UNEP is supporting the initiative by facilitating the development of a common methodology for conducting the assessments and its testing in a set of country studies in Asia, Latin America and Africa. These studies will improve our understanding of the apportionment of carbon among the oceans, atmosphere and the biosphere. It can also indicate national contributions to the atmospheric budget of greenhouse gases or even net emissions per capita. Such allocations need to be viewed with caution. There is little purpose in demanding full reparations for past actions by the largest emitters.
Logic confirms the impossibility of such expectations.
The net result would be a continued emission growth with the atmosphere sensitive only to the quantity of release not to the location of the source. We have a common cause that will require a cooperative solution that will stretch all our capabilities to the utmost, and, even at best, will result in eventual stabilization of the atmosphere at a higher level of greenhouse gas concentrations than is desirable. The question of what climate change means to you as an individual, or as part of a community, or even a nation, is far less simply stated than identifying the global consequences. To focus more clearly on this, requires another kind of country study. I would encourage nations to undertake national impact studies which would attempt to identify the implications of a climate change, to which we are already committed as a consequence of greenhouse gas accumulation in the atmosphere over the past hundred years.