At the recent Kyoto conference a consensus emerged on how much to reduce greenhouse gases in the short term and how to spread the costs of greenhouse-gas abatement. The Kyoto protocol, therefore, contains important principles of fairness for the present and future international response to the risks of climate change. Yet, the dissatisfaction on the part of the U. S. and many other developed countries on the exclusion of the developing countries in a process towards commitments may jeopardize ratification of the protocol. Many questions remain about the form of joint implementation and emission. trading, which also raise important issues of distributive fairness.

Even if the provisions set out in the protocol am realized by 2012, experts generally agree that there will be only very marginal reductions in the forecasted climate warning of the next century. This inevitably raises the question whether the benefits of the Kyoto emission reduction commitments are worth their costs. One view holds that decisive global action to ameliorate destitution and impoverishment of persons alive today is a more effective use of global resources than greenhouse gas reduction, especially if the future victims of global warming are better off than their ancestors are today and thus able to adapt to a changed climate. Yet, such issues have hardly been posed in the Kyoto negotiating environment because of the hegemonic grip that the emissions reduction strategy has on the policy discourse.

This discourse bas produced a wide range of proposals for sharing the costs of greenhouse-gas (GHG) reductions between the North and the South. With predicted escalating emissions in the South, there is a gradual but significant redistribution of entitlements from the North to the South. However significant this redistribution is, however, it will hardly change the fact that per-capita emissions on the part of the U.S. and other industrialized countries have and will continue to be far greater that the per-capita emissions of the developing countries. The acceptability of this redistribution, none-the-less will be an important issue in the ratification of the Kyoto protocol, especially in the U. S., as well as in future negotiations on its possible extension. In other words, issues of fair allocation will remain on the international negotiating agenda.

How can policy analysts and modelers engaged in climate research contribute to an international consensus on a fair way to allocate the costs of mitigating or adapting to climate warning? This discussion draws on national experience in distributing another type of environmental burden, namely that of hazardous waste disposal Since any disposal strategy inevitably imposes risks and costs on selected communities, regions or countries, a core issue is how societies impose these risks for the overall benefits of the society producing the waste? likewise, how does the global community impose on countries the burden of reducing GHG emissions for The overall benefit of the global community? Both questions involve issues of rich and poor, generators and non-generators, winners and losers, and contending views of what is fair within countries as well as between countries.

This discussion examines two questions of fairness in the climate change debate: Should nations continue along the path begun at Kyoto by allocating extensive resources to greenhouse-gas abatement over the next decades keeping in mind the competing demands for these resources? And, given a resolve to abate GHG emissions, what is a fair way to allocate the costs? I discuss the multiple moral discourses on each of these issues, and I argue that an understanding and respect of the plulal views of fairness are important in crafting an agreement that can be implemented. I also examine whether views of fairness can be related to recent theories concerning the social construction of environmental risks. Throughout the discussion, I illuminate the arguments with examples from. an IIASA study on distributing the burdens of hazardous waste disposal in Austria, which showed that views on fairness are empirically verifiable and related to both interests and culturally determined values.