10 Climate justice: how to distribute the remaining carbon budget to individual countries?

Let’s come back to the question of at which point in time to distribute the carbon budgets to individual countries and how this affects country-specific carbon budgets.

To meet Paris climate targets, there is only a limited amount of CO₂ left that can be “blown into the air.” As we have seen, each country can actually calculate how long its own carbon budget will last. But the exact point at which the global CO₂ cake is distributed raises profound questions of climate justice.

In the words of Stefan Rahmstorf:

A tricky question is: at what point in time do you distribute the budget? This is important because rich countries are eating up the remaining CO2 cake much faster than poor countries. I would propose: from the time of the Paris Agreement, i.e. from the start of 2016. Of course developing nations will argue (and have argued) for a much earlier start date, to account for the historic emissions of developed nations. That may be justified but has the practical problem that the remaining budget for countries with large per-capita emissions is then already zero or rather: overdrawn.

— Stefan Rahmstorf¹³

You can use two of our previously introduced apps to illustrate this for specific countries. In the scenario in the app below, you can compare the cases of Germany and India to see what a different point in time of distributing the global carbon budget implies for these countries.

When to distribute the carbon cake? Use the app from the previous section and start the scenario on the allocation of country-specific carbon budgets:

Go to app

The choice of the year of allocation is also defining the total size of the remaining global budget, because a large chunk of the global budget has already been used up since the industrial revolution (you can see this in this app). And this is quite crucial for climate justice: the later we distribute the budget, the lower the global budget will be, because developed nations have already used up a lot of the budget.

In the example scenario in the app, picking an earlier year has opposite effects for the cases of Germany and India. For Germany, an earlier allocation year means that the remaining German carbon budget is much smaller (it is even already overdrawn if choose 2007 instead of 2016). For India, we observe the opposite effect: India has substantially more time to emit CO2, if we choose an earlier allocation year.

So choosing 2016, the year of the Paris Agreement, as the allocation year might be an easy and practical way to allocate the remaining budget across countries. But it is clearly to the disadvantage of developing countries and therefore, unjust.

You can also use another app from a previous section of this mini course, to illustrate the problem of the allocation year:

When to distribute the carbon cake? Use the carbon budget app and gradually change the point in time of distribution of the global carbon budget. For each country, you can see how this affects the carbon budget:

GIF?

Go to app