What was the outcome of the climate change negotiations at Katowice?

Close to 200 countries that met recently at Katowice in Poland adopted a set of rules to limit global warming. Nitin Sethi discusses the key outcomes of the climate change conference

What was the outcome of the climate change negotiations at Katowice, Poland?

The negotiations between 197 countries produced a rulebook to implement the Paris Agreement. The rulebook lays down guidelines, regulations, modalities and procedures that countries must follow starting 2021 to implement the climate actions they have committed to under the first phase of the agreement. 

Why was there a need to extend the negotiations by a day?

In 2015, countries at the negotiation table had compromised on their hard positions to strike a bargain and a balance between the short- and the long-term interests of developing and developed countries and their groups. The balance included a mild form of differentiation between the responsibilities of developing and developed countries embedded across all the pillars and sections of the agreement. 

But in 2016 when members began to write the rulebook for the agreement, US President Donald Trump threatened to walk out of the agreement if it was not tweaked further to protect what he saw were US interests. Other developed countries joined in to demand that even the mild form of differentiation be done away with in the rules and that the pillar focusing on climate finance be heavily diluted. 

Developing countries fought back asking that the rules be framed within the bounds of the agreement. These arguments played out for three years and stretched to the last night of the Katowice climate talks. Ultimately, developed countries did give up on some of their extreme demands but they were still able to keep the outcomes weak on certain fronts. 

What are the key implementation guidelines (also called rule book or work programme) to the Paris Climate Agreement?

Countries agreed that deep details would be given while providing the self-determined targets for the second phase of the Paris Agreement starting 2030. This would make the targets (for emission reduction in particular) comparable and easy to assess for the impact they have at an aggregate level.

Countries agreed to a detailed process of reporting on how they have performed against their self-determined targets. Developing countries got some leeway to not do so at a level as deep as the developed countries if they believe they do not have the capacity for it. But they would have to tell by which year they would be able to do so.

Developed countries will be required to provide some upfront information on climate finance though the reporting rules leave enough ambiguity for developed countries to greenwash numbers. Every five years starting 2023 there would be a global stocktaking exercise to understand how countries have fared at a collective level to keep climate change and temperature rise in check. Countries would be then expected to revise their targets for the next phase or period of the Paris Agreement in light of the conclusions. 

What is a carbon market? Why couldn’t countries decide on its architecture?

The Paris Agreement commits to set up a global trading system in avoided greenhouse gas emissions. Countries and entities can pay some other country or entity to reduce emissions on their behalf and take credit for their respective countries against their targets. Countries and entities are expected to do so if they find it cheaper to buy the carbon credits rather than undertake mitigation action themselves. The differences on the architecture, particularly between Brazil and the developed countries, could not be resolved and will now be concluded in November 2019.

What was the kerfuffle over the UN Intergovernmental panel on climate change's (IPCC) 1.5°C report?

The US, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Australia did not want to welcome the report. The US, even while approving the report, had distanced itself from it. Saudi Arabia said the report had gone beyond the mandate scientists had been given by assessing the collective worth of the targets under the Paris Agreement. Some others, such as the least developed countries and the EU, wanted to peg the report centrally to future work under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change as well as the UN Secretary General’s special session next year, in order to force countries to revamp their existing Paris Agreement targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions without a linkage or dependence on climate finance and technology from the developed countries. 

Ultimately a weak face-saving reference was made to it in the final decisions at Katowice.