The UN Process Still Matters

It’s a sunny, hot day here in Cancun, but instead of hanging out on the beach, we’re getting to work to prepare for the beginning of the UN climate negotiations tomorrow morning. But the fact that the negotiations are taking place here, at a beach resort, has many people questioning the legitimacy of the negotiations themselves. I know many of my friends and family members were incredulous that the Secretariat would choose to have negotiations here if they were really serious about solving climate change. Of course, we will be spending most of our days in the cold, windowless convention center. But this has not been enough to assuage the climate change deniers and isolationists, especially in the U.S.

It seems like every day for the past year pundits have been tolling the death knell of the UN climate negotiations. These critics claim that the failure to reach a successor treaty to the legally binding Kyoto Protocol in Copenhagen last December is a sign that the consensus-driven negotiation process under the auspices of the UNFCCC (UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) shows that the process itself is terminally broken, and that the 16^th Conference of the Parties beginning on November 29^th in Cancun, Mexico will represent its final gasp.

Yet the UNFCCC process still matters, and remains the most important forum for the international community to discuss a response to climate change today. Every world leader and participant has affirmed the continuing relevance of this forum, including the U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change Todd Stern, who said in October at the University of Michigan that the UNFCCC should remain the central forum on climate change that the UNFCCC “…has history, inclusiveness and credibility on its side. It has grappled with this issue for 18 years. All nations are part of it. And for all its shortcomings, no other organization has the credibility the FCCC still enjoys with the global community.”

Stern’s remarks summarize the reasons for the UNFCCC’s continued relevance very ably. There are several other forums, bilateral and multilateral, that countries are using to discuss actions on climate change. But the same characteristics that make the UNFCCC negotiation process unwieldy and slow to yield results also make it the most relevant of this proliferation of processes. Not only does it include the input of every country in the world, but every country must consent for a final, legally binding agreement to be reached. This makes the negotiations seem tedious, even rather contentious at times, but it also means that a final agreement, when it is finally reached, will be stronger than any that does not include every country in the world. Greenhouse gas emissions present countries with an opportunity to free ride on others: if one country or a group of countries agree to limit their emissions, the ones that do not agree will be able to emit as much as they like and continue to grow their economies above the countries that do limit their emissions. Similarly, a process by which some countries thrash together an agreement behind closed doors and force others to sign on would not be sustainable in the long run. The Copenhagen Accord, which was created under similar circumstances last year and is already beginning to fall apart, attests to this.

Indeed, those who expect a legally binding agreement on greenhouse gas emissions in Cancun will undoubtedly be disappointed. Every major player, including the Secretary General of the UNFCCC Christiana Figueres, has declared that the Cancun negotiations will rather focus on reaching a “balanced package” of decisions on more concrete issues from financing adaptation in the poorest and least developed countries to technology transfer, rather than binding emissions targets. Yet it seems that even an agreement on this lower hanging fruit may be in danger, as tensions between the United States, the foremost developed country at these negotiations that is also not a signatory under the Kyoto protocol, and China, the de facto leader of the large and rapidly developing countries including Brazil, India and South Africa.

Much has been made of these tensions that surfaced in high dramatic fashion in Tianjin, China in October at the discussions leading up to Cancun. These differences are seen as the primary impediment holding up a legally binding agreement under the UNFCCC auspices, and yet another sign that the negotiation process is dead. Yet these tensions exist not just at the UN negotiations, but in every geo-political space, from the trade tensions over China’s refusal to allow its currency to rise in value, to territorial disputes over the oil-rich South China Seas. It is therefore not some flaw unique to the UN process that has created this dispute, but rather a reflection of the difficulties of international relations in the wider world being reflected through the UN process itself. It is therefore a difficulty that will have to be overcome if the international community is to reach a binding agreement on greenhouse gas emissions. Fortunately, the UNFCCC is the best forum to settle this dispute for good.