Three ideas to boost the debate on the reform of COP.

Global Governance of Climate Change. This is the “focus” of the Dolomite Conference that Vision is convening annually in Trento. And Vision’s “stocktake” of the latest COP in Dubai, is very much calling for a urgent reform of the mechanism through which the world has tried to govern a crisis which is proceeding at a much faster speed than institutions. 

The President of COP28, Sultan Al Jaber, rightly said in its final speech at Dubai, “an agreement is only as good as its implementation. We are what we do, not what we say”. As a businessman turned into a hard-working diplomat, he pragmatically achieved the best possible deal from a suboptimal setting. That deal, however, is far from being enough, as our assessment of its impact shows¹. How can we change that setting? This is a first reflection that Vision will try to develop into the months before the next Dolomite Conference (from the 27th to the 30th of June 2024).

1) Money. The most frequent critique to COPs is that it tends, indeed, to produce words with very little “means for implementation”. This means more crudely that promises are often not followed up by cheques. We believe that money can be the lever for giving to COP not only the financial muscle that it badly needs, but also the continuity that is grossly missing to the climate governance machinery. By that, we mean that COPs is still a (yearly) huge gathering (plus a climate action summit at the UN’s headquarter in New York) with relatively little happening in between: yes, there are all sort of research groups but there is not a proper executive body managing the climate in the interim. This vacuum can be filled by the political/ strategic management of the financial facilities needed to mobilize enough public and private resources needed for the transition (4 – 5 trillion USD needed per year according to art. 68 of Dubai's final declaration).

On this, however, we managed to both have too many facilities operating in this area; and too little money.

We need to simplify; clarify; strengthen the climate finance package. The map below gives a preliminary map drawn by the Climate Funds Update². We are talking about 21 institutions operating with multilateral arrangements; and seven within the UNFCC framework. And yet only three of them have an endowment which is higher than 1 trillion USD; and only five have disbursed effectively more than 500 billion USD.

Figure 1 - The climate finance map

We believe that:

• It would be wise to reduce the number of funds (and we are still waiting for the operationalization of the “loss and damage”) so to give much higher visibility to the facilities, encourage accountability and debate. One extreme possibility would be to have only two main funds – one for the energy transition and one for adaptation (one possibility would be that this could even be a “loss and damage” with a broader scope); and two smaller: one for R&D and one for experimentations (of already existing technologies).
• We would also favour a review of the approach to the design of these facilities. In our opinion, the brutal distinction in “developed” (donors) and “developing” (beneficiaries) is politically self-defeating: as for our proposal on “NEXT GENERATION PLANET”³, we would propose a mechanism by which all countries contribute according to GDP (and emissions); but that all local communities are protected and helped to mitigate (up to the extent “markets fail to do it”).
• Not less importantly, the “north star” of these facilities is to fund projects with a sum of money that is exactly what is needed to move back that project to being “marketable”. According to the “global stocktake”, we will need 4 – 5 trillion EURO per year and, thus, we need to attract as much as private money is possible.  
• Impact finance - the one which looks for measurable social or environmental impact alongside a financial return - would, instead, be indispensable for all projects that are far from capturing return which is high enough to attract edge like funds. Right now, according to the Global Impact Investment Network, assets mobilize by impact finance are about 1,1 trillion which looks like tiny vis-à-vis overall needs. The strategy should be here to give visibility to again few big initiatives capable to raise the interest of individual savers/ citizens.

The monitoring of the strategies of these funds, as well as their outcomes should be the core of an executive body of COP which is still missing.

2) Decision making. It is the heart of COPs, and it is pursued through a consensus that is meant to be unanimous. The paradox again is that this mechanism is neither enough efficient nor inclusive enough. We would both reduce the number of parties and include some that are not currently at the official table where decisions are taken. Countries should be robustly encouraged to pool gradually themselves into groups characterized by common geographies or interests.

The exception could be India, China and USA - and it is indeed enough to count these three (out of 198 COP’s parties) to have 47% of world GDP and 55% of CO2 emissions -  to which one could add the EU (that could even set the example since the next COP in BAKU), the African Union; the Community of Latina America and Caribbean States; the Gulf Cooperation Council; the ASEAN (plus Japan, Australia and New Zealand); and some central Asia block (plus Russia); and the AOSIS (the Alliance of small Island States) that is small and yet has been key to much of the climate policies.  

Some countries (including Canada) may have to regroup themselves with other blocks (and this may even be a good test of a different kind of enlargement for the European Union partnering with, for instance, UK) and yet, the scheme would be much more efficient.

The process will not be, of course, simple. States are probably the strongest legacy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One possibility would be to have a voluntary pooling (the European Union, again, should give an example) of voting rights, At the same time a minimum threshold in terms of number of habitants could be gradually introduced: let’s not forget that right now San Marino is a formal party and New York City is not and that 65, one third of the 198 UN member states have a population of less than 1 million”

At the same time, the reduction of the parties could open space for relevant (and legitimate) interests: a) the cities of C40 may have a formalization of their role. Likewise, it would be interesting to have at the table somebody defending the very interesting point of b) the regions of the world – the poles, the oceans – that are beyond the remit of any State and yet are the place where most of the climate change battle is played. Another very important party to which a seat should be assigned, is some form of c) citizens’ assembly (where young generation’s voice would be central). Finally, Vision would also argue that the d) scientific community should have an institutionalized role. One additional possibility is to have a rotational seat assigned to an industry (agrifood, for instance) or to representative of workers in industry that may suffer from adaptation.  

The mode of interactions should also change: less bureaucratic endless, zero sum negotiations amongst diplomats; and more problem solving participatory meetings. The introduction of the Majlis as an informal gathering meant to transform individual opinions into collective intelligence is interesting. A citizens’ assembly can pioneer methodologies of global participatory democracy (amongst the parties that want join it).

The new “climate government” would have not more than fifteen members, and it may well be both quicker and more democratic than the one that was constructed to govern a totally different, more stable century. This new government may meet more than once, although we still see merit to have it to meet once at a larger pow-wow gathering with thousands of activists, companies, entrepreneurs.

3) The COP itself. One hundred thousand people flocked into Dubai for the largest political gathering in history. The cost of their stay can be estimated to be around 250 million USD; and – if we only consider the CO2 emissions of their flights taking them to and from DUBAI - their footprint has been four times bigger than the yearly one that habitants of the Vanuatu islands that risk to disappear shortly. And yet, the COP has got a value especially for the young people. The atmosphere is truly global (similar to the one you have at the athletes’ village at the Olympic games) and you really find a lot of enthusiasm and motivation to meet people to share your ideals. The costs may be lowered by extending the duration of the event. The emissions by choosing places that can be better reached. The organization of the event can also be changed: national pavilions are probably redundant if it is the global exchange the one, we want leverage upon. It would be instead interesting to transform the heart of the gathering as a knowledge management place organized around problems to be solved (how do I develop energy grids which are affordable? How can I transit away from lithium batteries? How can technologies help to reduce the food that is wasted?).  

This first ideas will be open to debate and will be core part of the Dolomite Conference.

[1] Vision Think Tank, "A Stocktake of COP 28 Global Stocktake", 15 December 2023 

[2] https://climatefundsupdate.org/the-funds/

[3] The proposal is available at https://www.thinktank.vision/en/media-en/publications/next-generation-planet