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Sharing the burden of financing adaptation to climate change
- Source :
- Global Environmental Change Part A: Human & Policy Dimensions; Oct2009, Vol. 19 Issue 4, p411-421, 11p
- Publication Year :
- 2009
-
Abstract
- Climate change may cause most harm to countries that have historically contributed the least to greenhouse gas emissions and land-use change. This paper identifies consequentialist and non-consequentialist ethical principles to guide a fair international burden-sharing scheme of climate change adaptation costs. We use these ethical principles to derive political principles – historical responsibility and capacity to pay – that can be applied in assigning a share of the financial burden to individual countries. We then propose a hybrid ‘common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities’ approach as a promising starting point for international negotiations on the design of burden-sharing schemes. A numerical assessment of seven scenarios shows that the countries of Annex I of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change would bear the bulk of the costs of adaptation, but contributions differ substantially subject to the choice of a capacity to pay indicator. The contributions are less sensitive to choices related to responsibility calculations, apart from those associated with land-use-related emissions. Assuming costs of climate adaptation of USD 100 billion per year, the total financial contribution by the Annex I countries would be in the range of USD 65–70 billion per year. Expressed as a per capita basis, this gives a range of USD 43–82 per capita per year. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 09593780
- Volume :
- 19
- Issue :
- 4
- Database :
- Supplemental Index
- Journal :
- Global Environmental Change Part A: Human & Policy Dimensions
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 44581985
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2009.07.009