Paris climate talks: What can be expected from COP21 (Part 3 of 3)

Europe, the US and China have all submitted their plans to the UN ahead of the Paris talks, detailing greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets and measures to achieve them.

While the big players are getting serious on emissions reductions, there are still potential sticking points in the negotiations.

This is the final installment of a three-part series on The Barrel about the Paris climate talks. The first part(opens in a new tab) was posted on Friday, September 11, focused on the history of the UN climate negotiations. The second part(opens in a new tab), posted on Friday, September 18, looked into how the US and China hold the keys to a new global deal.

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• Deal will be agreed in Paris
• Legal issues need to be clarified
• Paris accord won’t achieve 2 degrees Celsius limit

Aside from possible disagreements over the delivery of financial aid for the poorest countries, one potential fly in the ointment is the Paris agreement’s precise legal form.

In 2011, UN climate negotiators agreed to create “a protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force,” by the end of 2015 at the latest, to start in 2020.

But it’s not yet clear what this means. The UNFCCC’s ultimate objective — to stabilize atmospheric greenhouse gas emissions at levels that avoid dangerous climate disruption — is already legally binding on the 192 countries that signed it.

International treaties and protocols are legally binding and require ratification to be in force, while COP decisions (Conference of Parties to the UNFCCC) have some legal force but are not binding in the same way.

The overall Paris agreement may therefore be legally binding, but that doesn’t necessarily mean each country’s emissions target is legally binding.

China’s submission includes language showing that it wants the agreement to be a “legally binding agreement implementing the Convention,” which could take the form of a core agreement plus later decisions by the COP.

Europe’s submission includes language stating that “the EU and its 28 Member States are fully committed to the UNFCCC negotiating process with a view to adopting a global legally binding agreement applicable to all Parties at the Paris Conference in December 2015 in line with the below 2 degrees C objective.”

Neither America nor Japan’s submissions contain any such language about legal form for the Paris agreement.

Similarly, Russia’s INDC says nothing on the agreement’s legal form, although Russia underlines its existing legally binding instruments capping emissions at a maximum of 75% of 1990 levels by 2020, and will “further elaborate and adopt legislative and regulatory acts providing for achievement of the stated INDC target by 2030.”

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National targets falling short of climate goal

The sum of national emissions targets so far submitted to the UN fall short of meeting the 2 degrees Celsius target, according to analysis released August 24 by the Grantham Research Institute – part of the London School of Economics.

The Grantham Institute’s analysis suggests combined global pledges will lead to annual global emissions in 2030 of 56.9 to 59.1 billion mt of CO2 equivalent – much higher than the 36 billion mt that the UN Environment Program suggests would be needed to have a 50-66% chance of avoiding average global warming of more than 2 degrees C.

Other research organizations have reached similar conclusions, lending weight to the notion that an agreement in Paris will still leave a gap between climate policy and climate science, representing a starting point for further action in future.

Bonn talks move process forward

Interim UN climate talks in Bonn, Germany on August 31 to September 4 moved the process forward ahead of Paris, although it appears that a lot of work remains outstanding.

The Bonn talks got the negotiations on track to produce the first comprehensive draft of the new global deal, the UNFCCC said September 4. The draft, to be drawn up by the co-chairs of the negotiations, Ahmed Djoghlaf of Algeria and Daniel Reifsnyder of the US, “will present clear options and ways forward on all the elements of the agreement and the decisions that will operationalize it from 2020,” the UNFCCC said.

The co-chairs of the UN’s main working groups have divided the content of the so-called Geneva Negotiating Text into three sections: a first text pertaining to a core agreement; a second section on elements to be addressed by COP decisions; and a third section containing text where there is disagreement as to whether the language belongs in the legal agreement or an accompanying COP decision.

This suggests important work remains to be done at a pre-Paris meeting again in Bonn on October 19-23.

What outcome can we expect from COP21?

A global climate deal in Paris is likely. Governments are in no mood to repeat the failures of Copenhagen. What’s changed is that the big players have a better idea of each other’s position, reducing the extent of last-minute brinkmanship that has characterized previous UN climate summits.

The Paris summit is likely to spur an agreement on a more inclusive international climate policy framework that captures current levels of ambition, and encourages further effort in future. Not all aspects of the deal will be legally binding, but it will cover a much greater percentage of global emissions than Kyoto ever did.

Let’s not pretend that all the climate diplomacy problems of the past have been solved. They haven’t. Issues surrounding financial aid for poorer countries are still sticking points, and no doubt some of the finger-pointing will continue as countries compare and contrast their intended national targets and actions, leaving some countries feeling that others could and should have done more.

But the major gulf that caused a stand-off between rich and poor countries has narrowed, and nations are now looking at how they can contribute, rather than simply fighting to do as little as possible, in order to serve their own perceived short-term national interests.

Certainly the Paris accord won’t do all the work, and it may only provide a basic framework for collective action, with legal details to be further elaborated in future COP decisions.

Gone, it seems, are the top-down legally binding emissions targets, and in their place are voluntary pledges that may contain some legal elements or be bound together into some kind of legal form. By creating more transparency on national efforts, there is likely to be a sense that all countries are contributing, creating a better sense of international fairness compared with previous summits.

But a word of caution seems timely here. A global deal will almost certainly be agreed in Paris, but it might not change much. Here’s why: many actions to curb greenhouse gas emissions are happening in spite of the UN process, not necessarily because of it. The UN talks are not the driving force that some people want them to be.

Actions by governments are happening in multiple venues including the G7, G20 and OECD groups. Governments are going ahead with policies that curb emissions, improve energy efficiency and energy security, clean up the air, and in some cases boost renewable energy capacity, because they are seen to bring advantages in their own right.

The extent to which these things are happening is a reflection of each country’s domestic needs, natural resources, energy demand, technological expertise, expected GDP growth, strategic priorities, industry lobbying, voter opinions and access to reliable energy partners. No country is going to sacrifice important national priorities for the sake of the UN talks, and in terms of democratic countries, no head of state or chief negotiator can agree to anything that they haven’t already been given a domestic mandate to negotiate on, or that they can’t achieve anyway using existing laws.

By making the terms of the Paris agreement less rigid, the deal may ultimately succeed where previous attempts failed. In that sense, Paris is a starting point, not an end destination.

The UNFCCC is not a supra-national body with the authority to hand down rules and regulations that trump national governments. It is a system that works by consensus and its ability to drive change is only as strong as the combined will of its member states.

For the energy, metals, shipping and agricultural markets, what matters most is the legislative frameworks in which they must operate, and those frameworks will continue to be driven at the national or state level, with or without a global climate deal.

For governments, an agreement in Paris might create the conditions in which they are better placed to further their climate protection ambition, as they see others moving forward in similar fashion. It’s hard for governments to get tough on emissions when their trading partners aren’t following suit. For that reason, COP21 matters, because it has the power to accelerate an existing long-term trend toward decarbonization.

What governments don’t want is a global framework that undermines their national priorities or constrains their development, so anything that looks like a brake on economic growth is not going to sit well with many governments. What they can live with is an overarching framework that gives them flexibility to do things their way. A deal that points the way to prosperity alongside a long-term clean up in the energy and industrial sectors has a very good chance of getting international sign-off in Paris.

Sources:

UNFCCC COP21 Paris(opens in a new tab)

Host country website(opens in a new tab)

United Nations INDC page(opens in a new tab)

US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration(opens in a new tab)

(This is the final part of a three-part series. If you missed the first part, see it here(opens in a new tab), and catch up on the second part here(opens in a new tab).)