We need to talk about the carbon budget

IT’S grotesque, isn’t it? A map of the world with countries scaled to match their annual CO2 emissions betrays a bloated Global North and a squeezed South. Unlike a mirror at a funfair that makes us laugh at some impossibly distorted version of reality, this reflection speaks a sobering truth – of global inequity, of haves and have-nots.

Faced with the wicked problem of tackling climate breakdown – detailed in the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – and reducing carbon emissions, we could see the challenge as one primarily confronting the Global North. Indeed, Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), the Paris Agreement’s central mechanism for facilitating national commitments to reducing emissions, frame decarbonisation of the global economy as a task mostly for countries with high emissions. But even if NDCs were ambitious enough to deliver net-zero emissions by 2050, they would still only address the half of the problem that is already manifest – but not the half that lies ahead.

While the Global South may be a small emitter today, it is also where most projected increases in the global population will occur, with millions aspiring to better lives. No one can rightly deny this aspiration – “leave no one behind” is the transformative promise of the UN Sustainable Development Goals – but historically, income growth has been strongly connected with higher per capita carbon emissions.