In the run-up to the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit, large parts of the global justice movement united around a push for the concept of climate debt. Later defined at the People’s Summit in Bolivia in 2010, climate debt can be considered: “the overconsumption of the available capacity of the Earth’s atmosphere and climate system to absorb greenhouse gases by the developed countries has run up a climate debt to developing countries and mother Earth (UNFCCC 2010:15)”.
This map highlights this spatial mal-distribution of climate change sources and its impacts. CO2 emissions per capita of countries are displayed together with a climate change vulnerability index as well as the total climate debt/claim of the countries in 2011 in million tons of CO2. A positive figure constitutes a debt, while a negative is a claim.
Conflicts over fracking, coal extraction and thermal power plants and struggles “to leave the oil in the soil” are displayed, along with new conflicts stemming from the “false solutions” to the climate crisis, such as many projects under the clean development mechanism, designed under the Kyoto Protocol for allowing rich countries to offset their emissions by reducing emissions in the Global South, that often lead to new environmental conflicts and to the further appropriation of environmental space in countries in the Global South.
Ecological debt, including climate debt, is one of the key concepts of the EJOLT project. With this aim, a calculation of the full carbon debt of the 154 major countries has been conducted. Additionally, an elaborated report on the history and applications of ecological debt and climate debt has been published by EJOLT (Warlenius et al. 2015), also available on EJOLT's webpage. In this document, the chosen methodology for the carbon debt calculations is described.
http://file.ejatlas.org/docs/Carbon-Debt-Methodology.pdf
The overall ambition has been to identify a method for quantifying climate debt that is a) in line with the definition of climate debt that has emerged from the environmental and climate justice movements, b) scientifically accurate, c) applicable on existing data, and d) user friendly, i.e. relatively easy to grasp and use by activists and citizens.
