Climate Contributions and the Paris Agreement: Fairness and Equity in a Bottom-Up Architecture

Abstract

E thical questions of fairness, responsibility, and burden-sharing have always been central to the international politics of climate change and efforts to construct an effective intergovernmental response to this problem. The conclusion of the Paris Agreement last December, lauded by the media, governments, and civil society around the world, is the most recent such effort, following the collapse of negotiations six years prior at the  Copenhagen conference. The shape and form of the Paris Agreement, however, represents a radically different governance structure to its predecessor, the Kyoto Protocol, reorienting the international regime toward a "bottom-up" structure, emphasizing national flexibility in order to ensure broader participation. In doing so, the Paris Agreement also provides a different answer to the question of what constitutes a fair and equitable response to climate change.The purpose of this essay is to review the normative implications of the Paris Agreement, namely in the challenges it poses for attaining a fair distribution of the "carbon budget" and for maintaining a good chance of keeping global warming below  degrees Celsius by the end of the century. In these new institutional arrangements and political compromises that have set the framework for climate action in the coming decade and beyond, how will fairness and equity be ensured in a world of voluntary climate "contributions"? The first section of this essay presents the key features of the Paris Agreement in the context of the "top-down/bottom-up" discussion on governance architectures and the notion of a carbon budget that has framed much of the recent ethics-based discussion on the distribution of emission rights and responsibilities. The second section then highlights the new ways in which the Paris Agreement has sought to respond to the normative importance of equity considerations in the climate response,

Energy business transformation & Earth system resilience: A metabolic approach

“…This suggestion builds from the successful approach leading to the Paris agreement. It has been argued that one of the main reasons for the success of the UNFCCC Paris agreement has been its combined bottom-up and topdown approach (Chan, 2016). By requesting parties to present their intended nationally determined contributions (INDCs) to climate targets, without any specific prescription, it allowed for a bottom-up approach that facilitated the dialogue in the lead up to Paris and its initial plenaries.…”

Pareto-Efficient Solutions for Shared Public Good Provision: Nash Bargaining versus Exchange-Matching-Lindahl

“…Taking each country i's 2015 greenhouse gas emission reduction pledge as the starting point q N i representing the non-cooperative Nash contribution, each country i could be asked how much y i it would be willing to contribute beyond q N i in exchange for the whole world contributing Y i = p i y i . 10 The Paris Agreement principles of "equity and common but di¤erentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, in the light of di¤erent national circumstances" (UNFCCC, 2015) that have guided the negotiations from the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio (Chan, 2016) are re ‡ected by EML. Each country has the common responsibility to submit bids and to implement any submitted bid, if it is part of the equilibrium.…”

The unavoidability of justice – and order – in international climate politics: From Kyoto to Paris and beyond

“…The international climate regime has moved away from an internationally agreed formula for allocating fair and equitable mitigation burdens and instead leaves it to the parties to define for themselves how they intend to meet their own interpretation of climate justice. It is now through a regular international review process that the international community seeks to subject national claims to equitable mitigation efforts to a transparent form of international scrutiny and contestation (Chan, 2016: 298), potentially relying also on civil society groups to perform so-called ‘equity reviews’ as part of the Agreement’s new deliberative process (Shue, 2018: 10). 2 Paris thus represents a weakening of the climate regime’s substantive justice dimensions and a greater procedural focus on how to review and ratchet up nationally determined mitigation pledges.…”