The need for a reboot of climate governance is obvious–we need to think differently about the challenge we face and to turn our attention to the transformative policies and politics we need to construct pathways to decarbonization. This is the target for an innovative five year research project at the Environmental Governance Lab (funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada) that will bring together academics from Canada, the US, the UK, and Sweden along with those working on climate policy/solutions from the civil society, business, and government spheres. Our January workshop initiated a conversation on what we need to construct pathways to decarbonization and what we have to work with to get started and sets the stage for the work to come. The main insights from the workshop are found in the Executive Summary, pasted here, and we encourage you to read the report and following the ongoing activities of the project on the Munk School website.

On January 10-11, 2013, a distinguished group of practitioners and scholars gathered at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs in an attempt to start a new conversation about the politics and governance of climate change. The Post-Kyoto era has now begun, with little fanfare, some anxiety, and considerable, unaddressed challenges. While the failure to negotiate a strong Kyoto successor deserves our attention, it doesn’t change the science, global concern, or public demands for action.  The scope of the mismatch between what we need to do—get on the path to decarbonization—and what the world has agreed to do—not much—is painfully clear.  We simply are not on the path to transformation needed to meet decarbonization goals.  This is the challenge we face and the conversation to which this workshop aimed to contribute.

We began with the assumption that it is unnecessary to start from scratch—pieces of the knowledge necessary to build, maintain, and expand pathways to decarbonization abound, but circulate in disparate communities that all too frequently fail to communicate and collaborate. This workshop thus brought together representatives of national and global NGOs (ICLEI Local Governments for Sustainability, The Urban Institute, International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD)), experts from intergovernmental organizations (World Bank, UNEP), and academics from a variety of disciplines (Political Science, Engineering, Geography, Law, Computer Science) to discuss what we need to create pathways to decarbonization, how we can overcome obstacles to doing so, and the potential for practitioner/academic collaboration to move us forward.

The discussions were wide-ranging, covering both general dynamics of climate governance and the fine-grained challenges of particular climate projects. Scholars and practitioners found the discussion fruitful and the group coalesced around a number of key themes.  These serve as lessons for the study and practice of decarbonization and the foundation for further conversations and actions that engage both the academic and practitioner communities.

The starting point for such conversations is found in the collective knowledge generated during the course of the workshop.  The key take away points highlight both the opportunities and challenges involved in developing pathways to decarbonization:

• Awareness is not enough.
  • Communicating the costs of climate change and the benefits of decarbonization may have a place in planning pathways, but focusing on individual awareness is not likely to be an effective strategy unless it is matched with strategies that can alter larger socio-political-economic structures and processes.

   

• Political coalitions are the linchpin.
  • They can be found at many levels and we need to uncover strategies for how coalitions can form around decarbonization.
  • The goal should be to decouple decarbonization from current political polarization, but to not depoliticize decarbonization itself.  There may be opportunities for “Baptist and Bootlegger coalitions” of actors traditionally seen as in opposition to one another.
  • Building coalitions is about identifying winners and losers and developing diverse strategies to engage both.
  • Building coalitions is not a static process. There is a need to identify dynamics in policy making that will lock-in coalitions and expand membership by creating incentives/benefits for new groups to join and to apply knowledge about creating path dependencies toward decarbonization policies.

   

• Seek for the sweet spot between design and serendipity.
  • Decarbonization cannot be planned, but supportive conditions and specific policies that facilitate decarbonization can be imagined and fostered.
  • Develop policies that foster innovation at multiple levels and scales. This innovation needs to be both technological and institutional.
  • Become comfortable with nonlinearity and uncertainty.

   

• There is no single path to decarbonization.
  • There was no single path to carbon lock-in, it developed organically as specific initiatives, experiments, policies, and technologies co-evolved with and became embedded within larger political and economic structures.
  • Decarbonization will likely develop in a similar organic manner, but it needs to happen more quickly and more consciously to be both effective and ethical

   

• Work to change what can be imagined.
  • Set big goals even if the means for reaching them are uncertain.

Workshop Participants

Graeme Auld, Carleton University

Steven Bernstein, University of Toronto

Michele Betsill, Colorado State University

Harriet Bulkeley, Durham University

Benjamin Cashore, Yale University

Steve Easterbrook, University of Toronto

Mark Halle, International Institute for Sustainable Development

Danny Harvey, University of Toronto

Matthew Hoffmann, University of Toronto

Dan Hoornweg, World Bank and University of Ontario Institute of Technology

Phil Jessup, LightSavers

Douglas MacDonald, University of Toronto

Megan Meaney, ICLEI Canada

Matto Mildenberger, Yale University

Lars Nilsson, Lund University

Matthew Paterson, University of Ottawa

Fulai Sheng, United National Environment Program

Wente is wrong about climate science. She repeats the claim that  “temperatures have held steady for 16 years.” This claim was debunked as soon as it was reported in October 2012 (see this article in the Guardian for one example: ).

Wente is misinformed in her denigration of climate models. She resorts to a nonsensical analogy when she asks rhetorically “Our economic models turned out to be lousy. Why should our climate models be better?” They are better. If climate models have problems, it is that climatic changes are coming faster and more severly than expected (see this article from Scientific American and this one from MSN.com).

Wente seems determined to sow doubt about the wisdom and possibility of acting on climate change.  To do so she erroneously depicts the pursuit of biofuels as a climate policy.  In fact many biofuel initiatives were actually agricultural policy, some simply designed to sell corn. She also tells only part of the story of German renewable energy programs and the EU’s emissions trading system. Cherry picking concerns to characterize them as “disasters” ignores their positive results, such as Germany becoming a world leader in renewable energy technology. Even more importantly this slant obfuscates the fact that climate policy is necessarily a learning process.   Some policies put in place to address climate change will succeed and others will fail—the same as in every other policy area. What is the justification for holding climate policies to an impossible standard while not even mentioning epic policy failures like the economic and environmental disaster that is fossil fuel subsidies?

Commentaries like Wente’s are all too common.  They rely on sketchy interpretations of climate science.  They seek to lull readers into inaction by claiming that things aren’t so bad or that we can’t really do anything anyway.  This is dangerous.  It is not outright denial of climate change; it is more subtle, more insidious. It makes doing nothing feel okay by creating the impression that doing something is doomed to fail.

Climate change is the challenge of our times and it is hard.  We do need to be humble, acknowledge uncertainty, and the limits of our knowledge. Yet we must resist the temptation to heed the obvious subtext of Ms. Wente’s commentary. Instead we must act. The stakes are too high, but even more importantly the potential missed opportunities—for economic growth, more sustainable and livable cities, healthier and more equitable lives—are too great to be lost through inaction.

Words of caution on climate policy are wise when they accompany calls to action, calls to learn by doing, calls to learn from successes and failures, and calls to find solutions. Words of caution are foolhardy when they are the sum total of the advice and stem from an unfounded characterization of the challenge at hand.    Experimentation and innovation should be celebrated, not discouraged.  We should applaud cities that seek to take action in the face of national inaction, companies that seek alternative fuels, environmental organizations that seek to overturn economically distorting and environmentally disastrous fossil fuel subsidies, and attempts to put a price on carbon. We must approach climate change with our eyes wide open, wary of hubris in the face of the complexities of climate change, but with a spirit of possibility.

Here’s the link to the commentary: http://www.themarknews.com/articles/life-after-kyoto-pursuing-decarbonization/#.UPlk0-hXsdV

We want our children to live in an America…that isn’t threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet.

Of course, thoughts are quickly turning to the question that Andrew Revkin is already perceptively asking in his blog today—what is next for US climate and energy policy and how can Obama move forward? The political equation at the national level for climate policy in the US has not changed significantly.  Obama still faces a skeptical and Republican House of Representatives and a robust coalition of economic and political interests that is willing and able to fight against progressive action on climate change (a coalition that defeated a climate friendly ballot initiative in Michigan relatively easily). Yet even so, there is a sense today that Obama’s re-election combined with the wake up call of Hurricane Sandy opens up possibilities for action on climate change.

I find that the case for optimism is actually quite strong, not because the national political situation has changed significantly, but because President Obama does not have to start from scratch on climate change and can thus have a relatively large impact with relatively modest action.  In the last decade local, state, regional, and global initiatives working on different aspects of climate change have emerged and proliferated in the face of stalemate and inactivity in the UN negotiations and in US federal climate policy. These initiatives (what I have called climate governance experiments) have been working to develop the technological, institutional, economic, and political capacity to move quickly on climate change.  Organizations like The Climate Group are bringing together local governments and corporations to do large scale pilot projects of climate friendly technology.  Initiatives like the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative brings together Northeastern US states in an emissions trading system that is demonstrating how a price can be put on carbon.  Networks of municipalities like the C40 group of large cities and the Cities for Climate Protection are demonstrating how local, municipal action on climate change can have an effect beyond the borders of individual cities.

Given developments like these and many other similar initiatives, one possible way forward for President Obama on climate policy is to channel what Revkin dubbed Obama’s options for “administrative moves” and “vast untested potential” for “basic leadership” not into a fight for broad national policies (at least not right away), but rather into support for the diverse ways that numerous and varied political and economic communities are already responding to climate change.  This could have two significant ramifications.  First, these non-traditional climate responses amongst local communities, cities, states, NGOs, and corporations have the potential for real, on the ground impacts on climate mitigation and adaptation. They are changing the ways that multiple communities produce and use energy, design transportation, communicate, work, and adapt to our already changing climate. Second, these initiatives can serve as the foundation for building political and economic coalitions dedicated to and clamoring for broader and deeper action at the national and international levels. As they grow in number, size, and impact, they can catalyze new political pathways to progressive climate action.

Leadership in climate policy is not just about fighting for a national legislation or for a grand global deal (although both of those are obviously important goals).  It is also about supporting, enhancing, and scaling up innovative efforts that are already underway.  If this kind of action is part of the Obama plan for climate change, then the optimism and enthusiasm that is cautiously emerging today may well be warranted.

This is a neat finding on its own and I hope it is both substantiated and finds its way into practice.  My interest in it is the implications it might have for governance.  There are dozens if not hundreds of this kind of simple options being touted for producing relatively large scale emissions reductions–reducing global warming by reducing soot was another recent one.  The question is what kind of governance infrastructure–what kind of rules and institutions–will be best able to figure out which ones are relevant/effective and how to scale them up?  I suspect that the traditional multilateral approach is not a good fit–small scale options that should be scaled up is not what multilateral treaty-making is good for.  Instead, the key will be to match these innovations with climate governance experiments that can more quickly get them implemented in transnational city networks, corporate-NGO alliances, and other initiatives. How to do such matching and scaling should be a matter of serious scholarly attention and policy inquiry.

This is a noteworthy development for a couple of reasons.  As the Times article reports, addressing these three kinds of pollutants can have a large impact on global warming (30-40% is the estimate in the article) and a number of technical fixes are available for addressing these issues.  These fixes are attractive because they are less politically fraught than addressing carbon dioxide–for instance addressing soot has huge health benefits. This means that an effective program to deal with these pollutants could have a larger and quicker impact on climate change than anything likely to come out of the UNFCCC process in the next 5 years or more.

It is also noteworthy as another example of the expanding experimental governance approach. This is expressly not a treaty negotiation with targets and timelines for reducing soot, methane, and HFCs with enforcement mechanisms to back it up.  It is a voluntary multilateral program that will use carrots to get countries involved in addressing these pollutants. Like transnational municipal networks, provincial-state initiatives in carbon markets, and NGO-corporate alliances that have proliferated in the last decade, this new initiative looks to respond to climate change outside the UN process, across borders, using new governance mechanisms (or old mechanisms in new ways).

This endgers both hopes and worries.  On the hopeful side, experiments like this, especially at the multilateral level and involving the US, can move quickly on a major part of the climate change problem without getting bogged down in the making of an international treaty.  In addition, this initiative contributes to the expansion of what counts as responding to climate change–moving beyond an exclusive focus on carbon dioxide emissions reductions and legally binding treaties.  Climate change needs to be attacked from multiple angles and the ultimate goal needs to be transformation of the energy system and economy away from fossil fuel dependence.  Expanding the response is a move in the right direction.

Of course, this kind of climate governance experiment–voluntary action–is not a pancea and raises important questions about effectiveness.  Will the carrots be enough to get buy in and can the program reach its goals outside the context of binding international legal instruments?  Time will tell.

This is a positive move in a political context where good news on the climate front is hard to come by.  It is certainly an experiment that bears watching.

http://www.themarknews.com/articles/7809-durban-post-mortem-and-the-band-played-on

What Happened?

Sorting through the varied dimensions and discussions that make up the decisions made at a major UN conference of this complexity can be a daunting task.  At the risk of oversimplifying, the following can be considered key ‘results’ of the negotiations:

• All countries attending the negotiations (194) agreed to “ to launch a process to develop a protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force under the Convention applicable to all Parties”  (http://unfccc.int/files/meetings/durban_nov_2011/decisions/application/pdf/cop17_durbanplatform.pdf).  These negotiations will begin in 2012 and are to be completed by the end of 2015.  The new agreement is mandated to come into force in 2020.
• The Cancun Agreements will continue to govern climate change for those who are not parties to the Kyoto Protocol  (US, Canada, Japan, Russia) and for those who do not have emissions reductions obligations under the Kyoto Protocol (e.g. China) until 2020.  Countries are still obligated to work towards the emissions reductions goals that they pledged in Cancun.
• The Green Climate Fund, which is designed to facilitate the flow of billions of dollars (up to $100 billion per year by 2020) to the most vulnerable countries to aid in adaptation to climate change, was approved and operationalized.
• Those countries that were parties to the Kyoto Protocol agreed to a second commitment period (recall that the Kyoto Protocol goes out of force at the end of 2012).  However, this was a relatively hollow victory. Russia and Japan signaled well-before the Durban meetings that they had no intention of signing on to a second commitment period. Canada confirmed what everyone already knew would happen by officially withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol on Dec 12^th (after destroying what was left of its international reputation in climate change by trashing the protocol and telegraphing its impending withdrawal during the negotiations). Those countries still committed to the Kyoto Protocol agreed to decide relatively quickly in 2012 what the targets for the second commitment period will be and decided that it will run from 2013 until 2017 (or perhaps 2020), but it is hard to see how this second commitment period could possibly be relevant

What Does it Mean?

The results from Durban do not warrant despair, but neither should they engender much enthusiasm.  There are positives to take away. The prospect of a legally binding global treaty is still on the table when it seemed far-fetched to predict this even two weeks ago.  This will keep the multilateral process moving forward.  Perhaps more importantly, this outcome provides critical signals for long term investments and planning along with a boost for extra-UN initiatives taking place in cities, amongst NGOs and MNCs and others dedicated to dealing with climate change.  In addition, it is a breakthrough that India and China agreed for the first time, in principle, to negotiate emissions reductions comparable to developed countries and that the US was convinced to participate as well.

But let’s not kid ourselves, there is a large gulf between agreeing to launch negotiations toward a relatively ambiguous end and accomplishing an effective, legally binding treaty that will move the world towards decarbonization and away from climate crisis.  The politics involved in achieving such a treaty have not gotten any easier because new negotiations have been agreed to and there are serious questions about how binding a pledge to negotiate a treaty by 2015 can ever be.  In some ways the Durban Platform is actually quite reminiscent of the Bali Roadmap from 2007 in which countries pledged to negotiate a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol by 2009—a pledge that went spectacularly unfulfilled.  Further, while nations agreed, in principle, to ramp up their commitments in the coming negotiations, it is far from clear that the size and speed of emissions reductions being considered will be sufficient to aggressively confront climate change.

For now the pledge and review mode of climate governance enshrined at Cancun, with its woefully inadequate pledges, will remain operative through 2020 and it will take significant political shifts from key players arising from as of yet unclear sources to change the fundamental dynamics of the climate negotiations. Starting from scratch with a 2015 deadline to reach an ambiguous goal of a legal instrument will be difficult.   Two years may well be insufficient to build the kind of political momentum behind a large-scale global accord that would be necessary to fulfill the mandate.

The size of challenge involved in shifting to a more stringent legal agreement after 2020 was made clear by the hollowing out of the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol mentioned abovethe political difficulties that were obvious in the discussions over the future of the Kyoto Protocol have the potential to plague the negotiations over the 2020 commitments as well.

So if there is optimism to be found it is in the fact that the multilateral process did not collapse and has taken tentative steps forward.  The solution to climate change is still not likely to be found in a global, legally binding treaty.  It is more likely to be found in the diffuse actions of multiple actors working to decarbonize the energy system and economy.  What Durban may end up providing is the kind of encouragement for global city networks, regional emissions trading systems, corporate-NGO alliances, community activities and more that increases their motivation and enhances their activities.  In turn the action outside the negotiating halls may provide the kind of political momentum and shifts necessary to make it possible to actually agree on an effective treaty by 2015.  This is the best case scenario.  Time will tell.