International Environmental Law Blog

IWC Resolutions Available

The press release for the International Whaling Commission's 59th Meeting, as well as hyperlinks to the five resolutions passed at the meeting are available at: http://www.iwcoffice.org/meetings/meeting2007.htm#pressrelease).

The two most significant developments at the meeting were a reversal of last year's resolution in St. Lucia calling for a listing of the moratorium (largely a function of the infusion of a substantial number of new anti-whaling States in the continuing battle by the pro and anti-whaling States to stack the aisles at the meeting) and a resolution on small cetaceans. The IWC, unfortunately, continues to address the latter issue only on an advisory basis, and is then, shocked, shocked, when these species continue to fare badly. wcgb

New Reports on Post-2012 Climate Regimes

Two New EcoEquity Reports, for the Heinrich Boell Foundation

We’ve recently completed two major (and closely related) reports for the Heinrich Boell Foundation in Berlin. Heinrich Boell is the leading German Green Foundation, and has long been on the forefront of the global movement to meld the justice and sustainability agendas. So we're pleased to announce...

A Brief, Adequacy and Equity-Based Evaluation of Some Prominent Climate Policy Frameworks and Proposals

A Critical Appraisal of the Vattenfall Proposal for a Fair Climate Regime

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A Brief, Adequacy and Equity-Based Evaluation of Some Prominent Climate Policy Frameworks and Proposals

In this report, we briefly consider six approaches to a post-Kyoto climate regime, all of which claim to be fair.  We evaluate each of them on its own terms, and also in terms of its ability, or potential ability, to deliver the all-important quality that we call "developmental equity."

We say “frameworks and proposals” because one of our six, the Climate Action Network’s Viable Framework for Preventing Dangerous Climate Change, is too general to be a taken as a proposal.  In fact, two of the others, the South-North Dialogue's Equity in the Greenhouse proposal and our own Greenhouse Development Rights, can be considered as attempts to flesh out the CAN framework.

In any case, these six (the others are Contraction and Convergence, the Vatttenfall Proposal, and the Global Climate Certificate System) were chosen for this analysis because they all have something of a political profile, and, of course, because they all claim to be based on explicit equity principles.  In this they’re notably different from most other approaches now in play and under development, and considering them as a group turns out be instructive.

And, yes, one of the six is our own Greenhouse Development Rights, but we think that you'll find that, in evaluating it, we've been remarkably, well, fair.

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A Critical Appraisal of the  Vattenfall Proposal for a Fair Climate Regime

In this second report, we expanded our analysis of the Vattenfall Proposal.  It was an interesting exercise, because, with this proposal, Vattenfall - a large, Northern European utility with substantial investments in nuclear energy and lignite based power plants - crossed an important line.  It stepped beyond generalities and (a first for the business sector, as far as we know) made a specific, quantitative proposal for a global burden sharing framework that it quite explicitly claimed to be fair.

It turned out that we did not agree.  But the proposal is still interesting, and merits a bit of attention.