The broad acceptance at Copenhagen of a 2° C temperature guard rail to avoid catastrophic impact of climate change has meant accepting a limit to the amount of carbon countries can emit. The next step is to work out how countries can ensure social and economic development of its people within the constraints of this carbon budget.
Developing countries cannot be expected to give their consent to an agreement that would make it difficult — and often impossible — to meet their primary goal of poverty alleviation and development.
It is for this reason that even though the prospects of an agreement at Cancun are dim, there is an attempt to arrive at a consensus on equity in burden-sharing.
An understanding on burden-sharing, it is felt, will make it possible to push issues like adequate finance, technology and capacity-building support provided by developed countries for developing countries. The attempt then is to use the exercise on equitable sharing of carbon space to break the deadlock in the climate negotiations.
The end result being not just ensuring the health of the planet, but securing the requisite development space for developing countries.
One way is to determine the 'fair' share of each country is the carbon budget. It is argued that since industrialised countries have had almost 150 years of unfettered run of the global atmospheric space, it is now their turn to give up carbon space for poor countries to meet developmental goals.
In real terms, it is a form of the right to pollute. The fair share is determined by allocating every person with equal emitting rights based on equal per-capita emission. The idea of equity is enshrined in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
As such, the notion every person on earth must have the right to emit equal amount of carbon follows from the convention. The per-capita approach works in favour of countries with higher population. Most developed countries have opposed this method that is advantageous to developing economies with sustained high growth rates such as India and China.
Countries like India, that are on high growth path and yet have a huge population living in poverty, need to calibrate their position on equity to derive the maximum development space without endangering the planet.
A study by T Jayaraman of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (Tiss) and other experts puts the global carbon space budget at 1,440 giga tonnes between 2000 and 2050. The equal per-capita approach is used to determine the fair share of carbon space.
Broadly, the Tiss study treats carbon space as equivalent to developmental space. "On the one hand such (greenhouse gas, especially carbon dioxide) emissions are the cause of global warming, it is also clear that for developing countries in the short and medium term, carbon dioxide emissions continue to be a necessary part of growth and development," according to the paper.
