This paper suggests a Greenhouse Development Rights (GDR) framework to ensure the right to sustainable human development whilst driving global emissions reductions. The authors define a global emissions objective of keeping the temperature increase below 2 °C by charting out a ‘2°C emergency pathway’, and note that doing so will demand ambitious initiatives, and a robust climate policy architecture. The authors assert that the South is neither willing nor able to prioritise emissions reductions above the social and economic advancement of its people. Therefore, it is argued that the key to climate protection is the establishment of an international effort-sharing regime in which it is not required to do so. Thus, the suggested GDR framework is based on equity principles of responsibility and capacity, defined in terms of a development threshold – a level of welfare below which people are not expected to share the costs of the climate transition by expending their limited resources to keep within a global carbon budget. These measures of responsibility and capacity are then combined into a single indicator of obligation - a Responsibility Capacity Index (RCI). The paper moves on to suggest ways to operationalise the index to progress in climate talks through a two-fold obligation approach.