Scientists welcome new global climate change pact

Over the last couple of decades, bioenergy has been under intense scrutiny, having significant research and business interests in European countries, while in India and a few other countries, the efforts have been overserved through last decade. Both production and consumption of bioenergy have been increasing steadily over the past two decades because of lower environmental concern and cost-effectiveness. Bioenergy utilising biomass has been considered a very important process of resource circulation and implementation of circular economy concepts, encouraging sustainable practices. Generation of methane (the simplest hydrocarbon) by anaerobic decomposition of organic maters has been known to humankind since 17th century. We describe here the main challenges and policy issues and provide policy recommendations for globally scaling up sustainable bioenergy approaches. The Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) defined under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties (COP21) need to reach global greenhouse gas (GHG) emission targets of 2°C. Sustainable biomass production and resource circulation can make a significant contribution, which has been evident in many bioenergy-cropping systems. This can bring multiple benefits and offset environmental problems associated with fossil-fuel usage, as well as intensive food production and urbanisation. This study focuses on how the concept of resource circulation in the areas of biomass utilisation converted to bioenergy in European countries, as the world leader, and in India, the largest democracy in the world.

Achieving China's Intended Nationally Determined Contribution and its co-benefits: Effects of the residential sector

Under the framework of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Conferences of the Parties (COPs), the United Nations Climate Change Conferences have been held yearly to evaluate the progress in dealing with climate change since 1995, when COP 1 was held in Berlin, Germany. COP20, in Lima, Peru in December 2014, reached an agreement that urged all countries to achieve their greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction targets by 31 March 2015. This information is called an Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC). With the deadline of 31 March 2015 already passed, only 35 of the 193 countries had published their INDCs. After solid and united global efforts, from 30 November to 12 December 2015, COP 21 was held in Paris, France, when, in a historical breakthrough and milestone toward securing the future Earth, a global agreement on the reduction of climate change was agreed upon by representatives of more than 193 countries in attendance. According to the COP21 Organizing Committee, the agreement was to limit global warming to well below 2°C compared to pre-industrial levels. By 12 December 2015, 160 INDCs had been submitted, and on February 04, 2016, Nepal confirmed the 161st INDC, which together represented 188 countries. The requirement that the agreement would become legally binding is that at least 55 countries, which jointly represent at least 55 percent of global greenhouse emissions, have to sign the agreement in New York between 22 April 2016 (Earth Day) and 21 April 2017, and also adopt it within their own legal systems. Readers may find some detailed information from the sixth United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Emissions Gap Report, which was available in 2015 [1].

This chapter looks at how the emergence of new powerhouses challenges global cooperation to combat climate change. That cooperation has mainly taken place within an institutional framework that scholars call the “global climate regime,” which is designed “to mitigate human-induced climate change by limiting anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases [GHGs] such as carbon dioxide and methane and protecting associated sinks” (Downie, 2011: 74). Its main components include, but are not limited to, the principles, norms, rules and procedures of the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), of the UNFCCC’s annual Conference of the Parties (COP) and of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol (Downie, 2011). Similar to many fields of environmental politics, the global climate regime is characterized by a lack of environmental effectiveness, which is partly due to a discrepancy between the regime’s institutional design and real-life developments. While the UNFCCC targets the “stabilization” of GHG concentrations (UNFCCC, 1992: §2), emissions have risen by 49% between 1990 and 2012 (PBL, 2012). That discrepancy was embedded in the regime from the start, but it worsens at a growing pace and calls for an increasing sense of urgency. Furthermore, the evolution is to a significant extent linked to the emergence of new economic and political powerhouses.

The twenty‐first Conference of the Parties (COP21) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Paris was a good COP in contrast to COP15 in Copenhagen, which will remain in history as the low point in climate policy. COP21 demonstrated unprecedented global collaboration when divisions were deep and stakes were high and resulted in the Paris Agreement, the first legally binding document to articulate a clear global temperature goal and a commitment to reach global net‐zero emissions after 2050. The agreement is also universal, with developed and developing countries alike expected to act. This article outlines key outcomes and explains what led to the shift from a bad to a good COP. It also examines the threats and opportunities as the world moves from making commitments to implementing them and draws parallels to the global agenda‐setting process on sustainable development that is also unfolding in the United Nations at the same time.

Climate change is a security problem in as much as the kinds of environmental changes that may result pose risks to peace and development. However, responsibilities for the causes of climate change, vulnerability to its effects, and capacity to solve the problem, are not equally distributed between countries, classes and cultures. There is no uniformity in the geopolitics of climate change, and this impedes solutions.

All Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) were requested to communicate intended nationally determined contributions (INDCs) in a clear, transparent and understandable way before the Conference of the Parties (known as COP21) held in Paris in 2015. The Contributions were supposed to be balanced and comprehensive to ensure sustainable development and expected to include finance, technology requires, technology transfer and capacity building aiming at mitigation and adaptation. This research focuses on investigating the INDCs prepared by countries from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), one of the most water-scarce and dry regions in the world. Following a content analysis, this research has found that INDCs from the region have not been able to reflect the desired output. Submissions were also not timely and not sufficiently ahead of time. Many countries were not able to disclose the current status. INDCs can play a significant role by providing objective, timely, and reliable information, which is missing at present in the countries from MENA.

This chapter is an overview of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC). The FCCC established the governance structure and approach to differentiation for the international climate regime. As a framework convention, the FCCC aims to create a flexible system of governance for the climate change problem. It authorizes the Conference of the Parties (COP) to establish new institutions or change the mandate of existing ones. It allows amendments, annexes, and amendments to annexes to be approved by a three-quarters majority vote. In addition, it provides for regular reviews of its specific commitments on sources and sinks, as well as of the annexes, with a view to their possible amendment.

Participant experiences during the activities implemented jointly (AIJ) pilot have been rich and varied. The experiences of this period offer a number of useful lessons, revealing the critical importance of technology cooperation to international efforts aimed at achieving the objective of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC). Events since the FCCC First Conference of the Parties (COP-1) have demonstrated that reducing the risks of rapid climate change and achieving the FCCC’s objective will require the introduction and diffusion of many new, low-emissions technologies. Innovative AIJ pilot projects have demonstrated that a mix of capacity-building activities are needed to facilitate successful technology cooperation. Simultaneously, the AIJ pilot phase has highlighted the inherent difficulties of technology cooperation for government leaders, private companies, international organizations, inter-governmental organizations (IGOs) and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Specifically, the AIJ pilot has shown that the full potential can only be realized through careful design of projects and procedures. These designs must incorporate a mix of capacity building activities that are appropriate to the specific circumstances, local institutions, and cultural context of the industrial and developing country partners. The purpose of this chapter is to highlight the lessons learned from capacity building during the AIJ pilot and explore their implications for the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and Joint Implementation (JI) under the Kyoto Protocol.

Negotiating failure: understanding the geopolitics of climate change

Climate negotiations: time to implement planetary health promises

ABSTRACTIn this paper, we advance discourse analysis to interpret how the state and direction of climate governance is imagined or interpreted by the multitude of actors present at UN climate conferences. We approach the annual Conferences of the Parties (COP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as active political sites that project ideas, assumptions and standards for the conduct of global politics. This paper examines to what extent the discourses of green governmentality, ecological modernization and civic environmentalism identified by Bäckstrand and Lövbrand [(2006). Planting trees to mitigate climate change. Contested discourses of ecological modernization, green governmentality and civic environmentalism. Global Environmental Politics, 6(1), 51–71; Bäckstrand, K., & Lövbrand, E. (2007). Climate governance beyond 2012. Competing discourses of green governmentality, ecological modernization and civic environmentalism. In M. Pettenger (Ed.), The social construction of climate change. Ashgate] a decade ago still inform how climate governance is imagined and enacted in the post-Copenhagen era. After reviewing scholarship on climate governance and International Relations, we introduce our discursive framework and systematically compare three contending discourses of climate governance articulated at COP 17 in Durban (2011), COP 19 in Warsaw (2013) and COP 20 in Lima (2014). We end by discussing whether the discursive struggles played out at UN climate conferences represent a shift in the ways in which climate governance was imagined and enacted on the road to Paris, and to what extent our findings may help to extend scholarship in this field.

The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was signed at the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) held in Rio, Brazil in 1992 and entered into force in 1994. The Kyoto Protocol, which sets out more detailed policies and measures that may be implemented by each party to achieve their commitments, was adopted at the third Conference of the Parties (COP 3 1997) to the UNFCCC in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan (see Annex G to this book for the list of COPs to the UNFCCC and MOPs to the Kyoto Protocol).

The activities implemented jointly (AIJ) pilot was established by Decision 5 of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) First Conference of the Parties (COP-1) in 1995. Decision 5 provides a broad framework for implementation of the pilot and identifies miminum criteria and guidelines for Parties to follow. With the advent of the AIJ pilot, only a hand-ful of countries were prepared to fully engage in this activity. Today, approximately 80 FCCC Parties are participating or have plans to participate in the pilot. Information from the pilot is reported to the FCCC Secretariat annually. AIJ project reporting guidelines have evolved over the past four years and standard guidelines have been developed by the Parties and are being used by most project developers. Project baselines and additionality of projects remain two AIJ pilot concepts which remain very controversial and difficult to report uniformly. Analysts continue to define additionality and develop methodologies for for project baseline development. Three AIJ projects are examined in detail: Burkina Faso Energy Management, Indonesia Reduced Impact Logging (RIL) and RUSAGAS fugitive gas capture. Lessons learned from each project are presented which are relevant to development of mature joint implementation (JI) and Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) regimes.Key wordsactivities implemented jointlylearningbaselinesreportingcost-effectivenessland-use change and forestryenergy efficiencyrenewable energy

All Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) were requested to communicate intended nationally determined contributions (INDCs) in a clear, transparent and understandable way before the Conference of the Parties (known as COP21) held in Paris in 2015. The Contributions were supposed to be balanced and comprehensive to ensure sustainable development and expected to include finance, technology requires, technology transfer and capacity building aiming at mitigation and adaptation. This research focuses on investigating the INDCs prepared by countries from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), one of the most water-scarce and dry regions in the world. Following a content analysis, this research has found that INDCs from the region have not been able to reflect the desired output. Submissions were also not timely and not sufficiently ahead of time. Many countries were not able to disclose the current status. INDCs can play a significant role by providing objective, timely, and reliable information, which is missing at present in the countries from MENA.