According to the concept of historical responsibility, the commitments of individual countries to take action on climate change are distributed based on the relative effects of their past emissions as manifested in present climate change. Brazil presented a comprehensive version of the concept to pre-Kyoto negotiations in 1997. The ‘Brazilian proposal’ originally combined several justice principles; however, following referral to the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice, discussion soon became confined to technical calculations. This case illustrates how disparities in knowledge production and framing can influence the inclusiveness of negotiations. Southern participation in the policy process was restrained due to lack of scientific expertise on the part of Southern countries and due to the non-inclusive biophysical discourse traditionally preferred by Northern policy-makers. The historical responsibility issue became stranded on problems of how to correctly represent physical nature in climate models. This marginalized the original intention that equity should be the guiding principle of the North–South interaction, arguably undercutting a potential angle of approach to advance the climate change negotiations. The article concludes that in the interest of facilitating the North–South dialogue in climate change negotiations, any framing of historical responsibility that excludes equity needs to be redefined.Original publication: Mathias Friman and Björn-ola Linnér, Technology obscuring equity: historical responsibility in UNFCCC negotiations, 2008, Climate Policy, (8), 339-354.http://dx.doi.org/10.3763/cpol.2007.0438. Copyright: Earthscan, http://www.earthscanjournals.com

Since 1990, the academic literature on historical responsibility (HR) for climate change has grown considerably. Over these years, the approaches to defining this responsibility have varied considerably. This article demonstrates how this variation can be explained by combining various defining aspects of historical contribution and responsibility. Scientific knowledge that takes for granted choices among defining aspects will likely become a basis for distrust within science, among negotiators under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and elsewhere. On the other hand, for various reasons, not all choices can be explicated at all times. This article guides those who need to evaluate the assumptions underlying specific claims regarding HR. This article examines the full breadth of complexities involved in scientifically defining HR and discusses how these complexities have consequences for the science-policy interface concerning HR. To this end, this article maps, reviews, and classifies the academic literature on historical contributions to and responsibility for climate change into categories of defining aspects. One immediately policy-relevant conclusion emerges from this exercise: Coupled with negotiators' highly divergent understandings of historical responsibility, the sheer number of defining aspects makes it virtually impossible to offer scientific advice without creating distrust in certain parts of the policy circle. This conclusion suggests that scientific attempts to narrow the options for policymakers will have little chance of succeeding unless policymakers first negotiate a clearer framework for their establishment.Historical responsibility (HR) for climate change has become one of the thorniest issues in negotiations under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). In its most abstract form, HR entails explicating the moral significance of history when distributing the responsibility to act on climate change. Although many agree that history does have moral significance, the political struggle over how this should influence the responsibility to act is marked by highly divergent understandings.At the initial stage of negotiating the draft Convention, in early 1991, the degree to which countries had contributed to climate change was proposed as a measure of responsibility to act. Other proposals stressed that historical emissions and the responsibilities they might trigger should prompt developed countries to take the lead in dealing with climate change, although not necessarily in proportion to their contributions.1, 2 At the time the UNFCCC was adopted in 1992, some argued that the division between Annex 1 and 2 countries, with differing specific commitments, and Parties not included in Annex 1 (non-Annex 1 Parties) corresponded to the acceptance and resulting operationalization of HR. However, in the process of specifying the UNFCCC in a protocol, the dispute between what we will term the 'conceptual' versus 'proportional' views of the moral s...

No abstract