Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • NEWS AND VIEWS

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.

    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed  Google Scholar

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.

Access options

Rent or Buy article

Get time limited or full article access on ReadCube.

from$8.99

Rent or Buy

All prices are NET prices.

Nature 588, 225-226 (2020)

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

References

  1. 1.

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

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. 2.

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

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. 3.

    Clarke, L. et al. in Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (eds Edenhofer, O. et al.) Ch. 6, 413–510 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2014).

    Google Scholar 

  4. 4.

    Hoegh-Guldberg, O. et al. in Global Warming of 1.5°C (eds Masson-Delmotte, V. et al.) Ch. 3, 175–311 (IPCC, 2018).

    Google Scholar 

  5. 5.

    van Beek, L., Hajer, M., Pelzer, P., van Vuuren, D. & Cassen, C. Glob. Environ. Change 65, 102191 (2020).

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Subjects

Latest on:

Nature Careers

Jobs

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing

Search

Advanced search

Quick links