I'm a 'climate change idol' 30 March 04

While agreeing with the thrust of the “contraction and convergence” (C&C) proposal, some governments may have room for complaint. China which has made strong efforts to limit its population may feel that it is a loser with this formula for allocation compared to less-concerned countries (I believe that Iran may be such an example, where population increase has been encouraged for various reasons, eg religious, wanting to have soldiers for any future conflicts, etc). Surely allowing your population to escalate at an unsustainable rate is also polluting. ( I agree that the poorer the country the less the impact of that population on global warming. However population pressure per se leads to many other sources of environmental degradation such as desertification, species extinction etc.) I think therefore that a case can be made that efforts to decrease the ecological impact of each country (in particular efforts to decrease population) should also be taken into account when allocation of carbon rights are made.

Ian

It’s not just you thinking this. The model is fundamentally sound, but after reading the Schumacher Briefing 5 I tapped out this note to myself:

“Trading of emissions shares per capita – how to avoid nations curbing their population control programmes in order to take a larger slice of the pie for centralised industry. i.e. would a nation purposefully allow itself to have a large population of huge inequality that replicated the current global system in order for the rich to have the right to emit more.”

There are a number of other modifications that need to take place, which I am pondering at the moment, but my instinct tells me that the only real issue is the use of a tradable unit of emission (Ebcus – emissions-backed currency units) that all nations agree to and continue to happily trade forever – this may require a rethink and is, I think the one thing that is holding C&C back. But if that’s all, then C&C is probably the best way forwards.

Keith http://www.theearthblog.org

Hi – this is exactly the question that was asked of Aubrey on Sat June 3rd at the Campaign against Climate Change conference at LSE.

He said that there is a problem with linking emissions to population for exactly this reason of differential population increase.

For that reason there could be a baseline population limit year agreed internationally, functioning on a national basis and then proportions of these entitlements allocated on a per capita basis.

It does get messy at this point obviously with different countries increasing or decreasing levels of population and the implications of this for industry, well-being and levels of development.

From the 2006 World Development Indicators report, it seems that, under that ruling, Sub-Saharan africa would do worst as they average (2004 figures) 5.3 births per woman (although disease is also having a huge impact on population); wheras Italy, Japan and Korea, with 1.2-1.3 births per woman will actually increase their per capita emissions availability over time as their populations are effectively decreasing.

I’m sure there are more sophisticated ways of working this out so it is really more equitable, but a perfectly equitable solution will be hard to find.

The second point is that, once the equitable solution is found, can we get the political backing behind it? Aubrey’s most recent publication says Yes he has got many politically powerful people on board; I want to see these people’s money where their mouths are, and the ability to outline what this actually means to the public in the developed world in terms of their lifestyles (and what this means for themselves also!).

Natasha