Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
12/11/2015
PARIS — Late Thursday, Laurent Fabius, president of the Conference of Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, released a new version of the draft text of the global climate agreement negotiated here over the last two weeks. Fabius had pushed hard for a final version of the text to be approved before the scheduled close of COP21 on Friday, asking negotiators to work overnight to meet that deadline. However, it now appears that the next, and potentially final, version of the text will not be released until Saturday morning.
“We want an agreement. We are extremely close to the finishing line. We must, therefore, show the necessary responsibility to find in the forthcoming hours a common ground. In other words, it’s time to come to an agreement,” Fabius said Thursday.
The Thursday evening text shows progress over previous versions, which were riddled with bracketed text yet to be decided. Most of those brackets have now been decided, and negotiations are focusing largely on three main points of contention: the responsibilities of developed and developing nations, financing the climate change efforts, and the plan’s level of ambition. “There are some brackets in terms of some specific areas, there are some issues which are the most complex which still remain in brackets,” Fabius said.
Until last evening, even the goal of the agreement had yet to be decided, with several developing countries pushing for a target of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius rather than the previous aim of 2 degrees. The 1.5-degree advocates, including many small island nations, argue that even a 2-degree warming would result in catastrophe for their countries. The sea-level rise that could result from a 2-degree rise in global temperatures, for example, could leave some small island nations underwater, quite literally wiping them off the map.
The latest text offers a compromise on the matter, stating that the purpose of the agreement is to “hold the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C, recognizing that this would significantly reduce risks and impacts of climate change.”
U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change Todd Stern suggested support for such language during a press briefing of the Coalition of High Ambition, of which the U.S. has become a member, on Wednesday. “We need a strong long-term goal. We need beyond the 2-degree target, we need to have a recognition of 1.5 in the agreement,” he said.
Furthermore, the text requests that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2018 issue a technical paper on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways.
The argument against setting a hard 1.5 degree is easily summed up, Elliot Diringer executive vice president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES), told reporters Thursday prior to the release of the new text. “As a general rule, I think it’s sensible to set goals that are attainable and 2 degrees is still within reach,” he said.
However, it has long been recognized that the Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs), public commitments by the nearly 200 countries participating in the talks, that will comprise the bulk of the agreement, will not meet the 2-degree target. For this reason, participants at the talks have requested that the final agreement contain an ambition mechanism, wherein countries would come back to the table every few years — five years is the general consensus at this time — and re-evaluate their goals, potentially increasing their ambition. In this way, it might be possible eventually to get onto the 2-degree pathway. Reaching a 1.5-degree pathway will be definitively more difficult, requiring greater emissions reductions from all countries in a shorter period of time.
To limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees, the world would have to significantly limit its carbon output by 2020; this is unlikely, making it nearly inevitable that there will be an overshoot of the pathway to a 1.5-degree future. If the world does overshoot the 1.5-degree pathway, landing on a pathway for a temperature rise of 2 or more degrees, even more work will have to be done to remove carbon already emitted from the atmosphere, a group of scientists told reporters Friday. “By the time the pledges enter into force by 2020, we will probably have exhausted the entire carbon budget for the 1.5 degrees target,” Steffen Kallbekken, director of the Centre for International Climate and Energy Policy, said during an early afternoon press briefing. “At the time when we start aiming to reach the target we’ll probably already [have] surpassed emissions consistent with that target.”
Overshooting is not ideal and could cause irreversible damage in some areas, such as climate change-induced damage to coral reefs. However, with an overshoot period of only a few decades, it could be possible to limit sea level rise to a point that would save many of the endangered small island nations. “If it’s for a few decades only it would not have a major impact on sea-level rise because there it’s really about the tipping points. With 1.5 we can be pretty sure that we will not [provoke] the irreversible melting of the Greenland ice sheet, for example,” said Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
Negotiators will continue to work Friday in informal meetings, and as of press time no full COP sessions are scheduled. The COP is expected to reconvene early Saturday morning to present a new, potentially final text that could address the remaining issues of contention.
GHG Monitor will provide live updates from COP21 this weekend on Twitter, hashtag #GHGParis. Full coverage will resume Monday.
