ABSTRACT
Eighteen years after the inception of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) at the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, 125 governments agreed to limit global temperature rise to 2°C in the Copenhagen Accord of 2009. Conspicuous by its absence in this Accord, however, was any agreement on how countries should share responsibility for reducing and adapting to climate change. For almost twenty years, developing countries (non-Annex I) have argued for equity, framed as a fair distribution of the earth’s capacity to absorb human greenhouse gases (GHG). However, this position has remained largely a political stance, rather than a basis for dialogue in negotiations.
