Countries' emission allowances towards the low-carbon world: A consistent study

Climate change present a range of equity issues for human being, but operating the equity principle within emission allocation scheme to various parties has raised multiple challenges. Although more than 40 schemes have been suggested in the literatures, there is little consistency in the way that baselines, scope, coverage and other key parameters have been compared or discussed. In this paper, we reviewed 41 schemes used in the literature so far and compared the cumulative allowances of main countries under various schemes in a consistent framework. Two cases are considered, i.e. only energy and industry related CO2 and all Kyoto GHGs. Besides the allowances, carbon Gini coefficient in the global perspective and the reduction tradeoffs between country groups are further quantitatively discussed. It is demonstrated that the full ranges of countries' allowances are quite large resulting from different equity considerations and implement methods behind different effort-sharing schemes. However, absolute mitigations are always required in developed countries in order to realize the 2 degrees C target, regardless of schemes. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.