The Climate Equity Reference framework (and it’s predecessor, Greenhouse Development Rights) was originally developed and modeled by Paul Baer and Tom Athanasiou of EcoEquity and Sivan Kartha and Eric Kemp-Benedict of the Stockholm Environment Institute nearly 20 years ago. Ceecee Holz has since joined the Climate Equity Reference Project. The team can be contacted at feedback@climateequityreference.org.
Tom Athanasiou
Tom Athanasiou is a writer, critic, speaker, and organizer.
Tom directs EcoEquity, an activist think tank that focuses on developmental justice in a climate-constrained world. His principle interests are class division and international discord – or rather cooperation – in the context of the global climate emergency. Another way of putting this is that he seeks an extremely rapid global climate transition, one that’s fair enough to actually succeed.
Tom coordinates the Greenhouse Development Rights author’s group, and has long been active in a variety of climate and climate-equity projects. He is for example the co-chair of the Climate Action Network’s Equity / Effort sharing working group. He is currently focused on the global campaign, within the UN climate negotiations, to establish an “Equity Review” in parallel to the “Science Review.”
Tom is the author of Divided Planet: the Ecology of Rich and Poor, Dead Heat: Global Justice and Global Warming, and (co-author) Greenhouse Development Rights: The Right to Development in a Climate Constrained World. He is writing a new book, with a secret title. (Its working subtitle is Economic Justice as the Key to the Greenhouse Century).
Ceecee Holz
Ceecee Holz is the Senior Research Associate at the Climate Equity Reference Project and the Executive Director of the Climate Equity Reference Project Canada. Ceecee is also an Affiliated Researcher at the Stockholm Environment Institute and co-teaches the core course of Carleton University’s Masters’ specialization in climate change.
Their field of research is international and Canadian climate change politics, with an overall research agenda focused on the role of equity and fairness as enablers of ambitious domestic and international action on addressing climate change. Ceecee also researches the role of civil society in international climate change politics and advises several Canadian and international organizations on climate policy.
Previously, Dr. Holz was a researcher in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at Carleton University and in the School for Political Studies at the University of Ottawa. Prior to that, they served as the Executive Director of Climate Action Network Canada – Réseau action climat Canada, a network of over 100 organizations committed to collaborating to advance action on climate change at all levels of government in Canada; they now serve on its board of directors. Ceecee has also been involved with Climate Action Network International’s advocacy work at the UN climate change negotiations for well over a decade, including as a past member of its board of directors. They received their PhD from the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, for a thesis entitled “The Public Spheres of Climate Change Advocacy Networks: An Ethnography of Climate Action Network International Within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).”
Sivan Kartha
Sivan Kartha is a Senior Scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute and Co-leader of an institute-wide theme Reducing Climate Risks. His research and publications for the past twenty years have focused on technological options and policy strategies for addressing climate change, and he has concentrated most recently on equity and efficiency in the design of an international climate regime. His most recent work has involved the elaboration of a Greenhouse Development Rights approach to burden-sharing in the global climate regime – an approach that places the urgency of the climate crisis in the context of the equally dire development crisis afflicting the world’s poor majority.
Dr. Kartha has also worked on mitigation scenarios, market mechanisms for climate actions, and the environmental and socioeconomic impacts of biomass energy. His work has enabled him to advise and collaborate with diverse organizations, including the UNFCCC Secretariat, various United Nations and World Bank programs, numerous government policy-making bodies and agencies, foundations, and civil society organizations throughout the developing and industrialized world. He is an author on the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report (Working Group III), co-leading the chapter on Sustainable Development and Equity.
Eric Kemp-Benedict
Eric Kemp-Benedict is a Senior Scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute. His work focuses on sustainable development planning and scenario analysis. Past and current projects include scenario development for the Global Scenario Group, UNEP’s Global Environment Outlook, the Comprehensive Assessment of Freshwater in Agriculture, and studies in West Africa, the Baltic Sea, and China. In his facilitation and capacity-building work, he actively develops and applies tools and methods for participatory and study-specific sustainability analyses. As a scenario modeler, he specializes in the development of application-specific models within a participatory framework. In addition to scenario analysis and scenario modeling in general, Dr. Kemp-Benedict’s particular areas of interest include water, livestock and land use, poverty and income distribution, and social dynamics.
In Memoriam: Paul Baer (1962 – 2016)
Paul Baer died from suicide in September of 2016. See his EcoEquity memoriam page here.