Opinion US exit from global climate governance can be an opportunity

Immediately after assuming office, Donald Trump signalled that climate denialism would be a more pronounced feature of his second stint at the White House. After withdrawing his country from the Paris Climate Pact, the US President threatened to diminish America’s engagement with global environmental compacts and treaties. The Presidential Memorandum announcing the US’s pullback from 66 international organisations, including premier UN agencies for climate negotiation and research — the UNFCCC and IPCC — is, therefore, not surprising. Its exit from the UNFCCC will remove the US from international climate diplomacy, and the absence of American scientists in IPCC could deprive the agency of state-of-the-art knowledge generated in the country’s institutions. This would make global warming mitigation tougher. However, climate negotiations are testimony to undercommitment from the country that has spewed the greatest amount of GHGs. American withdrawal from environmental treaties should, therefore, be seen as a chance to reimagine the  climate governance architecture.

The first task now should be to calibrate the deficits caused by US withdrawal. The Green Climate Fund and the Adaptation Fund were in poor health even before Trump’s presidency. The recently operationalised Loss and Damage Fund is yet to get its act together. The US has been a historic defaulter, though Joe Biden’s presidency did salvage Washington’s reputation to an extent. The contributions of other developed countries have also rarely matched their economic clout. Several Western European countries have slashed their aid budgets considerably in the last few months. The problem is also that middle-income countries tend to be the greatest beneficiaries of climate finance. In the aftermath of the US withdrawal, a serious introspection on mobilising funds and devising mechanisms to direct finances to countries that need them most should be the UNFCCC’s priority.

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Middle-income countries have the institutional capacity to execute major climate projects. But that means multilateral organisations need to find ways to mitigate the disadvantages of other nations in the Global South. In recent years, India has spoken of using the International Solar Alliance (ISA) to build capacities in poor countries. The US has exited the ISA, but it never gave any assistance to the alliance. The churn in climate architecture is an opportunity for the grouping to come into its own.