In the final installment of his four-part series, Raymond Kopp, Senior Fellow in RFF's Center for Climate Change and Electricity Policy, takes a look at the international negotiating process under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), from where it started to where it’s going.
American diplomacy is currently explaining to the world that next November’s conference on climate change will not - repeat, not - produce a legally binding treaty to impose explicit goals. Maybe some time in the undefined future a treaty will be possible, the Americans say, but not this year or any time soon.
The immediate purpose of this diplomatic campaign is to avert the wave of disappointment and ill will that has followed each of the recent annual conferences. But the American maneuvering demonstrates the peculiar bifurcated process of policy-making that is now evolving.
One branch of the process strongly supports a binding treaty, the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, and is working to extend its commitments beyond the present cut-off in 2012. But Kyoto puts constraints only on industrialized countries, not on the developing countries, and the United States has never joined it. The Obama administration knows that there is no chance whatsoever that the U.S. Senate will ratify any treaty that does not put similar obligations on China or the other major developing countries, viewed as economic competitors.
Instead, the U.S. government has been hard at work to develop an alternative path that would follow a much less formal style. Under it, each country would voluntarily set its own targets for emissions of the greenhouse gases that are changing the global climate. The rich countries would also put up a substantial fund to help the poor ones mitigate their emissions and adjust to the climatic changes already under way.
Todd Stern, the American special envoy for the climate negotiations, was recently in Johannesburg to carry the message that a treaty is not, at present, possible. South Africa is the host for the next United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) conference to be held at Durban eight months from now. Stern was careful not to suggest that he opposed a treaty in principle because a large majority of the world’s governments - including, crucially, China’s - are strongly in favor of it.
“When the time is right, a legal agreement would be a good idea, and we are for it,” Stern said, according to Reuters. But since that is unlikely at Durban, he added, the question is what can be done in the meantime?
Climate negotiations are now proceeding on two tracks, Stern explained at a Washington press conference last December, just after the last conference. “One is the Kyoto Protocol track, which doesn’t involve the United States, because we’re not part of it,” he said. The other track, which doesn’t yet seem to have a name, relies entirely on governments’ voluntary pledges to reduce their emissions. Rather than including all 192 members of the United Nations, it is a conversation among a dozen or so of the big economies and makes no distinction between developed and developing countries.
Asked what he expected to come out of Durban, Stern replied that governments are already starting to implement their mitigation pledges. Work is going forward in many areas, he said, citing a system of transparent reporting, a Green Fund, institutions to disseminate clean energy technology and to help societies adapt to changing climates, and increasing assistance to avoid deforestation. “And the day will come in the future when countries can come together in a legal format,” he concluded, ”but you can get an awful lot done on the way to that, and that’s what we’re trying to do.”
For those who, like most American officials, regard the Kyoto track as unrealistic and a dead end, the emergence of this second track has to be seen as unmitigated good news. But the other side of the question is that it has yet to show that it can produce much beyond empty promises. Although it speaks of international review of progress and verification of the numbers, the second track will have to build the kind of institutional structure that can give those numbers credence and continuity. The sources and rules for distribution of the aid to the poor countries remain very vague. So far the small countries see little reason to hope that they are not being cut out of the serious decisions.
As the world’s governments consider which track to follow at Durban and beyond, they confront a familiar political choice: Should they keep fighting for a stronger and clearer instrument that is, unfortunately, not within their reach at present? Or is it wiser to settle for a considerably less forceful and explicit solution that, for all its faults, might show real results in the near term? Since the second track is an American project, its success now depends primarily on the skill and determination that the Obama administration brings to its development.
Raymond Kopp is a Senior Fellow at Resources for the Future.
