Climate justice: can we agree to disagree? Operationalising competing equity principles to mitigate global warming

© 2017 Dr. Yann Robiou du PontWith the Paris Agreement, the international community has agreed to limit global warming to well below 2 °C and to pursue efforts to stay below 1.5 °C (UNFCCC 2015a) to avoid dangerous climate impacts. Staying within these boundaries requires important emissions mitigation efforts from all countries (Rogelj et al 2015). Equitable distribution across countries of mitigation efforts, or equivalently of emissions rights, consistent with global mitigation objectives is a contentious issue that involves divergent interpretations of distributive justice (Winkler and Rajamani 2014a). The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report categorises equity approaches from the scientific literature in five groups (Clarke et al 2014). At climate negotiations, most countries tend to support the approach that requires the least efforts on their behalf (Fleurbaey et al 2014, Lange et al 2010). With the absence of consensus on an effort-sharing approach, current negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) follow a self-interested, or ‘bottom-up’, approach to target setting (Andresen 2015, Bodansky 2016) where each country decides its own effort following its understanding of fairness. As a result, the sum of all parties’ announced contributions is not consistent with limiting global warming to 2 °C, let alone 1.5 °C (Rogelj et al 2016a). Under the Paris Agreement, countries committed to increase the ambition of their post-Kyoto climate pledges through a ratcheting-up process that begins in 2023. With the disagreement on effort-sharing approaches, the international community relies on diverging metrics to evaluate the adequacy of national pledges with the global warming thresholds. Since the beginning of climate negotiations under the United Nations, a rich literature has modelled allocations of emissions rights to countries using various effort-sharing approaches with uncoordinated parameterisation. At the start of this PhD work, no study modelled the effort-sharing categories presented in the last IPCC report under a common parameterisation. Additionally, the literature on the combination of effort-sharing approaches remained thin and consisted of averaging the emissions allocations of multiple effort-sharing approaches. This PhD thesis addresses these gaps with the modelling of a new emissions allocation framework, the ‘PRIMAP-Equity’ framework, and with the suggestion of a new combination of effort-sharing approaches. Firstly, this thesis quantifies allocations of emissions rights to countries in a manner that reflects the existing literature on distributive justice. An emissions allocation framework is developed to derive national emissions allocations that reflect the five equity categories of the fifth IPCC report. This modelling framework is applied to derive emissions allocations, under each of the five equity categories, consistent with the emissions mitigation goals of the G7 Elmau agreement signed in June 2015. The allocation framework is then used to derive national emissions trajectories aligned with the recent Paris Agreement goals of both well below 2 °C and 1.5 °C, consistently with the five equity categories . This work represents the first quantification of equitable national trajectories to achieve 1.5 °C goal and informs scientists and government experts in the preparation of the IPCC Special Report on 1.5 °C (IPCC 2017). The Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), countries’ national pledges, of 171 Parties are then evaluated in order to determine which, if any, categories of equity they are consistent with. As well, the thesis highlights the consistency of G20 countries’ pledges with equity allocations. This is discussed in the context of the statement on fairness contained in each pledge. This PhD thesis then addresses the apparent incompatibility between the global warming thresholds and countries’ self-interested visions of effort-sharing by suggesting a new quantitative approach. Doing so, this PhD thesis provides a new metric, inclusive of all international positions, to assess the ambition of the NDCs under the Paris Agreement. This new ‘hybrid’ allocation method reconciles the ‘bottom-up’ approach of equity with the ‘top-down’ climate threshold that they commonly agreed. Under this ‘hybrid’ approach, each country follows the least stringent effort-sharing approach – out of the five that reflect the equity categories presented in the last IPCC report – to achieve the Paris Agreement. The aggregation of current national pledges is found to align with such a ‘bottom-up’ combination of approaches and lead to a warming of up to 2.3 °C in 2100 (with a 50% chance). Conversely, an enhanced ‘bottom-up’ approach – ‘hybrid’ – of global emissions scenarios leading to 1.1 °C and 1.3 °C warmings results in the achievement of the Paris Agreement mitigation goals of 1.5 °C and well below 2 °C, respectively. Ultimately, this study quantifies a compromise where each country can choose an equity approach to determine its effort, but does directly use that approach to assess other countries’ pledges. Finally, the application of this ‘hybrid’ approach provides a temperature assessment for all countries’ climate pledges, indicating the consistency of countries’ ambition in light of the global temperature goals. The NDCs of India, the EU, the USA and China are in line with global ‘bottom-up’ situations leading to warmings of 2.6 °C, 3.2 °C, 4 °C and over 5.1 °C, respectively. The results of this thesis can inform public opinions and decision makers through the ratcheting-up process on what constitutes fair and ambitious pledges to achieve the Paris Agreement following a range or combination of equity approaches. Additionally, the assessments of the adequacy of countries’ pledges with international agreements can inform courts when ruling ‘climate cases’ where governments are sued for their lack of ambition in mitigating emissions (Sabin Center for Climate Change Law 2018)