Financing SD: country undertakings and rights for environmental sustainability

The paper proposes a global mechanism to finance and promote sustainable development (SD) that is multinational, provides incentives for rich and poor countries to promote SD, incorporates the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and links incentives and funding for SD to structural benchmarks and performance targets. The mechanism would operate as a large fund into which rich countries would pay based on their level of population, per capita income and change in an individual or composite measure of environmental sustainability. The approach offers a number of features that make it a superior mechanism to the Global Environmental Facility (GEF). Receipts from the funds, called Country Undertakings and Rights for Environmental Sustainability (CURES), would be made to poor countries based on their population, per capita income and absolute level of environmental sustainability. 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