Intergenerational justice: a framework for addressing intellectual property rights and climate change

At first blush, one may wonder what contribution normative theory can make to what seems to be such a technical/political issue as the role of intellectual property rights (IPRs) in the global climate change regime. There are two answers to this. Firstly, as eloquently put by Joe Bowersox,“... normative theory… can be a powerful diagnostic tool for evaluating public policy; it can act as an altimeter, if you will, that checks the thinness of the theoretical air surrounding a particular policy mountain or molehill, telling us whether there is enough oxygen present to support political life. Sometimes theory may even suggest that we try an alternative, less precipitous policy pass by which to cross to the other side.” Conceptions about justice - can provide a valuable framework in terms of ensuring that policy prescriptions are well directed, particularly given that economic policy discourse can bury ethical assumptions. This broader picture, can provide a valuable point of reference in the highly technical debates relating to intellectual property rights and climate change. A second reason for turning to normative theory is the reality that environmental treaties will not be agreed to without at least overlapping conceptions of fairness. This provides a practical motivation for interrogating more deeply justice discourses involved in the climate change negotiations. To the extent that the current global climate regime is inadequate, shared understandings of justice are a crucial precondition for reforming and making more effective the current climate change regime

Mapping geographical inequalities in access to drinking water and sanitation facilities in low-income and middle-income countries, 2000-17

Background Universal access to safe drinking water and sanitation facilities is an essential human right, recognised in the Sustainable Development Goals as crucial for preventing disease and improving human wellbeing. Comprehensive, high-resolution estimates are important to inform progress towards achieving this goal. We aimed to produce high-resolution geospatial estimates of access to drinking water and sanitation facilities. Methods We used a Bayesian geostatistical model and data from 600 sources across more than 88 low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs) to estimate access to drinking water and sanitation facilities on continuous continent-wide surfaces from 2000 to 2017, and aggregated results to policy-relevant administrative units. We estimated mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive subcategories of facilities for drinking water (piped water on or off premises, other improved facilities, unimproved, and surface water) and sanitation facilities (septic or sewer sanitation, other improved, unimproved, and open defecation) with use of ordinal regression. We also estimated the number of diarrhoeal deaths in children younger than 5 years attributed to unsafe facilities and estimated deaths that were averted by increased access to safe facilities in 2017, and analysed geographical inequality in access within LMICs. Findings Across LMICs, access to both piped water and improved water overall increased between 2000 and 2017, with progress varying spatially. For piped water, the safest water facility type, access increased from 40.0% (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 39.4-40.7) to 50.3% (50.0-50.5), but was lowest in sub-Saharan Africa, where access to piped water was mostly concentrated in urban centres. Access to both sewer or septic sanitation and improved sanitation overall also increased across all LMICs during the study period. For sewer or septic sanitation, access was 46.3% (95% UI 46.1-46.5) in 2017, compared with 28.7% (28.5-29.0) in 2000. Although some units improved access to the safest drinking water or sanitation facilities since 2000, a large absolute number of people continued to not have access in several units with high access to such facilities (>80%) in 2017. More than 253 000 people did not have access to sewer or septic sanitation facilities in the city of Harare, Zimbabwe, despite 88.6% (95% UI 87.2-89.7) access overall. Many units were able to transition from the least safe facilities in 2000 to safe facilities by 2017; for units in which populations primarily practised open defecation in 2000, 686 (95% UI 664-711) of the 1830 (1797-1863) units transitioned to the use of improved sanitation. Geographical disparities in access to improved water across units decreased in 76.1% (95% UI 71.6-80.7) of countries from 2000 to 2017, and in 53.9% (50.6-59.6) of countries for access to improved sanitation, but remained evident subnationally in most countries in 2017. Interpretation Our estimates, combined with geospatial trends in diarrhoeal burden, identify where efforts to increase access to safe drinking water and sanitation facilities are most needed. By highlighting areas with successful approaches or in need of targeted interventions, our estimates can enable precision public health to effectively progress towards universal access to safe water and sanitation. Copyright (C) 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd.Peer reviewe

EU and WTO Regulatory Approaches to Renewable Energy Subsidies: Negative and Positive Integration

This paper compares how the EU and the WTO have grappled with balancing the negative (trade-distortive) and positive (climate change-mitigation) effects of renewable energy (RE) subsidies. It first shows that, although both subsidy control regimes share some basic tenets of negative integration (i.e. prohibiting trade-distortive RE subsidies), EU State aid law is comparatively more constraining on governments’ space to support green energy in both substantive and procedural/institutional terms. It then argues that the more negative integration is strictly framed and implemented, the greater the need for positive integration (i.e., sheltering trade-distortive but climate-friendly RE subsidies under certain conditions). This, in turn, goes a long way in explaining why the EU’s regulatory model is also distinct for having progressively established a set of common rules on permissible “good” RE subsidies. With this in mind, the paper assesses the extent to which the absence of a comparable positive integration dimension in the WTO legal framework exposes RE subsidies to the risk of WTO-illegality. It finally argues that while comparing the two regimes may be useful from a theoretical standpoint, a transposition of the EU’s positive integration approach to the WTO is not desirable for a variety of legal, political and institutional reasons