More than 190 countries convene in Paris on Monday next week for the start of the landmark UN summit to agree a new global climate change treaty. The conference tops off a series of meetings this year in what has been called a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build a new international framework to address the challenges of global warming and sustainable development more broadly.
For Paris follows not only the UN summit in New York in September, which agreed the new 2030 development goals, but also the finance for development conference in Addis Ababa in July and the new framework for disaster risk reduction agreed in Sendai in March.
Collectively, these agreements will provide a foundation stone for global sustainable development for billions across the world in coming decades.
While a deal in Paris is still not assured, the signs have become increasingly positive in recent months. This is in large part because of the proliferation of new national and sub-national climate initiatives, including legislation and regulation, being adopted by countries across the world.
Last year alone, new climate laws and policies were introduced across a large swathe of industrialized and developing countries from Pakistan to Peru, to Poland and the Philippines, as a study published in April by the Grantham Research Institute at the London School of Economics underlines.
Seen in the big picture of the period since the Kyoto Protocol was agreed in 1997, the number of climate laws and policies in the 99 countries under review by the Grantham Institute has grown from 54 to 800 last year, distributed relatively evenly between the industrialized and developing world.
This shift is a key part of a wider transformation taking place. Previously, much of the political debate on global warming had been framed around narratives of sharing a global burden — with countries often trying to minimize their share.
Now, many countries view the issue as one of national self-interest. A growing numbers of nations, across every continent of the world, are trying to maximize the benefits of global-warming measures by embracing low-carbon growth and development and to better prepare for the impact of climate change.
One manifestation of this fundamental shift, which would be catalyzed by a global-warming agreement in Paris, is the potential creation of what may ultimately become a truly global carbon trading market involving the Asia-Pacific region, the EU and currently state-level schemes in the Americas.
Already, almost 40 countries and more than 20 cities, states and provinces use carbon pricing mechanisms or are planning to do so.
Moreover, in a recent report by the Climate Markets and Investment Association, it is estimated that carbon pricing mechanisms around the world will raise about US$22 billion this year in schemes covering more than 20 percent of global emissions.
This is up from the about US$15 billion last year.
While much attention inevitably focuses on the EU scheme, currently the largest in the world, this potentially game-changing political and economic development is also being driven by Asia-Pacific countries as disparate as New Zealand, South Korea, Kazakhstan, Vietnam, China, Thailand and Indonesia. That the Asia-Pacific region is helping lead the way on this agenda was underlined when Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) announced in September a 2017 start date for the regulatory rollout of China’s national emissions trading system, which will probably eventually surpass the size of that in the 28 EU states.
However, China is far from alone in moving in this direction of travel in the Asia-Pacific region. For instance, Kazakhstan introduced a carbon trading scheme in 2012, becoming the first Asian country to introduce such an economy-wide cap and trading system. Moreover, Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung last month signed off on the nation’s new carbon market scheme.
Earlier this year too, South Korea began its own trading scheme, now the world’s second-largest, which imposes caps on emissions from more than 500 of the country’s biggest firms. It is a bold, pioneering move that underlines the country’s political leadership in the fight against global warming.
And this all comes in the context of China’s own moves toward a carbon-trading scheme. Last year, Beijing embraced a National Plan for Tackling Climate Change that includes a target to, by 2020, cut carbon emissions per unit of GDP by between 40 percent and 45 percent from 2005 levels.
This is an ambitious goal at a time of continuing industrialization, and may not be fully realized. However, to maintain social cohesion, Beijing recognizes growth must increasingly be sustainable, given the country’s vulnerability to some of the worst impacts of climate change.
As these examples underline, at the heart of these promising developments in the Asia-Pacific region is a growing belief that carbon trading is the most economically efficient way to meet the political ambition of reducing emissions of greenhouse gases. Along with countries like New Zealand, Thailand and Indonesia, this vanguard represents what could become an Asia-Pacific carbon-trading hub in the battle against global warming.
Going forward, this system may in turn be linked with the EU scheme, which has been widely studied by international policymakers, including in Beijing, as they consider the design of their own programs.
By linking Europe and the Asia-Pacific region in this way, it is possible to envisage a wider scheme with the Americas too that would be a potentially game-changing development in the fight against global warming.
This would include state-level schemes in California, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative in nine northeastern US states and in Quebec, Canada.
Taken overall, a Paris deal would be the final piece in the post-2015 global sustainability framework jigsaw. Such an agreement would bolster the prospects of a carbon system emerging, from the Asia-Pacific region to the Americas, with potential to become a game-changing development in the fight against global warming.
Andrew Hammond is an associate at LSE IDEAS (the Center for International Affairs, Policy and Strategy) at the London School of Economics, and a former special advisor to the UK government. John Prescott previously served as British deputy prime minister and was Europe’s chief negotiator at the Kyoto climate talks in 1997.
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