IIASA fairness modeling recenters equity within existing Paris framework, sidestepping historical responsibility and reparative justice demands
Original framing: “Fairness-based pathways shift emissions cuts while preserving global climate goals” — Phys.org
The research uses MESSAGEix-GLOBIOM, an IAM with documented biases: it over-relies on BECCS (bioenergy with carbon capture) requiring 0.5-1.5 billion hectares — 2-6x India's land area — triggering food sovereignty conflicts. Its damage functions use quadratic curves calibrated to US/EU economies, underestimating tropical nonlinearities (crop collapse, wet-bulb lethality). The 'fairness' parameters (equal per capita, capability, responsibility) are static weights, not dynamic feedbacks from climate impacts on adaptive capacity.
The IIASA study exemplifies how Northern knowledge institutions domesticate justice into technocratic parameters, preserving a Paris architecture that treats the atmosphere as a waste sink to be allocated rather than a living system to be regenerated.
By scoring 0.15 on indigenous, 0.1 on marginalised voices, and 0.08 on trickster dimensions, the research reveals its epistemic capture: it cannot see what its categories exclude — colonial debt, territorial sovereignty, intergenerational kinship, the absurdity of optimizing collapse. The four solution pathways converge on a single structural shift: moving climate governance from allocation (who cuts) to reparation (who owes), from modeling (future pathways) to adjudication (historical liability), from state-centric negotiation to plurinational governance. This is not radical — it is the minimal coherence required when the trickster's mirror shows that 'fairness-based pathways' preserving 1.5°C is a category error: you cannot fairly divide a budget already stolen.