At 7:27 p.m. local time Saturday, Dec. 12, 2015, a new Paris Agreement on global climate change was born after four years of taxing labor. Its much-anticipated birth was quickly followed by copious self-congratulations by many of the parents in the room who almost all were overcome by joy and bursting with pride.
Praise heaped upon newborns should be taken with a grain of salt. “Historic” is a term often thrown about too cavalierly, and a “new era” does not start every time government bureaucrats pull a few all-nighters. But, what has come out of Paris clearly marks a new direction for global climate cooperation.
We wish the newborn well, but upon some postnatal reflection, it is clear that the birth of the Paris Agreement should be cause for both hope and caution. Certain political developments are principally good and welcome. Other changes are largely bad. And some purposeful omissions may be plain ugly.
The Good: Climate Change Policy Is Back
The Paris Agreement signals that climate change is back at the center of the global political agenda—at least for now.
A collective weight has been lifted off the backs of the many delegates who for the past six years have been struggling to recover from the Copenhagen fiasco in 2009, where countries failed to agree on a common strategy. The lingering gloom of Copenhagen has been replaced by Paris euphoria. For this, the French hosts deserve much credit.
The two weeks that preceded the birth of the Paris Agreement helped to breathe new and much-needed life into the multilateral process of formulating a global approach to climate change mitigation and adaptation. Unprecedented participation by world leaders, including President Obama, Chinese president Xi Jinping, and other heads of state, at the beginning of the summit helped set the tone that then allowed national delegates to make the necessary compromises.
The Paris Agreement signifies a very welcome return to multilateralism. Much of the Paris conference was also refreshingly transparent; the attempt to be inclusive was honest.
As a result, a new collective ambition—of “holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 degrees Celsius (C) (35.6 degrees Fahrenheit (F)) above preindustrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees C (34.7 degrees F) above preindustrial levels” (Article 2) has made its way into the text.
A major strength of the Paris Agreement is its near universal participation and acceptance of responsibility. This is much-welcome progress from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which only required mitigation action by a limited number of industrial country emitters responsible for bulk of historical emissions. It is also an important step forward from the 2009 Copenhagen Accord, which was put together at great haste by a small group, leaving most countries on the political sidelines.
The Bad: Unaccountable and Uncertain
The 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change laid down a broad legal structure for global cooperation to which future agreements were intended to provide more specificity. Paris did nothing of the sort.
Instead, the Paris Agreement introduces a new, and mainly worrisome, model of voluntary “nationally determined contributions” by governments. Many of the results are expected to be delivered by the magic of markets and not-yet-commercially available revolutionary technology, with world leaders cheering the change along.
