Live simultaneous interpretation in French.
International negotiations on climate change control are moving away from a global cooperative agreement (at least from the ambition to achieve it) to adopt a bottom-up framework composed of unilateral pledges of domestic measures and policies. This shift from cooperative to voluntary actions to control GHG emissions already started in Copenhagen at COP 15 in 2007 and will become a platform formally adopted by a very large number of countries in Paris at COP 21. The emerging architecture calls for a mechanism to review the intended contributions of the various signatories and assess their adequacy. Most importantly, countries' voluntary pledges should be compared to determine the fairness, and not only the effectiveness, of the resulting outcome. This assessment is crucial to support future more ambitious commitments to reduce GHG emissions that can be adopted only if no major free-riding behavior is detected. In addition, in case the assessment of INDCs reveals their inadequacy, countries will be asked by the UNFCCC to increase their effort through enhanced contributions in the formal UN negotiations. For all these reasons, it is crucial to identify a methodology that can provide the appropriate information to assess and compare the INDCs. This lecture is a first attempt into this direction. A first preliminary set of results designed to compare the INDCs of the major GHG emitting countries will also be proposed and the consequent policy implications will be discussed.
