Fair sharing of greenhouse gas burdens

This paper describes an approach to determine the relative accountability that each region and individual nation should bear in reducing atmospheric greenhouse gas, The paper argues that accountability should be based on equity acid that all measures of equity for which there are backers should be used in the decision making procedure. Each equity indicator defines a different accountability profile, leading to conflicting prescriptions, Multicriterion decision making methods are seen as having high potential to help design fair compromise profiles, and a methodology is proposed and numerous methods indicated for this purpose. The methodology is illustrated by defining 11 different equity indicators and then formulating and solving a multigoal programming model to determine a compromise accountability profile for 11 multinational regions. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd.