Equity, sustainable development and climate policy

Deep-seated differences about equity are not novel within the international climate policy arena. Equity has been elusive, but central, in the broader struggles to make development more sustainable and to share fairly the efforts required for development and climate policy. This special issue is intended to broaden the conversation about equity as a point of reflection in an ongoing debate. One of the reasons why equity has been both so central and so difficult to achieve within the climate arena is that it is a multi-faceted principle that needs to be applied in a dynamic context. Although the Durban Platform did not refer directly to equity or justice, its explicit recognition of the principles of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), including ‘common but differentiated responsibility and respective capabilities’ (CBDR&RC), has placed the operationalization of equity, CBDR&RC, and related concepts at the heart of negotiations leading to a 2015 agreement. The Durban Platform also saw movement towards relaxing the existing binary division of countries into two Annexes, and articulated a vision of an international climate agreement that would, in some form, be applicable to all. Both developments have occurred within a global context characterized by ongoing challenges to sustainable development and a steady increase in global GHG emissions. Together, these factors have created a context in which equity has emerged as an essential element in the negotiations of the Ad-hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform on Enhanced Action (ADP). There is a pressing need for creative and engaged thought about how best to operationalize equity and CBDR&RC within a framework capable of adequately addressing both the causes and impacts of climate change. Each of the articles in this special issue enters the equity conversation at a different point; equity in sustainable development and climate policy is necessarily a conversation informed by a multitude of perspectives. The resulting diversity of the articles included in this special issue is easily illustrated by briefly considering the main focus of each. Morgan and Waskow outline the complexities of equity across multiple issues, and see this as a possible advantage. In their perspective, equity firmly applies not only to mitigation, but also to adaptation and support. This point is further reinforced in Ngwadla’s article, as he examines both the form and magnitude dimensions of equity within the UNFCCC. Garibaldi argues that including climate impacts in the analysis of policy costs would radically alter the evaluation of policy options and would result in a larger shift in the overarching discourse of international climate policy. Derman draws attention to the role of stakeholders in the climate debate