In this article, we explore global climate agreements, the characteristics, the principles, achievements of global climate agreements, the challenges and the future.
Definition
Global climate agreements are formal, global understandings among nations to collaboratively address climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to its impacts. These agreements, often negotiated under the United Nations, provide a framework for countries to work together on a shared problem, aiming to limit global temperature increases and build a more sustainable future. Examples include the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Paris Agreement, which established common goals and binding commitments.
Characteristics of Global Climate Agreements
Long-term temperature goal: Aims to limit global average temperature rise above pre-industrial levels, often with specific targets like well below \(2\degree C\) or to limit the increase it
Mitigation: Commitments to reduce or remove greenhouse gas emissions through various strategies, including cutting emissions and enhancing natural carbon sinks.
Adaptation: Provisions to help countries and vulnerable communities cope with the unavoidable impacts of climate change, with support for building adaptive capacity.
Financial and technological support: Developed countries commit to providing financial resources and technology transfer to developing nations to help them transition to sustainable practices.
Transparency and reporting: Includes mechanisms for scientific research, monitoring, and public reporting to track progress and ensure accountability.
Innovative mechanisms: May include market-based approaches, such as emissions trading, to achieve mitigation goals in a cost-effective way.
Public awareness and education: Provisions to promote public awareness and education campaigns to encourage climate-friendly behaviour.
Common but differentiated responsibilities”: Acknowledges that different countries have different capabilities and historical responsibilities, leading to varying commitments, especially for developed nations.
The Principles of Global Climate Agreements:
Common but Differentiated Responsibilities and Respective Capabilities (CBDR-RC): This principle recognizes that all countries share a responsibility to address climate change but have different capabilities to do so, largely due to varying levels of economic development and historical contributions to greenhouse gas emissions.
Precautionary Principle: This principle suggests that if there is a threat of serious or irreversible harm to the climate system, lack of full scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.
Equity: Climate agreements strive for both intergenerational and intra-generational equity, ensuring that the burden of climate change and its solutions is shared fairly between the current generation and future generations, as well as among people alive today.
International Cooperation and Support: Effective climate action requires cooperation between nations, including financial and technological support for developing countries to help them adapt to and mitigate climate change.
The Polluter-Pays Principle: This principle holds that those who are responsible for pollution should bear the costs of managing it to prevent damage to human health or the environment.
Sustainable Development: Climate policies should be integrated with national development programs, recognizing that economic development is essential for adopting measures to address climate change.
Mitigation and Adaptation: Agreements require all countries to take action to both reduce their emissions (mitigation) and build resilience to the impacts of climate change (adaptation).
Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs): Each country sets its own climate targets (NDCs) and is responsible for implementing them, with the requirement to update and submit new plans every five years to ensure progress is made over time.
Global Stocktake: A process is established to periodically assess the collective progress made toward the agreement’s long-term goals, ensuring that commitments are being met and that countries are upgrading their ambitions.
Transparency: A transparent framework is created for reporting and reviewing progress on emissions, adaptation efforts, and support provided and received, helping to build trust and accountability.
Achievements of Global Climate Agreements:
Paris Agreement: A landmark achievement that brought nearly all countries together with the goal of keeping global temperature rise well below 2°C, with efforts to limit it to 1.5°C.
Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs): Every country submits its own climate action plan, creating a bottom-up approach to emissions reduction and adaptation that is a success for multilateralism.
Enhanced Transparency Framework (ETF): Provides a system for countries to transparently report on their climate actions and progress, with data feeding into the Global Stocktake to assess collective progress and inform future plans.
Financial and Technological Support: The agreements include commitments for financial and technological support from developed to developing nations to help them with mitigation and adaptation efforts.
Spurring low-carbon solutions: The agreements have sparked a global trend of setting carbon neutrality targets, making low-carbon solutions more competitive, particularly in the power and transport sectors.
Kyoto Protocol: The first major international agreement to set legally binding emission reduction targets for developed countries, it set a precedent for subsequent agreements.
Framework for Adaptation and Resilience: The agreements include goals for strengthening countries’ ability to adapt to the impacts of climate change and to recover from climate-related disasters.
The Challenges of Global Climate Agreement:
Lack of mandatory compliance: Agreements often rely on voluntary commitments and peer pressure, but they lack the ability to force countries to reduce emissions or meet their targets.
Weak accountability systems: Enforcement mechanisms are weak, meaning that large emitters can avoid accountability for their contributions to the problem.
Inadequate national pledges: The sum of current national commitments is not enough to keep global temperature rise within the agreed-upon limits, such as the 1.5°C goal.
Gap between commitments and action: Even with existing NDCs, there is often a lack of planning and funding to translate these goals into concrete action.
Political will: A lack of consistent political will among major powers and competing national interests can hinder progress and delay implementation.
Finance and resources
Unfulfilled financial pledges: Developed countries have not fully delivered on promises, such as the pledge of $100 billion per year in support for developing nations.
Unpredictable funding: The absence of predictable and reliable climate finance makes it difficult for developing countries to implement long-term adaptation and mitigation strategies.
Limited capacity: Developing countries may face institutional constraints and knowledge gaps that impede their ability to adapt to climate impacts.
Competing crises: Global crises, such as conflicts or economic downturns, can pull focus and resources away from climate action.
Economic and social transitions: Shifting to a low-carbon economy requires significant, and potentially risky, economic and social changes that are difficult to navigate.
Interconnected challenges: Climate change intersects with other environmental issues, such as deforestation and population growth, making it a more complex problem to solve.
The Future of Global Climate Agreement:
Loss and Damage Fund: The operationalization and funding of the Loss and Damage Fund established in recent COPs will be central. This fund is meant to help vulnerable nations cope with unavoidable climate impacts, but its current funding levels are far below the estimated need.
New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG): Negotiations are focused on agreeing on a new, much higher collective finance goal to replace the unfulfilled $100 billion per year target. This new goal will determine the scale of future financial support from developed to developing countries.
The Just Transition: Future agreements must ensure a Just Transition, meaning policies must not disproportionately burden low-income communities or workers in fossil-fuel industries. Financial mechanisms will be needed to support retraining and economic diversification in these regions.
- The Shift from Fossil Fuels
Recent climate conferences have signaled a major, albeit slow, shift away from fossil fuels, which will define future energy policy.
Phasedown/Phaseout Language: Future agreements will face intense pressure to strengthen the language on the global transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems, building on recent conference decisions.
Renewable Energy Targets: There is a growing focus on setting and delivering global targets to triple renewable energy capacity and double energy efficiency by 2030, which requires massive international cooperation and investment.
- Focus on Implementation, Transparency, and Accountability
The structure of the agreement itself is shifting from negotiating targets to verifying and enforcing implementation.
Enhanced Transparency Framework (ETF): The Paris Agreement’s ETF is fully coming online, requiring all countries to report on their emissions and progress toward their NDCs using a common set of standards. This is key to building trust and holding nations accountable.
Role of Non-State Actors: The future involves greater integration of commitments from sub-national governments (cities, states), private finance, and corporations to fill the gap left by insufficient national NDCs.
Conclusion
The global climate agreement today is the Paris Agreement, an international, legally binding treaty adopted by 196 Parties at COP21 in Paris in December 2015. It is the successor to the Kyoto Protocol and is the first treaty to bring all nations into a common cause to combat climate change.