The climate situation as it is today requires a very ambitious effort. The concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere reached a new record in 2020 and, despite a temporary decline during the Covid-19 pandemic, emissions have recently started to rise again. All this is accurately and scientifically reported both in the Greenhouse Gases Bulletin published by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and in the UNEP’s Emissions Gap Report 2021.
Given this dramatic situation, improving the tools the international community adopted with the Paris Agreement is a fundamental part of the effort to tackle climate change. Therefore, COP26 plays a much bigger role than that of a simple conference and should strengthen the foundations to achieve climate neutrality by the middle of this century and avoid irreversible change, including the loss of entire vital ecosystems. “Keeping 1.5°C alive” will be COP26’s mantra and will most probably guide the discussions among national delegates on all the issues at the heart of the negotiations in Glasgow. To reach that goal, passionate statements will not be enough, and strong political commitments as well as technical negotiated details are required.
The problems ahead seem enormous, and there are now unequivocal signals that the international community is not going in the right direction. Notwithstanding the urgency of the matter at stake, many world leaders seem to be treating climate negotiations as a matter of geopolitical contention: no longer just as a healthy geopolitical competition for leadership in the green transition, but an obstructionism that leads to a weakening of multilateralism — the only method capable of solving a global problem which, by nature, requires everyone’s participation.
Climate Change: from low-politics to hard-politics
Climate change is a multi-dimensional issue that entered the international political agenda in the late 1980s. Before that, it was mainly treated as a scientific rather than a political concern. For example, at the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, held in 1972 in Stockholm, climate change, despite being present in some recommendations of the final Report, did not have a prominent role in the meeting's agenda. Yet, with the growing negative impacts of climate change and environmental degradation, states started to increasingly recognize the necessity of international political cooperation to tackle the problem. Today, climate change has become, according to many, the defining challenge of our time and a critical component of states’ foreign policies. If, until recently, climate change was considered to be a very sectoral, low-politics issue with low salience for finance and foreign affairs ministers, it has now grown into a high politics issue. This is exemplified by the climate issue’s salience at the recent G20 Summit, initially conceived as a forum for economic and financial issues.
For a country, contributing to the definition of the rules and legal frameworks that regulate climate change has also become of fundamental, strategic importance. On the way towards a sustainable, green, and resilient future, many sectors will have to undertake a profound transformation; from the agri-food system to the energy, industrial, and infrastructure sectors. Thus, in addition to representing a challenge in itself, climate change is transversally linked to a wide range of policy areas, from economic growth to social stability and energy security, making it a quasi-all-encompassing issue. As such, understanding the future trends related to the scientific, socio-economic, and political aspects of a changing climate and being able to define future technical and regulatory standards has assumed strategic importance for all the involved stakeholders.
The evolution of the UN Climate Regime and of International Politics
To cope with the threat posed by climate change, an international climate regime was established in the 1990s under the UN’s aegis and since then it has evolved through negotiation processes – mainly at the Conferences of the Parties (COPs) – leading to the adoption of new treaties and protocols. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is an umbrella convention under which many decisions have been adopted, but also treaties such as the Kyoto Protocol (1997) and the Paris Agreement (2015), which regulates climate change at the international level in the post-2020 period. Despite its complexity, the climate regime has evolved in a relatively short period, and it is under continuous evolution.
Both the construction of the UN climate regime and the results of each UN climate change conference cannot be isolated from great power politics that provide the context in which the negotiations among the stakeholders take place. This is true for COP26, but it was also valid for all the conferences that led to the adoption of the different treaties that regulate — and regulated — climate change at the UN level.
In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, when the climate regime started to be formed, there were “both North-South inequities and East-West tensions” (Toronto Declaration, 1988). Nowadays, the world has substantially changed. East-West tensions are not split between two separate blocs as in the late Cold War period, though they have emerged in other forms. The current East-West divide in global climate change politics is represented by China and a larger Asian bloc, comprising India, that hold slightly different positions from the ones of many Western countries, which are historically responsible for the problem.
The North-South divide, in other terms the one between developed and developing countries, is the most persistent cleavage that has accompanied almost all the negotiations in global climate politics. In this regard, one critical issue for the climate regime architecture is that countries that were “developing” at the time of the adoption of the UNFCCC are now emerging economies responsible for a large amount of the current emissions.
The North-South divide is still present, though the composition and dynamics between the two groups have transformed over the years. In the UN climate regime’s architecture, the distinction between ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries is not merely nominal, since it determines what rules regulate a specific country’s situation and who is legally bound to act when a provision confers an obligation. The Paris Agreement softened the strict division in two separate groups of countries that were present in the Kyoto Protocol by eliminating the so-called "bifurcation" (or firewall) between the two groups with regard to mitigation commitments and by creating rules and provisions common to all parties.
These changes in the functioning of the UN climate regime mainly reflected the transformations in the global economy and in global emissions distribution, which made the Kyoto architecture inadequate. The Kyoto “firewall’ dividing the commitments between developed and developing countries became a problematic feature, particularly considering the rapid economic growth of a group of emerging countries with booming emissions (including China, India, Brazil, and South Africa) who, under the Kyoto regime, were exempted from emissions reduction obligation. In this altered geopolitical landscape, the strict distinction between developed and developing countries had gradually eroded and new political and negotiating coalitions emerged across the North and South.
Thus, at the basis of the Paris Agreement there is the idea that every country, without distinction between developed and developing ones, would set goals to curb carbon emissions in an effort to avert the worst effects of climate change.
International Politics and COP26
International politics is also having profound repercussions on the COP26 negotiations. Indeed, the UN climate conference is being held at a time when international relations are particularly tense and the deteriorating situation could endanger the possibility of achieving an ambitious outcome at the conference in Glasgow, besides the existing difficulties deriving from the technicalities.
The downward spiral of US-China relations and the growing difficulties in the relations between the EU and China over trade, human rights issues, and the management of Covid-19 risk to spill over into the climate issue, which seemed to be partially detached from these dynamics in the last years. US-China and EU-China relations are just an example of the more complex international relations that may affect the outcome of COP26.
Relations between the US and China largely define international relations. Until recently, despite the numerous strategic and diplomatic divergences and tensions (e.g., Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the South China Sea), the US and China — responsible together for over 40% of emissions — treated climate change as an issue wherein their interests could converge, leading them to greater cooperation. This willingness, however, explicitly stated at the Anchorage Summit in Alaska, seems to be falling apart.
China’s decision not to participate physically at COP26 — viewed by some commentators as an attack to multilateralism — mainly depends on domestic political reasons related to both the energy crisis and Covid-19, though it will certainly affect the effectiveness of the multilateral process ongoing in Glasgow. The US’ willingness to provide its leadership at COP26, as demonstrated by the level and size of its delegation, is weakened by the delays in the approval of the Build Back Better Act that should set the US on course to meet its climate goals. Biden and Xi Jinping are perfectly aware that without cooperation between their two countries there can be no solution to global warming. But their domestic dynamics, added to the international circumstances, are slowing cooperation both at the multilateral and bilateral levels.
Indeed, international politics is strictly intertwined with domestic politics. For example, the role of the Presidency – that is not merely logistical and could be critical in aligning diverging interests and negotiating the final text – gives the UK the opportunity to show its citizens and the entire world that its destiny after Brexit is not that of an isolated country that does not count internationally, but, on the contrary, that of a country that can lead the process towards ambitious decisions.
Nor should the potential impact of Covid-19 on negotiations be underestimated. The fact that some national delegations are not attending, in addition to those that decided not to go in Glasgow for more political reasons, may complicate the negotiating process. At COP21, the physical presence of political leaders was crucial up until the very last day to unlock some knots in the negotiations and finalize the Paris Agreement. Even more famous was Barack Obama’s irruption in a secret meeting among China, India, and Brazil at COP15 that helped to relaunch the negotiations among all the parties – which, however, ultimately ended up in a failure. These examples point to the fact that leaders’ physical, personal actions and initiatives may end up being diriment on some occasions. This is particularly true for COP26 in Glasgow.
Conclusion
The decisions that will be taken in Glasgow will mainly make the Paris Agreement, adopted in 2015, operational. The negotiators will have to find an agreement on the so-called "Rulebook".
The issues at stake at COP26 are numerous: how to monitor the implementation of the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), how to measure emissions transparently, how to finance climate actions, how to deal with the losses and damage caused by climate change and how to define the rules for the functioning of international cooperation mechanisms under article 6.
Besides these technical issues, COP26 will be fundamental to set the stage for political commitments that will be necessary to reach the Paris Agreement’s objective and “keep 1.5°C alive”.
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