Editing IPCC:AR6/SR15/Chapter-1 (section)

=== 1.1.1 Equity and a 1.5°C Warmer World ===

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The AR5 suggested that equity, sustainable development, and poverty eradication are best understood as mutually supportive and co-achievable within the context of climate action and are underpinned by various other international hard and soft law instruments (Denton et al., 2014; Fleurbaey et al., 2014; Klein et al., 2014; Olsson et al., 2014; Porter et al., 2014; Stavins et al., 2014) <sup>[[#fn:r22|22]]</sup> . The aim of the Paris Agreement under the UNFCCC to ‘pursue efforts to limit’ the rise in global temperatures to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels raises ethical concerns that have long been central to climate debates (Fleurbaey et al., 2014; Kolstad et al., 2014) <sup>[[#fn:r23|23]]</sup> . The Paris Agreement makes particular reference to the principle of equity, within the context of broader international goals of sustainable development and poverty eradication. Equity is a long-standing principle within international law and climate change law in particular (Shelton, 2008; Bodansky et al., 2017) <sup>[[#fn:r24|24]]</sup> .

The AR5 describes equity as having three dimensions: intergenerational (fairness between generations), international (fairness between states), and national (fairness between individuals) (Fleurbaey et al., 2014) <sup>[[#fn:r25|25]]</sup> . The principle is generally agreed to involve both procedural justice (i.e., participation in decision making) and distributive justice (i.e., how the costs and benefits of climate actions are distributed) (Kolstad et al., 2014; Savaresi, 2016; Reckien et al., 2017) <sup>[[#fn:r26|26]]</sup> . Concerns regarding equity have frequently been central to debates around mitigation, adaptation and climate governance (Caney, 2005; Schroeder et al., 2012; Ajibade, 2016; Reckien et al., 2017; Shue, 2018) <sup>[[#fn:r27|27]]</sup> . Hence, equity provides a framework for understanding the asymmetries between the distributions of benefits and costs relevant to climate action (Schleussner et al., 2016; Aaheim et al., 2017) <sup>[[#fn:r28|28]]</sup> .

Four key framing asymmetries associated with the conditions of a 1.5°C warmer world have been noted (Okereke, 2010; Harlan et al., 2015; Ajibade, 2016; Savaresi, 2016; Reckien et al., 2017) <sup>[[#fn:r29|29]]</sup> and are reflected in the report’s assessment. The first concerns differential contributions to the problem: the observation that the benefits from industrialization have been unevenly distributed and those who benefited most historically also have contributed most to the current climate problem and so bear greater responsibility (Shue, 2013; McKinnon, 2015; Otto et al., 2017; Skeie et al., 2017) <sup>[[#fn:r30|30]]</sup> . The second asymmetry concerns differential impact: the worst impacts tend to fall on those least responsible for the problem, within states, between states, and between generations (Fleurbaey et al., 2014; Shue, 2014; Ionesco et al., 2016) <sup>[[#fn:r31|31]]</sup> . The third is the asymmetry in capacity to shape solutions and response strategies, such that the worst-affected states, groups, and individuals are not always well represented (Robinson and Shine, 2018) <sup>[[#fn:r32|32]]</sup> . Fourth, there is an asymmetry in future response capacity: some states, groups, and places are at risk of being left behind as the world progresses to a low-carbon economy (Fleurbaey et al., 2014; Shue, 2014; Humphreys, 2017) <sup>[[#fn:r33|33]]</sup> .

A sizeable and growing literature exists on how best to operationalize climate equity considerations, drawing on other concepts mentioned in the Paris Agreement, notably its explicit reference to human rights (OHCHR, 2009; Caney, 2010; Adger et al., 2014; Fleurbaey et al., 2014; IBA, 2014; Knox, 2015; Duyck et al., 2018; Robinson and Shine, 2018) <sup>[[#fn:r34|34]]</sup> . Human rights comprise internationally agreed norms that align with the Paris ambitions of poverty eradication, sustainable development, and the reduction of vulnerability (Caney, 2010; Fleurbaey et al., 2014; OHCHR, 2015) <sup>[[#fn:r35|35]]</sup> . In addition to defining substantive rights (such as to life, health, and shelter) and procedural rights (such as to information and participation), human rights instruments prioritise the rights of marginalized groups, children, vulnerable and indigenous persons, and those discriminated against on grounds such as gender, race, age or disability (OHCHR, 2017) <sup>[[#fn:r36|36]]</sup> . Several international human rights obligations are relevant to the implementation of climate actions and consonant with UNFCCC undertakings in the areas of mitigation, adaptation, finance, and technology transfer (Knox, 2015; OHCHR, 2015; Humphreys, 2017) <sup>[[#fn:r37|37]]</sup> .

Much of this literature is still new and evolving (Holz et al., 2017; Dooley et al., 2018; Klinsky and Winkler, 2018) <sup>[[#fn:r38|38]]</sup> , permitting the present report to examine some broader equity concerns raised both by possible failure to limit warming to 1.5°C and by the range of ambitious mitigation efforts that may be undertaken to achieve that limit. Any comparison between 1.5°C and higher levels of warming implies risk assessments and value judgements and cannot straightforwardly be reduced to a cost-benefit analysis (Kolstad et al., 2014) <sup>[[#fn:r39|39]]</sup> . However, different levels of warming can nevertheless be understood in terms of their different implications for equity – that is, in the comparative distribution of benefits and burdens for specific states, persons, or generations, and in terms of their likely impacts on sustainable development and poverty (see especially Sections 2.3.4.2, 2.5, 3.4.5–3.4.13, 3.6, 5.4.1, 5.4.2, 5.6 and Cross-Chapter boxes 6 in Chapter 3 and 12 in Chapter 5).

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