Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP12627
Authors: Carlo Carraro
Abstract: International negotiations on climate change control are moving away from a global cooperative agreement (at least from the ambition to achieve it) to adopt a bottom-up framework composed of unilateral pledges of domestic measures and policies. This shift from cooperative to voluntary actions to control GHG emissions already started in Copenhagen at COP 15 in 2007 and became a platform formally adopted by a large number of countries in Paris at COP 21. The new architecture calls for a mechanism to review the nationally determined contributions (NDCs) of the various signatories and assess their adequacy. Most importantly, countries’ voluntary pledges need to be compared to assess the fairness, and not only the effectiveness, of the resulting outcome. This assessment is crucial to support future, more ambitious, commitments to reduce GHG emissions. It is therefore important to identify criteria and quantitative indicators to assess and compare the NDCs.
Keywords: climate change; negotiations; Paris Agreement; GHG emissions; mitigation
JEL Codes: No JEL codes provided
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| noncooperative approach adopted at COP21 (F53) | broad agreement among countries (F53) |
| broad agreement among countries (F53) | stabilize global greenhouse gas emissions (F64) |
| broad agreement among countries (F53) | emissions in 2030 projected to be similar to those in 2015 (Q47) |
| commitments from US, EU, and China (F53) | recognizing the need for emission reductions (Q52) |
| nature of NDCs (F53) | potential effectiveness in achieving the 2°C target (Q47) |
| current NDCs (F53) | may not be sufficient without further contributions and improved negotiating efforts (F35) |