Climate Change Diplomacy In 2014: A Universal Failure?

Traditionally this time of the year – as we try to savour the last concluding days of the old year and look in eager anticipation to the new – serves as a period of reflection in many areas of our lives. We ponder what have we accomplished these past 360-some days, where we have slipped or even lost our paths entirely, and how we seek to better ourselves in the future. Such reflections and their corresponding annual New Year’s Resolutions, despite sometimes antiquated or even dull overtones, are a tried and proven exercise for drawing important lessons from past experiences about the future. Being able to do so is as vital for the realm of environmental policy as it is for any other area of our lives, especially so when it comes to climate change.

The year 2014 has seen a number of landmark events in the battle against global climate change. The most publicized perhaps was the UN Climate summit in New York City in September, which was preceded by massive global street demonstrations demanding a meaningful international effort to curb dangerous GHG emissions. An estimated 600,000 protesters took to the streets in more than 2,500 solidarity events in 162 countries. More than half of the participants of this People’s Climate March gathered in NYC just before the UN summit and were even joined by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

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While it is certainly positive when UN summits about such important issues like climate change attract huge attention from the public, these well intended and to a degree certainly necessary public calls for action will hardly be sufficient, especially when it comes to climate change. To push through meaningful multilateral action for putting a real dent in GHG (first and foremost CO2) emissions requires more than high public exposure, showcased appearances of well-known celebrities, and grand statements.

The sad truth about global warming aka climate change is that it is an extremely difficult problem to solve, because the chief culprit CO2 is an intrinsic by-product of virtually every area of human activity in our modern, carbon-based economies. Tackling the problem will require a fundamental alteration of our energy systems, which will entangle high potential costs – not only economic, but also (and especially) political and perhaps even social.

Meaningful multilateral action on climate change therefore has consistently resulted in stalemate and inaction over the past two decades of international negotiations. The undoubtedly biggest success of this UN based process to date, the Kyoto Protocol, was in itself a highly imperfect first stepping stone that now is running out of steam (and time). As developing countries not bound to any real emission restrictions under the Kyoto deal, like China, have grown to become major emitters of global GHGs, world leaders and their diplomats have been scrambling to craft a meaningful successor.

After the abysmal failure of the Copenhagen Conference in 2009 to do so, the Lima Conference in December this year was meant to finally produce a draft proposal for such a new deal replacing the Kyoto Protocol, which is to be adopted at the Conference in Paris next year. After initially widespread enthusiasm following the joint US-China announcement on climate change and emission reductions at the conclusion of the APEC Summit in November, the proceedings at Lima were however quick to disappoint. Once again climate change proved to be an extremely elusive and vexing problem to reach multilateral agreement on, even as the two players formerly seen as the biggest obstacles to a global climate deal had already had reached agreement amongst themselves before the conference started. As The Guardian poignantly remarked: “It [the Lima Conference], followed a now familiar trajectory: optimism, then stalemate, then overrun and at the end a frantic last-minute scramble before, finally, a deal.” The final compromise, unsurprisingly, had to put forward rather low policy goals, including the prompt for countries to come up with their own emission targets and plans to achieve them until Paris 2015. While some, especially the diplomats themselves, were relieved about having been able to strike a deal at all and avoiding another complete disaster like Copenhagen, others, especially environmental groups, were quick to bash the deal as toothless and insufficient to contain global warming to the infamous 2°C threshold.

Image Source: http://econ.st/1lGCLpc

Time and time again multilateral negotiations under the universalistic UNFCCC framework have exhibited this pattern and resulted in, let’s say, suboptimal outcomes. Why is it that despite the virtually universal acknowledgement of climate change as dangerous, man-made, and requiring collective action by the world’s leaders, agreement on the scale, scope, and shape of this action is so hard to come by?

Many scholars in the field of International Relations see a multipolar world order unfolding, with more and more emerging developing nations, first and foremost the BRICS, demanding a seat and voice at the multilateral negation table, such as at the WTO‘s trade rounds or when it comes to climate change agreements. Ian Bremmer aptly describes this new order as a “G-zero” world, where no single nation or group of nations is sufficiently powerful to drive an international agenda. What this essentially means is that the universal agreement required for many multilateral treaties such as those employed under the UN-framework for climate change negotiations, becomes increasingly difficult to achieve. Both the scale of the negotiations, in terms of the number parties involved, as well as the scope of the problem they seek to address, stifles the potential range for agreement. Even the European Union, arguably the most economically and politically integrated region in the world, was facing arduous negotiations amongst its own member states, before an (according to some NGOs, still) imperfect inner-European agreement on climate change action could be reached in October this year.

Yet, both the EU’s internal compromise and the joint US-China declaration have shown that agreement on climate change action, even among difficult frenemies (such as the US and China) and during times of hardship (such as for the economically still troubled EU), can be reached. The potential range for compromise however naturally shrinks as more and more parties are added to the negotiation table. When it comes to a problem so vexing and difficult to solve like global climate change, the enormous size of the table under the principle of universality may have come to forbid agreement on anything more than symbolic gestures and shallow promises.

Some scholars therefore start to point out that such universal multilateralism may be unsuitable for tackling global climate change altogether. Despite a frequent and valid legitimacy argument in favor of universalism, the reality is that most CO2 emissions can and must be addressed by only a handful of nations. Counting the EU as a single emitter, only a dozen countries worldwide are responsible for almost ¾ of global emissions. (David Victor 2011: Global Warming Gridlock, page 213)

Image Source: http://econ.st/1Bgjv8B

The experience of 20 years of multilateral negotiations has to date produced only one real and still highly imperfect agreement on climate change mitigation, the Kyoto Protocol, and has not nearly had enough impact to curb global GHG emissions by what’s necessary to avoid dangerous climate change according to the IPCC. Looking towards the anxiously anticipated COP21 in Paris next year, maybe instead of yet another empty New Year’s Resolution of finally getting the whole world united behind a meaningful new universal climate change treaty, it is time to explore some alternatives.

David Victor of the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at the University of California, San Diego proposes so-called carbon or climate “clubs” to engage the most important GHG-emitters in meaningful emission reductions. Others have argued to shift the focus entirely away from the nation state and towards multinational corporations and their global supply chains in the fight against climate change. I myself have argued in my Bachelor thesis at the University of Vienna that the European Union’s Innovation Partnership on Smart Cities and Communities may constitute a promising bottom-up approach in what looks like an increasingly decentralized and denationalized battle plan against climate change.

Whichever new route (or combination thereof) we may be taking in the future, looking back at not only a year but nearly two decades of multilateral climate change negotiations, the important lesson to learn is that neither is the current universalistic approach to the UN-based multilateral negotiations without alternatives, nor has it been able to produce the kind of results which would warrant not to explore such alternative approaches. If we truly seek to make a dent in global GHG emissions we need to carefully reflect on our past experiences (sadly mostly failures) in trying to do so, in order to come up with new approaches finally enabling us to come to grips with this global menace.