United Nations Climate Summit Research Articles

Did the Glasgow COP26 negotiations meet or miss Article 6 (carbon markets) of the Paris Agreement? A systematic review of the literature

AbstractThe Paris Agreement is an important milestone in international climate policy and the associated negotiations of the United Nations Climate Summit under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Article 6 of the Paris Agreement is a supplementary mechanism—regarding carbon markets—to reduce greenhouse gases and achieve the UNFCCC's main objective of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations. The 2021 United Nations Climate Summit in Glasgow (COP26) played a key role in the pursuit of this goal. Via an overview of Article 6 negotiations in past COP summits and a systematic review and qualitative meta‐synthesis of the literature leading up to COP26, I identify three arguments involving Articles 6.2, 6.4, and 6.8 behind the selected literature. I substantiate these arguments based on the meta‐evaluation of the existing literature and propose a three‐stage meta‐evaluation of the arguments on Article 6 (carbon markets) of the Paris Agreement in the context of COP26 to ascertain if the negotiations were successful in leading to requisite agreements on Article 6. I conclude that future qualitative research should focus on Articles 6.4 and 6.8 of the Paris Agreement and examine the outcomes of future climate debates to see how ideas will flow through the negotiations regarding these two articles to pursue the goal of the UNFCCC under the Paris Agreement.Related ArticlesJihyung Joo, Jihyung, Jouni Paavola, and James Van Alstine. 2023. “The Divergence of South Korea's Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) from the EU ETS: An Institutional Complementarity View.” Politics & Policy 51(6): 1155–73. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12566.Nunes Silva, Carlos. 2012. “Policy and Evidence in a Partisan Age: The Great Disconnect—By Paul Gary Wyckoff.” Politics & Policy 40(3): 541–43. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2012.00363.x.Robles, Pedro, and Daniel J. Mallinson. 2023. “Catching up with AI: Pushing toward a Cohesive Governance Framework.” Politics & Policy 51(3): 355–72. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12529.

Forecasting carbon peaking in China using data-driven rule-base model: An in-depth analysis across regional and economic scenarios

At the 2020 United Nations Climate Summit, China officially announced the goal to achieve carbon peaking by 2030. Exploring whether it is possible to reach the peak of carbon emissions earlier necessitates an urgent and imperative need for precise long-term forecasting of China's carbon emissions dynamics. However, the current carbon peaking predictions mostly depend on mechanical or mathematical models, which failed to consider the interdependence between carbon emissions and the time series-based patterns existed in carbon emission data. Therefore, this study presents a novel carbon peaking prediction method based on the data-driven rule-base model, which is implemented by the adaption of the extended belief rule base (EBRB) model for time series forecasting (TSF), and thus the proposed method is referred to as TSF-EBRB model. The TSF-EBRB model not only captures and measures the temporal correlations within the data throughout the processes of modeling and inference, but also consists of a novel parameter optimization model based on the temporal correlations. The study collected carbon emission data from 30 provinces in China for empirical analysis. It computed and predicted the carbon peaking trajectories of each province under three different scenarios from 2022 to 2030, validating the effectiveness and superiority of the TSF-EBRB model better than other existing carbon peaking prediction methods. The results indicated that, with policy interventions, the majority of provinces are projected to reach carbon peaking before 2030.

Diversionary Post-Coal Politics in South Africa: A Chinese Solar-Powered Industrial Zone Controversy

In September 2021 at a United Nations climate summit in New York, Xi Jinping announced that there would be no further Chinese coal-fired power plants along the Belt and Road Initiative, which stretches as far as South Africa. Instead, the Chinese operator of South Africa’s single largest Special Economic Zone proposal – in rural Makhado – and his local allies suggested that solar power could supply energy for the $10 billion project, including high-emissions industrial projects. This raised the question of whether firms engaged in mining, smelting, processing and other carbon-intensive activities would pick ‘low-hanging fruits’ within the renewable energy sector (instead of that power going into the grid for broader consumption). Their incentive is to do so, in order to safeguard the so-called Minerals-Energy Complex from Western climate sanctions – threatened, on grounds of high CO2-inputs to export products including steel, aluminium and petrochemicals. In spite of a 2022 United Nations Development Programme endorsement of the project, social and environmental resistance has intensified, but the introduction of solar power for high-emissions metal manufacturing presents a special challenge. Two techniques associated with ecological modernisation – natural capital accounting and the Social Cost of Carbon – may prove relevant to civil society critics of ‘extractivism’, in shifting the narrative further across space, time and scale.

Continuing to Talanoa: storytelling dialogues for youth engagement in climate action and justice

This article recounts a classroom application of a dialogue, story-telling process used at COPs beginning in 2017. In that year, the Fijian President of the United Nations climate summit, COP23 in Bonn, proposed the entire assembly use his nation’s Talanoa Dialogue process for building ambition for national commitments to the Paris Agreement. When youth, women’s and Indigenous voices were heard in unprecedented ways, many committed to continuing the practice. A florescence of the Asian-Pacific-inspired, conflict-resolution storytelling and dialogue practice ensued, with some continuing for years afterward. This paper recounts eight rounds of varied Talanoa Dialogues employed in higher education contexts. Purposes ranged from internal team-building, to forging community partnerships, to serving as vehicles for youth representation in international contexts like climate COPs. All dialogues nonetheless prioritized listening, recording, and representation through ethnographic, anthropological lenses. These experiences support recommendations to (1) Create chances for youth to listen empathetically to the stories of others in ways attentive to varied national, ethnic and other intersectional (e.g. gendered, class-based) social locations, expanding their awareness and linking their affective and intellectual selves; (2) Make opportunities for youth to voice their own stories and perspectives on climate challenges and work, considering their developmental trajectories in intergenerational contexts, while emphasizing the need to “scale” from individual through global dimensions; (3) Explore the implications of borrowing from exogenous cultural traditions, considering what factors may render this relatively legitimate, as opposed to appropriative. I explore particularities of the cultural origins of Talanoa Dialogues, which mediate hierarchy and egalitarianism, arguing that this function is especially apt for navigating conundrums of youth leadership and so-called “youth-washing.”

Climate Change Cyber Activism- Visual Communication Content Analysis of Youth Activist Greta Thunberg’s Instagram

On August 14, 2019, Greta Thunberg sailed across the Atlantic Ocean to attend the United Nations Climate Summit in New York City. The purpose of this study was to explore the messaging behind youth Cyber activist Greta Thunberg’s Instagram account during her journey. We used an arts based visual content analysis approach and the following research questions guided the study: a) How did Thunberg share her climate activist journey with her Instagram followers? and b) How did Thunberg’s Instagram followers respond to posts she made during her climate activist journey? We collected posts from August 14 to 28, 2021. Images, captions, and the first ten comments of the posts shared by Thunberg’s Instagram account were qualitatively coded. Themes that emerged from the arts-based visual and textual analysis included: 1) Thunberg shared her experience through journey storytelling and voiced ongoing activism and 2) Thunberg’s audience members’ top comments indicated a primarily negative response to her journey. We highlight themes from the posts and discuss implications for online cyber activists and communication professionals.

Carbon emission scenarios of China's construction industry using a system dynamics methodology – Based on life cycle thinking

China is currently one of the world's major energy consumers and CO2 emitters. To save energy, and reduce consumption and carbon emissions, China proposed (at the 2020 United Nations General Assembly and Climate Summit) the introduction of stronger policies and measures for CO2 emissions to peak in 2030 and to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. The construction industry is a major contributor to China's carbon emissions, thus research on energy saving and carbon reduction in this industry is essential. The construction industry is characterized by complex upstream and downstream industrial chains, with different energy consumption at each stage, and a long overall life cycle. We used life-cycle thinking (LCT) to analyze the carbon emissions of the whole life cycle of the construction industry and built a model by using a system dynamics method, which analyzes the carbon emission process of the construction industry at different stages. Combined with the planning and policies implemented by the construction-related departments, we identified the main indicators of policy regulation and control. We used sensitivity analysis to examine the impacts of factors of regulation and control. We also adjusted key indicators and set up different scenarios to simulate the carbon emissions based on the effort to achieve “peak carbon.” The results show that the carbon emissions of the construction industry will be reduced by 2060, achieving the goals of “peak carbon” and “carbon neutrality.” Although the construction and operation stages individually can achieve peak carbon by 2030, the whole process of the construction industry will reach peak carbon by 2045, 2038, or 2036, depending on specific aspects of the scenario considered. However, the indicators, such as the green building ratio can realize carbon emission reduction at building operation stage for 4%∼6%, but cause greater carbon emission for 5%∼7% at construction material production and transportation stage—a phenomenon called “policy island.” Therefore, the coupling of policies should be a key concern in policy formulation and implementation.

How Climate Literacy and Public Opinion Are the Driving Forces Behind Climate-Based Policy: A Student Perspective on COP27.

Despite the existence of a substantial amount of climate-related scientific data, misconceptions about climate change are still prevalent within public opinion. Dissemination of misinformation to the public through subjective media sources is a major challenge that climate scientists face. Implementation of climate policy is crucial for mitigation and adaptation measures required to curtail anthropogenic rooted climate change. This paper will discuss student perspectives on the 2022 United Nations climate summit in Egypt (COP27) related to climate literacy and public opinion as the driving forces behind the enactment and execution of important climate-based policy.

What can the Glasgow Declaration on Forests bring to global emission reduction?

What can the Glasgow Declaration on Forests bring to global emission reduction?

Meeting the Goal of Net-Zero Carbon Emission [President’s Message

Many countries pledged to take necessary measures and limit the global temperature rise to 2&#x2009;&#x00B0;C, or better yet, 1.5&#x2009;&#x00B0;C, at the United Nations (UN) climate summit in Paris. However, according to a survey from <i>Nature</i>, many scientists think global temperatures may reach a disastrous 3&#x2009;&#x00B0;C above preindustrial levels, and around 60&#x0025; of experts from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) expect average global temperatures to reach that point by the end of the century if governments do not markedly slow the pace of global warming <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">[1]</xref>. That dynamic played out again during the 26th UN Climate Change Conference (COP26), in Glasgow, United Kingdom, in November 2021. The prime minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, declared that 2&#x2009;&#x00B0;C of temperature rise would be a &#x201C;death sentence&#x201D; for island countries. On 13 November 2021, COP26 concluded with nearly 200 countries agreeing to the Glasgow Climate Pact, which aims to limit the global temperature rise to 1.5&#x2009;&#x00B0;C and finalize the outstanding elements of the Paris Agreement.

Sustainable Use of Energy Resources, Regulatory Quality, and Foreign Direct Investment in Controlling GHGs Emissions among Selected Asian Economies

“United in Science” is the recent slogan of the United Nations climate summit in 2020. A collective effort of institutional governance, energy resources utilization, foreign inclusion, and regional collaboration is required for the Sustainable Development Goal (SDGs) of achieving a clean environment. In reaching this objective, this study investigates the sustainably of Regulatory Quality (RQ), Energy Consumption per capita (ECpc), Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), and their interaction in reducing the Greenhouse Gases (GHGs) Emissions. This study considered 27 Asian economies, covering the more extensively undertaken regional investigation, in the time period from 2001 to 2018. The results of the two-step system Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) show that RQ has a strong positive significant impact on GHGs emissions reduction. It further indicates that FDI inflows support the institutions to enhance their institutional capacities. Simultaneously, ECpc has negative impacts on GHGs emissions. Furthermore, RQ interaction with ECpc and FDI also have a strong significant positive impact on GHGs emissions reduction in Asia. The study concludes that the Asia region has been implementing aggressive and prudent policies towards environmental up-gradation to achieve sustainability. However, FDI inflows should be more allocated to environmental quality and energy efficacy to clean the climate and promote regional collaboration.

The 2017 United Nations Climate Summit: Women Fighting for System Change and Building the Commons at COP23 in Bonn, Germany

ABSTRACTThis contribution presents a “commoning ecofeminist analysis” of the actions and perspectives of selected activists within Ende Gelände (Here and No Further), Idle No More, and La Vía Campesina (The Peasant’s Way) who are seeking system change as expressed at the 23rd Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change held 6–7 November 2017 in Bonn, Germany. The analysis finds that women’s struggles for the commons, understood as cooperative control over the means of life, fundamentally challenge capitalist relations and affirm transformative alternatives. From this revolutionary potential, it follows that alliances, especially with those of Indigenous women and women of colour who are engaged in commoning, are crucial to making the epochal transition from ecocidal fossil capitalism to regenerative solar commoning.

The appeasement effect of a United Nations climate summit on the German public

As a global media event, COP 21 had the potential to enhance understanding and motivate political action. This study shows that although media coverage reached the German public and promoted conference-specific knowledge, this did not translate into active engagement. The annual UN climate summits receive intense global media coverage1,2,3, and as such could engage local publics around the world, stimulate debate and knowledge about climate politics, and, ultimately, mobilize people to combat climate change. Here we show that, in contrast to these hopes, although the German public were exposed to news about the 2015 Paris summit, they did not engage with it in a more active way. Comparing knowledge and attitudes before, during and after the summit using a three-wave online panel survey (quota sample, N = 1,121), we find that respondents learnt a few basic facts about the conference but they continue to lack basic background knowledge about climate policy. Trust in global climate policy increased a little, but citizens were less inclined to support a leading role for Germany in climate politics. Moreover, they were not more likely to engage personally in climate protection. These results suggest that this global media event had a modest appeasing rather than mobilizing effect.

Consequences of Global Warming of 1.5 °C and 2 °C for Regional Temperature and Precipitation Changes in the Contiguous United States.

The differential warming of land and ocean leads to many continental regions in the Northern Hemisphere warming at rates higher than the global mean temperature. Adaptation and conservation efforts will, therefore, benefit from understanding regional consequences of limiting the global mean temperature increase to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, a limit agreed upon at the United Nations Climate Summit in Paris in December 2015. Here, we analyze climate model simulations from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) to determine the timing and magnitude of regional temperature and precipitation changes across the contiguous United States (US) for global warming of 1.5 and 2°C and highlight consensus and uncertainties in model projections and their implications for making decisions. The regional warming rates differ considerably across the contiguous US, but all regions are projected to reach 2°C about 10-20 years before the global mean temperature. Although there is uncertainty in the timing of exactly when the 1.5 and 2°C thresholds will be crossed regionally, over 80% of the models project at least 2°C warming by 2050 for all regions for the high emissions scenario. This threshold-based approach also highlights regional variations in the rate of warming across the US. The fastest warming region in the contiguous US is the Northeast, which is projected to warm by 3°C when global warming reaches 2°C. The signal-to-noise ratio calculations indicate that the regional warming estimates remain outside the envelope of uncertainty throughout the twenty-first century, making them potentially useful to planners. The regional precipitation projections for global warming of 1.5°C and 2°C are uncertain, but the eastern US is projected to experience wetter winters and the Great Plains and the Northwest US are projected to experience drier summers in the future. The impact of different scenarios on regional precipitation projections is negligible throughout the twenty-first century compared to uncertainties associated with internal variability and model diversity.

"I Will Write a Letter and Change the World". The Knowledge Base Kick-Starting Norway’s Rainforest Initiative

In September 2007 two Norwegian NGOs wrote a letter to leading Norwegian politicians urging them to establish a climate initiative for protecting rainforests. Two months later, at the United Nations climate summit in Bali, Norway committed to donate three billion NOK annually to prevent tropical deforestation, making Norway the leading global donor in what has become the REDD+ mechanism (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation). This article provides a detailed analysis of the making of the rainforest initiative, placing particular emphasis on the knowledge base of the initiative, most notably a decisive letter. Close contact with policy makers in the process ensured legitimacy and credibility for the proposal. Important for the initiative’s rapid progression was that it came in the middle of the run-up to the negotiations of a cross-political climate settlement in the Norwegian Parliament. The rainforest initiative became one of the hottest proposals in the climate policy ‘bidding war’ between the government and the opposition. All these events must be seen against the background of 2007 being a year when public concern and media coverage about climate issues peaked. Politicians were under pressure to act, and the rainforest proposal’s perfect fit with the Norwegian climate mitigation main approach of pursuing large-scale cost-effective emission cutbacks abroad made it pass swiftly through the governmental machinery. In conclusion, the article suggests the metaphor of the perfect storm to explain how the NGOs exploited a situation which made the rainforest initiative an indispensable part of Norway’s climate policy.

Perspective health promotion policy planning to adapt to climate change.

The industrial revolution provided human beings with high quality, convenient lifestyles. However, overdevelopment and excessive consumption caused global warming and climate change, impacted human living environments and socioeconomic systems seriously, and ultimately became issues that need to be settled urgently. Ever since the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) came into effect in 1994, all advanced countries began to address climate change proactively. For example, Japan formed the Committee on Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation Research in 2008. The UK introduced the Climate Change Act in 2008. Australia passed the Clean Energy Act in 2011. Also, the 2014 United Nations Climate Summit 3 suggested that addressing climate change has become an urgent and vital issue around the world. The World Health Organization (WHO) published the “Quantitative risk assessment of the effects of climate change on selected causes of death, 2030s and 2050s” in 2014, which listed the impact of climate change on health as one of the most important issues worth studying and estimated that between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause w250,000 additional deaths per year, from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea, and heat stress. The direct cost of damage to health (i.e., excluding costs in

Coercion with kid gloves? The European Union's role in shaping a global regulatory framework for aviation emissions

ABSTRACTThe European Union (EU) is widely assumed to be a global environmental leader, especially in addressing climate change, though this reputation suffered greatly when European leaders were sidelined during the 2009 United Nations Climate Summit in Copenhagen. Subsequently, however, the EU has made significant progress in extending its Emission Trading System to the aviation sector, one of the fastest-growing sources of greenhouse gas emissions, and did so not only regionally, but also managed to get it onto the global policy agenda. This contribution investigates the EU's role in shaping the 2013 International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) resolution committing 191 government signatories to developing a global market-based measure to cap international aviation's carbon pollution. While not exactly setting new environmental standards or achieving definitive regulatory success, the case illustrates the agenda-setting capacity of the EU through leveraging its market power and adopting an explicitly extra-territorial rule to induce potential regulatory co-operation.

Correction: Addendum: Market Watch: Cash flow

Nature Climate Change 4, 858–859 (2014); published online 25 September 2014; corrected online 03 October 2014. In the United Nations Climate Summit in New York in September, the Green Climate Fund (GCF) primarily raised awareness, but it also raised the total that has been promised to it from the $1.083 billion I originally reported to $2.

March for Climate in New York

On Sunday, 21 September, the People's Climate March will be held in New York City to raise awareness about climate change. With world leaders gathering in that city on 23 September for the United Nations Climate Summit, the march aims to mobilize scientists, activists, community leaders, and members of the public who care about climate change and galvanize action about this important issue.

Social Media and the Organization of Collective Action: Using Twitter to Explore the Ecologies of Two Climate Change Protests

The Twitter Revolutions of 2009 reinvigorated the question of whether new social media have any real effect on contentious politics. In this article, the authors argue that evaluating the relation between transforming communication technologies and collective action demands recognizing how such technologies infuse specific protest ecologies. This includes looking beyond informational functions to the role of social media as organizing mechanisms and recognizing that traces of these media may reflect larger organizational schemes. Three points become salient in the case of Twitter against this background: (a) Twitter streams represent crosscutting networking mechanisms in a protest ecology, (b) they embed and are embedded in various kinds of gatekeeping processes, and (c) they reflect changing dynamics in the ecology over time. The authors illustrate their argument with reference to two hashtags used in the protests around the 2009 United Nations Climate Summit in Copenhagen.

Striking a balance

Sharon Long, a plant scientists who advised Barack Obama during his presidential election campaign, talks about green biotechnology and the role of scientists in political decision‐making.