The language adopted this year was so weak that for many envoys it marked a step backward from the Paris Agreement, under which nations agreed to offer deeper reductions every few years. The reversal, aided by President Donald Trump’s decision to back away from reductions the U.S. had pledged in previous years, undermined the integrity of the talks.
“There is no sugarcoating it: The negotiations fell far short of what was expected,” said Helen Mountford, vice president for climate and economics at the World Resources Institute, a U.S. research group. “Instead of leading the charge for more ambition, most of the large emitters were missing in action or obstructive.”
From Egypt to Uruguay, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia, nations expressed concern there was no language in the decision about how to spur climate-related aid.
That backtracks on a principle of the 1992 convention that set up the talks: that rich countries have the biggest historical responsibility for emissions and should pay to help the poor to fix the problem. Since 2009, industrial nations have been promising to boost climate aid to $100 billion a year by 2020. Uncertainty about how that money will flow eroded the willingness of countries to compromise on their demands.
Envoys aimed to elaborate on Article 6 of the Paris deal. That section of the 27-page accord allowed market mechanisms to be used in meeting emissions goals, though it didn’t spell out how those would work.
The ambition was to revive the Clean Development Mechanism and other tools that channeled aid to poorer nations for projects that cut emissions. Those projects generated tradable securities representing emissions cuts.
To some extent, the consequences of failure this year are low. Markets were the main agenda item, and many nations and green groups were skeptical about involving those mechanisms. They see carbon trading as a distraction from the broader need for much deeper and faster cuts in emissions, which no market mechanism would force.
“It symbolizes profits for their private sector and the chance to give the appearance that they are meeting their commitments while continuing to pollute and operate business as usual,” said Tina Stege, the climate envoy for the Marshall Islands.
Failure in Madrid puts a spotlight on the U.K., which is hosting next year’s talks in Glasgow. The agenda there was focused on raising the ambitions of countries to promise deeper cuts than they have set out for the Paris deal. Markets will now complicate that discussion.
“We firmly believe market mechanisms are a crucial element of the Paris Agreement architecture,” said Leonardo Cleaver de Athayde, director of the environmental department at Brazil‘s foreign ministry. “We find it very frustrating that at the end of the day we were not able to arrive at a final agreement.”
The envoys agreed to use texts drawn up in the closing hours of the Madrid meeting as the basis of their discussions next year, saying much progress had been made.
“For Glasgow to be a success, we need a clear message that countries will be called to revise and improve their climate action plans,” said Mohamed Adow, director of Power Shift Africa, an environmental group. “If that doesn’t come through, there’s going to be little that we can be able to harvest in Glasgow.”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.