The Danish part of the world's climate responsibility adds up to an annual bill of 6 to 12 billion DKK (1.02 to 2.04 billion USD).

Executive summary: Soon, in Copenhagen, the climate negotiations will reach a critical milestone. The stakes could not be higher – recent science makes this very clear. Between Barack Obama's election on the one hand and the economic crisis on the other, few people know what to expect, or even what would count as success.

And in it, Denmark, obviously, plays a critical role. Not only is it about to host the most important climate negotiation since Kyoto, but the Danish government has signaled a clear desire to convene
a successful outcome,
and more generally to
demonstrate leadership in
the global response to the
climate problem.

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Report: A Greenhouse Development Rights Analysis (2009)

GDR_report 1.80 MB

In this context, it is not surprising that Denmark has accepted the most stringent emission reduction target within the EU effort-sharing agreement. Relative to year 1990 levels, it has agreed to reduce emissions by nearly 27% by 2020. If the EU raises its ambition as part of a global agreement, as it has offered, then Denmark's target is likely to deepen to something closer to 35% . This is indeed ambitious. Still, it is important to ask whether it is enough. Will this level of effort, and the European effort-sharing framework within which it is defined, be enough to break the impasse that has, to this point, prevented real progress in the climate regime? This is the question that this report attempts to answer, and it will begin by distinguishing the short-term from the long. The short-term problem is straightforward enough – the industrialized countries, which committed in 1992 in Rio to lead the way to a post-carbon world, have simply not done so. Their emissions path has not been significantly transformed, and emissions from several key countries have continued their upward trend. Moreover, the financial and technological support for mitigation and adaptation in developing countries, which was promised in Rio, in Kyoto, and on many occasions since, has simply not arrived. Given this, the most politically relevant observation is that the North has still to demonstrate its willingness to lead. The developing countries, of course, must engage, but here we must be extraordinarily clear. This is not a world in which the North kept up its end of the Kyoto bargain, and it would be foolish to try to proceed as if it is. Given the North's failure to meet its past commitments, it must now make an extremely bold effort if any rapid progress is to be possible. Like many others, we had hoped to see such an effort unveiled by this time by the EU, which has so often been the North's most progressive bloc. But the European Commission's recent Communication, which signals the terms by which Europe will engage in Copenhagen, has forced us to conclude that the EU is not rising to the task. It proposes only to limit emissions to 30% below 1990 levels, which is toward the weaker end of the 25-40% range so widely discussed in the context of 2ºC trajectories. On the funding side, it proposes to support only the more costly of the South's mitigation options (i.e., excluding "low cost/short term net benefit options") rather than the "full incremental costs" agreed in the Framework Convention. And even more problematically, it suggest that support for adaptation may be limited to the "most vulnerable and poorest." This proposal is too weak to build momentum for the simultaneous action and trust building that must characterize the second commitment period. The long-term problem is even worse – the climate negotiations are fundamentally stymied by the effort-sharing question, and could easily remain at an impasse long after Copenhagen. This impasse derives from the profoundly, bitterly unequal nature of our shared social world, an inequality that matters a great deal in realist as well as moral terms. To be blunt – the climate crisis is extremely grave, so grave that the appropriate response can only be seen as an emergency climate mobilization. Yet such a mobilization, which would be daunting under the best of circumstances, must come instead while billions of people, overwhelmingly but not exclusively in the South, are still struggling to escape poverty, and even as a powerful new wave of global economic instability draws them backward into insecurity and fear. The centrality of this development crisis to the climate problem cannot be overstated. Nor can its most obvious implication, that the international climate policy impasse will not be broken without a fair global effort-sharing architecture, one that promises a way forward that does not threaten the development of the South. As an effort to move toward such a system, we have found the EC position to be much less helpful than it might have been, for it simply fails to transparently and unambiguously assert the EU's willingness to take its fair share of the global effort necessary to overcome the climate crisis. It does, to be sure, take a modest step beyond the ad hocism that defined the Kyoto targets, but it falls far short of establishing a transparent, principle-based system that holds the right to development at its structural core. This is where the Greenhouse Development Rights framework comes in. For GDRs (explained briefly below and in greater length in the Annex) is an effort-sharing system designed to be as simple as possible while still capturing the intention behind the UNFCCC's famous principles of "common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities." By incorporating responsibility, it captures the necessities of the polluter pays principle and establishes incentives for low-carbon development. By incorporating capacity, it respects the obvious truth that climate is an overarching civilizational challenge that will demand major financial resources. By defining both responsibility and capacity with respect to a development threshold, it safeguards a meaningful right to development. And, critically, by accounting for intra-national disparities in wealth, it recognizes that that this right adheres to individuals, not countries, and that the relatively wealthy people in poor countries, like their compatriots in the North, should ultimately (if not immediately) share the common obligation to stabilize and protect the global climate. It is, on other words, a sketch of the future, as it must soon come to be, and as such it tells us a great deal about what we must achieve in Copenhagen.