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LONDON – If China and the United States start pointing fingers across the table at the key UN climate talks in Paris in 2015, accusing each other of not doing their share to fight climate change, there may now be a way to measure which superpower’s claims are more accurate – and so far it won’t be the American negotiators who come out on top of that argument.

As governments and other climate organisations gear up for efforts to agree a new global deal to curb climate change and deal with its impacts in 2015, a collaboration between a California nonprofit and the Stockholm Environment Institute has produced an online tool to grade the equity of emission reduction pledges that countries have made and will continue to make.

Tom Athanasiou, executive director of EcoEquity, explained that his organisation’s Climate Equity Pledge Scorecard and Climate Equity Reference Calculator are based around the idea that every country has a “fair share” of emissions reductions to make, which can be measured by comparing that country’s historical responsibility (or total amount of emissions to date) and its present capacity, or capability, for reducing emissions.

“The problem here is the problem known as comparability of effort,” he explained. “When you have two countries such as the United States and China, which have really different economic structures, how do you compare the effort being made by the United States to the effort made by China?”

This is a familiar, and important, political problem. “It’s a lot harder for you to make a strong effort if you feel that other people are just taking advantage of you. That same dynamic maintains at the international level. If you believe, as I do, that the problem is that we’re in an emergency situation, and we need an emergency global mobilisation, than we have to have some notion of when a country is doing its fair share and when it’s not.”