The Cancun conference has been characterized by renewed multilateralism and the creation of a Green Climate Fund, which acknowledges that adaptation has become a key component of the new climate regime. Most observers agree that equity is now an essential condition for any new international agreement on climate change. However, equity is an equivocal concept, and different interpretations of equity clash with each other. Though equity concerns have been placed at the core of negotiations on mitigation efforts, they have been little addressed in the discussions on adaptation. As a result of this, the criteria that will be used to allocate the adaptation funding remain unclear and vague, which is detrimental for the emergence of a new climate regime. This paper aims to offer a new perspective on this issue, departing from the traditional perspective inspired by retributive justice. The fundamental injustice of climate change is well known: the countries that will be first and most affected by its impacts are those that bear the least responsibility for the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases. In order to fix this injustice, transfers from the North to the South will be needed to cope with and adapt to the impacts of global warming. On which criteria should such transfers be operated? Two different possible answers can be provided to this question. The first answer derives from retributive justice, based on the idea that damages should be repaired by those who have caused them. The philosophy behind the Kyoto Protocol is largely inspired by retributive justice, epitomised in the concept of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’. So is the concept of ‘climate debt’, put forward by campaigners for climate justice. A strict application of retributive justice to adaptation would imply that the countries with the greatest responsibility in global warming would transfer funds to compensate for the damages they have caused in countries that bear the least responsibility for these damages, and are the first and most affected. Yet this paper aims to show the practical problems that would arise from an application of retributive justice to adaptation, and makes the case for a perspective inspired by distributive justice. Unlike retributive justice, distributive justice is not concerned with the identification of responsibilities, but rather with the equalisation of resources and benefits, according to the needs and capacities of each party. Equity lies at the core of distributive justice, which mostly seeks to resolve distributional issues. With regard to adaptation, a distributive view of justice would no longer be based on the levels of responsibility, but rather on the levels of vulnerability and adaptive capacity. This would bear important consequences for the allocation of adaptation funding, which are described in the paper. Furthermore, the paper makes the case that distributive justice could pave the way for a transformed climate regime, in the light of the new geopolitics of climate change induced by the Copenhagen and Cancun conferences.
