LITERATURE PAPER OF THE PARIS AGREEMENT
ANALYSIS & ASSESSMENT
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Introduction
The Paris Agreement is a landmark in International Climate Policy for developed and developing countries to take action, embed it in their national context, and towards agreed transformational long-term objectives. It also acted as a milestone in uniting the world under one umbrella with a vision to work on ‘Climate Change. It brings to fore the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities, by its core obligations for all parties and by its range of techniques used to express differentiation. The core legal obligations are mainly procedural as the Paris Agreement does not prescribe specific mitigation actions or emission levels. Instead, in five-year "cycles", all parties have to prepare and enhance individual climate plans (NDCs) and be accountable for their implementation. Despite limitations in the legal detail, the approach is an experiment that relies on the national determination of efforts combined with the persuasive impact of the transparency framework and the regular taking stock of progress. The future details of these elements could be crucial for safeguarding the ambition of a cleaner climate for future.
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Key Points of Discussion
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https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/5-charts-that-explain-the-paris-climate-agreement/
On the night of December 12, 2015, the 21st Conference of Parties (COP 21) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) adopted an agreement that became a landmark in global climate governance. COP 21 was held in the French capital, and the Paris Agreement, as the agreement is called, comes 23 years after the framework convention was adopted at Rio de Janeiro in Brazil at the Earth Summit in 1992. The Paris Agreement establishes an Enhanced Transparency Framework (ETF) designed to build trust and confidence that all countries are contributing their share to the global effort.
Global warming because of the emission of greenhouse gases, the most prominent and dominant component of which is carbon dioxide, is undoubtedly one of the most profound global environmental issues in the world today. Whether the Paris Agreement will indeed help the world to come to grips with dealing with the problem of global warming of anthropogenic origin is surely a matter of concern to all of humanity.
Of the sectors of the economy that will be affected by global warming, agriculture is surely one of the most important. Although its contribution to global GDP may appear minor, agriculture is the primary source of the world’s food and food security, and the impact of climate change on agriculture is therefore a matter that concerns the world as a whole. In less-developed countries, where agriculture and allied activities are the main sources of income for large sections – and often a majority – of the population, any threat to food production is a threat to mass livelihoods and food security.
Adaptation of agricultural production to climate change requires, in the first instance, that the extent of global warming be kept under check to the extent possible. The mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions is therefore the first line of defence for agriculture in the face of the threat of climate change. It is in this context that the Paris climate summit is of critical significance to agriculture, even though agriculture was not the explicit subject under discussion.
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The Paris Agreement
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The final outcome in Paris consists of an overall resolution (or “decision” in UNFCCC parlance) and an agreement that appears as an Annexure to the decision document. Perhaps an easier way of understanding the parts of the document is to conceive it as an agreement accompanied by a decision that elaborates the means for the adoption and implementation of the Agreement.
The crucial parts of the Agreement are the decision on mitigation and the global and individual goals of developed and developing nations with respect to mitigation. The global goal is divided into two parts. The first, in Article 2.1(a) of the Agreement, is the assertion that all parties would strive to keep the increase in global average temperatures “well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change.” In order to achieve this goal, however, individual nations have been left to do what they want, without any clear indication of how the gap between what needs to be done and what nations are prepared to do is to be bridged. Article 4.1 does not provide any quantitative measure of how emissions are to be curbed either globally or by individual nations such that the objective laid out in Article 2.1 (a) can be achieved. It also does not provide any quantitative measure of what individual nations should do.
The Agreement thus sets aside some scientific facts that have been well established and articulated in AR5 of the IPCC. As AR5 notes, and discusses in some detail, there are clear limits on the permissible emissions of greenhouse gases over a specified time period if the global average temperature is to be kept below some specified limit.13 For a 2°C temperature limit, the limits on cumulative emissions are stringent. As has been noted by Tejal Kanitkar in her companion piece in this issue,14 if the world restricts cumulative emissions between 1870 and 2100 to 992 GtC, then there is a 67 per cent probability of limiting temperature rise to 2°C. This means that only 325 GtC can be emitted between 2012 and 2100.
The corresponding cumulative emissions limits to ensure a temperature rise limit of 1.5°C are even more stringent.15 The companion paper in this issue explores this question in greater detail. The point to remember is that, except under very special circumstances of rapid technological change, the goal stated in Art 2.1 (a) is well out of reach. As scientists have noted, ensuring a maximum temperature increase of less than 1.5°C (or even 2°C), requires the deployment of carbon capture technologies yet to be developed. It is clear that several leading climate scientists are very unhappy with the formulations of the Paris Agreement;16 indeed one scientist observed at a seminar during COP 21 in Paris that “1.5°C is in the rear-view mirror.”
As has been reported in the media, some countries, including China and India, were clearly against the formulation in Article 2(1), while the developed countries encouraged the small island states and the least developed countries that were mainly responsible for pushing this formulation in the two weeks of negotiations prior to the final agreement. The unattainable “aspirational” goal, as it has been described, made it to the final version of the agreement. As India’s veteran climate activist Sunita Narain pointed out, the key climate laggards in the developed country camp had taken control of the negotiations by the halfway mark, and encouraged the demand for the 1.5°C goal, even while diverting attention from the low commitments that they had made to climate change mitigation (Narain 2015). Thus, the Paris Agreement includes a goal that is in the nature of a promise to the most vulnerable nations and one that it cannot under any reasonable conditions achieve. Nothing short of extraordinary developments in technology (which Bill Gates has described as an “energy miracle”) can ensure its realization. The political, social, and human consequences of an obvious failure to achieve this goal are enormous. The riskiness of the path that the world has taken at Paris has no obvious parallel in contemporary history. By ignoring the global carbon budget, the Paris Agreement has set about moving global climate governance to a path that ignores the best results that science has to offer. The realization is yet to sink into global public opinion that the Paris Agreement challenges the very role that climate science has to play in providing the evidential basis for policy-making.
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Transparency of Article 13
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The Katowice conference (COP24, Dec. 2018) fleshed out a framework that is applicable to all countries by adopting a detailed set of modalities, procedures and guidelines (MPGs) that make it operational.
The MPGs are based on a set of guiding principles and define the reporting information to be provided, the technical expert review, transitional arrangements, and a facilitative multilateral consideration of progress.
The ETF provides built-in flexibility to those developing countries that need it owing to their national capacities. Capacity-building and support from developed country Parties will be crucial to facilitating improvement in reporting over time. The Katowice decision requested the Global Environment Facility to support developing country Parties in preparing their first and subsequent biennial transparency reports. Further, developing country Parties will be given assistance to fulfil their reporting requirements under the Convention from the Consultative Group of Experts which will also support the implementation of the ETF.
Through the detailed guidance on the reporting/review/consideration processes for the information to be submitted and by making these reports publicly available, the ETF will make it possible to track the progress made by each country. In this way, it will be possible to compare a country’s actions against its plans and ambitions as described in its Nationally Determined Contributions( NDCs).
Transition to the ETF
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The ETF under the Paris Agreement builds on the current, solid measurement, reporting and verification system under the Convention, which for developed countries is the greenhouse gas (GHG) inventories and the International Assessment and Review and for developing countries is the International Consultation and Analysis.
The enhanced transparency framework represents an important component of the ambition cycle in the global climate regime established by the Paris Agreement by building trust and confidence that countries are taking action to meet their national climate targets and actions defined in their NDCs under the Paris Agreement.
Furthermore, in addition to scientific research and findings by the IPCC, information reported in BTRs will be considered at a collective level as an important input into the global stocktake, leading to stronger climate action that will continue as the climate regimes moves towards the goal of zero net emissions by 2050 and climate neutrality thereafter.
Literature Review: Climate Change & Global Warming
Fall 2021 | 4. Sem. | BA Digital Business & Management | Prof. Dr. Hasan Koç
Students: Fabio Kunckel, Samuel Dennis Mietke, Timur Soroka
Global warming is one area of research that has been steadily increasing in discussions along the last decades. With temperatures increasing around the globe and natural disasters happening in higher frequency, businesses are starting to pay more and more attention to it since it will impact the future of the whole global population, especially in littoral areas and places prone to natural disasters. Since 2010, the overall number of articles published about this topic has increased as it is important to understand and have literature about this phenomenon in order to take action against, to prevent, and prepare for what is coming in the near future. The objective for this systematic literature review is to generate awareness of what kind of research is being published in the field of climate change and business, within the time frame of 2010 to 2021. Our research may support future studies in pinpointing missing aspects in the literature and to understand what measures are necessary for businesses to survive and improve the global situation.
More business literature on the topic of global warming has been published in more recent years. The topic of climate change and global warming has been increasing in the interest all over the world.
When analyzing the n-gram results, some topics become more prominent compared to the keyword frequency results. The bi- and trigrams seem to have a stronger focus on environmental issues. Bigrams such as extreme weather, weather events, GHG emissions, and Trigrams such as extreme weather events, and global warming issues might show that the environmental aspects play a central role within these articles. The management perspective on global warming seems to be equally important. Bigrams such as corporate strategy, strategic changes, risk management, strategy management, non-state actors, as well as Trigrams like corporate social responsibility are parts of the results. That might suggest that future responsibilities of business management will be to take ownership of the climate change challenges and environmental issues, to help create a more sustainable future.
Most of the business literature focuses on Business Adaptation, Actions and Responses to climate change by either analysing a certain case study or by providing examples that apply to different industries and sectors. Much of the business literature educates on the effects of climate change on businesses but also on the effects of businesses on climate change while greatly educating about climate change awareness and potential risks in the business sector and proposes new guidelines and frameworks to understand and tackle issues.
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Bibliography
https://www.jstor.org/stable/43860128
https://biotech.law.lsu.edu/blog/Analysing-the-Paris-Agreement.pdf
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