Schelling (1995) stressed the importance of disaggregating the impacts of climate change to correctly understand the resulting conflicts of interests across space and time. This paper considers equity implications at a level of disaggregation which we consider insightful, but which is non-standard in the literature. We consider a ‘three-agent’ model, comprising the North, the G20 emerging markets (the GEMs), and the rest of the world (ROW), and consider their impact on emissions and temperature increases to 2100. We demonstrate that simply stabilising emissions in GEMs would contribute significantly more than an 80% reduction in the North. Further, we consider climate impacts on ‘the poor’, where we distinguish between poor people in the industrialised world (IWP), the aspirational/urbanising poor in the developing world (AUP) and the traditional and rural poor of the developing world (TRP). We discuss the possibility for both a, ‘Mexican stand off’ and a ‘low-carbon race’.

Dr Cameron Hepburn is an economist specialising in environment and public policy. He holds Fellowships at the LSE and Oxford University. He was educated at Melbourne University in Law and Chemical Engineering, and earned his doctorate in economics from Oxford (as a Rhodes Scholar). He is actively involved in public policy as a member of the DEFRA Academic Panel and as a founder of Vivid Economics. He contributed two background research papers to the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change. Cameron is also a director of Climate Bridge, a company devoted to reducing greenhouse gas emissions in China.