Emerging Issues in Global Climate Governance after Paris - Regional Programme Energy Security and Climate Change in Asia and the Pacific
Event Reports
The overarching goal of the international community to limit global warming to a maximum of 2 or even 1.5 degrees can only be achieved by joint efforts of a large number of different stakeholders of all fields and levels, including nation states but also cities, communities, companies, industrial sectors and non-governmental organizations.
As part of their contributions to strengthen transnational climate change network building, in particular between China and Europe, Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung RECAP and Tongji University organized a workshop on key dimensions of a future climate governance system. Experts from academia, politics and business from China, European and Asian countries discussed three thematic fields:
- Engaging transnational actors, like cities, in global climate discourse and action
- Better connecting science and decision making in drafting new and effective concepts of and approaches for climate policy
- Incentivizing and modeling socio-technical innovations across (eco) systems
The first panel of the workshop dealt with the challenge of strengthening transnational co-ordination in climate politics. The negotiations and the success of COP21 clearly showed the importance of sub- and transnational actors such as local administrations, NGOs etc. The panel explored how these actors can even more effectively shape future global climate governance and influence political dynamics. Actors from developed countries are still dominant and the capacity of those from emerging countries has to be strengthened.
Cities and regional governments play a complementary role and are able to act quite flexible — but this will not diminish the function and responsibility of national governments, because a sort of “orchestrating” of different efforts is needed. Creating greater transparency on emissions and environmental impacts, both on parts of countries as of enterprises, is a prerequisite for mutual trust and in speeding up global climate mitigation efforts. In this respect the development of reliable and trustworthy methodologies to coherently measure GHG emissions by different kinds of actors and at different levels is necessary as well as the enhancement of legal frameworks and green financing mechanisms.
Probably more than in any political field, climate change mitigation and adaption have to be based on state-of-the art scientific research. Yet, the nexus between both ”worlds” is often fragile, ambiguous and prejudiced. The second panel looked into improving science-policy interfaces. It is for instance important to closer look into the different “functions” of global climate change agreements, i.e. in their role of legitimating national politics or laying the basis for claims about loss & damages on part of developing countries.
This creates inconsistences in the daily politics and threatens to devaluate evidence-based policy approaches. However, accepting that these ambiguities are inevitable, to a certain degree, and a prerequisite allowing for joint climate actions means to understand better the political processes at the heart of the science-policy nexus.
In the field of science and technologies the aforementioned gap between industrialized and developing countries is evident. And given the importance of climate change mitigation and potential damages, global expenditures on R&D are far too low – an issue, the UNFCCC mechanism has to address urgently. The ongoing debate on IPR protection remains a major obstacle in deeper cooperation between China and the EU. Future regional and global trade agreements have to find proper solutions as massive and systematic transfer of know-how is seen by many (developing) countries as crucial for substantial progress in climate change mitigation. In this context the challenge for countries like China in the process of decarbonizing the economy lays in not getting stuck in a middle-income trap and more scientific ad-vice is needed how to link climate mitigation with industrial and technology policies.
The third session explored the highly complex interdependencies of climate change effects across diverse fields and systems and related actions to mitigate and adapt. Currently we face an unpleasant uncertainty in scientific knowledge if it comes to understanding and de-signing effective policy measures that span different social, technical and natural systems. Positive externalities of climate change, i.e. in public health or job creation, are plausible but hard to prove. So-called “rebound effects” may even hamper hard-won gains, which also points at deeply rooted behavioral changes to be addressed.
It is quite obvious that there is a huge potential of mutual exchange of ideas and anticipative learning between China and Europe as both regions are very dynamic in terms of new policy concepts and innovations. A good example is the emission trading system (ETS) which is already established in Europe and is to be implemented in China on a national level next year.
The fourth panel reviewed the political mechanisms of climate governance processes: spanning from the shortcomings of the Kyoto Protocol and Copenhagen to the use of scientific prognosis tools for predicting outcome of future climate change negotiations and the ambiguity of geo-engineering. With the emergence of “polycentric” regimes (not only in climate governance), linking different fields of actions together effectively is one of the biggest challenges in international relations. It is quite obvious that a successful sustainable transformation – might it be on global, national or local level – can only be achieved throughout a multi-stakeholder process. In this respect the case of geoengineering is a good example as it opens the ground for both far-reaching ethical debate on shared and differentiated responsibilities and showcases the political complexities of large-scale technological “solutions” that are increasingly emerging on the horizon of decision makers.
Based on the findings of the presentations and discussions, four working groups collected ideas and elaborated suggestions for concrete
cooperation between China and Europe: ambitions and accounting of transnational climate mitigation actions, low carbon innovations, improved science-policy interfaces, coupling of energy system transformations; the vivid discussions made clear that there are plenty of political, technical and social concepts and mechanisms in climate policy which can be optimized and improved. Only if China and Europe enhance cooperation in business, research, modeling, and policy making, a significant progress on the road towards a low-carbon society can be achieved.
The following suggestions were articulated to point out and/or to build on key convergences between China and Europe in the context of the new bottom-up dynamic of post-Paris climate governance:
- China and the European Union can act as leaders of an „orchestration“ in subnational / transnational climate actions, linking national and local levels within the UNFCCC
- Globally consistent approaches and methodologies of measuring and accounting for subnational mitigation efforts need to be developed;
- Establish a framework for R&D streamlining and long-term technological innovation on a global scale (multi-stake holder and / G20) based on an ambitious and strategic EU-Chinese cooperation;
- Create a data bank for all patent free low carbon technologies to facilitate their global transfer and employment;
- Energy system transitions in China and Europe need to be jointly envisioned as conceptually, technically, and commercially linked. The global dimensions of “Energiewende” offer many opportunities to develop collaborative modeling, planning, and implementing post-carbon developments and policies. Mid- and long-term complementarities and synergies need to be deliberately designed and deepened in order to fully realize potentials of, and accelerate the progress of decarbonization;
- China and Europe should broaden and deepen law carbon cooperation much more energetically, e.g. including joint research projects, fostering e-mobility, joining de-carbonization efforts in third countries, envisioning post-fossil urbanities, enabling long-term coordination of strategic R&D funding;
- China and Europe should improve the mutual understanding of different national scientific cultures and institutional differences of scientific advice as well as evidence-based policy making, risk perceptions, and centralized planning processes.
