Climate Reports Propose New Climate Architecture

The Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements released 28 new reports last Sunday that will “offer a blueprint and information” to countries debating a successor to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the international treaty to reduce carbon dioxide emissions that has been widely panned as ineffective.

The reports will be presented to 192 countries at the annual international climate change conference in Poznan, Poland, which began this week.

One of the reports suggests that developed countries carry the burden of cutting carbon emissions, while developing economic powerhouses—like China, India, and Brazil—continue their industrialization at “business-as-usual” emissions levels.

Robert N. Stavins, a Harvard Kennedy School professor and the director of the project, said that the reports create “architectures” for new agreements based on economic, scientific, and political considerations.

The “rapidly growing powerhouse economies,” as Stavins calls them, will soon account for over half of the world’s carbon emissions. But much of their emissions come from ongoing industrialization, a process long since completed in developed countries.

“[Developing] countries are poor compared to the United States and other highly developed countries, and so in addition to thinking about it in terms of efficiency or cost effectiveness, there’s an issue of distributional equity,” Stavins said. “And also, you could say it’s our responsibility for what’s already up there, because of our own process of industrialization.”

All 28 proposals suggest either a cap-and-trade method for reducing international carbon emissions or a government tax on carbon usage.

Stavins said that while costs will not be imposed on developing countries in the short term, the key is to ensure that they are part of the international climate architecture.

“My way of thinking about this is that there’s this train, and if they’re not on the train, it’s not going to leave the station,” he said. “We’re just going to spin our wheels—we cut emissions in one part of the world, but they increase in another part of the world. What we need to do in our thinking is to separate getting on the train with paying a fare.”

This approach should be more politically palatable, Stavins said, especially when dealing with a country like China, which “has traditionally been unable to make the separation.”

Still, the reports state that policy responses to global warming are often a tough sell because countries worry that a carbon cap or tax will put them at a disadvantage in the international marketplace.

And though an international agreement avoids this issue by placing caps on all countries, it may violate free trade standards set by the World Trade Organization. Climate agreements and the WTO regulations are on a “collision course” and each may need to be modified to accommodate the other, according to the reports.

Stavins and his co-author, Joseph E. Aldy of Resources for the Future, an environmental resource-management group, said that their aim is only to offer information to the delegations convening in Poland.

“We’re not lobbying for anything here,” Stavins said. “Climate change is a complex issue: no single individual has cornered the market on wisdom, nor has any single institution cornered the market on wisdom, nor has any single sector cornered the market on wisdom, nor has any single country cornered the market on wisdom.”

He added that the project is designed to account for the need for a diversity of views by incorporating ideas from governments, private industry, and environmental advocacy groups.