Abstract
Although the Paris Agreement arguably made some progress, interest in supplementary approaches to climate change co-operation persist. This article examines the conditions under which a climate club might emerge and grow. Using agent-based simulations, it shows that even with less than a handful of major actors as initial members, a club can eventually reduce global emissions effectively. To succeed, a club must be initiated by the ‘right’ constellation of enthusiastic actors, offer sufficiently large incentives for reluctant countries and be reasonably unconstrained by conflicts between members over issues beyond climate change. A climate club is particularly likely to persist and grow if initiated by the United States and the European Union. The combination of club-good benefits and conditional commitments can produce broad participation under many conditions.
Highlights
Our results indirectly explain why existing club-like arrangements have been no more effective than the UNFCCC has been in mitigating climate change
Since the overarching purpose of a climate club is to provide a pure public good, the members will benefit from a broadening membership
Since the actors most likely to respond positively to current club members’ conditional commitments will probably share the founding members’ general concerns about the impact of climate change, agreement on how much each actor will contribute to mitigation efforts should be easier to reach in a club setting than in the context of UNFCCC global conference diplomacy
Summary
Reviewing the recent climate club literature, Falkner argues that starting small might be advantageous in at least three ways – by facilitating dialogue and bargaining, by creating incentives for membership and by offering great powers a privileged position (thereby enhancing the legitimacy of international climate governance in their eyes). Focusing on incentives, and being grounded in the second way, this article considers the potential for enthusiastic actors to use club goods and conditional commitments to attract members. That would avoid the worst climate change impacts, which in the BAU scenario would ‘equate to an average reduction in global per-capita consumption of 5 per cent, at a minimum, and forever’, the report finds Incorporating those findings into our model is non-trivial, because the report measures costs and benefits in different units, assumes costefficient mitigation and has caused substantial academic controversy. If the total benefit to the club of a specific reluctant actor’s entry enables the club to increase mitigation commitments enough to induce the non-member to join, a deal based on conditional commitments is struck This step is repeated until no more mutually advantageous deals can be made, following the same logic as in Step 1. They leave the club. If at least one actor leaves, every actor will reassess whether membership pays off
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