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On 12 December 2015, the Parties to the UNFCCC adopted the "Paris Agreement". With this step, the world community has agreed on a collective and cooperative path to fight human-induced climate change: After 25 years of UN climate diplomacy, the world's governments have for the first time in history negotiated a treaty which envisages climate action by all nations. The Agreement sets the world on a path that might lead to a decarbonised economy in the second half of the century. Researchers from the Wuppertal Institute have observed COP 21 and elaborated a detailed analysis of the results. The assessment provides an overview of the most important negotiation outcomes, assesses their results as well as shortfalls and provides an outlook of the next steps needed to implement the Paris Agreement's goals and to set the world firmly on a non-fossil based development path.
This report develops an evaluation framework that policymakers can use to identify whether offsets can add value and uphold environmental integrity of a compliance scheme. It uses a scoring framework on factors to: (1) identify which sectors have hard-to-abate emissions that can justify demanding offsets as cost-containment measures for ambitious climate policies; and (2) identify mitigation activities that are otherwise inaccessible, fosters sustainable development, and the extent to which it enables transformative sectoral action to be eligible to supply offsets. This evaluation framework identifies the optimal conditions that make factors successful in either having sectors demand offsets, or specific mitigation activities supply offsets. Sectoral emissions that are hard-to-abate are those that are technically unavoidable due to a lack and maturity of technologies, and therefore should be allowed to have cost-containment measures - such as offsets - to avoid adverse economic ramifications such as carbon leakage. Mitigation activities that can supply offsets are those that are currently inaccessible to local actor’s due to lack of access to technology, finance or capabilities. Allowing these mitigation activities to be eligible to supply offsets allows to pilot such activities and realize mitigation outcomes outside the original scope of the compliance scheme. This report has chosen selected sectors and mitigation activities to illustrate how this framework can be applied at the global level. It recognizes that country-specific factors can change the assessment of whether the offset approach will add value and uphold environmental integrity to proposed compliance schemes of a country. The report further proposes practical steps policymakers can do to undertake an evaluation at the national level.
This JIKO Policy Paper explores how Parties using Article 6 can increase their mitigation ambition. Building on a broad definition of ambition raising which puts the intensification of climate change mitigation targets and actions by Parties at its centre, eight different ambition raising options are identified. The analysis shows that these options are associated with different technical, institutional and political challenges, calling for a combination of different ambition raising options.