Multilateral Climate Negotiations Research Articles

No climate for cooperation: India-US climate relations during the Trump years

Since the start of multilateral climate negotiations, India and the US have been on opposite sides of the aisle on the issue of responsibility for climate action. Following years of intense scrutiny, India found points of convergence with the US and worked closely with the Obama administration to help secure a global deal at the 2015 Paris Climate Conference. The Trump era, however, marked a period of stark divergence between India and the US on the issue of climate change. The US’ climate inaction at the multilateral level under the Trump administration was met with India’s proactive global leadership in the fight against climate change. At the same time, the bilateral relationship saw greater convergence on the issue of energy trade, particularly conventional sources of energy such as coal, oil and gas. This essay analyzes India-US climate relations during the Trump years and argues that the personal views of the political leadership and domestic interest groups affected the nature of this relationship, which is best described as divergence on climate change but convergence on energy security.

India and Climate Change: Old Traditions, New Strategies

Climate change emerged as a serious diplomatic concern for India in the early 1990s. India has since been a staunch champion of the developing world, in multilateral climate negotiations; from playing a key role in establishing the principle of common but differentiated responsibility and respective capabilities, to forging alliances with countries with shared developmental concerns. Faced with the growing impact of climate change and changing geopolitics, India’s foreign policy on climate change has undergone significant shifts during two decades of multilateral climate talks. First, India’s willingness to undertake domestic climate action as a result of its changing economic status and, second, the role of the political leadership—since Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power in 2014—in shaping the climate discourse both in the country and abroad. India has, in recent years, shed its defensive, naysayer strategy at climate negotiations and led several multilateral initiatives for climate action. As India celebrates 75 years of its Independence, it is forging a new, confident leadership on issues of climate change. While there is continuity in India’s traditional stance on finance and technology transfer during negotiations, Indian foreign policy has begun to display a marked change in the strategic use of climate change to assert greater power on the global stage.

Green finance: An empirical analysis of the Green Climate Fund portfolio structure

While multilateral climate negotiations are at a deadlock, climate finance faces a crossroads as the lending community needs to develop renewed strategies on the ‘Future of Environment Funds’. Most policy and scholarly attention have been directed on how to improve the largest multilateral climate fund – the Green Climate Fund (GCF) – own funding, compared to surprisingly few studies on the allocation strategies of the GCF funding. A conventional view so far has been of a Fund devoted mostly to finance non-bankable projects with public funding. Yet, improving the ability of the GCF to channelize both public and private sources of finance, and to contribute to de-risking more traditional sources of finance, would scale up climate finance and at the same time also improve the GCF own attractiveness for contributors. In this paper we empirically analyse the GCF portfolio structure and strategy and suggest the GCF can skillfully fund non-bankable parts of larger “nearly bankable projects”. This supports a view of the GCF that departs from the conventional one.

China’s rising influence on climate governance: Forging a path for the global South

China’s influence on climate governance has been steadily increasing since the adoption of the Paris Agreement on climate change in 2015. Much of this influence, this article argues, has come from China forging a path for climate adaptation and mitigation for the global South. This is having far-reaching consequences, the article further argues, for the politics of global climate governance. China’s discursive and diplomatic power in climate politics is growing as China builds alliances across the global South. China is leveraging this enhanced soft power to elevate the importance of adaptation in multilateral climate negotiations, advance a technocentric approach to climate mitigation, export its development model, and promote industrial-scale afforestation as a nature-based climate solution. China’s strategy is enhancing climate financing, technology transfers, renewable power, and adaptation infrastructure across the global South. To some extent, this is helping with a transition to a low-carbon world economy. Yet China’s leadership is also reinforcing incremental, technocratic, and growth-oriented solutions in global climate governance. These findings advance the understanding of China’s role in global environmental politics, especially its growing influence on climate governance in the global South.

Our climate and health emergency - Future role for global public health

Abstract Prof Laetitia Rispel is Immediate past President of the WFPHA, and Professor of Public Health at the University of the Witwatersrand: Johannesburg. She has a strong research background and publication record on public health governance, health workforce education, ethics, policy and practice. Following talks on the relationship between climate change and food and water insecurity presenting a public health emergency, and case examples of recent disasters, Professor Rispel will outline the WFPHA vision for the public health sector's role in the coming decades. The expanding need for well resourced, and well-trained public health sector at national and regional levels will be outlined. As the world careers ever closer to existential threats from unabated climate change, a key theme covered will be the imperative for multilateral climate negotiations to include public health experts Following this presentation, the panel will invite questions and discussion from the floor to share experience and develop solutions-based model for expanded role of public health, and how we transition to that new world.

India’s approach to international law in the climate change regime

In the last decade of the multilateral climate negotiations, particularly in the negotiations leading up to the 2015 Paris Agreement, India questioned the need to negotiate a new legally binding instrument. Although other developing countries were also initially reluctant to negotiate a new legally binding instrument, over time their opposition fell away, and in the end, India alone remained opposed to the negotiation of a new legally binding instrument to fortify the climate change regime. Instead, India endorsed and privileged other softer forms of law, thus both triggering innovation and experimentation in law-making as well as blurring the boundaries between law, soft law, and non-law. This article examines India’s position in the last decade of the climate negotiations in relation to “legal bindingness”, exploring in particular possible reasons for India’s wariness on issues relating to “legal bindingness”.

Limited trading of emissions permits as a climate cooperation mechanism? US–China and EU–China examples

Recent multilateral climate negotiations have underlined the importance of international cooperation and the need for support from developed to developing countries to address climate change. This raises the question of whether carbon market linkages could be used as a cooperation mechanism. Policy discussions surrounding such linkages have indicated that, should they operate, a limit would be set on the amount of carbon permits that could be imported by developed regions from developing countries. This paper analyzes the impact of limited carbon trading between an ETS in the EU or the US and a carbon market covering Chinese electricity and energy intensive sectors using a global economy-wide model. We find that the limit results in different carbon prices between China and Europe or the US. Although the impact on low-carbon technologies in China is moderate, global emission reductions are deeper than in the absence of international trading due to reduced carbon leakage. If China captures the rents associated with limited permit trading, we show that it is possible to find a limit threshold that makes both regions better off relative to carbon markets operating in isolation.

A Minilateral Solution for Global Climate Change? On Bargaining Efficiency, Club Benefits, and International Legitimacy

Gridlock in the multilateral climate negotiations has created growing scholarly and practical interest in the use of minilateral forums. A large variety of climate club proposals have been developed in recent years, which promise more effective bargaining among the main climate powers, better incentives to encourage mitigation efforts and discourage free-riding, and new ways to align international power asymmetries with the interests of the global climate regime. I investigate the three dominant rationales that underpin minilateralist proposals. I offer a critical review of their potential as well as their limitations in promoting global climate action. I argue that minilateralism is unlikely to overcome the structural barriers to a comprehensive and ambitious international climate agreement. However, climate clubs can enhance political dialogue in the context of multilateral negotiations and can provide a more conducive environment for great power bargaining. They can create club benefits that strengthen mitigation strategies and help reduce the dangers of free-riding for so-called coalitions of the willing. And they can help re-legitimate the global climate regime against the background of profound power shifts that have slowed down progress in the multilateral negotiations.

Frameworks for Evaluating Policy Approaches to Address the Competitiveness Concerns of Mitigating Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Domestic carbon pricing policies may impose adverse competitiveness risks on energy-intensive firms and industries competing with foreign firms that may bear a lower or zero price on carbon. The risks of competitiveness effects include adverse economic outcomes — reduced production, lower employment, and higher net imports — and adverse environmental outcomes, with the shifting of emissions-intensive activities to unregulated foreign markets. Each can undermine political support for carbon pricing. Competitiveness policies, such as border tax adjustments, output-based tax credits, and related policies, also carry potential risks. They may result in less favorable distributional outcomes, undermine cost-effectiveness and economic efficiency, and raise risks in international trade and multilateral climate negotiations. This paper reviews the theoretical and empirical research on competitiveness risks, as well as the risks posed by competitiveness policies, and presents two alternative frameworks through which policymakers can weigh these various risks when evaluating policy options for addressing potential competitiveness effects as a part of a domestic carbon pricing regime.

Responsibilities in Transition: Emerging Powers in the Climate Change Negotiations

The BASIC countries (Brazil, South Africa, India, and China) play an increasingly prominent role in global climate negotiations. Climate governance spotlights burden-sharing arrangements, asking countries to take on potentially costly actions to resolve a global problem, even as the benefits are generally indivisible public goods. This article examines the BASIC countries' own Joint Statements and their individual and collective submissions to multilateral climate negotiations to identify the rationalist and principled arguments they have made about the climate burden-sharing requirements that developed countries, developing countries, and they themselves should face in global climate governance. It argues that their expectations for their own role are particularly unclear, with greater national action than international commitments to do so.

Reflections on small island states and the international climate change negotiations (COP21, Paris, 2015)

The latest and most significant round of multilateral climate negotiations (COP21) takes place in Paris (30/11 to 11/12/2015). Like other participants and signatories to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, small island states have submitted contributions (INDCs) towards reducing emissions as a precursor to the creation of a post-Kyoto global emissions framework. This reflection outlines their contributions and examines the underlying dynamics of small island INDCs as they attempt to engage with the process of international negotiation. Preliminary findings confirm the need for small island states to be supported financially and technically by global institutional mechanisms in order to develop the capacity to deal with climate change.

Business Interests and US–China Relations on Climate Change*

Cooperation between the USA and China serves as the lynch pin for the creation of an effective international climate regime. Recent US–China relations on climate change exhibit the contrasting pattern of active collaboration at the bilateral level and hostile relations at multilateral climate negotiations. This article argues that domestic politics, in particular business interests, largely explain the variation in US–China relations at the bilateral and multilateral levels. Due to the fragmented and decentralized structure of the climate policy community in the USA and China, business interests wield a disproportionately large influence over climate politics in both countries. Unlike multilateral climate negotiations that focus on universal benefits, bilateral collaborations on climate change projects deliver targeted benefits to business sectors through various government funding, support and favorable policies. As a result, business interests in the USA and China are quite supportive of bilateral climate change projects, while they oppose any endeavor to implement binding regulations in multilateral climate negotiations. Such observation implies that meaningful US–China cooperation on climate change will have to occur through bilateral projects that induce active private sector partnerships and private–public partnerships.

Genesis of the CDM: the original policymaking goals of the 1997 Brazilian proposal and their evolution in the Kyoto protocol negotiations into the CDM

A body of literature is emerging applying critical consideration to the Kyoto Protocol Clean Development Mechanism’s (‘CDM’) achievement of policy goals regarding sustainable development, geographical distribution of projects and related matters. This article places this literature in the context of the policymaking goals of the CDM’s Brazilian architects. The CDM arose from the Brazilian Proposal’s Clean Development Fund, and was negotiated between Brazil and the United States in the weeks preceding the Kyoto Conference of Parties. The CDM’s Brazilian architects continued to pursue their underlying policy goals by taking a leadership position in the Marrakesh Accords negotiations. During this period Brazil’s primary policy objectives comprised achieving meaningful mitigation of GHG emissions to avoid dangerous interference with the climate system, derailing a perceived US/IPCC initiative to allocate emissions cap obligations in the Kyoto Protocol on the basis of current emissions, and taking a leadership position both among the G-77 and China and in the multilateral climate negotiations as a whole. The CDM arose in this context from the G-77 and China’s desire to coerce the North’s compliance with the North’s emissions cap obligations through an alternative means of compliance. As a result, there was no focus on broad conceptions of sustainable development, or on broad distribution of CDM projects throughout the South. Instead, the CDM’s Brazilian architects envisioned that CDM-related sustainable development would arise exclusively from the presence of the CDM projects. Similarly, the Brazilian Proposal advocated allocation of the Clean Development Fund on a basis proportionate to each non-Annex I countries projected 1990–2010 greenhouse gas emissions. These views persisted through the evolution of the Clean Development Fund into the CDM and through Marrakesh Accords negotiations. This article argues that the CDM has largely met the policy goals of its Brazilian architects and that the pursuit of different, additional, refined or more nuanced policy goals necessitates corresponding refinements to the CDM, or any successor mechanism, specifically targeting those different, additional, refined or more nuanced policy objectives, lending support to the emerging literature proposing changes to the CDM to pursue corresponding policy objectives.

Fair and effective multilateralism in the post-Copenhagen climate negotiations

Copenhagen failed to agree a new legal treaty, and fragmentation is now a possible scenario. What options exist for a fair and effective multilateralism that might bring about the next turning point? Possible changes are considered in the context of the ‘how, what, where and who’ of multilateral climate negotiations. Fair process is crucial to an acceptable outcome. In order to increase effectiveness, multilateralism may need to define contributions from smaller groups, on a representative basis. The functions of other fora must be to build common understanding, whereas decisions and agreements are negotiated under the UNFCCC and its instruments. Reorganization of work within the UNFCCC will need to enhance its catalytic role, including how it supports domestic action. A mix of processes is needed to speed up the pace of decision-making, combining well-established UN procedures with some innovative ideas including those from the theory and practice in other multilateral environmental agreements. A review in 2015 must increase ambition. We need to invest in the UNFCCC, which remains the only legitimate, fully inclusive forum. Only a legally binding agreement ensures that others also act (‘fair’) and a binding nature is the best assurance of implementation (‘effective’). Equity demands a fair and effective outcome.

The Climate Commons and a Global Environmental Organization

The Climate Commons and a Global Environmental Organization C. Ford Runge (bio) Over the period 2000 to 2008, the United States maintained a largely hostile posture toward multilateralism, ranging from military adventurism to rejection of international norms for human rights and climate change. Its support for the Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations was undercut by a failure to live up to global commitments to foreign assistance (the Millennium Challenge) and protectionist and retrograde 2008 agricultural legislation. If this experience shows America anything, it is that renouncing its role as a constructive multilateral leader (dating to 1945) has been a disaster for its foreign policy and the esteem in which it is held. This desultory period is now at an end, and a fresh start can be imagined in which U.S. leadership over multilateralism returns. One of the most pressing challenges relates to global climate change and atmospheric carbon emissions. This issue is emblematic of environmental challenges that are transboundary in nature, in which sovereign nations must coordinate effective interventions with one another. These issues of global commons, of which the climate commons may be the most urgent, may provide an opportunity to push forward an agenda of institutional change. The specific change considered here is the creation of a Global Environmental Organization (GEO), which can give authority and responsibility to multilateral climate negotiations. My argument is that the creation of new multilateral institutions responding to global environmental challenges such as climate change is imperative. Fortunately, though these institutions would be new, their rationale and even their structure can be guided by experience with multilateral trade and commercial transactions, notably the World Trade Organization (WTO) and General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) system and the International Labor Organization (ILO).1 Just as the GATT/WTO emerged from the postwar conferences [End Page 139] as a rules-based response to global commercial interdependence, and an earlier ILO from global labor solidarity, so multilateral responses to environmental challenges reflect a growing recognition of nations' ecological interdependence, and a need for rules to coordinate their responses to these global challenges. This chapter is organized in five sections. First is a brief review of the trade-environment nexus and the rationale for global environmental rules over climate that can coexist with trade regimes. Second is a specific proposal for a GEO, a major responsibility of which would be to coordinate nations' responses to climate change. Third is an appraisal of the implementation of a GEO. Fourth is special consideration of the role of developing countries. A final section offers conclusions. The Trade-Environment Nexus In the last two decades, strident criticisms have been leveled at multilateral institutions such as the WTO, describing them as faceless international bureaucracies with programs harmful to the environment.2 Although hostile to multilateral institutions, these criticisms raise the question: If not these institutions, then what others? Though many criticisms of the global economy and global institutions may have merit, it is hard to think of a future in which trade and global institutions, or issues of environment, will play little or no part. Accordingly, the task is to redefine objectives in a global economy, and to restructure institutions to meet these objectives, especially the urgent challenge of climate change. The climate change debate has played out, like many other transboundary environmental issues, as a multilateral negotiation over a protocol agreement, the Kyoto Protocol of the Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) adopted December 11, 1997, which entered into force in February 2005. As of May 2008, 182 parties had ratified the protocol, including 36 developed and 137 developing countries (the United States is the only developed country not to have ratified it). Kyoto commits countries to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases (GHGs) or to engage in emissions trading to offset such commitments. Partly due to a failure of leadership by the United States, and partly due to exemptions written into the agreement for developing countries, especially large GHG emitters such as China, the protocol has been roundly criticized. [End Page 140] This chapter argues that successful multilateral environmental agreements on climate change, as well as many other transboundary environmental issues, may require...

A guide to the Kyoto protocol: a treaty with potentially vital strategic implications for the renewables industry

Why should renewables advocates care about the arcane business of multilateral climate negotiations? The answer is simple. Because these long-running and oft bogged-down talks have as their ultimate objective a goal with seismic implications for energy markets: substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Coming anywhere close to that goal would entail the creation of multi-hundred billion dollar markets in renewables in the years ahead. And in Kyoto last December, governments took a meaningful first step in that direction. This paper is a brief summary, and analysis of that first step. It concludes with some observations about immediate implications for the renewables industries.