Climate change doesn’t care about national borders. Carbon dioxide (CO2 ) and other greenhouse gases emitted in one part of the world can contribute to floods, forest fires and heatwaves in all other parts of the world. Unfortunately, policymakers don’t have the same global toolkit. National governments, or international groups like the EU, are limited to implementing policies that affect their share of global emissions. But how should we think of what a country’s share is? And how can countries such as the UK best contribute to reducing emissions?
There are different ways of thinking about a country’s emissions. Since the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the international standard has been a ‘territorial’ definition of emissions. For example, the UK government has committed itself to achieving net-zero territorial emissions by 2050. This means that the government is targeting emissions released within the territory of the UK, from fossil-fuel burning power stations in North Yorkshire to gas cookers in homes in south London.
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