Should the citizens of industrialized countries (e.g. UK or US) be expected to bear higher costs in mitigating climate change than the citizens of developing countries, just because of the emissions produced by their ancestors - Essay Example

Download file to see previous pages These rules are meant to develop a common approach towards climate change mitigation in the world and include a number of legal conventions and protocols ratified by different countries across the world. Climate change can be traced to the 17th and 18th century when the need for industrial development drove different countries in Europe to adopt large scale production approaches. Developed countries like the United Kingdom and the United States are therefore considered as some of the mega contributors to climate change due to their level of development. The carbon emission of these countries has remained high despite attempts to reduce climate change through the use of various means like carbon credits (Crisp, 2003).
Mitigation is costly and countries must commit a lot of resources to ensure that it is achieved to salvage the situation. The protocols that have been developed have attempted to include all countries, developed and developing, in the attempt to commit to the mitigation process. However, the massive contribution of the developed countries to climate change during and after the industrial revolution era has created a debate on whether they should shoulder the major burden of mitigating climate change. The impacts of developing process in the developing countries led to an increase in the changes in the climate that have created the ravaging impacts witnessed today. To develop a fair approach aimed at mitigating the impacts, burden should be shared based on the level of responsibilities between countries (Armstrong, 2005).
The intergovernmental panel on climate change meeting in 2007 identified the need for a global collective approach in mitigating climate change and controlling its spiralling impacts. This is due to the fact that the continued increase in climate will have major impacts to all nations across the world irrespective of their contribution to climate change. Mitigation measures and the ratio of burdening the responsibility ...Download file to see next pagesRead More