Strengthening bottom-up and top-down climate governance     

Jo Dirix  Wouter Peeters  Johan Eyckmans  Peter Tom Jones  Sigrid Sterckx 《Climate Policy》2013,13(3):363-383

Although the UN and EU focus their climate policies on the prevention of a 2 °C global mean temperature rise, it has been estimated that a rise of at least 4?°C is more likely. Given the political climate of inaction, there is a need to instigate a bottom-up approach so as to build domestic support for future climate treaties, empower citizens, and motivate leaders to take action. A review is provided of the predominant top-down cap-and-trade policies in place – the Kyoto Protocol and EU Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) – with a focus on the grandfathering of emissions entitlements and the possibility of offsetting emissions. These policies are evaluated according to two criteria of justice and it is concluded that they fail to satisfy them. Some suggestions as to how the EU ETS can be improved so as to enable robust climate action are also offered.

Policy relevance

The current supranational climate policy has not been successful and global leaders have postponed the adoption of a meaningful successor to the Kyoto Protocol. In view of this inaction, bottom-up approaches with regard to climate policy should be further developed. It is argued that two of the main top-down policies, grandfathering and offsetting, impede the avowed goals of EU climate policy and pose significant ethical dilemmas with regard to participatory and intergenerational justice. In order to provide a more robust EU climate policy, the EU should inter alia provide a long-term perspective for investors, reduce the volatility of the carbon price, and prepare for the possibility of carbon leakage.  相似文献   

Fairness critically conditions the carbon budget allocation across countries     

《Global Environmental Change》2022

Countries’ nationally determined contributions to mitigate global warming translate to claims of country specific shares of the remaining carbon budget. The remaining global budget is limited by the aim of staying well below 2 °C, however. Here we show how fairness concerns quantitatively condition the allocation of this global carbon budget across countries. Minimal fairness requirements include securing basic needs, attributing historical responsibility for past emissions, accounting for benefits from past emissions, and not exceeding countries’ societally feasible emission reduction rate. The argument in favor of taking into account these fairness concerns reflects a critique of both simple equality- and sovereignty-principled reduction approaches, the former modelled here as the equal-per-capita distribution from now on, the latter as prolonging the inequality of the status-quo levels of emissions into the transformation period (considered a form of “grandfathering”). We find the option most in line with fairness concerns to be a four-fold qualified version of the equal-per-capita approach that incorporates a limited form of grandfathering.  相似文献