Mizan R Khan, Ph.D
Professor of Environmental Management
North South University
Dhaka, Bangladesh
The Conference of the Parties 24 (COP24) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was held during 03-15 December 2018 in Katowice. This COP was mandated to adopt the Rule Book for the Paris Agreement Work Plan. It may be recalled that at COP21, the Paris Agreement (PA) was adopted to ultimately replace the Kyoto Protocol (KP), which was a top-down, legally binding emission reduction commitment by the developed nations.
Almost 25,000 delegates from the government, non-government, private sector and faith community attended the meeting, which was mandated to adopt the Rulebook for implementation of the Paris Agreement (PA). Based on my experience as a member of the Bangladesh delegation, I regard the ultimate outcome as not satisfactory, almost frustrating, but way better than the “Brokenhagen” of 2009.
The most rancorous elements that appeared at the meeting are: recognition of the science of climate change as presented by the IPCC 1.5C Special Report; urgency of ramping up the mitigation ambition to match the call of science; deciding on the levy to be transferable to a yet-to-be structured mechanism, replacing the Clean Development Mechanism under the soon-to-die Kyoto Protocol; the issues of climate finance (CF); and the agenda of Loss & Damage (L&D). Some elements have been agreed upon: that all countries will have to report their emissions and show progress in cutting every two years from 2024, after the global stock-taking at COP29 in 2023.
It may be recalled that under the Paris Agreement as a quasi-legal instrument, procedural issues like submissions of nationally determined contributions (NDCs) and their stocktaking every five years have been made legally binding for all, but the substantive issues such as emissions reduction by countries have been kept voluntary. This was done to buy universal ownership, only to avoid a truncated world under the KP. But estimates show that even if all countries fully comply with their NDC pledges, global temperature will still rise by almost 3 degrees Celsius, compared to the pre-industrial level. But the PA put an upper limit of 2 degrees Celsius, with an aspirational goal of keeping it below 1.5 degrees Celsius. Based on just a peer-review process, with no punitive compliance mechanism, runaway climate change as warned again by the latest IPCC Report on 1.5 degrees Celsius can hardly be arrested.
There is no reason to believe we already live in a post-equity world in climate diplomacy. Between the never-ending catfight among major emitters on both sides, the LDCs as nano-emitters are sandwiched, which have very modest expectations of financial and technology support mainly for adaptation, loss and damage, and capacity building. In between these max-mini emitters, there are goodwill alliances, such as Cartagena Group or Climate Vulnerable Forum, which try to mediate and reach out for consensus. Will they succeed in taming the most diabolically complex and intractable problem?
I argue that the root of this intractability lies in a few biological and manmade conventions. Biologically, human beings tend to maintain a state of equilibrium, known as “homeostasis,” in most of its physiological processes such as body temperature. If something happens to disrupt this balance, they react. The lack of adequate response to climate change is largely attributable to a long-term problem, as climate change, not the day-to-day weather, is a decadal issue; a stock, not a flow, problem, where yearly flow of emissions into the atmosphere shows no immediate impact, but growing stock over a few decades results in ratchet effects. So, we do not care about this temporal dimension much. But the poorest countries and communities already suffer from the unequally distributed spatial effects of climate change, who have hardly the needed adaptive capacity.
Then the traditional economics of climate change is not yet buying the major emitters in. They view costs to be much higher than the expected benefits, coupled with the problem of “free-riding” in providing a global public good. Economic decision-makers in major capitals are guided by the calculation of net present value of an investment, where distant benefits are discounted, simply undervalued. But the true lesson of the economics of pollution is to internalise the externalities, to correct market failures. Those who lead the market economy world can be condemned to “moral corruption”, as one Western expert argues. Who cares when emissions fly into others’ aerospace! But awarding the Nobel Prize in Economics this year to William Nordhaus, a Yale professor, who invested his life modelling for carbon prices on burning fossil fuels, is a loud message to negotiators of COP24 and beyond.
The final artifact of human convention in political science that holds the saddle back is the pervasive and persisting Westphalian lens of sovereignty, which sees national security/interests as a “zero-sum” game, that one loses when another wins. This centuries-old, purely national territory based perspective is held still dearly by many powers, both old and new. But climate change violates the basic human and development rights and the no-harm rule is already sacrosanct in Western societies. So holding on to the age-old sovereignty and national interests cannot deal with emerging global problems like atmospheric instability, which poses existential threat not just to small island and coastal states, but ultimately to us all. Obviously, we need a new lens of “pooled sovereignty”, because power and interests have become positive-sum, a win-win game unquestionably mitigating global problems like climate change.
Under these circumstances the negotiators from the particularly vulnerable countries must send the message that the polluters must pay. This can generate billions of public climate finance. We hope that together with our alliance blocs the least developed countries (LDCs) and the small island developing states (SIDS) will play the lead in convincing the world that free-riding by the major emitters must stop, to stabilize our atmospheric system, the base global public good that the survival of humanity depends on.
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