Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
10/17/2014
While progress in battling climate change outside of a global climate agreement has been substantial, the importance of such an agreement and the need for that agreement to be well structured should not be underestimated, Special Envoy for Climate Change with the Unites States Department of State Todd Stern said this week in a speech at Yale University in New Haven, Conn. “Establishing a strong, sound, stable international regime is a crucial part of the puzzle. We need an international agreement to prod countries to take aggressive climate action at home; we need it to supply the essential confidence countries require that, if they act, their partners and competitors will do so as well; and we need it to send a clear signal to businesses, investors, innovators and governments that the world’s leaders have committed their nations to the climate fight.”
The United Nations Climate Change Conference is due to be held in Paris in 2015 with the objective of developing a universal agreement on climate actions. Developing such an agreement will be difficult, Stern said. “Limits on emissions make countries nervous about economic growth and development. They are also difficult because the UN body where these talks occur includes over 190 nations; these nations are grouped into various blocs with crisscrossing agendas and priorities; long-standing north-south resentments continue to roil the debate; and negotiations are governed by a consensus rule of procedure, which, in effect, enables any small handful of determined countries to block progress. So this is no easy task.”
Agreement must be Focused on Mitigation, Adaptation and Financial Assistance
Stern laid out “three main pillars” for what the U.S. would ideally like to see in the Paris agreement. These three pillars – mitigation, adaptation and financial assistance – support the development of “an agreement that is ambitious, so that it can start to put us on the track that science counsels; inclusive, because we cannot meet our objectives without broad participation; durable, because our mission now is to negotiate an agreement for the decades, not for five or ten years; and fair, so countries feel their needs are respected and that they are getting a fair shake,” Stern said.
Climate mitigation efforts will vary from country to country due to the wide variety of circumstances in each individual country. Each country should develop its own Nationally Determined Commitment (NDC), Stern said. “This NDC structure, which has attracted a fair amount of convergence, makes sense. First, it will attract broad participation because it will quiet developing country fears of getting strong-armed into taking targets beyond their capability; and without broad participation there will be no ambition. Second, it will produce undertakings that countries are genuinely prepared to implement,” Stern said.
The key to adaptation is better planning, Stern said, and poorer countries will need the help of more advanced countries in this task. “For a great many smaller and poorer countries, which emit little but can suffer a lot from climate impacts, adaptation is the main concern. And even the most advanced countries need to engage in concerted adaptation and resilience planning,” Stern said. “Stated most simply, what countries need with regard to adaptation is better planning and more funding to help implement the plans.”
The last key to a successful climate agreement noted was financial assistance. “It is deeply in the interest of the United States and other advanced countries to help poorer countries build resilience against the severe impacts of climate change and to organize themselves to build low-carbon economies, so that the world collectively can secure the deep reductions we will need by mid-century,” he said.
