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Aligning National Interests and Global Climate Justice: The Role of Human Rights in Enhancing the Ambition of Nationally Determined Contributions to Combat Climate Change

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Abstract

The Paris Agreement on climate change revolves around nationally determined contributions (NDC) and acknowledges that the ambition of the global climate response will be determined by Parties’ understanding of their national interests. Initiatives currently envisaged in NDCs are insufficient to avoid disastrous climate change. Debates about the impact of climate action on economic development and national interests have abated the climate ambition of some governments. Conflicting modeling approaches have contributed to these debates. To scale up global climate efforts, it will be essential to convince Parties that the short-term benefits of robust national climate action outweigh its immediate costs. Innovation is driving progress to address climate change and can deliver substantial development co-benefits, particularly by reducing costs of renewable energy technologies and enabling new business models. However, innovation can take many years to reach deployment stage, can create unforeseen problems of its own, and does not benefit all equally. Climate justice links human rights, development and climate regimes. A climate justice perspective provides a normative, analytical and procedural framework to identify barriers to innovation diffusion, optimize development co-benefits of climate action and help build public support for the adoption of more ambitious NDC pledges.

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Fig. 1

Source: US IWG on Social Cost of Carbon (2010)

Fig. 2

Source: UNDP/ETH Zurich (2018)

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Notes

  1. The Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy model (DICE) was developed by Nordhaus and Sztorc (2013). The Climate Framework for Uncertainty, Negotiation and Distribution (FUND) was originally developed to study the role of international capital transfers in climate policy (Waldhoff et al. 2014). PAGE was initially developed in 1992. The Social Science Coordinating Committee (SSCC) used the 2002 version.

  2. The Copenhagen Consensus Project provides an illustration of the practical implications of this position (The Copenhagen Consensus Report 2004, 2008 and 2012). The Project sought to prioritize allocation of a fictive foreign aid amount across a wide range of problems and ranked efforts to cut carbon dioxide emissions last, effectively discouraging governments from any such investment. The 2012 Copenhagen Consensus included two R&D GHG reduction proposals in a list of 30 worthy investments. The ranking was conducted by a panel of leading economists, including Nobel prize laureates for economics. Health and education figured predominantly among the investments prioritized by the Project.

  3. A 10–12 °C warming would bring our species to its physiological adaptability limit due to heat stress. A resting human body generates nearly 100 W of metabolic heat. Sustained wet-bulk temperatures exceeding 35 °C would prevent metabolic heat dissipation and lead to lethal hyperthermia in humans and other mammals. Although such temperatures would render most currently populated areas uninhabitable (Sherwood and Huber 2010), DICE or PAGE estimate the resulting GDP loss to 25% by 2100.

  4. Burke et al. (2015) found that the simple gradual rise in temperature could severely hit the economy of countries as the heat-productivity relationship is believed to peak at an average annual temperature of 13 °C and sharply decline at higher temperatures. Based only on temperature effects and thus excluding other sources of economic losses associated with climate change such as extreme weather events and sea level rise, they estimated than expected costs of climate change could be 2.5 to 100 times larger than prior estimates for a 2 °C warming.

  5. For the most pessimist authors, it could lead to societal collapse as early as 2030 (Meadows et al. 1972, 2004; Ferone 2008; Sinai 2013), in a manner reminiscent to the collapse of countless civilizations in history (Kaniewski et al. 2013). Alternative zero growth models fostering resilience at the local level are already required (Sinai 2013).

  6. ‘Along the economically efficient emission path, the long-run global average temperature after 500 years is projected to increase 6.2 °Celsius over the 1900 global climate. While we have only the foggiest idea of what this would imply in terms of ecological, economic, and social outcomes, it would make the most thoughtful people, even economists, nervous to induce such a large environmental change. Given the potential for unintended and potentially disastrous consequences….’ (Nordhaus quoted by IPCC 2007, WG III, p. 232).

  7. See for example the opinion titled Climate policy robs the world’s poor of their hopes from Pielke and Sarewitz (2014).

  8. For example, the price of solar panels has dropped from USD 101 per watt in 1975 to USD 0.37 in late 2017 (Shahan 2018).

  9. Available at: http://cdmcobenefits.unfccc.int/Pages/SD-Reports.aspx.

  10. Global warming is likely to reach 1.5°C between 2030 and 2052 if it continues to increase at the current rate (IPCC 2018).

  11. The indirect gain in human health alone from reduced air pollution could be US$6 trillion by 2050 (IRENA 2015).

  12. Fossil fuels mostly benefit the wealthy (car owners, etc.) and savings from the phase-out of subsidies can be reinvested in priority social investment.

  13. The IEA Policies and Measures Databases list close to 4000 climate and renewable energy options (https://www.iea.org/policiesandmeasures/climatechange/).

  14. Article 28 of Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized”.

  15. Article 2 (1) of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights states that “Each State Party to the present Covenant undertakes to take steps, individually and through international assistance and cooperation, especially economic and technical, to the maximum of its available resources, with a view to achieving progressively the full realization of the rights recognized in the present Covenant …”.

  16. The concept of HRuF was championed by the UN Secretary- General to integrate human rights in all UN system activities in 1997. It has helped UNCTs to recognize the potential future human rights consequences of development problems, and to identify the political solutions.

  17. According to Drawndown Project (Hawken 2017), addressing the gender gap in agriculture is ranked sixty-second in terms of GHG emission reduction and would generate a net saving of US$87 billion.

  18. Seventy-five of the NDCs presented by developing countries highlights the importance of international support to achieve the NDC targets (IGES 2017).

  19. Several innovative business models for decentralized renewable energy already rely on digital finance. For example, the pay-as-you-go scheme, whereby customers pay a small upfront amount for the equipment and then regular payments using their mobile for the energy consumed.

  20. Crowdfunding raised $ 16.7 billion in 2017 and was mostly used for launching small and/or innovative businesses, key for employment generation in developing countries (Bayat-Renoux 2018).

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    Yannick Glemarec

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Glemarec, Y. Aligning National Interests and Global Climate Justice: The Role of Human Rights in Enhancing the Ambition of Nationally Determined Contributions to Combat Climate Change. Fudan J. Hum. Soc. Sci. 12, 309–327 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40647-018-0249-4

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