Posted on August 8, 2018 by Dan Esty
Managing interdependence in our complicated world of nearly 200 nations and thousands of other interests pushing and pulling on global policymaking is never easy. And yet the challenge of getting the world community to work together to solve problems remains urgent – especially for issues of inescapably global scope such as climate change. The international chaos of the past several weeks (with the U.S. President attacking allies, denigrating longstanding alliances, cozying up to autocrats, and brandishing tariff increases like a hotheaded D’Artagnan slashing his way through a Three Musketeers movie) shows just how fragile our collaborative regimes can be. Against this backdrop, the success of the 2015 Paris Climate Change Agreement in getting so many nations and so many others (including mayors, governors, and CEOs) to commit to a joint effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions looks more amazing today than it did when the COP21 negotiations concluded three years ago.
Continued progress to address the threat of climate change cannot, however, be taken for granted. Discord in one domain of international relations has a tendency to spill over into others. Indeed, successful collaboration often depends on give-and-take across policy realms as well as within particular treaties or other cooperative endeavors. President Trump’s bellicose behavior on the international stage thus adds stress to the efforts to maintain momentum for climate change action – on top of the discord that he had already introduced by promising to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement.
But the news from the climate change front is not all bad. President Trump cannot actually remove the United States from the Paris Agreement until 2020 based on the accord’s carefully specified withdrawal provisions. More importantly, the leadership slack is being taken up by others. Not only have foreign leaders, such as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and French President Macron, grabbed the climate change mantle, a whole series of mayors (including Anne Hidalgo in Paris and Frank Jensen in Copenhagen not to mention hundreds of municipal leaders across America) and governors (including Jerry Brown in California and Jay Inslee in Washington state) have ramped up their greenhouse gas emissions control initiatives. Indeed, nearly 3000 subnational leaders across all 50 U.S. states have signed on to the “We Are Still In” coalition, and their actions have kept the United States more or less on target to achieve the emissions reduction commitment set out by President Obama in the U.S. “nationally determined contribution” to the Paris Agreement.
So while the Trump Administration’s non-cooperative posture may yet slow down the global march toward a clean energy future, it may also hasten the creation of a new multi-dimensional structure of global climate change action – and a framework for managing international interdependence more generally — capable of withstanding the President’s belligerence. With layers of state and local activities as well as national and global ones, supported by initiatives from the business community and many other non-governmental actors, the pace of progress need not falter. And the unintended gift of a more diverse and robust regime of global collaboration may well endure.
Tags: Trump, Paris Agreement, international cooperation, subnational action, non-governmental organizations