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Calculating Countries' Fair Shares for Addressing Climate Change

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Thesis(5.62 MB)

Date

2025

Authors

Supervisor

Hall, David
Frame, Dave

Item type

Thesis

Degree name

Doctor of Philosophy

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Publisher

Auckland University of Technology

Abstract

Equity and responsibility are central concepts in the climate ethics literature and also the international climate regime. These concepts underpin debates about fair distributions of financial costs for addressing climate change, as well as rights to emit greenhouse gases. Ethical principles are often drawn on by climate ethicists and negotiators – in the abstract – to inform such debates. However, without clear relationships to data, these principles remain underutilised. This leaves international negotiators and policymakers in sub-optimal positions, as they seek to clarify country-level shares of collective climate finance goals and global emissions budgets, in line with internationally agreed temperature targets. While studies and tools to support such ethical analysis do exist, these tend to aggregate data at higher regional levels, do not include a warming-specific focus, follow untransparent methodologies, apply a form of moral objectivism that presupposes a single moral truth, and conflate ethical domains by combining the sharing of climate-related costs and rights to emit greenhouse gases within the same assessment. Motivated by the aim to develop tools which support democratic deliberation amongst the international climate policy community, this research builds a bespoke tool, the Science and Ethics of Fair Shares dashboard, to carry out top-down assessments of countries’ fair shares for addressing climate change. The research employs a multidisciplinary approach, by drawing on outputs from a simple climate model and environmentally extended input-output analysis to conduct a data-rich applied ethics. Dynamic comparisons of possible effort-sharing distributions are enabled via the operationalisation of five distributional principles: Polluter Pays, Beneficiary Pays, Ability to Pay, Grandfathering and Equality-over-time. The dashboard presents a proof-of-concept for a technology-assisted form of reflective equilibrium, which enables decision makers to explore and test the practical implications of distributional principles by combining multiple scientific and ethical parameters. Use of historical warming and consumption-based emissions on a per country, per gas basis reveal the importance of accounting for short-lived and long-lived gases differently. Additionally, the application of principles with warming-related information aligns countries’ fair shares with the Paris Agreement’s temperature targets. The design of a new Equality-over-time Principle explicitly includes future generations by incorporating countries’ projected populations in warming target calculations. Finally, a climate justice typology is developed so as to avoid the conceptual confusion that has arisen in other assessments. Rather than producing absolute answers to questions of moral responsibility, the dashboard invites users to test their own intuitions of fairness as they encounter a range of possible solutions, reflective of wider perspectives on equity and responsibility. In the penultimate chapter, questions are raised about the adequacy of currently available data, whether new data ought to be collected to better reflect the principles, or whether the principles themselves need to be revised in the face of data constraints. In light of this, the research strengthens the case for greater collaboration between communities of climate ethicists, economists, physical and social scientists. By enabling theory to better inform practice, future research can more readily support climate negotiators and policymakers in their real-world, effort-sharing debates.

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http://hdl.handle.net/10292/19964

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Doctoral Theses