Cześć, this is Cai May here writing from Katowice! I bring with my many feelings to this conference, stirring slowly in a pot of expectations for COP 24. Earlier this year, the IPCC released a special report on warming scenario of 1.5 Celsius increase, to which the international community responded with demands for more climate action ambition. SR 1.5 highlighted weather, industrial and ecosystem implications of the projected temperature rise relative to industrial levels, which included higher frequency of extreme weather events, endangerment and extinction of biodiversity, decreased food security, and more. The report also emphasized the heterogeneous spread of climate risks and impacts globally, calling attention to impacts to already-vulnerable communities in the Global South. We would agree that mitigation and adaptation efforts have already taken off, but there is still a gap between what is achieved and what needs to be done, especially so in the regions that are hardest hit. Developing nation blocs often adopt the positions that demand greater action from developed countries during negotiations, alongside the ethical argument of having insufficient capacity to adapt and mitigate, as well as the disparity in opportunities to industrialize.
Having gone through a full semester studying the UNFCCC climate regime, I have renewed faith in the Paris Agreement to tackle climate change head. The world’s climate conditions are a public good. There is nothing to stop us from emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and therefore we require some form of GHG regulation. The international UNFCCC climate regime has set out to manage our carbon emission and to protect the right to a clean environment, and to establish a consensus to decrease GHG emissions in order to limit the projected rise of average world temperature.
In the past, we have seen regulation success in the international regime with the Montreal Protocol that regulated ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). However, regulating GHGs is more challenging than CFCs because we rely heavily on fossil fuels across many different industries. Actions associated under mitigation involve major policy changes to transition, and many countries and industries are hesitant to make the switch because they face potential economic loss and are required to reform their production methods or practices. Since the culmination of the Kyoto Protocol, Parties have reflected the same reluctance. Because under an international regime, who’s to say that other Parties will make the same effort to mitigate?
During the Paris Agreement negotiations, developing nations have emphasized the element of common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR) to address the disparity of nations’ ability to adapt and mitigate. The notion of CBDR gets at another significant challenge in realizing the Paris ambition. Since industrialization, different countries’ economies have developed at different rates, which has generated the variety of socioeconomic and welfare conditions that we have today. Hence, it is difficult to assign equal burden to mitigate and adapt in an effort to carry out climate action on a global scale. The element of CBDR was tabled in response to the equality argument, and it has become the foundation of the Paris Agreement and the corresponding Paris Rulebook.
Since the focus of the Paris Agreement is to take climate action on a global scale, the negotiations have also tabled the agenda of building a better global community by aiding countries that lack capacity to achieve sufficient mitigation and adaptation goals. One important aspect in bridging capacity and national goals is through international funding, pooled into mechanisms like the Adaptation Fund, GEF and more. The Paris Agreement calls for annual contributions of USD $100 billion by 2020 through various financing channels but the international community has fallen short of meeting this goal. Additionally, Parties are also making progress through capacity building, technology transfers and response measures to help least-developed or vulnerable nations to be more climate resilient.
COP 24 comes with a strong push for more “ambition” to achieve national and international targets. However, we have yet to see how “ambitions” translate into concrete agreements in the implementation rulebook and Party NDCs. During the first week of COP 24, I will be tracking adaptation negotiations, and working with the Malaysian Youth Delegation, a youth-led NGO and YOUNGO constituent that reports on climate change policies in the Malaysian context. I look forward to experiencing COP 24 through the lens of a CSO, and see how Article 7 agenda items develop over the course of the next two weeks.
