The situation of the most vulnerable countries after Copenhagen

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Notes

Notes

1 Prime Minister Thomas's speech and others from the Copenhagen conference can be viewed on the internet at http://unfccc.int/press/multimedia/webcasts/items/2777.php

2 Six countries spoke actively against the Accord at the closing plenary: Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Sudan, Tuvalu and Venezuela. Their opposition effectively led to the Accord being merely “noted” rather than adopted as a COP decision.

3 Views on the long-term temperature “implied” by the Accord vary depending on assumptions about emissions reductions after 2020.

4 Notably the melting of the Artic sea ice and permafrost, as well as glacial retreat and sea level rise; other impacts such as changes in precipitation and extreme events are less confidently attributable to anthropogenic warming.

5 Hansen, J., M. Sato, P. Kharecha, G. Russell, D. W. Lea, and M. Siddall. 2007. Climate change and trace gases. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A-Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 365:1925–1954.

6 There have of course been numerous cost-benefit analyses that attempt to specify the “optimal” speed of emissions reductions based on balancing marginal costs with marginal benefits, but these simply assume that the “acceptable risk” of catastrophic impacts is that which balances marginal costs with marginal benefits, and that both can be measured accurately enough to be policy-relevant.

7 The common citation is to Box 13-7 in Chapter 13 of Metz, B., O. Davidson, P. Bosch, R. Dave, and L. Meyer, editors. 2007. Contribution of Working Group III to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. The typical misunderstanding is that this is a statement about physical emissions, when in fact it reports on the allocation of emissions in the scenarios described in the table.

8 Baer, P., T. Athanasiou, S. Kartha, and E. Kemp-Benedict. 2008. The Greenhouse Development Rights Framework: The Right to Development in a Climate Constrained World. Second Edition. Heinrich Böll Foundation, Christian Aid, EcoEcquity, and the Stockholm Environment Institute, Berlin and Albany, CA. Available at www.greenhousedevelopmentrights.org.

9 See note 7 supra.

10 It is not easy to find this stated explicitly in print, but it is a commonplace in the strategic discussions that I and my collaborators participate in.

11 The Climate Action Network (CAN) is an international coalition of environmental groups that lobby the negotiations directly, and includes many of the largest groups (e.g., WWF, Greenpeace, NRDC) as well as many much smaller groups, such as my own group EcoEquity. See www.climatenetwork.org (CAN International) as well as www.usclimatenetwork.org (US CAN).

12 See on this topic Paul Harris's excellent new book World Ethics and Climate Change: From International to Global Justice. (2010: Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh), as well as our own “Greenhouse Development Rights” framework (supra note 8).

13 The “Fair, Ambitious and Binding” meme was propagated by the TckTckTck campaign, CAN and others prior to Copenhagen.