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Trade-offs for equitable climate policy assessed

Computational models show that regionally varied prices for carbon emissions can greatly reduce the need for poor countries to receive financial assistance to tackle climate change, while still stabilizing global warming.
  1. Wei Peng

    1. Wei Peng is in the School of International Affairs and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802, USA.

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International agreements for tackling climate change face many challenges. One of the knottiest is how to allocate mitigation efforts fairly across nations, without increasing the overall global cost, and without asking poor countries to accept large amounts of financial assistance that raise concerns about infringements of national sovereignty. Writing in Nature, Bauer et al.1 report an analysis of the trade-off between cost and sovereignty for various international climate policies. They conclude that sovereignty concerns can be allayed substantially with only slightly higher global costs by using a strategy in which the carbon price — the charge per tonne of carbon dioxide emissions — is varied modestly to account for each country’s ability to pay.

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Nature 588, 225-226 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-03392-0

References

  1. Bauer, N. et al. Nature 588, 261–266 (2020).

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  2. Heck, V., Gerten, D., Lucht, W. & Popp, A. Nature Clim. Change 8, 151–155 (2018).

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