TY - JOUR A1 - Dirnitrov, Radoslav A1 - Hovi, Jon A1 - Sprinz, Detlef F. A1 - Saelen, Håkon A1 - Underdal, Arild T1 - Institutional and environmental effectiveness BT - will the Paris Agreement work? JF - Wiley interdisciplinary reviews : Climate change N2 - The 2015 Paris Agreement (PA) has been widely hailed as a diplomatic triumph and a breakthrough in global climate cooperation. However, it is commonly accepted that the PA's collective goal—keeping global warming “well below” 2°C above preindustrial levels—remains ambitious. Making matters even more challenging, in 2017, global CO2 emissions resumed growth after 3 years of near standstill. In 2018, this growth accelerated. It is therefore extremely important that the PA's institutional architecture meet expectations concerning its ability to induce member countries to promise and deliver emissions reductions. This study offers a review of the rapidly growing literature on the PA, to assess its strengths and weaknesses, its significance, and its prospects. We focus on evaluations of its institutional structure and its ability to induce member countries to implement policies. We frame the issues as a trilemma: the challenge of simultaneously satisfying all three main conditions for effectiveness—broad participation, deep commitments, and satisfactory compliance rates. Based on our review, we conclude that the key challenge for the PA will likely be to facilitate sufficiently fast ratcheting‐up of nationally determined contributions, while keeping compliance rates high. KW - ambition KW - climate change cooperation KW - compliance KW - Paris Agreement KW - participation Y1 - 2019 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.583 SN - 1757-7780 SN - 1757-7799 VL - 10 IS - 4 PB - Wiley CY - Hoboken ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Sælen, Håkon A1 - Hovi, Jon A1 - Sprinz, Detlef F. A1 - Underdal, Arild T1 - How US withdrawal might influence cooperation under the Paris climate agreement JF - Environmental science & policy N2 - Using a novel agent-based model, we study how US withdrawal might influence the political process established by the Paris Agreement, and hence the prospects for reaching the collective goal to limit warming below 2 degrees C. Our model enables us to analyze to what extent reaching this goal despite US withdrawal would place more stringent requirements on other core elements of the Paris cooperation process. We find, first, that the effect of a US withdrawal depends critically on the extent to which member countries reciprocate others' promises and contributions. Second, while the 2 degrees C goal will likely be reached only under a very small set of conditions in any event, even temporary US withdrawal will further narrow this set significantly. Reaching this goal will then require other countries to step up their ambition at the first opportunity and to comply nearly 100% with their pledges, while maintaining high confidence in the Paris Agreements institutions. Third, although a US withdrawal will first primarily affect the United States' own emissions, it will eventually prove even more detrimental to other countries' emissions. KW - climate change KW - Paris agreement KW - President Trump KW - 2 degrees C target KW - agent-based modeling KW - reciprocity Y1 - 2020 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2020.03.011 SN - 1462-9011 SN - 1873-6416 VL - 108 SP - 121 EP - 132 PB - Elsevier CY - Oxford ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hovi, Jon A1 - Sprinz, Detlef F. A1 - Saelen, Håkon A1 - Underdal, Arild T1 - The Club Approach: A Gateway to Effective Climate Co-operation? JF - British Journal of Political Science N2 - Although the Paris Agreement arguably made some progress, interest in supplementary approaches to climate change co-operation persist. This article examines the conditions under which a climate club might emerge and grow. Using agent-based simulations, it shows that even with less than a handful of major actors as initial members, a club can eventually reduce global emissions effectively. To succeed, a club must be initiated by the ‘right’ constellation of enthusiastic actors, offer sufficiently large incentives for reluctant countries and be reasonably unconstrained by conflicts between members over issues beyond climate change. A climate club is particularly likely to persist and grow if initiated by the United States and the European Union. The combination of club-good benefits and conditional commitments can produce broad participation under many conditions. KW - UNFCCC KW - climate change co-operation KW - climate clubs KW - club goods KW - conditional commitments KW - agent-based models Y1 - 2019 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123416000788 SN - 0007-1234 SN - 1469-2112 VL - 49 IS - 3 SP - 1071 EP - 1096 PB - Cambridge University Press CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Sprinz, Detlef F. A1 - de Mesquita, Bruce Bueno A1 - Kallbekken, Steffen A1 - Stokman, Frans A1 - Saelen, Hakon A1 - Thomson, Robert T1 - Predicting Paris: Multi-Method Approaches to Forecast the Outcomes of Global Climate Negotiations JF - Politics and Governance N2 - We examine the negotiations held under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention of Climate Change in Paris, December 2015. Prior to these negotiations, there was considerable uncertainty about whether an agreement would be reached, particularly given that the world’s leaders failed to do so in the 2009 negotiations held in Copenhagen. Amid this uncertainty, we applied three different methods to predict the outcomes: an expert survey and two negotiation simulation models, namely the Exchange Model and the Predictioneer’s Game. After the event, these predictions were assessed against the coded texts that were agreed in Paris. The evidence suggests that combining experts’ predictions to reach a collective expert prediction makes for significantly more accurate predictions than individual experts’ predictions. The differences in the performance between the two different negotiation simulation models were not statistically significant. KW - climate policy KW - climate regime KW - expert survey KW - forecasting KW - global negotiations KW - Paris agreement KW - prediction KW - simulation Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.17645/pag.v4i3.654 SN - 2183-2463 VL - 4 SP - 172 EP - 187 PB - Cogitatio Press CY - Lisbon ER -