Macroscope | Progress on climate change beckons in Paris

Climate change politics will take centre stage next week in Paris. The largest ever gathering devoted to fixing the climate will strive for what has proven elusive for more than two decades – a comprehensive, fair and effective deal that will set us on a path to fix global warming.

The summit starting next Monday is the 21st meeting of the Committee of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Some 50,000 participants will attend. Of all the international climate-related meetings that have taken place since the first one – the 1992 Rio Earth Summit – this is certainly amongst the most important.

Two main reasons for this stand out. For the first time, the aim is to forge a truly global agreement to curb carbon emissions, with the contributions of each economy determined in accordance with the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities.”

That means the emerging economies that are responsible for the bulk of carbon emission increments today – but not for the accumulated stock of CO2 that takes many decades to dissipate – will assume what they consider appropriate carbon mitigation commitments.

In the 1997 Kyoto Protocol that preceded the prospective Paris agreement, it was only the industrial economies that assumed binding commitments.

The Kyoto Protocol is best seen as a learning experience. Its achievements were modest. It set conservative emission reduction targets and did not open a trajectory that would ensure a global temperature increase of no more than 2 degrees Centigrade. This is the outer limit in warming that scientists reckon will keep us on the right side of manageable climate change.

Commitment to the Kyoto Protocol frayed over the years. The United States never signed. China was outside. Canada and others departed. Today, the emission reduction obligations of signatories account for less than 15 per cent of global emissions.