As we approach the end game serious negotiations for a post-2020 international climate regime, Brian Flannery describes the difficult road ahead.
Architects of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol believed it would usher in a long-term, top-down process for mitigating climate change, with a growing set of nations taking on increasingly ambitious greenhouse gas emissions targets and carbon markets playing a central role. That has not happened.
Instead, the world has moved to a bottom-up approach, where nations take on self-determined obligations based on national priorities and circumstances—an approach that I characterize as a “mosaic world.” In the mosaic world, for many developed and developing nations, carbon markets play no role. Though it promises less, proceeding under a mosaic approach may ultimately accomplish more than insisting on a top-down approach, which runs the very real risk of reducing participation by many countries that account for significant emissions globally. Without their participation, ambitious goals will never be met.
Tension over these approaches are on display as nations commence serious negotiations to develop a post-2020 agreement to be concluded in Paris in late 2015, at the 21st meeting of the Conference of Parties (COP-21). Since the very visible failure to reach an agreement in Copenhagen in 2009 (COP-15), nations have grown increasingly frustrated and concerned over the viability of negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). In part, this arises from a growing legacy of unmet expectations.
As the negotiations become increasingly complex, fundamental differences continue to grow and separate various coalitions of nations. Groups have yet to resolve central issues, including the following:
- the magnitude of national emissions commitments, and whether they should put the world on track to limit warming to less than 2°C;
- the means of implementation—particularly finance, but also technology and capacity building;
- how the agreement will reflect differences between developed and developing nations based on common but differentiated responsibilities, equity, and historical responsibility; and
- whether the ultimate agreement will be legally binding.
Given these differences and the realities of today’s mosaic world, progress in Paris may depend on whether nations can embrace bottom-up commitments in lieu of a more ambitious top-down, legally binding approach.
