State responsibility and compensation for climate change damages--a legal and economic assessment

By Richard S. J. Tol, R. Verheyen. 2004

200 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Customary international law has that countries may do each other no harm. A country violates this rule if an activity under its control does damage to another country, and if this is done on purpose or due to carelessness. Impacts of climate change fall under this rule, which is reinforced by many declarations and treaties, including the UNFCCC. Compensation for the harm done depends on many parameters, such as emission scenarios, climate change, climate change impacts and its accounting. The compensation paid by the OECD may run up to 4% of its GDP, far exceeding the costs of climate change to the OECD directly. However, the most crucial issues are, first, from when countries can be held responsible and, second, which emissions are acceptable and which careless. This may even be interpreted such that the countries of the OECD are entitled to compensation, rather than be obliged to pay. State responsibility could substantially change international climate policy.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Global and Planetary Change, Law

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5c7e6ffb35c80f31012202459f0398385843420c

How researchers see this paper

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In Economics and Econometrics

1. Frans Berkhout
2. T. Dekker
3. Rob Dellink
4. Joyeeta Gupta
5. H. Aiking
6. Adrian Smith

In Global and Planetary Change

1. Frans Berkhout
2. Rob Dellink
3. Joyeeta Gupta
4. H. Aiking

In Law

1. Joyeeta Gupta

Citations in the corpus

• Sharing the burden of financing adaptation to climate change (2009, background): “Attempts to apply this principle to climate change have been limited to assigning property rights to GHG emissions (as in emissions trading), but generally ignore the question of historical responsibility for climate change (Tol and Verheyen, 2004; Tol, 2006), with a few exceptions.”
• The Polluter Pays Principle and Cost-Benefit Analysis of Climate Change: An Application of Fund (2006, unknown): “Tol and Verheyen (2004) discuss liability for climate impacts in some detail, but do not study the effects on climate policy.”
• The Social Cost of Carbon: Trends, Outliers and Catastrophes (2008, unknown): “See Tol and Verheyen (2004) for a discussion on liability and impacts of climate change.”