Strong policies to address climate change will almost certainly require that large quantities of oil, natural gas, and coal remain underground. Because these resources have economic value, action to reduce carbon emissions means that fossil fuel owners and producers, and other entities in the fossil fuel supply chain, will experience a reduction in wealth. They will be on the receiving end of what we call the BCarbon Ask.^We compile disparate data sources, make some simplifying assumptions, and approximate the value of the Carbon Ask for the world as a whole. We find that the value of the world's fossil fuel enterprise in a business-as-usual case, unconstrained by climate policy, is about $295 trillion. In a world with a strong climate policy, the value of these resources drops to about $110 trillion, a decrease of $185 trillion, or 63 %. The Carbon Ask is equivalent to 2.4 years of global GDP. After reviewing the literature on resistance to technological innovation during the past two centuries and examining legal challenges to recent US greenhouse gas regulations, we find it unsurprising that the Carbon Ask creates powerful incentives for many stakeholders-who may be firms, workers, consumers, and governments-to resist policies to speed the development and diffusion of new, more environmentally benign technologies. We also find few precedents for policy-driven, rather than market-driven, technological transformations with a scale and scope similar to decarbonization of the global economy. Keywords Carbon Ask. Stranded asset. Decarbonization. Carbon budget. Emissions budget. Fossil fuel reserves. Fossil fuel resources 1 Additional information on global fossil fuel quantities is contained in a Technical Appendix. We would like to thank Irene Kim for her work as a research assistant. In addition, valuable comments were provided by Gerald Brock, Nancy Augustine, and two anonymous reviewers.

Since the early 1990s, countries have been working together under the United Nations to develop a framework for international action on climate change. This cooperation has led to rules, principles, institutions, and procedures to guide and support global action. Most notably, countries have adopted the UNFCCC and have focused on its implementation, including through two operational agreements: the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement. Since Parties to the UNFCCC adopted the Paris Agreement in 2015, they have focused significant attention to finalizing and negotiating the rules, procedures, modalities, and operational guidance that govern implementation of the agreement. Parties are turning their attention to the action and support that will be needed to fully implement the Paris Agreement’s obligations and its Rulebook. The objective of the paper is to provide recommendations for strengthening the architecture and implementation of the Paris Agreement. The paper does so by drawing on experiences under the UNFCCC and the Kyoto Protocol, including the existing transparency framework, Talanoa Dialogue, and the Kyoto Protocol’s compliance committee, and by considering the unique impact that science and the work of the IPCC, equity, and leadership have each had on implementation efforts.

This paper considers the concept of a “data loop” —a relationship between the government and the private sector that focuses on strengthening collaborative efforts to enhance climate ambition through data sharing—in the Indonesian context. In the data loop, the private sector shares climate and GHG emissions data with the government, and the government facilitates mandatory reporting systems to properly collect this data and incentivize voluntary reporting, further encouraging more robust data sharing. A data loop could generate the impetus for the private sector to provide the data required, and the government could, in turn, provide greater clarity through more robust assessments of efforts and projections, which would be supported by strengthened domestic and international measurement, tracking, reporting, regulation, and verification systems. The concept of the data loop builds upon previous research suggesting that a similar relationship could lead to enhanced climate action: an ambition loop. An ambition loop is a virtuous feedback loop in which bold policy action is supported by bold company leadership, resulting in the acceleration of further business action, faster progress to meet national targets, and the seizure of larger market opportunities. The government pushes companies by establishing bold targets and strong policies, and companies push the government by showing commercial demand and economic possibilities (Metzger et al. 2018).