A two-day sleep-deprived sprint of negotiations at the end of the world’s longest climate talks wasn’t enough for countries to agree on rules for an international carbon market.
Nations are already bracing for tense climate talks in 2020 as they also leave the two-week meeting in Madrid without a deal on how a mechanism to provide funding to developing countries for the losses and damages they experience from climate change should be governed. How that issue is decided will ultimately determine if the United States, which is in the process of pulling out of the Paris Agreement, will have to give money regardless.
Failure to reach an agreement means negotiations on all the final critical rules for implementing the 2016 global climate pact will push to next year’s talks in the United Kingdom. All nations are supposed to ramp up their voluntary emissions reductions pledges in 2020 under the Paris deal.
Environmental advocates, though, say countries reaching no deal was better than a bad deal that would allow for double-counting of emissions credits and jeopardize the environmental integrity of the emerging carbon markets.
“Countries that are serious about using carbon markets to increase ambition should move forward to set their own strong rules for high-integrity international emissions trading,” said Nathaniel Keohane, senior vice president of climate for the Environmental Defense Fund. He added those coalitions could allow for deeper greenhouse gas cuts.
“There’s no need to wait for the U.N. — and no time to waste,” he said.
The breakdown occurred largely between high-emitters such as the U.S., Brazil, China, Australia, and Saudi Arabia and smaller vulnerable developing nations — who accused those countries of trying to weaken the rules for carbon markets and watering down funding to help vulnerable countries deal with climate damages.
“It is very unfortunate that this is happening now,” Mohamed Nasr, negotiator for Egypt and the group of African nations, said Sunday during the talks’ closing plenary.
“We are not walking back. We are not backsliding. We are not running back from commitments,” Nasr said, speaking during a fight over long-term climate finance during the plenary. “But it seems this is not the same for all parties.”
Throughout the two weeks of negotiations, developing nations and environmental groups accused the U.S., in particular, of blocking talks on a funding mechanism for loss and damage. Developing nations had advocated for stronger, separate funds to help them deal both with natural disasters, as well as slow-onset events such as sea level rise, ocean acidification, and melting glaciers.
The Trump administration in November submitted the formal paperwork for the U.S. to leave the Paris Agreement. The U.S. exit will take effect in 2020, just one day after the presidential election.
A negotiator from Tuvalu, during the Sunday closing plenary, accused the U.S. of “ironically or strategically” fighting for loss and damage funding to be housed under the Paris Agreement, even though the country was leaving.
“They will wash their hands of any actions to assist countries which have been affected by the impacts of climate change,” the negotiator said. “This is an absolute tragedy and a travesty on those affected by the impacts of climate change.”
Environmental advocates say the agreement in Madrid fell far short on even one of the only major aspects countries were able to agree on: how strongly the deal calls for nations to ramp up their climate pledges next year.
The final text asks nations to “consider” the gap between countries’ voluntary climate commitments made in 2016 and what must be done to reach the Paris Agreement’s goal to keep global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius.
That gap was outlined in a U.N. report released in November, just before the climate talks began. The U.N. report found the world needs to cut greenhouse gases 7.6% per year — deeper and faster cuts than previously estimated.
The collapse of the talks and failure to strengthen implementation of the Paris deal led predominantly by large emitters “reflects how disconnected many national leaders are from the urgency of the science and the demands of their citizens,” said Helen Mountford, vice president for climate and economics at the World Resources Institute, in a statement. “They need to wake up in 2020.”
