Reframing the question: Bolivia's challenge to the Copenhagen Accord methodology

How to fairly and equitably distribute the remaining carbon budget left for a 2°C (or a 1.5°C) world? That’s one way to frame the central question on emission budget allocation under consideration by both the UNFCCC AWG-KP and the AWG-LCA, the approach taken by Ambassador Pablo Solon of the Plurinational State of Bolivia during his presentation on 3 August to the AWG-KP workshop on the scale of Annex I emission reductions.

If we start with the irrefutable premise that there is a carbon budget -- a certain amount of carbon that can be emitted, say between 2010 and 2050, to have a reasonable chance of staying below 2°C or 1.5°C -- then the most logical way forward is to first quantify the total size of the budget, then collectively develop the criteria to use to divide up that budget.

The methodology is really not much different from the process for allocating a household budget. There are constraints imposed by a monthly salary. If you spend all your salary in the first week of the month, eating will be difficult for the rest of the month. Rather than ad hoc spending, a wiser approach would be to discern all possible expenditures for the month and then prioritize and allocate the budget based on personal criteria.

This is the logic laid out by Ambassador Solon in his presentation to the AWG-KP. Using numbers generated by well-known climate experts, he proposes that a budget for 2010-2050 and a 1.5°C world is 420 Gt of carbon. For a 2°C world, emissions during the same four decades could amount to 750 Gt. It is now time for countries to engage in the necessary exercises of prioritization and allocation; if some countries spend all or most of the global carbon budget in the first ten years of the period, we will have a serious crisis on our hands.

With this approach, the next step is to collectively develop the criteria whereby the remaining atmospheric space will be allocated. The Bolivian proposal, as presented by Ambassador Solon, is to use two basic criteria to determine equitable division of the remaining atmospheric space: population and historical responsibility. Using a per capita approach, where cumulatively over the next four decades the A1 countries house 16% of global population and non-A1 countries are home to 84%, yields the following carbon allocation:

	percent of global population	carbon allocation for a 2C world	for 1.5C world
Annex I	16%	120 Gt	67 Gt
Non-Annex I	84%	630 Gt	353 Gt
Total	100%	750 Gt	420 Gt

Using the approach of historical responsibility, with 1850 as the reference year for historical contributions, yields the following carbon allocation for the total 1300 Gt emitted in the last century and a half:

	a fair allocation	the actual allocation	global emissions debt
Annex I	25% = 325 Gt	72% = 932 Gt	-607 Gt
Non-Annex I	75% = 975 Gt	28% = 368 Gt	+607 Gt
Total	1300 Gt

Ambassador Solon had no desire to mince words in commenting on the historical numbers, telling the Annex I countries in the audience directly: “You have overused atmospheric space.”

Unfortunately, the current approach of the Annex I countries is to ignore historical responsibility, spend what might be in their per capita budget now, and hope for the best. According to the analysis outlined by Ambassador Solon, the average annual carbon expenditure of Annex I countries in the next ten years is estimated to be 13.3 Gt. Over the course of the next decade, the Annex I countries could well spend their entire carbon paycheck.

The approach of the Copenhagen Accord (CA) pledges, and indeed the approach used to derive the first commitment period pledges under the Kyoto Protocol (KP), is illogical and irresponsible, driving us far beyond 2°C and threatening serious climate disruption. The CA approach is this: put the supposedly politically feasible emission reduction pledges on the table and if things don’t add up, well, we’ll deal with that problem sometime in the future. It’s a fundamentally irrational process, deliberately designed to obscure the fact that developed countries are claiming a much larger share of atmospheric space than is fair and equitable.