Category: Policy

Grantham Institute welcomes results of Energy and Climate Change Committee review of IPCC WG1 report

Uk ParliamentThe House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee report on the Working Group 1 contribution to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, which is published today, has found the IPCC process to be robust. The committee launched an inquiry into the IPCC WG1 report in October 2013, following criticism by some commentators of the IPCC review process and its conclusions.

The Grantham Institute submitted written evidence to the committee (you can read our evidence here) and our Chair Professor Sir Brian Hoskins was called before the committee to give oral evidence.

The committee found that “the IPCC has responded extremely well to constructive criticism in the last few years and has tightened its review processes to make its Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) the most exhaustive and heavily scrutinised Assessment Report to-date. The MPs call on the IPCC to continue to improve its transparency, however. The IPCC would benefit, they say, from recruiting a small team of non-climate scientists to observe the review process and the plenary meetings where the Summary for Policymakers is agreed.”

 

Commenting on the report Professor Joanna Haigh, Co-Director Grantham Institute said:

“Having assessed a significant quantity of submitted evidence, both written and oral, this report is overwhelmingly supportive of both the procedures and the conclusions of the IPCC. It concludes that the WG1 report is the best available summary of the state of the science of climate change, that improvements to IPCC procedures since the Fourth Assessment have ensured “the highest Quality of scholarship” and that there is no scientific basis for downgrading UK’s ambition to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

In terms of procedures it recommends two areas of further improvement – the appointment by governments of some non-climate scientists as members of the Executive Committee, and to observe the review process, and a greater level of transparency in plenary meetings discussing the Summary for Policymakers – but these recommendations in no way reflect concern about the content of the Assessment. A whole chapter of the report is devoted to examining criticisms that have been levelled, from both inside and outside the scientific community, on the scientific conclusions but none is found to have significant bearing.

Such a robust report from an all party parliamentary committee surely means that we can now reduce efforts spent on dealing with the constituencies working to discredit the IPCC, concentrate on understanding the science behind climate and climate change and do our best to make sure that the government plays a leading role in achieving a global deal on climate change.”

 

Professor Sir Brian Hoskins, Chair of the Grantham Institute said:

“The committee recognises that the recent WG1 report of IPCC gives a very good summary of the science relevant to climate change, whilst there are some remaining issues on transparency.

The question now is how do we respond to the risk posed by climate change, and I am pleased to see that the Report is clear: it supports the basis for the advice given by the Climate Change Committee and the path the UK is taking towards its 2050 carbon reduction target, in particular the 4th Carbon budget recently confirmed by Government, it advises that the UK Government at the top level should play a major role in international discussions leading up to Paris 2015.”

 

Sticking to the budget

Carbon budgetFollowing on from Simon Buckle’s post this morning another piece of good news on emissions reductions, the UK government has announced that they will not amend the fourth carbon budget, after reviewing their commitments in light of progress within the EU.

Therefore the carbon budget for 2023-27 remains at 1,950 MtCO2e, keeping the UK on track to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 by 80% relative to 1990 levels.

This decision is in line with advice from the Committee on Climate Change given in December 2013, that there was no basis to change the fourth carbon budget.

You can read more about the review in our background note on the fourth carbon budget.

Merkel raises the level of ambition

By Dr Simon Buckle, Grantham Institute

Brandenburg gateThere 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.

UNFCCC climate negotiations: reflections from the Rhine

BonnBy 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.

 

A slow start to a global climate treaty

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.

Moving from tactics to strategy: extreme weather, climate risks and the policy response

 By Dr Flora MacTavish and Dr Simon Buckle

In the press coverage of the recent floods, there has been a lot of discussion about whether the authorities could have been better prepared or responded more effectively. The National Farmers Union has called for the reintroduction of river dredging, although experts argue that dredging may be limited in its effectiveness. Local authorities have been criticised by experts for distributing sand bags rather than encouraging the use of more effective alternatives such as wooden or metal boards.

These are essentially tactical issues, however. It is the government and local authorities that have the vital strategic responsibility for fully embedding weather and climate risks into decisions on the level and focus of investment into flood defences and planning regulations about what can be built and where.

The persistence of the weather pattern that has caused this winter’s exceptional rainfall and floods has been very unusual.  However, as the Adaptation Sub-Committee of the UK Climate Change Committee noted in their 2011 report, heat waves, droughts and floods are all expected to get worse as a result of climate change. The recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment of the science (AR5) concluded that average precipitation was very likely to increase in the high and some of the mid latitudes, with a likely increase in the frequency and intensity of heavy precipitation events over land (see our note on The Changing Water Cycle).  If we are to improve our resilience, we need to get the strategic policy framework and incentives right.

Unfortunately, for flood risk, this doesn’t seem to be happening yet, despite the Pitt Review after the 2007 floods. In 2011, the Climate Change Committee noted a decline in urban green space in each of six of local authority areas studied, and an increase in hard surfacing in five of the six. The Committee’s 2012 report showed that the UK has become more exposed to future flood risk. It judged that four times as many households and businesses in England could be at risk of flooding in the next twenty years if further steps are not taken to prepare for climate change.

In particular it noted that:

  • Development within the floodplain in England has grown at a faster rate (12%) than development outside it (7%) over the past ten years;
  • One in five properties built in the floodplain have been in areas of significant flood risk:
  • Levels of investment in flood defences and uptake rates of protection measures for individual properties will not keep pace with the increasing risks of flooding due to climate change.

The Committee has acknowledged that the economic and social benefits of new developments may not always be outweighed by the risks of building on flood plains.  Decision makers should weigh up the trade-offs between long term risks such as climate change and other shorter term priorities, but the Committee judged that this was not happening “widely or consistently” at the time they wrote their 2011 report.

The government is in the process of trying to implement the Flood Re scheme to address concerns over the affordability and availability of flood insurance, but as our colleagues at the Grantham Research Institute at LSE have noted in their response to the government consultation,

“The design of the Flood Re scheme, which is expected to last until at least 2035, has not taken into account adequately, if at all, how flood risk is being affected by climate change. For this reason, it is likely to be put under increasing pressure and may prove to be unsustainable because the number of properties in future that will be at moderate and high probability of flooding has been significantly underestimated. “

Whether or not these particular floods are due to climate change, this is the sort of thing we expect to see more of in the future. When the immediate crisis is over, the government needs to think hard about its strategic response, which must include mitigation action as well as measures to develop greater resilience to weather and climate related risks.

Workshop on climate science needed to support robust adaptation decisions

By Dr Simon Buckle

I just wanted to highlight the great event we held last week with Judy Curry at Georgia Tech on how we can use climate science to help us make better decisions – in business, government, health and development.  Do have a look at the presentations from the really diverse group we managed to assemble in Atlanta, from international organisations, business, development agencies, NGOs and research.

A few  points strike me as worth (re)emphasising:

  • Climate models are extremely valuable tools for assessing climate change over the rest of this century, but even the most advanced climate models are not yet able to provide detailed information with sufficient confidence on the variability and change of regional climate in the next few decades. This will take time and money (higher resolution, more computational power).
  • So trying to forecast the climate in 5, 10 or 20 years time is right at the research frontier, but many decision makers aren’t as hung up over the uncertainties in climate projections as the scientists.  They’re used to dealing with uncertainty and some of the factors they need to take into account are way more uncertain than how the climate will change;
  • It’s the holistic view of risk that matters. In other words, how climate variability and change interacts with other factors such as population, urbanisation, economic growth, degradation of ecosystems, land use change etc;
  • Scientists working on decision relevant issues need to think really hard about the decision making context.  Who is making decisions? What is the motivation? What is being decided and what are the relevant timescales? And are the research methods and outputs relevant and informative? Are there alternative approaches that might increase the robustness of decision making in the face of uncertainty? Are the limitations of the research transparent to the decision makers who might use it?
  • Many different approaches are emerging from collaboration among decision makers and scientists that can supplement the valuable insights gleaned from climate models and help inform robust decision making in the face of climate variability and change.
  • Even if some prominent UK politicians still have their heads in the sand over climate risks, major businesses, governments and development organisations are already factoring climate into their decision making.

You can read a more detailed summary of the workshop on the Grantham Institute website.

Beyond adaptation: loss and damage negotiation at the United Nations

By Gabriele Messori, Research postgraduate in the Department of Physics

The 19th 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.

International Energy Agency announces closer cooperation with developing nations

By Neil Hirst

On Wednesday six major developing nations plus Russia  agreed to pursue closer cooperation, or “Association” with the International Energy Agency. The announcement is superficially modest, but it’s of major strategic importance. It’s the first crack in the “Berlin wall” that has separated energy policy making in the rich OECD countries from that in the developing world. The announcement itself concentrates on making energy markets more efficient but “energy technologies, energy efficiency, and renewable energy” are also on the agenda. These are early days, and there is long way to go to make this initiative effective. But this statement of intention, at Ministerial level, is a new and crucial step.

The IEA, of course, is not a climate change negotiating body. But we will never get international  agreement on climate mitigation until there is a shared understanding of the practical energy policies that can mitigate climate change at the same time as meeting other vital energy policy objectives for security, economic growth, and development. The IEA is where these issues are thrashed out amongst the OECD nations. Now  the major developing countries are , in many ways, some of the most important players. Getting them around the table with the IEA, on an equal basis,  is an important step in coming to grips with  the world’s energy challenges. Developments in Paris yesterday may turn out to be of greater significance than anything that happened at the COP in Poland.

The countries who have joined with the IEA in making this announcement are Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Russia, and South Africa. There is no certainty where this, initially limited, agreement will lead. But we may be witnessing a first step towards a structure of global energy cooperation that is genuinely fit for purpose.

The future of our planet is far too important to be left just to our politicians

By Dr Simon Buckle

Two years to go and counting down. That’s the real significance of COP19, the Warsaw Conference of the Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which runs from 11-22 November. A new universal climate agreement effective from 2020 is what is at stake, and Warsaw is a step on the path.

The COP21 meeting in Paris at the end of 2015 will hopefully be the successful culmination of many years’ of hard work by the UNFCCC Secretariat, government climate negotiators and many, many others. It’s time for governments to act on the words they agreed in the IPCC Summary for Policy Makers launched on 27 September – namely that substantial and sustained reductions in emissions are required to limit climate risks.  No doubt this is a point Ban Ki-Moon will make at his planned high-level Climate Summit in September 2014.

So how important is the Warsaw COP in this packed schedule to Paris? According to Christiana Figueres, the Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC Secretariat based in Bonn, the meeting is “a pivotal moment to advance international climate action and showcase a growing momentum to address climate change at all levels of society”.  That’s why there’s a Business Forum and a “Cities Day”.  There is also a Gender Day to showcase women’s role in meeting the climate challenge – a very welcome initiative since the differential impacts on distinct societal groups with contrasting interests and values is at the core of how we decide to respond – or not – to climate change.

Climate change is a critical issue for business, and business has to be part of the solution.  Companies realise that they can both become more profitable and improve business resilience by taking climate change and energy efficiency seriously.  We need to scale up these efforts significantly to limit the risks from climate change. The car industry is a good example of where European emissions regulation has encouraged innovation to reduce emissions.  However, businesses often have shareholders as well as customers and there is only so much they can do without a clear policy framework, a meaningful carbon price to capture the damage emissions do to others and adequate incentives for innovation and investment in clean technologies and new businesses, rather than in the old economy.

There is also a growing recognition that there are clear benefits, even in the short-term, from tackling climate change, including greater energy security.  Cities as key concentrators of human, financial and physical capital and resource use are at the forefront of efforts to make the transition to a lower impact and more resilient way of life. In rural areas, renewable technologies can play a valuable role in extending energy access for poor people in developing countries – a role that will grow as technologies get better and cheaper.

But Warsaw has to be about more than just showcasing what could be if we really tried.  To create the political conditions for an ambitious and effective mitigation agreement in 2015 covering all the major emitters, there’s a huge amount of hard work still to be done.  Warsaw can contribute by helping mobilise governments to deliver an ambitious and effective climate agreement in Paris in 2015.  Well before the end of next year, we need all the major emitting economies to have put on the negotiating table national commitments to significant and verifiable emissions reductions beyond 2020, with the degree of effort tailored to particular national circumstances.  This is not like the Kyoto Protocol. Emissions reductions are needed from developing as well as developed economies; the climate doesn’t care where the emissions come from.

Of course, vulnerable, developing economies will need help to make the transition to low-carbon, resilient economies. So a successful outcome in Paris depends on the quantity and quality of financial, technological and adaptation support that the UNFCCC institutions can mobilise for these countries.  Warsaw will hopefully take decisions to make the Green Climate Fund, the Technology Mechanism and the Adaptation Committee fully operational.  But institutions are not enough in themselves.  The developed economies have to deliver on their promises of additional financing. Clarity on plans to scale up finance to 2020 will be critical to success in Paris in 2015.

The great advantage of the UN process in tackling climate change is that it brings together over 190 countries with very diverse capacities and perspectives in a sustained effort to create an effective global response to climate change.  The voices of the poor and vulnerable can be effective in putting moral pressure on the rich.  The UNFCCC process should help us avoid a situation where the climate risks faced by the majority are determined by the decisions of the few.

This strength is of course also the UNFCCC’s Achilles Heel.  International agreements cannot bind national governments if they don’t want to be bound.  So whatever is agreed at Paris can only be as ambitious as countries judge is in their own interest, taking account of what others are doing in their self interest.  This is why there have been persistent calls for “bottom-up” approaches. While focused groupings, like the Major Economies Forum, can make a valuable contribution to the process, we need the UN process to keep up the pressure and also to provide an independent mechanism for monitoring, reporting and verifying countries’ emissions reductions.

As we’ve seen with the national pledges made after the Copenhagen COP, an agreement in Paris that is based purely on what countries want to do is unlikely to meet the scale of the challenge. Time is short, perhaps 50 years to make the transition to a much lower carbon world.  This is why the UNFCCC is absolutely right to seek to involve a much wider range of non-governmental actors in the discussions at Warsaw and beyond, to try and raise the level of ambition and to redefine what is feasible.

The future of our planet is far too important to be left just to our politicians.