Carmen Bunzl - Universidad Pontificia Comillas

Chapter 2. Options for future climate change architectures 39
possible. There has also been increasing interest in sectoral approaches, which
can best accommodate the different national circumstances of countries,
enhance developing country participation and moderate competitiveness
concerns if applied globally. Nevertheless, the core of the issue is politics, since
the final agreement on an international climate change regime will most likely
arise from an iterative process of countries proposing and assessing each others’
proposals.
1.2 Elements for a future international agreement on climate change
A number of elements are commonly incorporated in existing and new
proposals for climate change agreements. The topics of recent negotiations for a
future climate change agreement seem to be concentrating on four elements:
mitigation (which includes emission reduction efforts by Annex I taking the
lead, but possibly also by advanced Non-Annex I countries taking their “fair
share”), adaptation, technology, and financing. Based on these, the main
elements of the future international climate agreement may be identified
(Höhne et al., 2007):
1. Participation: All agreements are undertaken between specific groups
of participants. Agreements may be global or involve only a subset of
countries. Dangerous climate change can only be prevented if
industrialized countries’ emissions decline and developing countries’
emissions do not raise as much as currently expected; an increasing
number of countries should take on increasingly stringent
commitments.
2. Differentiation of emission targets – allocation: For proposals that
include emission reduction targets it is necessary to set the level of the
reductions for individual countries; how the allocation level should be
determined.
3. Types of commitments: Currently, Annex I countries have
committed themselves to binding absolute reduction targets. Other
Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería ICAI Carmen Bunzl Boulet Junio 2008