Topline
Industrialized and other well-off nations should pay nearly $200 trillion to poor countries for burning excessive levels of carbon dioxide, new research from the University of Leeds and University of Barcelona found, weighing in on the disparity faced by countries bearing the brunt of climate change.
A study published Monday found industrialized nations responsible for excessive levels of carbon … [+] dioxide emissions, are financial liable for the damages.
Key Facts
The study, published Monday in the journal of Nature Sustainability, compiled the first plan holding countries responsible for excessive CO2 emissions, liable for their behavior, asking them to fund compensation totaling $192 trillion by 2050.
Climate scientists began with the premise that the atmosphere is a commons and used recent global carbon budgets—how much carbon could be released into the atmosphere to achieve a certain climate target—to calculate what an equal “fair share” of that total carbon budget would be for 168 countries, based on the countries’ population size.
When researchers calculated what each country’s fair share was, they found some countries used within their fair share allocation, but some, mostly industrialized countries in the global North, had already significantly overshot their allocation.
The global North—the United States, Europe, Canada and Australia—was responsible for most of that compensation, $170 trillion, and the remainder of that $192 trillion figure came from high-emitting countries in the global South, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, researchers found.
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