COPs - The "Spinning Reserve" of Climate Change Mitigation

NOTE: This post tries something I haven't tried before. It takes a blog post originally written in 2012 (!!!), and updates it as if being written today in 2022, reflecting that fact that COP 27 is underway in Egypt.

Two weeks of international climate negotiations are currently underway in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. I routinely attended these negotiations for many years, attending every Conference of the Parties (or COP) up to COP-15.

International climate change policy got off to a roaring start after climate change “went public” in 1988, the same year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was launched.??The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was signed just four years later (1992), and entered into force just two years after that (1994, a breakneck pace by international treaty standards).?Three years later (1997) the Kyoto Protocol to the UNFCCC was signed, assigning "binding" emissions reduction targets to industrialized countries.?Even though the targets were much more modest than scientists were calling for, climate change policy was on a roll!?

That was 25 years ago (!!!).?Admittedly, climate change is an incredibly difficult problem to get one's head around, much less to control through national legislation, much less to tackle through international cooperation.?As a species whose “risk brain” is still optimized for spotting lions in the Serengeti, perceiving and acting on climate risk is a cognitive challenge.?We've never experienced it before, it's uncertain, it's long-term, and its impacts are difficult to distinguish from natural climate variability.?That's before grappling with the fact that almost all human activities contribute to climate change, that powerful economic interests have a vested interest in the status quo, that climate risks vary substantially across the globe, and that responsibility for future warming (as measured by current GHG emissions) is transitioning from the industrialized to the developing world.

These characteristics make policy negotiations aimed at mitigating climate change a game theorist's dream (or nightmare, as the case may be). ?It shouldn’t be surprising that it took eight years for the Kyoto Protocol, which was signed in 1997 after all-night negotiations, to come into force in 2005.?And after the Kyoto was never ratified by the United States, and Canada withdrew its ratification, the Kyoto Protocol was pretty much neutralized in terms of mitigating climate change. When its first commitment period came to an end in 2013, instead of transitioning into a more rigorous second commitment period, it pretty much faded away way into the sunset.

In the aftermath of the Kyoto Protocol, the Parties largely abandoned the idea of binding emissions reduction commitments, transitioning instead to an entirely voluntary framework defined by "Nationally Defined Contributions," or NDCs. This was already happening by the 2009 negotiations in Durban, South Africa, which set the stage for the Paris Agreement that would be signed in 2015. The Paris Agreement, while commonly characterized as a major success, in effect represented the replacement of binding targets with voluntary targets as the mechanism by which the international negotiations would tackle climate change. By most measures that would be characterized as a failure, not a success.

In preparation for the Paris Agreement a number of “work out the details” negotiating session were held in Bonn, Germany.?What happened???Days of debate over agendas.??Days of discussion over whether global regions are fairly represented in chairing the meetings.??Days of discussion over what (if anything apparently) was actually agreed to in Durban, South Africa. Extensive discussions of future emissions reduction market mechanisms, even as the existing market mechanisms of the Kyoto Protocol collapsed. ?A lot of concern over whether there would be money for the next scheduled round of "work out the details" negotiations, in that case in Bangkok, Thailand. These "work out the details" sessions have effectively now been underway for almost a decade, culminating in COP-27 currently underway in Egypt.

One way to think about the entire international negotiations framework, of which the Conferences of the Parties are a key part, is as "spinning reserve." Just as some fraction of power plants are always kept in “spinning reserve” for grid emergencies, the climate negotiations process has been put into "spinning reserve."??It keeps going, staffed by capable staff and (generally) well-intentioned negotiators, but they can’t actually make anything happen. Until something happens to trigger a “Climate Response Tipping Point,” often referred to today as the "Inevitable Policy Response," the policy process will remain in spinning reserve.??That doesn't mean it's pointless. Like those powerplants held in spinning reserve, we don’t want the global climate policy process to shut down entirely, since it would take too long to get it back up and running if we did actually reach a “Climate Response Tipping Point” and decided to actually tackle climate change. But going through the motions of annual Conference of the Parties does not in and of itself suggest that an Inevitable Policy Response has been triggered. ???

What does this mean for the growing fraction of the global business community that seems to recognize the need for coordinated global action on climate change, and that has looked to the international policy process as one place to focus their efforts? ?Bemoaning the lack of global political will doesn’t help.?Nor should we delude ourselves into believing that business can somehow substitute for government policy when it comes to internalizing the economic externalities that underlie climate change, or that voluntary individual corporate moves towards sustainability (laudable as they are) will make a measurable dent in the global problem of climate change.

Given the uniquely difficult characteristics of climate change as a risk management problem, the business community needs to think a lot farther outside the box about where and how to use its leverage and its resources to influence public opinion and public policy, focusing more on its "policy footprint" than its "carbon footprint."?The more innovative and focused the effort, the more likely we can move future climate negotiations from “spinning reserve” to “on line.”?