30 Years of International Climate Negotiations: Are They Still our Best Hope?

• Published date: 01 June 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10704965231163908
• Author: Raymond Clémençon
• Date: 01 June 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

The Journal of Environment &

Development

2023, Vol. 32(2) 114–146

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/10704965231163908

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30 Years of International

Climate Negotiations: Are

They Still our Best Hope?

Raymond Cl´

emençon

1



Abstract

30 years of international climate talks have not prevented the globe from heating up

more than 1 degree Celsius over post-industrial times, nor have they kept the year

2022 from breaking new temperature and extreme weather records around the world.

Although the international process has been indispensable for building the foundation

to move out of the carbon age, it is now time to shift attention away from the ac-

rimonious climate talks and treat them as a sideshow, rather than the solution to the

problem. An analysis of 30 years of international climate negotiations shows that

multilateral climate diplomacy years ago stopped driving countries’action. National

political opportunity structures, normative shifts, economic factors, and external

events are what shape countries’climate policies largely independent of international

climate negotiations.

Keywords

climate negotiations, Paris climate agreement, global warming, climate change, green

trade

Introduction

The objective of this article is to assess 30 years of climate negotiations before the

background of larger geopolitical, economic, normative, and technological trends. The

f‌irst part will provide a historic overview of climate negotiations and then analyze the

outcomes of the 26

th

and 27

th

Conferences of the Parties to the UN Framework

Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) held in Glasgow, UK in November 2021

1

Department of Global Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Raymond Cl´

emençon, Department of Global Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, SSMS Building

2113, UCSB, Santa Barbara, CA 93103, USA.

Email: rclemencon@global.ucsb.edu

(COP26) and in Sharm-El-Sheik, Egypt in November 2022 (COP27). The second part

of the article will assess the evolution of the climate discourse and consider policy and

technological trends over time. The third section will brief‌ly assess the relative role the

United States, China, and the European Union are playing in global emissions reduction

efforts. The main argument is that the heyday of international cooperation on climate

change is over. The momentum has shifted from international negotiations to national

and subnational actors, and increasingly from government to societal and private sector

actors.

International relations scholars have mostly considered the climate crisis a collective

action/free rider problem which pits the historic responsibility of rich countries against

the growing contributions of emerging economies, with the United States and China the

key players (Stern, 2007;Aldy & Stavins, 2009;Victor, 2001). Climate negotiations are

seen as a zero-sum game in which only the distribution of costs for emissions reductions

among countries matters. This thinking may explain why climate negotiations have

become more acrimonious and a comprehensive legally binding agreement looks

increasingly impossible to reach. A positivist structural analysis, however, hides the

hegemonic role the United States has played—deeply grounded in U.S. domestic

politics—in obstructing an effective climate regime (Oreskes 2010;Cl´

emençon, 2008,

2010;Skocpol, 2013).

There is little evidence that international negotiations have much inf‌luence on what

countries actually do domestically (Aklin & Mildenberger, 2020). The last couple of

years in particular have seen important climate policy relevant events unfold that have

no direct connection with the dynamics of international climate negotiations. More

attention is needed to understand how moral frames motivate domestic level policies

and how they interact with what happens on the international level (Cashore &

Bernstein, 2022). Perceived cost-benef‌it considerations have changed as countries

face the economic and human costs of the climate crisis and the generational dimension

comes into sharp focus. Domestic energy and climate policy decis ions in many

countries are increasingly inf‌luenced by a mix of economic and ethical climate justice

considerations that recognize the intergenerational trade-offs and the tremendous in-

equities between main polluters and those suffering the consequences (Timmons &

Parks, 2009;Sinden, 2010;Newell et al., 2021). Some research furthermore suggests

that support for climate policies may be larger than assumed by policymakers (Poushter

et al., 2022;Sparkman et al., 2022).

The following section of this introduction f‌irst reviews the state of the climate crisis

and then brief‌ly describes the factors that may make 2022 a turning point in the f‌ight

against greenhouse gas emissions.

The Unfolding Climate Crisis

Global heating continued its relentless trajectory in 2022. The most recent eight years,

2015 to 2022, were also the eight warmest years on record. The World Meteorological

Organization put the global mean temperature in 2021 at 1.11 ± 0.13°C above the

Cl´

emençon 115

1850–1900 average (WMO, 2022). The global average however hides great regional

differences.

Extreme weather events continued their record-setting devastation in 2022. Heat

waves hit Western Europe, North America, and Asia fueling disastrous wildf‌ires in

Spain and France and setting new national temperature records in many countries. Both

the Arctic and Antarctica saw extreme temperatures far above normal and accelerated

ice loss. In late August 2022, large parts of China f‌irst sweltered under anothe r record

heat wave followed later by torrential rains. Heavy monsoon rains f‌looded 1/3 of

Pakistan and cost more than 1100 people their lives and millions their homes. In

October, Hurricane Ian in Florida caused the most expensive f‌looding in U.S. history.

The year 2023 started with devastating f‌looding in California and record January

temperatures in Europe. Meanwhile global CO2 emissions reached their highest level

yet, recovering quickly from a dip during the COVID pandemic.

A UN Report released in October 2022 found that there is “no credible pathway”to

keep warming below 1.5°C, the threshold scientists say humanity should not breach

and the objective agreed on in the Paris Accord (UNEP, 2022b). Current policies imply

a temperature rise on the order of 2.8°C. The only positive news is that the world was

further off course before the Paris conference in 2015, when estimates of future

warming ranged up to 3.5° C (UNFCCC, 2021b). The concentration of CO2 in the

atmosphere reached 417 ppm in 2022, 51% above pre-industrial levels while global

carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels and cement hit a new record high of 36.6

gigatons of CO2 (GtCO2) (Friedlingstein et al., 2022).

Will the Year 2022 be a Turning Point?

With the background of the unfolding climate crisis, international climate negotiations

are extremely frustrating to follow for anyone concerned with the future of the planet.

The follow-up process to the Paris climate accord of 2015 is bogged down in acri-

monious geopolitical power politics concerning allocation of blame for historic

contributions, for continued reliance on fossil fuel expansion, and for failure to honor

f‌inancial commitments. The new icon of the youth movement, Greta Thunberg, called

the COP26 a “blahblahblah”club and skipped “greenwashing”COP27 (Dickie, 2022).

On the surface, this assessment is hard to refute.

The last two Conferences of the Parties to the UN Climate Convention in 2021 and

2022 came after the COVID pandemic and had the task of reviewing success towards

reaching the Paris goal and strengthening national commitments. They fell far short in

adopting strengthened commitments to address the critical period between now and

2030 necessary to keep a 1.5°C warming ceiling possible. COP27 in Sharm-El-Sheik in

November 2022 managed a historic, if for now only symbolic, victory for climate

justice advocates by establishing a loss and damage fund.

International climate negotiations must be seen before the background of broader

geopolitical and global trends and national political turning points. Multilateralism was

already facing serious challenges before Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022

(Nye, 2017;Kornprobst & Paul, 2021;Low, 2022). The world has faced increasing

116 The Journal of Environment & Development 32(2)