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Climate Teams: International Greenhouse Gas Mitigation

helena lopes 459331 unsplashCountries together    
can transfer our resources    
and reach net zero.    

Researchers at Motu, Seoul National University, Universidad de los Andes, Colombia, Environmental Defense Fund, and the University of California, Santa Barbara are proposing a new mechanism to extend international climate cooperation. The climate team mechanism is designed to allow countries to work together to transfer resources for credible emission reductions. More information on this project is at the climateteams.org website.

Some countries are willing to transfer significant resources to increase the speed of others’ transition to zero net emissions. No effective, credible international mechanism that can be applied to emission reductions in all sectors currently exists to do this, but the cooperative approaches of Article 6.2 of the Paris Agreement provide space for innovation.

A ‘climate team’ offers one model to enable host (low marginal cost) and investor (high marginal cost) countries to cooperate to genuinely reduce global emissions and enable more ambitious Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) in both. A large (national or jurisdictional) scale climate team agreement can more easily demonstrate additionality of mitigation and avoid leakage. It can take advantage of existing commitments (NDCs as a basis for crediting baselines) and monitoring (National Inventories) thus increasing transparency and reducing administrative costs.

Transformational change requires significant policy changes and large investments which can be both economically and politically costly. The climate team model gives the host country confidence that they will receive an acceptable return if they successfully reduce emissions.

More information is also available here, in a report for the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements (on page 71, entitled Climate Teams: A New Model for Investor-Host Climate Cooperation).

A two-page outline of the climate teams model is also available along with biographical information about those involved.

Funders

Korea Forest Service

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