Climate Consensus: Signs of New Hope on Road to Paris - by David Victor

Once again, the world is on a sprint toward a new agreement on global climate change.  The last time this happened — in 2009 — the sprint ended in acrimony in Copenhagen.  This time, the signs are more auspicious.  As someone who has been writing for nearly 25 years about the difficulties of making serious progress on climate change, I am more optimistic today than I have been in a very long time.  When governments gather in Paris late this year, I believe they are likely to adopt a watershed strategy for slowing climate change. 

I’m optimistic for two reasons.  First, the logic of Paris is new.  In the past, governments have tried to negotiate single, massive, and integrated treaties that all nations would supposedly sign and honor.  That was the logic of the 1997 Kyoto treaty — a logic that continued in Copenhagen when governments tried to finalize an agreement that would replace Kyoto.  But what they found was that single integrated undertakings are just too difficult to craft.  There are so many different countries, with different interests and capabilities, that efficiently finding a single common agreement is all but impossible. 
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What’s new is a more flexible approach — in effect, an umbrella under which lots of countries can make different commitments.  For some countries those commitments will be binding — something that is important to the European Union, for example — while for many others the effort will take on a more voluntary character.  This new approach relies heavily on national pledges for action — a so-called “bottom-up” strategy to contrast with the “top-down” treaty-drafting efforts of the past two decades.

In addition, many other groups are making pledges — for example, various groups of cities have banded together to implement climate policies on their own, regardless of whether their national governments do the same.  Even groups of firms are playing a role — such as an alliance of palm oil producers in Indonesia that have pledged to stop deforestation. 
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A second reason for optimism is that this flexible, bottom-up, and club-oriented strategy is already doing a much better job of engaging the most pivotal players:  the large, emerging countries.  A good model for what is possible is the U.S.-China agreement on climate change announced in November.  That agreement, in part, recognized the emission control efforts that each country was making already.  But it also pushed the U.S. and China to do more — for example, collaboration on development of new technologies — and helped lock their progress into place.  It was also a reminder that for most countries, real climate policy will mainly emerge by focusing on areas where the goal of slowing warming intersects with other goals that are a higher priority, such as cutting local air pollution. 
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As the key stakeholders come to accept this new reality — that diplomacy must be multi-speed, flexible, and bottom-up — it is possible that a lot of good will and new efforts will emerge.  Sure, this won’t deliver a 2-degree limit.  But it will turn the corner after decades of talking but not acting.  If 2015 marks the year that countries actually turn the corner then we should declare Paris a success.

Read more at Climate Consensus:  Signs of New Hope on Road to Paris