Climate change & Convergence

Contraction & Convergence is a driving principle for climate change negotiations. It states that each country should bring its per capita greenhouse gas emissions to a level that is equal for all countries and, when added across all countries, these emissions should be within safe, global limits.

Contraction is about reducing the total amount of greenhouse gases we put into the atmosphere while convergence is about the right to emit, distributed equally across countries and across individuals.

Convergence starts with this principle but extends it beyond greenhouse gas emissions to our use of all natural resources, to our rights for services such as education, health, security, and to our rights for well-being and justice.

Convergence is the name for the many different processes that aim for equal shares of our natural resources well within the limits of what the planet can support, and for equal rights to the services and institutions that we create within our complex societies.

The Converging World is dedicated to Convergence; it goes to the heart of the struggle with climate change by using renewable energy as an investment to generate growing, long-term, financial resources. This will create thousands of exciting projects, which will connect people across many divides in building a future that no longer diverges in both over and under consumption but instead converges to a safe and fair process of real growth.

Here is a clip from the film The Age of Stupid that explains the idea quite well:

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