Income-based environmental responsibility

A strong mitigation effort is underway to reduce the levels of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. An allocation of the mitigation effort among multiple agents requires understanding which agent is responsible for what emissions, according to a defined measure of carbon responsibility. The metric adopted by current international climate policy is production-based (or territorial) responsibility. However, other types of responsibility have been discussed in the literature, namely consumption-based (or upstream) responsibility and downstream responsibility. In this paper we study the latter, which is little explored in the literature. We clarify the term through a novel nomenclature, income-based responsibility and present a case-study, with the quantification of income-based responsibility for 112 world regions, and the comparison of the results with production and consumption-based responsibilities.