Climate and Environment at Imperial

By Dr Simon Buckle, Grantham Institute

There was some good news last week from the annual Petersberg Climate Dialogues held on 14-15 July in Berlin.  The Petersberg meetings were instituted after the perceived failure of the Copenhagen summit in 2009 in order to support the UNFCCC talks. They are co-chaired by Germany and the country hosting the next Conference of the Parties meeting, in this case Peru.

Chancellor Merkel took the opportunity in her address to signal renewed ambition for climate action, perhaps disappointing some of those who had been hoping (or even working) for a reversal of Germany’s commitment to decarbonisation.  As reported by EurActiv, Merkel said that “A turnaround is needed – worldwide“.  Making it clear that she intends to re-energise climate change mitigation, she noted that Germany aims to cut its own CO₂ emissions by 40% by 2020 (relative to 1990 levels) and that “Europe will be making an “ambitious contribution” to the forthcoming UNFCCC negotiations that should result in a new climate agreement at the Paris conference in 2015.  Of course, the current European Commission proposal to be discussed in October is somewhat less ambitious, reflecting largely East European concerns, and proposes a 40% reduction of EU-wide emissions only by 2030.

The final statement by the German and Peruvian co-Chairs repeated the point I have been making over the past few months to a number of national climate negotiators and the UNFCCC Secretariat and which was the subject of my 3 July blog. This is that “there was a need for [national] contributions in aggregate to meet the overall ambition of maintaining temperature increase below 2°C.  In order to ensure this happens, some Ministers acknowledged that a process for collectively considering intended nationally determined contributions was necessary.”  Progress, if not yet complete agreement.

The sense of greater momentum was reinforced by the announcement by the Vice President of the Chinese National Development and Reform Commission, Xie Zhenhua, that as part of its contribution to the Paris agreement, it may set a date for the peaking of its own emissions.

Just a couple of months before the UN Secretary General’s climate summit on 23 September, the political climate looks a lot brighter than it has for a long while.  Achieving what I see as the first and most significant step on the global mitigation pathway – a peak in global fossil-related carbon dioxide emissions, ideally before 2030 – is the sort of inspirational but realistic target that leaders should now embrace for the Paris agreement if we are to make the most of this opening window of opportunity to limit future climate risks.

Read Merkel raises the level of ambition in full

By Dr Simon Buckle, Grantham Institute

I spent a few days at the recent Bonn climate change conference (4-15 June) during the High Level Ministerial events on 5-6 June.  Not that these were the most interesting things happening there. Unsurprisingly, by and large, Ministers did not stray from well rehearsed positions, reflecting the continued skirmishing over the interpretation of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) term “common but differentiated responsibilities” in a world that is radically different from the one in which the Convention was conceived.

More interesting were the briefing session on the UN Secretary General’s forthcoming climate summit in New York on 23 September and a series of special events where negotiators got the chance to hear from and question IPCC authors about the implications of the IPCC AR5 reports for the UN negotiations and the review underway of the long-term target (2°C or 1.5°C?), a key issue for vulnerable countries (e.g. small island states) given the very different potential implications of sea-level rise. It’s worth looking at some of the webcasts.

A particularly revealing moment came during a special event to engage with Observers to the UNFCCC process organised by the co-chairs of the so-called “Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action” (ADP). The ADP is the subsidiary body charged with developing the Paris 2015 agreement as well as trying to identify ways to enhance mitigation action before 2020.

As part of the ADP process, early in 2015 countries should notify the UNFCCC Secretariat of their “intended nationally determined contributions” (INDCs) to emissions reductions in the period after 2020.  I therefore asked the ADP co-chairs how the UN process would ensure that these bottom-up contributions – and the aggregate global emissions that they implied – would be consistent with the long-term climate targets that countries had committed to.  This was indeed a critical issue they said, but they had as yet no idea how this might be achieved.

This seems to me to be a pretty fundamental problem. An aspiration to achieve “a carbon neutral world in the second half of the century” (the current UNFCCC thinking on such an overarching aim) is in my view just not good enough to constrain climate risks and achieve a cost-effective transition to a low-carbon world. In particular, it says nothing about the emissions path over the next 30 years or so.

We know that effective international action on climate is difficult to achieve given the concerns over competitiveness and free-riding.  So instead of the top down approach to earlier climate agreements (i.e. Kyoto with it modest targets and timetables) or the bottom-up approach that has now emerged by default from the political trauma of the 2009 Copenhagen summit, we now need a hybrid approach. What I have in mind is that the aggregate bottom-up emissions pledges under the UN process need to be supplemented and given coherence by a political commitment among the major emitting economies – notably the US, China and the EU – to achieve a clear, measurable and negotiable near-term mitigation objective, which would be reflected within the Paris agreement.  My own suggestion for what this objective should be is that it should commit to achieving a global peaking in fossil-related carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 or earlier if possible, with a subsequent decline.

Recent developments in the US and China suggest that such a goal is not impossible, particularly if the EU can get its act together and agree its 2030 targets at the October Council.  Moreover my own calculations suggest a global peak in fossil carbon dioxide emissions could be achieved while allowing developing country emissions (e.g. in India) to continue to grow for some time to come, as they must in any politically viable deal.

Of course achieving a global peak in carbon dioxide emissions is just a first step on the road to a longer term objective and if it is achieved too late or the peaking level is too high, we may not be able to achieve some of the more stringent climate targets.  But if we just focus on the long term target, we will end up in a zero-sum negotiation over the level and shares of a corresponding fixed carbon budget consistent with this target.  The urgent need at this point in time is to reverse the continuing growth in global CO2 emissions, a necessary first step in achieving any long-term goal.  The pace of emissions reductions after the peak and the eventual level of emissions in the second half of the century can be agreed at future summits.

No doubt there are several other ideas for making Paris a success being discussed by governments in private as I write.  One might be to build in flexibility to the Paris agreement itself and have short commitment periods, perhaps to 2025 initially but agreed on a rolling five years basis thereafter, mirroring the UK approach to setting carbon budgets.  And there needs to be far more public discussion about these alternatives.  But these technical suggestions are worthless without political leadership. The next 18 months presents an unprecedented opportunity to shift the world decisively onto a cost-effective, low climate-risk development path, with myriad benefits for our wellbeing and economic development.  The Secretary General’s September summit will be an early indication of whether our political leaders are ready to make this step or not.

Read UNFCCC climate negotiations: reflections from the Rhine in full

By Gabriele Messori, Stockholm University (former Imperial PhD student)

The United Nations’ climate negotiations usually gain the press spotlight once a year, when the big Conference of the Parties (COP) meeting takes place. The most recent COP, which took place in Warsaw last November, was discussed on this blog here. However, the efforts to design a global climate treaty under the umbrella of the United Nations are ongoing, and additional negotiations take place throughout the year. These are particularly important in preparing the ground for the COPs, and provide the occasion to iron out the contrasts which might hamper later work.

The most recent of these meetings took place last week in Bonn, Germany. Formally, this was the fourth part of the second session of the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action, or ADP 2-4.The focus was on two distinct topics. Firstly, on the ongoing effort to design a global climate treaty, which should be agreed upon by 2015 and implemented by 2020. Secondly, on the promotion of ambitious mitigation plans for the period before 2020. However, several points of contention emerged in the talks.

Far from reaching a quick consensus on the key topics, the participating countries raised several procedural issues which bogged down the discussions. These ranged from trivial aspects, such as the size of the meeting rooms assigned to the different groups, to more important considerations on the modality of the negotiations.

The crucial point was whether to proceed with informal consultations or establish contact groups. In the jargon of the United Nations, a contact group is an open-ended meeting which provides a more formal setting for the negotiations. A contact group needs to be officially established and its sessions are generally open to observers. The last two years have seen the negotiations carried out as informal consultations. Some countries, among which the EU, opposed the creation of a contact group. Many others, including the least developed countries, argued that a new, formal setting was needed.

The latter proposal was finally adopted, thus establishing a contact group. However, the debate that preceded the decision was lengthy and time consuming. While having an appropriate setting for the negotiations is important, the focus should always remain on climate change, which is the reason for which these meetings exist in the first place!

A second crucial discussion concerned the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). These are national plans for action on climate change, made by all countries participating in the talks, and should form an important part of the 2015 climate treaty. At present, there is still no clarity on fundamental points such as the form the NDCs should take, the topics they should address and the mechanisms for evaluating their progress. There is also a strong disagreement on how the burden of action should be shared between developed, developing and least developed countries. This is just a small selection of the unanswered questions concerning the national contributions; the complete list is much longer. Positions on these key aspects vary greatly. As an example, Brazil explicitly asked for the contributions to encompass the full range of actions needed to tackle climate change, including both mitigation and adaptation. Tuvalu, on the other hand, clearly stated that the NDCs should focus primarily on mitigation. Agreeing on the nature of the NDCs is one of the most challenging aspects of the negotiations.

On a more positive note, the work on pre-2020 action included for the first time technical expert meetings. These are meetings where experts can share best practices on renewable energy and energy efficiency with the country delegates. The meetings were praised by the vast majority of countries, and there were requests by a number of delegates, including those of the EU and the USA, to arrange similar meetings in future negotiations.

The week-long talks in Bonn also addressed many other topics, including transparency and equity in the 2015 climate agreement and climate finance.

Leaving aside the contrasts over specific items of the agenda, and considering the larger picture, the impression in Bonn was of a framework that is still missing some of its essential elements. While the technical expert meetings had a promising start, a lot still needs to be done both in terms of pre-2020 action and the 2015 climate treaty. In Warsaw last year, countries agreed to present their Nationally Determined Contributions “well in advance” of the 2015 COP, which will take place in Paris. In order for this to happen, there needs to be a rapid acceleration of the negotiations, and issues such as procedural aspects need to be dealt with swiftly, so that the discussion may focus on more concrete aspects of action on climate change.

Read A slow start to a global climate treaty in full

By Gabriele Messori, Research postgraduate in the Department of Physics

The 19^th Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) took place last month in Warsaw, Poland. These conferences are at the core of the international negotiations on climate change, and set the scene for future climate policies around the world. By most accounts, the Warsaw meeting had mixed results – it marked progress in some areas and stagnation in others. One of the most contentious negotiation streams, and one where some measure of progress was made, was loss and damage.

The current approach to climate change is based on two pillars: mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation is concerned with minimizing climate change. Adaptation is the result of the failure of mitigation to prevent climate change, and is aimed at adapting to a climate different to the one we have been familiar with in the past. However, even adaptation has it limits. For example, in the future it might become unfeasible for low-lying island states to adapt to rising sea levels. Loss and damage is meant to tackle cases where both mitigation and adaptation have failed. The concept stems from the realization that a changing climate will imply rising human and economic losses for our planet.

From a scientific standpoint, the problem of loss and damage is very complex. Any agreement on damage associated with climate change will need to have clear guidelines defining what can be ascribed to climate change and what cannot. The issue becomes particularly contentious for extreme events. In fact it is very hard, if not impossible, to associate a single weather event to changes in the state of the climate.

From a political point of view, the contentiousness of loss and damage mainly arises from two distinct considerations. The first is that the main beneficiaries of a loss and damage agreement would be low-income, low-resilience countries. A number of developed nations therefore view an agreement as a very costly form of climate finance. The second important aspect is that loss and damage is intimately tied to the idea of historic responsibility. The developed countries have been emitting greenhouse gases for much longer than the least developed and developing ones, and are therefore responsible for a large part of the cumulative emissions budget. Because of this, the agreement on loss and damage is very complicated under the legal aspect, with developed countries fearing that it might lead to the question of climate change liability.

In Warsaw, the negotiations on loss and damage were aimed at establishing a global framework to tackle the issue. Some of the developed countries, notably Australia, initially refused to commit any finance specifically to loss and damage. At the other end of the scale, a large coalition of small island states, least developed and developing countries demanded a comprehensive agreement, explicitly addressing “permanent losses and irreversible damage, including non-economic losses”. As expected, the final result was a compromise between these two extremes.

The “Warsaw international mechanism for loss and damage associated with climate change impacts” requires (developed) countries to provide financial, technological and capacity-building support to address the adverse effects of climate change. Next year the executive committee of the mechanism will develop a work plan, and a review will take place in 2016. After 2016, an “appropriate decision on the outcome of this review” will be made. Crucially, the agreement explicitly mentions that “loss and damage associated with the adverse effects of climate change includes, and in some cases involves more than, that which can be reduced by adaptation”. At the same time, however, the mechanism is placed under the adaptation pillar of the negotiations. This was bitterly opposed by many countries, which asked for loss and damage to be entirely distinct from adaptation.

The agreement was a hard-fought compromise between very distant negotiating positions, and will hopefully provide the foundations for an effective loss and damage global framework. The 2016 review, and the subsequent “appropriate decision”, remain important open questions regarding the future of the mechanism. A lot will depend on how the different parties will approach the review process. In addition to this, the scientific question of how to ascribe specific damage to climate change has largely been overlooked. Ultimately, only time will tell how effective the recent compromise reached in Warsaw will be.

Read Beyond adaptation: loss and damage negotiation at the United Nations in full