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  • Perspective
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Ethical choices behind quantifications of fair contributions under the Paris Agreement

Nature Climate Change volume 11, pages 300–305 (2021)Cite this article

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Abstract

The Parties to the UNFCCC and Paris Agreement agreed to act on the basis of equity to protect the climate system. Equitable effort sharing is an irreducibly normative matter, yet some influential studies have sought to create quantitative indicators of equitable effort that claim to be value-neutral (despite evident biases). Many of these studies fail to clarify the ethical principles underlying their indicators, some mislabel approaches that favour wealthy nations as ‘equity approaches’ and some combine contradictory indicators into composites we call derivative benchmarks. This Perspective reviews influential climate effort-sharing assessments and presents guidelines for developing and adjudicating policy-relevant (but not ethically neutral) equity research.

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Fig. 1: Equity principles included in studies presented as value-neutral.
Fig. 2: Equity principles included in studies presented as ethically explicit.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Climate & Energy College, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    Kate Dooley

  2. Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

    Ceecee Holz

  3. Climate Equity Reference Project, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Ceecee Holz & Tom Athanasiou

  4. Stockholm Environment Institute, Boston, MA, USA

    Sivan Kartha

  5. School of Sustainability, College of Global Futures, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

    Sonja Klinsky

  6. Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA

    J. Timmons Roberts & Galen Hall

  7. Centre for International Studies, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Henry Shue

  8. Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, African Climate and Development Initiative, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa

    Harald Winkler

  9. Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

    Simon Caney

  10. Politics and International Relations, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Elizabeth Cripps

  11. Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, India

    Navroz K. Dubash

  12. Department of Social Sciences, Education University of Hong Kong, Tai Po, Hong Kong

    Paul G. Harris

  13. CICERO Center for International Climate Research, Oslo, Norway

    Bård Lahn

  14. International Political Theory and Philosophy, Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany

    Darrel Moellendorf

  15. Department of Philosophy, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa

    Darrel Moellendorf

  16. University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Benito Müller

  17. School of Public Policy, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi, India

    Ambuj Sagar

  18. University Center for Human Values, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

    Peter Singer

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Contributions

All authors contributed to the conception of the work. K.D., C.H., S. Kartha, S. Klinsky, H.S., T.R. and H.W. jointly wrote the paper. K.D., C.H., S. Kartha and G.H. contributed to the analysis and interpretation of data, including the figures. All authors contributed to discussions of revisions and improvements to this paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kate Dooley.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

Additional information

Peer review information Nature Climate Change thanks Sudhir Rajan, Narasimha Rao, Steve Vanderheiden and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Data 1

Supplementary data containing Supplementary Tables 1 (Overview of reviewed studies) and 2 (Analysis for Figs. 1 and 2).

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Dooley, K., Holz, C., Kartha, S. et al. Ethical choices behind quantifications of fair contributions under the Paris Agreement. Nat. Clim. Chang. 11, 300–305 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-021-01015-8

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