5.1 Ideas
5.1.1 International ideas: the Second and Third Assessment Reports of the IPCC
5 India in the wings: the second phase (1995–2004)
This second phase covers the period from the first COP in
1995, through to the Marrakech Accords to the end of 2004, the year preceding the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. The following chapter describes the each of the forces as they operated at India’s domestic level and at the international level of the climate regime, with important events shown in Figure 21 below.
Crucial ideas (both intersubjectively and collectively held) are found in the IPCC’s Second and Third Assessment Reports. India was adjusting to a more liberalised economy with attendant variations in GDP in this phase while still battling high levels of poverty and underdevelopment.
In the climate regime, material capability in the form of finance, technology and capacity building – important to developing countries, including India – were seemingly low down on the international agenda during this second phase. The regime was in an institution-building phase as the states agreed to the Kyoto Protocol and then elaborated and operationalised it with the Marrakech Accords.
This section is an attempt to highlight connections between the mental frameworks within which, and through which, people and states conceive of action in the material world. These frameworks constrain and enable both what people and states are able to achieve and how they conceive of doing so.
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Figure 21: Second phase from Berlin Mandate (1995) to the year preceding the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol.
Figure 22: Working groups of the Second Assessment Report of the IPCC Source: Own compilation based on information available on
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_and_data_reports.shtml [Accessed on 20/02/2015]
The SAR was published at a crucial time in the emerging climate change regime’s history, given its publication in the lead up to COP2 – a COP at which the mandate issuing from COP1 was to begin to negotiate a Protocol to the Convention with binding reduction targets and a timetable to which countries would need to adhere. Given that the USA had resisted the so-called “targets and timetable” approach by pointing to the uncertainties of the science, any SAR statements evincing further certainty in the science were viewed as crucial to the forward momentum of the regime.
Thus it was important that the COP – including the USA – decided that the SAR was “the most comprehensive and authoritative assessment now available of the scientific and technical information regarding global climate change” (UNFCCC, 1996: decision 6/CP.2, para. 2). When the rumoured change in US Policy did materialise, and the USA formally announced to COP2 that it would support “the adoption of a realistic but binding target” for emissions, the SAR certainly appeared to be the proximate cause of the turnabout (Edwards & Schneider, 2001).
The SAR states that atmospheric concentrations of three of the greenhouse gases – Carbon Dioxide, Methane, and Nitrous Oxide – have all increased since pre-industrial times, an increase that can be “attributed largely to human activities, mostly fossil fuel use, land-use change and agriculture” (IPCC, 1995: 21, point 1). In addition fossil fuel combustion and biomass burning have led to increases in tropospheric aerosols, which are known to increase direct negative (cooling) radiative forcing17 as well as potentially increase indirect negative forcing. This would seem to have the potential to counteract any warming locally, but the rate of cooling is unknown; what is known is that aerosols are short-term climate forcers, unlike the known long-term forcing of GHGs (IPCC, 1995: 21, point 2). The report states that the “balance of evidence…suggests a discernible human influence on global climate,” despite the persistence of uncertainties due to the limited ability to
17 Radiative forcing is a measure of the transfer of heat between the earth and surrounding atmosphere – a negative number means more heat is being transmitted back to the atmosphere and the climate is cooling whereas a positive number indicates more heat is trapped near the earth’s surface and the opposite is true.
•The Science of Climate Change
Working Group I
•Impacts, Adaptations and Mitigation of Climate Change: Scientific-Technical Analyses
Working Group II
•Economic and Social Dimensions of Climate Change
Working Group III
_____________________________________________ Chapter 5. India in the wings: the second phase (1995-2004)
quantify the precise measure of human interference, and other key factors such as the “magnitude and patterns of long- term natural variability” (IPCC, 1995: 22, point 4). The SAR went some way towards calculating and clarifying the limitations to emissions required to stabilise concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, thereby effectively providing a carbon budget (Bolin, 2007).
In the years since the FAR had been published, improved technology had enabled more realistic climate model projections. These suggested that general warming could be expected to increase the number of extremely hot days and reduce the number of extremely cold days; this warming would also lead to a dynamic hydrological cycle that would increase and decrease the severity of droughts or floods, depending on local conditions (IPCC, 1995: 22-23, point 4).
This second phase also covers the publication of the Third Assessment Report (TAR) by the IPCC in 2001. The TAR was released at a difficult time for the climate change regime: COP6 had been suspended in November 2000 when negotiators could not reach agreement on the outcome of the Buenos Aires Plan of Action. Negotiations had broken down amid USA-EU and intra-EU tensions (Ott, 2001), with the key obstacles being fundamentally political and not technical In an unprecedented occurrence, the sixth COP was resumed (known as COP6 bis) in July 2001 in order to make progress towards finalising the technical details operationalising the Kyoto protocol. The focus of the three working groups was also slightly adjusted from the working groups of the SAR as shown in Figure 23 below (compare with Figure 22 above). This has remained the arrangement of the working groups (at least until AR5 in 2014).
Figure 23: Working groups of the Third Assessment Report of the IPCC Source: Own compilation based on information available on Bolin (2007) and
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_and_data_reports.shtml [Accessed on 20/02/2015]
In an effort to standardise reference to certainty the TAR introduced specific language expressing the assessed findings of WGI (scientific basis for climate change) on a continuum from “virtually certain” findings or observations (a greater than 99% chance) through the middle or “medium likelihood” (33-66%) all the way to exceptionally unlikely (less than 1% chance). WGII findings
•The Science of Climate Change
Working Group I
•Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability
Working Group II
•Mitigation of Climate Change
Working Group III
stipulated calibrated confidence levels between high (greater than 95%) through to medium (33- 67%) all the way to low (less than 5%) (IPCC, 2001: 5, Box SPM-1). Uncertainty and confidence levels are depicted in Figure 24 below.
Figure 24: IPCC authors’ language for confidence and certainty
Source: Own rendering of text in IPCC’s Third Assessment Report (2001)
The TAR author teams reported that observations of the earth’s surface showed a clear warming trend and it was very likely that the 1990s would prove to be the warmest decade since records began. Globally atmospheric concentrations of GHGs showed an upward trend, and human activity was likely the cause of the observed warming over the preceding 50 years (IPCC, 2001: 31, point 9.8). The outlook for the future continued to be bleak: global average surface temperatures were likely to rise at rates unprecedented in 10 000 years; warming above the global average was very likely over nearly all land areas, increasing hot waves and extremely hot days and decreasing cold snaps and extremely cold days (IPCC, 2001: 14, points 4.2-4.7). WG I assessed that an intensification of the hydrological cycle was very likely to produce increased average global precipitation with more extreme precipitation events in some areas and increased summer drying and attendant risk of drought in others (IPCC, 2001:31 point 9.14), while sea level was projected to continue to rise for centuries (IPCC, 2001: 21, point 6.8).
Impacts, adaptation and vulnerability were assessed by Working Group II, which found that action to mitigate GHGs would lead to less pressure on natural systems (IPCC, 2001: 21, point 6.9-6.10) and that adaptation would be a necessary complement to mitigation efforts (IPCC, 2001: 23, point 6.13-6.15). Adverse impacts were more likely the faster the rate, and the larger the change (IPCC, 2001: 14, point 3.28), and would disproportionately affect developing countries and poor people in all countries (IPCC, 2001: 23, points 6.16-6.18), raising issues of equity. Assessing the available literature, WGIII noted that successfully implementing GHG mitigation would require overcoming a range of social, technological, economic and institutional obstacles (IPCC, 2001: 24, point 7.6) and
_____________________________________________ Chapter 5. India in the wings: the second phase (1995-2004)
would be more effective at national levels if deployed as part of a portfolio of policy and regulatory instruments aimed at sustainable development (IPCC, 2001: 24 point 7.7 and p29, points 8.1-8.2).
The interplay of negotiations focusing on mitigation and adaptation is a story about choices: in the beginning and considering the stocks of GHGs already in the atmosphere, mitigation was the focus of the negotiations by both developed and developing countries. This was as much because of the more powerful voice of the developed countries as it was because of the belief that focusing on adaptation meant admitting to the defeat of mitigation attempts (Rayner, 2010). So focus was initially on mitigation, not adaptation, but in the absence of meaningful, mitigation measures as required by science, adaptation has become more important and urgent. In some ways developing countries have inadvertently stymied themselves as, by not pushing (or being able to push) the adaptation agenda from the beginning and being unable to ensure mitigation, they now stand to suffer most from the climatic changes.