This seminar will address potential policy pathways after the Paris agreement, specifically addressing policy implications of the temperature goals and the process of scaling up the Nationally Determined Contributions. The new climate agreement, adopted by 195 countries in Paris in December 2015, crowned an orchestration focused climate policy architecture. UN climate policy now focuses on incentivizing action and coordinating information on countries’ contributions towards meeting agreed global goals. Climate change governance can now be characterized as a “global potluck” regime where states determine their commitments in view of national capabilities, circumstances and priorities. The primary instrument of the bottom-up process is the so-called “nationally determined contributions”. To date, 189 countries have submitted their intended contributions. However, the collective ambition of INDCs falls short of staying on an emission pathway that is consistent with the temperature goal. The review process of the temperature goal as well as how the INDCs shall be transparently compared and ratcheted up are now under planning. The Paris negotiations brought to the basic disagreement on whether the ultimate goal should expressed in terms of societal transformation, decarbonisation, carbon neutrality or the eventually agreed “achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century”.
Webcast: https://connect.sunet.se/bgcatm/
Lectures Archive: http://vimeo.com/bgcatm/videos/
