PrintIs the Paris Agreement enough to get us to where we need to be? Each year, the United Nations issues what is called the Emissions Gap Report(link is external). This report gives a detailed look at the delta between where our emissions are, where they'd be heading with no policy intervention, and where we expect them to be with successful implementation of existing measures. Below we see what the report tells us.
We know that we want to keep warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius (relative to pre-industrial temperatures), but we have already “used up” about a degree of that. We also know that the closer to 1.5 degrees we can contain that warming, the better off we should be in terms of minimizing detrimental impacts.
- unconditional NDC (nationally determined contributions) - these are the voluntary actions that countries have committed to that are totally implementable without external support
- conditional NDC (nationally determined contributions) - these go farther than the unconditional NDCs, but require some sort of external financial support (perhaps from the 'high ambition' bloc of countries) or are contingent on the climate-related policies other countries choose to implement.
Take note - that bigger zoom of it is just through 2030. As we go farther out to 2050 and 2100, what happens is that the delta gets bigger. The longer we wait to take action, the more aggressive the action would need to be to achieve ever increasingly steep reductions.
The Asia Pacific Partnership
As a counter approach to Kyoto, the Bush Administration implemented the Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate (APP) in 2006. The idea was that the reason we did not support Kyoto was that it exempted countries- many of which were actually significant contributors to carbon. Another issue was the cost burden on US taxpayers.
APP is no longer in effect, but the partnership intended to address climate change issues, while promoting economic development and poverty reduction by leveraging development of clean and efficient technologies. More importantly, the partnership was comprised of China, South Korea, Japan, Australia, India, and the US. With Canada joining on later. This effectively captured the key countries that would be necessary to create real change and substantial emission reductions but were exempted from Kyoto.
As positive as this may sound, the APP was criticized for being a way to avoid Kyoto and for not having biding targets. But APP was meant to be a complement to Kyoto. As to non-binding goals, this criticism was ironic in that in the long run, without an enforcement mechanism, being “binding” was not as impactful for Kyoto as originally intended. The point of acknowledging the APP although it ended in 2011 with minimal fanfare is to show that there are different international agreement models.