Interplay between climate change and development
Negotiators from a wide range of developing countries have reiterated the UNFCCC premise ? sometimes in heated debates ? that a climate regime must in no way impede their progress toward development; to the extent that there are any conflicts between mitigation obligations and development aspirations, development must take priority. The perceived tension between climate and development is a central factor underlying the current conflict impasse in the international climate agreements. This task has three components aimed at explaining more clearly the nature of that impasse and elaborating concrete measures to help navigate through it. The objective is to take the current debate about climate and development to a higher level of rigor, by providing explicit and transparent information that can enable policy makers, negotiators, and civil society to engage in a more useful discussion on the tensions between climate and development. The first component is to define and quantify the nature of the tension between climate objectives and development objectives. The cost of mitigation (as calculated at the aggregate level by global integrated assessment models and national mitigation scenarios, for example) provides one useful measure. However, a critical additional dimension, which has so far not been closely investigated, is the distribution of mitigation activities and their costs within societies that have widely differing development needs at different income classes. It is this more disaggregated examination that will yield more policy-relevant information about the potential for conflicts between climate and development. This disaggregated perspective becomes even more important in assessing adaptation, and the requirements of different segments of the population in which adaptive capacity needs to be built. Specific countries ( India , China, and an LDC (Least Developed Countries) country are priorities) will be taken as case studies for a more detailed and specific presentation. The second component will explain the implications of the above examination in the language of international climate regime. This component will assess the implications for climate regime design that would reconcile the existing tensions between climate and development. This will be, in essence, a first attempt to make explicit and quantitative the foundational UNFCCC principle that countries should contribute “in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities and their social and economic conditions" in a manner that accounts for the intra-national differentiation that is needed to adequately represent the development needs of poor countries. The parallel and seemingly contradictory observations that developing countries can simultaneously have large numbers of poor residents and also significant and growing level of contribution to the climate problem and capacity derives directly from the existence of complex intra-national social and economic conditions. This research will also, as necessary, examine and adapt some of the main economic tools available for account for intra-national disparities in responsibility and distribution of costs, the such as “social weighting" (as a complement to time-preference discounting) and “cost-effectiveness" approach (as an alternative to cost-benefit approach).The third component is to provide quantitative results of the above examination that directly bear on the issue of national level commitments under a global climate regime. The nature of this quantitative presentation will be to consider specific climate objectives (e.g., Chancellor Merkel´s proposed global reduction targets) and socioeconomic development projections (e.g., those reflected in the IPCC scenarios, downscaled to the national level), and present these in a manner that provides explicit explanations of the potential impacts on development of alternative climate policy regimes.
