Many of us want our teaching to connect to public affairs. Engaging with international climate negotiations can provide a rich array of examples of philosophical concepts and theories, and a source of deep questions. However, there are significant barriers to entry here both for students and teachers. News reports of climate negotiations tend to be superficial or inaccurate. On the other hand, turning to primary and scholarly sources involved with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) requires facing a wall of jargon and acronyms. Learning to navigate the UNFCCC website, I’ve heard one climate scholar quip, is a dissertation project in itself.
In this post, I want to lower those barriers to entry for students and teachers in two ways. In Part I, I bring into focus some philosophical themes and questions that arose in COP26, the most recent annual conference of parties to the UNFCCC. I link to video footage where possible. In Part II, I report on and recommend an in-class simulation of climate negotiations.
(My focus will be on teaching global climate policy as part of value theory. I suspect there are also elements that can be included in philosophy of language and social epistemology classes, but that’s a separate story).
PART I: COP26—Illustrating Philosophy
History matters
One central topic in global climate ethics concerns burden-sharing. There are excellent accounts of different normative principles proposed to guide the just distribution of responsibility to deal with climate change. These include forward-looking principles which focus on countries’ differentiated Ability to Pay and backward-looking principles such as those which focus on historic responsibility or the benefits countries have received from fossil fuel burning in the past. While all these accounts roughly converge on the idea that rich and historically high-emitting countries of the Global North bear the primary responsibility for coping with climate change, the extent of responsibility of different countries is still a key issue.
However, it is tricky finding delegates at COP making recognizably ethical claims that correlate with the ideas discussed by philosophers. Many of the battles are fought through coded language over arcane procedural matters. And the parade of public speeches by Heads of State at the beginning of COP tend to be yawn-inducing promotions of their countries’ self-proclaimed achievements (notable exception).
However, press conferences at COP26, given during the heart of the negotiations by sleep-deprived delegates, can contain explicit references to burden sharing useful for use in-class. For instance, if you want to hear about the historic responsibility of the Global North, listen to the spokesperson for the Like-Minded-Developing-Countries (LMDCs). This bloc is currently made up of 22 countries from Asia, Africa, and South America, including India and China. Before COP26, the group issued a communique on a range of concerns. But more dramatically, in a press conference, during COP, current spokesperson for the LMDCs, Bolivia’s Diego Pacheco, emphasized that “history matters!”. Echoing some scholarly ideas of the earth’s limited ability to absorb CO2 as a resource that should be divided fairly, he claims that “developed countries” have over many decades “overused their domestic carbon space” and are “now using the carbon space of developing countries”.
Excusable ignorance?
In contrast, while UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson seemed to partially endorse the idea of developed countries’ historical responsibility, he also urged including a typical caveat to this responsibility—namely, that emissions produced before it was suspected that they caused harm should be discounted. (For a defense of that caveat, see here, and for a recent philosophical response to that “caveat,” see here). Showing excerpts from both these press conferences in class is a clear way to emphasize that the debate about backward-looking vs forward-looking principles is not purely academic. On the contrary, backward-looking and forward-looking principles are appealed to and rejected by political actors from different quarters, presumably to elicit sympathy for their respective negotiating positions from the audience of media and civil society.
“Loss and Damage” and legal liability
Another element at COP was significant movement on “Loss and Damage”—a contested concept that refers, roughly, to the harms of climate change that occur despite efforts to prevent them. Countries in the Global North are typically wary of establishing a separate stream of climate finance for Loss and Damage, ostensibly because it might, in future, be a concession of legal liability for such harms (notable exception here). In a bold move, Antigua and Barbuda together with Tuvalu launched a “commission” (video) to investigate legal avenues for pursuing compensation for loss and damage, making reference to the moral-legal principle of “polluter pays”. While an attempt to have this issue brought to the International Court of Justice will need the approval of another UN body such as the General Assembly, the new commission will apparently investigate the prospects for bypassing this process by exploring the potential for legal redress under the law of the sea. The loss and damage issue is another example to help students see how a philosophical concern—about liability for climate damages—is playing out in the global policy space, and interacting with other legal regimes.
Beyond binaries
We, and our students, can be tempted to treat international negotiations as a binary conflict between the rich, polluting Global North and the blameless, dominated victims of the Global South. But close study of COP26 also shows that dualistic set-up to be limiting. We could just as easily conceptualize the political debate as a three-way conflict, between powerful countries of the Global North, powerful emerging economies (India, China, Brazil, South Africa), and small climate-vulnerable states. Again, this is supported by press-conference footage. For instance, Milagros De Camps of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) calls for more action on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and finance from “major emitters”, and blames the G20 for upholding fossil fuel subsidies, a group that includes India, China, Brazil, South Africa, and Saudi Arabia, as well as major economies of the Global North. Another way to divide countries, which often reveals negotiating positions, are between those that might economically benefit, at least a little, from moderate levels of warming, and those that do not, as well as countries that have the most to lose from a transition away from fossil fuels, compared with those with more limited fossil reserves. These other groupings are less often discussed in the climate ethics literature, but we mislead our students and our readers if we follow some NGOs in framing climate negotiations solely as a struggle between North vs South.
India digs coal
To illustrate this point that sometimes fault lines cross North-South lines, it could be helpful to show students video clips of the final plenary. It is during the plenary that what is known as the “cover decision”—the overall statement on climate action agreed to by all parties—was to be formally accepted, along with the few remaining technical elements of 2015’s Paris Agreement. A couple of words in the final cover decision drew the attention of the global press, due to their dramatic late inclusion. The proposed draft text that countries had all but agreed to contained key references to “phasing out” coal power. Coal-rich India made a formal intervention suggesting this be weakened to “phasing down” coal power. Since consensus has remained the decision-making rule of the UNFCCC, no country wanted to be seen as jeopardizing the whole agreement by objecting to India’s amendment, so countries (reluctantly) accepted this change.
Within a political, rather than a legal document, this phase-out/phase-down change has little direct effect, but the language dampens the signal being sent to global investors and policy-makers about the speed of the transition away from coal. India has since pointed out, rightly, that the “phase down” language was not original. It was used in the surprise US-China agreement produced earlier in the conference. Moreover, neither the US nor China registered disapproval of the amendment in the plenary, suggesting that the change had their blessing. You and your students can watch India’s last minute change receive criticism in the plenary from representatives of the EU, Mexico, the Marshall Islands, Antigua and Barbuda (for AOSIS), and Fiji among others.
Students can consider: What constraints are the Indian (and Chinese) negotiators dealing with? Does the EU have moral standing to criticize India given the broken promises of developed countries to deliver the already relatively meager targets of international climate finance? What might greater cooperation on this complicated issue require?
Procedure
The complaints from the wide range of countries mentioned above were partly at the substance of the “phase-down” change, but also procedural—criticizing the way representatives of India (and the US and China) had implicitly used their threat of vetoing the agreement in order to insert language amenable only to a few countries.
If a class wanted to concentrate on procedural issues, there are questions that go beyond the use (or abuse) of veto powers and the advantages and disadvantages of consensus decision making. They could also consider how important access to the negotiations is. Renewed attention was brought at Glasgow to the question of who has access to the corridors and rooms of power. Corporate watchdog Global Witness meticulously counted up delegates and found the numbers of fossil-fuel lobbyists to be larger than that of any single country and twice that of the representatives of indigenous people. Covid restrictions and bad planning seemed to have left many activists and at least one official delegate out of the picture, leading to the common refrain that this was the “most exclusionary” COP ever. These problems are typically couched as a serious threat to the legitimacy of the process. For teachers, they provide a gateway into possible discussions about what other elements might be required to grant (undemocratic) international processes legitimacy in general.
PART II—Playing the roles
I wanted to introduce a segment on international climate ethics to my environmental ethics class this year. While I was tempted to start with the kinds of footage I have been suggesting above, I instead encouraged students to play the roles of countries in global climate negotiations. It was a good decision.
We used the World Climate Simulation game—a freely accessible simulation of the Paris Agreement’s “pledge and review” negotiating structure. The core idea is that groups representing major players in climate negotiations bring forward their pledges on climate finance and emissions reductions at timed intervals, with time for discussion both within and between the groups. These pledges are then entered into the C-Roads simulator which allows the players to watch their pledges change the projected temperature in 2100 in real time.
While the game is intended to provide a general introduction to international climate change negotiations, it can be tailored to focus more explicitly on normative issues. When groups announce their pledges, I ask them to try to defend their level of emissions reduction and climate finance contributions/asks. We go deeper into the ethical justifications (or lack of them) for different positions in the following class, turning to the clips of negotiators mentioned in the first section of this post, and encouraging discussion about the plausibility of their claims.
The simulation led to one of the best teaching experiences I have had. After absorbing a two-page briefing sheet on their faction, students became particularly engaged in class, arguing with each other vigorously but respectfully. In just a few minutes, students independently came up with concepts like issue tradeoffs (Nigeria offered the US royalty-free oil in exchange for faster US emissions reductions), and technology transfer. In the following class, discussions were able to move relatively seamlessly between topics like the Paris architecture (which they had now used), national interests (which they had now simulated), global temperature goals (which they had already tried to reach), climate finance (which they had now bargained about), and ethical argumentation (which they had now begun to innovate). In a survey, 83% of students voted the two-class segment as “better” or “much better” than average, and stressed that the interactivity element “made us think more”. I’ve heard feedback from other colleagues that similar simulations they have tried have also been successful.
I’m excited about running the game again—it is easily expanded to incorporate non-state actors such as the press and climate activists as side players, who don’t make pledges, but could try to intervene, or be swayed by impressive ethical appeals. Fossil-fuel lobbyists could have an objective to play spoiler roles. The simulation could easily be spread over two days, so students have time to write short speeches, or op-eds to try to further the cause of their assigned faction. For teachers who want to explore the role of non-state actors and different “policy levers” the Climate Action Simulation is also worthwhile.
COP26 and the World Climate Simulation provide a number of rich points of departure for classes across value theory: contemporary moral issues classes, business ethics, PPE, social and political philosophy, philosophy of law. I have not discussed international climate policy as an entry point to discuss topics such indigenous sovereignty or ideal vs non-ideal theory. Post-Paris, other fora, such as the G7, G20, and World Trade Organization meetings might (and perhaps should ) become more influential than COPs. But COPs will remain highly relevant and will almost certainly remain the most transparent venue for negotiations, which makes them accessible for teaching, at least once the barriers to entry are lowered.
I believe that one of the strengths of philosophical enquiry is to help students make sense of the conflicts which are shaping their world. Connecting the ethics of climate change to global climate negotiations is one way to do this. This post was intended to point you and your students to some resources that might help bridge the gap between theory and practice, to emphasize that debates about excusable ignorance, differential abilities, consensus decision-making, proper procedure and legitimacy of international institutions are not restricted to some hypothetical realm, but play out, literally, before our eyes in high-stakes global negotiations.
Further resources
COP26 recordings on demand (selected press conferences on my YouTube channel)
Summary of COP26 by Earth Negotiations Bulletin (an independent UN reporting service)
Climate Interactive simulation resources
Ewan Kingston
Ewan Kingston is an Assistant Professor in the Philosophy department at the College of Charleston. His current research concerns the appropriate influence (if any) that firms should have in their own regulation. He has been following COPs, both up close and afar, since COP15 “Hopenhagen” in 2009.
