Burden-sharing made simple

Delegates at Copenhagen will be bitterly divided on how the cost of tackling climate change should be shared between advanced and developing countries. After all, the concept of ideal fairness is highly controversial: philosophers have debated it for centuries. When it comes to a deal on global emissions, is such a thing even possible?

Developing countries (DCs) make two arguments about fair burden-sharing. The first is based on historic responsibility for the accumulated stock of carbon emitted by advanced countries (ACs). The ACs have used up a large part of the safe carbon-absorbing capacity of the atmosphere and should compensate the DCs for this—a persuasive point. Even so, it runs up against some powerful moral intuitions. The ACs did not expropriate knowingly. They acted in the belief, universally held until recently, that the atmosphere was an infinite resource. Moreover, the expropriators are mostly dead and gone. Should their descendants be held responsible for acts they did not themselves commit? True, ACs benefit hugely from their past carbon-intensive industrialisation, but should they be liable for all of this?



The second argument made by the DCs concerns the fair distribution of future carbon emissions. Suppose overall global emissions are controlled by issuing tradable carbon permits. The DCs argue that the permits should be allocated to countries on a population or per capita income basis. The rationale of allocating by population is rights-based: each human being has an equal right to use the remaining global carbon space, and should be allocated an equal amount. The rationale of allocating by income is egalitarian: permits should be given to the very poor because they are very poor. Either way, most permits would be given to the DCs; they contain most of the world’s people as well as most of the world’s poor.

But these principles are not universally accepted. There is no agreement that natural resources should be equally shared. Why should the atmosphere be different?

The way out of this maze is to adopt a principle that is a minimal requirement of fairness. It is simply: “do no harm.” In a climate change agreement, this means that DCs would be given enough tradable carbon permits to allow them to raise their living standards for a given period—say, for the next two decades—until they have eliminated abject poverty. (The period would be shorter for China and longer for Africa due to their differing rates of growth.) After that, they would be put on the same footing as the ACs and their permit allocations would be progressively reduced. And if other systems are used—like a worldwide carbon tax or transfer of carbon-saving technology—there would be an equivalent revenue or technology transfer to the DCs for the same period.

While the details would provoke fierce debate, this no-harm approach to burden-sharing can work. It takes some account of DCs’ concerns about fairness, since ACs would have to pay more to help them develop. But it would be more acceptable to the governments and citizens of the ACs than distributing permits on a population or per capita income basis, which would involve paying DCs several times more than they get in foreign aid now.

The stakes in climate change are so high that inflexible bargaining positions are a recipe for disaster. Securing agreement at Copenhagen will require a non-ideal—but acceptable—notion of fairness: we must go some way towards meeting everyone’s demands, but no one’s in full.