NEW YORK — The United Nations Climate Action Summit 2019 kicks off Monday. Essentially, the UN is looking for member countries to double down on their respective Paris Climate Agreement pledges (undoubtedly feeling extra pressure for reassurance after President Trump publicly said he would pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement).
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has made it clear he doesn’t want beautiful, grandiose speeches from member countries as they convene this week. He wants concrete specifics on how each will reach their Paris pledges.
“My generation has largely failed until now to preserve both justice in the world and to preserve the planet,” Guterres told a congregation of youth at the UN. “I have granddaughters. I want my granddaughters to live in a livable planet.”
The UN has aimed to have global greenhouse gas emissions cut by 45% within the next decade, and hit net zero by 2050. If this goal is met, scientists around the world think we may be able to avoid hitting a 2 degree Celsius average increase in global temperatures (which they say would be catastrophic to life on land and in the oceans). Different countries have set different plans to reach this goal, since each has a different reality on the ground. The UN has said it’s cool with each country developing its own plan.
What happens, though, if a country says its going to do certain things to reach this goal, and then decides not to? Are these commitments binding in anyway?
The answer to that is open to interpretation, in a sense, and legal scholars reach different conclusions based on ideology and belief on international law. The United Nations says the Paris Agreement has both “binding and nonbinding provisions”; but, as we’ve seen with the United States, countries can decide later to pull out or just not meet their goals, and if they’re wealthy and powerful enough there probably are no legal repercussions. When international law is enforced, after all, it’s usually enforced by those wealthy and powerful countries.
That is not to say there is no accountability, however. As the UN puts it:
There is no benefit to flouting the Agreement. Any short-term gain will be short-lived. It will undoubtedly be overshadowed by negative reactions, by other countries, financial markets, and most important, by their citizens.”
In other words, there may be political accountability rather than legal accountability. That is what UN Secretary General Guterres is banking on by speaking to youth climate leaders. As they become voters, he wants them to do what the UN may not be able to do on its own: pressure their countries to live up to their Paris Agreement pledges.
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