The Parties to the UNFCCC and Paris Agreement agreed to act on the basis of equity to protect the climate system. Equitable effort sharing is an irreducibly normative matter, yet some influential studies have sought to create quantitative indicators of equitable effort that claim to be value-neutral (despite evident biases). Many of these studies fail to clarify the ethical principles underlying their indicators, some mislabel approaches that favour wealthy nations as ‘equity approaches’ and some combine contradictory indicators into composites we call derivative benchmarks. This Perspective reviews influential climate effort-sharing assessments and presents guidelines for developing and adjudicating policy-relevant (but not ethically neutral) equity research.

《气候公约》和《巴黎协定》的缔约方同意在公平的基础上采取行动，以保护气候系统。公平的努力共享是一个不可回避的规范问题，然而，一些有影响力的研究试图建立公平的量化指标，这些指标声称是价值中立的（尽管存在明显的偏见）。这些研究中有许多未能阐明其指标所依据的伦理原则，有些标签错误的方法将富裕国家视为“公平方法”，而另一些方法则将矛盾的指标组合为综合指标，我们称之为衍生基准。本《观点》回顾了有影响力的气候努力共享评估，并提出了发展和判断与政策相关的（但在道德上不是中立的）股权研究的指南。