Industrialized and other well-off nations should pay nearly $200 trillion to poor countries for burning excessive levels of carbon dioxide, new research from the University of Leeds and University of Barcelona found, weighing in on the disparity faced by countries bearing the brunt of climate change.
The study, published Monday in the journal of Nature Sustainability, compiled the first plan holding countries responsible for excessive CO2 emissions, liable for their behavior, asking them to fund compensation totaling $192 trillion by 2050.
Climate scientists began with the premise that the atmosphere is a commons and used recent global carbon budgets—how much carbon could be released into the atmosphere to achieve a certain climate target—to calculate what an equal “fair share” of that total carbon budget would be for 168 countries, based on the countries’ population size.
When researchers calculated what each country’s fair share was, they found some countries used within their fair share allocation, but some, mostly industrialized countries in the global North, had already significantly overshot their allocation.
The global North—the United States, Europe, Canada and Australia—was responsible for most of that compensation, $170 trillion, and the remainder of that $192 trillion figure came from high-emitting countries in the global South, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, researchers found.
Low-emitting countries would receive nearly $6 trillion per year for committing to decarbonizing their economies more quickly than would otherwise be required, researchers said.
BIG NUMBER
$80 trillion. That’s how much the U.S. could be liable to pay over the more than 25-year time period, the study found. While the U.S. and other industrialized nations would be asked to pay up, other countries that have done a better job at containing carbon emissions would receive compensation during the time period. India, one of those countries, could be entitled to receive $57 trillion in compensation, the study estimates.
CRUCIAL QUOTE
“It is a matter of climate justice that if we are asking nations to rapidly decarbonise their economies, even though they hold no responsibility for the excess emissions that are destabilizing the climate, then they should be compensated for this unfair burden” Andrew Fanning, one of the researchers who published the study said.
KEY BACKGROUND
An estimated 1.4 billion tons of carbon dioxide need to be cut each year from global emissions in order to reach zero emissions by 2050, the Global Project found last year. That goal is one scientists have been stressing in recent years as people have come to better understand the grim side effects of ignoring excessive CO2 emissions. If emissions continue to grow, so will global temperature increases, scientists warn. In 2015, a number of nations signed the Paris Agreement in an attempt to cut carbon emissions by enough to prevent the catastrophic effects of climate change. But last year, the U.N. questioned whether several countries would be able to meet the agreement’s goal of holding temperature increases to 1.5 degrees. In November, climate negotiations among nearly 200 countries at the United Nations agreed to establish a fund that would help poorer countries manage climate disasters that have been made worse by emissions of wealthier nations. The details of the fund, however, are still being sorted out. It’s unclear which countries will contribute or where exactly the money would go. Before last year’s agreement, weather countries like the U.S., had opposed the idea of payments for fear of being held legally liable.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/anafaguy/2023/06/05/wealthy-countries-owe-poorer-nations-192-trillion-for-co2-emissions-study-suggests/amp/
