A special issue of the Climate Policy Journal published shows that over the last three decades, climate change has shifted from a predominantly environmental concern to a matter of significant geopolitics.
Addressing climate change not only requires a massive socio-economic transformation but must be dealt with at the global level and should be based on a flexible set of rules to reflect the conditions of a constantly-changing political environment. Bringing together new research by leading academics and practitioners on the evolving landscape of climate change politics, this special issue includes articles from Executive Secretary of the UN Climate Change Convention (UNFCCC), Christiana Figueres, and, former British Ambassador Sir Anthony Brenton.
In recent years, there has been an increased focus on developing country economies as global polluters. This coincides with a shift in the global balance of power – economic, military and political – away from the West, towards the emerging economies of the developing world. At the same time as this power shift, climate change has increased the vulnerability of developing countries and has threatened to seriously affect their development potential. A changing climate imperils food, water, and energy security, and affects human health, trade flows, and political stability. The effects of climate change are distributed unequally and create different challenges for different countries, whereby those that suffer most are unlikely to be those causing the problem.
Reflecting on the relatively slow progress of the international climate change negotiations, former British Ambassador Sir Anthony Brenton suggests in his article ‘Great Powers in Climate Politics’ that: "the notional equality of the participating states was, [equally] inevitably, a fiction”. The ‘universality’ built into the structure of the negotiation from the start were always unrealistic, and undoubtedly contributed to the much remarked confusedness and inefficiency of the negotiation process itself. Some ‘Great Power’ structure may be necessary to the process, “with key players finalizing the deals and then, where necessary overriding miscellaneous complaints from smaller countries”.
In her article on the future for international climate policy, ‘Climate Policy: A New Foundation of Stability and Prosperity’, Executive Secretary of the UN Climate Change Convention, Christiana Figueres is optimistic. She notes that “the geo-political shifts of the past quarter century created multiple economic power centre’s, both established and emerging, making it less possible for nations to act confidently together without stable reference points and the platform of trust that the multilateral system provides.” She continues, “the knowledge and understanding of how policy can be linked up is growing. Governments are charting a blueprint at the international level and increasing numbers of countries have climate policy embedded in their national legislation. Simultaneously, the private sector is already integrating an emerging economic model that benefits planet, people and profit margins. Public awareness and support for action is rising.”
The continuation of the Kyoto Protocol expresses the willingness of developed countries (even if there are only a few) to assume leadership in climate change mitigation. It also ensures that, in the short-term at least, the differentiation between countries with and without targets will remain. A key challenge for future international climate negotiations will be how to translate this mitigation burden into any new regime.
Two kinds of policy suggestions for the level at which future negotiations could commence are made by the different contributors; these may not be mutually exclusive. On the one hand, in their article ‘Drivers of National Climate Policy’, Paterson and Lachapelle argue that policymakers should stop focusing on targets and instead choose a more nuanced ‘sector-by-sector and policy-by-policy’ approach to more effectively take on the challenges of climate change. On the other hand, in ‘Great Power Politics, Order Transition, and Climate Governance: Insights from International Relations Theory’ Terhalle and Depledge propose that most regime-level-based negotiations (i.e. including the climate regime) are bound to fail as long as leading Great Powers do not successfully negotiate an overall political bargain on material power structures, normative beliefs and the management of the order. Both suggestions provide reasonable ways forward and offer new ways of engaging the climate conundrum.
What does this recognition of geopolitics mean for a long-term climate regime?
• Addressing climate change is a common responsibility of all states, calling for ‘their participation in an effective and appropriate international response’ (UNFCCC, 1992: Preamble), arguably under a common legal framework.
• States’ responsibilities must be differentiated.
• Capacity differentials matter, so that developed or developing country status will continue to be relevant but will neither be the only ground for differentiation nor insulate states against responsibility to act.
• The objective of the UNFCCC, which is to avert dangerous human interference with the climate system (UNFCCC, 1992: Article 2), frames all states’ collective responsibility under the treaty and is part of the context of Common But Differentiated Responsibilities (CBDR), such that current emissions and projected emissions trends are relevant to each state’s responsibilities (Brunné and Streck, 2013).