Adaptation to Climate Change: Who Pays Whom?

Abstract

The problem of adaptation to climate change is complex and multifaceted. At its core, however, are two simple questions: what actions should be taken to prevent or reduce harm that will be caused by anthropogenic climate change, and who should pay for those actions that have costs? In this chapter I focus on the latter question, concerning liability for the funding of adaptation. I argue that obligations for funding adaptation are based on ethical principles governing just relationships between individuals in a “life-support commons,” which are essentially the same as the norms of justice governing other forms of harm. Simply, it is wrong to harm others by abusing a commons, and if one does, one owes compensation. In this view, ethics and justice address the rights and responsibilities of individuals; obligations between countries are derivative, based on the aggregate characteristics of their populations, and pragmatic, given the existing state system. Furthermore, liability can be disaggregated in other ways; as I argue, it is equally important that the distribution of liability can be differentiated between classes within nations. A simple quantitative exercise applying these principles of justice to the adaptation problem suggests net liability from the North to the South but also net liability for adaptation from wealthy classes in the South. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) devotes a small but significant amount of attention to adaptation to climate change. Only in the last few years, however, with the creation of the Least Developed Countries (LDC) Fund and the Special Climate Change Fund (SCCF) under the UNFCCC, the creation of an Adaptation Fund under the Kyoto Protocol, as well as the support for the development of National Adaptation Plans of Action (NAPAs), have delegates and advocates begun to focus seriously on the problems of adaptation and adaptation funding. Given the disproportionate share of current and past emissions from the industrialized countries of the North and the evidence that the developing countries of the South are more vulnerable to climate damages, almost any plausible interpretation of “common but differentiated responsibilities” implies that the North should shoulder the major part of the costs of adaptation.