View point from Dezember 16th, 2008

On the road to a new international climate policy architecture

from Reimund Schwarze*

There has been widespread complaining about the tenacious negotiations in Poznań without any results. With the world far from sharing a common vision towards climate protection and negotiations in Copenhagen jeopardised and with them the agreement on mandatory goals regarding emissions reductions after 2012, whoever thought that the international climate policy would simply continue on from the Kyoto Protocol, should think again. That is to say that the world community certainly made no recognisable step in this direction at the negotiations in Poznań.

Kraftwerke tragen zum Kohlendioxid-Ausstoß bei.

The capture and storage of CO2 of coal-fired power stations has been hotly debated in Poznań.
Photo: André Künzelmann/UFZ

The establishment of a development aid fund for adaptation measures in developing countries fell through due to a lack of support from the donors and controversy about the structure of the use of the funds. The facilitation of measures in developing countries to conserve their forests fell apart as it did in Kyoto due to its contradictoriness: carbon sequestration in forests simply is not tropical forest conservation. The incorporation of technologies for carbon capture and sequestration into the mechanism for sustainable development also fell through for the time being.

However, even though the results achieved in Poznań appeared to be only very small or negligible, the feeling remains that the majority of the countries that were negotiating have recognised the seriousness of the situation and just how imperative dramatic cuts will be in Copenhagen. The hopes from meetings of the G8 in Heiligendamm and Toyaku, form the basis of this optimism, which made dramatic cuts in CO2-emissions of 50 percent by 2050 suddenly seem feasible. Another source of hope comes from the "reincarnation of the USA" as an international climate policy protagonist. The election victory of Barack Obama and his speech to representatives from the automobile industry in Los Angeles, in which he announced a minimum target of 80 percent by 2050 for the USA, are the kind of promises from which a new agreement can materialise in Copenhagen.

This is the basis of the optimism from Poznań in spite of its inadequate results. These developments also mark the transition to a new international climate policy architecture that will gradually replace the Kyoto Protocol. The characteristics of this "Post-Kyoto Architecture" are long-term goals with the participation of major emitters from the developing countries - initiated by negotiation processes at different levels within and outside of the UN. A continuation of the Kyoto Protocol in the phase from 2013 to 2018 was consequently almost a mere sidetrack of the negotiations in Poznań, with everything centering around the "Common Vision" of a post-Kyoto agreement that would also include the USA and other countries.

The outlines of this new climate policy architecture became clear in Poznań: Firstly, the industrialised countries will obligate themselves to dramatic cuts in their greenhouse gas emissions. Secondly, the major emitters from the developing countries will obligate themselves to "national action plans" in climate protection, which will lead to a significant divergence from `business as usual’, with the industrialised countries providing extensive financial aid packages to support this. The poorest countries of the world and the countries that will be most affected by climate change will receive additional financial aid from the UN, in order to protect themselves against the consequences of climate change, whereby the largest part of the funds will be made available CO2 -pricing in the industrialised countries, i.e. through the trading of emission certificates. From my point of view Poznań marked the start of the road to a new agreement, which will one day worthily replace the Kyoto Protocol. The feeling that many participants had "to go back to square one", is therefore not misleading. We are indeed standing before a new beginning - with another constellation of players at different levels of the negotiations. In this respect Poznań was a place for reorganisation. It was an important intermediate step on the road to a new post-Kyoto architecture.

*Prof. Dr. Reimund Schwarze is an expert on climate change policy at the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research in Leipzig and lecturer on Environmental Economics at the University of Innsbruck.