International Climate Negotiations Research Articles

Assessing losses and damages to ecosystem services: current state and opportunities for the Warsaw International Mechanism under the UNFCCC

ABSTRACT Ecosystems provide essential services that form the basis of human well-being. Climate change-induced losses and damages to ecosystem services (l&d-ES) thus have significant impacts on societies. Yet, little of the work on losses and damages (l&d) has focused on ecosystem services. Also in international climate negotiations, where the debate emerged with the establishment of the Warsaw International Mechanism (WIM), there remains space for better understanding and addressing l&d-ES. Part of the explanation of this lies in the challenge of assessing such l&d. To address this gap, this paper reviews scientific literature and data obtained from Post-Disaster Needs Assessment (PDNAs) to explore ways forward for more in depth assessments. The review confirms that little attention has been given to the topic, identifying 27 relevant scientific papers with only 6 providing a disaggregated monetary value for l&d-ES. Also amongst the 64 analyised PDNAs, only 12 report such disaggregated value; valuing just one ecosystem service per impacted ecosystem. The review finds that the majority of both the scientific literature and the PDNAs relies on extrapolating values from the literature. To enhance l&d-ES assessment and, with that, the opportunity for better understanding, recognition and uptake by e.g. the WIM, this paper makes three recommendations: 1. establishing a baseline of ecosystems recognized for their services of disaster risk reduction and/or climate change adaptation, while highlighting the need for an accessible and representative benefit transfer database; 2. enhancing collaboration between scientists and practitioners; and 3. quantitatively increasing data on l&d-ES. Key policy insights There remains space for better understanding and addressing l&d-ES. To facilitate assessing l&d-ES, the establishment of ecological baselines should be encouraged for ecosystem services that can be reported on in other circumstances. Additionally, a benefit transfer database is needed that is that is geographically and ecologically representative, explicitly oriented towards l&d-ES, and easily accessible to both researchers and decision-makers. Considering the divergence of ecosystems addressed by different stakeholders, it may be advisable to encourage the collaboration of a wide stakeholder range, including scientists, to collect data that advance the understanding of l&d-ES. Disaggregated assessment of l&d-ES should be quantitatively increased and the WIM could encourage the reporting of l&d-ES, in order to expand the database and understanding of l&d-ES.

COP and the Cloth: Quantitatively and Normatively Assessing Religious NGO Participation at the Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change

How much is religion quantitatively involved in global climate politics? After assessing the role of the Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change from a normative perspective, this descriptive, transdisciplinary and unconventional study offers the first comprehensive quantitative examination of religious nongovernmental organizations that formally participate in its annual meetings, the largest attempts to solve the climate crisis through global governance. This study finds that although their numbers are growing, only about 3 percent of registered nongovernmental organizations accredited to participate in the conference are overtly religious in nature—and that more than 80 percent of those faith-based groups are Christian. Additionally, this study finds that religious nongovernmental organizations that participate in the conference are mostly from the Global North. The results call for greater participation of religious institutions in the international climate negotiations in order for society to address the planetary emergency of climate change.

Producing nationalized futures of climate change and science in India

ABSTRACT The complex relationship between climate knowledge production and political action has long been discussed. Critical and post-colonial analyses have looked at how models, used to produce scientific projections of climatic shifts, produce novel concepts of territory by the nation-state. The production of novel political temporalities has largely been ignored, however. This chapter critically analyses and compares two climate reports produced by the Indian Government. These reports, the first climatology reports developed in India, represent two significant shifts in the State’s temporal imaginary of climate change and climate politics. First, the State, through these reports, temporally orients itself to the future (models of potential climates-to-be), rather than the past (attribution of historical responsibility to Northern states) as it had during the first half of international climate negotiations at the United Nations. Second, by focusing on the development of regional-specific models, the Indian government subtly continues to resist the imposition of a synchronized, global time of climate change, albeit through a nationalist framework. If the meaning of climate change is ultimately derived from a clash of competing temporalities between Global South and North, as well as between humanity and Nature, it speaks to the necessity of post-colonial scholars to engage directly with the meanings of the future in the Anthropocene.

Negotiating the future of the Adaptation Fund: on the politics of defining and defending justice in the post-Paris Agreement period

ABSTRACT The Paris Agreement's rapid entry into force, less than one year after it was adopted, reaffirmed that the international community would continue its efforts to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to climate change impacts. Yet structures created under the Kyoto Protocol, like the Adaptation Fund, were left in a state of unprecedented ambiguity because parties had to actively approve their continuation under the Paris Agreement, or risk seeing them fade into history. Drawing on narrative political analysis of negotiating texts and observations at meetings of the Conference of the Parties (COP), we argue that the Adaptation Fund negotiations became a particularly intense site for the contestation of justice-based norms in international climate policy. Developing countries’ ardent and almost unanimous support for the continuation of the Adaptation Fund, despite the Fund's relatively small share of international climate finance, provides important insights into processes of norm contestation in international climate negotiations since the Paris Agreement, which marked a significant transition toward liberal norm structures. We explore how this unwavering support for the Adaptation Fund—and the claims to distributive and procedural justice it represents—could impact not only Fund governance and structure in the post-Paris Agreement period, but also the success of future adaptation efforts and the Paris Agreement itself. Key policy insights As global environmental governance moves towards a more liberal conception of justice, developing countries are holding on to specific issues, such as adaptation finance, to preserve distributive justice-based norms, deeply rooted in the history of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). A critical tension in international adaptation finance is contrasting conceptualizations of justice and responsibility. While developed countries increasingly see their climate financing decisions as optional and in the same vein as development aid, developing countries argue that financing is an obligation for countries with historic responsibility for climate change. In order to resolve some of the stickiest issues on climate finance, pressing concerns about procedural and distributive justice must be addressed. Developing countries will focus on defending their position and power in the negotiations, rather than discussing technical decisions, until justice is acknowledged and preserved.

Impacts of the carbon emission trading system on China's carbon emission peak: a new data-driven approach.

Over the past four decades, China’s extensive economic growth mode has led to substantial greenhouse gas emissions, and China has become the world’s largest emitter since 2009. In order to alleviate the dual pressures from international climate negotiations and domestic environmental degradation, the Chinese government has pronounced it will reach its emission peak before 2030. However, through analyzing 12 scenarios, we found that it will be very difficult to meet this ambitious goal under the current widely used policies. With the trial implementation of China’s carbon emission trading system (ETS), concerns arise over whether national ETS can accelerate the carbon peak process. In this paper, we propose a new proactive data envelopment analysis approach to investigate the impacts of national carbon ETS on carbon peak. Several important results are obtained. For example, we find that carbon ETS has a significant accelerating effect on carbon peak, which effect will advance the carbon peak by one to 2 years, and the corresponding peak values are reduced by 2.71–3 Gt. In addition, the setting of carbon price in the current Chinese pilot carbon market is found to be overly conservative. Last, our estimation on the carbon trading volume indicates that the ETS lacks vitality as the annual average carbon trading volume only represents approximately 4.3% of the total average carbon emissions. Based on these findings, several policy implications are suggested regarding the means by which China can more smoothly peak its carbon emissions before 2030 and implement national carbon ETS.

Devlet ve Devlet-dışı Aktörler arasında Küresel İklim Yönetişimi: Çekişme ve Yeniden Meşrulaştırma Dinamikleri

Global climate governance is one of the most complex global governance systems that is also ridden with
 divergent interests of states and non-state actors. Since the 2000s, the authority of UN-led global climate
 governance has been contested by the states declining their mitigation targets of the Kyoto Protocol and by
 those that find the international climate negotiations inefficient to ramp up climate action. These divergent
 views of states resulted in the counter-institutionalization apparent in the proliferation of minilateral
 forums and hybrid coalitions of climate initiatives oftentimes bringing states and non-state actors together.
 These non-UNFCCC partnerships have functioned to be strategic actions that put pressure on the global
 climate governance system to re-legitimate itself. Meanwhile, transnational actors have also contested the
 same system demanding a deeper cooperation that will keep the temperature goal below 2 degrees. This
 study argues that with its new mode of governance named hybrid multilateralism, the Paris Agreement
 was actually an institutional adaptation to the contestations by states and non-state actors in the forms
 of counter-institutionalization and politicization. It also discusses the problematic sides of the functions
 that non-state actors are expected to provide in this new governance mode. This paper is composed of
 four parts: firstly, the theoretical background that feeds into the analysis of empirical data with regard to
 global climate governance will be presented. Secondly, beginning from the Rio Conference, milestone
 developments in global climate governance will be examined by taking the contestation by the states into
 consideration. In the third part, the process of the politicization of climate change in which transnational
 actors and specifically the climate change movement demanded more decisive climate action will be
 explicated. In the last part, the existing legitimacy deficits with regard to non-state actors in post-Paris
 climate governance will be elaborated.

The Issues of Loss and Damage Within the International Climate Law

Climate change has become an important element on the international political agenda and presents the international community with new legal challenges. Some consensus was reached at the 1992 Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Since COP 16 (Cancun 2010) Loss and Damage (L&D) was accepted in international climate negotiations and on COP 19 (Warsaw 2013) the Warsaw International Mechanism (WIM) for loss and damage related to climate change impacts was established. At COP 21 (Paris 2015) with Article 8 of the Paris Agreement (PA), the topic of loss and damage officially entered a new international legal system. However, in paragraph 51 of Decision 1 / COP 21 to accept the PA any liability or compensation is expressly excluded from Article 8. Nevertheless, the concept of loss and damage has become an independent third pillar of the international climate regime and points to the negative effects of climate change, which cannot be avoided by adaptation and mitigation. The concept of loss and damage is expected to address the inevitable impacts of climate change, particularly affecting the most vulnerable least-developed countries (LDCs), low-lying developing countries and small island developing states (SIDS). The purpose of this article is to give an insight into the L&D discourse.

Negotiating weights for burden sharing rules in international climate negotiations: an empirical analysis

We have collected data from a world-wide survey among COP delegates to empirically investigate preferences for certain burden sharing rules among key groups in a setting that reflects the possibility of observing concessions from negotiating partners. In our survey, the participants had the opportunity to select and combine up to eight (pre-defined) burden sharing rules and to assign relative weights to the selected rules in their preferred bundle. We examine whether such a mechanism helps to overcome the currently strictly (self-interested) strategic claims on equity in the negotiation process. We observe that delegates from different groups of countries show a general willingness for concessions. However, the degree to which different burden sharing rules are taken into consideration partly differs between countries. As a key insight we report that the individual assessment of the polluter-pays rule based on current emissions does not only stress the persistence of the traditional Annex-B/Non-Annex-B division but also suggests tendencies for a more fragmented grouping with different positions between, for example, delegates from developing countries (i.e. G77 members) and emerging countries (i.e. BASIC). At the same time, we observe tendencies for a more harmonized view among key groups towards the ability-to-pay rule in a setting of weighted burden sharing rules.

Beyond delegation size: developing country negotiating capacity and NGO ‘support’ in international climate negotiations

Unequal negotiating capacity has been a longstanding concern for developing countries in multilateral environmental negotiations, affecting their fair and active participation in shaping outcomes. Questions over capacity have often been measured and answered through focusing on delegation size. This article argues that this approach is increasingly limited due to changing practices of non-state actor inclusion within state delegations to the UN climate change negotiations. More significantly, delegation size also obscures more subtle capacity-building efforts through specialized non-governmental organizations that have emerged to ‘support’ developing country delegations. Whilst existing research has analysed the diverse roles that NGOs play in international negotiations, NGOs whose main purpose is to provide negotiating support have been neglected and under-explored. This article addresses this neglect by presenting three brief case studies of such NGOs. It derives from these cases a typology of negotiating support NGOs to illustrate their variance in terms of the ‘range’ of issues supported and the ‘scale’ of support provided to developing countries, whilst providing directions for future research. It illustrates the ways in which NGOs also ‘perform’ diplomacy, and contributes to a more nuanced understanding of how developing countries negotiate in climate negotiations.

International Climate Negotiations: Processes and Politics

International Climate Negotiations: Processes and Politics

Turning Away from Wicked Ways: Christian Climate Change Politics in the Pacific Island Region

ABSTRACT Based on the cross-referencing of ethnographic materials collected in Fiji and Vanuatu, this article explores the diverse ways faith and climate change are connected together and how these connections are sustained and transformed over time. It does so through the prism of three ‘practices of assemblage’ identified by Tania Murray Li, namely forging alignments, authorising knowledge, and reassembling. It emphasises the partnership and combined efficacy of faith-based organisations and the Bible in these practices, while revealing the role of various other actants including God, NGOs, youth activists, cyclones, a Ni-Vanuatu canoe, and Fiji’s Presidency of COP23. This approach highlights the coexistence, in both Fiji and Vanuatu, of a religiously informed and adaptation-oriented environmental stewardship narrative, stressing human responsibility in the face of climate change, with a counter-narrative considering climate change as God’s business. This coexistence sometimes creates tensions between worldly and religious responses to climate change. These different religious perspectives of climate change can also be deployed as a political resource in nation-building processes, regional power relations, and international climate negotiations. In Oceania indeed, climate change appears as a new arena in which the inextricable entanglement of Christianity and politics is revealed.

Market responses to global governance: International climate cooperation and Europe's carbon trading

AbstractInternational environmental cooperation can impose significant costs on private firms. Yet, in recent years some companies have been supportive of international climate agreements. This suggests that under certain conditions environmental accords can be profitable. In this paper, I seek to explain this puzzle by focusing on the interaction between domestic regulation and decisions at international climate negotiations. I argue that global climate cooperation hurts the profits of polluting firms if domestic governments do not shield them from international compliance costs. Vice versa, if firms are subject to protective (i.e., insufficiently severe) policy instruments at home, firms can materially gain from international climate agreements that sustain expectations about their profitability. I test the argument with an event study of the effect of decisions at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) on major European firms that received free carbon permits in the early stages of the European Union Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS). The analysis suggests that financial markets carefully follow the international climate negotiations, and reward the regulated firms based on the outcome of UNFCCC decisions. The evidence also indicates the advantageous interplay between certain types of domestic regulations and international regimes for business. More generally, the results show the perils of privately supported policy for the effectiveness of international public good provision.

Extraction and development: fossil fuel production narratives and counternarratives in Colombia

ABSTRACT Colombia, a country that is very vulnerable to climate change, has played a positive role in international climate negotiations. Paradoxically, Colombia is also the sixth largest coal exporter globally, and its government has adopted policies to further increase the country’s production of coal and other fossil fuels. This article explores to what extent the national government reproduces a powerful paradigm – namely, that fossil fuel extraction is necessary for development – and how this resonates at the sub-national level. We find that the government’s narrative has evolved to accommodate Colombia’s changing national circumstances and public criticism. Though counternarratives exist, they have struggled to propose credible nationwide alternatives to extractive-based development, thus reinforcing the belief that extraction-based development is unavoidable. We describe how government narratives constitute an obstacle to both supply-side policies to restrict fossil fuel development and to transitional assistance policies to adjust to shifts in the global coal market. Key policy insights The view that fossil fuel extraction is necessary for development is a powerful barrier to supply – side climate policy. This view also hinders the formulation of transitional assistance policy. Empirical evidence that fossil fuel extraction seldom leads to equitable development is not enough to overcome this view. Narratives on fossil fuel-based development continuously adjust to prevailing economic development paradigms and contemporary development challenges.

The Discourse of Climate Change and Womens Health: Some Insights on Gender Mainstreaming

Climate Change has an overwhelming health impact on all, especially on the women, constituting around 49. 58% of the global population. There is ample literary evidence in support of the claim that a changing climate has a differentiated impact on humanity and that it is not “gender neutral”. Climate driven food scarcity, poor air quality, rising temperature and extreme weather events (floods, droughts, heat waves etc. ), acute water shortage, increasing incidence of vector borne diseases make the situation all the more dreadful for women in particular. And this vulnerability gets even more critical because of various biological, political, social and cultural factors that historically contributed against women and their empowerment. Though women are reservoirs of indigenous knowledge about how to deal with the aftermath of climatic changes, yet they remain largely untapped. However the importance of gender based climate action plan was long absent in arena of international climate negotiation. It was only in COP7 (2001) where women’s involvement in climate action had first caught global attention and subsequently nodal international bodies are working on formulating programmes and appropriate policies for promoting gender balance. However, the progress on this has been limited in comparison to the magnitude of impacts of climatic changes on women’s health and hence much more needs to be done on the policy front so as to promote gender equity and women’s participation in various adaptation and mitigation policies.

Stock Market Reactions to International Climate Negotiations

Several studies have shown that investors take environmental regulation into account in their investment decisions. We investigate if international climate negotiations are an effective signal to decarbonize the economy. For that purpose, we analyze short-term market reactions to the outcomes of international climate negotiations, through an event study. We compare the stock price effects on the largest green“ companies with the largest brown“ companies globally. We find that international climate negotiations have a signaling effect on global financial markets. Before 2013, climate negotiations mainly had effects on green“ companies. Only starting in 2013, but especially in 2015 (Paris Agreement), we can find negative effects on brown“ companies. This indicates that the focus has shifted to the risks for brown companies. Although the Paris Agreement was considered a political milestone, it was less effective as an investment signal. A possible explanation is the mismatch between international targets and national policies.

A Behavioural Approach to International Climate Negotiations

The article analyses the strategies of Latin American countries in international climate negotiations, their main determinants and modifications in the last twenty years. It aims at understanding why at the beginning of the negotiation process in the 1990s Latin American countries were reluctant to make GHG mitigation commitments but at present they have all signed the Paris Agreement and are working on implementing their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). Content analysis was performed on Latin American delegates’ declarations in UNFCCC Climate Change Conferences (COPs) between 1995 and 2014. The article identifies the economic and governance incentives that have been introduced in the international climate regime to induce behavioural change among developing countries’ decision makers, including economic instruments (carbon markets), higher recognition of equity issues within the UNFCCC participation mechanisms, availability of new information, climate finance provision and growing trade restrictions for market access based on the carbon content of exported products.

Communicating marine climate change impacts in the Caribbean and Pacific regions

The scientific literature on marine and coastal climate change has proliferated in recent decades. Translating and communicating this evidence in a timely, and accessible manner, is critical to support adaptation, but little is being done to summarise the latest science for decision makers. For Small Island Developing States (SIDS), which are highly vulnerable to marine and coastal climate change impacts, there is an urgent need to make the latest science readily available to inform national policy, leverage climate funding and highlight their vulnerability for international reports and climate negotiations. Climate change report cards are a proven successful way of presenting climate change information in an easily accessible and informative manner. Here we compare the development of marine climate change report cards for Caribbean and Pacific Commonwealth SIDS as a means of translating the latest science for decision makers. Regional engagement, priority issues and lessons learnt in these regions are compared, and future opportunities identified.

Collective risk social dilemma and the consequences of the US withdrawal from international climate negotiations

International climate negotiations represent an interesting theoretical problem, which can be analyzed as a collective risk social dilemma as well as an n-person bargaining model. The problem is made more complicated by politics due to the differences between: (1) total and per capita emissions; and (2) present-day and cumulative emissions. Here, we use a game theoretic approach in conjunction with the literature on effort-sharing approaches to study a model of climate negotiations based on empirical emissions data. We introduce a ‘fair equilibrium’ bargaining solution and examine the consequences of the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. Our results suggest that the collective goal can still be reached but that this requires additional greenhouse gas emissions cuts from other countries, notably, China and India. Given the history of climate negotiations, it is unclear if these countries will have sufficient political will to accept the additional costs created by the US defection.

Brexit and the EU in Global Climate Governance

Climate change governance is one of the EU’s priorities. The EU has developed a central (and arguably, a leading) role in global climate governance. The UK has been an important supporter of strong climate action both within the EU and in international climate negotiations. We investigate how/whether the EU’s role in global climate governance will be affected by Brexit by focusing on potential changes in three conditions for EU leadership: (1) credible and ambitious internal climate policy; (2) constant and effective international engagement through climate diplomacy; and (3) the ability to attract followers. We find that the UK has sometimes played the role of a pivotal outlier, either pushing for more internal policy ambition or blocking certain policy options. Brexit is likely to have cumulative effects on the EU’s role in global climate governance over the long term, through a series of changes in internal EU policymaking and climate diplomacy. The speed and scope of these changes depend on the nature of the future UK–EU relationship. We argue that the broader international context and strains on EU unity represent more urgent challenges to the EU’s role in global climate governance than those posed by Brexit.

Role of Small Islands in UN Climate Negotiations: A Constructivist Viewpoint

This article is about small island developing states (SIDS) and their role in the United Nations (UN) climate negotiations. It presents a discussion about how a constructivist model of foreign policy analysis and international system design can be used to explain the impact of climate ideas of SIDS on UN climate system. The SIDS have been in the UN climate negotiations since the 1980s, committed to a climate agenda with clear ideas about the challenges they face and the type of solutions they seek from the international policy community. In this respect, this article seeks to explain that climate ideas shared among SIDS have established an intersubjective understanding to promote a compelling common voice at international climate negotiations, which is based on an island vulnerability identity. These ideas have shaped the policy thinking and interests of climate negotiators to design institutional frameworks that have given special consideration to SIDS. It concludes that this observation represents a disproportionate impact of SIDS. Despite the weak material powers for being small islands, their climate agenda has influenced the UN system design to address their concerns.