New climate treaty will be based on equity: US negotiators
Creative Commons: UN Climate Change, 2011
U.S. diplomats returned from last month’s global climate summit in Durban, South Africa, crowing that they had cracked the armor shielding China, India and other emerging nations from accepting binding emission cuts.
But now a serious challenge awaits them: preparing for an entirely new climate change regime.
Creating a different system — one that puts all countries on an even legal playing field while still remaining sensitive to different levels of wealth and historic emissions — promises to be a politically fraught and divisive task. Not only must negotiators decide how much more global warming responsibility the United States will have than China — they might also have to determine how to weigh mitigation obligations among countries like Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Mexico or South Korea.
At the core of this new debate, analysts say, lies the concept of equity. It is the policy that took center stage in Durban, yet its inner workings still remain murky. ”The way we look at it, it’s a concept that embodies fairness,” State Department Special Envoy for Climate Change Todd Stern said in a dawn press conference as the summit staggered to a close. “From a U.S. point of view, any agreement that’s going to be legal has got to have legal symmetry, by which I don’t mean that everybody has to do the same thing or that developing countries that are growing at a rate of 7 or 8 or 9 percent a year will have to make absolute reductions.”
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