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Von der Sektorkopplung bis zum Wasserstoff, von der Umsetzung des Klimaschutzgesetzes bis hin zum europäischen Green Deal: Um Klimaneutralität zu erreichen, braucht es eine koordinierte und effektive Politiksteuerung über einzelne Ressorts hinweg. Klimapolitik ist Querschnittsaufgabe, denn von der Stromerzeugung über Industrie, Gebäude und Verkehr bis hin zur Landwirtschaft müssen alle Sektoren mit hohem Tempo treibhausgasneutral werden. Fachleute des vom Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung BMBF geförderten Kopernikus-Projekts Ariadne haben zentrale Probleme der staatlichen Steuerung deutscher Klimapolitik untersucht und Lösungsoptionen vorgelegt.
Despite Germany’s Paris Agreement pledge and coal exit legislation, the political debate around carbon-intensive coal remains heated. Coal power and mining have played an important, yet changing role in the history of German politics. In this paper, we analyze the entire parliamentary debate on coal in the German parliament (Bundestag) from its inception in 1949 to 2019. For this purpose we extract the more than 870,000 parliamentary speeches from all protocols in the history of the Bundestag. We identify the 9167 speeches mentioning coal and apply dynamic topic modeling – an unsupervised machine learning technique that reveals the changing thematic structure of large document collections over time – to analyze changes in parliamentary debates on coal over the past 70 years. The trends in topics and their varying internal structure reflect how energy policy was discussed and legitimized over time: Initially, coal was framed as a driver of economic prosperity and guarantee of energy security. In recent years, the debate evolved towards energy transition, coal phase-out and renewable energy expansion. Germany’s smaller and younger parties, the Greens and the Left Party, debate coal more often in the context of the energy transition and climate protection than other parties. Our results reflect trends in other countries and other fields of energy policy. Methodologically, our study illustrates the potential of and need for computational methods to analyze vast corpora of text and to complement traditional social science methods.
Global mitigation efforts remain insufficient to limit the global temperature increase to well below 2 °C. While a growing academic literature analyzes this problem, perceptions of which obstacles inhibit goal attainment and which responses might be most effective seem to differ widely. This makes prioritization and agreement on the way forward difficult. To inform prioritization in global climate policy and research agendas, we present quantitative data on how 917 experts from the IPCC and the UNFCCC perceive the importance of different obstacles and response options for achieving 2 °C. On average, respondents consider opposition from special interest groups the most important obstacle and technological R&D the most important response. Our survey also finds that the majority of experts perceives a wide range of issues as important, supporting an agenda that is inclusive in terms of coverage. Average importance ratings differ between experts from the Global North and South, suggesting that balanced representation in global fora and regionally differentiated agendas are important. In particular, opposition from special interest groups is a top priority among experts from North America, Europe and Oceania. Investigating the drivers of individual importance ratings, we find little difference between experts from the IPCC and the UNFCCC, while expert's perceptions correlate with their academic training and their national scientific, regulatory, and financial contexts.
Understanding pledge and review: learning from analogies to the Paris Agreement review mechanisms
(2022)
This article draws lessons for the effectiveness of the Paris Agreement’s pledge and review mechanisms from the performance of comparable review mechanisms established under other international treaties. The article employs systematic evidence synthesis methods to review the existing literature on international review mechanisms in the human rights, trade, labour, and monetary policy fields and identifies six common factors influencing their performance. Applying these findings to the Paris Agreement, the analysis finds that its review mechanisms incorporate many of these factors. In particular, they combine both expert and peer review, allow for repeated interaction and capacity building, and facilitate the regular and transparent provision of information. The comparative analysis also highlights two major deficiencies of the Paris Agreement: the absence of procedures to assess the adequacy of national pledges and actions taken to implement them, and resource constraints in carrying out a complex and arduous review process. Active engagement of non-state actors with review mechanisms is identified as a potential remedy to these shortcomings. However, the overall experience of other regimes suggests that, on their own, review mechanisms provide few incentives for states to undertake significant policy changes. Rather, the political context of each regime conditions the performance of review mechanisms. We therefore conclude that the Paris Agreement’s review mechanisms alone are unlikely to bring about the necessary ratcheting up of climate policy ambitions.
Should economic growth continue in a world threatened by the prospect of catastrophic climate change? The scientific and public debate has brought forth a broad spectrum of views and narratives on this question, ranging from neoclassical economics to degrowth. We argue that different positions can be attributed to underlying differences in views on (a) factors that determine human well‐being, (b) the feasibility and desirability of economic growth, (c) appropriate intervention points, and (d) preferences about governance and policy options. For each of these dimensions, we propose points of agreement on which a consensus between conflicting positions might be achieved. From this basis, we distill a sustainability transition perspective that could act as a basis for a renewed debate on how to align human well‐being with environmental sustainability.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has proven its value as an institution for large-scale scientific collaboration to synthesize and assess large volumes of climate research for use by policy-makers, as well as for establishing credibility of findings among diverse national governments. But the IPCC has received considerable criticism of both its substance and process. The new IPCC leadership to be elected in October could help guide the IPCC to a clear, shared understanding of future objectives and could shape procedural reforms. We identify key opportunities for reform by addressing two related questions: Is the IPCC doing the right things? Is the IPCC doing things right?
This article argues that a legally binding, multilateral agreement is a necessary condition for achieving the highest levels of greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reductions consistent with limiting warming to below either 2°C or below 1.5°C. Clear legally binding commitments within a multilaterally agreed process with strong legal and institutional characteristics are needed to give countries the confidence that their economic interests are being fairly and equally treated. Common accounting rules are needed for comparability of effort, and in order to protect environmental integrity, to demonstrate transparency, for effective monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) of emissions and actions, and to facilitate and support a strong international carbon market. Securing full implementation will depend, in part, on the strength of an agreement's compliance mechanism. The Copenhagen Accord, by itself, represents a quintessential ‘bottom-up’/‘pledge and review’ approach. It is open to interpretation whether the Accord can become a stepping stone on the way to strengthening the legally binding, multilateral framework to fight climate change, building on both the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Kyoto Protocol, or whether it will lead to the unravelling and fragmentation of all that has been built up to date. Legal architecture choices made in 2010 and beyond are likely to be determinative.
The 2°C reconsidered
(2014)