Allocating the responsibility of CO2 over-emissions from the perspectives of benefit principle and ecological deficit

Responsible emissions of anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) are currently estimated according to the principle of territorial responsibility; that is, individual countries are only responsible for the anthropogenic CO2 emissions within their own political boundaries. In the context of globalization of world economies, such an accounting principle would easily result in carbon leakage, thus undermining the effects of global warming combat. From the perspectives of benefit principle and ecological deficit, this paper develops a framework to estimate the amount of responsible anthropogenic CO2 over-emissions, which serves as a basis for calculating the amount of anthropogenic CO2 reduction that a defined country is responsible for. The benefit principle assigns the responsibility of pollutant emissions to the driving forces behind the activities that emit pollutants rather than to direct emitters. The perspective of ecological deficit proposes that a country should take the responsibility for reducing pollutant emissions when it runs the deficits of assimilation, that is, its responsible emissions exceeding its capacity of assimilation. The proposed framework is demonstrated using the data of Taiwan in 1996, and discussions on improving and extending the framework in future research are provided. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.