Tool

Climate Equity Reference Calculator

The Climate Equity Reference Calculator and the Climate Equity Pledge Scorecard are general equity reference tools, designed to allow users to specify their own preferred interpretation of national responsibility and capacity for climate action. This interpretation is then used to determine each country’s fair share of the global climate effort, on both the mitigation and adaptation sides.

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Last updated on 28 August 2018

The tools are designed to be quite flexible, to support as wide a range as possible of plausibly legitimate interpretations of the core equity principles of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). They do not produce a single “correct” result; instead, the results are derived from the settings chosen by the user. The Scorecard is designed to allow the user to quickly assess a country’s pledge. It is integrated with the Calculator.

The core of the Equity Reference Calculator (and the basis of scores assigned by the Climate Equity Pledge Scorecard) is the Responsibility and Capacity Index. Users determine how the national RCIs are calculated by choosing the relative weight given to responsibility and capacity; the level of progressivity; and the historical responsibility start date.

Both tools were developed by Sivan Kartha and Eric Kemp-Benedict of SEI and Tom Athanasiou and Paul Baer of EcoEquity, who also developed a specific effort-sharing approach, the Greenhouse Development Rights framework. The Calculator and Scorecard have been created to provide a much more general equity reference framework to enable analysis of a broader range of possible conceptions of responsibility, capacity, and fair shares.

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