Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Creative policy solutions: contraction and convergence
Aubrey Meyer, musician and composer, former member of the UK Green Party and
co-founder of the Global Commons Institute in 1990, is an active promoter of
climate mitigation through 'contraction and convergence' - a practical and equitable
approach to combating climate change. He believes that those economists who argue
that climate mitigation is too expensive a policy option effectively condone the
murdering of many of the world's poor. He argues (Meyer, 2000) that although
greenhouse gas emissions have been accumulating in the atmosphere as a result of
industrialization for over 200 years, suggesting that in principle every citizen on the
planet has an equal right to emit, there must be an equitable individual allowance
based on safe global emissions targets provided by the best scientific understanding
available. Contraction and convergence offers a simple model on which an inter-
national agreement on greenhouse gas emissions can be based. It can be achieved
in three stages:
1
securing an agreement on a cap on CO
2
concentrations in the atmosphere;
2
calculating the speed at which emissions need to be reduced to reach that target;
3
calculating the consequent total carbon budget and allocating a per capita
allowance throughout the world.
The result will be that per capita emissions from each state will 'converge' at a fair
level, while the global sum of emissions will 'contract'. Meyer believes that greenhouse
gas concentrations should contract to 450ppm and that convergence to equal per
capita emissions should be achieved by 2030. This process requires the creation of
a carbon currency, which could finance clean technologies and eradicate Third World
debts, combat global poverty, and minimize the economic differences between the
developed and developing worlds. As Flannery (2005) notes, this 'strong medicine'
could be the foundation for a new Kyoto that does away with 'free riders' but will
mean definite political and economic costs for the developed nations.
Contraction and convergence is thus a vehicle for achieving global equity not only
in CO
2
emissions but also in economic wealth, prosperity and human well-being.
The rich nations of the North are by far the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases.
Even today, Africa's accumulated emissions are a small fraction of those produced
by the UK. Contraction and convergence, however, can only be realized if the
participation, dialogue, debate and accommodation that is beginning to character-
ize global politics in major areas of environmental and sustainability policy making
is developed further. NGO pressure groups, independent think-tanks, scientific
organizations, and corporate and government bodies, which form 'epistemic' or
knowledge-based communities, must work with rather than against each other if
agreement on climate change is to be secured. As Gough and Shackley write:
The science-policy nexus represented by the IPPC, and supporters of the
UNFCCC Kyoto Protocol, with its inclusion of government officials, international
organizations, scientists, NGOs, business and so on, incorporates the key fea-
tures of an epistemic community. A distinctive knowledge-based approach to
climate assessment and policy has emerged within the IPCC, in which NGOs
have been instrumental, both as expert advisors and in providing the legitimacy