Climate change has strong ethical dimensions, and global solutions to this problem are unlikely to be crafted, or to be stable, without some broad conception of what is fair (see IPCC, 1996; Stern, 2006). There is a burgeoning literature on these dimensions (Müller, 2001; Gardiner, 2004; Brown et al, 2006; Klinsky and Dowlatabadi, 2009; Harris, 2010; see also Chapter Six), with part of this work focusing on historical responsibility for climate change (Botzen et al, 2008; Friman and Linnér, 2008; Klinsky and Dowlatabadi, 2009). The notion of historical responsibility for climate change of ‘Annex I’ (that is, developed country) parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has been regularly invoked by developing-country governments. Historical responsibility is also one of the main lines of argument underlying the principle of common but differentiated responsibility for climate change, and the polluter pays principle more generally. Discussion on equity – a political-economic approach to historical responsibility (Friman, 2007) – has been widely present in the Chinese debate on climate change. It is indeed one of the main discursive elements in China's official position (Ellermann and Mayer, 2010), framing understanding of the country's ethical position vis-à-vis developed countries and the rest of the world.

In this chapter, we examine the Chinese position on responsibility for climate change by drawing on the results of the Ad-hoc Group for the Modelling and Assessment of Contributions of Climate Change (MATCH), a group that was created in 1997 following a proposal from Brazil (UNFCCC, 1997). The MATCH group has concentrated on the causal attribution of historical greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to countries (see Ito et al, 2008; Prather et al, 2009; Höhne et al, submitted).

Contributions versus responsibility

Climate impacts, whether anthropogenic or due to natural variability, will inevitably have a multitude of causes. The moral responsibility for climate impacts will typically be shared by a number of actors. There is a link between a moral agent causally contributing to an impact and being (partly) morally responsible for it, but that does not mean that the two are the same. The MATCH project modelling focused on determining the causal contribution of GHGs covered under the UNFCCC to certain climatic impacts, in particular to changes in mean global temperature.