Fair burden-sharing for climate change mitigation: an axiomatic approach

A significant challenge in climate change negotiations is establishing a burden-sharing method that all or most governments find fair. Two key fairness principles are emphasized by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in allocating mitigation efforts: the Polluter-Pays principle ("common but differentiated responsibilities"), suggesting that the countries with the highest greenhouse gas emissions should contribute more, and the Ability-to-Pay principle ("respective capabilities"), suggesting that economically advantaged countries should contribute more. This paper proposes a new burden-sharing method that integrates the Polluter-Pays and Ability-to-Pay principles without resorting to weighted indicators. We provide an algorithmic procedure to implement the method in polynomial time and conduct an axiomatic study to emphasize the significance of our approach. Finally, we apply our method using worldwide data.