Oliver Geden is a senior research fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) in Berlin.
Starting today, 3 June, delegates from 194 nations will gather in Bonn for the next round of UN climate negotiations. The expectations for the talks are quite low. In the 20 years since the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was adopted, progress in the area of international climate policy has been modest at best. Annual greenhouse gas emissions have increased by over one-third since 1992. Acute conflicts of interest among industrialized, emerging, and developing countries remain a persistent obstacle.
A comprehensive global climate treaty will not be concluded until 2015 at the earliest, and it will not enter into force before 2020. One of the few points of general consensus in the international community is on the overarching objective of limiting the global temperature increase to 2ºC in order to avoid crossing the threshold into “dangerous climate change.” Although the EU had already started to campaign for the 2°C target in the mid-1990s, this target was not formally adopted until 2010 at the UN Climate Change Conference in Cancún.
If one is to accept key findings from climate research and the recommendations from scientific policy advisors, emissions will have to be reduced significantly between 2010 and 2020 to stay below the 2°C limit. Yet given that global emissions trends are moving in the opposite direction and will be impossible to reverse in a matter of a few years, this goal is patently unrealistic. And since a target that is obviously unattainable cannot fulfil either a positive symbolic function or a productive governance function, the primary target of international climate policy will have to be modified.
Contrary to widespread hopes, the global agreement on the 2°C target has contributed little to the implementation of ambitious policy measures worldwide. The target currently serves a primarily symbolic and declarative function. For this reason, a pragmatically motivated reduction in the level of political ambition carries risks. This is particularly critical for the EU, which has gained worldwide recognition as a leader in climate policy, not least because of its role in bringing the 2°C target into the international climate policy arena and successfully pushing through its adoption as a global limit.
But the EU not only risks damage to its public image. Since Europeans derive their internal emissions reduction objective of 80–95% (compared to 1990 levels) by 2050 directly from the 2°C target, a weakening of the global climate policy target would inevitably lead in turn to a debate over the easing of EU reduction targets. This could become a highly controversial issue in the coming years, when the EU has to decide on its legally binding emissions target for 2030.
Despite the dwindling probability that the established goal can still be met, there has been no broad discussion to date about the future of the 2°C target. There is no “Plan B.” As global emissions continue to rise, the EU will not be able to avoid this question much longer. The heads of state and government of EU member states who hold the decision-making power in this area will have to develop clear ideas about how a change in the target formula can be achieved in conformity with member states’ interests in climate, foreign, and economic policy.
The various options for modifying the 2°C target can be differentiated first and foremost by the level of intervention involved. A reinterpretation of the current target would entail adjusting certain assumptions of climate economics in order to temporarily avoid the crucial “make-or-break” point of the 2°C target—the last possible year in which global emissions would have to peak. The most obvious starting point for the EU would be to ask whether the 2°C target should still be understood as an absolute upper limit or whether it might be a threshold that could be crossed temporarily.
While the reinterpretation approach strives for an indirect and politically less risky path to reducing ambition levels, the revision approach takes a direct route. This could mean accepting a less ambitious global target that would be significantly higher than 2°C or even giving up a specific global stabilisation target altogether.
The EU will probably favour a reinterpretation over a revision of the 2°C target. However, that does not mean its preferences will necessarily prevail. What ultimately happens will be determined by the actions of major emitters like China and the USA, and even more by how global emissions levels evolve over the next several years. If the trend is not reversed soon, a reinterpretation of the 2°C target might not be enough. If the EU wants to maintain its role as a global leader in climate policy, it will have to investigate all options for target modification as soon as possible, even those that seem politically unappealing.
No matter which option the EU chooses to pursue in the medium term, and which one is ultimately adopted in international climate policy, the relationship between climate policy and climate science will undoubtedly become much more pragmatic. The need to reinterpret or revise the 2°C target arises primarily from international climate policy’s lack of success. Yet its failure is also the failure of the dominant approach to policy advice up to now: the attempt to delimit the range of options available to climate policy by establishing “science-based” climate objectives.
With the deliberate modification of the 2°C target climate policy will enter into a new phase. What seemed to be a non-negotiable planetary boundary will be subject to open renegotiation. Political leaders, not scientists, are the ones who have to decide on climate targets. But eventually, they also bear the responsibility for meeting their commitments.
>> Oliver Geden’s research paper on the topic can be found here.
