Sharing the climate burden

Equity has been central to the multilateral negotiations on climate change mitigation and adaptation between the South and the North. The dispute is not with the science that establishes the need to keep global temperature rise below 2°C, measured from pre-industrial levels, as the threshold that will leash in climate change from being ‘dangerous’ to becoming ‘catastrophic’. The dispute is that once the world accepts the need to cap temperature, it is also accepting the need to cap emissions, because of which temperatures are increasing.