Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to propose a dynamical model describing the achievement of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change. To represent the complex, decade-long, multiparty negotiation process that led to the accord, we use a two time scale dynamical model. The short time scale corresponds to the discussion process occurring at each meeting and is represented as a Friedkin-Johnsen model, a dynamical multiparty model in which the parties show stubbornness, i.e., tend to defend their positions during the discussion. The long time scale behavior is determined by concatenating multiple Friedkin-Johnsen models (one for each meeting). The proposed model, tuned on real data extracted from the Paris Agreement meetings, achieves consensus on a time horizon similar to that of the real negotiations. Remarkably, the model is also able to identify a series of parties that exerted a key leadership role in the Paris Agreement negotiation process.
Highlights
The 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change is an accord ratified by 196 “parties” [195 countries and the European Union (EU)] under the aegis of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)
If the Conference of the Parties (COP) is the main venue for the important decisions, to deal with the multiple aspects entering into a comprehensive agreement meant to tackle climate change, the UNFCCC has created a number of technical bodies whose role is to help the presence of a yearly plenary meeting (the COP) in dealing with specific topics
All speaking parties are considered stubborn for the corresponding meeting, with a stubbornness coefficient which is proportional to the number of speeches a party gave at the meeting
Summary
The 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change is an accord ratified by 196 “parties” [195 countries and the European Union (EU)] under the aegis of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). If the COP is the main venue for the important decisions, to deal with the multiple aspects entering into a comprehensive agreement meant to tackle climate change, the UNFCCC has created a number of technical bodies whose role is to help the COP in dealing with specific topics (carbon emission mitigation, adaptation to the effects of climate change, climate finance, green technology transfer, climate agreement implementation, legal and procedural matters linked to climate agreements, etc.) These bodies, called constituted bodies (see Table 1), meet regularly and contribute to the decisions that are discussed in the plenary COP meetings. Using the official documentation available on the UNFCCC website (https://unfccc. int) and at other repositories such as the Earth Negotiations Bulletin (https://enb.iisd.org/enb/vol12/), we assembled a database containing detailed information on which countries participated to each meeting, and which countries expressed their views at each meeting, over the period 2001–2015 (see Fig. 1)
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