Carbon Burden Sharing: The North-South Divide

“Carbon Burden Sharing: The North-South Divide” places students inside a fictional intergovernmental committee convening in Baku to decide how the cost of a global carbon price should be shared across nations. IMF analyst Amara Okafor-Diallo has modeled four proposals — a uniform global price, an income-adjusted tiered framework, a uniform price with a historical-emissions rebate, and a voluntary-markets-plus-border-adjustment scheme — against a 137-country dataset of emissions, income, climate vulnerability, and readiness. Students quantify the burden each proposal places on individual countries and blocs, weigh efficiency against equity, and test “common but differentiated responsibilities” against the reality that the nations most vulnerable to climate change are often least able to pay. A structured advocacy exercise then has teams argue competing proposals, revealing how one dataset can support opposing conclusions. The case suits graduate and executive courses in sustainability, strategy, business and society, public policy, and negotiation.

• Apply the four quadrants of Equity Analytics (Disparate Allocations, Disparate Valuations, Differential Allocations, and Differential Valuations) to a global policy context.
• Use real data to evaluate whether a uniform carbon price produces equitable outcomes across structurally different economies.
• Discover that the North-South binary, while useful for mobilization, conceals important within-bloc variation—and that vulnerability, readiness, and historical responsibility are inversely related to one another.
• Practice selective rhetorical framing—advocating for competing positions using the same dataset—and analyze the framing strategies in debrief.
• Apply the five-step Equity Analytics roadmap (Define → Measure → Analyze → Intervene → Monitor) to a policy design problem.