How do we put a number on climate accountability? Can we, and should we have a league table for nations which provides a metric as a single score, or is it too complex and nuanced a task to label this simply?
For the sake of conversation, I’ve created a rudimentary table, below. It includes the top 10 carbon sinners and the 10 most populous countries alongside those with the 10 highest GDP. I’ll apologies now to the analysts, for my simplistic calculation for the ‘Carbon Impact Score’ (CIS), but I wanted to get a feel for where the greatest onus for change might lay.
CIS=(Carbon Footprint*10000)/Population*(GDP*10)
There’s no great surprises in the table, but does it tell the full story?
I feel a key missing element is the effect of carbon import and export. If a country exports a carbon based substance, say, oil, should they then be wholly penalised for this? Also, should we share the burden between the country who exports the oil and the country that burns it?
The term ‘carbon-leakage’ describes how affluent countries export their carbon use to other countries, as described by newsknown.com: “The US, for example, likes to point out that China is the world’s biggest emitter, but it is polluting the atmosphere in large part through supporting the lifestyles of affluent nations such as America itself, a net-importing nation whose citizens generate twice as many emissions as China per capita.”
https://newsknown.com/how-carbon-footprinting-could-accurately-measure-countries-emissions-2
I fear that unless there’s an amicable agreement on overall effort to reduce our global carbon footprint, we will continue to waste more precious time on blame and avoiding accountability rather than defusing the bomb. Given the COVID test-bed of global urgency, the unequal way in which the world has so far distributed vaccines does not fill me with hope on this matter, but we have no other option. Over to you, COP26.