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At the initiative of the European Union and the most vulnerable developing nations, the Durban climate conference in December 2011 launched negotiations to develop a new international climate change agreement that covers all countries. The agreement will take the form of a protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force applicable to all Parties. It will be adopted in 2015 and implemented from 2020.
Public consultation
The agreement is being negotiated through a process known as the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action.
In March 2013 the European Commission published a Consultative Communication which launches a public debate on how best to design the 2015 agreement. The paper raises a number of key questions and invites the views of stakeholders, Member States and EU institutions.
The public consultation coincides with an expected intensification of the international negotiations this year. The online consultation runs until 26 June and includes a stakeholder conference on 17 April in Brussels. The Commission will analyse responses to the consultation and these will feed into the development of the EU's negotiating position.
From patchwork to single global regime
The 2015 agreement will have to bring together the current patchwork of binding and non-binding arrangements under the UN climate convention into a single comprehensive regime.
Whereas the EU, a few other European countries and Australia have joined a legally binding second period of the Kyoto Protocol which runs until 2020, some 60 other countries around the world have made different types of non-binding commitments to reduce, or limit the growth in, their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
Key elements
In seeking responses from stakeholders, the Communication points to a number of key elements of the agreement, which should:
- Be inclusive, by containing commitments that are applicable to all countries, developed and developing alike;
- Focus on encouraging and enabling countries to take on new and ambitious commitments to cut their GHG emissions;
- Include commitments ambitious enough to limit warming to 2°C;
- Be effective, by enabling the right set of incentives for implementation and compliance;
- Be perceived as equitable in the way it shares out the effort of cutting emissions and the cost of adapting to unavoidable climate change;
- Be legally binding;
- Learn from and strengthen the current international climate regime;
- Respond to scientific advances and be sufficiently dynamic and flexible to adjust as scientific knowledge develops further and as technology costs and socio-economic circumstances change;
- See a broader range of countries share responsibility for providing financial support to help poor countries tackle climate change.
Stepping up pre-2020 ambition is also crucial
The Consultative Communication makes clear that global action taken before 2020 will be crucial to setting policies on the right path for the agreement to succeed.