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The Paris Agreement created an institutionalized role for non-state actors through voluntary cooperation. Many international NGOs (INGOs) are particularly active in these "Paris partnerships," often working with multinational corporations to reduce emissions and promote decarbonization. Though there is ample work on both the effectiveness of the Paris partnerships and on the role of INGOs in the global climate regime, much of this work focuses "outward" – on how INGOs contribute to climate mitigation and adaptation, or influence norms, discourse and policy. Yet, there is considerably less work that focuses "inward" – examining who INGOs work with in order to achieve their policy goals. This paper provides a descriptive analysis of key INGOs in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process, as a first step in a larger research agenda to understand the incentives and opportunities that drive INGO behavior. Specifically, it uses network analysis to identify the "climate establishment" – which I define as the insider INGOs working within the multilateral process and with large corporations to influence rulemaking, soft law and firm behavior. Measures of network centrality demonstrate that two INGOs – WWF and the World Resources Institute – are by far, the most authoritative members of the climate establishment. They participate in the largest number of partnerships, and have "important" friends, as measured by eigenvector centrality. The data also indicate that the climate establishment sees carbon pricing as a key strategy, and it often cooperates with banks that are large funders of fossil fuel projects. The descriptive analysis of the climate establishment and its partners raises important questions for future research about why INGOs choose to partner with F100 companies, and how such cooperation might influence INGO behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Moving beyond technocratic approaches to climate action, climate justice articulates a paradigm shift in how organizations think about their response to the climate crisis. This paper makes a conceptual contribution by exploring the potential of this paradigm shift in higher education. Through a commitment to advancing transformative climate justice, colleges and universities around the world could realign and redefine their priorities in teaching, research, and community engagement to shape a more just, stable, and healthy future. As inequitable climate vulnerabilities increase, higher education has multiple emerging opportunities to resist, reverse, and repair climate injustices and related socioeconomic and health disparities. Rather than continuing to perpetuate the concentration of wealth and power by promoting climate isolationism’s narrow focus on technological innovation and by prioritizing the financial success of alumni and the institution, colleges and universities have an opportunity to leverage their unique role as powerful anchor institutions to demonstrate climate justice innovations and catalyze social change toward a more equitable, renewable-based future. This paper explores how higher education can advance societal transformation toward climate justice, by teaching climate engagement, supporting impactful justice-centered research, embracing non-extractive hiring and purchasing practices, and integrating community-engaged climate justice innovations across campus operations. Two climate justice frameworks, Green New Deal-type policies and energy democracy, provide structure for reviewing a breadth of proposed transformational climate justice initiatives in higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Arctic region is one of the most exposed to the global climate change. Russia accounts for more than a half of the whole Arctic territory and population and allocates most of the economic activity of the region. From the Soviet time till now, the Arctic region also accounts for a substantial share of Russia’s wealth. The article analyzes often ambiguous knowledge on climate change implications for the long-term economic development of the Russian Arctic. Based on the review of the key policy documents issued in Russia and ongoing and planned development programs, the study aspires to contribute more clarity on Russia’s standing in the Arctic region. We aim to analyze the convergence of Russian climate and Arctic policies boosting the synergies between each other. The paper discovers, among other issues, the climate change adaptation priorities in policy areas aimed at minimizing net costs of climate change. While policies rhetorically aim at contributing to resilient and sustainable growth in the Russian North, they remain under-developed in accounting for multiple climate-related risks. Our analysis suggests that a comprehensive framework of Arctic policy measures should be centered around climate change as a core factor underlying the future of the region and should encompass two main policy dimensions: (a) strengthening the knowledge base on climate change, the adjunct risks, and emerging opportunities in the region and (b) developing the system for climate change risk management and resilience building ensuring that regional diversity and climatic and socioeconomic features of various locations are taken into serious account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy relevance is the raison d’être for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), yet few studies have analysed what the concept entails, not least from the perspective of key target groups for the IPCC. We present a framework which enables analysis of how different actor strategies (heating up and cooling down) contribute to shape relevance-making in specific political situations when IPCC knowledge is interpreted and used. Drawing on empirical evidence from the reception and use of the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C (SR15) across three policy making levels, the paper demonstrates different examples of creating policy relevance. First, the paper analyses the origin of SR15 and the failed attempts to formally acknowledge SR15 in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process. Second, it investigates how SR15 has been used to develop and legitimize the EU net-zero target and the European Green Deal. Third, the paper demonstrates how SR15 has been used both for legitimizing and challenging climate policy at the national level, using the example of Norway. In sum, the reception of SR15 demonstrates that while IPCC outputs have resulted in controversy at the international level, they have been highly relevant at regional and national levels. The analysis shows that policy relevance is context-dependent and indirect—created through processes involving many actors, institutions, and types of knowledge. Situating these findings within the larger shift in the international climate regime implied by the Paris Agreement, the paper concludes with a set of empirically grounded recommendations for how the IPCC may approach the goal of policy relevance post-Paris. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Integrated assessment models are tools largely used to investigate the benefit of reducing polluting emissions and limiting the anthropogenic mean temperature rise. However, they have been often criticized for their underlying assumptions, often leading to low levels of abatement. Countries and regions that are generally the actors in these models are usually depicted as having standard concave utility functions in consumption. This, however, disregards a potentially important aspect of environmental negotiations, namely its distributive implications. The present paper tries to fill this gap assuming that countries/regions have Fehr and Schmidt (The Quarterly Journal of Economics 114(3):817–868, 1999) (F&S) utility functions, specifically tailored for including inequality aversion. By adopting the RICE model, we compare its standard results with the ones obtained introducing F&S utility functions, showing that, under optimal cooperation, the level of temperature rise is lower in the last scenario. In particular, the peak temperature, reached in 2155 under standard assumptions and one or two decades later under F&S preferences with, respectively, heterogeneous and homogeneous F&S inequality aversion parameters (α and β), is of 2.86 ∘C in the former scenario and of 2.65 ∘C and 2.67 ∘C in the latter two. Furthermore, it is shown that potentially stable coalitions are easier to be achieved when F&S preferences are assumed. However, potentially stable coalitions are far from reaching environmental targets close to limiting the mean temperature rise below 2 ∘C despite the adoption of F&S utility functions. The 2 ∘C target is almost achieved in all scenarios when the payoffs in the F&S utility function are given by the per-capita consumption rather than utility of consumption, with F&S preferences and heterogeneous F&S inequality aversion parameters leading to a peak temperature rise of 2.04 ∘C. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an assessment of Article 4.1 of the Paris Agreement on climate; the main goal of which is to provide guidance on how “to achieve the long-term temperature goal set out in Article 2”. Paraphrasing, Article 4.1 says that, to achieve this end, we should decrease greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions so that net anthropogenic GHG emissions fall to zero in the second half of this century. To aggregate net GHG emissions, 100-year global warming potentials (GWP-100) are commonly used to convert non-CO2 emissions to equivalent CO2 emissions. The GWP-scaling method is tested using methane as an example. The temperature projections using GWP-100 scaling are shown to be seriously in error. This throws doubt on the use of GWP-100 scaling to estimate net GHG emissions. An alternative method to determine the net-zero point for GHG emissions based on radiative forcing is derived, where the net-zero point is identified with the maximum of GHG forcing. This shows that, to meet the Article 2 warming goal, the net-zero point for GHG emissions needs to be reached as early as 2036, much sooner than in the Article 4.1 window. Other scientific problems in Article 4.1 that further undermine its purpose to guide efforts to achieve the Article 2 temperature targets are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indices assessing country-level climate and disaster risk at the global scale have experienced a steep rise in popularity both in science and international climate policy. A number of widely cited products have been developed and published over the recent years, argued to contribute critical knowledge for prioritizing action and funding. However, it remains unclear how their results compare, and how consistent their findings are on country-level risk, exposure, vulnerability and lack of coping, as well as adaptive capacity. This paper analyses and compares the design, data, and results of four of the leading global climate and disaster risk indices: The World Risk Index, the INFORM Risk Index, ND-GAIN Index, and the Climate Risk Index. Our analysis clearly shows that there is considerable degree of cross-index variation regarding countries’ risk levels and comparative ranks. At the same time, there is above-average agreement for high-risk countries. In terms of risk sub-components, there is surprisingly little agreement in the results on hazard exposure, while strong inter-index correlations can be observed when ranking countries according to their socio-economic vulnerability and lack of coping as well as adaptive capacity. Vulnerability and capacity hotspots can hence be identified more robustly than risk and exposure hotspots. Our findings speak both to the potential as well as limitations of index-based approaches. They show that a solid understanding of index-based assessment tools, and their conceptual and methodological underpinnings, is necessary to navigate them properly and interpret as well as use their results in triangulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of increasing pressure to deliver climate action targets and the growing role of citizens in raising the importance of the issue, deliberative democratic processes (e.g. citizen juries and citizen assemblies) on climate change are increasingly being used to provide a voice to citizens in climate change decision-making. Through a comparative case study of two processes that ran in the UK in 2019 (the Leeds Climate Change Citizens’ Jury and the Oxford Citizens’ Assembly on Climate Change), this paper investigates how far citizen assemblies and juries are increasing citizen engagement on climate change and creating more citizen-centred climate policymaking. Interviews were conducted with policymakers, councillors, professional facilitators and others involved in running these processes to assess motivations for conducting these, their structure and the impact and influence they had. The findings suggest the impact of these processes is not uniform: they have an indirect impact on policy making by creating momentum around climate action and supporting the introduction of pre-planned or pre-existing policies rather than a direct impact by truly being citizen-centred policy making processes or conducive to new climate policy. We conclude with reflections on how these processes give elected representatives a public mandate on climate change, that they help to identify more nuanced and in-depth public opinions in a fair and informed way, yet it can be challenging to embed citizen juries and assemblies in wider democratic processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]