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2 Int'l Env't Agreements: Pol. L. & Econs. 1 (2002)

handle is hein.journals/intenve2 and id is 1 raw text is: International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics 2: 1-22, 2002. 0 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. Burden Sharing and Fairness Principles in International Climate Policy LASSE RINGIUS1, ASBJORN TORVANGER2 * and ARILD UNDERDAL2 UNEP Collaborating Centre on Energy and Environment, Ris0 National Laboratory, P.O. Box 49, DK-4000 Roskilde, Denmark; 2 CICERO, P.O. Box 1129 Blindern, N-0318 Oslo, Norway (*Author for correspondence, e-mail: asbjorn.torvanger@cicero.uio.no) Accepted 10 October 2001 Abstract. One of the major challenges facing participants in the global climate change negotia- tions is to find a scheme of burden sharing that can be accepted as fair by all or at least most governments. In this article we first explore which basic principles of fairness seem to be suffi- ciently widely recognized to serve as a normative basis for such a scheme. We then examine a set of proposals for differentiating obligations that have been submitted by governments in the negoti- ations leading up to the Kyoto Protocol to see which principles have been honored. In the concluding section we discuss the implications of our analysis for the design of more specific burden sharing rules. Key words: burden sharing, climate agreements, fairness principles Abbreviations: GDP = Gross Domestic Product; CO2 = Carbon dioxide; LRTAP = UN Economic Commission for Europe Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution; RIVM = National Institute of Public Health and the Environment, the Netherlands; AGBM = Ad Hoc Group on the Berlin Mandate; G-77/China = Group of 77 and China (developing countries) 1. Introduction Beginning in the late 1980s, a series of global negotiations has been conducted with the explicit objective of preventing a negative change in the global climate system due to increasing emissions of greenhouse gases from anthropogenic sources to the Earth's atmosphere. These on-going global negotiations are aimed at pro- viding an international public or collective good namely protection of the global climate system by means of voluntary international cooperation. In the case of climate change, there is no single predominant actor who can and will provide the good through unilateral measures, and no institutional mechanisms are available for supranational governance. In such a situation, one of the major challenges facing the negotiators is to find some scheme of burden sharing that can be generally accepted as fair by all or at least most governments.1

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