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COP25 is now in its second and final week, and time is running out for negotiators to produce something meaningful at the end. Here are some of the key issues negotiators are facing this week.
There is still unfinished business in implementing the Paris climate agreement
In the 2015 Paris accord, almost every country in the world agreed for the first time that the climate is changing due to human activity, and that they are obligated to act to mitigate it. But what form that action takes is different for each country, and each country gets to define that action for themselves.
Still, the agreement sets out parameters for how countries set their targets, how they measure progress, how they ramp up their goals over time, and how they report their efforts in a transparent way. Together, these standards form what’s called the Paris rulebook, and it’s the means by which countries will actually put the accord into practice.
Much of the Paris rulebook was finalized at the last UN climate meeting in Poland, but there are still several issues on the table at COP25. One is that many developing countries want stronger provisions around loss and damage stemming from climate change. The idea is that in addition to reducing the future impacts of climate change, there needs to be accountability for past and present damages. Rising sea levels, more extreme heat, and worsening disasters are already taking a toll on some of the poorest regions in the world. Many changes to the climate are also baked in and unavoidable. So wealthier countries should allocate funds for dealing with these consequences in poorer countries, rather than simply funding projects that curb emissions and deploy clean energy.
The main framework for this is the Warsaw International Mechanism, but it doesn’t come with a built-in source of funding. And some wealthier countries are already trying to limit their potential contributions to the mechanism.
There are also negotiations around setting common timeframes for implementing the Paris agreement, namely determining the time horizon for commitments to curb emissions.
However, the section of the Paris agreement known as Article 6 has proven to be especially difficult to resolve. It takes up just over one page of the Paris agreement text, but has enormous, complicated implications for the accord and could collapse it altogether. The negotiations around Article 6 pushed the last round of climate talks at COP24 in Poland into overtime and it still wasn’t resolved. So getting it right is a high priority for negotiators in Spain.
“I strongly hope that COP25 will be able to agree on the guidelines for the implementation of Article 6 of the Paris Agreement,” Guterres said. “That was unfortunately not achieved in Katowice [Poland].”
Article 6 governs how countries can work across borders to meet their climate change targets, particularly through markets where countries can trade carbon emissions credits. If one country is well ahead of their target for curbing emissions, they could sell the credit for the overshoot to another country struggling to hit their own target, for example.
Ideally, such mechanisms would allow countries to adopt even more ambitious greenhouse gas reduction targets than they would otherwise. It would also help conserve some of the most valuable bulwarks against climate change, like tropical rainforests that soak up and store vast quantities of carbon.
But a badly structured set of rules around Article 6 could undermine progress in limiting climate change, allowing wealthy countries to buy their way into meeting their goals with offsets, or if credits are poorly designed, lead to more greenhouse gas emissions overall.
Simon Evans and Josh Gabbatiss at Carbon Brief have an excellent in-depth explainer for all the ways Article 6 could make or break the Paris agreement. The double-counting problem though, may be the biggest issue.
Known as “corresponding adjustments” in UN-speak, the idea is that if an emissions credit is sold from one country to another, it moves from the ledger of one country to another. For example, if Norway pays to restore a chunk of the Amazon rainforest, which in turn absorbs a quantity of carbon dioxide, Norway would get credit for reducing its net impact on the climate, but not Brazil. But if both countries claim credit, that’s double-counting.
Reports indicated that Brazil has been one of the most vocal opponents of this idea of corresponding adjustments, likely because Brazil is home to 60 percent of the Amazon rainforest. The Amazon stores about 10 years’ worth of human-produced emissions in its biomass, but there’s tremendous economic pressure to exploit it. Protecting and restoring the Amazon could be a vast source of emissions credits.
Brazil’s negotiators have cited section 4(c) of Article 6, which states that an international emissions trading mechanism should “contribute to the reduction of emission levels in the host Party, which will benefit from mitigation activities resulting in emission reductions that can also be used by another Party to fulfill its nationally determined contribution.” That is, the country that hosts an emissions reduction project deserves to benefit from it somehow.
But the next section of the Paris agreement says credits “shall not be used to demonstrate achievement of the host Party’s nationally determined contribution if used by another Party to demonstrate achievement of its nationally determined contribution.”
Thiago de Araujo Mendes, the secretary for climate change and forests in Brazil’s environment ministry, wrote in letter to the Guardian last year that Brazil is opposed to double-counting. But Brazil’s proposal at the last round of talks effectively allowed double-counting in the early years of the Paris agreement with the stipulation that the over-estimate would be corrected and compensated for at a later date.
It’s not too surprising, then, that some activists are skeptical of the whole enterprise. “Instead of focusing on how to transition from fossil fuels, COP25 is focused on finding elaborate ways for rich, industrialized countries to be able to carry on polluting while pretending not to,” said Angela Valenzuela, a youth climate activist from Chile, during a press conference Monday in Madrid.
COP25 is laying the foundation for next year’s climate meeting when the next round of climate targets are due
The COP in Glasgow in November 2020 will mark five years since the signing of the Paris agreement, and it’s the meeting when countries are expected to present their next round of commitments to curb their contributions to climate change. That means even more aggressive cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, less reliance on mechanisms like emissions trading, and more details about how they will achieve their goals.
Sixty-eight countries have already indicated that they plan to ramp up their goals, but these countries are mainly smaller developing countries on the front lines of climate change, like island countries facing sea level rise.
Many of the larger greenhouse gas emitters have so far been silent. “The major economies are not showing the leadership they need to show,” Andrew Steer, president of the World Resources Institute told reporters Monday. “We are not anywhere close to where we need to be.”
The unofficial goal of COP25 was to be a venue where more countries would announce more aggressive goals, as well as more funding for international climate financing programs. Steer said that it’s likely more countries will take this opportunity before the conference is over. But the rules that are decided here will determine how much more aggressively the world acts to limit warming in the coming decade.
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