Post-Paris policy relevance: lessons from the IPCC SR15 process

2018

The rise of climate change as an issue of global concern has rested on scientific representation and understanding of the causes and impacts of, and responses to climatic change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in particular, has been central to how climate change has become known as a global political problem. This thesis aims to critically examine the production, negotiation, and stabilisation of policy-relevant knowledge in international climate politics. It takes the IPCC as a global stage on which the knowledge politics of climate change plays out, drawing attention to the performative interactions which shape the relationship between knowledge production processes and policy making at the global level. Informed by social constructivist accounts, particularly from within the social studies of science, this thesis builds on the notion that science and politics can never be truly separated from each other, rather, they are co-produced. In turn politics is no...

2014

This research focuses on climate change as a political process: it describes the Kyoto Protocol, its origins and ratification process in the international climate-diplomatic arena, as well as the climate strategy based on the United Nations' framework convention on climate change, its results and consequences. It views the issue of climate change as a decision-making problem focusing on the relationship between climate science, policy development and politics. This monograph revisits the scientific discussion on the topic and prepares an advanced synthesis and a bigger picture on developing policies for mitigating climate change. Some unpublished and previously unpublished sources like notes, e-mails, transcripts of meeting minutes and diaries are used for the description and analysis of UN Climate meetings and UNFCCC Conferences of the Parties (COP). Parts of this study feature elements of action research: the writer has participated as an active legislator in the topic at hand, as is the case for emissions trading. The study discusses climate change as a so-called wicked problem-i.e. a multi-faceted bundle of problems. To sum up, it can be said that the Protocol has not met the expectations. There are many reasons for this. The climate problem has been assumed to be more onedimensional than it is in reality-a wicked problem-, which has led to excessive simplification. The relationship between science and politics has been problematic in the field of climate science. The public demands more certainty and more precise information than science is able to provide. For the climate scientist, this implies a pressure to act as committed advocators rather than objective scientists. One of the core claims of this research is that preserving the epistemic or cognitivist ideal of science is still necessary in climate science. Otherwise, the error margin of the research risks increasing and even multiplying, when the value-laden preferences accumulate at the various levels of this interdisciplinary field. Researchers should not make political accentuations or risk assessments on behalf of the politician or decision-maker, but rather restrict their research to the production of information as reliable as possible. The study evaluates the main instruments of EU climate policy, such as emissions trading (ETS). It explains why such a genius system in theory has not been able to show its strength and results in practice for the EU. The overlapping legislation can be considered a key reason. Also the unilateral economic burden has proven to be problematic, when solving the global problem of climate change has been attempted by local means. Future climate policy is likely to be more practical and is composed of parallel elements. The special position of carbon dioxide may be challenged and the prevention of pollutants like black carbon will also be placed parallel to it. Reaching a global agreement is more and more unrealistic. Instead of setting emission ceilings the major emitters prefer technological investments and decarbonising the economy. If the EU desires a global climate policy it should approach the others and stop waiting for others to jump onto a Kyoto-type bandwagon. Emissions trading may well be functional as an emissionreduction instrument. It could also work well in the reduction of soot, i.e. black carbon, which is China's most urgent pollution problem.

Nina Hall looks at current trends to argue that climate change has become institutionalised in global affairs as a top priority issue, identifying four dimensions that confirm this: scientific consensus, political action, the location financial resources and the institutionalisation of climate change multilateral organisations. Hall examines G7 and G8 communiqués as well as international organisations’ engagement with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). This approach allows the concluding observation that, although climate change was previously minimised by international actors, this trend is reversing.

npj Climate Action

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been a crucial facilitator of climate change research and governance. After its sixth assessment cycle, the organization is at a critical juncture. The amount of climate science has grown tremendously over the past three decades, but so has global emissions of greenhouse gases. If the world is to reach the objectives implied by the Paris Agreement, climate action must accelerate on an unprecedented scale and pace, across widely differing contexts. Scientific knowledge will play a key role in this endeavour. Everyone who produces or relies on climate knowledge needs to wrestle with this pivotal question: How can IPCC processes and outcomes be reformed to produce knowledge that is more relevant for climate action? The organizational and resource constraints of the IPCC must be considered when searching for answers. This is an introduction to a special collection of research articles, reviews and perspectives dealing with this qu...

India Quarterly: A Journal of International Affairs, 2021

Anthropogenic climate change has emerged as the most disruptive socio-political issue in the last few decades. The Kyoto Protocol’s failure to curb the rising greenhouse gases emissions pushed the UNFCCC-led negotiations towards a more flexible, non-binding agreement at the Paris COP21 meeting in 2015. The Paris Agreement’s hybrid approach to climate change governance, where flexible measures like the nationally determined commitments are balanced against the ambition of limiting the global temperature within the two-degree range, ensured the emergence of an increasingly complex and multi-stakeholder climate change regime. The article outlines the roadmap of the transition from the top-down approach of Kyoto Protocol to the legally non-binding, bottom-up approaches adopted for the post-Paris phase. The article outlines the post-Paris developments in international climate politics, which hold long-term geopolitical and geoeconomic implications. The article focuses on the fundamental ...

The global climate change agreement completed on December 12, 2015 in Paris set a collective target to cap greenhouse gas emissions in order to limit the temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius with a goal to get as close as possible to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. These goals were to be accomplished through a “bottom up” mechanism for national policy approaches in which states made their own choices about how they would meet climate targets. This paper examines why and how an agreement was possible in 2015 when it had not been before. What was different in Paris, or leading up to Paris, so that the parties involved successfully came to an agreement when it was not possible in Copenhagen? This paper presents a problem definition and issue framing perspective to examine the shift in the discussion in Paris from the burdens of climate action to opportunities climate action offered for economic and development models. It provides a road map to understand the role of key stakeholders, including governments, the business community, civil society, and subnational actors in the making of the climate agreement.

2017

Climate change emerged as a topic of public and political concern in the 1980s alongside the discovery of the ‘Antarctic Ozone Hole.’ The issue was raised up the political agenda in the latter half of the 1980s by scientists and international administrators operating in a transnational setting –culminating in the eventual formation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988. Created to produce a comprehensive assessment of the science, impacts and possible response strategies to climate change, the Panel managed to bridge to the two worlds of science and politics as a hybrid science-policy organisation, meeting the divergent needs of a variety of groups, specifically in the US Government. This thesis will provide an analysis of the negotiations that resulted in the formation of the IPCC in 1988. In particular, I examine the power politics of knowledge production in the relationship between a transnational set of scientists engaged in assessments of climate change and national policymakers. I argue that the IPCC was established as a means of controlling who could speak for the climate, when and how, and as such the Panel legitimised and privileged certain voices at the expense of others. In addition to tracing and examining the history of international climate change assessments in the 1980s, I will scrutinise how the issue became a topic of international political concern. Focusing on the negotiations between the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the United States of America in the formation of the IPCC, I will argue against the received view that the U.S. has consistently been in a battle with climate science and the IPCC. As I will show that the U.S. government was both integral to the decision to establish the IPCC and also one of its strongest backers. Following the formation of the Panel I examine the ad hoc decisions taken and processes adopted during the First Assessment (AR1) that contributed to the anchoring of the IPCC as the central authority on climate related knowledge. As such I show that in the absence of any formal procedural guidance there was considerable leeway for the scientists and Working Group Chairs to control and shape the content of the assessment. Finally, I analyse the ways in which U.S. and UK policymakers strategically engaged with the Panel. Significantly, I show that the ways in which the U.S. pushed all political debates to the heart of the scientific assessment imparted a linear approach to policymaking –assessment precedes and leads the policymaking –contributing to the increasing entanglement of the science and politics of climate change. Moreover, the narrow technical framing of the issue and the largely tokenistic attempts to involve participants from developing countries in the IPCC resulted in the UN resolutions (backed by developing countries) establishing the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee/United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (INC/UNFCC) contrary to the wishes of U.S. policymakers.

2019

Much mitigation-related governance activity is evident in a range of sectoral systems, and regarding particular governance functions. However, there is a tendency for this activity to relate to the easiest functions to address, such as "learning and knowledge building", or to take place in somewhat limited "niches". Across all sectoral systems examined, the gap between identified governance needs and what is currently supplied is most serious in terms of the critical function of setting rules to facilitate collective action. A lack of "guidance and signal" is also evident, particularly in the finance, extractive industries, energy-intensive industries, and buildings sectoral systems. Of the sectoral systems examined, the power sector appears the most advanced in covering the main international governance functions required of it. Nevertheless, it still falls short in achieving critical governance functions necessary for sufficient decarbonisation. Signi...