Emission budget approaches for burden sharing: some thoughts from an environmental economics point of view

In this paper, we examine budget approaches as a device for burden sharing in mitigating climate change. The purpose of this comment is twofold: First, we provide an overview over the general concept of budget approaches and investigate into the role of such approaches within the current climate negotiations. Second, as these approaches have an obvious normative dimension, we discuss some of the issues raised by Schuppert and Seidel (2015) in this Special Issue from the stance of an environmental economist. We highlight that budget approaches may serve as a tool to communicate the urgency of action against climate change and to remind representatives from industrialized countries of their responsibility in the historical sense as well as in terms of ability-to-pay. This even holds when the allocation of national emission shares is based on relatively easy-to-calculate sharing rules that can potentially serve as normative heuristics.