Decent Living Emissions: A Conceptual Framework

By Narasimha D. Rao, P. Baer. 2012

116 citations recorded by the source corpus.

There is very little elaboration in literature of the phrase “equitable access to sustainable development” that is referenced in the Cancun Agreement on climate change. We interpret this at a minimum as people’s right to a decent living standard, which gives rise to claims by countries to an exemption from mitigation for the energy and emissions needed to provide a decent life to all. We elaborate a conceptual framework for a comprehensive quantification of such an energy requirement, including the energy required to build out infrastructure to support these living standards. We interpret decent living as the consumption by households of a set of basic goods including adequate nutrition, shelter, health care, education, transport, refrigeration, television and mobile phones. We develop universal indicators for these activities and their infrastructure requirements, and specify a methodology to convert these to energy requirements using energy input-output analysis. Our main recommendations include estimating bottom-up, country-specific energy and emissions requirements, incorporating a minimum for methane emissions, and using international benchmarks at the sector level to encourage the reduction of countries’ energy and emissions intensity.

Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Pollution, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6a5292f0962e1a75b99d7ba14909ad7a16e317d4

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Environmental Engineering

In Pollution

In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

Citations in the corpus

Human well‐being and climate change mitigation (2017, background): “Arguably, these bottom-up perspectives provide a greater opportunity for open and normative deliberations around sufficient energy consumption in different contexts and its effects on social outcomes.(36) The emissions implications of agricultural production for sufficient food consumption have been”
Equity, climate justice and fossil fuel extraction: principles for a managed phase out (2020, background): “…for meeting them (Moss 2016), echoing the notion of “survival emissions” in contrast to “luxury emissions” (see also Agarwal and Narain 1990; Shue 1993; Rao and Baer 2012).8 Still, further exploration is certainly warranted, as “simply choosing in the present to do damage in the future is quite…”
Why equity is fundamental in climate change policy research (2017, background): “For example, given current technological conditions and existing inequities in access to energy and infrastructure, human wellbeing requires additional access to fossil energy for some but not others (Rao and Baer 2012).”
Climate change and sustainable welfare: the centrality of human needs (2015, background): “Citing the research of Rao and Baer (2012), this would entail meeting certain standards everywhere of such satisfiers as food, household energy, water and sanitation and health care.”
Providing decent living with minimum energy: A global scenario (2020, background): “Fortunately, recent advances have been made in both theory (Rao and Baer, 2012; Day et al., 2016; BrandCorrea and Steinberger, 2017) and estimation (Rao et al.”
The unequal distribution of household carbon footprints in Europe and its link to sustainability (2020, background): “Our findings point to important expenditure thresholds for low-spending groups and decreasing elasticities for higher spenders across the consumption categories, signalling diminishing utility from further consumption of that good (Rao & Baer, 2012).”