EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay is from the Spring 2010 Perspectives on Development publication by the World Bank. It argues that an effective climate regime entails simultaneously addressing multiple goals concerning equity, the climate, and social and economic development. A few excerpts:
The past two decades have seen the creation and evolution of an international climate regime, with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Kyoto Protocol as the main pillars. Kyoto set binding international limits on the greenhouse gas emissions of developed countries. It created a carbon market to drive private investment and lower the cost of emission reductions. And it prompted countries to prepare national climate change strategies.
But the existing global regime has major limitations. It has failed to substantially curb emissions, which have increased by 25 percent since Kyoto was negotiated. It has delivered only very limited support to developing countries. Its Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) has so far brought little transformational change in countries’ overall development strategies. The Global Environment Facility has invested $2.7 billion in climate projects, well short of the flows needed. The global regime has so far failed to spur countries to cooperate on research and development or to mobilize significant funding for the technology transfer and deployment needed for low-carbon development. Aside from encouraging poor countries to prepare National Adaptation Programs of Action, it has delivered little concrete support for adaptation efforts. And the Adaptation Fund, slow to get started, falls far short of the projected needs. In 2007 the Bali Action Plan launched negotiations to achieve an ‘agreed outcome’ during the UNFCCC 15th session in Copenhagen in 2009. These negotiations present an opportunity to strengthen the climate regime and address its shortcomings.