Two Decades of International Climate Negotiations - Carbon Budget Allocation Approach to Re-shaping Developing Country Strategies

Climate negotiations have been going on for the last two decades and the awareness for impacts of climate change has improved substantially. However, the trends of global CO2 emissions did not reveal any encouraging signs, with developing countries emitting even more CO2 and industrialized nations showing no signs of reducing emissions to below their 1990 levels. In order to meet the ambitious targets set by the Stern report for the next two decades, it is important to find new and path-breaking approaches to climate change. This paper attempts to analyze the use of carbon/development space historically, at present and in the future with a focus on equity. Trends analysis focuses on the last two decades (Post Rio) and the carbon budget based analysis considers a period of 1850-2050. Industrialized countries are found to have significantly overshot their budgeted allocation for the last 160 years. Both the developing and industrialized countries are overshooting the present budget estimates based on world per capita budget for the next forty years and proportional to the population of each country. It is important for the industrialized countries to bring down their emissions to meet their carbon budgets while the developing countries use their development space as a guideline for their development path. Furthermore, this paper presents aggressive and regressive scenarios for the industrialized countries to compensate for the climate debt they have created.