Seizing the COPportunity: Understanding the Evolution of Climate Negotiations Since 1995

By Rishikesh Ram Bhandary

At the 17^th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP17), India tried to introduce a discussion on intellectual property rights, arguing that these rights were hindering the transfer of clean technologies to developing countries. However, there was no agreement on its inclusion, and because decision-making in the UN climate process requires consensus, the meeting could not formally discuss the topic.

Since then, the agenda-making process for UN climate negotiations, held under the auspices of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), has only become more fractious. In a process where trust and collaboration are key to achieving the ambitious climate action needed to stay below the 1.5C warming threshold, agendas can make or break policy movement.

Now, as policymakers, climate scientists, researchers and academics travel to Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt for COP27 from November 6-18, another agenda fight is brewing. Many climate vulnerable nations are urging for loss and damage finance, or finance for countries facing catastrophic impacts from climate change, to be added to the agenda. An early version of the COP27 agenda did not have loss and damage listed, leading climate vulnerable countries to rally along with civil society organizations to demand its inclusion. However, while high-income countries are hesitant to address loss and damage, they since have signaled that they wouldn’t “obstruct” its inclusion on the agenda. This announcement, though reluctant, reflects just one of the shifts that have been seen in climate negotiations in recent years.

The new Climate Negotiations Database and accompanying Climate Policy journal article co-authored with Jennifer Allan of Cardiff University brings together officially adopted agendas of UN climate negotiations since the first COP in 1995. The goal of the database is to help lay the groundwork for a rigorous, empirical approach to studying the international climate regime and how it can be made more fit-for-purpose. Understanding what does, or doesn’t, get talked about and what decisions governments make, or don’t make, under the UN climate process is critical to identifying policy gaps.

Key takeaways

1. Mitigation and transparency feature the most prominently

There’s no question that reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the primary cause of human-induced climate change, has been a key focus in climate negotiations. The data clearly shows that the goal of mitigation has consistently been an overriding focus of the climate talks. While other items such as adapting to climate impacts, mobilizing finance and supporting technology development and transfer have also entered the conversation, mitigation and transparency have been the two major issues that the UN process focuses on.

One of the key functions of the UN climate process has been to introduce reporting guidelines on policies governments put in place to address climate change, their performance in achieving their targets and national data relevant for climate change more generally. In the lead up to the Paris Agreement, countries had diverging views on how transparency provisions would work and if developed and developing countries would have two different sets of rules. However, the high frequency of transparency in the negotiations suggests that countries expect the UN climate regime to play a key role in instituting reporting standards and other measures to aid transparency.

2. High frequency agenda items do not mean more implementation

While mitigation and transparency have both featured heavily on the climate agenda, the actual content of discussions is different. Discussions on transparency have moved from negotiating reporting standards to implementing them. For mitigation, there is great hesitation to discussing sources of carbon emissions and substantive commitments that countries would have to make. Of course, the nature of the Paris Agreement is that governments determine what goes into their national pledges, so there is not much space for the UN process to prescribe how and what countries should do.

3. The negotiation process is consolidating around the Paris Agreement

The highest volume of work took place when governments were trying to negotiate an extension to the Kyoto Protocol and a brand-new agreement that was acceptable to all countries. This period of flux – 2007 to 2012 – was not just very busy but also immensely generative. Agenda items beyond mitigation received significant attention, and ultimately, this period helped shape the contours of the Paris Agreement.

Looking ahead

This database is a start to fully understanding how climate negotiations facilitate global climate action, shining a light on three key areas to explore next.

1. Whose agendas?

One of the motivating factors for this study was to get a better picture of whose voice is heard in the UN climate process. Agenda items usually have strong champions. As mentioned above, India’s efforts to add exemptions or waivers on intellectual property rights for technology onto the agenda were not successful. Conversely, Costa Rica and Papua New Guinea were successful in adding deforestation to the agenda in 2005. Some topics have been able skip the line because the item had a strong backing from a major player, such as the Chilean COP presidency championing oceans. This naturally raises the question of which topics make it on the agenda and which topics get left out?

Moreover, this is not simply a Global North-Global South issue. Climate change has many stakeholders. Examining the formal, intergovernmental agendas also helps to shed light on how and why certain stakeholders have more policy influence than others.

2. Agenda items to concrete decisions

The database tracks climate agendas and shows how attention has varied by topic across time. The next step is to obtain a granular understanding of what decisions and implementation measures are taken.

3. The changing nature of global climate governance

The Paris Agreement places national governments in charge of identifying their own nationally determined contributions. How much authority does the UN process have in requiring rules and commitments to be agreed at the intergovernmental level or delegated to its agencies? How much of that authority resides with national governments or other actors? This distribution of responsibility is just one aspect of the climate change that needs to be better understood to facilitate accountability and real climate action.

With the political attention primarily revolving around the Paris Agreement, the agendas of the climate summits are likely to reflect this priority. However, given the intensified pace of climate change, the entry of new stakeholders and actors into the ambit of climate governance, whether related to health or trade unions, and the cross-cutting nature of climate change, the focus of future COPs will continue to evolve. With climate impacts bearing heavily on the minds of many climate vulnerable countries, COP27 will be a crucial indicator on how well the official UN process responds to rapidly changing realities.

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