3.5 What has affluence got to do with the science of climate change?

This is an important question and relates to the perceived objectivity of science.

The example above on affluence and climate change is an example of a ‘poverty-based’ approach to equity and climate change.

Other perspectives on equity include:

  • Rights based – the right of people to the global commons, in this case a fair share of per capita emissions. Contraction and convergence is an example.

  • Liability based – the right of people not to be harmed by the action of others without suitable compensation (e.g. poor countries that are vulnerable to climate impacts would have rights to compensation).

  • Opportunity based – the right of people to achieve a standard of living enjoyed by those with greater access to the commons.

There are others, and they all these raise questions about the way that emissions are measured and about how responsibility for emissions is apportioned. So they all connect with science at least in relation to approaches to measuring emissions. It's quite difficult for science to avoid these issues, because adopting any single approach to measurement may implicitly assume one ethical approach over others.

As the IPCC notes:

The equity debate has major implications for how different stakeholders judge different instruments for reducing greenhouse gases (GHG) and for adapting to the inevitable impacts of climate change.

  • See the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, Mitigation of Climate Change (Chapter 2, Framing issues, pp. 142 for a detailed discussion of equity issues in response to climate change.

3.4 What is the relationship between affluence and climate change?

4 The effects of global warming