David Victor

International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)

Surprises can be positive or negative, actual, theoretical, or artificial, i.e., generated by models, journalists or pundits. Focusing here on negative, actual surprises, Victor predicts a vast oversupply of surprises that will find scientists spending their time in attribution, e.g., is an event (surprise) caused by global warming?

The conventional wisdom is that negative surprises will provide pressure for more stringent action to slow global warming and that will make the Climate Convention more effective. Most policy advocates assume that environmental policy evolves in ratchets, pushed along in brief windows of opportunity. Fears and evidence of surprises are key elements of climate politics because they can provide both a window for political actions by focusing on the costs of unchecked global warming and thus help marshal public support in favor of costly anti-greenhouse actions. Law and policy could move very quickly in an atmosphere marked by many surprises and with less attention to nuances of science and expert advice.

But the conventional wisdom may be wrong. We don't know where the climate convention is going. Trying to manage the economy and its greenhouse gas emissions requires an international legal framework, and if this is not done well, it could be extremely costly. When attempting to develop such a framework, it helps to have a smoking gun, such as a dead forest or an ozone hole to spur international action, but this is not always possible. It may be politically expedient to develop law (rapidly) in the context of climate surprises, but could easily lead the policy responses down the wrong track, and that is a problem if only because whatever institutions are created to manage the climate problem will be durable and difficult to change, and the climate problem itself will require long term (many decades, perhaps centuries) policy responses.

Where the convention stands

The Framework Convention on Climate Change is a legal text in international law, meaning that it will be ratified and binding on the parties. Is there connection between such "hard law" and what actually happens at the domestic level? The basic goal of the Climate Convention is that countries should try to bring levels of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2000 -- a "soft target" that probably will not be met by many. A recent report from OECD shows that several countries are really trying. Most countries really do obey international law, but no one can predict what levels will really be in the year 2000. The convention further requires developed countries to help developing countries pay for these changes. All parties to the convention are required to submit reports detailing their emissions and their policies to control these emissions. What happens to the reports is key. Other systems of reports -- notably those managed by the OECD and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), do seem to work because the reporting obligations are taken seriously, and the reports are subjected to serious reviews. Virtually every international environmental agreement requires reports but they are often late, of poor quality, and include questionable data. In the climate convention the reports will be publicly available and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) will have at least informal roles in double-checking that governments actually do what they claim in their reports and that governments live up to their international commitments. Getting the reporting system to be effective is much more important than the actual goals and timetables in the convention.

The Global Environment Facility (GEF) will be the interim financial mechanism. GEF is a $2 billion pot of money to be spent on global problems. GEF, which has operated for three years, will be the financial mechanism for implementing the climate and biodiversity treaties.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is becoming less and less relevant to the Convention, i.e., all issues of legal organization and content are untouched by the IPCC. They could help with global warming potentials (GWP), an important policy-relevant concept, but the method chosen by IPCC simply lumps everything into one number. Victor prefers allowing countries to set their own targets expressed in terms of greenhouse (radiative) forcing,thus avoiding the use of a GWP, but he acknowledges that this is not the way it will probably go. Indeed, the ongoing process is based more on the Montreal Protocol model , where emissions targets were set, and different gases were weighed according to their ozone depletion potential (ODP).

The Secretariat for the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) has been extremely busy since Rio. By late August 1994, 93 countries had ratified the convention; 110 may sign on before the Conference of Parties (COP) convenes in Berlin on March 28, 1995.

Issues relevant to how the Convention has evolved

1. Among the symbols that drive politics are the fear of surprise and catastrophe. Symbols are central because the stakes are high and facts are soft. Many scientists are in frustrating, decidedly "unscientific" roles -- such as commenting on whether symbols such as "playing dice with the planet," are accurate descriptions of the climate dangers.

2. The anti-symbols that industry and some scientists are producing in response to green symbols frequently amount to symbol debunking and character assassination of proponents (i.e., saying scientists are crying wolf to get funding for their research). Alternative symbols -- those that don't focus on looming catastrophe -- have been in short supply.

3. This issue has been put on the agenda by the environmental movement in industrialized countries. Because symbols play such a prominent role, it may turn out that agendas will be set by those countries -- primarily the rich democracies -- that can use symbols effectively.

4. Developing countries have been dragged into the issue and have not set the agenda. The developed world (led by the "green groups") has set the environmental agenda. The developing countries have focused on other issues like financial resources, technology transfer, and equity. The exception to this is the Low-lying Countries Coalition, which, for obvious reasons, is concerned about rising sea levels; but they have not been successful in anything they have fought for.

If surprise occurs, it will affect the symbols. Many surprises will occur, and scientists will spend more time debunking the link between global warming and unsurprising events than actually identifying real surprises. The focus will be on negative surprises e.g. catastrophic extreme weather events, because of the politics and symbols -- negative surprises are crucial to those who favor strong controls on greenhouse gas emissions because they underscore the potentially catastrophic effects of climate change.

Because virtually all ideas and pressure for greenhouse policy come from the domestic level, the international policy level is probably not very relevant. Similarly, the existence and salience of surprises at the domestic level matters most. This contradicts the romantic notion of a unified world response.

The Vision Thing: Where is the Convention Headed?

The logical next step is a protocol, but on what? Transportation, energy efficiency standards, transfer of energy-efficient technologies?

Parts of conventional wisdom worth rethinking:

• targets and timetables
• convention/protocol model
• hard law versus soft law
• how to make package deals (stakes are high)
• how to deal with cross-cutting issues
• how to deal with non-compliance generally and in specific cases
• liability, cause and effect problem in a noisy system