The global carbon budget: a conflicting claims problem.
Climatic Change, June 2016, Volume 136 (3), 693-703
An e ffective climate agreement is urgently required, yet conflict between parties prevails over cooperation. Thanks to advances in science it is now possible to quantify the global carbon budget, the amount of available cumulative CO2 emissions before crossing the 2oC threshold (Meinshausen et al., 2009). Countries carbon claims, however, exceed this. Historically such situations have been tackled with bankruptcy division rules. We argue that framing climate negotiations as a classical conflicting claims problem (O'Neill, 1982) may provide for an e ffective climate policy. We analyze the allocation of the global carbon budget among parties claiming the maximum emissions rights possible. Based on the selection of some desirable principles, we propose an ecient and sustainable allocation of the available carbon budget for the period 2000 to 2050 taking into account di erent risk scenarios.