The updated Greenhouse Development Rights Framework argues that the best way to break the impasse between the climate and the development crisis is simply by expanding the climate protection agenda to include the protection of development dignity.
The Greenhouse Development Rights Framework provides an innovative approach towards combining sustainability goals and development equity. It is designed to support an emergency climate stabilization program while, at the same time, preserving the right of all people to reach a dignified level of sustainable human development free of the privations of poverty.
From the Executive Summary of the Second Edition, September 2008:
"A climate framework designed to support an emergency climate stabilization program while, at the same time, preserving the right of all people to reach a dignified level of sustainable human development free of the privations of poverty.
A warming of 2°C over pre-industrial levels has been widely endorsed as the maximum that can be tolerated or even managed. Yet even as the emerging science increasingly underscores how extremely dangerous it would be to exceed 2°C, many people are losing all confidence that today’s inertial, politics-bound societies will be able to prevent such a warming. Our quite different conclusion is that the 2ºC line can indeed be held, but that doing so demands a sharp break with politics as usual. Accordingly, we follow the science, defining a global emissions objective – a “2ºC emergency pathway” – that preserves a real chance of holding the 2ºC line, and then setting out to straightforwardly assess the strategies and accommodations that will be necessary to do so. More specifically, since carbon-based growth is no longer a viable option in either the North or the South, we set out to assess the problem of rapid decarbonization in world, sharply polarized between North and South and, on both sides, between rich and poor."
The Greenhouse Development Rights Framework: The Right to Development in a Climate Constrained World
A report by Paul Baer, Tom Athanasiou, Sivan Kartha and Eric Kemp-Benedict
Published by the Heinrich Böll Stiftung, Christian Aid, EcoEquity and the Stockholm Environment Institute
Revised second edition
Full study: Download the complete study as pdf-file (116 pages, 2.83 MB) [GDR-second-edition-i.pdf]
Short version: Download the Executive Summary (6 p., 4.4 MB)
