An Ethics-based Climate Agreement for the South Pacific Region

The aim of this article is to describe a comprehensive regional climate agreement for the South Pacific region. This agreement would integrate the usual view of climate negotiations among the developed countries as the sharing of mitigation costs, with that of the Pacific Islands, which focuses on the disproportion between responsibility for, and the efforts of, adaptation to burdens imposed by climate impacts. The agreement, moreover, is grounded on sound principles of justice and criteria of equity which give greater legitimacy to it and can persuade parties with conflicting interests to cooperate more closely on collective actions. On the mitigation side, discussion of the initial allocation of endowments focuses on the criterion of differentiated equality, taking account of undeserved inequalities as suggested by Rawls’ theory of justice as fairness. Endowments are initially distributed according to a formula whose reference is equal per capita distribution corrected for the most striking unjustifiable inequalities. Possibly a sound benchmark for the just financing of adaptation activities is the criterion of differentiated historical responsibility, again backed by Rawls’s theory, while the allocation of adaptation resources can be based on the criterion of lack of functionings, as substantiated in Sen’s capability approach. In practical terms, it is possible to envision the creation of an adaptation fund where each single contribution is proportional to cumulative emissions net of undeserved inequalities, and which allows participation by poorer vulnerable countries proportionally to their levels of human development.