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Climate Deal Would Commit Every Nation to Limiting Emissions A Climate Accord Based on Global Peer Pressure
(about 17 hours later)
LIMA, Peru — Negotiators from around the globe reached a climate change agreement early Sunday that would, for the first time in history, commit every nation to reducing its rate of greenhouse gas emissions — yet would still fall far short of what is needed to stave off the dangerous and costly early impact of global warming. LIMA, Peru — Shortly before 2 a.m. on Sunday, after more than 36 straight hours of negotiations, top officials from nearly 200 nations agreed to the first deal committing every country in the world to reducing the fossil fuel emissions that cause global warming.
The agreement reached by delegates from 196 countries establishes a framework for a climate change accord to be signed by world leaders in Paris next year. While United Nations officials had been scheduled to release the plan on Friday at noon, longstanding divisions between rich and poor countries kept them wrangling through Friday and Saturday nights to early Sunday. In its structure, the deal represents a breakthrough in the two-decade effort to forge a significant global pact to fight climate change. The Lima Accord, as it is known, is the first time that all nations — rich and poor — have agreed to cut back on the burning oil, gas and coal.
The agreement requires every nation to put forward, over the next six months, a detailed domestic policy plan to limit its emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases from burning coal, gas and oil. Those plans, which would be published on a United Nations website, would form the basis of the accord to be signed next December and enacted by 2020. But the driving force behind the new deal was not the threat of sanctions or other legal consequences. It was global peer pressure. And over the coming months, it will start to become evident whether the scrutiny of the rest of the world is enough to pressure world leaders to push through new global warming laws from New Delhi to Moscow or if, as a political force, international reproach is impotent.
That basic structure represents a breakthrough in the impasse that has plagued the United Nations’ 20 years of efforts to create a serious global warming deal. Until now, negotiations had followed a divide put in place by the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which required developed countries to act but did not demand anything of developing nations, including China and India, two of the largest greenhouse gas polluters. The strength of the accord — the fact that it includes pledges by every country to put forward a plan to reduce emissions at home — is also its greatest weakness. In order to get every country to agree to the deal, including the United States, the world’s largest historic carbon polluter, the Lima Accord does not include legally binding requirements that countries cut their emissions by any particular amount.
“This emerging agreement represents a new form of international cooperation that includes all countries,” said Jennifer Morgan, an expert on international climate negotiations with the World Resources Institute, a research organization. Instead, each nation will agree to enact domestic laws to reduce carbon emissions and put forth a plan by March 31 laying out how much each one will cut after 2020 and what domestic policies it will pass to achieve the cuts.
“A global agreement in Paris is now within reach,” she said. Countries that miss the March deadline will be expected to put forth their plans by June. The plans from every country, known within the United Nations as “Intended Nationally Determined Contributions,” will form the basis of a sweeping new deal to be signed in Paris in 2015.
On its own, the political breakthrough will not achieve the stated goal of the deal: to slow the rate of global emissions enough to prevent the atmosphere from warming more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit over the preindustrial average. That is the point at which scientists say the planet will tip into dangerous and irreversible effects, such as melting sea ice, rising sea levels, increased flooding and droughts, food and water shortages, and more extreme storms. By asking countries to put forward plans dictated by their own economies and domestic politics, rather than a top-down mandate, the Lima Accord helped secure the agreement of every nation to some kind of carbon-cutting action, experts say.
Experts estimate that the aggregate impact of the commitments would reduce emissions at about half the level necessary to prevent that 3.6-degree increase. To prevent the temperature increase, emissions would have to be reduced by double the amount called for in the accord. But with no language requiring the significant cuts scientists say are needed to stave off the costly effects of global warming, countries can put forth weak plans that amount to little more than business as usual. Countries can even choose to ignore the deal and submit no plan at all.
The freshly struck agreement, the Lima Accord, sends the obligation of devising a plan to cut carbon emissions back to the nations’ capitals — and its success or failure rests on how seriously and ambitiously the parliaments, congresses and energy, environment and economic ministries of the world take the mandate to create a new policy. “If a country doesn’t submit a plan, there will be no punishment, no fine, no black U.N. helicopters showing up,” said Jennifer Morgan, an expert on climate negotiations with the World Resources Institute, a research organization.
American negotiators, led by the State Department’s climate change special envoy, Todd D. Stern, have pushed hard for provisions that required all countries to make their proposals public, transparent and presented with comparable metrics as a way to create outside pressure on countries to produce more ambitious plans. Instead the architects of the plan, including top White House officials, hope that the agreement will compel countries to act to avoid international condemnation.
“The Lima Accord delivers what we need to go forward,” Mr. Stern said. “It relies on a lot of peer pressure,” Ms. Morgan said.
Some environmental groups criticized the compromise deal for watering down language that would have bound countries to more rigorous transparency requirements — such as using similar timetables and baseline years from which emissions would be cut. The accord recommends that governments use those metrics, but does not require it. The structure of the deal is what political scientists often call a “name-and-shame” plan.
“It’s the bare minimum of what we need, but we can work with it to get the pressure on,” said Alden Meyer, president of the group Union of Concerned Scientists. Mr. Meyer and other experts said they expected outside nongovernmental groups, research organizations and universities to perform independent analyses of countries’ carbon-cutting plans in order to assess how all the plans stack up in comparison. Under the Lima Accord all countries must submit plans that would be posted on a United Nations website and made available to the public.
Delegates here widely acknowledged that the catalyst for the deal was a joint announcement last month in Beijing by President Obama and President Xi Jinping of China that the world’s two largest greenhouse gas polluters would limit their emissions. That move appeared to break the 20-year impasse in climate talks — particularly a longstanding insistence by developing nations that they not be required to make emissions cuts while they still had populations in poverty. A requirement that all countries submit plans using identical metrics, for easy comparison, was deleted from the accord because of the objection of developing nations.
“The success of this has laid a good foundation for success of Paris,” said Xie Zhenhua, China’s vice minister of National Development and Reform Commission. “Next year all of us, all countries, will continue to demonstrate our ambition, flexibility and confidence,” he said. “What’s essential for naming and shaming is that the individual contributions be comparable,” said Robert Stavins, a professor of Environmental Economics at Harvard University.
The environment minister of India, the world’s third largest carbon polluter, praised the deal. “We have a true consensus,” said the minister, Prakash Javadekar. India has resisted calls to commit to net reductions of its soaring carbon pollution, insisting that it should not be required to cut its use of cheap coal-fired power while millions of impoverished Indians live without electricity. But already, a number of research groups and universities expect to crunch the numbers of the plans, producing apples-to-apples assessments. The hope, negotiators said, is that as the numbers and commitments of each country are publicized, compared and discussed, countries will be shamed by the spotlight into proposing and enacting stronger plans.
But India has signaled that it does intend to submit a plan to at least slow its rate of emissions. And Mr. Javadekar appeared to signal his support of the process of working toward a deal in Paris, saying he hopes to continue to engage with other countries throughout the year. “We see the sunlight as one of the most important parts of this,” said Todd D. Stern, the senior climate-change negotiator for President Obama.
“Let us not leave all our differences for the next venue,” he said. The motivations of the world leaders and whether they care about those assessments are essential to the success of the deal.
While all countries will be required under the Lima Accord to submit plans to reduce emissions, the nature of the plans can be different according to the size of their economies. Rich countries, like the United States, are expected to put forward plans detailing how they would put their emissions on a downward trajectory after 2020. Large but developing economies, like China, are more likely to put forward plans that name a future year in which their emissions peak. Poorer economies are expected to put forward plans indicating that their pollution will continue to increase — but at a lower rate. Mr. Obama wants to sign on to the plan because he sees his role in fighting climate change as a cornerstone of his legacy, both he and his advisers say. But whether the United States will follow through on his commitment depends on whether his successors and fellow politicians feel the same.
While the Lima Accord lays the groundwork for a possible Paris deal, unresolved questions and huge divisions among countries lie ahead. The biggest one is money. Countries vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, such as low-lying island states and African nations, are already demanding that the Paris deal include not just details on mitigating emissions, but also commitments that rich countries will spend billions of dollars to help them adapt to and recover from the ravages of climate change. The president has pledged that the United States will cut emissions by as much as 28 percent by 2025. The nation can achieve some of that under new regulations of tailpipe and power plant emissions enacted by his administration.
Developing nations are also demanding help for the transition from using cheap, heavily polluting coal and oil to low-carbon sources of energy, such as wind and solar power. Over the next year, as world capitals prepare their carbon emissions reduction plans, they will also be gearing up for a clash between rich and poor nations, in which the poor may demand money from the rich in Paris. But further laws or regulations, enacted after Mr. Obama leaves office, must be put in place for the United States to meet its pledge, experts say. Most in the emerging field of Republican presidential contenders have come out fiercely against Mr. Obama’s domestic climate-change policies, and they may not be swayed by international scorn if the United States does not follow through on its Lima pledge.
Also ahead is the question of how governments can continue to further ratchet down carbon pollution without severely curbing economic growth. Under the accord’s terms, by November 2015, once all countries have put forward their plans for limiting emissions, scientists and statisticians will add up the numbers to determine exactly how far they are from preventing the 3.6-degree temperature increase. That figure will form the start of another round of negotiations. The Paris deal is expected to include language requiring that countries reconvene regularly throughout the coming decades to raise the ambition of their carbon-cutting plans. In China, the political motivations for reducing emissions are more internal. China’s president, Xi Jinping, has pledged that China’s emissions will peak by 2030 and decline after that. To meet that goal, the Chinese government is looking into creating a national cap-and-trade system by 2016 that would force polluters to pay for their greenhouse gas emissions.
But China was driven to cut pollution largely to quell domestic unrest, as citizens protested against the increasingly bad air caused by coal power production. The previous decade of international criticism, as China surpassed the United States as the world’s largest polluter, did not compel it to take domestic action.
There is much speculation about how India, the world’s third largest carbon polluter, will respond. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has declared repeatedly that his top priority is economic growth and lifting people out of poverty, even if that means the construction of hundreds of new coal-fired power plants to deliver cheap electricity. Mr. Modi is also seen wanting to resist being viewed as caving in to pressure from Mr. Obama.
In New Delhi, critics have already begun pushing back against the deal.
“The burden of tackling climate change will decisively shift to developing countries, making their efforts toward poverty reduction and sustainable development difficult and expensive,” said Sunita Narain, director of the Centre of Science and Environment, an Indian advocacy group.
However, India’s environment minister, Prakash Javadekar, noted last week in Lima that climate change has already affected his nation, and that his government intends to submit a plan by June that would show how India would lower the rate at which it produces pollution.
Observers are also closely watching Russia, the world’s fifth-largest polluter, for its response to the plan. President Vladimir V. Putin has publicly scoffed at the science of human-caused climate change and shown a willingness to defy international opinion.
But this week in Lima, Russian delegates said that Moscow is at work on an emissions reduction plan.
Climate change policy observers will also closely watch Australia. This year, the Australian government voted to repeal a carbon tax, and the administration of Prime Minister Tony Abbott has also eliminated its Department of Climate Change. On Sunday morning in Lima, as delegates from around the world praised the passage of the Lima Accord, the Australian delegation chose not to make remarks.
Still, the delegation did say it will submit a climate change plan to the United Nations this spring.