Department of Political Science, University of Alabama, Marrs Spring Road, Tuscaloosa, AL, 35401, USA.
Department of Economics, University of Sheffield, 9 Mappin Street, Sheffield, S1 4DT, UK.
Nat Commun. 2023 Mar 14;14(1):1408. doi: 10.1038/s41467-023-37130-7.
Despite worsening climate change, the international community still disagrees on how to divide the costs of mitigation between developing countries and developed countries, which emitted the bulk of historical carbon emissions. We study this issue using an economic experiment. Specifically, we test how information about historical emissions influences how much participants pay for climate change mitigation. In a four-player game, participants are assigned to lead two fictional countries as members of either the first or the second generation. The first generation produces wealth at the expense of greater carbon emissions. The second generation inherits their predecessor's wealth and negotiates how to split the climate change mitigation costs. Here we show that when the second generation knows that the previous generation created the current wealth and mitigation costs, participants whose predecessor generated more carbon emissions offered to pay more, whereas the successors of low-carbon emitters offered to pay less.
尽管气候变化日益恶化，但国际社会仍未就如何在历史碳排放量大的发达国家和发展中国家之间分担减排成本达成一致。我们通过经济实验研究了这一问题。具体来说，我们测试了有关历史排放的信息如何影响参与者为气候变化缓解支付的费用。在一个四人游戏中，参与者被分配为第一代或第二代的两个虚构国家的领导人。第一代以更大的碳排放为代价创造财富。第二代继承了他们前辈的财富，并就如何分担气候变化缓解成本进行谈判。在这里，我们表明，当第二代知道上一代创造了当前的财富和缓解成本时，排放更多碳的前辈的后代愿意支付更多，而低碳排放者的后代则愿意支付更少。
