Greenhouse Development Rights

What is the Greenhouse Development Rights framework?

The Greenhouse Development Rights framework is designed to support an emergency climate stabilization program while, at the same time, preserving the right of all people to reach a dignified level of sustainable human development free of the privations of poverty.

More specifically, the GDRs framework quantifies the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change's official principles -- which call for "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" -- with the goal of providing a coherent, principle-based way to think about national obligations to pay for both mitigation and adaptation.

GDRs overviews and introductions

For a more detailed and precise explanation of Greenhouse Development Rights, see the Executive Summary of the second edition of the GDRs book, "The Right to Development in a Climate Constrained World." The second edition itself is still forthcoming, but when it's done (soon) it will contain this, our short, official, scrupulously precise summary.

More informally, you might take a look at "Squaring the Climate Circle: A New Politics of Solidarity Can Heal a Divided Planet," by Tom Athanasiou of the GDRs author's group. It begins on page 16 of Bad Deal for the Planet: Why Carbon Offsets Aren't Working... and How to Create a Fair Global Climate Accord, a new report by International Rivers that also includes Patrick McCully's critique of the Clean Development Mechanism: "The Great Offset Swindle: How Carbon Credits are Gutting the Kyoto Protocol, and Why they Must be Scrapped." The two essays, you may notice, go together quite nicely.

GDRs presentations

To see a recent presentation of the Greenhouse Development Rights slides, click here. This link will take you to an official UNFCCC recording of a Bonn side event (28th sessions of the SBs) on June 10, 2008. It's a pretty interesting 2 hours, but if you want to skip right to the GDRs presentation (as interpreted by SEI's Sivan Kartha) just click on his name. (Also note that this video link is sometimes a bit flaky).

To actually download a set of the latest GDRs slides (reflecting the 2nd edition reference trajectories and definitions) with extensive notes, here is the latest Power point presentation. The presentation is of course a moving, evolving target, but this is a good snapshot, which was finalized on June 18, 2008.

By the way, we should say that the Greenhouse Development Rights framework was developed and modeled by Paul Baer and Tom Athanasiou of EcoEquity and Sivan Kartha of the Stockholm Environment Institute, with the support of Christian Aid and, recently, the Heinrich Böll Foundation. At this point, Paul, Tom and Sivan are collectively knows as "the authors's group," and the project is picking up an expanded set of freinds, supporters, and sponsors. These now also include Oxfam Great Britain, the Stockholm Environment Institute, Norwegian Church Aid, and the Dutch Interchurch Organization for Development Cooperation.

The authors can be contacted at authors@ecoequity.org.

Download the first edition of the book: "The Right to Development in a Climate Constrained World"

If you’re looking for the Greenhouse Development Rights book, The right to development in a climate constrained world, this is the right place. You can download a low-resolution version here, or a larger, high-resolution version with somewhat clearer graphics here. Note that you can (and probably should) skip the technical appendices

Note too that a second edition is in development, and that you can download its executive summary here.

Not that the first edition isn't still really useful, but the second edition will include many refinements. Many are localized matters of precision and style. But others are more significant:

• Just after our initial (November 2007) publication, the World Bank released new income data and PPP (purchasing power parity) conversions. These are critical in the calculation of the Greenhouse Development Rights “Responsibility and Capacity Indexes,” and this new edition fully integrates these new data.

• Earlier versions of GDRs relied heavily on two IPCC SRES scenarios (A1B and B1). A1B was taken as our “business and usual” case, and B1 was contrasted to it to estimate the size of the global “no regrets” potential – the size of the emission reductions that could be made for free, or indeed profitably. The SRES scenarios, however, are being overtaken by events (for example, actual emissions rates are overshooting even the most worrisome of the SRES cases) and so, following current usage, we have taken the 2007 World Energy Outlook reference projection as our new BAU case. Our new estimate of the “global no regrets potential” is based on an influential McKinsey estimate, which too is based on the 2007 WEO reference case.

• We have decided to change our treatment of "no-regrets" reductions. We no longer interpret their standard definition (zero or negative cost reductions, including co-benefits) to imply that all countries, whatever their level of development, should be obliged to achieve those reductions alone. Now, recognizing the importance of various non-cost barriers (e.g., structural, institutional, financial, and technological barriers) to achieving no-regrets reductions, we oblige countries to achieve only a specified fraction of their so-called no regrets obligations. The remainder is included in the global mitigation requirement that is allocated among countries according to capacity and responsibility.

• We have modestly changed the value of the development threshold, from $9,000 to $7,500, i.e. from 150% to 125% of the $6,000 global poverty line. This was found to be more consistent with national estimates (in China and India specifically) of the size of the consuming class.

• Many of the charts have been rescaled so as to focus on the 2020 time horizon. Longer term projections are often problematic, at least for our purposes, and in any case we wish to emphasize 2020, which has emerged as the key near-term benchmark in climate policy discussions.

• Finally, and significantly, our discussion of the political landscape has been updated to account for developments in Bali. Section 6 is the place to find these changes, but here’s the headline: the frozen politics of the pre-Bali period are, if not actually breaking up, at least developing deep cracks. This is of course good news, for in change there is hope, but as the new science makes clear, we are running out of time.

Note, too, that other changes are planned for the future, particularly if, as now seems likely, the Greenhouse Development Rights framework is widely judged to be useful, and thus worthy of further development. The way to think about this is that the GDRs architeture is pretty stable, but that the details -- numerical, political, insitutional -- are evolving with the times. And of course, in practive, anythink like GDRs would have to be negotiated, which would lead to huge changes. Still, the shape of the GDRs framework is no longer in rapid flux.

January 2008

Greenhouse Development Rights at the Bali climate COP

Bali was quite a milestone for the Greenhouse Development Rights project. Not only does the GDRs "book" look great, but our side event (the slides are here; the UN's archived video, which may or may not work, is listed at 10:30 AM on this page) went very well indeed. And GDRs was also presented or discussed in six other side events, which may be some sort of record. It's certainly a sign that, against a background of interminable "negotiations as usual," there's substantial interest in facing the real challenge -- a principle-based burden sharing system designed to be fair, and thus viable, even under the stress of an emergency transition.

This interest is rising among the NGOs, and is already high in the developing world. See for example "The road from Bali", an excellent piece in the Business Standard (a major Indian business magazine) by veteran diplomat Nitin Desai, which explains the GDRs approach with admirable simplicity. Or Business Rules, a far more "radical" analysis (though published in Frontline, a national news magazine) by grassroots activist C.E. Karunakaran that embeds the GDRs analysis in prose that's far less restrained than Desai's.

Why has GDRs hit so strong a cord in India? We could speculate, but it's more important, at least for the moment, to note that the cord is resonating across a wide political spectrum -- from "Business Standard" to "Business Rules." And that the real debate, here as around the world, is not about GDRs but rather about Bali. GDRs is relevant only insofar as it helps us to make sense of what happened there, only insofar as it helps us to measure Bali's progress (and Bali's failure) against the real challenges of climate stabilization.

The Bali debate is everywhere, but one easy place to dip into it is via the three articles on Bali that EcoEquity's Director Tom Athanasiou wrote on Gristmill: Rational expectations, Elephants in the room, and Where do we go from here? The third of these, in particular, raises the key question, well expressed in the old quip about the optimist, who thinks that this is the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist, who fears that this may well be the case.

Who's right? We're going to find out soon enough.

November 2007

An “open source” policy framework The Greenhouse Development Rights framework is based on a simple idea, that there are only a small number of reasonable ways in which the UNFCCC’s famous “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capacities” can be quantified. We’ve proposed a specific method for making such a quantification, but we do not presume to have the last word on the matter.

Accordingly, we’d like to see Greenhouse Development Rights develop into an open source policy framework. That is, we want people who are sympathetic (or even unsympathetic) to our basic idea to be able to work with our analysis, our data, our assumptions, and our models, and to develop their own versions, variations and extensions of the GDRs approach. Accordingly, we’ve put our database, along with some of the computer code used in our calculations, into a public repository at http://gdrs.sourceforge.net. It needs more work, but the basics are already there, and we invite the nerds among you to visit, download the “GDRs Calculator,” and give us your feedback. We’ll take it seriously, because this is very much a work in progress.
Address correspondence to GDRs@ecoequity.org

Years ago, when we first spun up EcoEquity, we saw equal per-capita emissions rights as the essential foundation of a just and effective global climate regime. It's been a long trip since then, and for better or for worse this has changed. Our goal remains the same -- the proper marriage of justice and realism -- but we've come to take the diversity of "national circumstances" very seriously indeed when trying to understand what such a marriage implies.

And when we say that national circumstances have to be taken into account, we don't simply mean that some countries are hotter that others. We also mean that some have a great deal more responsibility for the climate crisis, and that some are a good deal richer than others. The bottom line is that we still see per-capita rights as crucial, but no longer see them as emissions rights per se. In fact, we think that the best way forward, for those of us who still see rights-based approaches as critical, might well be the entirely different terms of "rights to sustainable development."

Such rights are asserted by the Berlin Mandate, though working out what they mean in practice isn't easy. One thing that seems pretty clear is that sustainable development rights must be animated by a system that leverages the Polluter Pays Principle to fund a rapid global clean-energy transition. Beyond that matters get less clear, though we think we've worked out a useful approach to the problem, one which we intend to be taken as both a proposal and a reference framework by which other proposals can be judged. We call it Greenhouse Development Rights.

The Greenhouse Development Rights approach is very much a work in progress. Given this, we've decided to set up this page to make it easier for interested parties to follow its evolution.

First, the people behind the curtain. The original "Greenhouse Development Rights" group, which evolved from the group that, after the Climate Action Network's 2002 "Equity Summit," set out to further develop the "Per Capita Plus National Circumstances" approach. There are three of us: Tom Athanasiou and Paul Baer of EcoEquity and Sivan Kartha of the Stockholm Environment Institute, all doing business, at least as far as GDRs is concerned, as EcoEquity. There was a forth in our ranks, Steven Bernow of the Tellus Institute, but Steve died just as we really picking up steam. Still, his name belongs here.

The Greenhouse Development Rights approach debuted at a side event at COP 10 in Argentina, with a paper and presentation by Siv, Paul, and Tom that was introduced by Deborah Cornland of Sweden's Mistra, an early supporter of the GDRs project. This paper was called Cutting the Gordian Knot, but this, alas, did not translate well. The final, reworked version was published on April 15 2005, under the title Cutting the Knot: Climate Protection, Political Realism, and Equity as Requirements of a Post-Kyoto Regime.

There followed a long pause in the development of approach, during which we bemoaned our lack of funding, debated the feedback which we had received at COP10, and pursued other projects. Recently, however, things have picked up speed. For one thing, a number of people and organizations have become interested in the Greenhouse Development Rights approach, most notably the estimable British development group Christian Aid. For another, we have completed and published two relevant new papers.

The Nairobi draft does, however, mark real progress since we debuted the GDRs approach at COP10. Since then we've been grinding slowly through the issues and improvements needed to make it really useful. For one thing, we're no longer treating countries as monolithic, but rather calculating their "responsibility and capacity indexes" in a manner that is sensitive to intra-national income disparities. Not to say class. For another, and just as importantly, adaptation, and obligation to pay for adaptation, are now fully integrated into the GDRs framework.

And we're happy to say that the GDRs drafting group is not alone in trundling the Nairobi draft around the halls of the conference center. Christian Aid is now a full partner, and some other prospective partners are also in the wings. Our hope is to put our core point onto the political agenda as quickly as possible - that if we actually intend to build a climate regime that can hold the warming to 2C or less, we had best think very clearly indeed about how that regime can preserve, and actively promote, the right to human development.

Finally, and only a bit tangentially, we'd like to mention second report, this on precautionary emissions pathways, published by the UK's Institute for Public Policy Rese and authored by EcoEquity's Research Director, Paul Baer. It's called High Stakes: Designing emissions pathways to reduce the risk of dangerous climate change , and it was written by Paul Baer of EcoEquity and co-authored with Michael Mastrandrea of Stanford University.

"High Stakes" has already gotten a bit of high level attention, and it's a key contribution to the intensifying debate over precaution and long-term objectives. This is because it shows, by way of fairly robust but transparent risk calculations, that even if we could orchestrate an extremely steep and nearly immediate decline in global emissions, we would still face a risk on the order of 10-20% or more of exceeding the 2ºC threshold, the most broadly endorsed "precautionary" target.

The relevance of this work should probably be pointed out -- the GDRs approach begins with an explicit calculation of the "mitigation shortfall" that has to be filled by any viable global climate regime. That shortfall can only be calculate with respect to a true "soft landing" emissions pathway. Which is where "High Stakes" comes in.