A research team led by Princeton University scientists, including Energy Research Center of the Netherlands researcher Heleen de Coninck, has developed a new way of dividing responsibility for carbon emissions among countries.
The approach is so fair, according to its creators, that they are hoping it will win the support of both developed and developing nations, whose leaders have been at odds for years over perceived inequalities in previous proposals.
The method which is outlined in a paper titled "Sharing Global CO2 Emissions among 1 Billion High Emitters," uses a new fairness principle based on the "common but differentiated responsibilities" of individuals, rather than nations.
The proposal would use individual emissions as the best, fairest way of calculating a nation’s responsibility to curb its output of carbon dioxide, the authors said. The methodology does not mean that individuals would be singled out, only that these calculations would form the basis of a more equitable formula. Some present strategies that employ averages of energy use in a country are widely regarded as unfair, the authors say, because such efforts mask the emissions of wealthy, high polluters.
"Most of the world’s emissions come disproportionately from the wealthy citizens of the world, irrespective of their nationality," Chakravarty said, noting that many emissions come from lifestyles that involve airplane flights, car use and the heating and cooling of large homes. "We estimate that in 2008, half of the world’s emissions came from just 700 million people."
In the new scheme, emission reduction targets for each country are calculated in a multi-step fashion. The researchers used a strong correlation between income and emissions to estimate the emissions of individuals in every country. Next, they combined these factors to see how individual emissions are distributed globally. Looking forward to 2030, the researchers estimated first individual emissions and then a global emission total at that future time based on projections of income, population and energy use. They imagined the world’s leaders deciding now that the projected global emission total for 2030 is dangerously high, choosing a lower global target and seeking a process by which the work of achieving this new global target could be divided among the world’s nations.
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