This year marks the 20th anniversary of the first Conference of Parties (COP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate change. For those working in the rarefied atmosphere of the global negotiations, the year opened on a buoyant note, with many eulogies for the success of the Lima COP20 in December. The Conference agreed the final roadmap for the Paris COP21 in December 2015, on which hinge hopes for an effective new global treaty on tackling climate change, triggering reactions somewhere on the spectrum between relief and enthusiasm.
Lima was a crucial point on the road to Paris, and in some respects a ‘dress rehearsal’ for key issues and debates there. The agenda, as always, was broad. The finance discussions were mildly lifted by the announcement that contributions had reached the $10bn goal for the next few years and the sense that the machinery of the Green Climate Fund is now fully in operation. But it was of course muted by eternal disagreements over exactly how the money should be spent – including the balance between mitigation and adaptation – and the ominous shadow of the goal to reach $100bn/year by 2020, and even more entrenched views about the relative contributions of public and private sector.
Another important tension in the negotiations is over ‘loss and damage’. It is widely accepted that however much effort is put into adaptation, climate change will result in loss and damages – indeed, by most reckonings, already has. Developing countries have successfully insisted that the question of what to do about it – including who is responsible, with its undertones of liability and compensation is on the agenda. Developed countries have been desperate to try and not talk about the issue and to keep it off the agenda. They did not succeed at the previous COP and the Lima outcome confirms that the issue will simply not go away: it will remain a running sore unless and until some way forward is found.
But at the heart of the final deal was agreement on the process and terms for all countries to submit ‘Intended Nationally Determined Contributions’ (INDCs), ‘well in advance’ of the Paris meeting (and preferably by 31 March). The Lima outcome sets out a rather vague framework for these INDCs, confirming that they may include a wide raft of issues beyond purely setting out mitigation ambition to 2025 or 2030.
INDCs have become the new central tool for the global process. Do not underestimate their significance: all countries are expected to submit INDCs that represent a ‘progression’ from their current commitment (with special language, as usual, for the poorest countries). This amounts to a significant shift from the original Convention, which placed the emphasis on industrialised country leadership, to a fully global process. Not surprisingly, one of the major wrangles that kept the lawyers busy was wording, including whether the whole process is ‘under’ or ‘guided by’ the Convention. Another key phrase to appear was the addition, ‘in light of different national circumstances’ to qualify that longstanding bone of contention in the Convention, the principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities’. It can be read as protecting (of the poorest) but also signals both empowerment and expectation on others – to signal that any recalcitrants amongst the major emerging economies, in particular, should not retreat behind unified defences of the ‘G77’/non-Annex I country grouping.
The reality is that all countries are now due to set out what they propose to contribute to the global effort. The guidelines are limited; the scope is broad; and the process of evaluation remains contentious. But anyone with experience will recognise that it sets the Parties on a one-way street. That is the good news from Lima, coupled with the fact that geopolitically, the EU, US and China – supported by the critical mass of developing countries – are all not only actively determined to reach a deal, but share sufficient common view of what that deal looks like in broad concept. The main dark cloud on the geopolitical horizon was the ‘dog that didn't bark’ – Russia – which as history shows can be hard to include, but far more risky when it feels excluded and slighted and retreats into a (temporary) silence.
As ever, the success of an international conference can be measured in terms of expectations, process objectives, or specific goals. Lima was a success on the first two. The outstanding question is what it bodes in terms of the third. The underlying context for that debate on adequacy is set by an age-old tension in international negotiations about ‘broad vs deep.’ One reading of the Copenhagen collapse of 2009 is that it was split fundamentally between these conceptions: the developing countries for the most part wanted Kyoto to continue, as an instrument that would apply legally-binding commitments and a related strong architecture, whilst seeking to ensure those commitments remained confined to Annex I countries only: deep, but narrow. Most of the industrialised world wanted to go broad instead, albeit with diverse views on the pros and cons of losing the depth.
In practice all the action since Copenhagen has been on the ‘broad’, recognising that the problem cannot be solved without this, and based very much on a bottom-up philosophy – hence ‘intended’, ‘nationally determined’, and ‘contributions’ (formally of course the Kyoto Protocol also continues, but in a neutered form with the EU as the only major participant signing up to (though still yet to ratify) second period commitments). As the former US Ambassador to the WTO noted, however, it is hard for an external observer to fathom the significance of something set in such a weak form – the ‘shallow’ corollary. It is certainly of little help to the WTO, which has been staunchly trying to insist that trade law should and need not get in the way of anything that countries want to do to collectively to protect the climate. The WTO has stressed that Parties can always decide that specific commitments in a legally binding multilateral environmental treaty should take precedence over the general principles of trade law. But a loose set of what may amount to not much more than arbitrary and uncoordinated pledges, however, cannot possibly do so.
The arguments for the INDC structure went beyond the desire for ‘broad’. It was also argued that legally binding commitments have a crucial drawback – that fear of a binding constraint will lower the level of ambition that countries would sign up to. Legally binding commitments to a weak outcome will hardly solve the problem. By making the framework so structurally weak, the argument goes, we will have a much higher level of ambition.
We will soon see. Lima reasserted its support in principle for the goal to limit global temperature rise to 2°C, but therein of course will lie the hangover. Celebrating that Lima sets a good basis for the Paris COP is understandable, but it may all look very different in a few months. By this summer we should for the first time be able to build up a global picture based on national offerings (notwithstanding some inevitable late deliveries). And that will make it plain that the ‘bottom-up’ intentions do not remotely match the ‘top-down’ ambition.
Indeed, it seems increasingly apparent that they will point in opposite directions. We already have the first few big ones: the EU target to reduce 40% below 1990 levels by 2030, agreed in October (and now formally submitted as part of its INDC), was followed swiftly by the US-China announcement. The US stated it would cut by 26–28% (from its peak in 2005) and China agreed to cap its rising emissions by 2030. These are significant steps forward – a US goal for deeper cuts in the 2020s and the first time that China (or indeed any emerging economy) has accepted the need, and offered a timeline, to reverse rising emissions. But in effect it allows for emissions potentially some way above 10 tonnes CO2/capita in the late 2020s – in sharp contrast to the implications of a 2°C goal, which implies peaking around 2020, and subsequent to approach 2 tCO2/cap by 2050.
The structure for Paris is perhaps a necessary stepping stone, but a sober assessment of the INDCs will raise the awkward question, as to whether the track we are on could end up with the worst of both worlds: a loose non-binding structure (I.N.D.C.s), yet still with a low level of ambition.
So stand by for a nasty hangover as the world is faced by the concrete evidence that the global aggregation of national ‘intentions’ are – one could say – on a different planet from the one that defines the formally agreed global ambition.
A key agenda for Paris will thus be set by what process, if any, can realistically narrow that gap over the subsequent years. And a key agenda for the rest – different levels of governments and regions, business, city alliances and other civil society actors – will be what networks of actions can accelerate progress, above and beyond the formalities of Paris. With of course, the resulting question: whether and how these ‘twin tracks’ can reinforce each other.
This is the first of a 2-part Editorial, ‘From Lima to Paris’. The second part, ‘Resolving the Parisian Paradox’, will be published for the COP-Presidency-convened research conference ‘Our Common Future under Climate Change’ in Paris, 7–10 July 2015.
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At Climate Policy we are pleased to welcome this crucial year of 2015 with some modest changes to Editorial personnel. Notably, after many years, Tom Downing and Roberto Schaeffer have stepped down from their roles as Associate Editors. In their place we are delighted to welcome Navroz Dubash, from the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, and Frank Jotzo from Australian National University.