COP23: The ‘Inside-Out’ Approach to Delivering Climate Action

Authors

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  David Wei

  Managing Director, Climate and Nature, BSR

  

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  David Wei

  Managing Director, Climate and Nature, BSR

  

  New York

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  David works with companies to develop and implement credible environmental goals, manage climate and nature risks, integrate justice into environmental action, and incubate collaborations to build a net-zero economy. 

  He strives to maximize the impact of our applied research, collaborative initiatives, and work with individual companies. This often means innovating how companies credibly align with the Paris Agreement, adapt to inbound climate disclosure regulation, and take advantage of growing interest in science-based nature goals. David also directs BSR’s Transform to Net Zero collaborative initiative. 

  Before joining BSR, David was a climate diplomat for the Marshall Islands with the advisory group Independent Diplomat and led on emissions reductions and transparency in the UN climate negotiations for the Alliance of Small Island States. As an international lawyer with the Foundation for International Environmental Law and Development, David built up the environmental treaty expertise of governments across the globe. He began his career as a securities litigator with Fried Frank in New York and a commercial litigator with Cassels Brock in Toronto, before focusing on climate change. 

  David holds a LLM in International Law from New York University, a JD and MA in International Relations from the University of Toronto, and a BA in Ethics, Politics, and Economics from Yale University.  

  Close

What if there was a UN Climate Conference where actors reducing greenhouse gas emissions and building climate resilience took center stage, leaving government negotiators to the periphery?

At an “inside-out COP” like this—as described by renowned climate scientist Saleemul Huq at the Development and Climate Days event during the middle weekend of COP23—more attention would flow to those delivering results on the ground, not those skillfully weaving compromises with words.

COP23 showed that the inside-out COP is less and less a fantasy. It was physically divided between the Bonn zone, which featured on-the-ground action, and the Bula zone, where governments continued technical negotiations under the Paris Agreement. That the Bonn zone had brighter energy than the Bula zone may continue in COPs to come. And a focus on results is ever more important with global emissions set to increase for the first time this year, after plateauing for three years of economic expansion.

This is not because the UNFCCC negotiations derailed. To the contrary, countries agreed on the design of the Talanoa Dialogue, a high-level dialogue in 2018 which will take stock of our collective progress toward net-zero emissions, and set the scene for governments to enhance their commitments under the Paris Agreement in 2020. As the We Mean Business coalition and many others asked for, the dialogue creates opportunities for business to demonstrate our progress along the Paris Agreement emissions trajectory and the megatons of emissions we have removed from the atmosphere.

Countries also made progress on technical negotiations under the Paris Agreement by creating the raw material which will eventually become rules for how they account for emissions, communicate national commitments, report on progress, use carbon credits, and are held to comply. Since the Paris Agreement asks all countries to take action, all countries have skin in this game, slowing down the completion of these rules by COP24. There may be extra negotiating sessions in 2018 to finish them.

Just outside the government zone, the energy of action was more apparent. At the U.S. Climate Action Pavilion, California Governor Jerry Brown spoke to the Global Climate Action Summit, which will bring together non-state actors of all stripes in San Francisco next September. And former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg launched the first report under America’s Pledge, an effort to aggregate the impact of non-state actors in the U.S.

Toward the end of the second week, China and 18 other countries announced an increase in the use of sustainable bioenergy. The U.K. and Canada led a group of 20 countries, as well as several U.S. states and Canadian provinces, to launch the Powering Past Coal Alliance to phase out coal use in power generation over the coming decades.

The Powering Past Coal Alliance may foreshadow two trends in the future. First, that policy commitments will become multistakeholder affairs, including governments, businesses, and other non-government partners. And second, that increases in government ambition will be incrementally marked outside the formal Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) deposited under the Paris Agreement, since updated NDCs will require a quid pro quo every five years at the multilateral negotiating table.

In this world of increasingly “inside-out” COPs, the We Mean Business coalition will continue to support increased ambition from all. We appreciate the invitation to convene events and provide inputs to the Talanoa Dialogue. Businesses are stepping up, hundreds are committing to reduce their own emissions in line with the 2°C Paris goal, and they are finding innovative ways of achieving those goals.

We look forward to sharing those experiences to help policymakers have the confidence they need to continue to set and implement stronger and more ambitious targets of their own. There were clear signs of momentum and continued commitment by both countries and non-state actors at this COP, which we must continue to build on in the year ahead.