Reconciling Human Development and Climate Protection: Perspectives from Developing Countries

The goal of the Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements is to help identify key design elements of a scientifically sound, economically rational, and politically pragmatic post-2012 international policy architecture for global climate change. It draws upon leading thinkers from academia, private industry, government, and non-governmental organizations from around the world to construct a small set of promising policy frameworks and then disseminate and discuss the design elements and frameworks with decision-makers. The Project is co-directed Acknowledgements Major funding for the Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements has been provided by a grant from the Climate Change Initiative of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Additional support has been provided by Christopher P. The views expressed in the Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements Discussion Paper Series are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the John F. Kennedy School of Government or of Harvard University. Discussion Papers have not undergone formal review and approval. Such papers are included in this series to elicit feedback and to encourage debate on important public policy challenges. Copyright belongs to the author(s). Papers may be downloaded for personal use only. Executive Summary Human activity is causing irreversible harm to the climate system and environment. The Kyoto Protocol is only a good starting point to raise the awareness of climate change. However, this protocol failed to address some core issues, such as setting targets based on a fair and efficient burden-sharing principle, effectively engaging developing countries, setting a long-term goal, implementing cost-effective policy instruments with given binding target, non-compliance penalties and etc. Therefore, whether society can stabilize the global climate without stifling development aspirations, would rely on whether we can design a fair and efficient climate change policy architecture for the post-2012 era. For this purpose, this paper provides a new multi-stage climate policy framework based on a revised Global Development Right (GDR) calculation, and proposes a feasible hybrid negotiation framework from the perspective of developing countries. According to the " common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities " principle in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), we recognize that due to the historical emissions contributions and different pace of industrialization and growth around the world, a successful international climate policy needs to balance equity and efficiency and eventually achieve an overall carbon mitigation target. In this paper, we first discuss a multi-stage framework to gradually engage developing …