"Circus" Of Ad-Hoc Climate Pledges Mean That No One Is Certain On Temperature Projections
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Can it be done? One of the least noticed results of the circus of pledges made to date at the conference is that most bypass the UN negotiating system that is theoretically running things and ensuring the integrity of promises. They are largely unilateral statements of intent, often imprecise in their meaning, and with little means of independent oversight or enforcement. If the United States fails to meet its methane promise, or Vietnam shirks its promise to end coal burning, there will be no accountability and few repercussions.
Already, some pledges look open to question. Within 48 hours of Indonesia’s president Joko Widodo committing his country to ending net deforestation by 2030, his environment and forestry minister, Siti Nurbaya Bakar, contradicted him, saying “forcing Indonesia to zero deforestation in 2030 is clearly inappropriate and unfair.” And as of now, net-zero remains an aspiration. “None of the countries that has a net zero target has implemented sufficient short-term policies to put itself on a trajectory towards net-zero,” Niklas Hohne from the New Climate Institute, which monitors carbon-cutting plans, told the BBC.
Delegates say that for the plethora of ad hoc promises in Glasgow to carry weight, they need to be included in formal pledges within NDCs; they need assured finance, often from rich nations; and they need to be backed up by a rule book for accounting and policing the pledges. Securing those essentials is the work of the second week of the conference.
One key outstanding issue being widely discussed among delegates is the wording of what is known in conference jargon as Article Six, which should set out how countries can collaborate with each other to meet their pledges. It sounds technical, but is deeply political and again could be resolved by leaving UN processes as passive bystanders. As first drafted in Paris, Article Six referred only to nations sharing technology, finance, and know-how. But it has since become a potential framework for global carbon-offsetting markets, raising concerns about double counting, land grabbing, and outright fraud. Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International and a veteran of almost every previous climate negotiation, recently dismissed offsets as “an accounting trick to keep emissions off the ledgers of polluters.”
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https://e360.yale.edu/digest/climate-negotiators-confront-a-key-question-how-hot-will-the-planet-get
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