GEG guest blogger Ryan Hogarth reviews the outcomes of the Copenhagen Summit for climate change governance. While the substance may be thin, he argues that the shift in decision-making procedure is significant. This post was the winner of the GEG blog competition ‘Governing Climate Change After Copenhagen’.
-
15 Feb 2010 / Ryan Hogarth
-
07 Dec 2009 / Arunabha Ghosh
The success or failure of Copenhagen will depend not only on the substance of the deal but on the spirit and message of the talks as well. Negotiators inside the Bella Center in Copenhagen will no doubt go down to the wire on commas and clauses. For the ordinary citizen, the legitimacy of any climate agreement will depend on answers to four questions.
-
13 Jul 2009 / Arunabha Ghosh
Can 192 countries agree on a global deal to confront climate change when 17 economies cannot? For those watching the proceedings at the G8 summit in L’Aquila last week, this must be a nagging question in the lead up to the much-anticipated meeting on climate change in Copenhagen in December. The signs are mixed but [...]
-
30 Jun 2009 / Arunabha Ghosh
Arunabha Ghosh writes in Indian business newspaper, The Financial Express, that developing countries face a triple challenge of increasing income growth, building energy infrastructure, and confronting climate change.
-
30 Jun 2009 / Arunabha Ghosh
Arunabha Ghosh writes in Indian business newspaper, Mint, that reconciling the competing concerns of poverty reduction in and lower emissions from developing countries depends upon a credible multilateral mechanism for technology transfer.
-
02 Apr 2009 / Carolyn Deere
The G20 leaders’ communiqué today has provided a vital boost for global trade, but several important trade-related commitments – to developing countries, to sustainable development and to multilateralism – were disappointing or missing. With a further G20 meeting scheduled before the end of the year, leaders must now deepen and expand their trade agenda to address these shortfalls. At the same time, they must acknowledge the democratic deficits of the G20 and explore more inclusive alternatives for global economic decision-making – in particular those that would ensure greater representation of the world’s poorest countries.
-
23 Mar 2009 / Yash Tandon
Guest blogger Yash Tandon sets out a forward-looking agenda for global trade governance and sustainable development from a Southern perspective.
The world’s multilateral negotiations on trade and on sustainable development over the last decade yield two important lessons for the multilateral system.
The first lesson concerns the interconnectedness of things: trade, security, employment, human rights, development, terrorism, migration, poverty, climate change are all interconnected. For the developing countries of the South, trade and climate change are a dual facet of their continuing sustainable development challenges.
-
20 Mar 2009 / Mark Halle
President Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emmanuel, is famous for saying that we should “never let a good crisis go to waste”. And let’s make no mistake about it, we are in crisis. While the world’s attention is largely focused on the financial meltdown, with a side order of climate change, we may soon need to face up to the fact that we are living what Australian environmental business expert Paul Gilding calls “The Great Disruption” – the confluence of a major economic breakdown and the unraveling of the global environment. And, while our leaders are busily wheeling out stimulus packages in a desperate attempt to kick-start the faltering economy, the same is not possible for the global environment. In the words of Glen Prickett of Conservation International: “Mother Nature doesn’t do bailouts”.
-
17 Mar 2009 / Richard Kozul-Wright
When the latest efforts to close the Doha Round ended abruptly in December 2008, entrenched negotiating positions were a factor; but underlying systemic issues, ignored in many accounts of the stop-and-start history of the Round since 2001, were of greater significance: these include countries trading more but earning less; the dangers of premature deindustrialization; a growing technological divide and diminishing policy space. While addressing these systematic challenges will be key to the future stability of the multilateral trading system, the immediate threat to international trade comes from a deeply dysfunctional system of unregulated finance. Fixing that should be the urgent priority of the international community.
-
17 Mar 2009 / Charles Gore
The most critical challenge for global economic governance is to find effective and fair ways of mitigating and adapting to climate change whilst at the same time reducing global income inequalities and realizing the development aspirations and unrealized human potential of millions of people in developing countries. Recent evidence, for example on sea level rise and the shrinking summer ice in the Arctic Ocean, suggests that climate change is occurring even faster than models pronounced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have predicted. Biophysical feedback mechanisms, too often omitted from climate models, are likely to be a key factor in the underestimation and are likely to make climate change irreversible once critical atmospheric temperatures are passed. How fast we act will affect both the magnitude and reversibility of climate change. Some say 2015 will be too late; but even if they are wrong, the climate issue will certainly be at the top of the public agenda by then.
