Enablers of ambitious climate action : Challenges and opportunities to combine climate change and sustainable development
Despite decades of international climate negotiations, cumulative worldwide climate-action pledges still fall short of the needed effort to keep the maximum global mean temperature increase well below 2°C and to further strive for a maximum of 1.5°C, as established in the Paris Agreement. This Agreement ensures that all developed and developing countries are engaged in climate action, but ambition levels nationally determined. Hence, understanding what enables and what discourages climate action and how to use these levers to boost ambition is key to the implementation of the Paris Agreement.My PhD research aims to address research gaps on major climate-change action enablers and to explore how these enablers have performed over time and across countries. Moreover, it aims to develop research and policy-making tools to further analyse these enablers and to leverage their potential to boost climate-change action. The major enablers that I address in my thesis, are: key moments in international climate negotiations; country contexts and the common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities (CBDR-RC) principle; international climate assistance; and policy coherence for the joint implementation of climate targets and the sustainable development goals (SDGs). In this context, I discuss four policy coherence types: coherence between national and international action; coherence between sources of finance; socio-economic and environmental coherence; and coherence between international policy agendas.In Chapter 2, I and my collaborators (hereafter referred to as ‘we’) explore how international climate negotiations have influenced the adoption of national climate strategies, legislation and targets during the period 2007-2017. We found that momentum around the Copenhagen Accord and the Paris Agreement led to a stronger adoption of national strategies and legislation, and of GHG-emissions reduction targets, respectively. The number of countries with national climate legislation and strategies increased quickly up to 2012, and levelled-off after. On the other hand, GHG-emissions reduction targets tripled in the run-up to the Paris Agreement. Renewable energy targets adoption has grown steadily, but energy-efficiency targets are only adopted by about a third of countries.In Chapter 3, we analyse how countries’ development contexts influence their pledged GHG-emissions reductions to 2030 relative to 2010. To that end, we compare GHG-emissions-reduction targets relative to several key development indicators that reflect countries’ responsibilities and capabilities. We found that countries with higher GDP per capita and higher historical and annual GHG per capita tend to pledge higher GHG emissions reductions per capita. Nonetheless, we observed that some countries with high fossil fuel dependency pledge much lower GHG emissions reductions relative to other countries with similar GDP and historical or annual GHG emissions per capita. No correlation was found between past climate-relevant official financial assistance (ODA) received and conditional GHG emissions reduction pledges. Importantly, we found that many countries maintain the same targets or even pledge lower GHG-emissions reductions in their updated Nationally Determined Contributions.In Chapter 4, we explore how climate-relevant ODA was distributed across development areas represented by the SDGs and across climate-change action types (i.e. mitigation versus adaptation) and how this compares to countries priorities as elucidated through the Nationally Determined Contributions. We find that the distribution of climate-relevant ODA across the SDGs mostly matches that of the recipient countries’ NDC activities, but this correlation did not improve in the post-Paris period (2016-2018), relative to the pre-Paris period (2010-2015). Moreover, we find that donors focus strongly on climate change mitigation, while recipients propose more adaptation measures, although this became more even post-Paris.In Chapter 5, we further analyse the positive and negative effects of specific climate-change mitigation measures on the SDGs and the context dimensions that influence the occurrence and magnitude of these effects. We find that climate-change mitigation action affects all SDGs positively and negatively. Energy efficiency, reduced demand for energy services and a switch to renewable energy mostly lead to positive effects on many SDGs. However, bioenergy, carbon capture and storage and nuclear energy negatively affects several SDGs. The choices of project location and of approaches in implementation were the most common dimensions that influence the occurrence and magnitude of positive and negative effects. Addressing these dimensions through policy design and policy mixes, as exemplified in this chapter, would help to enhance positive effects and to reduce negative effects of climate-change mitigation action.In Chapter 6, we apply the concept of climate-development interlinkages in an international setting by analysing how UNFCCC and CBD address their impacts on one another and the common drivers of climate change and biodiversity loss. We found that both agendas acknowledge their interlinkages, address common drivers and refer to each other’s topics, but important areas, drivers and trade-offs remain limited or unaddressed – in particular, wetlands, marine and coastal ecosystems, agriculture, trade and urbanization.Finally, in Chapter 7, I discuss the studied major enablers of climate-change action and provide further research and policy recommendations based on the findings of previous chapters. Maintaining the international climate momentum generated with the Paris Agreement adoption is essential. Researchers need to further explore climate-change action enablers, how they perform and how they can be engaged. To raise ambition, countries need to be able to compare and to learn from one another, climate finance allocations need to better reflect recipients’ priorities, and policy coherence must be enhanced nationally and internationally across different areas of sustainable development.My PhD thesis advanced the scientific understanding of climate-change action enablers and provides tools for further research and policy making. In particular, the tools allow researchers and relevant stakeholders to 1) compare the ambition of countries’ climate pledges in a development context; 2) better align climate and sustainable development finance; 3) make use of an overview of climate and SDG interactions and of opportunities for enhanced policy coherence; and 4) assess gaps and opportunities for a better integration of the international climate and biodiversity agendas. From a policy perspective, our climate-change action assessments likely facilitate comparability and support policy makers to design better measures that maximize synergies and minimize trade-offs between climate and sustainable development actions. Overall, my findings and recommendations likely enable more ambitious climate action, when applied.
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| Format: | Doctoral thesis biblioteca |
| Language: | English |
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Wageningen University
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| Subjects: | Life Science, |
| Online Access: | https://research.wur.nl/en/publications/enablers-of-ambitious-climate-action-challenges-and-opportunities |
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