Climate Change, Justice, and Clean Development – A Review of the Copenhagen Negotiating Draft
Global climate protection will be at the center of negotiations during the Copenhagen Conference in December 2009. It is very likely that climate change is raising challenges for mankind which have never existed in these dimensions before. In view of the sheer enormity of these challenges, we might also have to consider solutions which have previously never existed.
Measured against the increasingly urgent recommendations of the scientific community, the current climate regime – based on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and its subsequent Kyoto Protocol – is manifestly inadequate to address the challenges posed by a warming climate. Even if current mitigation commitments under the Kyoto Protocol are met, the international community will still be further away from achieving safe greenhouse gas emission levels than at the time the Protocol was adopted. Discussions on a new climate agreement with commitments for the period after 2012 are once again guided more by political and economic interests than by overriding climate considerations. Existing market based mechanisms such as the Clean Development Mechanism have significant flaws, and are unable to create a sufficient price signal with current mitigation objectives. Yet a system of tradable emission rights, distributed globally on a per capita basis, has the potential of addressing several challenges at once: climate change and global poverty. Differentiated allocation in the initial phases of such a system could help compensate for divergent historical responsibilities for atmospheric climate change.
| Copyright: | © Lexxion Verlagsgesellschaft mbH | |
| Quelle: | Issue 3/2009 (Oktober 2009) | |
| Seiten: | 9 | |
| Preis inkl. MwSt.: | € 41,65 | |
| Autor: | Prof. Dr. Felix Ekardt  Anne-Katrin Exner Sibylle Albrecht | |
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