Equal Per Person
Equal per Person (equity)
For the purposes of this personal carbon tracker, the remaining global carbon budget at 2015 is shared equally per person alive today (7.3 billion)
This seems to be the simplest approach and reasonably fair – given that it is far too late for the fairest “historical” option. However, the more you think about how many people to share the budget between, the more complicated it gets. For more discussion on how many of us there are, see population size.
So 842 Gt CO2 to divide by 7.3 billion giving us 115 Tonnes CO2 each for 2˚C
Or 242 Gt CO2 divided by 7.3 billion giving us 33 Tonnes CO2 each for 1.5˚C
This could mean simply taking the remaining carbon budget and dividing by everyone on the planet at this moment. This would mean that people born in the future have not been allocated any of the carbon budget so “your” personal carbon budget needs to be shared with everyone yet to be born in the future.
UK carbon Budgets
The UKs carbon budget is also based on the idea of sharing the global budget equally. However, instead of taking the total budget now and sharing it equally, the idea is to take the IPCC projection of what we will each be able to emit in 2050 (2 tonnes in models including significant carbon sequestration) and reducing down to that from our current levels. So the overall emissions we would be responsible for are far more than we are proposing here. For more info see www.theccc.org.uk/tackling-climate-change/the-science-of-climate-change/setting-a-target-for-emission-reduction/