Countries' Historical Emission Responsibilities: A Normative Perspective

Changyi Liu (), Jiahua Pan (), Ying Chen () and Mengmei Chen ()
Additional contact information
Changyi Liu: National Climate Center, Zhongguancunnandajie 46, Haidian District, Beijing 100081, China
Jiahua Pan: Institute for Urban and Environmental Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, MCCTower, 28 Shuguangxili, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100028, China
Ying Chen: Institute for Urban and Environmental Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, MCCTower, 28 Shuguangxili, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100028, China
Mengmei Chen: Graduate School of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Liangxiang College Park, Fangshan District, Beijing 102488, China

Chinese Journal of Urban and Environmental Studies (CJUES), 2014, vol. 02, issue 02, 1-16

Abstract: This paper raises six critical normative questions on accounting countries' historical emission responsibilities of climate change: (i) What should be the time period? What should be the start date and the end date? (ii) Should the Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use (AFOLU) and non-CO2gases be included or not? (iii) Should the embedded emissions in trade be accounted or not? (iv) Should countries be assigned responsibilities for emissions before 1990 or not? (v) Should the historical responsibilities be discounted or not? (vi) Should subsistence emissions be exempted or not? From the perspectives of ethics and justice, legal, economics, and politics, we think that (i) the contributions should include past, current, and future emissions, and responsibilities should be assigned for historical emissions before 1990; (ii)CO2and non-CO2emissions from the AFOLU sectors should be exempted from countries' responsibilities since they are subsistence emissions in order to satisfy basic needs; (iii) the historical emissions should be discounted based on both physical and economic reasons. Finally, we claim that the discounting approach is an innovative, systematic, and pragmatic method to solve the deadlock historical responsibilities, which can decrease the historical responsibility and financial responsibility to a reasonable level for the developed countries while insisting on the equity principles.

Keywords: Climate change; responsibilities; equity; carbon budget; discount (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S2345748114500183
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wsi:cjuesx:v:02:y:2014:i:02:n:s2345748114500183

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from

DOI: 10.1142/S2345748114500183

Access Statistics for this article

Chinese Journal of Urban and Environmental Studies (CJUES) is currently edited by PAN Jiahua

More articles in Chinese Journal of Urban and Environmental Studies (CJUES) from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().