As tension rises at the climate summit, the question arises: is such a conference still useful?

Why must such a major climate summit be held every year, such as the past two weeks in the Brazilian city of Belém? It is a question that they quickly answer at the UNFCCC, the United Nations climate agency. The so-called Conference of the Parties (COP) is “crucial in the fight against climate change”, it says the climate agency’s website. To measure progress and negotiate the best ways to tackle climate change, taking into account each other’s circumstances.”

Simon Stiell, former Minister of Environment and Education in Grenada and head of the climate agency for a few years, summarizes it this way: “Every tenth degree of global warming is important. Every year is important. Every choice is important. Every COP is important.”

But not everyone shares this enthusiasm yet. The previous climate summit in the Azerbaijani capital Baku left behind a diplomatic mess, especially after President Ilham Aliyev called oil and gas “a gift from God” in his opening speech – a deliberate provocation of thousands of attendees who are deeply concerned about the climate crisis. That climate summit has only made the call for change louder.

It Rulebook is finished

Last summer, the influential Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES) pitched in a discussion piece raises the question of whether there is a more effective way to save the climate. Kaveh Guilanpour, vice-president of C2ES and author of the piece, pointed out that for the first time in Belém there was no need to talk about loose ends of the Paris Climate Agreement (2015). It Rulebookas the elaboration of the details in the Paris Agreement is called, is finally complete.

Until last year, negotiations were still ongoing about the implementation of a number of complicated and sensitive topics from that agreement – for example, about emissions trading, about a new mechanism for financing climate policy in developing countries and about how countries can report transparently and comparably on their greenhouse gases. Decisions have now been made on all three.

As the effects of climate change become more visible, global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise and warming will exceed 1.5 degrees

In addition, the COP in Belém was the first since the completion of a complete ‘ambition cycle’, Guilanpour said. Such a cycle, agreed in the Paris Agreement, lasts five years and starts with national climate plans of all countries. After three years, the results of these plans will be calculated and the extent to which countries need to step up to achieve the global climate goals.

According to Guilanpour, the current COP is no longer suitable for this new phase. As the effects of climate change become more visible, global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise and warming will exceed 1.5 degrees. Guilanpour fears “a growing mismatch” between expectations and results, which could endanger the credibility of the Paris agreement, causing people to lose confidence in global climate policy.

Not equipped for implementation

The UN climate agency was good at formulating a solid framework for global climate policy, but is therefore not equipped to implement that policy. That is also the criticism of Yvo de Boer, former head of the climate agency. He was surprised by it in an interview NRC that renewable energy is being negotiated at climate summits, while others, such as the International Renewable Energy Agency, are not at the table. Industrialized countries have been struggling for years with efficient financing of climate policy in poor countries, but banks are not participating. “The business community and expert organizations should have a greater role in the climate negotiations,” says De Boer.

Last year, the Club of Rome, the organization that warned about climate change more than fifty years ago, also sent an open letter to the climate agency with proposals to accelerate policy implementation. “The world community must somehow absorb three billion tons of CO₂emissions from the global economy” to maintain a safe climate, two co-signatories wrote an opinion piece for the Reuters news agency. This means that the current growth in emissions must be reversed (immediately) to a reduction of 7.5 percent per year. This is only possible if COPs ‘are able to bridge the gap between action and crisis’.

Organizing countries must meet stricter criteria, according to the open letter, and they must demonstrate that they themselves are meeting the objectives of the Paris Agreement. The COPs must become smaller and more flexible. They should be held more often, with a more limited number of countries. Negotiations must focus on concrete reduction plans and countries must be held accountable for the results of their actions. And all this under the supervision of a scientific advisory board.

Climate expert Alden Meyer of the British think tank E3G, who has been following the negotiations since 1992, is wary of too major interventions in the COP process. In the French newspaper Le Monde he warned last year that “COPs are the one place where all countries can look in the mirror every year and ask themselves whether they are doing enough.”

According to Meyer, this multilateralism should not be endangered, because countries can only solve the climate crisis together. COPs are the only forum that gives all countries a voice, including the most vulnerable ones that have no other influence. At the same time, Meyer tempers expectations about climate summits. “They only reflect national decision-making,” he says. “The UN cannot force a country to do something it does not want to do, or punish it if it does not achieve its goals.”

Every decision requires consensus

That makes it difficult to remove one of the main stumbling blocks to rapid decision-making: consensus. Everything at a climate summit must be decided jointly. In practice, this means that one country can hold the rest hostage. Panamanian Environment Minister Juan Carlos Navarro intervened last month an interview with Climate Home News for abolition of the consensus model. “It’s a miracle that we’ve gotten this far,” Navarro said, referring to the Paris agreement. “We need to change the rules now so that we have a basic, rational decision-making process based on majority or supermajority, where we can do things better and faster.”

The call comes mainly from developing countries. Rich, powerful countries will never give up a veto. Maybe it will help, said MEP Bas Eickhout (GroenLinks) a few years ago in an interview in NRC when climate summits become more “political”. Much is now discussed in small meeting rooms, hidden from the world and boarded up by technicians and lawyers. No one knows exactly what position a country occupies. Have the discussion much more often in the plenary meeting, Eickhout suggests. “Then it immediately becomes clear who is blocking a decision.”

According to Jessica Green, author of the book Existential Politics: Why Global Climate Institutions Are Failing and How to Fix ThemThat won’t help much. The fundamental mistake of COPs, , is that they view climate change as a technical problem that is about “managing tons of carbon“, the world’s emissions accounting. But it is an existential political conflict between two parties, of which only one can ultimately win: the fossil industry, which stands to lose thousands of billions of dollars as a result of overly successful climate policies, or victims of global warming such as the small island state of Vanuatu, which threatens to disappear in the long term. It is, says Green, quite literally a battle to the death.

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