CAP: What to Expect in Doha: An Overview of the 2012 U.N. Climate Change Negotiations

[pampango]

The next high-level gathering of parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change started this week in Doha, Qatar, and will continue until December 7. In this column we provide an overview of the upcoming talks and discuss what the results of U.S. elections may mean for the Obama administration’s positions during these negotiations.

Though many throughout the world hoping for a binding international treaty viewed Copenhagen as a disappointment, it was never likely that the 2009 U.N. climate change conference could have ended in a binding agreement. The United States would not have signed onto an agreement that did not solve the problem of rising greenhouse gases, leaving out major emitters such as India and China—now the largest emitter in the world, the country’s per-capita emissions are on par with the European Union’s emissions. China even objected in Copenhagen to developed countries articulating their own 2050 emission-reduction targets in a formal agreement, presumably because it would mean that rapidly developing countries would be responsible for the remainder of required emissions reductions to achieve some level of climate safety.

But for all its criticisms, Copenhagen was groundbreaking. For the first time countries at all stages of development agreed to put forward pledges for national actions to address global warming by 2020. Over the past three years, 141 countries, including all the major emitters in the developed and developing world—which are responsible for more than 80 percent of global emissions—have made voluntary mitigation pledges. This was an important step forward, given that until then the only articulated pledges for reductions were made by developed countries in the Kyoto Protocol, which now account for less than 15 percent of global emissions.

As we have argued, the most significant achievement of the Durban Platform is to create a process that will culminate in an international agreement that applies to all parties, unlike the Kyoto Protocol. To cement this in place, both the United States and the European Union opposed explicit reference to the “common but differentiated responsibilities” and equity in the Durban agreement. Both of these ideas have been interpreted to mean a hard and fast distinction between the obligations of developed and developing countries to reduce emissions.

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/news/2012/11/27/46139/what-to-expect-in-doha-an-overview-of-the-2012-u-n-climate-change-negotiations/

Should be interesting times in Doha. Could a binding, enforceable agreement possibly emerge from this round of climate change negotiations?

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. I don't think anything binding will be agreed

The article says all the momentum now is for 'bottom-up' emissions targets which each country suggests for itself. If those were binding, then I think most countries would be very unambitious - they wouldn't want to set large reduction goals that, if they missed them, would cause them problems, while they knew other countries were free to pick modest goals they knew they could achieve without major change.

Enforcement is also not something easily achievable in one round of negotiations. You have to set up an international body that everyone agrees has the ability to judge and hand out penalties. It took years to set up the World Trade Organisation, the only body that can really do the same kind of thing across most of the world - and look how many DUers look on it as an evil entity.

But I think there will be more of a genuine effort to improve things a bit this time; unfortunately, that's because things look more desperate.