How fights over what's fair have stalled progress on climate change

Our planet is changing. So is our journalism. This story is part of a CBC News initiative entitled Our Changing Planet to show and explain the effects of climate change and what is being done about it.

The feast has been grand, at least for those who arrived early on.

The early diners — call them developed countries — ordered advancements and luxuries without concern for the atmospheric price. Perhaps, at first, the cost wasn't clear.

Others joined the table, hungry for their turn and a taste of the same. Why should developing countries refrain from fossil fuels when some have been gorging for, well, more than a century?

But now, there's no doubt, it's time to pay up. 

Starting Sunday in Glasgow, the Conference of the Parties (COP) will meet for the 26th time in three decades trying to decide how to split the bill.

What's fair — a concept so fundamental that toddlers and chimpanzees have opinions about it — has been far from simple when it comes to global climate change negotiations. Claims of unfairness were part of the failure of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and one of the arguments used by President Donald Trump when the U.S. temporarily left the Paris Agreement.

This time, although science behind human-caused climate change is clear and damage is mounting, especially in parts of the world least responsible, success depends on wealthy, polluting countries coming to agreement.

"Fairness is always in the eye of the beholder," said Prof. Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Bangladesh, who has been at every annual COP meeting since they began in Berlin in 1995.

"When I hear these arguments [about fairness], I hear slave owners ... deciding who should sell their slaves or free their slaves first," said Huq.

"If you don't sell your slaves or free your slaves first, why should I? Nobody's asking the slaves."

The understanding that some countries are more responsible than others for climate change has been part of the United Nations Framework Convention of Climate Change (UNFCCC) since the start. 

That framework, enacted in 1994, includes a list of rich, industrialized countries — the United Kingdom, Japan, the U.S. and Canada among them. These "Annex I" countries are supposed to be doing more, "taking into account their common but differentiated responsibilities," according to the document.

"They accepted they were the bigger polluters," said Huq, who advises the caucus of least-developed countries at COP negotiations.