The Long and the Short of It - The Changing Arctic Environment: The Arctic Messenger - page 351

There is no shortage of proposals and many are not easy to understand. Clearly, the world
needs an overall framework for GHG emission reduction - one that is “fair” to all coun-
tries regardless of their state of economic development. The underlying paradigm that has
(and continues to be) the basis of approaches taken under the UNFCCC is the concept of
“contract and convergence”. Under this simple framework (developed in the United King-
dom in the 1990s), countries would agree on mitigation measures to collectively achieve a
contraction path for their GHG emissions. Ultimately and ideally, all the national contrac-
tion pathways would converge on a similar per capita GHG emission level for all countries.
The nature of the pathways would be based primarily on scientific projections as to what
would be needed to prevent the global mean temperature exceeding an agreed level (say,
+2°). A person in Kenya, for example, would then have an identical CO 2 allocation as a
person from the United States, China or the European Union. In other words, we would
have achieved carbon equity by contracting and converging our CO 2 emissions. At some
later negotiable date, a country's allocation would become fixed and not adjusted to reflect
population density. Finally, the total trajectory would continue downwards until we have
all reached or almost reached carbon neutrality. 1
Is this achievable? The 2012 Global Energy Assessment (GEA), coordinated by the
International Institute of Applied System Analysis (IIASA), concluded that indeed it is, but
it requires firm dedication to bring it about. The GEA argued that it is a fatal hallucination
to believe we have any long-term sustainable policy options other than to urgently move
in the direction of carbon neutrality. Furthermore, it shows that with political and commer-
cial commitment, we have the capacity to change our energy use and sources to provide
enough energy for us all wherever we live. All that is required is to work together and to
accept change. Finally, remember that the GEA is not a product of physicists, chemists,
earth scientists or biologists. It is largely a product of economists and the global business
community.
So far, so good. However, when attempting to implement the approach, countries have
immediately come up against short-term implications that they have found hard to accept
or address. Most developing countries with low per capita GHG emissions are reluctant