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The 2014 United Nations Climate Change Conference had been scheduled from 1 to 12 December in Lima/Peru. While in the run-up to the conference, China and the US in a surprise bilateral move had announced plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions that exceeded expectations, the conference was characterised once again by a deep division between key players from the former so-called "developed" and "developing" world. The negotiations thus took 32 hours longer than planned and ended on Sunday morning at 1.22 am. More importantly, the conference failed almost completely to resolve the tasks it was supposed to do in order to prepare the last round of negotiations before next year's conference in Paris 2015, which is supposed to deliver a comprehensive future climate agreement. A team of researchers from the Wuppertal Institute attended the conference and have compiled a first assessment of the results.
Much of the current literature on climate clubs sees mitigation costs creating free rider incentives as the main problem of climate policy. Climate clubs are supposed to solve this problem by creating additional incentives for mitigation. Looking more in detail, one sees that the situation differs from sector to sector. Some industry sectors indeed have substantial cost and competitiveness issues. In others such as electricity and transport, there are costs at micro level but balance for economy and society as a whole is rather positive. International climate policy in general and clubs in particular should therefore be tailored to sectoral specifics.
Article 6.4 of the Paris Agreement establishes a new mechanism for Parties to cooperate in achieving their nationally determined contributions (NDCs). One key innovation of the Article 6.4 mechanism is its objective to "deliver an overall mitigation in global emissions" (Art. 6.4(d)). This report develops recommendations on how to implement this objective. A key difficulty lies in the fact that even basics of how the mechanism is supposed to function have so far not been clarified by the Parties. The report therefore first sketches out what has so far been agreed and discussed on the mechanism’s activity cycle. Second, as the concept of overall mitigation has so far also not been clearly defined by Parties, the report derives a working definition from the language that was agreed in the Paris Agreement. In the next step, the report provides a survey of the options to achieve overall mitigation that have so far been discussed in the relevant literature and in the Article 6 negotiations. Many of these options were developed in the context of the Kyoto mechanisms. The report therefore discusses to what extent the options are also applicable under the Paris Agreement or whether adjustments need to be made. In the following, the options that are applicable under the Agreement are assessed on the basis of a number of criteria. The report concludes with a summary of the main findings and recommendations.
2020 was meant to be the year of climate ambition. Then the COVID-19 pandemic struck, the Glasgow conference was postponed to November 2021, and climate policy generally appeared to have been put on the backburner. But towards the end of the year prospects seemed to brighten with a series of zero-emission pledges and the election of Joe Biden as US President. This article analyses what the year of the pandemic achieved in terms of combating climate change. This article first summarizes the virtual events that were organised to substitute for the physical UNFCCC conferences and what progress was or was not made on the outstanding items of the "Paris rulebook", implementation of the Gender Action Plan, and other items. Subsequently, the article surveys the status of NDC updates and to what extent recovery programmes have been used to advance climate action. Finally, the article takes a closer look at the current dynamics among non-Party actors. In summary, while formal negotiations essentially stopped in the year of the pandemic, the conservation did not. However, implementation is still lagging far behind the ambitious targets that have been set. While implementation is mostly the domain of national policy, the international process has a number of options at its disposal to foster climate action.
This paper analyses the results of the climate conference in Lima 2014 in the light of the coming climate summit in Paris by the end of this year (COP21). The authors from the Wuppertal Institute make recommendations for the improvement of the current cooperation in the context of the climate convention and they suggest to complement the existing UN regime with a club of forerunner countries in order to provide new breath for international climate policy.
While the Paris Agreement (PA) has enshrined ambitious long-term objectives, the current actions of the Parties to the Agreement fall far short of these goals. The Global Stocktake (GST), established in Art. 14 of the PA, may help narrow this gap between ambition and action: its purpose is to review the implementation of the PA and to assess the collective progress of the international community towards Paris goals. While some general modalities on how to conduct the GST have been adopted, the details are still to be determined.
The objective of this report is to analyze existing international regimes as regards their review processes, the contribution of these review processes to various governance functions and, finally, to derive lessons for the GST. Processes analyzed include:
the design of the upcoming Global Stocktake itself,
the Talanoa Dialogue (TD) which is the direct precursor of the GST,
the Agenda 2030 High-Level Political Forum (HLPF), which features a regular stocktaking process focused on progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs),
the review processes of the UN human rights system (UNHRS) and
the review processes and assessment panels of the Montreal Protocol (MP).
The analysis of each review process is organised in four section: (1) political background and context, (2) technical and organisational details of the processes, (3) interface between the political and technical processes, and (4) how the review processes contribute to achieving the objectives of the respective regime, particularly governance functions of the regime (guidance and signal, transparency and accountability, and knowledge and learning).
Design options for the new international market mechanism under article 6.4 of the Paris agreement
(2020)
In this project commissioned by the German Environment Agency, important aspects of the mechanism under Article 6.4 of the Paris Agreement were examined in more detail. This mechanism is to succeed the CDM under the Kyoto Protocol from 2021 onwards, but it will contain decisive improvements, especially with regard to a robust accounting of emission reductions and better integration into the national climate policy of the host country. The report is addressed to the international experts, in particular to the delegates to the climate conference and observers, and is therefore written in English. A German summary is included. The following topics are covered:
How does the mechanism achieve an overall reduction of global emissions?
Are there opportunities to use benchmarks to establish baselines?
Can contributions to increasing ambition be made by using Art. 6.4?
What contribution can the voluntary market make to increasing ambition in the future?
Introduction of incentives for the participation of private companies under Art. 6.4 of the PA.
The role of the Art. 6.4 mechanism on the way to a net zero emission world.
The project provides a contribution to the general discussion in the EU as well as to the Article 6 - Negotiations under the UNFCCC. It is a contribution that presents backgrounds and interrelationships for individual questions concerning the design of the new market mechanisms under Article 6 and can thus contribute to a more informed decision-making process.Since there are, however, several different ways of designing a mechanism that can avoid double counting and provide incentives for increasing ambition, this project is only one of several current contributions to the international discussion.
Global climate
(2017)
On 7-18 November, the twenty-second Conference of the Parties (COP-22) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the twelfth Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (CMP-12) took place in Marrakech. Due to the rapid entry into force of the Paris Agreement, Marrakech also hosted the first Conference of the Parties serving as the Meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement (CMA-1). Nobody had expected this one year before in Paris - the entry into force of the Kyoto Protocol, by comparison, had taken eight years. Many hailed the rapid entry into force as further proof of the commitment of the world community to finally tackle the climate problem.
Global climate
(2017)
On 12 December, the twenty-first Conference of Parties (COP-21) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) adopted the Paris Agreement. This marked the conclusion of the long process of crafting a new international climate regime that began with the adoption of the Bali Roadmap in 2007, failed spectacularly in Copenhagen in 2009, and resumed with a new approach in Durban 2011. This article summarizes and analyzes the main contents of the Paris Agreement.
Global climate
(2016)
This article summarises the main outcomes of the Lima UN Climate Conference (COP20 / CMP10). It starts with the discussions under the Durban Platform on developing a new comprehensive climate agreement and increasing short-term ambition and subsequently covers the issues relating to near-term implementation of previous decisions in the areas of transparency, reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, loss and damage, adaptation, finance, and carbon markets.