Month: February 2015

The IPCC at a Crossroads

Love it or hate it, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) plays a very important role in global climate change policy around the world. This is because its reports enjoy a degree of credibility that renders them influential for public opinion, and – more important – it is because the reports are accepted as the definitive source on all matters climate change by international negotiators working under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). In previous essays at this blog, I have written both about problems with the IPCC process (Is the IPCC Government Approval Process Broken?, April 25, 2014) and about its significant merits (Understanding the IPCC: An Important Follow-Up, May 3, 2014; The Final Stage of IPCC AR5 – Last Week’s Outcome in Copenhagen, November 4, 2014).

The IPCC is now at a crossroads. Its Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) is now complete and largely successful (see my previous essays cited above). But, like many large institutions, the IPCC has experienced severe growing pains. Its size has increased to the point that it has become cumbersome, it sometimes fails to address the most important issues, and – most striking of all – it is now at risk of losing the participation of the world’s best scientists, due to the massive burdens that participation entails.

The good news is that this is a moment of considerable opportunity for addressing these and other challenges, because the direction of future assessments is now open for discussion and debate. Indeed, as I write this, the 195 member countries of the IPCC are meeting in plenary in Nairobi, Kenya, to discuss – among other topics –the future of the IPCC.

A Potentially Important Meeting on Another Continent

Just one week before the Kenya IPCC sessions commenced, another, much smaller meeting took place about 4,000 miles northwest of Nairobi – in Berlin, Germany. Twenty-four participants with experience with the IPCC met in Berlin for a three-day workshop on the future of international climate-assessment processes, from February 18th through 20th. The aim of the workshop was to take stock and reflect on lessons learned in past assessments – including those of the IPCC – in order to identify options for improving future assessment processes.

Participants included social scientists who contributed in various capacities to AR5 and earlier IPCC assessments, users of IPCC reports (from national governments and intergovernmental organizations), and representatives of other stakeholder groups. Participants came from both developed and developing countries, and discussions were held under Chatham House rules, with no public attribution of any comments to individuals.

The workshop (titled “Assessment and Communication of the Social Science of Climate Change: Bridging Research and Policy”) was co-organized by four academic and research organizations based in Europe and the United States: Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM, Italy), the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements (USA), the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC, Germany), and the Stanford Environmental and Energy Policy Analysis Center (USA).  FEEM, the Mercator Institute, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation provided financial support for the workshop.

Possible Ways Forward for the IPCC

As I noted above, now is a moment of considerable opportunity, because the future of the IPCC is open for discussion and debate, including at the meeting taking place this week in Nairobi. In this context, two of my co-organizers – Carlo Carraro of FEEM and Charles Kolstad of Stanford – and I have written a brief memorandum, based on our reflections on the Berlin workshop discussion. We describe a set of specific challenges and opportunities facing the IPCC, and provide options for improving the IPCC’s process of assessing scientific research on climate change. The complete memorandum is available here for your reading, and so I won’t attempt to summarize the highlights in this blog post, but simply note that our analysis focuses on five areas:

  • Improving integration and coordination across IPCC working groups, and enhancing the interface between scientists and governments;
  • Enhancing the interface between the IPCC and various social scientific disciplines and communities;
  • Increasing efforts – in innovative ways – to facilitate contributions of expertise from developing countries;
  • Increasing the efficiency of IPCC operations and ensuring the scientific integrity of its work products through targeted organizational improvements; and
  • Strengthening outreach and communications.

I should also note that Carraro served as Vice-Chair, and Kolstad and I served as Coordinating Lead Authors, all of Working Group III of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report, but our organizing of the workshop and our authoring of this new memorandum were carried out in our roles as researchers, and completely independently of our former official capacities with the IPCC.

The Path Ahead

The memorandum is only the first of several products that will be forthcoming from this initiative. Over the coming months, we will produce a comprehensive report from the workshop (in time for the IPCC’s next meeting in October of this year, as well as the subsequent UNFCCC meeting in Paris in December). When that report is available, I will be pleased to bring it to the attention of readers of this blog.

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A Challenge for the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement

At the recent climate negotiations at the 20th Conference of the Parties (COP-20) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Lima, Peru, a very important issue was left on the table, unresolved: Will the 2015 Paris Agreement (scheduled to be signed in December of this year at COP-21) facilitate – or at least avoid inhibiting – international linkage of national (and for that matter, sub-national) climate policies?

Brief History

In the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action, adopted by COP-17 in 2011, negotiators agreed to develop a new legal instrument “under the Convention applicable to all Parties,” for adoption at COP-21 in December, 2015, in Paris. With the Lima talks now behind us, it appears that the 2015 agreement will reflect a hybrid climate policy architecture—one that combines top-down elements, such as for monitoring, reporting, and verification, with bottom-up elements, including “Intended Nationally Determined Contributions” (INDCs), describing what a country intends to do to reduce emissions, based on domestic political feasibility and other factors. (I wrote about this in Assessing the Outcome of the Lima Climate Talks, posted on December 14, 2014.)

Can the Aggregation of INDCs be Cost-Effective?

A major question facing negotiators is how can the new hybrid policy architecture encourage greater ambition, while remaining true to the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities.” A key answer to that question is to allow for the linkage of heterogeneous national policy instruments. Why do I say that?

Here’s the reason. An attribute of the Paris architecture that will encourage greater ambition over time is cost-effectiveness. (Another key attribute to encourage greater ambition is comparability of INDCs, a topic on which we’re also working at the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements, about which I will write in the future.) To enhance the cost-effectiveness of the new system, a key feature will be linkages among regional, national, and sub-national climate policies. By linkage, I mean formal recognition by a greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation program in one jurisdiction (a regional, national, or sub-national government) of emission reductions undertaken in another jurisdiction for purposes of complying with the first jurisdiction’s mitigation program.

Linkage can be straightforward, as with the bilateral recognition of allowances under two cap-and-trade regimes, but – importantly — linkage can also take place among a heterogeneous set of policy instruments, such as between systems of performance standards, carbon taxes, and cap-and-trade.

Linkage in the Paris 2015 Agreement

In a new paper that was released by the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements at a packed “side event” in Lima, my co-authors – Daniel Bodansky of Arizona State University, Seth Hoedl of Harvard Law School, and Gilbert Metcalf of Tufts University – and I analyze theoretical issues relating to linkage among heterogeneous climate policy instruments and apply this analysis concretely to the 2015 Paris agreement. In “Facilitating Linkage of Heterogeneous Regional, National, and Sub-National Climate Policies Through a Future International Agreement,” we examine how the agreement can help facilitate the growth and operation of a robust system of international linkages of regional, national, and sub-national policies, as well as how inappropriate or excessive rules could obstruct effective, bottom-up linkage. Importantly, both economic and legal perspectives are represented in this research (which was supported by the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA) and six of its member companies: Chevron, GDF-Suez, Global CCS Institute, Rio Tinto, Shell, and TransCanada)

Key Findings from Research

I encourage you to take a look at the full paper or, at least, its executive summary, but here – in very brief form — are the key findings.

First, there are a number of design elements the 2015 agreement should avoid, because they would inhibit linkage. These include “supplementarity requirements” that require parties to accomplish all or most of their emissions-reduction commitments within their national borders. The 2015 agreement also should avoid including detailed linkage rules in the core agreement; an agreement with more flexibility would allow rules to evolve on the basis of experience.

Second, to advance linkage, the 2015 agreement should: define key terms, in particular the units that are used for compliance purposes; establish registries and tracking mechanisms; and include default or model rules, from which nations are free to deviate at their discretion.

The most valuable outcome of the Paris Agreement regarding linkage may simply be including an explicit statement that parties may transfer portions of their emissions-reduction contributions to other parties—and that these transferred units may be used by the transferees to implement their own commitments.

It sounds simple, but a small but vocal set of (largely socialist) countries – including Bolivia, Venezuela, and Cuba – have vehemently opposed in the climate negotiations anything that looks remotely like a market, and will try hard to prevent such provisions from appearing in the 2015 agreement.

Next Steps

As the negotiating teams from 195 countries prepare to meet this month in Geneva, Switzerland, and in June in Bonn, Germany, the question remains of whether the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement will allow for and indeed facilitate international linkage of national and sub-national policies, and thereby encourage cost-effectiveness and greater environmental ambition. Over the next several months, the answer to this question will become clear.

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