Elsevier

Global Environmental Change

Volume 48, January 2018, Pages 67-75
Global Environmental Change

Integrated assessment of international climate mitigation commitments outside the UNFCCC

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2017.11.001Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Climate action outside the UNFCCC can accelerate implementation and add additional reductions to NDCs.

  • These reductions are projected to be of similar magnitude as NDCs.

  • But overlap between these initiatives and NDCs is assumed to be large, around 70–80%.

  • This is insufficient to close the gap between NDCs and the 2 °C limit.

  • Non-state actors data needs to be more publicly available and monitoring and reporting improved.

Abstract

In the Paris Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), for the first time, non-state actors were addressed in the international negotiations and were explicitly invited to act on climate change. Indeed, there are many transnational emission reduction initiatives (TERIs) outside the UNFCCC, driven by non-state actors or national governments, which aim at reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Using an Integrated Assessment Model (IAM), this study assessed the potential impact of a selection of large TERIs that existed before the Paris Agreement on global greenhouse gas emissions. TERIs could lead to significant emission reductions: the eleven selected initiatives included in the analysis here could – if fully implemented – deliver annual GHG emission reductions of 2.5 GtCO2eq by 2020 and of 5.0 GtCO2eq by 2030 from a no-policy-baseline emission level of 53.7 GtCO2 and 61.1 GtCO2eq, respectively. Although these reductions are of similar magnitude as those pledged by countries under the umbrella of the UNFCCC, these reductions may significantly overlap with those of pledges and Nationally Determined Contributions. The maximum estimate of overlap is around 70% by 2020 and 80% by 2030. This means that the combined impact on global GHG emissions of TERIs and NDCs, assuming a maximum overlap, would lead to emission levels between 53 and 55 GtCO2eq by 2030, compared to a level of 54 to 56 GtCO2eq resulting from NDCs alone.

Introduction

International climate policy within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) so-far has focused mostly on commitments from national governments. In the Paris Agreement (UNFCCC, 2015b), countries world-wide agreed to keeping ‘the increase in global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit temperature increase to 1.5 °C. As a first step towards this goal, countries have submitted Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) in the run-up to the COP21 meeting in Paris, which after ratifying the Paris Agreement become NDCs. It has been shown that together, the NDCs are not expected to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions sufficiently towards a 2 °C emission pathway: the median emissions gap between GHG emission levels resulting from NDCs and the 2 °C limit by 2030 is estimated to be between 11 and 14 GtCO2eq (Rogelj et al., 2016).

The change towards more bottom-up action within the UNFCCC also included the acknowledgement of non-Party stakeholders as important parties in taking climate action (UNFCCC, 2015a). Non-Party stakeholders can be defined as any group participating in global (climate) governance that is not a sovereign state (Chan et al., 2016, Nasiritousi et al., 2016). They include non-state actors such as civil society, the private sector, financial institutions, cities and other subnational authorities. Note that the definition of non-state actors is often not made explicit in literature. Here, the categorisation of the NAZCA portal is used: “NAZCA brings together the commitments to action by companies, cities, subnational regions, investors and civil society” (UNFCCC, 2015a, UNFCCC, 2015b), and thus include sub-national actors. Many take actions as a member of International Cooperative Initiatives (ICIs), that share a common goal and are mostly driven by likeminded countries (Widerberg and Pattberg, 2015). In addition, coalitions of the willing, which are groups of national governments, are also taking action on climate change outside the UNFCCC, often under the umbrella of other UN organisations. All these initiatives widen the scope of international climate policy by including new actors beside national governments (Hajer et al., 2015), and new coalitions outside the UNFCCC.

To clearly demarcate these new initiatives, we use Slingerland et al. (2011) that identified the above occurrences as “alternative routes that offer specific advantages in terms of increasing societal support for greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions”. In this paper, we focus specifically on transnational emission reduction initiatives (TERIs), which can be defined as international activities outside the UNFCCC driven by non-state actors or coalitions of national governments that have committed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. TERIs often operate in specific sectors and/or together with specific actors. It was decided to focus on international activities in this paper (in contrast to national-scale initiatives) as these can be expected to lead to most reductions (UBA, 2016), thus complying to a pragmatic reason to restrain the analysis to a clearly defined list of measures and avoid too much overlap between them.

Clearly, it is important to assess the potential reduction potential of TERIs and their contribution beyond current NDCs. Previous studies have shown that the potential impact of TERIs can be large, but assessments also differ substantially. The differences are caused by selecting different climate initiatives or including different overlap assumptions or baseline assumptions. A first group of studies have addressed the mitigation potential of initiatives beyond national governments. According to Blok et al. (2012), 21 coherent major initiatives, already existing or proposed, together are estimated to reduce GHG emissions by 10 GtCO2eq by 2020 relative to a 56 GtCO2eq business-as-usual level, assuming that a significant upscaling of existing initiatives is possible and that proposed initiatives will organise themselves. The New Climate Economy (2015) estimates that state- and non-state actors would together achieve emission reductions of 16 to 26 GtCO2eq by 2030 relative to the business-as-usual level of 69 GtCO2eq, if they cooperate, scale up ambition and remove barriers. A second group of studies focused on existing commitments of initiatives only, based on current participation levels. Hsu et al. (2015) analysed 29 existing action statements with quantifiable targets, announced at the New York Climate Summit, and projected a total reduction of 2.5 GtCO2eq by 2020, relative to the business-as-usual level of 59 GtCO2eq. UNEP (2015a) estimated that a wide selection of non-state climate initiatives with concrete mitigation actions and/or quantified mitigation targets would reduce emissions by 2.9 GtCO2eq, with a range of 2.5–3.3 GtCO2eq by 2020 relative to the Current Policy Scenario of the World Energy Outlook 2014. UBA (2016) estimates that 19 initiatives, based on their quantifiable goal, are estimated to reduce between 5–11 GtCO2eq annual reductions by 2030 compared to an NDC emission level of 53–56 GtCO2e.

This study uses the Integrated Assessment Model (IAM) IMAGE (Stehfest et al., 2014) to get an order estimate of the emission level after implementation of TERIs that existed at the time of COP21 in Paris, and the potential overlap with existing pledges and NDCs made by national governments in the context of the UNFCCC. We focus on a list of TERIs available just before the Paris Agreement, as more information is available on these measures allowing quantitative assessment. To our knowledge, this is the first study on the effectiveness of TERIs that uses an IAM framework. The advantage of doing so is that the analysis is based on a consistent emission scenario, including both energy-related and agriculture, forestry and land-use (AFOLU) emissions, which enables not only an estimate of the global impact of TERIs in terms of total reductions, but also the total emission level after implementation of TERIs. The IMAGE model represents a useful tool for analysis given the relatively detailed sectoral representation of this IAM compared to others. This study goes beyond existing studies on TERIs by assessing the impact of a selected set of large TERIs in a more consistent way, but also by paying more attention to the overlap with pledges/NDCs by discussing our results in the context of different existing methods. In order to assess the effectiveness of TERIs it is crucial to know how the TERIs overlap with government policies. So-far, this question has only been partly addressed by Hsu et al. (2015), UNEP (2015a) and UBA (2016). We use information on the TERIs to assess the maximum potential overlap, which should be regarded as a conservative approach.

It should be noted that TERIs often have other objective than direct emission reductions, such as networking and knowledge sharing (Chan et al., 2016, Michaelowa and Michaelowa, 2016), which were not included in our assessment. However, it is important to note that these are considered relevant for successful implementation (Widerberg and Pattberg, 2015) (see Section 5).

In addition, it should also be noted that analysing the reductions resulting from TERIs involves some important challenges. First, there is no GHG accounting framework in place yet for non-state action, and no global model exists that can assess climate policy of non-state actors. Second, individual actor emission estimates, targets and trends are not publicly or readily available. Third, no existing consistent framework is available yet that could assess TERI commitments. Given these limitations, our assessment should be regarded as a first attempt to quantify the effect of TERIs by connecting business-as-usual projections developed in the IMAGE model to aggregated actors and sectors. This paper can be seen as starting point for further analysis of new or expanded emission reduction initiatives.

Section snippets

Selection of TERIs

The TERIs assessed in this study have been selected from the Climate Initiatives Platform (UNEP and Ecofys, 2015) and supplemented with potentially high-impact initiatives found in UN (2015), UNFCCC, 2013, UNFCCC, 2014, Wouters (2013). The aim was to select the largest initiatives that cover most economic sectors. Overlap between initiatives was kept small by selecting the largest initiative per sector. This selection should enable making a first-order estimate of the impact on GHG emissions

Selected climate initiatives

The long list of TERIs consisted of 184 climate initiatives from the Climate Initiatives Platform, and 13 were added from Wouters (2013), 7 from UNFCCC (2013), 5 from UNFCCC (2014) and 3 UN lead initiatives from UN (2015). From this long list, eleven were selected: seven international cooperative initiatives, three UN lead initiatives, and one private governance network (see Supplementary material).

Impacts of the TERIs

The selected initiatives cover almost all energy and AFOLU sectors, except for the freight transport and rural residential sector (see Supplementary material). Table 1 shows the estimated emission reductions of the various TERIs. The largest absolute reductions are expected from company, city, the NYDF, the Kigali Amendment, and the Global Methane Initiative (see Table 1). Except for the HFC proposal, these TERIs represent a large part of global emissions in 2010. Together, these initiatives

Discussion and conclusion

One of the expectations of TERIs is that they can realise additional emission reductions beyond those proposed by national governments under the UNFCCC (Blok et al., 2012), but Widerberg and Pattberg (2015) raise the question whether this is really the case. In order to assess this, we have selected those TERIs that have set quantified emission- or energy reduction targets. However, the purpose of TERIs in climate policy implementation is broader then bringing mere additional reduction to

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