The Oxford Approach – Operationalizing the UNFCCC Principle of ‘Respective Capabilities’

The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change implies that countries should shoulder costs and burdens of climate change in accordance with differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, but it does not indicate how these fairness parameters are to be quantified. In this OIES Paper, Benito Müller and Lavan Mahadeva provide a novel and distinctive methodology (‘Oxford Approach’) regarding quantifying the (economic) capability of countries as a contribution to assessments of fair cost/burden distributions, an issue of central importance in the upcoming international climate change debate.

By: Benito Müller , Lavan Mahadeva