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Environmental Politics
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Distributing the burdens of climate change

Edward A. Pagea
a
Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, UK

To cite this Article Page, Edward A.(2008) 'Distributing the burdens of climate change', Environmental Politics, 17: 4, 556
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 Environmental Politics
Vol. 17, No. 4, August 2008, 556–575

Distributing the burdens of climate change

Edward A. Page*

Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, UK

Global climate change raises many questions for environmental political

theorists. This article focuses on the question of identifying the agents that
should bear the financial burden of preventing dangerous climate change.
Identifying in a fair way the agents that should take the lead in climate
mitigation and adaptation, as well as the precise burdens that these parties
must bear, will be a key aspect of the next generation of global climate
policies. After a critical review of four rival approaches to burden sharing,
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the paper argues that only a principled and philosophically robust

reconciliation of at least three of these (‘contribution to problem’, ‘ability
to pay’ and ‘beneficiary pays’) can generate a satisfactory mix of theoretical
coherence and practical application.

Introduction
How should the costs of climate change mitigation and adaptation be spread
across countries and generations? This question has become a key aspect of the
ongoing debate about climate change, yet it has resisted tidy solution in the
face of a number of accounts (Shue 1999, Neumayer 2000, Singer 2002, p. 32ff,
Caney 2005, Meyer and Roser 2006). At first glance, it might seem obvious that
the present generation should bear the primary burden since existing persons,
and the states to which they belong, are the only agents in a position to act now
to prevent dangerous climate change. Past generations may have been
irresponsible in their use of carbon and other greenhouse gases but are now
dead; and leaving the problem for future generations to solve seems grossly
unfair. Allocating the responsibility to the present generation, however, merely
postpones the problem that there is a wide range of existing agents to which
responsibilities of justice might be allocated, including individual countries,
multinational corporations, international institutions, and, most abstractly, the
existing generation as a whole. It also fails to address the more concrete issue of

*Email: [email protected]

ISSN 0964-4016 print/ISSN 1743-8934 online

Ó 2008 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/09644010802193419
http://www.informaworld.com
 Environmental Politics 557

how much can be demanded of each of these agents. Climate change, then,
poses profound ‘level of analysis’ and ‘burden allocation’ problems (Caney
2005, p. 754).
Confronted with the problem of the level of human agency responsible for
combating climate change, much of the literature focuses on the unique
responsibility of the developed world and the sovereign countries it comprises.
The focus on national responsibility is central to the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), for example, which
endorses the principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ (CBDR)
according to which ‘the developed country Parties should take the lead in
combating climate change and the adverse effects thereof’ (United Nations
1995, p. 5). It is also a key feature of Article 10 of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to
the UNFCCC (Grubb et al. 1999, p. 289) and Principle 7 of the 1992 Rio
Declaration on Environment and Development (United Nations 1992).
In what follows, I examine a range of ethical principles that have been
invoked in support of CBDR. These principles have often been invoked in
support of common and differentiated responsibility and which have often
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been thought of as sufficiently supportive of it that any differences between

them are merely objects of philosophical curiosity with few or no policy
implications (Shue 1999, Singer 2002, p. 26ff). I argue, first, that there is far
more divergence here than is often supposed; and, second, that only a
principled reconciliation of burden-sharing principles can generate a satisfac-
tory synthesis of theoretical coherence and practical relevance.1

Contribution to problem
Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, over 2000 billion tonnes of
carbon have been released into the atmosphere as a result of human activities
such as fossil fuel burning (Stern 2007, p. 221). The global concentration of
carbon dioxide (CO2) has increased from 280 parts per million (ppm) in the
atmosphere (in 1760) to 379 parts per million (in 2005) (Alley et al. 2007, p. 2).
The concentrations of other greenhouse gases (GHGs) have also risen
substantially in this period such that total greenhouse concentrations reached
430 ppm CO2-equivalent (CO2e) in 2007 and are currently growing by at
least 2 ppm every year (Stern 2007, p. xvi).2 The simple idea behind the
‘contribution to problem’ principle is that countries should contribute to the
costs of managing climate change in proportion to their share of global
cumulative greenhouse emissions; and the unique ethical responsibility of
developed countries reflects the fact that they lead the world in terms of
ongoing and cumulative emissions (Shue 1999, p. 533ff, Neumayer 2000, Singer
2002, p. 27ff, Caney 2005, p. 752ff). This relatively simple account of burden
sharing can be developed in terms of three sub-principles. First, countries
should compensate identifiable victims of their past and present climate-
altering activities. Second, countries should reduce, and ultimately cease,
activities that transform the climate system. Third, countries should fund
 558 E.A. Page

measures to reduce the human costs of climate impacts they caused which are
no longer avoidable.
At first glance, the empirical basis of ‘contribution to problem’ reasoning
seems undeniable. While all countries emit GHGs, the physical responsibility
for current atmospheric greenhouse concentrations is unevenly spread. Since
one unit of any GHG has an equal climate-forcing effect wherever it is emitted
and since scientists have developed clear, if not infallible, protocols for
measuring the source and quantity of each country’s emissions over time, it is
relatively straightforward to assign responsibility for a country’s physical
contribution to present and future climate change. According to a number of
studies, the developed world (defined as OECD North America and Europe,
Eastern Europe, Former USSR, Japan, Australia and New Zealand) is
responsible for at least 60% of current greenhouse emissions (Baumert et al.
2005, p. 31).
Yet this only gives half the picture. Climate change is not caused by any
particular year’s greenhouse emissions but rather by the atmospheric
accumulation of greenhouse gases over hundreds of years. In this sense, the
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gases that are responsible for the climate change are ‘stock pollutants’; and this
has a significant bearing on questions of responsibility and policy (Parry 2005,
p. 235). Current year-on-year emissions of CO2 add perhaps 4% to the
atmospheric stock of the gas with the result that past emissions are absolutely
crucial when it comes to assigning physical responsibility for climate change.
From an historical perspective, developed countries are once again the key
players since they were responsible for roughly 75% of total anthropogenic
CO2 emissions from 1750 to 2005 (Baumert et al. 2005, p. 31). Although there
are various ways of assessing the impact of a country’s cumulative emissions on
the climate system (equal weight for all country emissions; marginal change in
global temperature caused by a country’s past emissions; or marginal change in
GHG concentrations caused by a country’s past emissions) it is clear that the
emissions of the developed world have been decisive in the emergence of
anthropogenic climate change.
It is worth noting that, as the causal responsibility for greenhouse
concentrations changes, future ‘contribution to problem’ analyses will modify
the burdens of each country. Economic growth, as well other socio-economic
drivers such as urbanisation and population increases, mean that China, India
and other developing countries are fast increasing their contribution to (and
thus causal responsibility for) climate change. A number of studies suggest that
the developing world’s collective emissions will surpass the developed world’s
within 30 years; and developing countries are projected to be responsible for
over 75% of the global increase in emissions between now and 2030 (Stern
2007, p. 200). Meanwhile, recent research shows that in 2006 China surpassed
the US to become the world’s top greenhouse emitter (Auffhammer and
Carson 2008).
While the causal responsibility of the developed countries seems clear, the
case for linking cumulative emissions with climate burdens is more complex.
 Environmental Politics 559

One reason for this is that the approach splits into two forms depending on
whether causal responsibility is sufficient for burden attribution (strict liability)
or whether an extra ingredient needs to be added to generate liability, such as
that the original emitter acted knowingly and therefore wrongly (conditional
liability). Some writers, such as Neumayer (2000, p. 188), hold that the
conditional liability approach is implausible in the case of climate change,
while others hold that the absence of calculated wrongdoing weakens historical
accountability to the point where the emissions of all countries before the late
twentieth century should be discounted (Caney 2005, pp. 761–762). I will not
try to resolve this troubling issue, except to say that there are problems with
either form that question the power of an exclusively contribution-based
approach to climate burden sharing.
First, neither form can explain a number of widely held beliefs concerning
the limits of responsibility attribution. Suppose that climate change could be
traced entirely to natural climatic variations. In such cases, ‘contribution to
problem’ reasoning could not explain why the victims of climate change should
not be abandoned to their fate even if measures could be undertaken by
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wealthy countries to limit their suffering. The focus on historical responsibility,

that is, clears the way to a ‘polluted pays’ approach when there are no
identifiable polluters. While this conclusion could be finessed by appealing to
substantive principles of justice, this would mean abandoning the theoretical
parsimony provided by focusing on historical responsibility.3 Suppose, next,
following an example devised by Simon Caney (Caney 2005, p. 763), a
developing country was shown to have been a major historical greenhouse
emitter of a similar level to the UK. The ‘contribution to problem’ approach
implies that this country should bear a heavy burden, on a par with the UK, to
finance climate mitigation and adaptation policies despite its poverty.4
‘Contribution to problem’ reasoning, then, upsets the convention that the
resources available to a country alter its environmental responsibilities. The
problem here is not merely that the approach ceases to apply in the absence of
anthropogenic causality or wrongdoing, or that it denies that a country’s
wealth is relevant in isolation of its historical responsibility, but that it can
often only be reconciled with our intuitions by rejecting the core thesis that
climate burdens should reflect historical emissions activity.
A second problem for both forms emerges from the historical nature of the
problem. At the individual level, it seems obvious that the ‘contribution to
problem’ approach cannot deal well with the fact that many of the individual
citizens and policymakers responsible for their countries’ historical emissions
are now dead. Shouldering their descendants with the responsibility for
financing climate policy would be to require compensation from the wrong
people. Such problems re-emerge, albeit subtly, at the national level since there
have been numerous changes in international boundaries since 1750 thus
questioning the fairness of holding developed countries responsible for the
greenhouse emissions of their prior incarnations (Caney 2005, pp. 58–60). It
has been suggested that this problem could be solved if we restrict historical
 560 E.A. Page

responsibility to the period from 1900 onwards (Neumayer 2000, p. 189). Yet
this indicates as much an abandonment of historical responsibility as it does its
revitalisation since any victims of pre-1900 emissions would thereby go
uncompensated. We must also remember that, while many national boundaries
have remained more or less unchanged since 1900, many have not. Suppose,
next, that a carbon-neutral nation was successfully invaded and subjugated
by a carbon-intense nation. It seems absurd that the population of the
former country could be required to share the historical greenhouse responsi-
bilities of the latter, yet this is exactly the implication of the ‘contribution to
problem’ approach when applied at the collective level.5 This is a problem for
strict and conditional historical responsibility since the scope of both in these
cases seems radically curtailed so long as we assume that only agents that
actually caused an environmental problem should be held responsible for its
solution.
Third, a problem for the conditional form of climate liability flows from the
fact that, until the late twentieth century, there existed widespread ignorance of
the causes and effects of climate change. The injustice inflicted on the
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developing world by the developed world’s externalising some of the costs of

industrialisation seems to be tempered by widespread ignorance of the nature
and scale of global climate change until the 1990s. The first IPCC report, for
example, was not published until 1990; the UNFCCC was signed only in 1992;
and the Kyoto Protocol to the UNFCCC was negotiated in 1997, and only
came into force in 2005. Unless we subscribe to the strict form, which insists
that a country should always pay the full costs of its environmental activities
even if these could not have been reasonably foreseen by the relevant actors, it
seems unfair not to discount, or even disregard entirely, a country’s historical
emissions record (for a contrary view, see Neumayer 2000, p.189, Gardiner
2004, p. 583).
Fourth, and finally, there are problems for both forms of liability raised
by considerations of ‘non-identity’ (Parfit 1984, p. 352ff). The idea is that the
activities responsible for anthropogenic climate change operate as minor, but
necessary, conditions of later generations of individuals coming into existence
though their impact on human interaction. So, very few members of the
present (or any subsequent) generation can plausibly argue that they have
been made worse off by climate change since the historical greenhouse
emission activities from which it arises were also necessary for their very
existence. This suggests that those drawn to the ‘contribution to problem’
principle on the grounds that it models the standard understanding of harm
and its prevention should think again (Caney 2005, pp. 757–759, Page 2006,
pp. 132–142). While non-identity considerations only operate at the level of
individuals due to the particular features of human reproduction, they also
threaten the ethos of country-based ‘contribution to problem’ reasoning for
this clearly operates at the national level for reasons of explication and not
because it denies that the interests of individuals ultimately underpin our
concern about climate change.
 Environmental Politics 561

Ability to pay
According to the next defence of common but differentiated responsibility,
developed countries should shoulder the burden of climate justice as a result of
their greater wealth and capacity to act. They should, that is, cover the cost of
robust policies of mitigation and adaptation in proportion to their income or
wealth. It is irrelevant, so the argument goes, that we can assign countries
varying levels of responsibility for the emergence of the climate problem since
justice concerns the efficient achievement of desirable outcomes and is
essentially blind to the historical origins of human problems. As Henry Shue
(1999, p. 537) explains, ‘among a number of parties, all of whom are bound to
contribute to some endeavour, the parties who have the most resources should
contribute the most to the endeavour’.
One obvious objection to ‘ability to pay’ is that, in some circumstances,
possessing a comparatively high standard of living is not an appropriate basis
to calculate a country’s ethical obligations. This is because being wealthier than
others would not confer any special responsibility on a country if it only has
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enough resources to meet the basic needs of its own citizens. While in practice
this objection does not apply to developed countries on any useful standard of
basic needs, it does suggests that Shue’s articulation of the ‘ability to pay’
approach should be amended. It is not ‘the nations with the most resources’
that should lead the way in climate policy but rather ‘the nations with excess
capacity’. The claim then is that the developed countries are rich enough to
divert some of their resources to combat dangerous climate change so they
should do so up to the point where this does not compromise the lives of their
citizens as measured by some conception of human well-being.
One problem with the ‘ability to pay’ approach is revealed by the following
thought experiment. Suppose that climate change was brought about by a very
small group of countries that ignored cleaner methods of industrialisation.
Suppose also that the pattern of wealth was similar to that witnessed today
except that there was a large group of wealthy, yet low emitting, countries.
According to the ‘ability to pay’ approach, the responsibilities of developed
countries to manage climate change would be the same in both scenarios
regardless of the issue of which countries were actually responsible for climate
change. But can historical responsibility for a harmful outcome really be
irrelevant to the task of funding the management of that outcome? There
appear to be two main responses to this question. First, it might be proposed
that we discount the climate burden to be shouldered by wealthy, low-emitting
countries. The idea would be to introduce differentiated responsibility amongst
the developed world by embracing a modest ‘contribution to problem’
principle. Second, we might instead opt to ‘outsmart’ the questioner by
insisting on burden sharing in proportion to capacity at the cost of apparent
unfairness to the responsible rich.
There are even more troubling scenarios. Imagine that advances in climate
science revealed that there was a much greater connection between the
 562 E.A. Page

geographical source of emissions and the impacts of climate change such that
those countries emitting the most greenhouse gas would later come to suffer the
most from climate changes. After several centuries, the result might be that the
prospects of the developed and developing could reverse. Would the ‘new
developed world’ be under a strong obligation of justice to aid the ‘old (now
disadvantaged) developed world’ despite the latter having brought most of its
misery on itself? Suppose we thought that it would. Would this responsibility
be as strong as the responsibility we intuitively believe present-day developed
countries have to address the climate problem? So long as we hold that the level
of burden in these two scenarios fails to converge it seems that ‘ability to pay’
approaches derive some of their plausibility from the implicit assumption that
those with the ability to solve environmental problems were also responsible
for their emergence. Put slightly differently, although focusing on ability to pay
is undoubtedly of relevance in the construction of effective and equitable
climate policies it leaves unanswered why those who have the ability should pay.
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Beneficiary pays
The fact that historical responsibility considerations can sometimes underpin
and sometimes undermine ‘ability to pay’ arguments is suggestive of a hybrid
account that gives some weight to both approaches. Yet there is a third, and
comparatively undeveloped, approach to climate justice that can explain why
the wealthy countries should bear the main burden of climate policy. The basic
argument here runs as follows. The greenhouse emissions activities of past
generations have greatly benefited countries of the developed world (without
these activities, that is, these countries would now be much worse off on almost
every metric of well-being). Since any agent should support, as a matter of
fairness, practices that manage the negative effects of activities from which they
benefit, the countries benefiting the most from greenhouse emitting activities in
the past bear the greatest responsibility of climate justice. This is not, however,
because these countries are held strictly, or conditionally, liable for causing
climate change but that they are strictly liable to contribute to the costs of
combating negative externalities from which they have benefited. ‘Beneficiary
pays’ reasoning is distinct from ‘ability to pay’ in being concerned with how a
country’s wealth arose; and distinct from ‘contribution to problem’ in being
concerned with the effects, rather than the causes, of climate change-inducing
activities. I develop the approach below by showing how it deals with two
obvious objections.
First, there is the non-identity problem. There is an air of paradox in
requiring countries that have benefited from greenhouse-driven industrialisa-
tion to pay for climate policy measures when their citizens would not have been
born, and enjoyed the benefits in question, in the absence of industrialisation.
As we saw above, ‘contribution to problem’ approaches also seem to break
down in the relevant timeframes since the greenhouse emissions that
contributed to the emergence of climate change originated in acts and policies
 Environmental Politics 563

that also modified the population size and composition of all countries (Caney
2005, p. 757ff). A similar problem arises in the case of ‘beneficiary pays’ since
there may be no existing individual beneficiaries from which we can coherently
seek payment; and it is surely incoherent to claim that a country can benefit
from an activity even if none of its citizens thereby benefit. There is no
straightforward response to this objection so long as the focal point of justice is
taken to be the interests and rights of particular human beings. However, it is
worth noting that there are some grounds for supposing that notions of
intergenerational benefit are easier to handle than intergenerational harm even
where non-identity considerations obtain. The idea, which I cannot expand on
here, is that causing an agent to exist who thereby leads a life well worth living
can be good for that person even if it cannot be better for them that they came
into existence in the first place (Parfit 1984, p. 489).6
Second, there is the non-reciprocity problem. The vast majority of benefits
received by successive generations of the developed countries were not explicitly
bequeathed on the understanding that they also came with moral burdens
attached. So why should the benefits received from past generations linked to
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the exploitation of the atmosphere be repackaged into duties of climate justice?

Why not assume that past generations wanted their descendants to enjoy these
benefits and disregard the interests of those who have been harmed by their
production? We might call this the problem of unintentional benefit. An
additional problem is that many benefits bequeathed by earlier generations are
forced upon us in the sense that we could not have refused them and it seems
unfair to hold agents responsible for the externalities of benefits that could not
have been declined. This can be called the problem of forced benefit.
A full response to these problems is beyond the scope of the article, but a
partial solution seems within grasp in the guise of the principle of ‘fair
reciprocity’ (Page 2007). The idea is that each generation, as a matter of
fairness, should manage the burdens associated with past industrialisation even
if the benefits they inherited were created unintentionally, received involunta-
rily and operated as necessary conditions of later generations coming into
existence. The notion of fairness involved, however, is somewhat different to
the traditional understanding of reciprocity as repaying directly those from
whom one has benefited. Instead, it builds on the idea that duties of reciprocity
and fairness arise both when we provide benefits for those that have made
sacrifices for us and when we provide benefits to certain third parties when the
original benefactors are beyond our reach. In the present case, the duty to
contribute to climate policy in proportion to how much a country has gained
from historical emissions activities is owed to contemporaries and predecessors
but discharged by protecting the well-being of contemporaries and future
generations. Of course, if too little is done to manage climate change over the
next century, the developed countries might find themselves in the position
where they are unencumbered by ‘beneficiary pays’ duties for there can be no
duty to pass on benefits one has not received. Yet, the task at hand is to define
and explain the duties that existing countries and their inhabitants have to
 564 E.A. Page

protect the atmosphere; and there is much that they should do on ‘beneficiary
pays’ grounds, given their privileged inheritance.

Patterns and hybrids

While each of the approaches discussed above would recommend contrasting
climate burden distributions, there does seem to be a broad convergence
amongst them on some version of ‘common and differentiated responsibility’.
Developed countries were causally responsible for climate change; they are the
main beneficiaries of activities that cause climate change; and they have the
ability to tackle the causes and effects of climate change. The three approaches
also share the feature that a principle of burden sharing is selected
independently of wider distributive concerns. According to a fourth approach
to burden sharing, climate impacts are viewed as simply one of many categories
of burden that should be managed according to a comprehensive theory of just
distribution. In a sense, this approach reduces the question of climate burden
sharing to a matter of practicality: climate policies are selected according to
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their fit with some ideal of distribution not because they reflect some
underlying principle of climate justice (Meyer and Roser 2006, p. 232ff, Page
2006, pp. 78–98). I do not seek here to defend any one of these ideals as a
unique solution to climate justice – though the sufficiency ideal promises much
in this regard – but rather to show that each ideal has provided a unique
approach to burden sharing.
Perhaps the simplest ideal to which one might appeal is equality. The idea is
that benefits and burdens pertaining to any human activity should be
distributed so that inequality is minimised. Egalitarians hold that equality is
valuable in the sense that it does not derive its value from its relation to other
values, so while departures from equality may be justified all things considered
they are always bad in one respect (Temkin 1993, pp. 6–18). There is a
somewhat paradoxical feature of egalitarianism, thus defined, that questions its
role as a comprehensive theory of justice. This is that egalitarianism looks
favourably on outcomes that reduce inequality even when this is in the interests
of no one. Egalitarianism, that is, raises the ‘levelling down problem’ (Raz
1986, p. 230ff, Parfit 2000). Putting aside the levelling down problem for a
moment, egalitarianism has obvious applications to climate justice: climate
change should not be permitted to upset the achievement of equality of life-
chances across countries or generations. Since unchecked climate change will
tend to exacerbate existing inequalities between countries, the egalitarian will
expect the developed countries to fund generous policies of mitigation and
adaptation. This is not because of what these countries or their citizens have
done in the past, or because they are wealthy as such, but rather because this is
the most efficient way of achieving the desired outcome of greater equality.
One way in which those broadly sympathetic to egalitarianism might avoid
the levelling down problem is to embrace the contrasting idea of priority.
Prioritarians reject the notion that it is always bad that some people are worse
 Environmental Politics 565

off than others through no fault of their own since they are unconcerned with
the comparative properties of distributive outcomes. Instead, they think it
regrettable that people are badly off as such: the lower a person’s well-being,
the stronger our duty is to benefit them (Parfit 1995, p. 23). The distinction
between equality and priority is highly relevant for climate justice since climate
change will pose different sorts of challenge to egalitarianism and prioritarian-
ism. Climate impacts will undoubtedly affect the life-chances of the worst off
even if it does not increase overall inequality. Moreover, a prioritarian
approach to burden sharing will generally involve asking the developed
countries to shoulder the burden of climate policy since this will be least
disruptive to the goal of improving the life-chances of the worst off countries
(or their citizens). But prioritarianism and egalitarianism will as likely as not
diverge on the specific remedies to climate injustice reflecting the deeper
disagreement between these views as to the ethical importance of the gap
between the fortunes of the better- and worse-off. Prioritarians, for example,
are far more likely to embrace market environmental mechanisms, such as
emissions trading, which tend to increase efficiency in climate mitigation at the
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cost of exacerbating the gap between rich and poor.

A third distributive ideal, sufficiency, is also crucial to the construction of
just climate policy. This holds that benefits and burdens should be distributed
so that people have sufficient capacity to pursue the values they care about
(Frankfurt 1987, Crisp 2003). Attaining what we really care about, for
sufficientarians, requires a certain level of well-being. But once this level is
reached there is no further relationship between how well-off a person is and
whether they discover and fulfil what it is that they really care about. In this
way, it is argued that it is not reasonable for a person to seek a higher standard
of living when they have reached the ‘threshold of sufficiency’ even if this
would mean that they would increase their overall well-being. Perhaps the
central difficulty with the sufficiency theory is that the distributions it
recommends are so sensitive to the existing pattern of well-being. At the
same time, sufficiency analyses crave accurate information about the threshold
itself that is difficult – perhaps impossible – to obtain (Casal 2007, p. 312ff).
These problems aside, in many contexts sufficientarians will follow the CBDR
principle by exempting developing countries from costly action so long as
bearing such burdens would prevent their citizens reaching the threshold of
sufficiency. But since it is not intrinsically concerned with inequality, or the
plight of the worst off, a sufficientarian climate response might also require less
of developed countries than its rivals if sustaining the most lives above the
sufficiency level meant concentrating resources in the hands of the well-off
(Page 2006, p. 85ff).
The introduction of generalised principles of distribution into the more
localised debate about climate change raises two issues central to progress on
the burden-sharing issue. The first is whether we should treat the problem of
climate burdens independently of general concerns of distributive justice. The
second is which of the rival approaches discussed above provides the most
 566 E.A. Page

secure philosophical underpinnings for climate change policy (on the

assumption, of course, that there are no further candidates waiting in the
wings). I cannot hope to answer these two questions here, but I would like to
make two suggestions as to how they might be answered, both presented in the
spirit of pluralism. First, the issues of ‘general justice’ at stake could be
developed by an approach invoking each of the three main distributive ideals in
different contexts. This call for pluralism echoes the work of a number of
contemporary political philosophers in the liberal-egalitarian tradition
(Daniels 1996, Buchanan et al. 2002). The resulting synthesis could operate
in a number of ways. One move would be to match the ideal to the sphere of
justice in question. For example, while we might appeal to equality when
distributing goods at the domestic level, we might appeal to priority when
distributing goods amongst countries; or we might seek to realise equality
within generations and sufficiency between generations. A different move
would be to match the ideal to the distributive context faced, for example by
assigning sufficiency lexical priority when at least some lives can be made
decent (Page 2006, p. 94ff).
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Second, the ‘local justice’ issues as stake might be developed by a burden-

sharing account that gives weight to all three of the approaches discussed
above but is also sensitive to the insights revealed by analyses of general justice.
The main suggestion I have here is that the method used to identify the parties
who should bear the costs of tackling climate change should be separated from
the method used to calculate the precise burden each of these parties should
bear. This would be achieved by appealing to a sufficientarian ‘ability to pay’
principle; using the level of historical benefit from greenhouse emissions
activities to establish a preliminary distribution of responsibility within this
group; and finally, modifying the precise level of contribution required from
each by assessing comparative historical responsibility for climate change (see
Figure 1).
Much work remains to refine this approach if it is to provide a principled
reconciliation of the four accounts of burden sharing outlined above in a way
that is of practical use in constructing climate policy. It is, moreover, a rather
modest interpretation of pluralism in that the competing principles it reconciles
are applied in the same distributive context, with considerations of
intergenerational and international justice being dealt with only indirectly.
Some development of its implications for global climate change policy,
however, can be achieved through a revealing contrast with three recent
approaches to burden sharing pluralist origins. These are, first, Oxfam
International’s Adaptation Financing Index; second, Simon Caney’s Hybrid

Figure 1. A pluralist approach to burden sharing.

 Environmental Politics 567

Account; and, third, EcoEquity’s Greenhouse Development Rights Framework

(Oxfam International 2007, Caney 2005, Baer, Athanasiou and Kartha 2007).
There are four key issues facing a comparative assessment of these approaches.
First, how should the burden-sharing components be specified? Second, how
should the components be reconciled: should they be equally (or unequally)
weighted or should one be given lexical priority? Third, should the focus of
burden attribution be individuals or the countries to which they belong?
Fourth, how might we deal with emissions pre-dating scientific awareness of
and/or consensus on anthropogenic climate change?

The adaptation finance index

Oxfam International’s ‘Adaptation Finance Index’ (AFI) aims to construct a
fair method of allocating funding commitments for a global climate adaptation
programme that would dispense $50 billion per year by 2050 alongside an
ambitious mitigation strategy (Oxfam International 2007, pp. 17–23). The AFI
establishes a burden-sharing indicator comprised of an evenly weighted mix of
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(1) each country’s physical contribution to climate change and (2) each
country’s ability to shoulder the costs of a global climate adaptation effort. The
AFI’s ‘contribution to problem’ element is calculated by subtracting the
amount of greenhouse gas that a country could have safely emitted over the 12-
year period 1992–2003 (set at 2 tonnes per person per year) from that country’s
actual emissions over this period. The figures resolved from the formula are
then modified in order to create a climate responsibility index in percentage
terms, with the top three countries being the US (51.4%), Japan (9.9%) and
Germany (7.5%). The ‘ability to pay’ element, meanwhile, appeals innovatively
to the UN Human Development Index (HDI) to create an index of capacity
and also to introduce a sufficientarian ‘development threshold’ for the
attribution of any burdens of climate adaptation. All countries with HDIs
below 0.9 are exempt from any form of burden: the adaptation funding ability
of the remaining countries is assessed by multiplying their respective
populations by their HDI scores minus 0.9.7 The resulting figures are then
modified to create a simple climate funding ability index in percentage terms
with the same top three countries emerging as the responsibility component:
the United States (36.0%), Japan (15.9%) and Germany (6.7%).
The final AFI index (which assigns a financial burden share to every country
with positive responsibility and ability scores, weighting the components
equally) fits well with the CBDR principle in that the world’s poorest countries
are exempt from climate adaptation duties (Oxfam International 2007, p. 28).
This is because these countries invariable have 50.9 HDI scores and none
exceeded the annual 2 tonnes per capita safe emissions allowance in any of the
base years. The index proposes that the 28 qualifying countries, by contrast,
should fund climate adaptation in proportion to their AFI scores with the result
that the US, EU, Japan, Canada and Australia are responsible for 95% of
climate adaptation policy (Oxfam International 2007, p. 28).
 568 E.A. Page

There are a number of problems with the AFI that suggest it falls short of
being a philosophically sound or practical approach to burden sharing. The
first problem is that the authors provide no argument for their equal weighting
of the two AFI elements. There is clearly some practical convenience associated
with this assumption, but it does not reflect any sound philosophical analysis.
Second, the authors also do not explain the logic behind either of the
burden-sharing thresholds (HDI score less than 0.9; and annual national per
capita emissions of less than 2 tonnes). This is a problem as, in combination,
they skew the index away from the responsibilities of the ‘harmful poor’ such
as (1) ‘Countries in Transition’ (Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Romania)
that were responsible for sizeable greenhouse emissions before the sharp
decline of economic activity accompanying the dissolution of the Soviet Union;
and (2) rapidly industrialising countries (China, Brazil, Mexico and India)
which are responsible for massive ongoing emissions despite their relative
poverty. Both categories are exempted on ‘ability to pay’ grounds, reflecting
the fact that the HDI threshold is implausible in this form.8 A further problem
with the HDI threshold is its arbitrariness as demonstrated by the case of
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Portugal. Portugal is one of the countries hovering around the 0.9 HDI
threshold – over in 2004 (0.904) and under in 2005 (0.897) – with the result that
it is exempt from duties in Oxfam’s 2004-based report but would bear a full
share of the climate burden if the authors used a more recent index. In a sense,
any threshold-based system will involve such anomalies, but the problem is
compounded here through the use of a 12-year period for the climate
responsibility component (1992–2003) while using a single year (2004) for the
climate ability component. The challenges such faults bring into focus are
threefold: to find a lower, yet philosophically reasoned, threshold of climate
ability; to calculate the ability metric over an extended, non-arbitrary, period
of time; and to explain the weightings of these components.
Third, the approach provides no argument for its ‘methodological
nationalism’ which ignores the climate duties of individuals and which is
reinforced by the use of the nationally based HDI indicator. One regrettable
consequence is the marginalisation of impoverished groups residing in the
developed world (‘the south in the north’). Although absolute deprivation is
uncommon in the developed world, the AFI ignores the role of relative poverty
in developed countries. This is a problem because inequality can clearly function
as a drag on a country’s ability to fund international environmental
agreements.9 A further dimension of this problem is that the climate
responsibilities of affluent individuals and groups in developing countries
(‘the north in the south’) are also ignored despite them having benefited greatly
from greenhouse driven industrialisation. The most extreme anomaly concerns
the growing band of the super-rich in exempted countries. According to Forbes,
a record number of the world’s 1125 US$ billionaires in 2008 were citizens of
developing and transition countries, including Russia (87 billionaires), China
(28), India (19), Brazil (18) and Nigeria (1) (Forbes 2008). The duties of such
persons must surely be dealt with by any just approach to burden sharing.
 Environmental Politics 569

Fourth, ignoring pre-1992 emissions skews the final AFI table and is not
given any philosophical motivation. The problem arises not only in considering
countries in decline during the 1992–2003 base period (who get an overly
generous deal) but also for those such as Ireland, Finland, Israel, Switzerland
and Singapore (who lose out through the neglect of historical emissions). A
more coherent approach would be to extend the responsibility component at
least as far back as 1900 and possibly beyond.

Caney’s ‘hybrid account’

An alternative approach to burden sharing is proposed by Simon Caney (2005,
p. 767ff). Caney argues that climate burden sharing should reflect both ‘ability to
pay’ and ‘contribution to problem’. The central idea, reflecting Joseph Raz’s
(1986) ‘interest-theory’ of rights, is that all persons possess a right not to suffer
from climate impacts that undermine their basic interests; and all persons have
burdens associated with protecting this right but those living in developed
countries have the most pressing duties reflecting their wealth and carbon-intense
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lifestyles (Caney 2005, p. 769; see also Jagers and Otterström in this issue).
There are four elements to Caney’s account of climate entitlements: the first
and second target physical responsibility whereas the third and fourth target
financial capacity. First, all existing and future persons are duty bound not to
exceed their ‘safe quota’ of greenhouse emission since this would automatically
violate the rights of contemporaries and future generations. Second, if a person
does exceed their quota they are duty bound to try and compensate those whose
rights are thereby violated. Caney holds that these two backward-looking
principles, which express the most cogent elements of ‘contribution to problem’
reasoning, must be supplemented by two forward-looking principles of justice.
Third, the global rich are obliged to mitigate and/or finance adaptation measures
to protect people whose interests and rights are not protected by the first two
elements (they might be victims of natural climate variation or of the imprudent
behaviour of the now dead). Fourth, the global rich must also act to discourage
non-compliance with the demands of climate justice: this final principle, which
we might call the ‘ability to further justice’ principle, ensures that the most
fortunate only fulfil their duty to combat climate change by behaving ‘pro-
actively’ rather than ‘reactively’ (Caney 2005, p. 769).
While Caney provides a more robust argument for climate pluralism than
Oxfam, there are several gaps in his development of the ‘hybrid account’. First,
he does not specify the weightings of (or priority rules amongst) the four
principles so it is unclear how a detailed distribution of burdens could be
generated even if we assume that the primary responsibilities will fall on the
developed world (Caney 2005, pp. 772–774). It is also not clear how conflicts
between the ‘ability to pay’ and ‘contribution to problem’ elements would be
resolved if and when they occur. How might the four principles be applied to
deal with the real case of persons living in poor countries with unsafe national
per capita greenhouse emissions, for example, or the hypothetical case of rich
 570 E.A. Page

countries with safe per capita emissions? He also ignores the problem of
generational conflict arising if it becomes impossible for all to lead a decent life
without emitting more than their ‘safe quota’ (Caney does not specify this
figure but it seems fair to assume that it would be similar to Oxfam’s measure
of 2 tonnes per person per annum). So whereas Oxfam’s approach to burden
allocation is transparent at the cost of excessive focus on a small number of
developed countries, Caney’s approach plausibly casts a wider net in terms
of burden attribution but only at the cost of unclarity in the distribution of
responsibility and ability to pay. The hybrid account also ignores beneficiary
pays considerations, which are only dealt with indirectly through the third and
fourth principles.
Second, the hybrid account views the ultimate source of justice and rights
to be the interests of individual persons. In this sense, the hybrid account is not
as vulnerable to ‘north in the south’ and ‘south in the north’ issues as Oxfam’s
AFI. Yet no real argument is offered for this methodological individualism and
it is unclear how Caney’s four principles would be operationalised given the
national focus of the current global climate architecture, or in the face of
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widespread belief in the political and ethical sovereignty of individual

countries. It is not clear how the four principles of the hybrid account could
be harnessed to determine which individuals in the developing world should
contribute, which should not, and how much can be asked of the former.
Third, Caney, like Oxfam, adopts a weaker conception of ‘contribution to
problem’ than the UNFCCC or the Kyoto Protocol. Concerned that
incorporating historical emissions will unfairly burden later generations with
the costs of their ancestors’ activities, Caney’s responsibility component
(specified in the second principle) only measures post-1990 emissions (Caney
2005, p. 774). While he gives two separate arguments for ignoring historical
emissions (excusable ignorance of the causes and effects of climate change pre-
1990; and unfairness of holding later generations responsible for the actions of
earlier generations) he gives no specific or persuasive reason for choosing such
a recent base year. The result, echoing Oxfam’s RCI, is harsh treatment for the
newly industrialised populations and lax treatment of those residing in
countries of transition. A stricter notion of climate change liability is needed to
reflect the enormous benefits that individuals and countries have gained from
emissions over the 1760–1990 period regardless of the specifics of physical
responsible or the emergence of the scientific consensus on climate change.
Baer, Athanasiou and Kartha (2007, pp. 25–26) may be correct in thinking that
a precise method to determine an appropriate cut-off point may never emerge
but Caney and Oxfam are surely misguided in setting the effective start date for
greenhouse responsibility as 1990 or 1992.

Greenhouse development rights

To summarise the previous two sections, Oxfam’s AFI is practical but
philosophically simplistic, whereas Caney’s ‘hybrid account’ is philosophically
 Environmental Politics 571

sophisticated but lacking in policy relevance. A third approach, which seeks to

give a more precise account of responsibility and ability, has been proposed
under the rubric of ‘Greenhouse Development Rights’ (GDRs). In what
remains of the paper, I outline this approach and argue that it is well placed to
reconcile the twin aims of philosophical robustness and practical application.
The two central ingredients of the GDR approach are the specification of
an ‘emergency climate programme’ (ECP) and the incorporation of poverty
reduction and development goals within the global climate architecture. The
ECP has the objective of limiting global warming to 28C or less above its pre-
industrial level and massive investment to help vulnerable populations cope
with climate damages that are now unavoidable. The programme invokes
stringent mitigation measures so that global greenhouse concentrations would
peak (in 2015) at 470ppm CO2e on the way to an 80% reduction in year-on-
year GHG emissions on their 1990 levels (by 2050). The annual cost of such
mitigation and adaptation measures is estimated as 1% or more of Global
World Product or roughly $650 billion annually (in 2005 US$) (Baer et al.
2007, p. 34). More specifically, the ECP comprises three elements: (1) the fixing
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of a global ‘greenhouse emissions budget’ required to meet the 28C goal; (2) the
assignment of a proportion of the global budget to each country based on a
combined index of historical responsibility (40% weighting) and ability to pay
(60% weighting); and (3) a detailed national emissions budget reflecting (1) and
(2) (Baer et al. 2007, p. 31).
The approach pursues poverty reduction and development goals by re-
cognising the global development right of all persons to a ‘dignified level of
sustainable development’. The ‘dignified level’ is set at $9000 year (in 2005 US$)
or 150% of the current ‘global poverty income’ of $6000 (for comparison, the
current global per capita income is $8500). In other words, the approach
appeals to a development threshold, similar to Oxfam’s AFI, in establishing the
burden of each country. The main difference is that the focus of the GDR
approach is the sum of above-threshold income of all individuals residing in a
country rather than the HDI scores or per capita income of that country.
Persons at (or under) the threshold level – which is modelled on the minimum
income required for membership of the ‘global middle class’ – are not obliged to
make sacrifices for the sake of the climate security of others. So, while the
authors argue that countries can be used as the vehicles for global climate
policy, they are at a deeper level viewed as ‘merely collections of unequal
individuals’ (Baer et al. 2007, p. 5). One benefit of this individual focus, as we
saw earlier with Caney’s hybrid approach, is that patterns of burden sharing can
be modified to address inequitable intra-national distributions giving rise to
‘north in the south’ and ‘south in the north’ problems (Baer et al. 2007, p. 28ff).
The overall financial burden of each country to fund climate policy is
calculated in terms of a ‘Responsibility and Capacity Indicator’ (RCI),
reflecting the capacity and historical responsibility of its citizens past and
present. A country’s capacity is defined as national income minus the incomes
of all persons below the $9000 development threshold; and a country’s
 572 E.A. Page

responsibility is defined as its cumulative emissions 1990–2005. The RCI for

each country, which represents the percentage contribution each country
should make to the ECP, is created by multiplying its capacity and responsi-
bility scores (weighted 60/40) creating the following percentage burdens: the
United States (34.3), EU (26.6), China (7.0), Russia (2.3) and India (0.3). The
final step in the argument is to use the RCI scores to establish a climate change
levy on each country to be raised by carbon taxes and other revenue gene-
ration. The authors calculate that, if the ECP cost 1% of Global World
Product annually, the average annual climate tax bill for the key countries
would be: $780 (US), $372 (EU), $142 (China) and $51 (India). The cor-
responding total annual bills will be circa $212 billion (US), $164 billion (EU),
$43 billion (China) and $2.1 billion (India). Reflecting their negligible climatic
contribution, and minimal share of the ‘global middle class’, the Least
Developed Countries (LDCs) would be liable for a fraction of the ECP’s cost
($200m per annum in total based on an average taxpayer bill of $7) (Baer et al.
2007, p. 36).10
The GDR approach offers an ingenious mix of philosophical pluralism and
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policy-relevant index construction. It combines many of the strengths of rival

approaches while providing a coherent, if not complete, response to our four
problems. However, the approach stands in need of some development in the
light of the following defects. First, the weighting of the two elements of the
RCI is not well explained. The authors note that there are a number of
weighting possibilities (Baer et al. 2007, p. 32) but they nonetheless settle on an
insufficiently motivated 60/40 split between ability and responsibility. The
authors also do not explain why a weighting approach is preferred to a mixed
approach of weightings and priority rules (as suggested by Oxfam) or outline a
set of philosophical principles that would underpin the weighting (as suggested
by Caney).
Second, the ECP may prove to be too ambitious or undesirable. The ECP
aims for an 80% cut in global GHG emissions by 2050 with a peak CO2e of
470 ppm. This is based on the assumption, which has received insufficient
scrutiny, that the consequences of a 28C warming will be globally catastrophic.
It is also based on the assumption that such an aim is feasible, which is in doubt
given that greenhouse concentrations reached 430 CO2e in 2006, are currently
growing by 2 ppm per year, and show no signs of contraction.
Third, the focus on income in the calculation of the RCI leads the authors
to ignore issues of relative poverty or non-income aspects of human well-being.
The result is that whereas Oxfam counter-intuitively exempts Russia, China
and Brazil from bearing duties of climate justice, the GDR approach is
counter-intuitively harsh on these countries, reflecting its focus on income
rather than a more comprehensive indicator of development. It is perhaps most
unintuitive in this regard when it attributes some climate burdens to LDCs.
Fourth, like its rivals, it takes the pragmatic but philosophically
questionable path of counting only recent historical emissions (1990–2005) as
the basis of its responsibility component. The result is that the approach is
 Environmental Politics 573

biased against the interests of the Least Developed Countries (slightly), the
rapidly expanding developed countries (moderately) and the recently
industrialised countries (greatly). It also offers an unacceptable financial
concession to Russia and other economies in transition, which experienced
declining emissions in the 1980s and 1990s, but were responsible for sizeable
emissions hitherto. Part of the problem is undoubtedly that the authors do not
recognise the ‘beneficiary pays’ principle or the way in which this principle
captures part of the ethical relevance of historical emissions.

Conclusion
A number of scholars have suggested that all of the main philosophical
approaches to burden distribution converge so clearly on the CBDR principle
that the differences between them are objects of philosophical curiosity with
little policy-relevance. I have argued that this assumption is highly question-
able. Subtle differences in the arguments that underpin superficially convergent
approaches can lead to the selection of different climate aims and objectives, as
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well as different burden-sharing approaches. There is no single principle or

approach at present that identifies developed countries and their citizens,
cleanly and persuasively, as the entities that should shoulder the burden of
mitigation and adaptation. A more sophisticated analysis is needed that
reconciles competing arguments based on cumulative emissions, ability to pay
or benefits received. Of the three analyses examined that shared such pluralist
foundations, Global Development Rights were found to be the most
philosophically robust and policy-relevant vehicle for climate burden alloca-
tion. This approach is far from perfect and far from easily reconciled with the
existing global climate regime. But it is a useful starting point from which to
inject fair burden-sharing principles into the next generation of climate policies.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank an anonymous referee from Environmental Politics for their useful
suggestions on how to improve the text. Earlier versions of the article were presented at
academic conferences in Reading, Bristol, Greifswald and at the ECPR Joint Sessions of
Workshops, Helsinki University, 8–10 May 2008. I would like to thank the audiences on
all occasions for their comments.

Notes
1. In order to maintain a clear focus on principles of burden distribution, rather than
the agents identified as burden bearers, I focus in the first three sections on the
responsibilities of countries as opposed to their individual inhabitants. This
simplifying assumption reflects the primacy of countries in a range of international
environmental agreements as well as much of the climate justice literature. As the
analysis of alternative principles deepens in subsequent sections, I relax this
assumption to evaluate both individualist and collectivist approaches.
2. CO2e is a useful unit of measurement that converts atmospheric concentrations of
the six most important greenhouse gases (Carbon dioxide, Methane, Nitrous
Oxide, Perfluoromethane, Hydroflurocarbon 23 and Sulphur Hexafluoride) into
 574 E.A. Page

equivalent amounts of CO2 so that climate forcing from all sources can be
expressed in one figure.
3. Note that, even if we regard this example with suspicion, IPCC models show that
up to a quarter of the 0.78C global warming of the past century can be accounted
for by natural climatic variation (Alley et al. 2007).
4. This example is hypothetical but not merely conceptual: India and Canada emitted
roughly the same amount of CO2 between 1850 and 2002, equal to 2.2% and 2.1%
of world emissions respectively (Baumert et al. 2005, p. 32).
5. I am grateful to Göran Duus-Otterström for suggesting this example.
6. By contrast, being born into a life worth living cannot coherently be described as
bad for that person if the only alternative was not coming into existence at all, so
there does seem to be some asymmetry between activities that harm, and activities
that benefit, later generations. For a more sceptical view, see Caney 2005, pp. 757–
758.
7. For comparison, there were 28 countries in 2004 with HDI scores greater than 0.9.
These countries shared a per capita income of $20,000 þ (in 2005 US$); a
77 þ year average life expectancy; and a 92% adult literacy rate.
8. Note also that the UN divides the world’s countries into three tiers according to
their HDI performance: 1–70 (‘high human development’), 71–155 (‘medium
human development’) and 156–177 (‘low human development’) (UN 2008). The
AFI exempts 52 of the countries in the top tier from bearing climate adaptation
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duties, which suggests that the ability threshold is too demanding.

9. For comparison, 22% of the UK population (13 million people) experienced
income poverty in 2006 on the basis of having an income of 60% or less of the
national median (Palmer et al. 2007, pp. 22–50). Meanwhile, 12.3% of the US
population (36.5 million people) lived in poverty in the same year (US Census
Bureau 2007, pp. 11–17).
10. The United Nations defines Least Development Countries as those with (i) very
low income as evidenced by a capita income of US $750 or less; (ii) human
resource weakness as evidenced by indicators of health and education; and (iii)
significant economic vulnerability (UN 2004, p. 15). At present, 49 of the UN’s 192
member countries belong to this category.

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