Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
6/13/2014
As U.N. members get ready for a new set of climate talks scheduled to be held in Paris next year, the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions released a new report this week that calls for a “hybrid” approach to a new agreement that would give countries flexibility in how they meet any new climate goals. “This emerging hybrid approach seeks to balance national flexibility and international discipline to produce greater ambition. It aims to ensure broad participation through flexibility, by giving countries significant latitude in defining their national contributions or commitments. And, through international rules on transparency and accountability, it aims to prod countries to do more than they otherwise would,” the report says.
The report lists several potential elements of a hybrid approach, including nationally determined contributions, long-term goal setting, rules on transparency and accounting, procedures to review the implementation of the nationally determined contributions and provisions to allow for the updating of member state contributions. The goal of the hybrid model, the report says, is to strike a balance between the global nature of the climate change issue and the individual political circumstances of member states. “The hybrid model recognizes that while climate change is inherently a global challenge, the political will to address it must arise, and be exercised, primarily within the domestic realm,” the report says. “It is, accordingly, a concession to the limits of international law in influencing countries’ behavior in an area so vital to their self-interests.”
Questions Over ‘Top-Down,’ ‘Bottom-Up’ Approaches
The report notes that previous climate agreements have been generally lacking in some areas and have thus been mostly unsuccessful in meeting their goals of combating climate change. The Kyoto Protocol, the report explains, was “top-down,” giving little flexibility to member states by providing for only one “type of mitigation commitment—legally-binding, economy-wide, absolute emissions targets, defined through a process of international negotiation— and included strong international accounting rules.” This stringent approach was not affective, the report says, because “Kyoto’s more top-down approach provides greater legal and technical rigor, promotes transparency and comparability of effort, and holds the promise of greater ambition.” The study adds, “But few states have been willing to accept it, primarily because international climate change policy is driven largely by domestic rather than international politics. The countries willing to undertake second commitment period targets under the Kyoto Protocol account for only about 14 percent of global emissions.”
On the other end of the spectrum are the Copenhagen Accord and Cancun Agreement, the report says, which demonstrated a “bottom-up” approach. These measures “gave states almost complete flexibility in defining the nature and stringency of their commitments— including the sectors and gases covered, and the baseline relative to which commitments are defined— and left accounting to national discretion.” This more flexible approach was also ineffective, according to the report. “A more bottom-up approach encourages greater participation, since national commitments reflect national choices. But it may produce little more than business-as-usual, since states may pledge only what they already planned to do anyway. More than 90 countries made quantified pledges under the Copenhagen/Cancun approach, representing more than 80 percent of global emissions. Though likely an improvement on business-as-usual, these pledges do not, in the aggregate, put the world on a pathway to meeting the 2° C temperature limit agreed to in Cancun. Moreover, they are difficult to evaluate and compare, due to limited transparency and differences in approach,” the report says.
