The European Commission (EC) this week (26 March) adopted a consultative paper that launches a public debate on how best to design a new international agreement to combat climate change. This follows the negotiations that began in December 2011 at the Durban climate conference.

The Consultative Communication raises key questions and invites the views of stakeholders on the new agreement, which is to be completed by the end of 2015 and will be implemented from 2020.

While the EU, Australia and other European countries have joined a legally-binding second commitment period under Kyoto Protocol, some 60 other countries around the world have made different types of non-blinding commitments to reduce, or limit growth in, their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

The 2015 agreement will have to bring together the binding and non-binding arrangements under the UN climate convention and the Kyoto Protocol into a single comprehensive regime.

Key Elements

A key element of the consultation is that it seeks to obtain responses from stakeholders regarding the responsibility countries must share to provide financial support to help poor countries tackle climate change.

The consultation also calls for the views of stakeholders as to how the agreement should respond to scientific advances and be flexibile toward scientific developments.

The EC has set out other criteria for the agreement, noting it should:

• be inclusive, containing commitments that are applicable to all countries;
• focus on encouraging and enabling countries to take on new and ambitions commitments to cut GHG emissions;
• include commitments ambitious enough to limit warming to two degrees Celsius;
• be effective by enabling the right set of incentives for implementation and compliance;
• be perceived as equitable in the way it shares out the effort of cutting emissions and the cost of adapting to unavoidable climate change;
• be legally binding;
• learn from and strengthen the current international climate regime;

“More action is needed by everybody”

Connie Hedegaard, European Commissioner for Climate Action, said: “In Copenhagen, world leaders set the goal of keeping global warming below two degrees in order to prevent the most severe impacts of climate change. That is good. But as the world day by day is moving away from this target, it is clearly not enough. More action is needed by everybody.

“An ambitious international agreement in which all major economies commit to take action according to their current and future capabilities is vital if we are to succeed. This paper is an invitation to help shape the EU’s position and contribute to getting the strongest possible deal in 2015.”

The 2015 agreement negotiations were launched at the same time as negotiations under the Durban Platform banner, which will seek to ‘deepen global GHG emission reductions before the agreement takes effect in 2020’. The EC states that this is because nations’ current emissions pledges for 2020 are not significant to prevent global warming exceeding two degrees Celsius.

The EC states that although current climate pledges cover 80 per cent of global emissions, they are not enough to keep global temperature warming below two degrees Celsius. In fact, according to a report from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the ‘ambition gap’ between current pledges and the action required to prevent this temperature rise is actually growing.

As such, it is asking countries that have not yet pledged to reduce emissions by 2020 to do so, whilst those that have are being asked to consider ways in which they can ‘move to the most ambitious end of their [target] ranges’ by 2020.

In order to close this ‘ambition gap’, the EU and a number of nations are proposing voluntary partnerships between governments, civil society and the private sector to form ‘international cooperative initiatives’. These would seek to tackle areas that have significant potential for improvement, for example shipping and aviation, in a cooperative manner.

The EC’s public consultation on climate change will run online until 26 June. A related stakeholder conference will be held on 17 April in Brussels.

Read the UNEP report on the growing ‘emissions gap’.