The Paris Agreement’s Implications for Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification of Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Climate-Related Policies and Measures in Developing Countries

Abstract

Under the terms of the Paris Agreement there will be much more information than ever before on the quantities and mix of greenhouse gases that each country emits and on the action it is taking to respond to climate change. The information will be regularly updated, and to some extent it will be standardized and made comparable across countries. It is a welcome prospect — or is it? In December 2018 the Conference of the Parties to the Paris Agreement (CMA) issued rules to operationalize the treaty, including rules on the “enhanced transparency framework” (ETF) — another term for a monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) system. The CMA’s rules on MRV are heavily qualified, introducing uncertainty into their application. Just like the treaty itself, the Agreement’s rules on MRV favour developing countries with a multitude of exceptions. The normative principle behind them is a compound of convictions about “national self-determination”, flexibility in implementation for developing countries, and state immunity from review (except for a low-level, “technical”, review of state reports, to check conformity with ETF requirements). This principle is a bloated version of the common but differentiated responsibility (CBDR) principle. A better term for it is “principle of indeterminacy”, for its effect is to keep state conduct on climate change indeterminate and unpredictable. The rise of a sprawling ETF under the Paris Agreement is worrisome, in a context where neither the Agreement nor the Rules provide for a process to determine equitable mitigation effort by parties, both in general and in relation to the 2°C warming limit. Instead, the regime creates many new opportunities for open-ended talking (and, more generally, interaction) among state representatives, which some will see as a positive development, but it also increases the unpredictability of mitigation outcomes. The MRV-related risk is that the ETF will usher in a period of mass information generation whose handling will overpower efforts to raise the level of mitigation ambition among states.