Implications of various effort-sharing approaches for national carbon budgets and emission pathways

Nicole J. Berg, Heleen L. Soest (), Andries F. Hof, Michel G. J. Elzen, Detlef P. Vuuren, Wenying Chen, Laurent Drouet, Johannes Emmerling, Shinichiro Fujimori, Niklas Höhne, Alexandre C. Kõberle, David McCollum, Roberto Schaeffer, Swapnil Shekhar, Saritha Sudharmma Vishwanathan, Zoi Vrontisi and Kornelis Blok
Additional contact information
Nicole J. Berg: PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency
Heleen L. Soest: PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency
Andries F. Hof: PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency
Michel G. J. Elzen: PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency
Detlef P. Vuuren: PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency
Wenying Chen: Tsinghua University
Shinichiro Fujimori: Kyoto University Katsura Campus
Niklas Höhne: Wageningen University
Alexandre C. Kõberle: Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
David McCollum: International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)
Roberto Schaeffer: Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
Swapnil Shekhar: The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI)
Saritha Sudharmma Vishwanathan: Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIMA)
Zoi Vrontisi: National Technical University of Athens
Kornelis Blok: Policy and Management

Climatic Change, 2020, vol. 162, issue 4, No 8, 1805-1822

Abstract: Abstract The bottom-up approach of the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) in the Paris Agreement has led countries to self-determine their greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction targets. The planned ‘ratcheting-up’ process, which aims to ensure that the NDCs comply with the overall goal of limiting global average temperature increase to well below 2 °C or even 1.5 °C, will most likely include some evaluation of ‘fairness’ of these reduction targets. In the literature, fairness has been discussed around equity principles, for which many different effort-sharing approaches have been proposed. In this research, we analysed how country-level emission targets and carbon budgets can be derived based on such criteria. We apply novel methods directly based on the global carbon budget, and, for comparison, more commonly used methods using GHG mitigation pathways. For both, we studied the following approaches: equal cumulative per capita emissions, contraction and convergence, grandfathering, greenhouse development rights and ability to pay. As the results critically depend on parameter settings, we used the wide authorship from a range of countries included in this paper to determine default settings and sensitivity analyses. Results show that effort-sharing approaches that (i) calculate required reduction targets in carbon budgets (relative to baseline budgets) and/or (ii) take into account historical emissions when determining carbon budgets can lead to (large) negative remaining carbon budgets for developed countries. This is the case for the equal cumulative per capita approach and especially the greenhouse development rights approach. Furthermore, for developed countries, all effort-sharing approaches except grandfathering lead to more stringent budgets than cost-optimal budgets, indicating that cost-optimal approaches do not lead to outcomes that can be regarded as fair according to most effort-sharing approaches.

Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10584-019-02368-y Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:climat:v:162:y:2020:i:4:d:10.1007_s10584-019-02368-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10584

DOI: 10.1007/s10584-019-02368-y

Access Statistics for this article

Climatic Change is currently edited by M. Oppenheimer and G. Yohe

More articles in Climatic Change from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().