By Ashok Khosla

For the casual but well-informed observer, it must be astounding to see the levels of hypocrisy and double-standards that negotiations in the global arena can reach. And in this respect, few planetary issues can compete for the approval of the “greed is good” school of thought with various aspects of the climate crisis, which by its very nature and spread can only be dealt with by concerted, multilaterally generated and globally implemented solutions that need a different political way of thinking: egalitarian liberalism, one that has been widely extolled by Western philosophers and politicians, but rarely put to practice.

Climate change has been at the centre of the global political agenda for half a century. Discovered in 1956 by scientists as a potential threat to wellbeing worldwide, it took nearly four decades of continuing scientific research and international policy-level discussions to be recognised as needing a framework for governance to manage its potential impacts. A systematic framework for defining the rights and responsibilities of nations to ensure that the world did not suffer the large-scale negative consequences of climate change was needed, and after a long and detailed preparatory process, the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC) was signed at the Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Its detailed structure and functions were to be elucidated by the annual Conferences of the Parties, to create more specific sub-agendas that could be focused on by the appropriate agencies of the member governments and international agencies.

Already, 20 years earlier, the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment held at Stockholm in 1972, had attempted to define basic principles which governments should apply to the governance of major global issues. These included such fundamental commitments as “polluter pays” and the “precautionary principle”, with which the governments sought to limit or at least assign responsibility for causing environmental harm and redressing it. To bring in the needs to make these principles fair and effective, further refinements were introduced in different environmental fora, including, for example universal applicability, Common but Differentiated Responsibilities, etc. These principles have been championed and attacked by different groups of nations but generally, they have stood the test of time and underlie the outcomes envisaged in most environmental conventions that have subsequently been adopted. In the arena of climate change, even from the earliest discussions, they are becoming critically important because of the turns in the discussions on funding climate action.

Such funding issues become all-important for climate change because of the massive costs of both preventive action and coping mechanisms. Those who have funds are not necessarily willing to disburse them to those who need them without the application of systematic criteria for effectiveness and economic merit. How can we get the biggest bang for the buck? Whose needs are the greatest and ability to finance these is the weakest? In the meantime, as the frequency of extreme events caused by climate change rose during the past couple of decades, many nations raised the question why should the victims (of climate-related catastrophes) have to pay the same as those who contribute most to climate change while their economic benefit from activities that cause climate change in the first place. This, of course, boils down to the age-old mutually accusatory North-South dialogue. While many nations who emit more than their share of climate-impacting GHGs can easily be identified, as can those who are suffering the most from climate-related events, there are some who are not obvious since their economic and emission trajectories have changed drastically in recent decades, namely India and China.

It is not beyond the current tools available to scientists and economists to factor in the changes that have taken place of time. Welfare economists do this all the time by well-known devices such as “discounting”. Even with the shortcomings of these tools, it is possible to calculate how much each country has contributed to the current carbon load and continuing emission in the atmosphere and, from this, to monetise the relative contribution it makes to the costs of climate-related impact, integrated over time. Similarly, the affordability and ability to pay of each country can be calculated and integrated over time. Combining these two calculations, the global community could easily put together a map showing who are the net emitters of carbon over time who should contribute most to the Fund and who would be worthy of receiving support from it. Presumably, this is what the IPCC has been asked to do at the recent end of the first phase of the COP currently taking place in Dubai.

In the grand sweep of history, egalitarian liberalism in the West became an obsession quite recently—around the same time as the Industrial Revolution and the start of the era of climate change. Touted more vocally by Western societies than it was ever put into practice, this principle believes in essence that every individual has equal rights to a better life, including future generations. It is every individual, not every country as an aggregate that counts. National level statistics cannot reflect the diversity of the people’s ability to pay towards climate action or of their past contributions to it. This means that it is not trajectory of the GDP or Aggregate National Carbon Emissions that are important in evaluating a country’s contribution to the Fund or its entitlement from it but the range of living conditions of its population.

The author is Chairman, Development Alternatives

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