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Contraction and Convergence: The Global Solution to Climate Change
... Based on the experience of the Clean Development Mechanism, this paper identifies the following opportunities to benefit from such a club. Firstly, by facilitating the contraction and convergence of countries' per capita and absolute carbon emissions through the application of principles of distributional fairness, the framework reduces the costs of delivering more ambitious NDCs (see Meyer 2000). Secondly, opportunity lies in the creation of excludable benefits which only accrue to members of a climate club and the application of its joint certification mechanism. ...
... Instead, emissions need to be shared equitably and effectively, especially among wealthy, highly developed and carbon-intense economies (Welch and Southerton 2019; Li and Duan 2020). Based on the findings and innovative approaches advocated in Stua and Coulon (2017), the here proposed system seeks to do so by ensuring that overall per capita consumption-based emissions among climate club members eventually 'contract and converge' towards carbon neutrality (Rajan 2019;Meyer 2000). By operationalizing the carbon neutrality target, this system can be used by national governments (and possibly sub-national entities) to stimulate spatially and temporally flexible institutional and organisational innovation around the assetization of carbon emission mitigations. ...
Recent times have witnessed an increasing number of countries and private firms pledging carbon neutrality by mid-century. Whilst representing a significant improvement in intentions to tackle climate change, such pledges lack substance and structure. For instance, individual pledges lack coordination and aggregation among peers, while strategies and measures to achieve ambitious targets are largely absent. Moreover, current disagreements obstructing progress in international climate change negotiations further undermine the reliability of carbon neutrality objectives. Effective international policies are needed to foster aggregate mitigation ambitions and the creation of adequate supporting mechanisms. This theoretical paper describes a governance innovation aimed at overcoming such shortfalls and disagreements through a unifying yet customizable pathway towards carbon neutrality. It does so by first outlining a political governance framework based on a climate club interpretation of Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. Secondly, it proposes carbon emission mitigation effort sharing on a per capita basis to ensure efficiency, equity and political feasibility. Thirdly, this paper describes how the supply of certified mitigations of carbon emissions required to satisfy effort sharing-based demand can be assetized as carbon credits by operationalizing Article 6 as a joint certification mechanism. The resulting governance architecture for managing demand and supply of mitigations shifts efforts to tackle climate change from a ‘problem-driven’ cost approach to ‘opportunity-driven’ value creation pathways towards carbon neutrality.
... These targets can be seen as constituting a fair consumption space for all, determined through equitable distribution of the remaining global carbon budget for staying below 1.5-degree increase in warming. It therefore sets a shared direction for over-consuming and under-consuming populations-a global "contraction and convergence" (Meyer 2000) towards a shared prosperity within a "safe operating space for humanity" (Rockström et al. 2009). ...
... Since climate change is a global scale phenomenon, the assumption is that everyone living in the same year in the world, regardless of age, location, and any other status, would have an identical carbon footprint target at the national average level. The approach partly adopts the concept of "contraction and convergence" proposed by (Meyer 2000), but with simplified assumptions. "Contraction 8 Presentation by Sivan Kartha to the UNFCCC plenary in 2012: (Davis 2012) 9 Note that the CSER approach (Climate Equity Reference Project 2015) calculates fair shares among countries not of the global carbon budget, but of the mitigation effort required to remain within the global carbon budget. ...
This report continues the science-based approach of linking concrete changes in lifestyles to measurable impacts on climate change in order to keep with the 1.5-degree aspirational target of the Paris Agreement on climate change. The 1.5-degree lifestyles approach examines GHG emissions and reduction potentials using consumption-based accounting, which covers both direct emissions in a country and embodied emissions of imported goods while excluding emissions embodied in exported goods. It analyses lifestyle carbon footprints of ten sample countries, representing high-, middle-, and low-income countries, and identifies hotspots, or consumption domains with the highest impact on the environment.
The report also fills the knowledge gap arising from most prevailing climate scenarios that underplay the potential contributions of lifestyle changes to climate change mitigation and focus entirely or mainly on developing new technologies and on changes in production.
For each country in the report, the footprint gap between current and sustainable target levels are determined for the years 2030, 2040, and 2050. To bridge these gaps, options for reducing footprints in each country are introduced, estimating potential impacts from various adoption rates in each country. Finally, two scenarios are developed for each country, one focused on systems change and another on behaviour change, showing indicative pathways for achieving the 2030 target.
... Az "összehúzódás és konvergencia" elnevezésű javaslatot Aubrey Meyer 1990-ben fogalmazta meg a globális szintű klímapolitikára, miszerint az üvegházhatású gázok kibocsátáscsökkentését úgy kell elérni, hogy a régiók, illetve az országok egy főre számított átlagos kibocsátásai egymáshoz közelítsenek [Meyer, 2000[Meyer, , 2004 ]. E globális környezetetikai jellegű megoldást mások az igazságos erőforrás-felhasználásra ajánlották [UNEP/IRP, 2011]: ennek szigorúbb változata értelmében az egy főre vetített erőforrás-használatnak ki kell egyenlítődnie, miközben az összesített értéke nem növekszik. ...
The globalisation has had significant and severe impacts on the Earth’s environment, which is the common home of all human societies, and from which state and resources the life and the wellbeing of the present and the future generations depend. This book is devoted to the analysis of evolution of the environmental globalization process, its drivers and dangerous consequences, the development of the international environmental scientific and policymaking cooperation. The most important international organisations, programmes and agreements are presented, which deal with various global environmental problems, together with the evaluation of their effectiveness. Based on this comprehensive overview, the most essential conclusions and lessons are drawn. A very large number of references is added and in many cases the most relevant quotes from the referred books and papers are also provided.
A globalizáció már eddig is rendkívül nagy és kockázatos hatással volt a földi környezetre, amely a társadalmak közös otthona, és amelynek állapotától, erőforrásaitól függ a jelen és a jövő nemzedékek élete, életminősége. E kötet szerzője áttekinti a tágan értelmezett környezeti globalizációs folyamat kibontakozását, az okok és a veszélyes következmények feltárását, a nemzetközi tudományos és politikai együtt¬működés fejlődését. Bemutatja a főbb nemzetközi szervezeteket, programokat, megállapodásokat, értékeli azok hatékonyságát és levonja a legfontosabbnak tartott tanulságokat.”
... Several methods for sharing globally constrained GHG emissions have been proposed (e.g., Meyer 2000, McKibbon and Wilcoxen 2002, Höhne et al. 2006, Messner et al. 2010. Some of these approaches support equal per capita emissions targets, but vary in how quickly emissions would be reduced in industrialized nations, and whether developing nations would be allocated higher per capita emissions in the short-term to improve standards of living. ...
Ontario in a world with 450 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere. Current impacts, risk assessment, ghg emissions reductions.
... Here, we assume the contraction and convergence approach (C&C) [15], as it is considered "the best possible solution to the twin problems of climate change and inequity" [16]. Under the C&C approach, the total carbon budget for Germany ranges from 7 to 8 Gt CO2 for the time period of 2020 to 2050 as calculated by [14]. ...
Fossil fuels cause the most CO2 emissions. For net-zero-2050, both the energy demand must be reduced - for example, by insulating buildings and switching to electromobility - and the remaining energy demand must be covered by renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, biomass or geothermal energy - a complete transformation of the energy system. Scenarios can be used to describe how the future can be shaped under different framework assumptions. This energy scenario shows an exemplary path of conversion to new energy supply technologies to meet a CO2 budget of less than 7 gigatons remaining for Germany. To achieve this, CO2 emissions from the energy system must already be halved by 2030 compared to today. To achieve this, all consumption sectors (households, industry, commerce, transport) as well as the power plant and conversion sector must contribute. The following figures show what a possible transformation could look like for the various consumption sectors.
... Here, we assume the contraction and convergence approach (C&C) [15], as it is considered "the best possible solution to the twin problems of climate change and inequity" [16]. Under the C&C approach, the total carbon budget for Germany ranges from 7 to 8 Gt CO2 for the time period of 2020 to 2050 as calculated by [14]. ...
In order to transform the energy supply completely to renewable sources, energy carriers such as hydrogen and synthetic methane that can be stored on a large scale will be needed in the future. In net-zero-2050, these must be generated from renewable electricity. This graph shows calculated results of the energy scenario for the potential demand of hydrogen, synthetic methane and synthetic fuels in Germany up to 2050.
... Az "összehúzódás és konvergencia" elnevezésű javaslatot Aubrey Meyer 1990-ben fogalmazta meg a globális szintű klímapolitikára, miszerint az üvegházhatású gázok kibocsátáscsökkentését úgy kell elérni, hogy a régiók, illetve az országok egy főre számított átlagos kibocsátásai egymáshoz közelítsenek [Meyer, 2000[Meyer, , 2004 ]. E globális 81 "the growth in international interdependence may shortly come to an end, reversing a trend that began with industrialization. ...
A globalizáció már eddig is rendkívül nagy és kockázatos hatással volt a földi környezetre, amely a társadalmak közös otthona, és amelynek állapotától, erőforrásaitól függ a jelen és a jövő nemzedékek élete, életminősége. E kötet szerzője áttekinti a tágan értelmezett környezeti globalizációs folyamat kibontakozását, az okok és a veszélyes következmények feltárását, a nemzetközi tudományos és politikai együttműködés fejlődését. Bemutatja a főbb nemzetközi szervezeteket, programokat, megállapodásokat, értékeli azok hatékonyságát és levonja a legfontosabbnak tartott tanulságokat.
... The approach of 'contraction and convergence' (C&C) by Meyer (2000) accepts the principle of equal per capita GHG entitlements to carbon space. The equal per capita principle had, however, been anticipated by many analysts (Fujii 1990;Agarwal and Narain, 1991). ...
... Az "összehúzódás és konvergencia" elnevezésű javaslatot Aubrey Meyer 1990-ben fogalmazta meg a globális szintű klímapolitikára, miszerint az üvegházhatású gázok kibocsátáscsökkentését úgy kell elérni, hogy a régiók, illetve az országok egy főre számított átlagos kibocsátásaik egymáshoz közelítsenek [Meyer, 2000[Meyer, , 2004 ]. E globális környezetetikai jellegű megoldást mások az igazságos erőforrás-felhasználásra ajánlották [UNEP/IRP, 2011]: ennek szigorúbb változata értelmében az egy főre vetített erőforrás-használatnak ki kell egyenlítődnie, miközben az összesített értéke nem növekszik. ...
Abstract:
"Our common environment and the globalisation"
Key themes presented in this book: the evolution of globalisation and its environmental aspects; enhancement of interlinkages between the societies and the natural environment; environmental vulnerability and resilience of the societies; environmental security; various concepts of sustainability; international and interdisciplinary scientific cooperation dedicated to global environmental issues; environment-related international conflicts; development of global environmental policies (programmes, agreements); evaluation of the effectiveness of the global environmental governance; conclusions and lessons. There are more than four hundred literature references.
The officially published version:
https://mersz.hu/farago-kozos-kornyezetunk-es-a-globalizacio-arnyak-es-remenyek
The uploaded version is the author's final manuscript as it is available from http://real.mtak.hu/133300/
This paper reviews circumstances where governance arrangements and organizational innovations assign value to carbon emission mitigations or energy demand reductions. The creation of such value hinges upon 1) the effective governance of financial mechanisms to create demand; and 2) the ability of organizations to assetize and supply carbon emission mitigations and energy demand reductions as commodified private goods. To analyse the political and organizational governance of such demand and supply systems, this paper uses insights from transaction cost economics. On the demand side, transaction costs are reduced through the innovative governance of markets at national level, such as white certificate markets for energy savings, and international level, such as baseline-and-credit systems for carbon emissions reductions. Strict rules regarding accountability, transparency, measurement, reporting, verification, and inclusion reduce transaction costs for organizations to assetize reductions and mitigations on the supply side. Despite limited success to date, these innovations provide the basis for international carbon emissions mitigation governance through climate clubs based on Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. This paper concludes that such clubs provide the basis for creating consistent demand for carbon emission mitigations and associated energy demand reductions through the positive pricing of mitigation actions.
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