COP24 president Michal Kurtyka jumps at the end of the final session of the COP24 summit on climate change in Katowice, Poland, on December 15, 2018. (Photo by Janek Skarzynski/AFP/Getty Images)JANEK SKARZYNSKI/AFP/Getty Images
Weary negotiators completed an agreement late Saturday laying down the rule book for the 2015 Paris climate treaty, including how countries will monitor and verify one anothers’ commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Countries are now looking to a United Nations summit next September in New York, where Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called on national governments to announced new, more stringent targets for reducing GHG emissions.
That UN session will come as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is expected to be campaigning for re-election, with the vote schedule for October. Mr. Trudeau’s national climate agenda - notably the planned carbon tax - looms as a major issue as federal and provincial conservatives argue the levy imposes too high a burden on households and businesses, and is ineffective at reducing emissions.
After two weeks of talks in Poland, negotiations established the “rule book” that implements the international climate treaty, which aims to limit the average increase in global temperatures to well below 2 C and avert the most catastrophic impacts of climate change.
“I am pleased countries around the world came together to agree to rules for transparently reporting how all countries are fulfilling their commitments to reduce emissions and tackle climate change," federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna said. “To increase our ambition for climate action, we need clear and transparent rules.”
However, environmental advocates and some national negotiators were alarmed that the UN meeting did not reflect the need for urgent action that was signaled in October’s report from an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which concluded the world must limit the increase in global temperatures to 1.5 C and needs to take immediate and drastic action in order to do so.
At the beginning the talks, the United States, Saudi Arabia and Russia combined to block the adoption of that IPCC report. The final agreement reached late Saturday merely “welcomes” its timely completion and “invites” nations to “make use of the information” it contained.
While President Donald Trump has set the United States on the path of withdrawing from the Paris accord, the decision does not take effect until 2020. And so the U.S. was represented in the Poland talks and, at one point, made a presentation on the benefits of fossil fuels.
The Canadian government was dealt a major setback in its effort to establish rules under the Paris accord for the trading of market-based emissions credits, which would facilitate a global marketplace. Canada needs to establish those rules so it can count emission allowances that Quebec-based companies purchase from California under the Western Climate Initiative, and may look to international markets to purchase credits needed to meet its 2030 targets.
Brazil blocked the completion of that chapter and negotiators will work to finish it at next year’s Conference of the Parties (COP), to be held in Chile. The COP is the formal process under which the Paris accord was negotiated; the Secretary-General’s summit scheduled for September is a political gathering that aims to increase leaders' commitment to address climate change as an urgent global challenge.
The secretary-general’s summit “is now positioned as a critical juncture for world leaders to articulate how their next national climate plans will respond to dire warnings of the latest IPCC report,” said Helen Mountford, vice-president of the Washington-based environmental think tank World Resources Institute. “Countries need to go back to their capitals and start doing their homework to get ready.”
Canada’s Green Party Leader Elizabeth May slammed the national negotiators, including Ms. McKenna, for failing to reflect the urgency of global challenge. She argued all countries should immediately produce new emissions targets that are consistent with the 1.5 C goal. National commitments made to date would leave the world on a path to more than 3 C of warming by 2100, which scientists say would have a disastrous impacts.