Shared Waters—shared Responsibility. Application of the Principles of Fairness for Burden Sharing in the Mediterranean

The paper addresses the issue of burden sharing within the context of the Barcelona Convention for the protection of the Mediterranean. The initial premise is that the perceived fairness of burden sharing rules is an important factor in the success of multilateral environmental agreements. We review briefly the basic ideas behind the fairness and equity debate in global environmental affairs before we apply a number of widely accepted equity rules in the case of Mediterranean marine protection. We derive arithmetic examples to illustrate the application of the rules and compare them in terms of their political attractiveness, cost-effectiveness and practical feasibility. It is shown that the simple rule of egalitarian justice scores high on all aspects.