Ban Ki-moon's Climate Challenge

The UN secretary-general has stated that climate change should be on the agenda at the G20 summit in Toronto.

The United Nations boss, Ban Ki-moon, issued a challenge to the Harper Conservatives last Wednesday: put climate change on the agenda when Canada hosts the G20 summit next month in Toronto. British economist Sir Nicholas Stern delivered the same message the next day.

Meanwhile, U.S. Senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman were issuing a challenge of their own to their colleagues: put the new climate change bill, the American Power Act, on top of the Senate's legislative agenda in the coming months.

Amid the crossfire, the Conservative government seemed without a plan. While Prime Minister Stephen Harper suggested that the G20 summit would mainly focus on the global economy with only a limited amount of time set aside for climate change, he affirmed Canada’s commitment to tackling climate change through a different forum, the UN process that produced December’s Copenhagen Protocol. Meanwhile, Environment Minister Jim Prentice reiterated Ottawa’s commitment to harmonizing Canadian climate regulations with those coming out of Washington. Yet at the same time he expressed doubts that the America Power Act, or any other comprehensive climate bill, would pass through the Senate.

If the Harper government needs a plan, it can start by accepting the Ban-Stern challenge.

The G20 summit represents a unique opportunity for countries to put some meat on the Copenhagen Protocol. That deal was a breakthrough in that it included greenhouse gas reduction commitments from all of the world’s major emitters, including China and the U.S. Only developed countries had set out targets under the Kyoto Protocol, and the U.S. never ratified that agreement. But Copenhagen was also a disappointment in that countries only agreed to aspirational targets. They left themselves much work to do.

For many reasons, the upcoming G20 meeting is an ideal place to start that work.

First, the summit will bring together the world’s major emerging economies and greenhouse gas emitters, including Brazil, Russia, India, and China. It was largely this group of countries that was able to produce the Copenhagen Accord at the 11th hour when most commentators thought the negotiations had failed. In smaller groups, countries often find their interests more closely aligned. Small negotiating blocs have successfully tackled acid rain and water pollution in Europe and broken deadlocks in international trade negotiations.

As Professor David Victor and others have written in Science, a group like the G20 “would be small enough to make progress on such complex issues yet sufficiently broad to exert leverage on the global situation.” Indeed, if China and the U.S., backed by the G20, announced a climate change deal, the rest of the world would likely sign on, just as the international community took note of the Copenhagen Accord. The G20’s leverage is even greater when proposing solutions, such as adaptation funds for technology transfer initiatives, which only these major economies can finance.

Next, as the G20 is primarily an economic forum, it is an important opportunity for countries to discuss the economics of climate change. In particular, at Copenhagen, developed countries agreed to raise $30 billion over three years to help developing countries mitigate and adapt to climate change. That timeline is ambitious, and the money will only materialize by 2012 if leaders put their heads together now.

Along the same lines, the G20 is a perfect opportunity to discuss the economic implications of future U.S. climate policy. It is becoming clearer with each new Congressional climate bill that Washington will not let any future caps on domestic greenhouse gas emissions impair the international competitiveness of American industry. For example, the American Power Act would, by 2020, require the president to put tariffs on carbon-intensive products imported into the U.S. from countries without comparable climate regulations in place. As a meeting of trading partners, the G20 could be a sounding board for such proposals.

Finally, the G20 offers the Canadian government an opportunity to reassert its leadership on climate change and, in doing so, ensure its seat at the negotiating table. Prime Minister Paul Martin once proposed tackling the climate agenda outside of the UN process with a similar group of the major developed and emerging economies, a group he called the L20. In the past few years, Canada has eschewed such a leadership role, seemingly content to sit in the passenger seat of U.S. climate policy. The G20 is a chance to retake the wheel, at home, in Toronto.

Before his meeting last week with Prime Minister Harper, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said that “Canada has a special role and special responsibility to play.” This may have been a challenge to the federal government. But in many ways, Ban also offered it a climate plan.