regions to determine the precise amount of national emission budgets (akin to the EU bubble in the Kyoto Protocol). Further integral features of C&C are a global emissions trading scheme and a “cut-off” year which defines the population basis for allocating emissions entitlements.

Greenhouse Development Rights
The second concept, Greenhouse Development Rights (GDRs) was first presented as a broad outline at the side events of COP 10 in 2004. Unless otherwise noted, the following information on the GDRs approach is drawn from the latest, i.e. the second edition of “The Right to Development in a Climate Constrained World” by Paul Baer, Tom Athanasiou, Sivan Kartha and Erik Kemp-Benedict (Baer et al., 2008).

Compared to C&C, GDRs is a more thoroughly elaborated framework proposal. Six elements are central:
(1) GDRs specifies an extraordinarily ambitious emissions pathway which, geared to the latest alarming evidence, has a relatively high probability of holding global warming below 2°C. This “2°C emergency pathway” has absolute emissions peaking in 2013 and dropping thereafter with a maximum rate of more than 5 percent per year, resulting in reductions of 80 percent below 1990 levels in 2050. Atmospheric GHG concentrations peak at about 420 CO2 ppm (corresponding to 480 ppm CO2-eq) and by 2100 return to 400 ppm CO2-eq or below.
(2) As a further integral feature, GDRs aims at the individual. It claims to preserve the right of each individual to reach a dignified level of sustainable human development. Hence intranational income distribution is taken as a basis for global burden sharing.
(3) GDRs specifies a global development threshold in terms of an income threshold of $7500 PPP. Individuals whose income is below this threshold are ascribed the right to development. These, by definition, poor individuals are not expected to help to pay the costs of the climate transition. Individuals with income above the development threshold, by definition the global consuming class, are thought of having realized their right to development. Instead, they face the obligation of sharing the effort of funding the whole emergency program including the costs of curbing the emissions associated with their own consumption, the costs of bringing everyone below the development threshold up to that level along sustainable, low-emission pathways, in addition to the cost of adaptation to unavoidable climate change and compensation for climate damages.
(4) The precise burden sharing between individuals and states respectively is determined by the so-called Responsibility Capacity Index (RCI). The capacity component of the RCI is defined as income above the development threshold. The responsibility component of the RCI is defined as cumulative per-capita emissions since 1990, excluding emissions that correspond to consumption below the development threshold. In order to calculate the aggregated responsibility and capacity of a given country, a model of income distribution based on the Gini coefficient is used. It is assumed that within a given country, income is linear proportional to emissions, and hence to responsibility.
(5) Applied to industrial nations, the RCI indicates obligations to reduce emissions which in a couple of years from now grow to more than 100 percent. The European Union, for example, has a reduction obligation of approximately 140 percent below 1990 by 2030. That is, countries with high capacity and responsibility have a dual obligation which can only be met by strenuous domestic action and the financing of decarbonisation abroad.
(6) Two options are described in detail to operationalize the GDRs framework. The first option is based on regular estimations of global mitigation and adaptation costs. The determined costs are then shared among the world’s nations in proportion to their RCIs. Within countries, a progressive climate tax should collect each nation’s obligatory financial contribution. At the global level, these funds would be channelled to a single grand international fund to manage and allocate the financial resources required for the climate transition. The second option comprises a global cap and trade system on the basis of national business as usual (BAU) trajectories which, at the start of each commitment period, should be updated and revised. At the same time, it will be negotiated what fraction of its no–regrets reduction opportunities any country should be responsible to exploit by itself. The RCI serves here as the basis for determining national mitigation obligations which are defined as shares of the global mitigation requirement.

III. Criteria for the assessment of climate policy proposals
Any future climate regime should be environmentally effective, that is, it should prevent or at least limit dangerous interference with the climate system. Moreover, any proposed regime should also allocate the burden of meeting this objective among the world’s nations in an equitable manner. Beyond that, it should have prospects of timely being realized under the current political and institutional conditions, that is, it should be acceptable and feasible.

The four criteria are mutually dependent and very much interlinked. For example, a concept’s performance with a view to the equity criterion determines its chances of being accepted which, in turn, is a precondition of its implementation. A downright equitable concept, however, may turn out to be practically infeasible and hence environmentally ineffective.

Environmental effectiveness
To be consistent with the ultimate objective of stabilizing atmospheric GHG concentrations, any proposed climate change regime must provide for stringent emissions targets resulting in large reductions of net global GHG emissions. Although the ambitiousness of the emissions reduction of a given proposal is an important contributor to its environmental effectiveness, it may not necessarily be decisive. Other factors affecting the environmental effectiveness of a given climate change regime proposal include whether it accounts for changes in scientific understanding, how easy and how fast it can be implemented effectively, to what extent it stimulates technological change and changes in public awareness, attitudes, and learning, to what extent it encourages long-term participation, and how it provides for compliance.

The assessment of this criterion will concentrate on the certainty a proposal provides that it will result in environmental effectiveness. Here, the factual time constraint is of paramount importance. According to Hansen et al. (2008) “continued growth of greenhouse gas emissions, for just another decade, practically eliminates the possibility of near-term return of atmospheric composition beneath the tipping level for catastrophic effects”.

Equity
Because among other reasons nations have legal duty under the United Nations Framework Convention to reduce their emissions based upon equity, all proposed climate change regimes must require equitable reductions among nations. Here John Rawls’s “Theory of Justice” (1971) provides a solid theoretical basis. John Rawls argues that social and economic inequalities should be allowed only if they are to the benefit of the least advantaged members of society. While Rawls sees the so-called “difference principle” as determining a fair distribution of the benefits and burdens produced by social cooperation within self-contained national communities, both Beitz (1979) and Pogge (1989) propose that Rawls’s difference principle should be applied globally arguing that national origin is equally morally arbitrary to a distributive scheme as e.g. race and gender. Per se, a concept designed to solve the climate crisis must not necessarily simultaneously solve other problems such as global poverty. Nevertheless, the minimum requirement it has to fulfil is to not further worsen the situation of the already bad-off.

Political acceptability
Political acceptability can be straightforwardly determined if a state openly supports or rejects a proposed climate change regime or similar versions thereof. If there is no express statement, a good starting point to judge political acceptability is provided by the relative burden a concept puts on different states or groups of states. As individual parties must ratify the negotiated agreement, national cost considerations will be critical because any proposal which may be perceived as posing unproportional burdens to some states, while favouring others, risks facing political opposition. In judging political acceptability, it will be assumed that states which benefit in financial terms will accept a proposed regime provided that there are no other conditions entailed by the proposed regime which can be assumed to be unacceptable because of other considerations such as previous statements of the nation. However, this is not to preclude the possibility that, for reasons of justice and fairness, nations will accept a proposed framework which imposes reasonable burdens on their citizens.

Political feasibility
This criterion is primarily concerned with two dimensions of political feasibility, namely negotiability and implementabilty. Whether a concept can be negotiated successfully depends on a number of factors such as simplicity, moderate requirements on data and tools, compatibility with the UNFCCC and Kyoto architecture, flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and economic predictability. Factors relevant to implementation include the institutional capacity a concept demands and whether it provides mechanisms to facilitate compliance.

IV. Main results of the comparison
When comparing the concepts of C&C and GDRs, a fundamental point must be made that both approaches have different levels of precision and ambition. More specifically, the authors of GDRs explicitly focus on the individual and contend that the climate change crisis can only be tackled in combination with the development issue and that the GDRs approach has the potential to accommodate both issues at a single blow. The authors of C&C primarily focus on nations and do not maintain to solve the development issue as well.

While GDRs applies the Responsibility Capacity Index (RCI) to quantify national mitigation and adaptation obligations, C&C is silent on the question of adaptation. In this respect, C&C is incomplete. The following summarizes for each criterion the main results of the comparison.

A. Political feasibility
Both frameworks are widely compatible with the existing legal architecture. As they allow for emissions trading, both score equally well with a view to flexibility and cost effectiveness. Beyond that, C&C is in many respects clearly advantaged.
As C&C in its simplest version only requires agreement on the level of stabilization and the date of convergence, it can be expected to be negotiable within comparatively little time.

Conversely, GDRs is definitely more complicated than C&C. In order to make GDRs fully operational, nations need to agree upon a number of matters including the emergency emissions trajectory, the precise level of the development threshold, the year when responsibility starts, the formula to calculate the RCI, and the respective weights of capacity and responsibility. To assign national obligations, regularly, country-specific data on BAU scenarios and no-regret options would have to be processed. This reduces the transparency of the GDRs concept and significantly increases the necessary amount of data.
Compared to GDRs, C&C has a higher degree of institutional feasibility. Due to its simplicity, C&C only requires data about emissions and population numbers of all nations. As periodic renegotiations of emissions targets in the sense of the Kyoto Protocol’s commitment periods and the preparation of BAU scenarios are redundant, nations would have a general long-term certainty over the conditions under which they would have to participate and could plan accordingly. This increased planning reliability would help nations involved in a C&C regime to comply with what they have committed themselves to in good faith, independent of economic cycles.

B. Equity
From an ethical perspective, C&C can be justified by conceptualizing the limited assimilative capacity of the Earth’s atmosphere with regard to GHGs as a common pool good to which each human being, in principle, is equally entitled. In line with a presumption in favour of equality, every person worldwide is entitled to emit the same amount of GHGs. Under this presumption, the burden of proof lies on those who argue for an unequal distribution of emission entitlements (Kverndokk, 1995).

The deviation in favour of presently high-emitting countries that is due to the transition period can be justified on the basis of the principle of need. Accordingly, high-emitting countries are granted more emissions rights than they would get if there was an immediate per-capita allocation because they need time to change lifestyles and infrastructure. However, just as well, it can be argued that industrialized countries deserve less than equal per-capita emissions rights because of their historic responsibility for causing the climate problem. This would be in line with the polluter-pays principle, a well-established international law norm. Another critical feature of C&C is the population base-year. It would be morally arbitrary to exclude all persons born after a certain date from using a common pool good.

Concerning the situation of the least well-off, it is found that all those countries with currently very low per-capita emissions would not need to contribute to finance the climate transition. Instead, they would benefit from hot air trading. Rawls’s difference principle would thus be satisfied.

The authors of the GDRs framework (Baer and Athanasiou, 2007) also consider the global sinks for GHG emissions a common resource; however, instead of equality of emissions rights, they argue that the focus should be on developmental equity. The justifiable claim that developed countries should be liable for the emissions they historically caused is accounted for by introducing the right to development.

Strikingly, the way Baer et al. define the right to development in the GDRs framework is not consistent with the right to development as declared by the UN General Assembly in 1986. Following the first Article of the 1986 Declaration, Arjun Sengupta (2006) defines the right to development as “the right to a process of development in which all human rights and fundamental freedoms can be fully realized”. In fact, the authors of GDRs understand the right to development very well as a right to human development in the sense of reaching “a modest yet dignified level of well-being” (Baer et al., 41) , but for the sake of calculating the RCI, development is reduced to its economic dimension (Baer et al., 42). This is justified by the fact that particularly in low and middle income countries there is a high correlation between income and basic indicators of well-being. From an ethical perspective this justification is problematic since a correlation at the national level is not necessarily causation at the individual level. Especially in the case of women rights, it is not proven that rising income necessarily leads to a more dignified life.

Although, if ideally realized, GDRs would improve the living conditions of the worst-off in financial terms, it would not necessarily be fair to any duty holding individual. For example, it is critical to derive from the income individuals presently earn their causal and moral responsibility for present and past emissions. The assumption that the total income individuals earn above the development threshold is available to be taxed according to the calculated RCI must be criticized as well. Individual people may have legitimate reasons why they need or deserve more income. As well, the authors of GDRs ignore some social realities when they do not question why some countries are characterized by very large inequality in income distribution and whether it is realistic to assume that in those countries GDRs can effect voluntary redistributions. Accordingly, it is not clear whether the rich minority in poor countries would pay to fulfil national climate obligations and that the living conditions of the worst-off individuals would not deteriorate.

C. Political acceptability
Over the past years, C&C has been officially endorsed by the European Union and several developing countries (GCI, 2008). In contrast, so far no government has accepted GDRs. Beyond factual acceptance, it is illustrating to consider financial benefits and burdens under both concepts.

For developed nations, both concepts entail financial transfers beyond anything that have so far been made. As C&C does not prescribe precise target values, it gives scope to industrialized countries which may facilitate their acceptance. Basically, slower convergence reduces the burden of higher per-capita emitters. For example, C&C would also be feasible with the proposed EU target of 550 ppm CO2. However, this limit would hardly be in line with the thereby proposed temperature target of limiting global mean temperature rise to 2°C above pre-industrial levels (Meinshausen, 2006). With regard to GDRs one needs to consider that the magnitude of the dual obligations is dimensions higher than those currently considered in major developed countries and the EU. For example, the EU has pledged to return to 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 and to 30 percent below 1990 levels in case other developed nations agree to similar commitments. By comparison, GDRs claims a reduction of approximately 80 percent below 1990 by 2020. Another point is that developed countries have so far resisted a legal obligation to transfer resources to developing nations in line with the right to development (Marks, 2006:71).

With regard to developing countries, a straightforward attribution of benefits and costs is not possible. Under a C&C regime, at least developing countries with low per-capita emissions would not need to contribute financially to climate protection. Instead, hot air trading would entitle them to vast financial resources of which they may per se freely dispose. However, under a stabilization target of about 450 ppm CO2-eq in combination with convergence by 2050, developing countries with per-capita emissions above or close to the world average will soon have to deviate from their business as usual path and will not receive excess emissions allowances (Höhne and Moltmann, 2008). Under a GDRs regime, each developing county would need to exploit a certain fraction of its no regrets options. In addition, each developing country would need to contribute to the funding of the global emergency emissions program according to its income distribution. Obligations which GDRs imposes on developing countries concern the defaults that first this contribution should be fully absorbed by wealthy inhabitants and that the allocation of additional financial resources should be subject to a specified decision-making process. However, so far developing countries have refused to finance mitigation and adaptation measures from their own resources. Human rights requirements related to the implementation of the right to development have been resisted as well by several developing countries (Aguirre, 2008:118).

D. Environmental effectiveness
A fundamental difference between both concepts is that while C&C is principally neutral regarding the specific long-term target to be agreed, GDRs prescribes an ambitious emergency emissions reductions pathway. However, it may be doubted whether a regime based on GDRs would result in higher emissions reductions than a regime based on C&C.

Decisive is that GDRs, unlike C&C, contains three serious risk elements (cf. Kraus, 2009).

(1) While, due to its simplicity, C&C could be implemented relatively fast, GDRs is definitely more complicated including some highly controversial questions which are time consuming to negotiate (see above). Generally, each additional negotiating point lengthens the duration of the whole negotiation and entails the risk of bringing the negotiations to a complete halt. As a dire consequence, the whole concept could not be implemented and emissions would continue to rise.

(2) A further grave disadvantage of GDRs is to be seen in that business-as-usual (BAU) scenarios play a central role in both proposed implementation options. Compared to C&C, GDRs does not directly allocate the precautionary emissions budget necessary to hold the emergency pathway but the global mitigation requirement which can only be determined after national BAU scenarios have been prepared and negotiated. That is, while nations under the C&C concept have the possibility to factor in the emissions constraint at every level of planning, nations under the GDRs framework are allotted their national mitigation obligation only after they have already prepared BAU plans. In other words, while under the C&C framework the limited assimilative capacity of the atmosphere occupies a central position and the economic system can only grow within the atmospheric limits, GDRs gives national development and growth ambitions top priority which only as a subordinate step are accommodated to natural limits. In addition, BAU scenarios rely on assumptions about the evolution of factors which are difficult to control (e.g. economic growth, energy demand, energy efficiency, technological progress) and inherently unpredictable (societal development). There is an increased risk of tedious discussions and a negotiation deadlock, in which case national mitigation obligations could not be assigned and individual states would continue to carry out their BAU plans. In this way, GDRs impedes the change of environmentally harmful behaviour and the exploration of sustainable alternatives.

(3) GDRs does not only make Western consumerism absolute in taking it as the standard for reaching a dignified life but also entitles every individual to the resources necessary to lead a life as a member of the global consuming class. Discussions about sustainable consumption – as many as there may be – cannot detract from the fact that the Western mainstream lifestyle in its present form is energy and resource-intensive and as such a main cause of the current climate misery. There is a certain risk that even with massive North-South transfers of the most modern and energy-efficient technologies, a lifestyle that relies on ever-increasing consumption and accumulation of resources cannot be adopted by the global population on a sustained basis (cf. Linz et al., 2002). A global regime based on GDRs runs the risk of legalizing comprehensive infrastructure projects in developing countries which serve to introduce the Western lifestyle but which are not compatible with Earth’s life-sustaining capacity. Another critical aspect is that by reducing development and the capacity component of the RCI to income, aspects such as behaviour change and sufficiency are systematically ignored. GDRs might give the impression that with adequate resource transfers and redistribution measures, the climate problem will take care of itself and that profound behaviour changes and a fundamental reorientation and self-limitation will not be necessary.

V. Conclusions
Taken together, the above suggests that GDRs performs worse against all of the four criteria. In its present form, GDRs is also inappropriate to implement the right to development and to solve the development crisis.

Compared to GDRs, C&C is easier to negotiate and to implement, C&C has a higher potential to lead to a global climate compromise, C&C rests on less contestable ethical foundations, and has a higher potential to stimulate changes in public attitudes and awareness. All in all, C&C is the preferable concept. However, with a view to tackling the climate challenge, C&C should put more emphasis on the fact that in the future for many countries the conventional development path based on increasing economic growth and the consumption of fossil fuels will no longer be feasible.

Climate change largely challenges prevalent international institutional control mechanisms. To overcome the climate crisis, it is therefore the more important to create a global atmosphere of trust as a basis for comprehensive cooperation across social, economic, and cultural divides. The image of a divided world which is in the centre of the GDRs Framework (e.g. Baer et al. 2008:91) may aptly describe reality but it may not show a vision of how to bridge the gap between rich and poor, North and South. C&C, however, evokes the image of a global community in which, under growing pressure, people in poor and rich countries alike act together to bring about a more careful and sustainable management of the atmosphere.

However, a global climate partnership based on C&C will only be achieved once the obligation of rich countries to assist adaptation in poorer countries is duly recognized. This is not a question of charity but a question of justice and fairness.

By

Katrin Kraus
Graduate Research Assistant in Environmental Ethics
Greifswald University
katrin.kraus@uni-greifswald.de

References
Aguirre, D. (2008). The Human Right to Development in a Globalized World. Ashgate Publishing Limited, Hampshire, UK, and Burlington, USA.

Attfield, R. (2008). Global Warming and Development. Philosophy Cafe, Cardiff, University, entry posted on October 21st, 2008. Available online at accessed 11/04/09.

Baer, P., and Athanasiou, T. (2007). Frameworks & Proposals. A Brief, Adequacy and Equity-Based Evaluation of Some Prominent Climate Policy Frameworks and Proposals. Global Issue Papers, No. 30. Commissioned by the Heinrich Boell Foundation. Available online at

Baer, P., Athanasiou, T., Kartha, S., and Kemp-Benedict, E., (2008). The Greenhouse Development Rights Framework, Second Edition, November 2008. Available online at

Beitz, Ch. (1979). Political Theory and International Relations. Princeton University Press, Princeton.

GCI (2008). Carbon Countdown. The campaign for Contraction & Convergence. Global Commons Institute, London. Available online at

GCI (2009). GCI Briefing: “Contraction & Convergence”. Published as Meyer, A. (2004). “Briefing: Contraction and Convergence”. Engineering Sustainability, 157(4), pp. 189-192. Available online at accessed 11/04/09.

Hansen, J., Sato, M., Kharecha, P., Beerling, D., Masson-Delmotte, V., Pagani, M., Raymo, M., Royer, D.L., and Zachos,

J.C. (2008). Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim? The Open Atmospheric Science Journal, 2, pp. 217-231.

Höhne,N., and Moltmann, S. (2008). Distribution of emission allowances under the Greenhouse Development Rights and other effort sharing approaches. Report for Heinrich Boell Foundation, Ecofys GmbH, Cologne. Available online at

Kraus, K. (2009). Contraction & Convergence and Greenhouse Development Rights: A critical comparison between two salient climate-ethical concepts. Diploma thesis at the Ernst Moritz Arndt University Greifswald.

Kverndokk, S. (1995). Tradeable CO2 Emission Permits: Initial Distribution as a Justice Problem. Environmental Values, 4(2), pp. 129-48.

Linz, M., Bartelmus, P., Henicke, P., Jungkeit, R., Sachs, W., Scherhorn, G., Wilke, G., and Winterfeld, U. (2002). Von nichts zu viel. Suffizienz gehört zur Zukunftsfähigkeit. Wuppertal Paper Nr. 125. Available online at

Marks, S. P. (2006). Obligations to Implement the Right to Development: Philosophical, Political, and Legal Rationales. In Andreassen, B. A., and Marks, S. T. (Eds.) Development As A Human Right. Legal, Political and Economic Dimensions. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, and London, UK, pp. 57-78.

Meinshausen, M. (2006). What Does a 2°C Target Mean for Greenhouse Gas Concentrations? A Brief Analysis Based on Multi-Gas Emission Pathways and Several Climate Sensitivity Uncertainty Estimates. In Schellnhuber, H.J., Cramer, W., Nakicenovic, N., Wigley, T., and Yohe, G. (Eds.) Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, pp. 265-279.

Meyer, A. (1999). The Kyoto Protocol and the Emergence of ´Contraction and Convergence` as a Framework for an International Political Solution to Greenhouse Gas Emission Abatement. In Hohmeyer, O., and Rennings, K. (Eds.) Man-Made Climate Change. Physica, Mannheim, pp. 291–345.
Meyer, A. (2000). Contraction and Convergence. The Global Solution to Climate Change. Green
Books, London.

Rawls, J. (1971). A Theory of Justice. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA.

Pogge, T. (1989). Realizing Rawls. Cornell University Press, Ithaca.
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Development As A Human Right. Legal, Political and Economic Dimensions. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, and London, UK

I. A Perfect Moral Storm.
In his recent article “A Perfect Moral Storm: Climate Change, Intergenerational Ethics and the Problem of Moral Corruption,” Stephen Gardiner shows that the complexity of climate change contributes to the underestimation of its moral significance. To illustrate the difficulties of comprehending the ethical duties invoked by climate change, Gardiner uses the image of a “perfect storm.” This image allows him to examine the problem in the distinct but related dimensions of its global impact, its intergenerational or historical impact and the theoretical complexity produced by the interaction of these distinct dimensions. While analyzing moral responsibility in each separate dimension poses its own set of challenges, combining both dimensions and gauging the impact of their collusion plainly exceeds the sophistication of current theoretical models, thereby inviting convenient delusions that alternately exaggerate or undervalue climate change. Instead of allowing us to evaluate climate change in terms of its complex reality, the combination of global, temporal and theoretical “storms” threatens to compromise the moral integrity of would-be respondents, thereby compounding rather than elucidating the problem.

Viewed individually, the component “storms” of climate change constitute problems whose solutions may be difficult to articulate and implement. They do not represent insoluble problems. The global storm of climate change questions the basis for collective action in responding to the effects of climate change. Because climate change involves the emissions of many nations who neither suffer nor benefit equally from their effects, individual interests often obscure the collective effects of emissions. In the absence of a linear connection between local greenhouse gas emissions by individual agents and the cumulative, global effects of those emissions, a veneer of uncertainty obscures individual responsibility for climate change and creates a wedge between individual and collective interests. While correlations between cumulative emissions rates and global climate change demonstrate a basis for collective responsibility, uncertainty permits individuals to deny their direct responsibility, suggesting that individuals might have material reasons for evading contributions to collective action.

Though by no means unproblematic, the conceptual basis for the nation state may provide an institutional model that reconciles individual and collective interests. Historically, the power of national government derives from the need to reconcile individual self-interest with the collective need for security. Though long underlying the theory of the nation state, the power to enforce individual commitments to collective action desperately needed to address the problem of climate change is curiously absent from existing international institutions. With this absence, a relatively simple conceptual problem regarding disputes between individual and collective interests goes unresolved for a lack of means. In the face of still greater conceptual challenges, the lack of collective will to the address conceptual challenges we do comprehend hints at the danger of moral corruption Gardiner cites in the conclusion to his analysis.

While the conceptual solution to the global storm leaves out important details regarding the global institutions it recommends, such a solution effectively identifies a means for mediating between differences of individual and collective interest in the absence of inter-generational obligations. Demonstrating the inter-generational basis for collective interest becomes a much more difficult task because the individuals causing historical greenhouse gas emissions have no way of experiencing the effects of climate change. If we recognize that the lifespan of greenhouse gas emissions is at least 100 to 120 years, with upward measurements ranging on the order of millennia, we can see that those responsible for emissions in 1909, for example, have no sense of the consequences of their behavior. In the absence of any recognizable threat from emissions, the request that emissions be curbed appears as an unjust and capricious restriction on industrial development that hampers the wellbeing of developing nations. Viewed from the standpoint of emitters and using the longer timeframe of millennia suggested by some research, our dawning consciousness of the effects of climate change today has little to say about the effects of greenhouse gas emissions in thousands of years and so these hypothetical effects fail to move the needle on public policy because the inter-generational magnitude of climate change seems so insubstantial.

These are absurd scenarios. Unlike the developing industrial powers of a century ago, developing countries of today know about the actual and predicted effects of greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover, many policy-makers express nominal concern for the future effects of climate change even though their interest is limited to the next election cycle rather than the order of generations. Yet, ignoring the fact of generational overlap allows analysis to isolate three distinct factors, significant within an inter-generational interpretation, which a temporally static, global account of climate change omits. First, viewed as a “Pure Inter-generational Problem,” the harms produced by one generation are not experienced, even as an indirect global effect, by that same generation. Consequently, by the time effects of climate change become noticeable, significant damage has already occurred, causing remediation efforts lag far behind the inter-generational causes of climate change. Second, since becoming nominally aware of climate change in the 1970s, few comprehensive remediation strategies have been enacted. Consequently, greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, leading to a significant back-loading of mitigation efforts. As a result of the lag between the time we become aware of specific effects of climate change and the time comprehensive remediation strategies can implement mitigation efforts, which are already back-loaded, new consequences have already changed the cost and scope of mitigation efforts. Due to the combination of these first two factors, information lag and strategic back-loading, the third distinctively inter-generational consequence of climate change involves the recognition that the effects of current actions are substantially deferred.

The deferral of currant attempts to affect climate change compounds the problem of plausible deniability that affects individual agents’ estimation of their global and inter-generational responsibilities because the utility of these strategies will not appear until well in the future, while their costs will become apparent immediately. Deferral alters the stakes of the challenge posed by climate change because the superimposition of the global and temporal dimensions of the problem creates an apparent incentive for uncertainty and delay. Yet, just as the effectiveness of remediation strategies will not appear for some time, it is equally certain that the costs of delay compound the effects of climate change in two distinct ways: First, present uncertainty strains attempts to convince individual actors of their collective obligations in the global dimension. Second, the temporal effect of delay caused by scientific uncertainty multiplies the effects of climate change given the progressive arrangement of inter-generational contributions to climate change.

Nevertheless, successfully identifying the exacerbating factors involved in global considerations and the multiplier effects of temporal considerations provides no assurance that we possess the theoretical tools to grapple with the simultaneous articulation of global and temporal factors one upon the other. Gardiner identifies our theoretical ineptitude as the third storm, in addition to the global and temporal storms identified previously, not only because it raises explicit questions about our ability to comprehend the complexity of climate change, but also because it points out the danger of moral corruption in the face of that complexity. Coming to terms with this complexity involves not only identifying the individual global and temporal components of climate change, but how aspects common to both, scientific uncertainty for example, introduce a deceptive simplicity that compromises efforts to develop an adequate response based on an honest understanding of the problem.

In conclusion, moral corruption constitutes a significant threat because it permits self-deception by selectively applying our attention to components of climate change that ease our moral burden. Practically, moral corruption emerges in beliefs that excuse inaction with claims of scientific uncertainty and exorbitant economic or political costs while ignoring signs that encourage action such as scientific consensus and the mounting inter-generational costs of inaction to be borne by future generations. Theoretically, moral corruption appears in the self-interested choice of strategies we select in responding to climate change by emphasizing the self-interested obligations for collective action suggested by the global effects of climate change without evaluating these strategies according to inter-generational standards requiring ethical commitments that go beyond contemporary preferences. In contrast to the practical effects of moral corruption, which play on the division between interests for self and other, the theoretical implication of moral corruption suggests that the way we constitute the distinction between individual and collective interests may render a theoretically adequate balance between personal and political obligations, while effectively abandoning questions of responsibility to innocent generations to come.

By:
Joshua Kurdys
Graduate Student in Philosophy
Penn State University,
jjk312@psu.edu

References:

Gardiner, Stephen M. “A Perfect Moral Storm: Climate Change, Intergenerational Ethics and the Problem of Moral Corruption.” Environmental Values 15, no.3 (August 2006) 397-413

I. Introduction.

In their article, “Conceptualizations of Justice in Climate Policy,” researchers Sonja Klinsky and Hadi Dowlatabadi, demonstrate divergence among climate change ethics and policy communities about the role of distributive justice in policy making. (Klinsky, S., H. Dowlatabadi, 2009) The authors of this paper observe that policy-makers construct solutions to climate change that rely on implicit normative claims that affect the ways policy assigns responsibility, assesses need, provides access to entitlements, distributes impacts and addresses concerns of procedural justice. Focusing primarily on the ways specific policy proposals unintentionally affect those areas of distributive justice, Klinsky and Dowlatabadi argue that policy making could be improved by inquiring more deliberately into the broad array of distributive justice concerns raised by climate ethicists. At the same time, several issues emerge that could be examined in more depth by those focusing on climate ethics.

II. Policy Initiatives and Distributive Justice.

Klinsky and Dowlatabadi analyze specific mechanisms included in policy proposals to highlight the underlying ethical assumptions behind policy architectures proposed by a wide range of policy analysts and advisors. Their analysis indicates that policy initiatives fall into three broad categories depending on whether they prioritize Equitable Burden Sharing, Fair Distribution of Costs and Impacts, or Justice for Costs, Impacts and Liabilities. Each approach rests on distinct ethical commitments. For instance, beliefs about the nature of causal responsibility for climate change influences whether responsibility is limited to the costs of stabilizing current emissions levels, encompasses human development costs and environmental damages in addition to economic factors or, finally, whether responsibility requires compensation for historical costs and damages. Because these implicit beliefs have profound effects on distributive justice, this work relies on specific policy mechanisms to uncover the ethical attitudes motivating policy-makers. Although rarely addressed explicitly in the policy proposals, effects on distributive justice become most conspicuous in disagreements regarding the ways policies define the problem of climate change, measure the extent of the problem and address the task of responding to the problem. The premise of the paper is that policy-makers cannot be expected to address these effects or the disagreements they entail until they understand the normative beliefs motivating policy and the subsequent mechanisms by which specific policies affect distributive justice.

The first group of climate change policy initiatives relies on the principle of Equitable Burden Sharing. Proposals embodying this principle argue that the costs of emissions reductions should be distributed equally in order to minimize economic and industrial impacts to individual states. Without directly addressing the environmental and human development impacts of climate change, such proposals rely on convictions that economic measurements and technological substitutes can effectively respond to current climate change impacts and threats of future harm. Accordingly, Equitable Burden Sharing policies represent climate change as fundamentally an economic and technological problem for which the most economically stable and technologically advanced countries both bear the greatest burden and possess the most efficient mechanisms to affect change. Such an approach downplays the importance of both non-economic impacts of climate change and the need to include the concerns of developing nations in policy formation.

A second larger and more diverse group of policies remedies some of the holes left by Equitable Burden Sharing initiatives by attempting to affect a fair, as opposed to an equal, distribution of costs and impacts. By considering non-economic, human development and environmental impacts along with traditional economic and emissions costs, these policies claim that a fair or equitable distribution of the costs and impacts of climate change policy may require an inequitable allocation of resources when remediation starts from a position of economic and resource inequality. Heavy emitters and healthy economies need to assume the lion’s share of burdens to ensure that heavily impacted developing and impoverished nations gain the same level of benefit from climate change remediation as their partners. The primary mechanism used to affect distributions involves per capita entitlements that allow populous, undercapitalized economies greater access to scarce fossil resources and emissions capacities. Moreover, since policies endorsing Fair Distribution of Costs and Impacts place greater emphasis on human development, including the preservation of local cultures, ecosystems and species, these policies have less faith that substituting clean resources through technological development can effectively respond to the variety of threats posed by climate change. Using resource transfer in addition to technological exchange, these policies conceive of climate change remediation as a partly technological task involving emissions reductions, but also a human development obligation aimed at improving the lives of those directly impacted by climate change.

Finally, by far the smallest group of policies embraces remediation tactics involving the costs of liability for climate change viewed from a compensatory justice perspective in addition to the burdens of mitigation costs and human development. According to these models, the causal responsibility for climate change applies to historical emitters rather than focusing solely on current heavy emitters. While approving the need to reduce current emissions in response to the human development needs of impoverished countries, these policies also demand that justice compensate for historical abuses regardless of current emissions levels and well-intentioned remediation efforts. In light of historical responsibility for climate change and a broader emphasis on human development that encompasses historical harms to development as well as contemporary impacts, proposals in this category advocate not only per capita resource entitlements but significant resource transfer mechanisms designed to compensate for historical resource extraction and depletion. Along with difficulties regarding the attribution of historical responsibility for climate change, critics cite these proposals for being overly punitive and failing to take into account transnational liability for climate change. Resource extraction, for example, is supposed to provide economic and industrial benefits to developing countries that complicate the picture of transnational liability. Advocates of the compensatory justice approach respond, however, that since greenhouse gas emissions deplete a resource without an assigned economic value, namely access to the atmosphere, the modest compensation provided by fossil fuel extraction has been inadequate. As this debate shows, issues of liability within compensatory justice become increasingly complex, illustrating a crucial need for information sharing regarding the demands of justice and the constraints of policy.

III. Final Remarks: Bridging the Ethics-Policy Divide.

While existing policies express a wide variety of ethical commitments, due to the lack of communication between ethics and policy communities, the full range of ethical questions implied by climate change and the crucial policy details raised by these concerns remains obscure to policy-makers and ethicists alike. Increased attention to four areas, including evaluative modeling, public ethics, sovereignty and technology, promise to foster the communication needed to bring these respective communities together.

Evaluative models of policy proposals begun within policy communities would benefit from closer collaboration with ethicists because the technical difficulties inherent in modeling typically discourage policy-makers from extending models to contentious disputes regarding distributive justice. Such omissions indicate a clear case where collaboration would benefit not only policy-makers, but ethicists who normally refrain from constructing the models needed to evaluate the policies required to achieve their distributive justice goals.

Similarly, neither ethics nor policy communities seriously explore public perceptions of ethics in the multi-dimensional, multi-scaled context of climate change although both communities make assumptions about what people find fair and unfair.

A third area both communities could explore in more depth is the question of sovereignty. Assumptions about the appropriate entity to be included and considered in climate policy also, but the multi-scaled nature of climate change raises difficult questions about how these entities should be dealt with.

Finally, although technology features prominently in many policy proposals, ethicists rarely address it directly and policy-makers almost never explore technology’s impact on distributive justice in their proposals. Because technology shapes not only the kinds of emissions reductions aimed for, but also the concrete costs and benefits of any policy direction, further investigation into the impacts of technology on the distributive justice elements of climate policy is essential.

This paper presents a plea for greater collaboration between the ethics and policy communities. Until policy analysts are able to include diverse justice impacts into their policy proposals, it is unlikely that the resulting policies will approach anything resembling the requirements of justice laid out in any ethical framework. Simultaneously, in order for ethical analysis to be useful, ethicists must address the full range of concrete policy mechanisms under consideration. If we are to get both fair and effective climate policies, it will be because policy-makers and ethicists make deliberate efforts to identify their overlapping interests in distributive justice.

By

Joshua Kurdys
Graduate Student in Philosophy
Penn State University,
jjk312@psu.edu

References:
Klinsky, Sonja, Hadi Dowlatabadi, Conceptualizations Of Justice In Climate Policy, Climate Policy, Volume 9, Number 1, 2009 , pp. 88-108

I. Recommended Changes to Negotiating Text

The following recommended revisions are designed to strengthen the ethical dimension of the Negotiating Text prepared in May 2009 by the chair of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action (AWG-LCA) under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and revised after the sixth session of the AWG-LCA and dated 22 June 2009.

1. In the Preamble, include the following two paragraphs:

a. “Recognizing that a successful global partnership requires a common faith in the ethical principles that are the foundation of the shared vision for long-term cooperative action called for in the Bali Action Plan, and that fulfillment of the Parties’ common but differentiated responsibilities will require on-going dialogue regarding how to address the ethical, as well as scientific, technological and financial, challenges presented by climate change.

b. “Recalling the affirmation of our responsibility to one another, to the greater community of life, and to our children in the Johannesburg Declaration of the World Summit on Sustainable Development.”

2. In Chapter I. A Shared Vision for Long-term Cooperative Action, paragraph #7, add a reference to “a strong ethical commitment” in the sentence that reads: “The urgent need to confront dangerous climate change requires a strong ethical commitment and political determination to continue building an inclusive, fair and effective climate regime….”

3. In Chapter I, paragraph #8, add a reference to “human rights.” This could be done, for example, by revising the second sentence to read: “It takes into account social and economic conditions and human rights.”

4. In Chapter I, paragraph #8, add a concluding sentence that reads: “It also recognizes that the common but differentiated responsibilities of the Parties includes the duty to protect and restore the integrity of Earth’s ecological systems, with special concern for biological diversity and the natural processes that sustain life.”

5. In Chapter I, paragraph #1, capitalize “Earth.” Throughout the document whenever the planet is referenced, the planet’s name, “Earth,” should be used and capitalized.

6. In Chapter I, paragraph #4, add a reference to gender equality in connection with the statement regarding “the need for gender equity”. The sentence will then read: “…addressing the need for gender equality and equity.”

7. In Chapter II. Enhanced Action on Adaptation and Its Means of Implementation, Section A. Objectives, Scope and Guiding Principles, add to paragraph #22 a new sub-paragraph that reads: “Be guided by the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Earth Charter.”

If a section on Objectives and Principles is added to Chapter III. Enhanced Action on Mitigation, a similar principle on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Earth Charter could be added to this section.

II. Rational for Recommendations 1a and 2

Ethical values and principles define what is considered to be right and wrong, good and bad, in human conduct in an interdependent world. A society’s ethical ideals form its vision of the common good. A faith in shared ethical values is what creates among people a strong sense of community. It builds mutual trust and inspires respect for the law. It provides the only sure foundation for long-term cooperative action.

Scientific knowledge, technological innovation, and financial mechanisms are all essential to the international effort to address climate change. However, a change in attitudes and values is also necessary. Over the past four decades through summit meetings, declarations and conventions, the international community has gone far in developing a compelling vision of universal values and a sustainable future, but the political will to act has often been weak. Only a steadfast common faith in the principles of sustainable living on the part of leaders in government, business and civil society will inspire and sustain the political will needed to address climate change and create a sustainable future.

Regarding the use of the term “faith” in Recommendation 1a, it should be noted that Universal Declaration of Human Rights uses the term “faith” in a very similar way. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in its Preamble states:

Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.

When the word “faith” is used in a context such as this, it means a moral faith, that is, a deep trust in the ethical principles involved as a guide to what is just and good and a wholehearted commitment to their implementation.

The administration of a new international agreement on climate change will involve at all levels many complex problems that require on-going ethical evaluation regarding how best to apply the principles and achieve the goals of the shared vision for long-term cooperative action. For example, when resources are limited, difficult decisions must be made about how best to promote the common good. There will be conflicts between various values and between nations. Defining the responsibilities of present generations in relation to future generations will be a continuing task. In such cases, leaders are needed who have the ability to evaluate situations and the consequences of alternative courses of action in the light of an inclusive ethical framework.

Science by itself cannot determine what is right and wrong. Experimental scientific inquiry can clarify the consequences of various courses of action, and this information is of critical importance in the process of ethical deliberation. However, making ethical judgments about different courses of action and their consequences involves choices and decisions that go beyond the scope of scientific knowledge. Ethical principles provide guidance regarding the various issues and interests that should be kept in mind in the course of the ethical decision-making process.

III. Rationale for Recommendation 1b

The passage cited from the Johannesburg Declaration (2002) is important because it provides a concise statement of the scope of the Parties’ common but differentiated responsibilities. The passage is from Article 7, which reads as follows:

From this continent, the cradle of humanity, we declare, through the Plan of Implementation of the World Summit on Sustainable Development and the present Declaration, our responsibility to one another, to the greater community of life and to our children.

It is also noteworthy that a similar statement is found in the Preamble of the Earth Charter (2000). The first paragraph of the Earth Charter Preamble states:

We stand at a critical moment in Earth’s history, a time when humanity must choose its future. As the world becomes increasingly interdependent and fragile, the future at once holds great peril and great promise. To move forward we must recognize that in the midst of a magnificent diversity of cultures and life forms we are one human family and one Earth community with a common destiny. We must join together to bring forth a sustainable global society founded on respect for nature, universal human rights, economic justice, and a culture of peace. Towards this end, it is imperative that we, the peoples of Earth, declare our responsibility to one another, to the greater community of life, and to future generations.

IV. Rationale for Recommendation 3

Securing and protecting human rights should be recognized as one basic component of the Parties’ common but differentiated responsibilities in the shared vision for long-term cooperative action. A UNESCO report on the ethics of climate change makes the following summary statement regarding this point: “If we consider the impact global climate change is predicted to have on the living standards, health, livelihood and even life of populations who will be most vulnerable to the consequences of climate change, a good case can be made for a very strong moral duty, if not a legal obligation, for all signatories of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights to put in place measures that will protect the human rights which the international community has accepted.” (See “Ethical Implications of Global Climate Change,” page 19, prepared by the Working Group on Environmental Ethics of COMEST for the World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology, June 2009). Article 28 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights asserts, for example: “Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.” This principle can certainly be interpreted to include an obligation to address global environmental threats to human rights.

In addition, in recent decades a number of international regional treaties and over 60 state constitutions have recognized the principle of environmental justice that affirms the right of every person to a safe and healthy environment. This principle is also contained in Earth Charter Principle 12, which asserts: “Uphold the right of all, without discrimination, to a natural and social environment supportive of human dignity, bodily health, and spiritual well-being, with special attention to the rights of indigenous peoples and minorities.”

The universal ethical values set forth in human rights principles provide a compelling reason for urgent international action on climate change and serve as one basic guide when considering what is equitable, fair and just regarding strategies for adaptation and mitigation.

V. Rationale for Recommendation 4

There are four interrelated reasons why the shared vision for long-term cooperative action on climate change should recognize the duty of the Parties to protect and restore the integrity of Earth’s ecological systems. First, protecting and restoring ecosystem carbon stocks is a necessary mitigation activity. Scientific evidence is growing that stabilizing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases at a safe level will require both deep cuts in fossil fuel emissions and a dramatic decrease in emissions from deforestation and ecosystem degradation. Second, healthy ecosystems are more resilient and have greater capacity to adapt to climate change impacts, and therefore can better serve ecosystem-based adaptation initiatives. Third, humanity is dependent on the goods and services provided by Earth’s ecological systems, and the loss of biological diversity and degradation of Earth’s life support systems under the impact of climate change can undermine efforts to achieve sustainability and threaten human security. Fourth, the greater community of life in all its diversity has intrinsic value and is worthy of respect and care quite apart from its instrumental value to human beings.

In addition, the Rio Declaration (1992) in Principle 7 asserts: “States shall cooperate in a spirit of global partnership to conserve, protect and restore the health and integrity of the Earth’s ecosystem.” The World Charter for Nature (1982), the Earth Charter (2000) and the United Nations Millennium Declaration (2000) all recognize the principle of respect for nature, which requires the protection and restoration of Earth’s ecological integrity. Earth Charter Principle 5 is the imperative to: “Protect and restore the integrity of Earth’s ecological systems, with special concern for biological diversity and the natural processes that sustain life.”

Our Common Future (the 1987 report of the World Commission on Environment and Development), Agenda 21 (1992), the Rio Declaration (1992), and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (1992) all adopted the practice of capitalizing Earth when referring to the planet. For example, the Rio Declaration Preamble refers to “the integral and interdependent nature of the Earth, our home,” and the UNFCC Preamble asserts “that change in the Earth’s climate and its adverse effects are a common concern of human kind.” The practice of referring to “the Earth” involved a decrease in references to nature in general and reflected the growing recognition of the unity of the biosphere and the interdependence of people and Earth’s ecosystems. It also involves adopting the common practice among scientists of using the planet’s name, Earth. This should become standard practice when drafting international documents.

There are three basic alternatives when referring to the planet: “the earth,” “the Earth,” or “Earth.” Using “the Earth” is a step toward using the planet’s name with a capital E. Since no one would refer to planets like Mars and Jupiter as “the Mars” or “the Jupiter,” it seems not appropriate to continue using the definite article with the name Earth.

In addition, an important reason for using the name Earth is that this practice can encourage respect and care for our planetary home and the greater community of life of which people are a part. The practice of referring to “the earth” can reinforce the problematical attitude of regarding the planet as just a warehouse of resources that exists for human exploitation. Use of the name Earth can evoke the image of our planet floating in space captured in the photographs of the astronauts. This image inspires in many people an appreciation of the uniqueness, beauty, and fragility of our planetary home and a heightened awareness of humanity’s dependence on Earth’s extraordinary biosphere.

VI. Rationale for Recommendation 6

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights asserts “the equal rights of men and women.” However, gender inequality remains a worldwide problem. Denied access to education, health care and economic opportunity in many countries, millions of women are among those most vulnerable to the dangers posed by climate change. Securing the human rights of women is both a matter of social justice and essential to achieving sustainable development and building climate resilient communities. A call for gender equity is not sufficient. The critical issue is gender equality. Equity means fairness. The concept of gender equity can be problematical, because what is considered fair in regard to the treatment of women can vary greatly in different societies. In the light of these considerations, a shared vision for long -term cooperative action should include gender equality among the fundamental principles that define the Parties’ common but differentiated responsibilities.

The Earth Charter (2000) addresses this issue in Principle 11 as follows: “Affirm gender equality and equity as prerequisites to sustainable development and ensure universal access to education, healthcare, and economic opportunity.”

VII. Rationale for Recommendation 7

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the Earth Charter (2000) together provide a vision of the fundamental principles that form the core of the new global ethics that have emerged through intergovernmental initiatives at the United Nations and worldwide, cross-cultural dialogue in civil society. Taken together the two documents provide the balanced understanding of universal human rights and universal responsibilities that is needed to realize the Millennium Development Goals and build a just, sustainable and climate resilient world. The Earth Charter sets forth a larger and more inclusive vision of shared values and common ethical standards than is found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, reflecting the influence of the environmental and sustainable development movements and related international declarations and conventions. The Earth Charter integrates the human rights agenda into this more comprehensive ethical framework, making clear the interdependence of human rights, environmental conservation, eradication of poverty, equitable socio-economic development, democracy and a culture of peace. Together the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Earth Charter clarify the nature and scope of humanity’s common but differentiated responsibilities and provide each State with a basis for determining its differentiated responsibilities. It is, therefore, appropriate for the Parties to be guided by these two documents in designing actions on adaptation and mitigation and in implementing these strategies.

The Earth Charter is a declaration of fundamental ethical principles for building a just, sustainable and peaceful global society in the 21st century. It is the product of a decade long, worldwide, cross-cultural dialogue on common goals and shared values. The Earth Charter project began as a United Nations initiative but it was carried forward and completed by a global civil society initiative. It was finalized and launched in 2000 by the Earth Charter Commission, an independent international entity. The drafting of the Earth Charter involved the most inclusive and participatory process ever associated with the creation of an international declaration. It has been endorsed by UNESCO and IUCN and over 4,800 civil society organizations worldwide. For more information, see the Earth Charter International website: www.earthcharter.org

By:

Steven Rockefeller,
Earth Charter International Council
Song Li,
Earth Charter International Council
Professor Brendan Mackey,
Fenner School of Environment and Society
College of Medicine, Biology & Environment
The Australian National University, Canberra ACT, 200 Australia;
Earth Charter International Council