The Greenhouse Development Rights framework

The vast majority of emission reductions required to prevent dangerous climate change must be made in the developing world. Yet the human development aspirations of developing countries requires expanded energy services, which has historically always been accompanied by rising carbon emissions. Developing countries have thus firmly asserted that a solution to climate change cannot come at the expense of their development. The Greenhouse Development Rights (GDR) framework is a climate regime architecture explicitly structured to safeguard a right to development, and thus make an ambitious global solution possible. It is a burden-sharing framework that defines national obligations, based on responsibility for the climate change problem and capacity to solve it. Both are defined with respect to a “development threshold” that serves to relieve from the costs and constraints of the climate crisis those individuals still striving for a decent standard of welfare. Highlighting the United States and China, we discuss implications in the context of an international funding mechanism and a global cap and trade system. The GDR approach is relevant to a next phase of the global climate regime negotiated in Copenhagen as a framework for principle-based commitments for industrialized countries, and a basis for future evolution toward a globally differentiated system.