CLIMATEWIRE | A major question has emerged as the world strives to reduce greenhouse gases: How much money should rich nations pay to poor ones for raising Earth's temperature?High carbon countries owe at least $192 trillion to low-emitting nations in compensation for their greenhouse gas pollution.
World leaders agreed last year at the U.N. climate talks in Egypt to establish a fund that would pay vulnerable countries for “loss and damage” associated with climate change. But the details of how the fund will operate — including which states are eligible for compensation, what kinds of damage the fund will cover and how the money will be disbursed — are still undecided.
Then they divided the carbon budgets into fair shares for every country. Each nation gets a slice of the budget according to its size and population. They found that all the countries in the Global North group had already exceeded their fair shares of the carbon budgets. The group had collectively blown through its 1.5 C budget back in 1986, and its 2 C budget was gone by 1995.