Climate policy implementation: geographical perspectives

Abstract

On 11 December 1997, with the agreement of the Kyoto Protocol, the leaders of the major industrialised nations and the European Union undertook to reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions to at least 5 per cent below 1990 levels by 2008-12. Even then, everyone recognised that the Protocol's modest targets and huge 'complex of flexibilities' represented merely the beginning of serious international efforts to address climate change (Grubb et al. 1999, xvii). Yet, however restricted Kyoto might be in terms of targets or obligations for developing countries, it has survived repeated buffetings, not least the USA's decision not to ratify the treaty, and continues to provide the overarching framework for international negotiations on emissions reduction and many national climate strategies. Preparations for a successor treaty are now firmly underway amid ambitious pronouncements on future targets (mainly from European quarters) and calls for firmer commitments by industrialising nations. Yet for all the undoubted importance of these negotiations, the real credibility test for future climate policy is perhaps less which targets to adopt than how substantial emissions reductions can be achieved. Kyoto partly addresses this via its assortment of flexibility mechanisms (Joint Implementation, the Clean Development Mechanism and international emissions trading); however, decisions about which technological and behavioural solutions to prioritise, which market-led and regulatory devices to deploy, and how these should be governed, remain deeply debated and contested. Implementation is thus likely to become a key topic of debate in climate policy over the next decade and one where geography, with its traditions of inquiry into governance and human-environment relationships, is well positioned to contribute. Geographers have been actively involved in research on climate change detection, attribution and consequences for many years (for reviews of developments in climatology, Quaternary science, and regional, sectoral and development studies, and biogeography see Liverman 1 999 and Liverman et al. 2004). Geographers also hold prominent roles in several international advisory and research groups (Diana Liverman as leader of the Tyndall Centre's Informing International Climate Policy programme; Neil Roberts with the National Academies Committee on Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the last 2000 years, which reported to the US Congress in June 2006; David Simon as Scientific Steering Committee member of the International Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change). Highprofile sessions at the 2006 and 2007 RGS-IBG and AAG meetings, the formation of a dedicated RGS Climate Change Research Group, and numerous individual contributions (e.g. Bulkeley 2001 as just one example), meanwhile, provide further evidence of the discipline's growing reputation in climate policy research. Despite this, Hulme and Turnpenny (2004, 106) contend that 'geography as opposed sometimes to individual geographers has played a relatively minor role' in recent developments in climate research and policy. The reasons for this, they suggest, are complex and diverse but reflect the limited number of geographers enrolled in influential bodies like the Hadley Centre and the Climate Change Impacts Review Group (to borrow their UK examples), as well as disjunctures between some