Sklar and Luers ask what our climate change goal is
The most recent round of UN climate negotiations ended last month in Warsaw, and the outcome was familiarly inconclusive: Nations agreed to keep negotiating and making voluntary efforts to reduce emissionsof greenhouse gases. After nineteen years of negotiations little has changed. Or has it?
Although the outcome of the negotiations has not changed significantly, the character of the problem has. Twenty years ago, the international community kicked off a process to address climate change with the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. This 1992 convention set the goal of stabilizing the atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases to avoid “dangerous” change. In setting this goal, it established climate change as a simple pollution problem—where a dangerous level of contamination could be clearly defined and mechanisms for avoiding that level established. In 2009, in Copenhagen, UN climate negotiators adopted two degrees Celsius as the dangerous level of change, and since then, negotiations have focused on defining targets for reducing the global warming pollutants to avoid that level.
Characterizing climate change as a simple pollution problem may have helped focus the early policy negotiations, but things are different today.