COP25 once again highlights the dark future of the green planet. Given the attitudes of the Trump administration and Jair Bolsonaro, no significant progress is likely in the near future
The outcome of the United Nations’ Climate Change Conference, also known as COP 25 (25th United Nations Climate Change Conference), held in Madrid from December 2 to 13, has disappointed many. It produced a bland, platitudinous statement re-emphasising with “serious concern the urgent need to address the significant gap between the aggregate effect of Parties’ mitigation efforts in terms of global annual emissions of greenhouse gases by 2020.” It simultaneously added that it “stresses the urgency of enhanced ambition in order to ensure the highest possible mitigation and adaptation efforts by all Parties.”
COP 25’s failures were primarily in two areas. One was its inability to frame rules governing the operations of carbon trading, which owes its origin to the Kyoto Protocol of 1997. Deferred to this year by the last year’s conference, COP 24, it has been shelved for the next climate conference, COP 26, to be held in Glasgow in December next year. The second was its failure to make any progress towards achieving meaningful emission cuts.
One must first look at the carbon trading since deliberations over it were supposed to be a principal feature of the conference even before the latter began. It owes its origin to the Kyoto Protocol, which came into force in 2005. Dividing countries into developed and developing ones, and recognising that the former were responsible for the current level of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions through more than 150 years of industrial activity, it mandated that the 37 industrialised nations plus the European Union cut their emission levels to targets for GHG emissions for the first compliance period from 2008 to 2012. Developing countries, numbering 100, and including India and China, were asked to contribute by investing in projects designed to lower emissions in their countries.
Developed, industrialised countries undertook to reduce their annual hydrocarbon emissions by an average of 5.2 per cent, representing 29 per cent of the world’s GHG emissions, by 2012. All countries were required to draw up national emission reduction targets, called Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), which they had to submit regularly to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The protocol laid down that instead of reducing its own emissions, a polluting company or country could buy carbon credits from another that had reduced its carbon footprint. Industrialised countries could do so through the Emission Reduction Purchase Agreement, while a Clean Development Mechanism gave developing countries carbon credits in the form of Certified Emission Reduction Units, which were bought and sold in a separate market. Equally, instead of reducing emissions domestically, an industrialised
country or a company could offset its high levels of GHG emissions by investing in green ventures through what the Protocol identified as Joint Implementation (JI) projects and, thereby, earn Emission Reduction Units from the latter.
The question arises: What is a carbon credit? It is a permit or a certificate, issued by a Government or a regulatory body, allowing a country or an organisation to burn a certain specified amount of hydrocarbon fuel over a specified period. Each carbon credit is valued against one tonne of hydrocarbon fuel.
As the commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol ended in December 2012, parties to it met in Doha, Qatar, and amended it, fixing new emission reduction targets for the period 2013 to 2020. The Doha Amendment, as it was called, was, however, never ratified and was superseded by the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015. Article 6 of the Paris Climate Agreement provides for international cooperation and carbon trading.
Unfortunately, the issue of carbon trading has been clouded by allegations of corruption and the fundamental claim that it does not really help in reducing emission levels. Particularly under focus have been Joint Implementation Projects. The rules provide that an industrialised country must invest in a project, which would not otherwise have come about and not in ones that were to happen anyway. The allegation is that the latter has been the case in an alarming number of instances.
As early as August 24, 2015, a report in The Guardian by Arthur Neslen referred to the findings of the Stockholm Environment Institute that the Joint Implementation scheme was so open to abuse that three quarters of the allowances under it lacked environmental integrity. As a result, around 600m tonnes of carbon were wrongly emitted under the UNFCCC-administered Joint Implementation (JI) scheme. The institute’s paper, which was corroborated by United Nations officials, and parts of which were published in Nature Climate Change, states that an estimated 80 per cent of JI projects were of low environmental quality. The Guardian dispatch quotes one of the authors of the report, Vladyslav Zhezherin, as saying, “Many of them didn’t observe the requirements of JI on ‘additionality’ as they would probably have happened anyway, and I would even doubt the physical existence of some of these projects.” He was further quoted to have added, “I would say that many of them were fake.”
According to The Guardian report, Russia and Ukraine were the two biggest beneficiaries of the JI system. Not surprisingly, JI markets in the two countries have received particular attention. The Guardian report quotes a source with regulatory experience in Ukraine’s JI market as saying that as the 2000s dragged on, JIs increasingly came to be seen by market participants as “a corruption mechanism.”
Clearly, the rules and regulations for carbon trading need to be reformed substantially to rule out corruption and ensure transparency in transactions. Matters have been further complicated by the issue of whether carbon credits earned before the Paris Climate Conference can be used in the period after it came into force. Not surprisingly, the rules continue to be subjects of discussion and, judging by the progress thus far and the interests involved, are unlikely to be finalised in COP 26. Even if these are, the wider question of whether the carbon trading system actually helps in reducing emission levels remains, with the critics pointing out that it primarily helps the developing countries to maintain their high emission levels without making any significant contribution to reducing — or even containing — emission levels in the developing countries.
This once again underlines the fact that global warming can only be mitigated by implementing the Paris Climate Agreement’s goal of keeping the global temperature rise this century to well below 2oC above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5oC. It is also important to achieve the Agreement’s goal of enhancing the ability of countries to deal with impacts of climate change. Unfortunately, no progress was made in these directions in Madrid and given the attitudes of the Trump administration and leaders like Jair Bolsonaro, the President of Brazil, no significant progress is likely in the near future.
(The writer is Consultant Editor, The Pioneer, and an author)
