Climate Special 9: Partners in Action (I)

On today’s podcast, we hear from China’s Special Envoy for Climate Change, Liu Zhenmin, who expresses his optimism about the future of international cooperation on climate governance, particularly between China and the US.

Transcript

Partners in Action  (I)

On today’s podcast, we hear from China’s Special Envoy for Climate Change, Liu Zhenmin, who expresses his optimism about the future of international cooperation on climate governance, particularly between China and the US.

Looking back at the history of international climate negotiations and China-US cooperation on climate issues, Liu Zhenmin, China’s Special Envoy for Climate Change, a senior diplomat who has participated in the multilateral climate negotiations as a leader and key member of multiple Chinese delegations, remains confident in the future of global climate governance.

Before being appointed as the Special Envoy for Climate Change in January 2024, Liu served as the Under-Secretary-General for the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs from 2017 to 2022, overseeing work on climate change and sustainable development.

The US’s second withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, which was announced by President Donald Trump on his first day in office back in January, will (quote) “have a much greater impact on the international community’s efforts in tackling climate change than on the US itself,” according to Liu Zhenmin in a recent interview with NewsChina.

However, Liu believes that because global multilateral efforts on tackling climate change have become an irreversible trend, the US will get back on track with international cooperation and continue the joint China-US leadership on global climate governance at some point in the future – something that’s widely anticipated by the international community. 

As Liu highlighted, while the world is facing many challenges, climate change is an imminent challenge and crisis, and it is imperative for humanity to accelerate and intensify our action to achieve the goal of carbon neutrality by the middle of this century. Otherwise, human society will have to pay a huge price.

What follows is a translation of NewsChina’s interview with Liu Zhenmin. 

Our interviewer asked: What are the major factors influencing international climate negotiations?

Liu Zhenmin replied: In 1972, the principles that guide environmental protection of the international community were established at the first United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, Sweden. In 1988, a joint decision was made between the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) to found the intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The first IPCC report issued in 1990 concluded that human activities have caused a change in global mean temperatures since the first Industrial Revolution in the late 18th century, and suggested that governments around the world take action to address climate change. In 1990, the General Assembly of the United Nations worked out a resolution to launch negotiations on a legally binding document on climate change. After five rounds of negotiations, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), and Agenda 21 were all signed in June 1992 at the UN Conference on Environment and Development held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Then the UN Convention to Combat Desertification was passed in 1994 in Paris, France. Those landmark conventions show that sustainable development has become the guiding principle for humanity.

The transition from scientific consensus to the establishment of the UNFCCC was remarkably swift. The achievement of the UNFCCC was significantly influenced by geopolitics. The end of the Cold War created a favorable political climate for negotiations. Additionally, in the early period following the Cold War, developed countries were confident in their dominance of global governance, including climate issues.

However, the negotiations were divided between two camps from the outset – the wealthy countries from Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) led by the US, and the Global South represented by G77+China. This was an unexpected situation for developed countries.

As developed countries had been the major source of emissions from the Industrial Revolution up to the years when those negotiations happened, they were expected to assume the primary responsibility for historical emissions. Meanwhile, developing countries were still striving to achieve poverty reduction and food security, which means their emissions would continue to increase during their industrialization process. In this context, a consensus had been reached between the two camps: the UNFCCC established the principles of equity and Common but Differentiated Responsibilities and Respective Capabilities, clarifying the different obligations of developed and developing countries.

Another historical context is that with the end of the Cold War, economic globalization accelerated. In the 1980s, the rapid economic growth in the US and Europe necessitated the pursuit of sustainable development without shutting down their own enterprises. Instead, they began to relocate labor-intensive and heavily-polluting industries on a large scale to developing countries, with China becoming a major destination for such industrial transfers, resulting in increasing emissions along with its economic takeoff in the 1990s.

However, in the initial rounds of UNFCCC talks, developed countries did not recognize that shifting industrial production overseas would also transfer pollution to developing economies. As a result, at the first Conference of Parties (COP1) to the UNFCCC, held in Berlin in 1995, Parties agreed to start negotiations on setting quantified emission reduction goals for developed countries after 2000, laying the groundwork for the Kyoto Protocol.

During negotiations of the Kyoto Protocol, geopolitical issues began to emerge. By the 1990s, the three major powers that had the greatest potential to challenge US hegemony since the end of World War II – that is, Germany, Japan, and the former Soviet Union – had been effectively contained. The US strategists had already started to contemplate who the future adversaries might be. Several major developing countries were essentially identified as potential future rivals to the US. Consequently, the US pushed these developing countries, notably China, India and Brazil, to take on emission reduction and limitation commitments.

The Kyoto Protocol’s major achievement was setting a target for industrialized nations to reduce their emissions between 2008 and 2012 by an average of 5 percent below 1990 levels. However, according to the Berlin COP1, emission reduction efforts in developed countries should have started in 2000. The delay was largely due to the expected shift in US leadership from a Democratic to Republican administration after Bill Clinton’s presidency ended in 2000. The Republican Party was unlikely to accept the protocol. As expected, one of President George W. Bush’s first announcements after taking office in January 2001 was that his administration would not submit the Kyoto Protocol to Congress. This was the US’s first withdrawal from a multilateral climate agreement.

All this shows how geopolitics and globalization have been two major factors influencing international climate negotiations.

NC: As the two largest emitters, what roles do China and the US play in global climate negotiations?

LZ: In 2008, Barack Obama won the presidential election. Since his inauguration in 2009, he had been considering how to restore US leadership in global climate governance. The key question for him was how to persuade the American public to support international commitments to addressing climate change. He realized that the “top-down” emissions reduction model established by the Kyoto Protocol needed to change, as the US federal government could not intervene in economic and social affairs at the state level. He argued that while no other country would agree to abandon the Kyoto Protocol as the second legal document on global climate governance, the top-down approach was unfeasible within the US system.

As the US sought to work out a new model that aligned with its domestic political system, other countries also reached a consensus that insisting on the top-down Kyoto Protocol model, at the risk of excluding US participation in global climate governance, would not be beneficial to global climate efforts. They needed to work together with the US to develop a new framework.

Meanwhile, between the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol and the Copenhagen Summit in 2009, emissions from developing countries increased. In 2006, China overtook the US as the world’s largest emitter. The Chinese government started to recognize that unrestrained emissions would cause severe pollution, harming the country’s own ecological environment and hindering sustainable development. As early as 2002, during the 16th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC), China advocated for a scientific approach to development that is “people-oriented, comprehensive, coordinated and sustainable.” After the 18th CPC National Congress in 2012, President Xi Jinping introduced the concept of “ecological civilization,” saying “lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets.” These ideas demonstrated and paved the way for China’s increasingly proactive response to climate change.

The ensuing years marked a period of China-US cooperation on climate change. From 2013 to 2015, China and the US issued three joint declarations on climate change, laying a foundation for the 2015 Paris Agreement. Upholding the UNFCCC principles of equity and Common but Differentiated Responsibilities and Respective Capabilities, the Paris Agreement introduced a new bottom-up cooperative modality, where all countries pledged to address climate change through Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). This modality was initiated in those joint declarations between China and the US.

The new modality addresses major concerns for both countries. The US wanted to move away from the top-down Kyoto Protocol framework, while it was impossible for China to accept mandatory emission reduction targets during its industrialization process. The NDCs allowed each country to set its own targets and progress at its own pace. Despite their differing political systems and priorities, the largest developed and developing countries reached a consensus on a model acceptable to both.

Driven by the China-US consensus, Parties proposed their first round of NDCs at COP21 in Paris in 2015, marking a new stage of global climate governance. It is fair to say that China and the US made historic contributions to the Paris Agreement.

For China and other countries, the NDCs modality stipulated by the Paris Agreement brought the US back into the multilateral system. For the US, the Paris Agreement achieved its goal left incomplete in the Kyoto Protocol – bringing the major developing countries of China, India and Brazil into the world’s emission reduction framework. Indeed, as rapid economic growth amid globalization continued, developing countries became increasingly aware of the pressing need for sustainable development.

Regarding greenhouse gas emissions, the Paris Agreement set several objectives: reaching global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible, achieving a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of the century, and limiting the global average temperature increase to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, and pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5°C. In accordance with the Agreement, more than 150 countries announced their carbon neutrality goals, most around 2050, proving the NDCs model to be effective.

At COP28 in 2023, held in Dubai, UAE, countries reviewed the implementation of the Paris Agreement and reached the UAE Consensus for a fair, orderly and equitable global energy transition.

The UAE Consensus also stemmed from China- US cooperation. Had it not been for the China-US Sunnylands Statement on Enhancing Cooperation to Address the Climate Crisis reached in November 2023, built on agreements reached in the IPCC reports, it would have been difficult for COP28, which was started around a month later, to reach a consensus on energy transition.

The UAE Consensus was a big stride forward from the Paris Agreement. Though some scientists have criticized the progress as too slow and too small to meet Paris Agreement targets, at least the appropriate measures and actions are now on track.

Well, that’s the end of part one of our interview with Liu Zhenmin, and we’ll hear part two next week. Our theme music is by the famous film score composer Roc Chen. We want to thank our writers Wu Jin and Li Jia, translator Du Guodong and copy editor Pu Ren. And thank you for listening. We hope you enjoyed it, and if you did, please tell a friend, so they too can understand The Context!