A brave new target: cut greenhouse emissions by 122%

A new approach to tackling climate change advocates setting emission reduction targets - of sometimes greater than 100% - according a country's responsibility and capacity to contribute to a solution. Could this ever be put into practice, asks Duncan Clark

Duncan Clark
guardian.co.uk,
Monday October 06 2008 15:30 BST

Over the past 10 years, targets for cuts in CO2 emissions have crept up. Take the UK. Kyoto required a 12.5% reduction from 1990 levels by 2012, some of which we'd already achieved when we ratified the agreement. Next, the government promised a 20% reduction by the same date. That developed into a 60% cut by 2050, which the government has now accepted may need to become an 80% reduction.
George Monbiot and others have gone further, calling for a cut of more than 90% by 2050 to reflect the latest science and to allow for equal distribution of the right to pollute around the world.
Many think that targets such as these sound hopelessly ambitious, but a new report (pdf) from the Stockholm Environment Institute goes further still. It claims that for many developed countries a useful and just target will be a reduction of more than 100% – and in just over a decade. The report takes Sweden as a case study and concludes that its goal should be a drop in emissions of 122% by 2020.
Hold on a minute, I hear you cry, how can a country reduce its emissions by more than it produces?
The answer to that seeming paradox, of course, is to pay for emissions reductions abroad. But why should Sweden and other similar countries have to do that? Surely reducing its own emissions to zero – or nearly zero – would be enough?
Not according to the new report, which is based on an approach called Greenhouse Development Rights. This idea has been around a year or so, but hasn't often made the headlines. The new report is an interesting example of seeing how it might actually work in practice. It's all a bit complex, so bear with me here.
The approach is based on the idea that the developing world will, justifiably, never "prioritise rapid emissions reductions above its goal of human development for its people. Any strategy that even implicitly attempts to force such a prioritisation will be futile."
The way around this potential roadblock, the report suggests, is to work out the true responsibility of each country – ie its emissions – as well as its true capacity to contribute to the solution.
To work out the responsibility, you look at imports and exports to work out the true carbon footprint of each country. If an individual in the West purchases something – be it a phone made in China or a bean grown in Kenya – the emissions are allocated to your country, not the country that produced it. In the case of Sweden – which, like most rich countries, imports far more than it exports – this adds around a fifth to its official emissions figures.
How about capacity? The idea here is to set an income threshold – the report plumps for $20 per person per day – above which a responsibility for paying for climate change kicks in. It's a bit like how income tax works: you don't pay anything until you earn a fixed annual minimum.
Finally, you work out the total required cut in global emissions reductions and divvy it up nation-by-nation according to responsibility and capacity. In the case of Sweden, the report calculates that it should make (or pay for) 0.51% of the world's total emissions savings, which equates to 122% of its current emissions. This ambitious target, the report estimates, would cost the average Swedish citizen around $1.20 per day.
For comparison, the US would need to make or pay for 33% of the world's emissions saving, the EU 26%, Japan 7.8%, China 5.5% and India 0.5%. But over time, as emissions and income patterns shift, so do the targets. If a country gets greener, its responsibility drops. If it gets richer, it will be asked to do more.
All of which is rather neat. I'm going to ponder this idea more (the report doesn't make for easy Monday-morning reading), but my initial reaction to the GDR concept is positive – something worth serious consideration alongside competing schemes such as Contraction & Convergence and Kyoto2.
Unfortunately, as with all such schemes, it's hard to imagine today's world signing up. Sweden? Perhaps. The US? Perhaps not. The American politicians who have recently been describing the financial bail-out as the first step on the slippery path to socialism would doubtless make parallels between the GDR approach and that old Marxist maxim: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
The report acknowledges that its proposal would be hard for many nations to swallow, with targets "large enough to seem implausible by today's standards of political realism." But it implores Sweden to take a do the right thing by the climate and the world's poor by committing to its 122% carbon cut in the run-up to the Copenhagen summit.
We'll have to wait and see if it happens. It seems a long shot to me, but we can take some comfort from the fact that a handful of Western governments – such as Sweden's – may at least seriously consider such targets. Thanks be for Scandinavia.