Incremental progress, not transformation, in Paris climate deal

The entranceway to COP21: The Paris climate conference.

After years of anticipation, policymakers have agreed a new global deal to tackle climate change. The fact that such a sentence can be written without caveats demonstrates real, tangible, progress. But make no mistake, the Paris deal does not on its own equate to transformative change.

Here are a few reflections on what the Paris deal means for the future of climate policy.

It moves the conversation

People can now honestly say that there is  a 'global climate deal'. That means that instead of policymakers fretting about getting one, they can now focus on delivering actual emissions reductions, which is the whole point of the exercise, really.

That may sound glib, but it's an important step (albeit incredibly belated). Perhaps the most enlightening comment I heard during my brief visit to the negotiations was that the deal has the potential to 'normalise' the issue of climate change.
The deal means that cutting emissions is now an assumed goal of pretty much all countries, to a greater or lesser extent. That arguably puts climate change alongside 'fighting disease' or 'securing the economy' as a standing item on policymakers' list of priorities. That can only be helpful.

The fact that countries no longer need to struggle to agree that they should do something about this problem - and can now focus on actually doing something - is a major step.

1.5 degrees is fantastical, and not a 'goal'

That's the good news. But it's not all so rosy.

There is not now an international goal to prevent temperatures rising by more than 1.5 degrees, as it would be easy to think from some of the reporting. The goal is to still prevent temperatures rising by more than 2 degrees. But there is some text in the deal that says this will be done with an eye to preventing 1.5 degrees of warming.

It seems the most vulnerable nations were pushing for such text as a means to try and increase overall levels of ambition. A big question remains, however: What did they trade, to get a heavily caveated version of that goal?

Given the imprecision involved in turning policy into temperature targets, it seems a fantastical goal may have been included at the expense of more controversial - and more effective - concrete actions.

Some countries, aware that the world may not even deliver on the two degrees goal, may have been willing to insert text on the 1.5 degrees goal if they could remove more concrete clauses. For example, there is no text on liability or compensation from rich countries (that are emitting the most) to the most vulnerable countries (that have generally contributed the least to the problem, but will feel the worst effects).

I don't know if that is what happened. But trading concrete commitments to compensate countries for decades of harm, for a fantastical goal related to future warming, seems a bad deal.

There will still be a climate circus, every five years

Negotiators struck a deal in Paris largely because they arrived knowing the limits of countries' ambitions. This is because almost all the countries submitted pledges outlining medium-term steps they were willing to take to cut emissions, in important documents called Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs).

The bad news is that the INDCs don't add up to preventing more than two degrees (let alone 1.5 degrees) of warming. So one of the major battle grounds in Paris was to try and agree a 'ratchet' mechanism to ensure ambition increased once the meeting was done and dusted.

How to do this? Meet every five years for a 'stocktake', of course.

So, from 2023 onwards, every five years, countries will meet and argue over who is doing their fair share to tackle climate change - sound familiar?

The tone of those negotiations will have moved from 'are we all going to do something' to 'what are we going to do', and this is thanks to Paris. But for an issue with as much at stake as climate change, it is unclear whether occasionally auditing each others' efforts will prove sufficient to meet the challenge.

Incremental progress

Some newspapers called the Paris deal 'historic'. One prominent scientist called it 'bullshit'. My assessment falls somewhere inbetween.

The agreement is historic in the sense that it moves the conversation forwards. This is more than previous deals have done.

But whether it is sufficient to catalyse real transformation is certainly questionable. As one friend put it, negotiators were given a turd-shape mould and some brown clay, and after two weeks they've managed to create something resembling faeces. In other words, the process worked this time, even if the product isn't so great - so you've got to give negotiators some credit.

That is perhaps ungenerous (as well as unpleasant). But it seems wise to proceed with caution. If people think Paris means tackling climate change is a done deal, the world is in real trouble.

The Paris deal creates the space for action. Policymakers must use that space to master a complex dance that decouples emissions from economic growth, stimulates a new type of consumerism, and weans society off the fuels it has depended on for centuries. If they use it to lie down and sleep, the world has a future no brighter than before.