COPs are struggling to keep 1.5C alive. Are there better forms of climate diplomacy?

octobre 23, 2024

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‘COP urgently needs to change,’ campaigners say. Here are the key reforms and alternatives that experts are proposing.

Almost a decade since the Paris Agreement was signed at COP21 – with the landmark goal of limiting global heating to 1.5C – the world is hurtling towards double that.

The gulf between the hope that groundbreaking deal represented and the current reality has left many people frustrated with the annual UN climate summits.

With time ticking down, some experts are questioning whether climate COPs are the best space, or structured in the best way, for the scale of action required.

“I would just like it if more countries and more parts of civil society would step back and really take a hard look at whether it will deliver what we need,” says Anthony Burke, a professor of environmental politics.

On the cusp of COP29, which UN climate chief Simon Stiell has said must be “the-stand-and-deliver-COP”, here are the key critiques and suggestions of COP sceptics and would-be reformers.

Why has COP failed to fully tackle climate change so far?

One of the greatest strengths and weaknesses of the climate summit (and the biodiversity COP) is that it takes a multilateral approach. All 197 signatories to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) treaty must agree on conference decisions.

Likewise updates to the Paris Agreement – hailed as a triumph of the multilateral process – can only proceed with buy-in from all parties.

“It’s generally frustrating because […] you have to really go at the pace of your slowest person,” Michai Robertson, senior finance negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) told us last year.

On the plus side, consensus adds a unique legitimacy to major decisions such as the agreement to create a loss and damage fund for climate-vulnerable countries at COP27. And, in theory at least, it gives a small island state the same voting power as a global superpower.

“While it is frustrating, I typically tell people that it’s really and truly the only process that we have. That we can have a substantive say in and not feel like we’re going to be cast aside,” Robertson added.

‘It’s the best we’ve got’ is a sentiment shared by many campaigners, big NGOs and the developing countries which can least afford for COP to fail. But frustration with a lack of progress has pushed some experts to consider alternative and additional forms of climate action.

“There’s a level path dependency that a big international agreement like [the Paris Agreement] exerts on everyone,” says Prof Burke says from his home in Canberra.

“A lot of us were prepared to give [it] the benefit of the doubt. It was certainly an artful compromise, but embedded within it were the UNFCCC voting rules that give potentially one state veto over major COP decisions.”

Under the Paris Agreement, countries have to submit to a global stocktake every five years, reporting on their progress towards emissions-cutting targets. It’s a welcome opportunity for peer pressure and review, says Burke, but the 2023 check-in revealed a world well-off the 1.5C target.

The problem with the negotiations, according to former UK diplomat Simon Sharpe, is that they focus too much on process – when and how countries should set targets etcetera – and not enough on substantive action.

“It was as if a government had told its citizens exactly when and how to fill out their tax returns, but left it up to them to decide how much tax, if any, they would pay,” he wrote for the UK’s Prospect magazine last year. “As a result, we have a system of unilateral action dressed up as a multilateral process. As long as this is the focus of climate change diplomacy, we are collaborators in non-collaboration.”

Could separate climate treaties be more effective?

You don’t need the whole world around the table every time, Sharpe says, advocating for smaller models of participation.

Burke too argues for a more tactical focus on particular emission sectors – from agriculture to coal and forests – that could be developed into treaties and approved through the UN’s General Assembly which, crucially, only needs a two-thirds majority.

Both thinkers draw inspiration from the success of peace treaties, which concentrate on specific problems and places. Burke points to the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons as a positive example of building momentum; stigmatising, banning and eventually eliminating a heinous form of warfare.

His 2022 paper makes the case for a Coal Elimination Treaty, which could then be expanded to include oil and gas. The current Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty initiative, now endorsed by 14 countries, has an “impressively encompassing design,” Burke wrote, but he is concerned the world is not yet ready to reject fossil fuels wholesale.

Treaties could begin with regional coalitions – establishing deforestation-free zones, for example. And they could be folded into another major proposal: a Greenhouse Convention.

This, Burke says, arises from the need to stabilise the climate as we hover above planetary tipping points. Analogous to the Nuclear Weapons Convention, it would track and maintain global net zero particularly where fossil fuel emissions are concerned, “which means a very different, much more intrusive surveillance kind of approach.”

Is there still a role for climate COPs?

Progress on arms control and nuclear weapons demonstrates that where there’s a will there’s a way for states to take urgent action. But despite escalating disasters, the climate crisis is still not seen in the same critical light.

Burke wonders whether this will change as climate vulnerable countries start to lose patience and exercise their frustration more creatively. Vanuatu, for example, has petitioned the International Court of Justice for a decision on states’ legal obligations to combat climate change. The South Pacific island nation has also pushed for the ICC to recognise ecocide as the fifth international crime under the Rome Statute.

At COP19 in Warsaw, 132 developing countries walked out of talks on loss and damage funding in protest at the lack of seriousness from some developed nations. Without results, more widespread walkouts could follow.

“But we don’t have to take a negative approach,” Burke says. “We can say we know the agreement’s flawed, we’ll argue for these improvements. But then let’s go to the General Assembly and start talking about this new agreement in a positive and constructive way.

“They’re not opposed initiatives,” he adds. “Even though I think the defenders of the status quo would try and portray them in that way.”

In its defence, a UN Climate Change spokesperson says: “Clearly much bolder climate actions by governments are needed, but we shouldn’t lose sight of the significant progress of recent years, such as the historic agreement by every nation at COP28 last year to transition away from all fossil fuels – something unthinkable just a few years prior.

“Without UN-convened international cooperation, humanity would be headed towards devastating global heating,” they add.

How else could we reform COP and drive climate action?

A conference is, to some extent, only as good as its attendees. Which is why a record number of fossil fuel lobbyists at COP28 (2,456) was such troubling news.

COPs have ballooned in size in recent years, to the point where UN climate chief Simon Stiell has said he would like to see them get slimmer. Given their pernicious influence, getting rid of fossil fuel lobbyists and elements of the wider ‘trade fair’ around COP is no cosmetic adjustment.

“The COP is polluted by oily money. Why else would this process never have arrived at blocking a single fossil fuel project?” says Robin Wells, director of UK grassroots group Fossil Free London.

“COP urgently needs to change, so it is never again hosted by oil states, frequented by industry lobbyists or guilty of locking out those who have most to lose. If COP does not change, its failure will be the defining failure of human history.”

There is still time to make the Paris Agreement more rigorous, Burke suggests, including by accounting for military emissions too.

An alternative structural improvement is to replace consensus decision-making at COP with voting. UK writer George Monbiot proposes doing so with the ‘Borda count’ method, with a scoring system for different options that allows all delegates to have a say.

Perhaps the most important point to bear in mind is that COPs are not the only venue for climate action – and it’s dangerous to assume they are. Or, as Wells puts it, to believe that COP29 is a place where leaders will “bestow climate solutions on us.”

Three years on, Greta Thunberg’s pinned tweet is a reminder that continues to resonate: “the people in power don’t need conferences, treaties or agreements to start taking real climate action. They can start today. When enough people come together then change will come and we can achieve almost anything. So instead of looking for hope – start creating it. »

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