Author: Carter Forinash

I had the opportunity to talk to an American who has attended Conferences of the Parties (COPs) going back to at least 2016 in Marrakesh.

I was able to get some insight into how the American delegation is put together. In general, the delegation is headed by the office director out of the State Department’s Office of Global Change (or a stand-in if they’re unable to attend), who leads strategy and engagement with the UNFCCC Secretariat. From there, two different groups generally get pulled into the delegation based on needs: first, negotiation portfolios go out to members of the office, who are generally assigned either alone or in pairs to specific items on the agenda; second, there’s a major interagency component, with technical experts from other agencies brought in (e.g. EPA leads in IPCC, NOAA in climate science and USDA on agriculture). Delegations were particularly heavy on these interagency experts between Copenhagen and Marrakesh as the Paris Agreement was being hashed out.

While delegation strategy is an internal matter, I was able to get the gist of what the delegation looks out for over the course of the COP.  During the first week, when the overall course of negotiations is being laid out, most of the negotiation is done in formal negotiation sessions—and the big issues of concern are usually procedural, rather than substantive (for instance, a country might try to slow-roll the negotiation schedule to block serious discussion on a topic, or stop the chair from starting informal negotiations later in the week). Those procedural hurdles are often tough to overcome since the system works on consensus. During the second week, when negotiations are often less formal and often go for 12+ hours a day, concerns become more substantive. All of these topic “curveballs” get discussed in daily delegation meetings.

On the party groupings topic, I was surprised to learn the degree of engagement that the American delegation has with the Umbrella Group, formally the only party grouping that the U.S. is involved with. Per my conversations, the U.S. usually convenes with the Umbrella Group daily (after a quick delegation catch-up session post-6 a.m. wakeup), to coordinate strategy—this is led by whoever chairs the Umbrella Group, currently Australia. While the U.S. engages with other groupings, including the E.U. and the EIG, these daily meetings are the core of the delegation’s engagement with party groupings. In the case of plenary sessions on specific days (or the closing session) the UG will also sometimes make a unified statement—but given differences in opinion many statements often come from individual members instead.

I also got a good overview of the experience of attending the COP, with the conference split into the Blue Zone—where negotiations take place, some more public and some with more limited access—and the Green Zone, where both Parties and non-Parties set up pavilions and other exhibitions. The U.S. has in the past had a pavilion that showcased technology (including an interactive globe that showed various climate patterns and structures) and panel discussions to supplement the formal work going on.

Last week, I attended the International Conference on Sustainable Development‘s 9th Plenary session, which focused on the potential for a “green recovery” from the COVID-19 pandemic, among other issues. Inger Andersen, executive director of the UN Economic Programme (UNEP) and former director of the Intentional Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Divided between a keynote speech by Anderson and a conversation between Anderson and Jeffrey Sachs, Columbia University professor of health policy and an advisor to the UN Secretary General. While the keynote address was centered around the need for “multilateral action [to] unlock the full potential of a green COVID-19 recovery,” I was particularly interested in session given its focus on biodiversity accords—particularly the 2010 Aichi targets—and Anderson and Sachs’ willingness to draw practical negotiation lessons from Aichi and other protocols.

While the keynote focused largely on strategies for a green recovery—and the need for that recovery—I will focus on the second half of the talk (for brevity’s sake), which focused on drawing concrete lessons from prior climate framework successes to apply toward future negotiations on fossil fuels. The “lessons learned” approach is key—as was discussed in class, with lessons from Copenhagen and Cancun carrying forward to COP26—given the lack of enforcement mechanisms in securing international cooperation on climate. Instead, practically-tested methods are necessary in the climate arena,

Anderson applied lessons from the 1987 Montreal Protocol and biodiversity negotiations to develop a framework for future negotiations to meet the IPCC’s 1.5 degree threshold for irreversible climate damage. From the Montreal Protocol—which addressed Ozone depletion, largely through Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and which Sachs called the only truly successful climate treaty—Anderson proposed three success factors that contributed to its success: a narrow focus, an imminent and credible harm from failing to address the issue, and a straightforward technical solution to the issue.

Applying this three-pronged test to the warming threshold shows obvious issues with a successful, comprehensive approach to a successful climate agreement. First, unlike CFCs, the pervasive nature of fossil fuels in the global economy—as opposed to more narrowly applied restrictions on CFCs—makes it harder to set a narrow focus to any agreement, although the degree threshold comes closer to setting a single indicator for success than prior metrics, necessary for a narrow scope. On the second factor, there is no single imminent and credible harm à la urgent concentrated in specific locations, cancer threat from ozone depletion; on the third, there is no single “quick fix” to fossil fuel dependence in the vein of a switch from CFCs to hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs).

To match the success of Montreal, any fossil-fuel-focused agreement has to try to better align with these success factors—and there are signs that negotiations are moving in that direction. The concrete degree threshold—which was narrowed from 1.5-2 degrees down to 1.5 degrees by the IPCC—is a step, as is the breaking down of climate priorities into areas including biodiversity, which itself is broken down into species, ecosystem, and genetic diversity dimensions; these distinctions allow for narrower negotiations with more concrete indicators, per the plenary session. Meanwhile, the growth of renewables—which Anderson pushed as increasingly economically desirable, positioning leaders to leapfrog fossil-fuel-dependent economies in the next two decades—has presented a technical fix that did not previously exist.

Separate from the three-pronged success factor, the plenary session also touched on a key difference in the restrictions placed by the 2015 Paris Agreement and the Montreal Protocol—other than the obvious differences in scope. While Montreal addressed both producers and users of CFCs—essentially easing the complexity of restrictions at the national level by applying reductions across the board—Paris largely exempts producers, in part due to political dynamics. As Sachs pointed out, production of fossil fuels is driven by countries who are necessary to the success of any agreement, including the U.S.—which ends up watering down any regulations on producers in order to secure participation on other fronts. This is the last of the key lessons from the success of Montreal: that restrictions on producers ease the burden of restrictions on users—and improve the incentives to use technical fixes, including renewables, by reducing the availability of fossil fuels (or CFCs in the Montreal comparison).