Countries' Historical Emission Responsibilities: A Normative Perspective

This paper raises six critical normative questions on accounting countries' historical emission responsibilities of climate change: (i) What should be the time period? What should be the start date and the end date? (ii) Should the Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use (AFOLU) and non-CO2gases be included or not? (iii) Should the embedded emissions in trade be accounted or not? (iv) Should countries be assigned responsibilities for emissions before 1990 or not? (v) Should the historical responsibilities be discounted or not? (vi) Should subsistence emissions be exempted or not? From the perspectives of ethics and justice, legal, economics, and politics, we think that (i) the contributions should include past, current, and future emissions, and responsibilities should be assigned for historical emissions before 1990; (ii)CO2and non-CO2emissions from the AFOLU sectors should be exempted from countries' responsibilities since they are subsistence emissions in order to satisfy basic needs; (iii) the historical emissions should be discounted based on both physical and economic reasons. Finally, we claim that the discounting approach is an innovative, systematic, and pragmatic method to solve the deadlock historical responsibilities, which can decrease the historical responsibility and financial responsibility to a reasonable level for the developed countries while insisting on the equity principles.