As climate negotiators again converge in Bonn this week, it is appropriate that we take stock of the key issues that must be resolved if climate negotiations are to yield an equitable solution that is also acceptable.
Beyond the political rhetoric that is bound to follow, progress on the issues listed will be the key determinant of the degree of success.
The most critical unresolved issue vexing the negotiations is the issue of accepting and interpreting historical responsibility.
The touchstone of "common but differentiated responsibilities" under the Framework Convention embodies the historical responsibility of the developed world that is home to less than 20% of humanity but responsible for almost 80% of the current greenhouse gas concentration of our planet.
Post Bali, the North (led by the US) has denied any historical responsibility. The North recognises that in a climate constrained world, the developing countries cannot even reach poverty levels of the North without significant incremental cost that will eat into the South's priority and, indeed, its right to development.
All proposals crafted by the North, including the Copenhagen Accord, not only seek to preserve a disproportionate share of even the remaining environmental space for the North but require the South to make binding commitments to address climate change and bear the cost of such commitments to varying degrees but, in all cases, disproportionate to the South's contribution to the problem.
If one ignores historical responsibility , the position of the North can be defended . However, the Framework Convention and the Bali mandate recognise historical responsibility and hence make all mitigation actions by the developing world voluntary and require the developed world to pay the full incremental costs incurred by the developing world for such voluntary actions and for adaptation to climate change.
Clearly one cannot decide how much reparation to pay (in the form of money and/or technology) unless one first agrees on the extent and nature of the historical responsibility.
The planet's carbon constraints were formally recognised by the international community at Stockholm in 1972. One way could be to equitably distribute the world's cumulative carbon budget to its citizens using 1972 as the base year. Unused entitlements could be traded to pay for the incremental costs of addressing climate change. Such a formulation would implicitly take care of when a country "peaks" or "graduates" .
Agreement on the level of mitigation actions within the borders of the developed countries is the second major unresolved issue. Quite apart from the inability to extract binding and ambitious emission reduction targets from Annex I countries for the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol, it needs to be recognised that the level of OECD's consumption of energy and other natural resources to sustain its lifestyles is simply unsustainable.
The proposed market mechanisms that will reduce emissions where they are most economic to reduce (i.e., the developing world) will be only as successful as we are in redistributing, more equitably, the world's energy and natural resource consumption.
