Contraction and Convergence Awards

“Aubrey Meyer’s C&C proposal makes an important contribution to the debate on
how we achieve long-term climate stability taking account of the principles of
equity and sustainability.”
Tony Blair - Former UK Prime Minister

Aubrey’s innovation is integration and ‘goal-focus’. Setting out an inclusive
model that steers the full-term C&C-event at the right rates needed for this
UNFCCC-compliance, reveals the risks that concern insurers and supports
investors in the high rates of investment and return required for clean tech
and renewables. C&C measures the benefits of sustainability by defining how
to politically organise the structure for UNCCC-compliance necessary to
achieve it.

Aubrey saw that the gap between the climate science and the climate policy
debates has aggravated the gap between the long-term need for compliance
and the short-term quarrel about who should take action first. Scepticism and
denial were influential in IPCC’s ‘scientific debates’, resistance from
‘contrarians’ and ‘vested interests’, ‘global versus local’ formulations, all in
conflict created a random and absurd political process. Before Kyoto, US coal
interests said, ‘there isn’t a problem and you can’t solve it without developing
countries’. Environmental lobby groups said, ‘there is a problem and you can
solve it without developing countries’. Aubrey’s contribution was to pre-empt
and cut through that with C&C model and the effort over twenty years that
caused C&C to become internationally recognised as the apex model of how
organise to achieve UNFCCC-compliance.

C&C is completely unique in that it calculates and sub-divides the whole
emissions-contraction-event needed for UNFCCC-compliance into the
convergence parts that sum to that whole. This is a solution that corrects the
problem of parties trying to negotiate parts they merely hope will sum to that whole.

Analytically C&C acts heuristically. Politically it offers a tool for the ‘truth and
reconciliation’ that global agreement needs.

It synthesizes the inclusive and teleological nature of achieving UNFCCC-
compliance, our ‘absolute international inter-dependency’ and the ‘acute time-
dependency’ of acting-out the finite ‘path-integral’ needed for achieving
UNFCCC-compliance. Integrating the scientific work of the IPCC, with the
political argument at the UNFCCC and the damage cost curves from the
Insurance Industry, it distinguishes the ‘rates of C&C’ that are relevant to
achieving agreement for UNFCCC-compliance, from those that aren’t.

C&C applies over a global scale spatially and a full-term time-scale that defines
the extent and rate of decarbonisation required to deliver the ‘low carbon
economy that is integral to overall sustainability.