Christiana Figueres: On the road to Paris

To me, the heart of the challenge is, how do you decouple GDP from GHG? How do you support developing countries to bring their population out of poverty in a low-carbon, high-resilient way? If that is mapped out in Paris, and if the financial support for developing countries to be able to follow that path is made evident, then I think we have success.

Clearly, one of the very difficult issues is the financial support for developing countries, because there’s not necessarily full agreement on what is going to be recognized as financial support. Financial flows occur without necessarily being tagged — this is climate finance or this is not climate finance — so it’s much more complex issue than we thought. Despite this complexity, we do have to get to the point where developing countries feel there is going to be enough financial support for them to make this huge technological leap we are hoping they are going to make.

It’s going to be very difficult for countries to commit to a specific temperature today because there are many factors that are going to affect that. I think what is absolutely critical is to set the destination, the collective intent. And, frankly, it should be about reaching the balance between emissions we will have to put out because they’re unavoidable and the natural absorptive capacity of the planet. If we can reach that balance by the second half of the century, then we will have obtained the ultimate objective. I don’t know that it is possible to say right now are we going to end up with 1.5, 1.6, 1.7, 1.8, 1.9 °C. But it’s got to be within that range. There is no doubt that it has to be below 2 °C.

Contrary to the Kyoto protocol, this legal instrument that is being built here will not have one level of legal “bindingness.” I don’t think that the whole [Paris] agreement is going to have the same legal nature, but rather there will be several components that will have different legal nature.

It is already tackling climate change, right? You see both public and private capital shifting, and that is exactly what needs to happen in order to change the economy. Would that capital have shifted without a UNFCCC process? Maybe — but not now. What the UNFCCC process does is first to raise the voice of urgency: There is only a small window in time that will allow us to tackle climate change. And the second part that I think is absolutely critical, and very unique to the UNFCCC process, in addition to the urgency, is the fact that this has to be done in a way that not only responds to the forces of the market and the development of technology, but protects the most vulnerable. That would not occur without the UNFCCC.

What it has done is reminded everyone that we do have planetary boundaries. That is why we have a sense of urgency, because we only have a limited budget. And it is a budget for the rest of the history of mankind. That is a daunting concept to even begin to incorporate into decision-making. So, in that sense, I think it has brought a sense of realism and a sense of urgency into this discussion.

We will be looking much more at trends and the aggregate impact of the INDCs rather than into the INDCs of specific countries. What we have here is a fruit salad. We have apples, we have pears, and we even have bananas. So that is our responsibility to lay bare the diversity in the approaches of the INDCs.

At the same time, I can already tell you that if you put the numbers together of the INDCs we already know that that first set do not get us to 2 °C. That is why there is a very important part of the Paris agreement that truly reflects that [this] set of INDCs is the first contribution, but it is not the last. Paris needs to look at both the very short term, which is the pre-2020 emissions; the medium term, which is the INDCs; but also the long term, because Paris is an agreement that is going to be accompanying us and guiding emissions for, perhaps, the next couple of decades.

It is only at the level of the processes that these two things are running in a parallel. At the level of countries, there is no difference. I was recently in Egypt and Egypt is very interested, as is Morocco, in increasing renewable energy. Now, is that sustainable development, or is that an answer to climate change? Frankly, it’s both. From a Moroccan or Egyptian perspective, what they’re doing is increasing their energy security and decreasing their dependency on the import of fossil fuels. If you want to say that is to do with sustainable development, well, yes, but it also has to do with climate change.

Now, fortunately, or unfortunately, there are two processes in the United Nations. The SDGs say, “What kind of society do we want to have in 20 to 30 years?” It’s an aspirational, visioning exercise, with metrics, which is good. In the climate convention, what is agreed here is legally binding. They are two legally and procedurally two different processes that are very complementary and, from the countries’ point of view, are not to be divided.

From the planetary perspective they also completely go hand in hand for the following very specific reason: If we do not address climate change in a timely fashion, we will wipe out all the development gains that have been made in the past 15 to 20 years. We will severely threaten any further development and growth, particularly in developing countries. And we will condemn the populations that are most vulnerable doubly, because they are already vulnerable and we would be condemning them to huge impacts from which they may not recover.