The development of a comprehensive and integrated post-2012 global policy
framework is clearly needed. This should be one that reflects both the concerns of developing countries to place their economies on a sustained and sustainable
development path and the global concern to substantially reduce GHG emissions and
mitigate and adapt to global warming. It needs to address three stark facts that exist in
today's world:
the world is facing a global climate crisis that requires urgent emergency
action to make sure that global GHG emissions peak within the next 10
years and then decline drastically over the next three to four decades, if
global warming is to be kept at less than 2°C by mid-century;
flowing from the climate crisis, the environmental and carbon emissions
space available for developing countries has been drastically and
inequitably reduced by the development pathways taken by today's
developed countries, to the extent that there simply is not enough global
environmental and natural resources, nor the carbon emissions space,
available to allow developing countries to develop in the same way, or
even in anything approaching the same way, as developed countries did
when they were themselves developing. The shrinking of environmental
and carbon emissions space as a result of the climate crisis means that
global GHG emissions must be drastically cut, with developed countries
bearing the major burden and developing countries contributing their share
of emissions reductions in a way that will not compromise their
development prospects; and
global economic inequity has widened and continues to widen between the
developed and developing countries, aided and promoted by an
increasingly complex web of international economic rules and structures
(especially in trade, intellectual property, investment and finance) that has
increasingly limited the development policy space of developing countries
and making it more difficult for them to use economic development policy
instruments used by developed countries when they themselves were
developing.
General Principles for a Development Agenda in Climate Change
Any new climate change regime that fails to address these facts will be
environmental, politically, socially, morally, and economically unsustainable and
unjustifiable. Global action to stabilize the climate requires full commitment from
both developed and developing countries, and the latter will find it difficult to commit
if doing so threatens their development prospects—which effectively means that a
global climate regime with any promise of success must explicitly embrace the right
to development, in particular of developing countries and their peoples. Developed
countries must not only lead the way in reducing their emissions deeply and soon (so
as to create a bit more environmental and carbon space); they must also work with
developing countries and show and implement the political will to help create
developmental space for developing countries and support a transformation of their
development pathways to ones that are low-carbon emissions and adapted to changing
climate conditions. The principles that should guide this post-2012 framework are already contained in
the UNFCCC and in the 1992 Rio Declaration on Environment and Development with
its accompanying Plan of Action – Agenda 21. These include:
the principle of common but differentiated responsibility and respective
capabilities to be implemented in a spirit of global cooperation and partnership
providing special priority to the special situation and needs of developing
countries, especially LDCs and the most environmentally vulnerable
the use of the precautionary approach
the reflection of the polluters pay principle
the fulfilment of the right to development in an equitable and sustainable
manner
the establishment of a supportive international economic system that supports
the economic growth and sustainable development of all countries, especially
developing countries, so as to enable them to better address climate change.
The need for negotiations to cover all relevant sources, sinks and reservoirs of
greenhouse gases and adaptation, and comprise all economic sectors
