Inequity in International Climate Change Negotiations

The adoption of international climate agreements requires thorough negotiation between parties. This study aims to analyse the inequities between developed and developing countries in climate negotiations. This was done through a scrutiny of the main stages of these negotiations from the Rio Conference to the advent of the Paris Agreement. Our analysis has shown pervasive inequities along the climate negotiations over time. The UNFCCC made a qualitative separation between developed and developing countries in the principle of common but differentiated responsibility. Furthermore, the Kyoto Protocol emphasized this with the commitment of developed countries to reducing their greenhouse gas emissions by at least 5%. The Kyoto Protocol by introducing flexibility mechanisms such as the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) contributed to increase inequalities. The Paris Agreement has increased inequity by requesting each country to submit nationally determined contributions (NDCs) even though the global emission of developing countries remains very low. The negotiation style of developing countries is mostly limited to compromise and accommodation to the desires of the powerful states, as is the case in most international cooperation. The reality of the climate change negotiations mirrors the inequalities between developed and developing nations.

Private finance and governance of REDD+ projects in Indonesia

<p>This thesis explores the role of private finance within REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) programmes in Indonesia. Since its debut in 2007 as a potential investment opportunity, enterprising and innovative private sector actors have moved to establish REDD+ projects within a voluntary carbon market, while the United Nations Convention on Climate Change continues negotiations to establish a comprehensive global mechanism. These profit-seeking actors have invested millions of dollars developing REDD+ projects within a rapidly evolving voluntary market that has emerged alongside the turmoil of global climate change negotiations. This dynamic market context brought about a wide variety of expressions of REDD+ in Indonesia, which this research seeks to untangle and illuminate. The thesis yields insights into the workings of market environmentalism, and complicates widespread notions of ‘private finance’ as a homogenous and predictable category of actor. In order to better understand the emergent REDD+ industry in Indonesia, and the role of private finance in shaping it, this research draws on the global value chain (GVC) framework to analyse processes of commodification and governance within REDD+ projects and ‘supply chains’. This approach identifies key private finance actors, and explores why they are involved across motivations for social, environmental and financial outcomes. It also reveals REDD+ projects as a produced commodity and provides insight into the multiple ways they are valued. The research thus highlights how private finance actors evaluate REDD+ commodities as they engage with them. These logics, and the profit-seeking rationale of private finance actors, are seen to have important governance implications in shaping the characteristics of REDD+ projects and the networks of actors involved in them. However, simultaneously, the malleable and selective characteristics of the REDD+ commodity itself shapes certain governing implications of private finance. This thesis contributes to debates concerning the commodification of nature within market environmentalism and the neoliberalisation of nature, providing insights into the nature and agency of private finance.</p>

Private finance and governance of REDD+ projects in Indonesia

<p>This thesis explores the role of private finance within REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) programmes in Indonesia. Since its debut in 2007 as a potential investment opportunity, enterprising and innovative private sector actors have moved to establish REDD+ projects within a voluntary carbon market, while the United Nations Convention on Climate Change continues negotiations to establish a comprehensive global mechanism. These profit-seeking actors have invested millions of dollars developing REDD+ projects within a rapidly evolving voluntary market that has emerged alongside the turmoil of global climate change negotiations. This dynamic market context brought about a wide variety of expressions of REDD+ in Indonesia, which this research seeks to untangle and illuminate. The thesis yields insights into the workings of market environmentalism, and complicates widespread notions of ‘private finance’ as a homogenous and predictable category of actor. In order to better understand the emergent REDD+ industry in Indonesia, and the role of private finance in shaping it, this research draws on the global value chain (GVC) framework to analyse processes of commodification and governance within REDD+ projects and ‘supply chains’. This approach identifies key private finance actors, and explores why they are involved across motivations for social, environmental and financial outcomes. It also reveals REDD+ projects as a produced commodity and provides insight into the multiple ways they are valued. The research thus highlights how private finance actors evaluate REDD+ commodities as they engage with them. These logics, and the profit-seeking rationale of private finance actors, are seen to have important governance implications in shaping the characteristics of REDD+ projects and the networks of actors involved in them. However, simultaneously, the malleable and selective characteristics of the REDD+ commodity itself shapes certain governing implications of private finance. This thesis contributes to debates concerning the commodification of nature within market environmentalism and the neoliberalisation of nature, providing insights into the nature and agency of private finance.</p>

Rationale for a Climate Club Embedded in Article 6 of the Paris Agreement – A Pathway to Carbon Neutrality

Recent times have witnessed an increasing number of countries and private firms pledging carbon neutrality by mid-century. Whilst representing a significant improvement in intentions to tackle climate change, such pledges lack substance and structure. For instance, individual pledges lack coordination and aggregation among peers, while strategies and measures to achieve ambitious targets are largely absent. Moreover, current disagreements obstructing progress in international climate change negotiations further undermine the reliability of carbon neutrality objectives. Effective international policies are needed to foster aggregate mitigation ambitions and the creation of adequate supporting mechanisms. This theoretical paper describes a governance innovation aimed at overcoming such shortfalls and disagreements through a unifying yet customizable pathway towards carbon neutrality. It does so by first outlining a political governance framework based on a climate club interpretation of Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. Secondly, it proposes carbon emission mitigation effort sharing on a per capita basis to ensure efficiency, equity and political feasibility. Thirdly, this paper describes how the supply of certified mitigations of carbon emissions required to satisfy effort sharing-based demand can be assetized as carbon credits by operationalizing Article 6 as a joint certification mechanism. The resulting governance architecture for managing demand and supply of mitigations shifts efforts to tackle climate change from a &lsquo;problem-driven&rsquo; cost approach to &lsquo;opportunity-driven&rsquo; value creation pathways towards carbon neutrality.

7. Politics of climate change

‘Politics of climate change’ begins by looking at the history of the climate change negotiations, considering key milestones such as the Kyoto Protocol, the Copenhagen Accord, and the Paris Agreement. At the Paris climate meeting in 2015, world leaders agreed that global temperature increase should be kept below 2°C, with an aspirational target of 1.5°C. Despite this agreement, global carbon emissions have continued to rise every year. There are potential flaws in the approach of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). We should note the various carbon trading schemes and the UN’s REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) programme, which has been subsequently refined as REDD+. What needs to be achieved politically if climate change is to be mitigated?

China’s Fairness Discourses and Allocation of Climate Responsibility

The idea of ‘fairness’ may be viewed as fundamental to a nation’s participation in the development of the international legal system governing climate change. As the second-largest economy and the largest Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emitter in the world, China’s actions on climate change are critical to the global response. Indeed, international cooperation on climate change is unlikely to succeed without China’s active engagement. Therefore, China’s perception of the fairness of responsibility allocation will significantly influence its attitudes toward its international climate responsibilities. However, limited work has been done to date to concretely examine China’s perspective of the fairness of responsibility allocation and to understand its fairness discourses and practices of climate responsibility in a dynamically evolved process. This article aims to fill that gap in the literature by elucidating how China perceives the fair allocation of climate responsibility and how its fairness discourses and practices have evolved over the course of the three phases of international climate change negotiations. It will be shown that China has perceived the factors of historically accumulated emissions, per capita emissions and capability to lie at the very core of its understanding of fairness.

“Special Circumstances” and the Politics of Climate Vulnerability: African Agency in the UN Climate Change Negotiations

African countries are well recognised as being among the worst affected by the impacts of climate change. However, efforts to secure recognition of these “special circumstances” of African countries within the UN climate negotiations have been unsuccessful, despite this being a continental priority prior to and following adoption of the Paris Agreement. Such status is linked to global priorities for funding adaptation to climate change. This article explores why some other groups of developing countries have been successful in securing such recognition when African countries have not. It provides a historical institutionalist explanation of the path-dependent politics of such institutional recognition, emphasising the timing of when different groups have advanced vulnerability claims, which shapes the opposition that African countries have encountered in their efforts, as relative late-movers, to exercise agency. It highlights contestation surrounding what “vulnerability” to climate impacts means, and how this contestation has divided Global South solidarity.

Climate Change Totems and Discursive Hegemony Over the Arctic

The Arctic and its animals figure prominently as icons of climate change in Western imaginaries. Persuasive storytelling centred on compelling animal icons, like the polar bear, is a powerful strategy to frame environmental challenges, mobilizing collective global efforts to resist environmental degradation and species endangerment. The power of the polar bear in Western climate imagery is in part derived from the perceived “environmental sacredness” of the animal that has gained a totem-like status. In dominant “global” discourses, this connotation often works to the detriment of Indigenous peoples, for whom animals signify complex socio-ecological relations and cultural histories. This Perspective article offers a reflexive analysis on the symbolic power of the polar bear totem and the discursive exclusion of Indigenous peoples, informed by attendance during 2015–2017 at annual global climate change negotiations and research during 2016–2018 in Canada’s Nunavut Territory. The polar bear’s totem-like status in Western imaginaries exposes three discursive tensions that infuse climate change perception, activism, representation and Indigenous citizenship. The first tension concerns the global climate crisis, and its perceived threat to ecologically significant or sacred species, contrasted with locally lived realities. The second tension concerns a perceived sacred Arctic that is global, pristine, fragile and “contemplated,” but simultaneously local, hazardous, sustaining and lived. The third tension concerns Indigenization, distorted under a global climate gaze that reimagines the role of Indigenous peoples. Current discursive hegemony over the Arctic serves to place Indigenous peoples in stasis and restricts the space for Arctic Indigenous engagement and voice.