The Kyoto Protocol failed in part because it tried to offer a one-size-fits-most solution to a challenge that manifests itself differently from state-to-state, country-to-country, and region-to-region. The United States and China this week offered the first high-profile example of the UN's new approach: one that lets each country find its own way, within reason.
This story first appeared on The AnthropoZine. You can view the original here.
13 November 2014 | In the beginning was a word, and the word was "commitments".
In the end was a different word, and the word was "contributions".
On Tuesday in Beijing, we saw what a difference a word can make when US President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping jointly announced they'd contribute to the climate effort by doing things that each could realistically achieve.
Numerically, Obama said the US would slash its greenhouse-gas emissions to 26% below its 2005 levels by 2025, and Xi said China would stop its emissions from rising by 2030. Beyond that, they agreed to cooperate on carbon capture and storage, and separately to combat illegal deforestation throughout the 21 countries that make up the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC).
Hailed by some as a bolt-from-the-blue game-changer and dismissed by others as too little too late, the deal is actually exactly the kind of bottom-up effort that negotiators hoped to stimulate when they rephrased climate agreements at last year's talks in Warsaw.
"Before the Warsaw talks, we all talked about 'commitments,'" says Peruvian Environment Minister Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, who will be presiding over December's talks in Lima. "This year, we're talking about 'contributions.'"
Specifically, negotiators are talking about "Intended Nationally Determined Contributions" (INDC), which are specific proposals that countries around the world will begin submitting to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) after December's talks end. "The United States will submit its 2025 target to the Framework Convention on Climate Change as an 'Intended Nationally Determined Contribution' no later than the first quarter of 2015," the White House said in summarizing the deal on its web site.
It should come as no surprise that the US and China are providing the first big test of the INDC concept, because INDCs were created after the United States, Japan, and some other developed countries refused to commit to reductions until developing countries, as well as economic powerhouses like China and Brazil, made commitments of their own. The shift from "commitments" to "contributions" takes the principle of "common but differentiated responsibilities" out of the footnotes and into the forefront of negotiations.
The idea is to first see what each country puts on the table, and then to incorporate these proposals into a global agreement that will keep the earth's temperatures from rising more than 2°C - an approach that essentially turns the negotiating process around: instead of starting with global rules that allow for some flexibility locally, countries are starting with local proposals and then rolling them up into a synchronized global framework.
So, yes, the game changed, but it didn't change this week in Beijing. It changed last year in Warsaw. On Tuesday, we just got to see the new rules in action.
The biggest problem with INDCs now is that the only thing everyone seems to agree on is that that you must be able to compare one country's INDCs to those of another country. Beyond that, there's wide disagreement on how comparable they must be, what activities they can include, and how much information needs to be submitted along with an INDC to make sure it has substance.
The Lima climate talks are designed to yield agreement on what's required for an INDC to be legitimate, capping a process that's been going on all year and reached a fever pitch in June. That's when more than two dozen countries submitted proposals for creating INDCs ahead of a meeting in Bonn, Germany. There, Kishan Kumarsingh of Trinidad and Tobago and Artur Runge-Metzger of the European Union, distilled the proposals into a draft negotiating text on INDCs.
On December 1, negotiators will arrive in Lima for this year's climate talks, and you can expect the text to then bloat from its current form into an incomprehensible mess of phrases, half-phrases, and [bracketed text] before Kumarsingh and Runge-Metzger boil it down into something manageable.
They are co-chairs of the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action (ADP), which means they, together with Pulgar-Vidal, are charged with herding all of its cats, cattle, and canaries towards agreement on what makes a good INDC.
If they succeed, then countries will spend the first few months of 2015 uploading their INDCs to the UNFCCC web site, sparking an iterative process of matching the bottom-up INDCs with top-down reality checks, culminating, we hope, with a global agreement at the Paris Climate Summit (COP 21) at the end of 2015.
Just as the media are picking apart the US-Climate deal now, so too will negotiators pick apart the INDC guidelines in December as they strive to make sure that contributions are equitable and comparable, even without a single baseline year and universal reduction targets.
This story first appeared on The AnthropoZine. You can view the original here.
13 November 2014 | In the beginning was a word, and the word was "commitments".
In the end was a different word, and the word was "contributions".
On Tuesday in Beijing, we saw what a difference a word can make when US President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping jointly announced they'd contribute to the climate effort by doing things that each could realistically achieve.
Numerically, Obama said the US would slash its greenhouse-gas emissions to 26% below its 2005 levels by 2025, and Xi said China would stop its emissions from rising by 2030. Beyond that, they agreed to cooperate on carbon capture and storage, and separately to combat illegal deforestation throughout the 21 countries that make up the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC).
Hailed by some as a bolt-from-the-blue game-changer and dismissed by others as too little too late, the deal is actually exactly the kind of bottom-up effort that negotiators hoped to stimulate when they rephrased climate agreements at last year's talks in Warsaw.
"Before the Warsaw talks, we all talked about 'commitments,'" says Peruvian Environment Minister Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, who will be presiding over December's talks in Lima. "This year, we're talking about 'contributions.'"
Specifically, negotiators are talking about "Intended Nationally Determined Contributions" (INDC), which are specific proposals that countries around the world will begin submitting to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) after December's talks end. "The United States will submit its 2025 target to the Framework Convention on Climate Change as an 'Intended Nationally Determined Contribution' no later than the first quarter of 2015," the White House said in summarizing the deal on its web site.
It should come as no surprise that the US and China are providing the first big test of the INDC concept, because INDCs were created after the United States, Japan, and some other developed countries refused to commit to reductions until developing countries, as well as economic powerhouses like China and Brazil, made commitments of their own. The shift from "commitments" to "contributions" takes the principle of "common but differentiated responsibilities" out of the footnotes and into the forefront of negotiations.
The idea is to first see what each country puts on the table, and then to incorporate these proposals into a global agreement that will keep the earth's temperatures from rising more than 2°C - an approach that essentially turns the negotiating process around: instead of starting with global rules that allow for some flexibility locally, countries are starting with local proposals and then rolling them up into a synchronized global framework.
So, yes, the game changed, but it didn't change this week in Beijing. It changed last year in Warsaw. On Tuesday, we just got to see the new rules in action.
What is an INDC?
The biggest problem with INDCs now is that the only thing everyone seems to agree on is that that you must be able to compare one country's INDCs to those of another country. Beyond that, there's wide disagreement on how comparable they must be, what activities they can include, and how much information needs to be submitted along with an INDC to make sure it has substance.
The Lima climate talks are designed to yield agreement on what's required for an INDC to be legitimate, capping a process that's been going on all year and reached a fever pitch in June. That's when more than two dozen countries submitted proposals for creating INDCs ahead of a meeting in Bonn, Germany. There, Kishan Kumarsingh of Trinidad and Tobago and Artur Runge-Metzger of the European Union, distilled the proposals into a draft negotiating text on INDCs.
On December 1, negotiators will arrive in Lima for this year's climate talks, and you can expect the text to then bloat from its current form into an incomprehensible mess of phrases, half-phrases, and [bracketed text] before Kumarsingh and Runge-Metzger boil it down into something manageable.
They are co-chairs of the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action (ADP), which means they, together with Pulgar-Vidal, are charged with herding all of its cats, cattle, and canaries towards agreement on what makes a good INDC.
If they succeed, then countries will spend the first few months of 2015 uploading their INDCs to the UNFCCC web site, sparking an iterative process of matching the bottom-up INDCs with top-down reality checks, culminating, we hope, with a global agreement at the Paris Climate Summit (COP 21) at the end of 2015.
Just as the media are picking apart the US-Climate deal now, so too will negotiators pick apart the INDC guidelines in December as they strive to make sure that contributions are equitable and comparable, even without a single baseline year and universal reduction targets.