Regearing
the Global Response to Climate Change: 5 Past Mistakes the 2015 Paris
Agreement Needs to Fix
Posted: 12/09/2015
9:07 pm EST Updated: 4 hours ago
Daniel C. Esty
Hillhouse Professor
of Environmental Law and Policy at Yale University
Negotiators from
around the world are gathered in Paris with hopes of concluding a new
climate change agreement tomorrow or maybe Saturday if the talks go
in to overtime. With 150 Presidents and Prime Ministers in
attendance, the opening session of this 21st Climate Change
Conference of the Parties (CoP21) last week generated high hopes for
a more robust global response to the build-up of greenhouse gases in
the atmosphere, which threatens to cause not just global warming but
sea level rise, increased frequency and intensity of hurricanes,
changed rainfall patterns, droughts, floods and diminished
agricultural productivity. To produce real success and a framework
for ramped-up action, a series of mistakes that have plagued the
world community's existing climate change strategy must be addressed
in the 2015 Paris Agreement.
1. Bottom-up, not
just top-down
The focus since 1992
on nation-states and national greenhouse gas emissions targets has
proven to be ill-suited to the task at hand. It turns out that
Presidents and Prime Ministers don't actually have much day-to-day
impact on the activities that affect a nation's "carbon
footprint." It is much more important that Mayors, Governors and
corporate executives be brought into the response to climate change
as they are the ones whose everyday decisions determine the scale of
greenhouse gas emissions. Recasting the world's climate change
approach thus needs to begin with an effort to engage
states/provinces, cities and companies in delivering a more
"bottom-up" climate change action agenda.
Promising signs of
this broader engagement are already evident. Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo
hosted a Summit of Local Government Climate Change Leaders on
December 4 with 700 Mayors and Governors from around the world in
attendance. These officials have already done a great deal to reduce
emissions in their cities and states/provinces -- and their successes
and "solutions" were on display throughout the Summit day.
Moreover, hundreds of them made further commitments in Paris to
improved public transit, broadened energy efficiency programs,
expanded renewable power production and other initiatives that will
not just reduce emissions but also improve the quality of life in
their jurisdictions.
This action
orientation should not just be celebrated but also reflected in the
Paris Agreement. While international relations and treaties have been
the exclusive purview of nation-states since the Peace of Westphalia
in 1648, it now makes sense to rethink that structure with regard to
the world's response to 21st century problems of broad scope, such as
climate change, which require action at many scales and across many
sectors. The fact that greenhouse gas emissions come from millions
and millions of disaggregated sources means that for the
international response to be successful, it must work through the
subnational politicians, business executives and other societal
leaders who are positioned to lead the way toward a decarbonized
future. Why not give these efforts formal recognition in the 2015
Paris Climate Change Agreement?
While
traditionalists in foreign ministries may panic at the prospect of
significant innovation in the structure of international law, a solid
policy logic exists for a broader climate change agreement
architecture that formalizes the role of Mayors, Governors and CEOs
in responding to the greenhouse gas emissions problem and creates a
more inclusive 21st century model for international collaboration.
Fundamentally, treaties among nation-states make sense when national
governments have a monopoly of control over the issue at hand. So
let's leave territorial disputes and arms control agreements to
Presidents and Prime Ministers. But for other issues, where success
requires broader involvement, we should establish a new type of
international accord that goes beyond national governments and
encompasses all of the key players. The 2015 Paris Climate Change
Agreement offers a great opportunity for the launch of this new
model.
2. Action
orientation
An agreement which
tracks the need for more of a bottom-up global climate change
strategy leads straight to the second opportunity that a successful
Paris Agreement should reflect: a stronger action orientation. Too
much focus has been placed in past negotiations on emissions targets,
timetables and talk -- with too little emphasis on what is needed to
deliver changed on-the-ground results, particularly with regard to
transformation of the energy sector. Goals are important. But much
effort needs to go into figuring out how to achieve the desired
results, which means that more emphasis needs to be put on incentives
for clean energy, resilient infrastructure, afforestation and other
dimensions of a decarbonized future.
3. Harnessing
private sector problem solving and financial capacity
Third, prior
negotiations failed to recognize the critical role of the corporate
world as a point of leverage for climate change action, especially
when it comes to technology development and clean energy project
development. While public sector decisions are important and set
critical goals, private sector implementation will be critical to a
transformed future. So the new agreement needs to put much more focus
on channeling business choices and spurring efforts to deliver
low-carbon goods and services, manufacturing and distribution.
Finding ways to use
limited public resources to leverage private capital for expanded
deployment of energy efficiency and renewable power generation will
be critical to success going forward. For too long climate change
finance discussions have centered on how much money developed nations
will provide to developing nations. But a clean energy future will
not come from adding more zeros to development assistance budgets.
There is simply too little money to achieve the energy infrastructure
transformation required. What is needed is a roadmap for developing
nations to follow to position themselves as attractive places for
private capital to be deployed. In this regard, the work of the UK
Green Investment Bank and the Connecticut Green Bank offer important
models that could be expanded.
The sharpening of
focus on private capital as the key pathway to a clean energy future
does not mean that there is no role for government in facilitating
decarbonization. To the contrary, governments, especially at the
local and regional scales, need to develop ways to "derisk"
the flow of private capital into clean energy infrastructure and
other climate change related investments. They can do this through a
number of innovative policy mechanisms including power purchase
agreements (which make renewable energy projects "bankable"),
energy efficiency incentives, default "risk sharing" on
clean energy loans and concerted efforts to reduce the time and
expense of permitting, regulatory approvals and the other "soft
costs" that can make rooftop solar power and energy efficiency
projects too expensive.
4. All hands on deck
Perhaps the most
serious mistake made in the climate change agreement architecture of
the past was the decision to bifurcate the world into an Annex 1 list
of countries, which were asked to take action, and non-Annex 1
countries, which took on no real obligations. This structure,
consolidated in the Kyoto Protocol's approach to the core principle
of burden sharing -- "common but differentiated responsibility"
-- has meant that many developing nations thought they were justified
in sitting on the sidelines for the past two decades. But inaction by
so many countries has not only severely hampered the global response
to climate change; it has also created a very difficult political
dynamic in the United States.
The unwillingness of
China, India and other emerging economies to commit to being part of
the climate change solution has provided skeptics in the US Congress
with an excuse not to act. With emissions from the developing world
rising rapidly, they argue that greenhouse gas controls by the US and
Europe will do little to address the build of GHGs in the atmosphere
and that US companies shouldn't be burdened with expensive emissions
controls when so many of their competitors are not bearing comparable
climate change mitigation costs.
Real success in
Paris thus depends on reasserting that common but differentiated
responsibility means that every nation commits to take action to
address climate change. The fact that 180+ nations have produced
reports that spell out their intended nationally determined
contributions (INDCs) to emissions reduction puts the present
negotiations on the right track. China, in particular, has agreed to
reduce its emissions by 2030 and to establish a system of tradable
emission allowances. Many other critical developing countries, such
as Mexico and Brazil, have developed ambitious emissions control
programs. It therefore appears that the world community is poised for
the first time to break the vicious circle of inaction and conclude a
climate change agreement with commitments that span the globe.
5. Leveraging
Digital Age Tools
Finally, the new
agreement needs to take advantage of another fundamental change in
the world that has emerged since the 1992 Framework Convention -- the
opportunities of the Digital Age and information technologies. In
particular, the world community needs a more vibrant platform to
record climate change commitments and assess follow-through. Data
collection with metrics designed to track emissions and gauge policy
success at various scales -- global, national, state/provincial,
local and corporate -- is easy to do in our Information Age.
Developing common methodologies for reporting and verifying who is
doing what to respond to climate change will be critical to a
ramped-up global response to the problem. Scorecards that allow
identification within relevant peer groups -- e.g., clusters of
nations at similar levels of development, big cities, fast-moving
consumer goods companies, etc. -- of leaders, laggards and best
practices can help to harness competitive spirits and spur progress
without any formal "binding" requirements or enforcement
mechanisms.
6. Conclusion
This week's
agreement offers an opportunity to correct a number of the structural
failures of the 1992 Framework Convention and the subsequent Kyoto
Protocol -- and to reframe the foundation for global action on
climate change. But ultimately, what matters most is not the
recasting of words but rather the opportunity the Paris negotiations
offer to shift the world's climate change mindset. We need to get
past the dispiriting lack of progress over the past two decades and
lift the trajectory of the global response to the build-up of
greenhouse gas emissions. In this regard, the Paris outcome,
reflecting not just the new agreement among national governments and
but all of the other commitments made by Mayors, Governors, CEOs,
civil society leaders and Bill Gates and his Breakthrough Energy
Coalition promises to create a new "Spirit of Paris" that
makes the move to a clean energy future look not just possible but
inevitable -- and attractive.
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