On November 4th, 2020—while much was still unknown about the outcome of the US elections—the outgoing Trump Administration enacted a consequential international climate policy decision by officially withdrawing the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement. Although President-Elect Biden has committed to rejoining the Paris Agreement once he takes office, the US’s temporary withdrawal from the agreement revealed the fragility of international climate agreements, and the importance of non-Party stakeholders (i.e. businesses, subnational governments, etc.) to serve a supplementary role in achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement. This past week, I had the opportunity to interview Kathleen Wight and Julia Meisel from the Rocky Mountain Institute about the role of the private sector and subnational governments in the international climate negotiating space.
Rocky Mountain Institute is an independent, nonpartisan nonprofit which, according to its website, “engages businesses, communities, institutions, and entrepreneurs to accelerate the adoption of market-based solutions that cost-effectively shift from fossil fuels to efficiency and renewables.” Through my conversations with Kathleen and Julia, I was able to get a holistic view of the role that RMI plays in the international climate negotiation space.
Kathleen Wight is the Business Development Manager for Industry and Heavy Transport at RMI. She works primarily on corporate engagement with RMI’s climate intelligence program, looking to see how better data can better inform carbon emissions reduction in hard-to-abate industries like aviation. One of our main topics of discussion was on the role she sees industry-specific agreements like Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA) playing in achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement. While she emphasized the importance of CORSIA as a tool of international carbon abatement in the aviation market, she believes that industry, technology, and market has already gone well-beyond offsets in their sustainability ambitions. In our interview, she stated, “it is better [for airline companies] to replace jet fuel with biofuels than it is to solely rely on plantings forests that take 25 years to grow to any real amount of carbon reduction.” Going forward, she thinks that the biggest sustainability advancements in the industrial sector will be in the form of increasingly accurate ways of monitoring emissions reductions. Through these improvements, she believes investors in the industrial sector will be more comfortable knowing that carbon emissions reductions are both “actionable and bankable.”
For this blog, I also had the opportunity to speak with Julia Meisel who is a Senior Associate with the Global Climate Finance program at RMI. In our conversation, she highlighted RMI’s America’s Pledge project which was launched in 2017 at COP23 with the help of former Mayor Mike Bloomberg and former Governor Jerry Brown. America’s Pledge was an agreement made in the wake of the Trump Administration’s decision to pull the US out of the Paris Agreement between U.S. cities, states, businesses, and universities that reaffirmed their commitment to helping America reach its Paris climate goals.[1] Julia emphasized the importance of subnational agreements like America’s Pledge in buffering potential political volatility at the national level and for ensuring countries are able to stay consistent on a path of carbon emissions reductions. For Julia, she sees three major priorities for RMI in the international climate space going forward: 1) Aligning the goals of the financial sector with the climate goals of the Paris Agreement, 2) increasing national ownership of climate finance to promote greater independence and equity for developing countries in achieving their NDC goals, and 3) raising funding for research and development in the energy sector. She sees plenty of potential to make headway on these priorities at COP26 and through other channels of action.
Overall, my conversations with working professionals at RMI gave me a better understanding of the importance of non-Party stakeholders and market-based solutions to climate change in addition to international climate agreements under the UNFCCC. In order to accelerate and scale climate solutions, many stakeholders—including businesses, activists, and nonprofits—must be given meaningful channels of negotiations at the COP. Additionally, these non-Party stakeholders are crucial partners for countries in achieving their NDCs and countries must recognize their importance through strengthening subnational and market-based channels of action in the climate negotiating space.
