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New Podcast on Carbon Markets & International Cooperation, Direct from UN Climate Change Conference in Madrid

In my previous posting as this blog, What to Expect at COP-25 in Madrid, I wrote about the “Rulebook” for the Paris Agreement, which puts flesh on the bones of the skeletal 13-page Agreement. It was completed last year at COP-24 in Katowice, Poland, with the exception of one very important part of the Agreement, namely Article 6, which potentially facilitates international carbon markets and other forms of cross-border cooperation.

In the latest episode of our podcast, “Environmental Insights: Discussions on Policy and Practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program,” our focus is on precisely this topic in an interview with an individual who has had tremendous experience in this realm, Andrei Marcu, the founder and executive director of the European Roundtable on Climate Change and Sustainable Transition. You can listen to the interview here.

In hosting these podcast episodes, I interview interesting and accomplished people who are working at the intersection of economics and environmental policy. Our first episode featured my interview with Gina McCarthy, former Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (who is leaving Harvard to become President of the Natural Resources Defense Council). Our second episode featured Nick Stern of the London School of Economics discussing his career, British politics, and efforts to combat climate change.

In this third episode – recorded here in Madrid at COP-25 – Andrei Marcu provides an overview of the opportunities and challenges facing the negotiators, with particular attention to the important work now being done on carbon markets and international cooperation via Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. By the way, you can read about the other activities of the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements at COP-25 in Madrid here.

Marcu has long been engaged in multilateral negotiating processes and subsequent implementation action, both at the global and sectoral levels. In various capacities, he has acted as negotiator for developing countries, coordinator for the G-77 and China, and as representative of the international business community. He previously served as Manager of Private Sector Cooperation in the United Nations Development Programme; and founder, president and CEO of the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA).

Marcu attended the first week of negotiations at COP-25, during which time lower-level discussions were held among representatives of many of the 200 countries which signed the Paris Climate Agreement of 2016. Marcu characterizes the Agreement as a “decentralized pledge and review type of approach” to the global emissions problem, one that brings countries to the table, but also one that “creates headaches” in the market.

In the interview, Marcu says that what happens in Madrid during the coming week will be very important. “Presumably you will see three decisions – one for Article 6.2, one for 6.4 and one for 6.8,” he explained, naming three of the key sections of the Paris Agreement that are being negotiated at COP-24. Marcu also remarked that some of the most difficult decisions may be “punted” to future talks.

In general, Marcu said he is “optimistic that we are moving in the right direction” on addressing climate change, while also expressing concern about the pace of change. “To be fair, it is not an easy change. It’s quite a radical change as people are just coming to terms with what carbon neutrality means.” he stated. “It is not an incremental change. It is a radical change.”

What to Expect at COP-25 in Madrid

The “Rulebook” for the Paris Agreement puts flesh on the bones of the skeletal 13-page Agreement, and was completed last year at COP-24 in Katowice, Poland, with the exception of one very important part of the Agreement, namely Article 6, which potentially provides for international carbon markets and other forms of cross-border cooperation. Watch for key developments in Madrid!

Key Challenge for Long-Term Success of Paris Agreement

There are two necessary conditions for ultimate success of the Paris Agreement. First, adequate scope of participation. This has been achieved, with meaningful participation from countries representing some 98% of global emissions – or some 85% if the U.S. withdraws in November, 2020 (compared with the 14% of global emissions from countries committed to emissions reductions under the current, second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol). The other necessary condition is adequate ambition of the individual national contributions. This is where the greatest challenges lie.

The very element of the Paris Agreement that has fostered such broad scope of participation – namely, that the individual national “pledges” (Nationally Determined Contributions or NDCs) are anchored in national circumstances and domestic political realities – implies that individual contributions may not be sufficient, due to the global commons nature of the climate change problem, and the attendant free-rider issues.

So, are there ways to enable and facilitate increased ambition over time? Linkage of regional, national, and sub-national policies can be part of the answer – connections among policy systems that allow emission reduction efforts to be redistributed across systems. Linkage is typically framed as between cap-and-trade systems, but regional, national, and sub-national policies will be highly heterogeneous. More about this below.

Merits and Concerns regarding Linkage

Linkage facilitates significant compliance cost savings by allowing firms to take advantage of lower cost abatement opportunities in other jurisdictions. According to one recent study, costs could – in theory – be reduced to 25% of what they otherwise would be! Also, linkage means improved functioning of markets by reducing market power and price volatility, and there are political benefits to linking parties as a sign of momentum when political jurisdictions band together. Another advantage is administrative economies of scale. Finally and very importantly, linkage allows for the UNFCCC’s key equity principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities” (CBDR) to be achieved without sacrificing cost-effectiveness.

There are also some legitimate concerns about policy linkage. First, there are distributional impacts, both in the form of redistribution within jurisdictions, and redistribution across jurisdictions. Such impacts are politically problematic. There is also the automatic propagation of some design elements, in particular, the cost-containment elements of banking and price collars which propagate from one linked system to another. For that matter, weak design in one jurisdiction affects prices and quality in all linked jurisdictions. And price shocks can propagate through linked jurisdictions. Finally, there is decreased autonomy, as rules are set jointly by all linked parties.

Linkage and the Paris Agreement

There are three distinct but closely related levels of relevant policy action. First, national (or regional) governments can establish emission-reduction policies, including carbon taxes, cap-and-trade systems, and performance standards. Second, these jurisdictions can link their policy instruments through mutual recognition of permits, allowances, or credits via bilateral agreements. This allows trade of these units across international borders, which facilitates lower-cost achievement of the aggregate target. But such transfers of emission reduction responsibilities and actions need to be correctly counted toward compliance with respective NDCs under the Paris Agreement. This is where Article 6 comes in!

In particular, Article 6.2 provides for Internationally Transferred Mitigation Outcomes (ITMOs) and Corresponding Adjustments, which together can function as the international accounting mechanism to correctly reflect a multiplicity of international private-sector exchanges (under various international linkages).

In other words, I view ITMOs as units of accounting for Corresponding Adjustments, not as a medium of exchange for government-government purchase and sale. Otherwise, Article 6.2 would become equivalent to the Kyoto Protocol’s Article 17 (international emissions trading), and will fail as that did, because governments are not cost-minimizing agents, and lack requisite information even if they were (Hahn & Stavins, “What Has the Kyoto Protocol Wrought? The Real Architecture of International Tradeable Permit Markets,” 1999).

Is Heterogeneity a Challenge for Linkage?

Yes, it can be. There are three major categories of heterogeneity that can pose challenges to effective international policy linkage under the Paris Agreement. First, there are heterogeneous policy instruments: cap-and-trade; tradable performance standards; emission reduction credits (offsets); taxes; and performance standards. Second, there are heterogeneous jurisdictions and geographic scope: regional, national, and sub-national; and status under the Paris Agreement (Party and non-Party). Third, the NDC targets themselves area highly heterogeneous: hard (mass-based) emissions caps; relative mass-based emissions caps (relative to BAU); rate-based emissions caps (per unit of economic activity or per unit of output); and non-emissions caps, such as some degree of penetration of renewable energy sources. Also, there are differences in base year, target year, sectors, GHGs, estimated global warming potential, and conditionality.

Is Linkage Among Such Heterogeneous Policies Feasible or Wise?

With Michael Mehling (MIT) and Gilbert Metcalf (Tufts University), I have carried out research on heterogeneous linkage and the Paris Agreement (“Linking Climate Policies to Advance Global Mitigation.” Science 359, 2018). Among our major findings is the following. Most features of heterogeneity do not present insurmountable obstacles to linkage, but some present real challenges, and indicate the need for specific accounting guidance to avoid double-counting. Article 6.2 provides an obvious home for this accounting guidance (Schneider, Duan, Stavins, Kizzier, Broekhoff, Jotzo, Winkler, Lazarus, Howard, and Hood. “Double counting and the Paris Agreement rulebook.” Science 366, 2019).

The Outlook for Heterogeneous Linkage under Article 6.2 of the Paris Agreement

The negotiators in Madrid have an opportunity to define clear and consistent guidance for accounting for emissions transfers under Article 6.2. A robust accounting framework can foster successful linkages of climate policies across jurisdictions. But if guidance extends much beyond basic accounting rules – such as implicit taxes on cooperation via what have been termed “share of proceeds” and “net global emission reduction” – then restrictive requirements will impede effective linkage, and thereby drive up compliance costs. True to the spirit of the Paris Agreement, less may be more!

So, a combination of sensible common accounting rules and absence of restrictive criteria and conditions can accelerate linkage, allow for broader and deeper climate policy cooperation, and – most important – thereby increase the latitude of Parties to scale up the ambition of their NDCs.

Only time – and the work of the delegates in Madrid – will tell.

The Harvard Project on Climate Agreements at COP-25

Along with my Harvard colleagues, Joseph Aldy, Robert Stowe, and Jason Chapman, I will be at the Twenty-Fifth Conference of the Parties (COP-25) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Madrid, Spain, leading our delegation from the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements (HPCA), December 8-11, 2019.

In addition to holding a series of bilateral meetings with various national delegations, I will participate in at least four events. Two of these are panel sessions organized by HPCA, while the two others are panel sessions organized by national delegations. Our team will be at COP-25 during the week of December 8-12, 2019. COP-25 attendees who wish to meet with the Harvard Project during the conference should send an email Jason Chapman, Project Manager (jason_chapman@hks.harvard.edu).

Four Events in Brief

Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions through Carbon Pricing: Recent Research, Analysis, and Experience
Robert Stavins, Moderator and Panelist; Joseph Aldy, Panelist; Hosted by Harvard Project on Climate Agreements, Enel Foundation, and Tsinghua University Global Climate Change Institute; Monday, December 9, 2019; 11:30 am – 1:00 pm; Location: Side Event Room 3

The Seventh Global Climate Change Think Tank Forum: The Latest Developments in Climate Change Economics
Robert Stavins, Presenter; Hosted by China National Center for Climate Change Strategy and International Cooperation; Tuesday, December 10, 2019; 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm; Location: China Pavilion

Realizing the Potential of Article 6 of the Paris Agreement
Robert Stavins, Moderator and Panelist; Joseph Aldy, Panelist; Hosted by the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements; Wednesday, December 11, 2019; 12:30 pm – 2:00 pm; Location: Pavilion of the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA)

Enhancing Capacity of Developing Countries to Address Climate Change: Issues and Opportunities
Robert Stavins, Keynote Speaker; Hosted by Korea University, Green Asia, Center for Climate and Sustainable Development Law and Policy, Global Green Growth Institute, UNDP Seoul Policy Centre, UN Office for Sustainable Development; Wednesday, December 11, 2019; 3:00 pm – 4:30 pm; Location: Korea Pavilion

Two Harvard Project Events in Detail

Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions through Carbon Pricing: Recent Research, Analysis, and Experience

Monday, 9 December, 2019; 11:30am – 1:00pm, Location: Side Event Room 3

Speakers will present recent research and analysis of carbon-pricing policy to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The panel will give some attention to experience and prospects in South America and to China’s emerging national system. A new research paper by Robert Stavins on the relative merits of cap and trade and carbon taxes will provide a basis for much of the discussion.

Speakers: Joseph Aldy, Harvard University; Simone Mori, Enel; Raffaele Mauro Petriccione, Director General of DG Climate Action in the European Commission; Robert Stavins, Harvard University; Zhang Xiliang, Tsinghua University; government representatives to be invited.

Realizing the Potential of Article 6

Wednesday, 11 December 2019; 12:30pm – 2:00pm; Location: Pavilion of the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA)

Panelists will discuss the potential of Article 6 to decrease mitigation costs and incentivize increased ambition. They will review the status of the negotiations on the Article 6 rulebook, including issues remaining to be resolved at that point in the COP – including potentially, ongoing discussion about double counting (environmental integrity) and the Article 6 – Article 13 interface (applications of the enhanced transparency framework to Article 6 transfers).

Panelists: Joseph Aldy, Harvard Kennedy School; Kay Harrison, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, New Zealand; Kelley Kizzier, Environmental Defense Fund; Andrei Marcu, European Roundtable on Climate and Sustainable Transition; Robert Stavins, Harvard Kennedy School

The Path Ahead

After COP-25, I will post an essay at this blog assessing the progress (or lack thereof) made in Madrid – on Article 6, as well as other elements and issues.

In the meantime, if you will be at COP-25, and would like to meet with the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements, please contact Jason Chapman (jason_chapman@hks.harvard.edu).

Will the Paris Agreement Help or Hinder Cooperation among Nations?

I just returned from Florence, Italy, where I participated in the Second Carbon Market Workshop, organized by the European Commission, and hosted by the European University Institute. This workshop, which brought together government representatives from around the world (with a sprinkling of academics and NGO representatives to add some spice to the discussion), was convened to examine how regional, national, and sub-national jurisdictions can cooperate in ways that could increase the effectiveness and/or reduce the costs of their respective climate change policies. One of my tasks at the workshop was to make a brief dinner speech. Jos Delbeke, the long-time, legendary Director-General of Climate Action for the Commission, asked me to talk about how the Paris Agreement might help or hinder practical climate policy cooperation around the world. I drew extensively upon my research with Michael Mehling and Gilbert Metcalf. Here is the gist of what I said in my dinner speech.

Some Paris Agreement Fundamentals

The hybrid design of the Paris Agreement was key to its successful enactment in 2015 and its coming into force in November, 2016. The hybrid design to which I refer is the combination of top-down (centralized) and bottom-up (decentralized) elements. The top-down elements include, for example, the requirement that countries state their national contributions every five years, a schedule which is binding under international law for those jurisdictions that have ratified the Agreement. The key bottom-up element is the set of individual Nationally Determined Contributions (or NDCs) themselves, which are not part of the Paris Agreement itself, but rather are listed in a separate Registry. These are not binding under international law, but rather are left to the domestic authority of the respective countries.

This dual structure led to the achievement of one of two necessary conditions for ultimate success of the Paris Agreement, namely adequate scope of participation, which now includes countries accounting for 97% of global emissions, compared with the 14% that are covered by the current, second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol.

But adequate scope of participation is only one of two necessary conditions; the other is adequate collective ambition. Unfortunately, the fundamentally voluntary nature of the NDCs – which is precisely what facilitated the exceptionally broad scope of participation – works against adequate ambition to address this global commons phenomenon, which is plagued by free rider problems.

The Challenge for Climate Negotiators

This raises the key overall challenge that faced the negotiators in Bonn in May and will face them in Katowice, Poland, in December (at the Twenty-Fourth Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change): What can they do, when writing rules to put flesh onto the skeletal Paris Agreement, to encourage countries to increase their ambition over time? That’s where carbon markets and cooperation among jurisdictions potentially come in.

International Cooperation under the Paris Agreement

Largely because cooperation among jurisdictions — including through carbon markets — can lower abatement costs, such cooperation may be essential for the ultimate success of the Agreement. This cooperation might take the form of international linkage, where by “linkage,” I mean connections among policy systems that allow emissions reduction efforts to be redistributed among those systems.

Such linkage is typically framed as between cap-and-trade systems, but regional, national, and sub-national policies are and will be highly heterogeneous, including not only cap-and-trade, but offset systems, carbon taxes, performance standards, and technology standards. Note that we already see this sort of heterogeneity within the European Union’s own set of climate change policies, as well as within California’s suite of climate initiatives.

The good news is that linkage among highly heterogeneous policies is eminently feasible, as I have written about previously in this blog, drawing on my research with Michael Mehling (MIT) and Gib Metcalf (Tufts University). The even better news is that one part of the Paris Agreement provides a potential home for such international cooperation, linkage, and carbon markets – Article 6. (If you are interested in the details, I recommend a recent report from the Asian Development Bank, “Decoding Article 6 of the Paris Agreement.”)

The Promise and Problems of Article 6

In the negotiations that led up to the 2015 Paris climate talks, it was by no means clear what role — if any — market mechanisms would play in the Paris Agreement. In the negotiations, the European Union, Brazil, and other countries played crucial roles in generating the compromise that became Article 6 of the Agreement.

That compromise resulted in text that — to put it kindly — is very much subject to interpretation. Now, as Benito Müller, Kelley Kizzier, and their colleagues have observed, intentional vagueness and ambiguity of text can be quite helpful in achieving a negotiated compromise, but such vagueness is decidedly not helpful when it comes to making an agreement operational.

This compromised home for markets emerged in Article 6 despite the entrenched opposition of a small set of vocal countries — including some Latin American socialist economies (the so-called ALBA coalition) — who wanted nothing of the kind to appear in the Paris Agreement. They succeeded in keeping the word “market” out the Paris Agreement, but the concept and the potential reality is very much there! (Ironically, at their insistence, the phrase “non-market” does appear in the Agreement.)

In any event, provision for markets and international cooperation is implicit in Article 6.2, which allows for cooperative approaches involving Internationally Transferred Mitigation Outcomes (or ITMOs), which are vague and without definition, but can function as an international accounting mechanism for international trades, exchanges, and cooperation. And Article 6.4 establishes a more centralized mechanism to contribute to emissions mitigation and support sustainable development, essentially as a successor to the Clean Development Mechanism (and may soon come to be called the “Sustainable Development Mechanism” or SDM).

Advantages and Concerns about Cooperation and Linkage

Despite the opposition I mentioned, most parties to the Paris Agreement are supportive of cooperative approaches (and more than half explicitly mentioned carbon markets in their respective NDCs).

This may be because of six important advantages of such cooperation: first, cost savings by allowing firms to take advantage of lower cost abatement opportunities in other jurisdictions; second, reducing market power of individual firms by enlarging the market’s scope, and reducing total price volatility by thickening markets; third, political benefits to Parties, by providing a sign of “momentum” as jurisdictions band together, possibly influencing other parties to participate; fourth, administrative economies of scale through knowledge sharing in design and operations, as well as shared administrative and oversight costs; fifth reducing leakage and competitiveness impacts by harmonizing the shadow price of carbon across jurisdictions; and sixth, allowing for the achievement of the UNFCCC’s critical principle of “Common but Differentiated Responsibilities” without sacrificing cost-effectiveness.

There are also real concerns about linkage: first, distributional impacts within and across linked jurisdictions; second, automatic propagation of certain design elements, in particular, cost-containment elements (banking, borrowing, and price collars); and third, decreased national autonomy.

Back to the Article 6 Negotiations and International Policy Linkage

Article 6 can be a home both to linkage of the sort we usually talk about, as well as “soft linkage,” such as an agreement — explicit or implicit — to harmonize carbon prices either at some level or within overlapping bands.

Thinking about the UNFCCC negotiations taking place now, most types of heterogeneity – of policy instruments, level of political jurisdiction, and nature of NDC targets – do not present insurmountable obstacles to linkage, but some do present real challenges, and indicate the need for specific guidance as the rulebook of the Paris Agreement is written.

Unfortunately, some countries want the Article 6 guidance to go beyond fundamental issues of accounting and environmental integrity to broader matters of environmental ambition, which properly belong in other parts of the Paris Agreement. Whereas, accounting provisions to avoid double-counting of NDC actions through ITMOs surely belong in the Article 6 rulebook, some countries have proposed, for example, that all ITMO exchanges themselves must actually reduce net emissions.

This sounds very much like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s 20% rule in its 1970’s Emissions Trading Program, which required that net emissions fall by 20% with each trade. This was a tax and an inhibition on trading, and the result was that virtually no trading occurred. This reminds me of a corrupted version of George Santayana’s admonition that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Instead we have, “I’ve learned from my mistakes, and I can repeat them exactly the same again.”

The general problem is that if the guidance extends much beyond basic accounting rules, then restrictive requirements could actually impede effective cooperation. True to the nature and spirit of the Paris Agreement, less can be more!

UNFCCC Update from Bonn

I closed my dinner comments in Florence with a brief update on the negotiations that concluded the previous week in Bonn. The two weeks of meetings of the Article 6 group were reported to be much tougher than they had been previously, yet the progress on the Article 6 work is actually ahead of that of groups focused on other parts of the Paris Agreement. Although positions on Article 6 are hardening, there is no clear blocking party or coalition (unlike in the work on some of the other parts of the Agreement). There may be less resistance to agreement simply because participation in Article 6 instruments would ultimately be voluntary.

The Path Ahead

So, as the negotiations proceed, a combination of common accounting rules and an absence of restrictive conditions can accelerate linkage, allow for broader and deeper climate policy cooperation, facilitate the emergence of a robust global carbon market, and – most important – increase the latitude of the Parties to the Paris Agreement to scale up the ambition of their long-term contributions to global greenhouse gas emission reductions.

Whether that will come to pass, we simply do not know as of now. As usual, only time will tell.