Greenhouse Development Rights
Greenhouse Development Rights (GDRs) is a justice-based effort-sharing framework designed to show how the costs of rapid climate stabilization can be shared fairly, among all countries. More precisely, GDRs seeks to transparently calculate national “fair shares” in the costs of an emergency global climate mobilization, in a manner that takes explicit account of the fact that, as things now stand, global political and economic life is divided along both North/South and rich/poor lines.
Critically, GDRs approaches climate protection and economic development as two sides of one coin. Its goal is developmental justice, as it might exist even in a world that is compelled to rapidly reduce greenhouse-gas emissions to near-zero levels. The GDRs analysis suggests that rapid climate stabilization will prove impossible without an extremely strong commitment – a right – to a dignified level of sustainable human development (humanity). A right to life free from the privations of poverty.
The GDRs approach builds, whenever possible, upon established scientific and political understandings. In particular, it explicitly codifies the foundational call of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which seeks “the widest possible cooperation by all countries and their participation in an effective and appropriate international response, in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities.” The GDRs strategy is to transparently calculate responsibility and capacity for all countries, with respect to explicit assumptions and benchmarks that can be clearly debated, negotiated, and, when necessary, changed. By so doing, it seeks to provide a coherent, transparent, and compelling way of calculating and comparing national “fair shares” – broadly defined – of the cost of the global climate transition.
The goal of the GDRs effort is a sustainable mobilization that can be accepted as fair around the world. National obligations are calculated as shares of a global obligation that includes adaptation as well as mitigation. The approach here does not traditionally exhibit political realism, for that term is generally understood to imply an approach that starts with what is politically realistic today. The GDRs approach, in contrast, seeks to outline an approach that is consistent with the requirements of the climate science.
In the GDRs framework, a country's obligation to act is based upon its climate debt – its responsibility for contributing to climate change – and equally upon its capacity to act. Responsibility and capacity are both defined with respect to a “development threshold” that exempts the responsibilities and resources of the poor – survival resources and survival income – from being considered when calculating national obligation. Thus, GDRs can be seen as a reference framework intended to support clear, useful thinking about “comparability of effort,” even between widely disparate developed and developing nations.
Finally, GDRs is not an academic exercise. Climate stabilization is a global commons problem, one that is fundamentally defined by the problem of fair use. GDRs, by transparently calculating principle-based obligations to protect the global climate system, sets out a framework by which fair-shares emissions rights can be defined, calculated, understood, debated, and negotiated. As such, it lays out a framework by which actually existing climate treaties and strategies – even “bottom up pledges” like those welcomed by the Copenhagen Accord – can be transparently evaluated and compared.