What’s On the Agenda? UN Climate Change Negotiation Agendas Since 1995

Since the UN General Assembly launched negotiations on climate change in 1990, countries have negotiated and adopted the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement. Between the treaties, major decisions set new approaches to reducing emissions and established new institutions.

In the last 22 years, how have COP negotiations evolved to address an increasingly wide range of issues relevant to climate change?

A new journal article in Climate Policy by Rishikesh Ram Bhandary and Jen Iris Allan attempts to understand what climate talks have focused on and how the volume of work has changed over time. The authors have created a Climate Negotiations Database, a public interactive database that categorizes negotiation agenda items starting with the first Conference of the Parties (COP) of the UNFCCC in 1995.

Key findings:

• Intergovernmental agendas provide one way to study how countries collectively view climate change and potential governance options.
• The Climate Negotiations Database finds relative stability in the top 10 climate issues discussed over time, with mitigation and transparency as the top two categories.
• The range of issues discussed in the context of international climate negotiations has expanded, especially since 2007. The climate talks have broadened their focus beyond reducing emissions.
• There is a mismatch between the recurrence of mitigation sub-items and substantive outcomes that would yield emissions reductions. Half of the mitigation sub-items relate to market mechanisms and forests, perhaps indicating a lack of attention to the core work of reducing emissions from industrial sources.
• The number of agenda sub-items for the climate regime spiked at the start of the Paris Agreement negotiations and remained relatively high. Under the Paris Agreement, the balance of issues considered may shift and potentially amplify the recent downturn in mitigation-related items.

Overall, while the negotiations have broadened to include a wider range of issues, transparency and mitigation matters have dominated the agendas. Greater balance among issues is needed.