E3G

The Quest for Climate Justice

By John Ashton

Climate and Equity

Let’s now come back to the equity questions I mentioned. How can we deal with this challenge in a way that is just and fair?

A good starting point is responsibility. Different countries are responsible for different levels of emissions, both currently and over history, both in aggregate and on a per capita basis. An average American accounts for something like 10 times the emissions of an average inhabitant of many developing countries. So there are different degrees of responsibility for the problem. There is a strong equity case for those who have caused the problem to bear the main burden of solving it.

Furthermore, different countries have different capacities to deal with the consequences of climate change. On the whole, rich economies are more resilient than poor ones. They have the resources and the expertise to protect themselves.

I lived in Hong Kong for several years. Every summer Hong Kong gets hit by typhoons. Many of those typhoons cross the Philippines before reaching Hong Kong. Invariably, they do more damage, and cause more suffering, in the Philippines, largely because wealthy Hong Kong is more effective in all kinds of ways at protecting life and property. 

Unfortunately, those countries most vulnerable to climatic disruption also tend to be those least responsible for causing it. So climate change is a problem with perpetrators and victims.

What does that imply for what we should do about climate change? There are two key questions. What should we as a global community do to get emissions under control and move to a zero carbon economy? And what should we do to help those most exposed to harmful consequences?

Most people assume that these questions cannot be answered without incurring substantial costs. From this perspective, the international climate negotiations are essentially an argument about who should pay what, to whom, and when. Leave aside whether that is the right way to look at climate change: it isn’t, and we won’t make real progress without shifting the debate towards the benefits of a stable climate rather than the costs of action. But the reality is that for now people do concentrate on the costs, and often exaggerate them.

Is there a simple principle of equity that might help in carrying out this exercise of distributing the burden, or slicing up the cake of climate action? It is tempting to look for one.

But the equity problem is actually very complex. In addition to the considerations of responsibility and capacity, others also come into play. Some people argue - and it’s a legitimate but debatable argument, and ultimately an ideological one – that in some sense, every human should be entitled to account for the same quantity of carbon emissions: that we should all have an equal share of the global carbon space.

Some countries, equally legitimately, argue that their priorities for now should be how to meet the needs of their desperately poor people: to provide food, shelter and public health. They accept that climate change affects their ability to meet these needs, but simply don’t have the capacity to engage with it systematically. And for those that do, an additional equity issue is the sense in any negotiation that it is unfair for countries with similar circumstances to undertake substantially different degrees of effort.

Unfortunately not all of these considerations point in the same direction. They cannot therefore be boiled down into a single equity formula that tells us how to deal with climate change in a just way. Solving the equity puzzle is a bit like trying to solve Rubik’s cube.

But perhaps that’s not such a bad thing. It means that as with most other negotiations, in the end everything boils down to politics. And these equity questions to at least help to frame the space within which political choices can be made.

The international climate process is effectively stuck at the moment. But if we can get it moving again, it is possible, by applying these equity arguments, to identify some of the conditions that will need to be met in building the next stage of the international climate framework. First, the US - which accounts for 25% of the worlds emissions with only 5% of its population - will need to reengage, with commitments commensurate both with it responsibility and to its capacity to respond. Second, the industrialized economies will need to continue taking on stronger commitments than anyone else. Third, they will also need to do more to help the poorest countries deal with climatic harm. That incidentally is not just a question of money. For example there is a strong case for opening up the possibility of international refugee status for those whose livelihoods are destroyed by climate events. And fourth, those developing countries whose economies and emissions are growing rapidly will need to find ways of accepting some of the responsibilities that go with their success.

For now, such a framework is well out of reach. The political conditions simply do not exist for a constructive debate about it, not least because of the position of the US Administration. At present, there is little to be gained from a detailed debate about policy choices. What matters much more, as I said at the beginning, is expanding the political envelope within which those choices will have to be made. And that takes us straight back to the questions of identity we keep touching on, to the cultural reference points against which we define ourselves, and to the language we use to describe the problem.