Copenhagen offers lessons for climate governance

In an op-ed for the Financial Express today, I argue that the chaos on the streets of Copenhagen and the frustration with the negotiations inside the Bella Center show a mirror to the world of international diplomacy and global governance. For international regimes in general, Copenhagen offers lessons for agenda-setting and participation, negotiations and rule-making, and implementation, monitoring and enforcement of commitments. Read the article here.

Why climate finance negotiations do not move forward

During my week in Copenhagen I was asked to contribute to Opinio Juris, a forum of reputed international law and international relations scholars. I argue that negotiations are stuck because we are unable to break out of the moulds that have defined our positions for nearly two decades. The massive trust deficit that plagues the negotiations can only be broken if we take a more honest approach towards debunking seemingly dichotomous and exclusive positions: a choice of public over private finance; a trap of us versus them stemming out of a fear of competition; and a stalemate over what comes first, commitments or conditionality. Continue reading the article, Red herrings in debates over climate finance, here.

Four questions for Copenhagen

The success or failure of Copenhagen will depend not only on the substance of the deal but on the spirit and message of the talks as well. The legitimacy of any climate agreement will depend on answers to four questions:

1. Where will the deal get struck and who will participate?

2. How will commitments be implemented?

3. Who will pay for the sharing of burdens?

4. How will firms and private citizens respond to the signals that come out of the climate negotiations?

My article on the GEG blog, Making Copenhagen count, engages with these questions to highlight the prevailing and potential tensions in climate change discussions. A longer list of my current research on climate change governance (on technology transfer, financing, trade and climate links, monitoring and enforcement) is available here.

Lotteries and poker games in climate finance

Lotteries are games of pure chance. Poker is a game of part chance, part strategy. Climate negotiations hinge on, among other things, creating a pool of finance to share the burden of mitigating and adapting to climate change. The game is not one of a winner taking all by sheer luck, but of who contributes how much to the common pot. No country is willing to act first; doing so would be to fold. Countries are taking a chance on the level of aggregate effort needed to avoid dangerous climate change, but their strategy is to avoid revealing preferences.

The absence of internationally enforceable mitigation commitments means that the burden on climate finance will increase. Unilateral promises will depend on whether sufficient financing is available to achieve the scale of actions needed. So, who will pay, how much, and through which mechanisms? I explore some of the games being played in climate finance and the implications for the Copenhagen meetings in my latest op-ed in the Financial Express, Even climate is about money.

Climate finance - it's still the one

Climate finance is one of the four issues on which a future climate regime will rest (the others being mitigation, adaptation, and technology development and transfer). It will also prove to be the main stumbling block during the Copenhagen meeting on climate change this December.

This weekend came the news that the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Trinidad had agreed to UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown's and French President Nicolas Sarkozy's proposal to establish a $10 billion fund to help developing countries reduce their emissions and adapt to a changing climate. The fund, expected to kick in by 2010, is an important step - one more push towards securing at least a political outcome in Copenhagen.

But several issues remain unresolved. The most important is the 'additionality' of funding. This is jargon for the demand from developing countries that funding made available for climate change should be over and above existing allocations for official development assistance. In other words, they do not want climate change finance to simply substitute money intended for education, health and other development aspirations. Today, The Guardian reports that it has evidence that the European Union is trying to delete references to additional funding from the Copenhagen text. The United Kingdom supports additional funding, but even its climate-related aid allocations have come from existing aid budgets, not as extra money. As a clarification, a Department for International Development spokesman said, 'Additional funding for climate change would be made available from 2013...'

At one level, the question of additionality is problematic because it is difficult to distinguish between assistance for general development programmes, say improving water management systems, and activities geared towards climate adaptation.

But the bigger problem is that the funds required are several multiples of what is currently spent (only $1 billion a year on adaptation). On mitigation, too, scholars suggest that at least $50 billion might be needed annually in the form of public financing support (see my paper with Kevin Watkins; Lord Nicholas Stern repeats the point in an op-ed today). But current levels of public financing are much lower (since 1991, the Global Environment Facility has cumulatively provided only $2.5 billion for climate financing and leveraged another $15 billion).

A further problem - and related problem - is the long history of unmet commitments on development assistance, which has resulted in an atmosphere of sheer mistrust and bad faith between rich and poor countries. Moreover, the richest country (the United States) has yet to table any offer regarding climate financing. President Obama admitted at the G8 summit in July this year that the United States had 'sometimes failed to meet its responsibilities so let me make it clear those days are over.' It doesn't look like those days are over yet.

So, why will climate finance prove to be the stumbling block? Because all other actions will be contingent on the available funding. Over the last few weeks, we have seen one country after another offering unilateral commitments to reduce emissions (Brazil; Russia; South Korea; United States) or carbon intensity (China; even India is considering an announcement). Fast growing developing countries are adopting measures that they believe to be in their interest anyway. But any additional actions will depend on additional funding. As one developing country delegate in climate negotiations earlier this year complained, asking poor countries to take on climate-related actions without promised financing was like selling lottery tickets without announcing the prize! Such tickets would not find many buyers, he noted.