Intergenerational Equity

At a press briefing earlier this morning, YOUNGO, the UN youth constituency at the climate talks, spoke of their belief that Intergenerational Equity and therefore the primary objective of the climate negotiations is currently threatened by a pathological lack of ambition and blame shifting between countries.

Future generations are the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Accordingly any idea of the ‘dangerous impacts of anthropogenic climate change’ should be measured by how it will affect our children. With the atmospheric concentration of CO2 reaching 400 parts per million just a few weeks ago, it is easy to imagine that current decision makers simply do not care about future generations. Worryingly, the current negotiations for a 2015 agreement have been stuck on the issue of equity with little to no discussion of Intergenerational Equity. This has to change.

Youth at the UN Climate talks have put forward a number of concrete ways to help halt the rise of atmospheric CO2 and ensure that we limbo below 1.5 degrees of warming and ensure the safety of future generations:

1. The ADP agreement must include the principle of “Intergenerational Equity” within the preamble of the negotiating text and an Arbiter to help operationalize the principles of the convention, including Intergenerational Equity. We call upon parties to undertake a workshop at COP19 to discuss Intergenerational Equity and ways of institutionalising and operationalizing this principle within the ADP.

2. All countries need to drastically increase their mitigation ambition by raising their targets including moving to the upper bracket for ‘conditional’ targets. This should be supported by the phasing out of fossil fuel subsidies by 2020 (production subsidies in non-Annex I countries and both production and consumption subsidies in Annex I).

YOUNGO believe that if their ideas are not integrated into the work of negotiations, and ambition heightened, then the tug of war between the interests of developing and developed countries could cut away any chance of Intergenerational Equity in a warmer world.