Climate clubs: politically feasible and desirable?

Abstract

The idea of a stringent climate club, once the reserve of academic debates, is quickly gaining ground in international policy circles. This reflects dissatisfaction with the multilateral UNFCCC process, but also hope that a minilateral club could increase climate policy ambition, reinvigorate the Paris Agreement process, and make future emissions pledges stick. With the Biden Presidency renewing the US commitment toward climate action and the European Green Deal proposal for carbon border tariffs, some are advocating the creation of a transatlantic climate club. What could a club approach hope to achieve, and what do we know about its political feasibility and desirability? In this article, we seek conceptual clarification by establishing a typology of different club models; we inject a greater sense of political realism into current debates on the feasibility of these models; and we consider their legitimacy in the context of international climate cooperation. Key policy insights. Knowledge gaps and confusion regarding the nature of climate clubs hold back debates about what intergovernmental clubs can contribute to international climate policy. . Club design matters: existing club models vary in terms of the proposed size, purpose, operational principles, legal strength, and relationship to the UNFCCC. . Clubs focused on normative commitments face low barriers to establishment.They lack legal strength but can help raise policy ambition. . Clubs aimed at negotiating targets and measures can increase bargaining efficiency, but struggle to deal with equity and distributional conflicts. . Clubs seeking to change incentives via club benefits and sanctions face the highest hurdles to implementation. Their promise to tackle free-riding remains untested and difficult to achieve. . Climate clubs face an international legitimacy deficit. Any club proposal needs to consider how to add to, and not distract from, the multilateral climate regime.

A climate club to decarbonize the global steel industry

“…This includes establishing a credible labelling or certification scheme for low-emission steel, combined with an independent auditing and compliance mechanism. Most of the academic literature so far has focused more on 'sticks' -coordination of carbon pricing and carbon border adjustmentsto address free-riding and carbon leakage concerns, which are seen as the main rationales for a climate club [15][16][17][18] . While necessary, these face political headwinds.…”

Why do climate change negotiations stall? Scientific evidence and solutions for some structural problems

“…Separation, then, means that each group would come to their own climate actions -from very ambitious to none at all. Potentially, the example of the most ambitious group would then lead the conditional cooperators in the second-most ambitious group without free-riders to lower GHG emissions as well (Eckersley, 2012;Falkner et al, 2021). One drawback is, of course, that the largest emitters in the second-most ambitious group might end up in the free-riding group and not curb emissions at all.…”

The Paris Agreement has the potential to facilitate ambitious climate action: a reply to ‘Why do climate change negotiations stall? Scientific evidence and solutions for some structural problems’ by Ulrich J. Frey and Jazmin Burgess

“…These are essential insights and point to the potential for establishing climate clubs. This approach to cooperation should be seen not only as an alternative to the UNFCCC process, but also as a potential complement, and one that is fully compatible with the design of the Paris Agreement (see Falkner et al, 2022). Facilitating club formation, whether between groups of countries on overall climate policy, as a result of sectoral cooperation (for example, within aviation or shipping) or based on specific technologies (such as hydrogen or carbon capture and storage), can help overcome or circumvent the problems of 'opposing interests and political stances' that Frey and Burgess (2022: 2) identify (and offer a more realistic path forward than overturning the consensus decision-making rule).…”