The Chairmans Club - Global Initiative on Climate Change

Global Initiative on Climate Change

The Club’s agenda has been influenced profoundly by the global debate on climate change and the potential consequences for corporate agendas and strategies. Keynote meetings have addressed the Stern Report, the Politics for Climate Change at Brussels, the Shell Energy Scenarios, and CBI review of the UK’s industrial response.

A misalignment is emerging between top down approaches (emissions quotas) to climate issues driven by national economic and political considerations, and the global nature of climate systems and the urgency of their implications for action (supply side investment) necessary to decarbonise economic activity sufficiently quickly.

An ad-hoc working group has therefore been established under the aegis of Global Solutions Initiative to track the developments in science and influence public policy and the consequences for corporate direction and priorities.

Briefing papers have been prepared on key themes and a proposal developed for establishing global machinery to complement and understand more fully existing national and institutional programmes.

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The Problem Post Tallberg Reflections Reflections on Turning Society Around in a Hurry A Dispassionate Survey

Proposal to Establish a Global Network

The Science Context: the IPCC has been hugely instrumental in generating the present consensus that to have a reasonable chance of limiting global warming to around 2°C, requires a reduction of CO2 eq emissions to <20 billion tonnes per annum by 2050, and stabilisation of the concentration of these gases in the atmosphere at around 450 –500ppm. The size of the discontinuity envisaged in energy systems is absolutely enormous, equating to a reduction of some 65 billion tonnes per annum - or well over all existing emissions - and an implied per capita target of 2 tonnes CO2 eq per annum, which compares, when world population increase is considered, to the present average of 8, and a US figure of >20 both in the course of rising.

The achievement of such a concentration path pre-supposes transformational breakthroughs at several levels, (1) in a number of key technologies; (2) in consumer, business and public policy attitudes, behaviours and priorities in relation to acceptable levels of waste, transportation intensity and energy efficiency; (3) pricing mechanisms, markets and measurement systems for carbon that reward emissions foregone in agriculture and forestry as powerfully as the value of traded caps for manufactured goods: (4) a political will by nation-states to co-operate on meta-objectives about limits to emissions, and (5) action by key emitting states to negotiate urgently on the key international deals which have to be done regardless, and provide the appropriate resources, whilst continuing to compete for capital allocation and asset efficiency in support of, and within the limits set by, the macro-goals.

Various scenarios already regard a target level of 550ppm as excessively challenging/unobtainable for a number of reasons. They argue that investment in new technologies such as CCS will not be made sufficiently urgently using traditional market evaluation techniques and depreciation standards; the current DOHA round shows the difficulty of reconciling immediate national and regional priorities for GDP and employment growth with wider longer term co-operative objectives; reporting standards and information systems for energy efficiency, emission intensity and transparency are still embryonic. In addition, over and above these challenges, there is the shadow of a more pessimistic climate science – well set out in the interim results of the EC’s ADAM work - which postulates the urgent evaluation of much more demanding thresholds of 350ppm CO2 eq and below, beyond which it is argued irreversible damage to planetary systems and/or unstoppable runaway global temperature increase becomes a much higher and unacceptable level of risk.

At present the debate about the feasibility of a ‘blueprint’ with significant milestones and dates to contain the maximum temperature increase to around 2°C with an appropriate time-shape is not played out in public, and there is little constructive experience with, or appetite for contingency risk management for events that have not been encountered before - the so called Giddens Paradox - but are clearly embedded as possible outcomes in both the consensus and more pessimistic scenarios.

The Gap in Governance Machinery: the route to Copenhagen and beyond is presently populated with several different narrative outlines of what needs to happen. They are all powered by what Stern calls the “logic of basic arithmetic” and assume effective implementation through the agency of national governments acting co-operatively. They further assume that a timely and ‘good enough’ consensus will be achieved on issues such as equity rights of developing countries; capital transfers to preserve forests, oceans, and other carbon sinks; cap-systems which significantly decrease, rather than displace, emissions geographically; and that public investment subsidies will be forthcoming to ‘kick-start’ CCS technology among other things. It seems increasingly possible that the present institutions of global climate governance will not be able to cut through the morass of competing national interests, and therefore will not prove adequate to the challenge framed for them by the international science community.

Proposal to establish a Pathfinders (Sherpas) Group and a Global Climate Network: there are four primary arenas of potential misalignment where political and institutional programmes and individual voices most powerfully require supplementary and supportive action.

1) communicating and updating the key developments in climate science in the intervals between the IPCC Assessment Reports, in order to create and maintain intensely and urgently a common and continuously current awareness and preparedness.

2) establishing a shared global blueprint of goals, tolerance levels, actions and fresh resource requirements as a common reference framework for integrating and leveraging individual national priorities, policies and solutions - embracing scientists, governments, corporations, institutions, NGOs and consumers.

3) scoping, energizing and creating accountability for the critical international deals at the heart of the blueprint necessary for radically decarbonising the global economy (coal fired power stations, carbon capture and sequestration, deforestation and land-use, equity and absolute poverty-alleviation rights and responsibilities) starting with the key emitting states and focusing on the enabling frameworks and technologies to kick-start self-interested action by the key companies and political agencies, which "own" the existing carbon economy.

4) developing and openly rehearsing an emergency lifeboat-drill or dress-rehearsal of actions and resource commitments for accelerated deployment in advance of any serious early warning shocks, or passing of tipping point thresholds recognised in advance by catastrophe scenarios as a core opponent of risk management.

These four arenas transcend the mandate and scope of any of the individual climate organizations already in existence, and are not addressed by any overarching global mechanism sufficiently commensurate with the problem.

The creation of such a mechanism would need to comprise a Global Climate Network of leaders with the highest political, moral, scientific and business authority and standing, pursuing a mandate to chart the way forward in the form of a pre-agreement or concordat by nation states, based on the outcomes of such a lifeboat-drill rehearsal, as the framework for the national, regional and sectoral programmes to be executed subsequent to key thresholds being passed or critical events occurring.

The Global Network would want to consider how best to monitor, influence, catalyse and prepare the political process and particularly the key individual heads of governments worldwide to underwrite the development and implementation of the pre-agreement. At its pinnacle it would comprise a small number of global figures with the world status to be virtually self-nominating in view of their credibility, stature and global experience across public policy, international corporate and programme leadership, politics and climate-science - and of their freedom from representational obligations.

It would be supported and serviced by – and in turn support – an international and initially informal group of the highest quality Pathfinders (sherpas) in constant interaction and co-ordination with national and international agencies and policy-makers, comprising climate scientists, scenarists and communicators charged with synthesising findings from all available sources to stimulate the communication of policy options, evaluations, and resource-deployment programmes necessary for the ‘Blueprint’ and emergency ‘lifeboat-drills’, and ensuring their highest order readiness for transfer from a rehearsal mode into agreed global actions, as soon as this becomes essential.

The combination of Network, Sherpas, and ‘lifeboat drill’ would complement and leverage the existing plural political power systems, which are currently having to juggle their roles as world stewards of last resort for longterm 'constant care' for planetary health on the one hand, and the preservation of the very carbon economy on the other which sustains the material well being of consumers and electors. Their unique contribution would be in finding points of affinity between conflicting national and regional perspectives, and in accelerating the ability of plural systems to focus and act decisively on the key international deals that need to be done. Such authority as they exercised would be exclusively by virtue of the remarkable qualities and standing of the individual network members and sherpas and their concern for the public good. Their legacy would be to help shift the model of global governance from competing national self-interests reacting after the event to unrehearsed disasters, towards coalitions of self-interested states based on science and moral purpose energized to rehearse and react in advance of present danger.

The Global Solutions Initiative is primarily a coordination mechanism for bringing together the energy and insights of the institutes, agencies, centres and key individuals involved in shaping the fundamental research and policy options at the heart of the global climate debate.