For effective, efficient, equitable carbon pricing:

1. Price pollution with a defined, steadily rising price on climate-disrupting emissions, preferably at the source.
2. Add momentum. Enhance incomes; build economic value at the human scale.
3. Reduce emissions effectively and accountably, by keeping the administrative structure simple and transparent.
4. Internalize inefficiencies — cost and harm linked to polluting business models — incrementally, with escalating certainty and with no leakage.
5. Spread by aligning price signals and supporting policies, harmonizing across borders, so pricing can be enacted country by country.

The PARIS Principles were introduced in September 2014, with the launch of the Pathway to Paris project, on the day of the UN Climate Summit in New York.

They were offered as guidance to the research process that led to the creation of the FASTER Principles, and continued to serve as the guiding context for engagement of the Carbon Pricing Workstream of the Citizens’ Climate Engagement Network, during and after the COP21 in Paris.

In support of the effort to shift all finance onto climate-smart pathways, and as the virtue of household dividends has become more apparent in political struggles over carbon pricing, we have updated and re-launched these five principles, so the action mandate at the start of each line spells PARIS:

1. Price pollution,
2. Add momentum,
3. Reduce emissions,
4. Internalize inefficiencies, and
5. Spread by aligning.

Any carbon pricing policy that meets these five principles, as laid out at the top of this page — covering the whole economy, expanding the economic vibrancy of local economies, and steadily intensifying the market signal that pollution is not good business — can achieve an efficient, effective, equitable transition to climate-smart low-carbon practices.

The future prosperity of any economy — even those that are disproportionately funded by carbon fuel production — will hinge on being able to achieve such a transition.

Below, you will find updates relating to the journey these principles have taken from their initial introduction to playing a role in how the Paris Agreement envisions and motivates carbon pricing policies at the national and regional levels.

The Pathway to Paris Whitepaper

September 23, 2014

This report made its debut during the UN Secretary General’s Climate Summit, at UN Headquarters in New York City, on September 23, 2014. It was then presented as the core of the Pathway to Paris Project, during a launch event that evening. You can download a PDF of the full whitepaper, including notes or view the full whitepaper and notes as an embedded ebook on Issuu.com (as seen above).

As impacts from global climate change gather force and escalate, a network of partners across the world is looking to secure an effective agreement in Paris, at the end of 2015, to stave off catastrophic climate disruption. The “bundle of everything” strategy for global treaty negotiations has not given us a true global solution.

So, Citizens’ Climate launched an initiative to bring stakeholders into the process of decision-making, build connections between organizations, governments, individuals and enterprise, and mount a coalition effort to secure an agreement to motivate carbon pricing country by country that follows five Core Principles:

• A steady, resolute and rising carbon price.
• Internalizing costs incrementally, steadily and with no leakage.
• Simple, transparent, effective at reducing emissions.
• Building economic value at the human scale.
• Easy to implement: country by country, harmonizing across borders.

World Bank / IMF Commit to Carbon Pricing, Stakeholder Engagement

October 16, 2014

During a Civil Society Town Hall Meeting at the World Bank in Washington, DC, we challenged both IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde and World Bank President Jim Yong Kim to commit to:

1. Support citizen engagement as a vital tool for best-results policy design, and…
2. Support carbon pricing as the most efficient and effective way for any nation to reduce carbon pollution.

Both committed publicly to be more open to stakeholder and broader public engagement in policy design and to support putting a price on carbon. It became evident there was a need to build a multilateral coalition of support for carbon pricing and that citizens should have a voice.

Lima: More Affordable, More Effective

December 12, 2014

During the COP20 in Lima—without active consideration of prescriptive carbon pricing language for the global negotiating text—a diverse and spontaneous coalition of leaders, advocates, organizations, and negotiators, began to repeat the refrain that a well-designed price on carbon is the essential policy choice for making all other areas of climate action more affordable and more effective.

Full-Spectrum Climate-Smart Finance

May 25, 2015

 A week before 195 nations gathered in Bonn for the next round of ADP negotiations, to refine the draft text of the Paris Agreement, at the Climate Finance Day in Paris, UNFCCC Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres told a room full of finance ministers, central bank governors, and financial sector leaders that the idea of climate finance was too narrowly construed. She called for a comprehensive transition to an economy in which no part of the financial system generates climate damage. Throughout the day, discussion continually turned to economically efficient policy approaches that could motivate such a transition.

• On May 2, 2016, a high-level Acceleration Dialogues event addressed the challenge of evolving a climate-smart financial sector at the Nobel Peace Center, in Oslo.
• Work toward full-spectrum climate-smart finance is ongoing at ResilienceIntel.org

Climate Summit of the Americas

July 14, 2015

During the Climate Summit of the Americas, multiple representatives of Canadian provincial governments set a new standard for defining carbon pricing options, by listing the available choices as “cap and trade, revenue neutral carbon tax, or carbon fee and dividend“. The RNCT or CF&D were recognized as administratively efficient and of wide economic benefit, while cap and trade was seen as a way for subnational jurisdictions to link to influential markets, backed up by committed governments, like California.

Accelerating Carbon Pricing: The ‘FASTER’ Principles

September 21, 2015

The FASTER Principles—laid out by the World Bank and OECD, with consultation from the IMF and the other founding strategic partners designing Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition—aim to establish 6 universal principles for successful carbon pricing, built on:

• Fairness
• Alignment of policies and objectives
• Stability and predictability
• Transparency
• Efficiency and cost-effectiveness
• Reliability and environmental integrity

For the first time, global intergovernmental institutions have established that the most efficient way to price carbon may be through straightforward fees, and that socially equitable outcomes can be secured through fiscal dividends. The phrasing of the FASTER Principles clearly echoes the conceptual direction and phrasing of the Pathway to Paris Core Principles.

E3CP: Effective, Efficient, Equitable

November 27, 2015

Our Carbon Pricing Workstream has translated the Core Principles and its own draft language for the Paris Agreement into three simple requirements that would allow any nation to develop and deploy effective, efficient and equitable carbon pricing (E3CP) policies:

• Effective in reducing economy-wide absolute emissions while supporting domestic economic growth across all sectors.
• Efficient at minimizing the cost of implementation while maximizing environmental, economic and social co-benefits.
• Equitable by avoiding disproportionate burdens and protecting vulnerable populations from unjust or negative economic or environmental impacts while building economic value at the human scale for individuals and their communities.

The E3CP letter—which calls on all Parties to the UNFCCC process to embrace these three requirements and support their addition to the text of the Paris Agreement and/or corresponding legal Decisions—has been signed by a diverse range of thought-leaders, including former US Sec. of State George Shultz, CCL Executive Director Mark Reynolds, Executive Director of Physicians for Social Responsibility Catherine Thomasson, Niskanen Center President Jerry Taylor, and others.

COP21 Launch of Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition

December 1, 2015

On the first day of the COP21, there was an unprecedented step forward on one of the toughest issues facing negotiators. The Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition is now part of the global policy-making environment. The Coalition includes governments, intergovernmental agencies, businesses and nonprofits, who all agree the world needs to be pricing carbon fairly, effectively and efficiently, as soon as possible.

The agreed mission, among the partners, is to ensure no nation misses the opportunity to add effective, efficient, equitable carbon pricing to its national climate strategy. As the Paris agreement will come into full legal force in 2020, the goal is to add carbon pricing to all national strategies by that time, to ensure the most cost-effective way to implement a true global response to climate disruption.

Principles in the Paris Agreement

December 14, 2015

The Paris Agreement came to include key principles related to the PARIS Principles listed above. Specifically:

• Price pollution—“integrated, holistic and balanced non-market approaches”, “voluntary cooperation”, and “A mechanism to contribute to the mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions”.
• Add momentum—“Promote mitigation and adaptation ambition” … “in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication”, including “technology transfer and capacity-building”.
• Reduce emissions—“transparency, accuracy” and “avoidance of double counting” mean carbon prices—including market mechanisms and non-market approaches—cannot be designed to extend or expand negative externalization, and reductions must be demonstrably “additional”… “To deliver an overall mitigation in global emissions.”
• Internalize inefficiencies—“environmental integrity [and] completeness” mean a policy-driven price must internalize costs, without glossing over real distortions embedded in a carbon-intensive market.
• Spread by aligning—“comparability and consistency” and “coordination across instruments”mean prices may be designed country by country, but should harmonize across borders, and align with priorities such as reducing emissions and equitable outcomes.

In 2016, the CPLC, the CCEN, and 195 nations working through the UNFCCC process, have the opportunity to build carbon pricing strategies appropriate to national circumstances but guided by these fundamental principles of environmental integrity, policy coherence, transparency, environmental effectiveness and social responsibility.

To understand the significance of this opportunity, it is crucial to recognize that for the first time in world history:

1. we have a global agreement that requires all countries to take real and transformational action to reduce carbon pollution, and…
2. that agreement sets real standards that require carbon pricing to be effective, transparent, and equitable.

4 Actionable Priorities for Accelerating Carbon Pricing Implementation

December 14, 2016

In Marrakech, the work of implementing the Paris Agreement moved forward in important ways. The Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition and the World Bank are supporting a new blue-ribbon commission chaired by Lord Nicholas Stern and by Nobel Economics Laureate Joseph Stiglitz. The commission will study critical questions relating to innovation and deployment of optimal carbon pricing solutions, to ensure at least 50% of global emissions will fall under intensifying carbon pricing policies—supporting global action—by 2025.