Equitable access to sustainable development: operationalizing key criteria

Equitable access to sustainable development (EASD) is crucial for the future of the climate regime as it applies to adaptation, mitigation, and the means of implementation. An approach to allocating effort and deriving carbon budgets is presented here based on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) principles of responsibility, capability, and sustainable development. A transparent model to operationalize EASD is applied by applying quantitative proxies for these criteria, and results for selected countries and groups are presented. A robust result is that the mitigation burden calculated by the model is significantly greater for developed than developing countries. For individual countries the results vary depending on the parameters chosen. A middle value of the mitigation burden for South Africa of 15 GtCO₂e over the first half of the 21st century is reported, with the greatest effort required when a starting year of 1970 is chosen and historical land-use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF) emissions are excluded when accounting for responsibility. In a regime applicable to all, it is clear that although all countries must do more, some must do more than others.

Policy relevance

Equitable access to sustainable development is crucial to the climate negotiations. Quantified allocations are presented for South Africa and other countries, based on the UNFCCC principles of responsibility, capability, and sustainable development. It is shown that the mitigation burden given these principles must be significantly greater for developed than developing countries. The results are relevant to, inter alia, the upcoming 2013–2015 review and the negotiations under the Durban Platform.     

Scientific detector workshop 2022 on-sky performance verification of near-infrared e−APD technology for wavefront sensing and demonstration of e−APD pixel performance to improve the sensitivity of large science focal planes

Near-infrared adaptive optics as well as fringe tracking for coherent beam combination in optical interferometry require the development of high-speed sensors. Because of the high speed, a large analog bandwidth is required. The short exposure times result in small signal levels which require noiseless detection. Both requirements cannot be met by state-of-the-art conventional CMOS technology of near-infrared arrays as has been attempted previously. A total of five near-infrared SAPHIRA 320 × 256 pixel HgCdTe e⁻APD arrays have been deployed in the wavefront sensors and in the fringe tracker of the VLTI instrument GRAVITY. The current limiting magnitude for coherent exposures with GRAVITY is m_k = 19, which is made possible with ADP technology. New avalanche photo-diode array (APD) developments since GRAVITY include the extension of the spectral sensitivity to the wavelength range from 0.8 to 2.5 μm. After GRAVITY a larger format array with 512 × 512 pixels has been developed for both AO applications at the ELT and for long integration times. Since dark currents of <10⁻³ e⁻/s have been demonstrated with 1Kx1K e⁻APD arrays and 2Kx2K e⁻APD arrays have already been developed, the possibilities and adaptations of e⁻APD technology to provide noiseless large-format science-grade arrays for long integration times are also discussed.