Published GG2020 reports
Beyond a Global Deal – A UN+ Approach to Climate Governance
In this report, the GG2020 working group on climate change lays out its recommendations for the future of global climate governance. The fellows propose a governance framework that utilizes bottom-up approaches to climate protection in the absence of a global deal.
Beyond the Numbers – Strategies for Global Nuclear
The GG2020 working group on nuclear governance recommends approaches to nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament that qualify success as more than simply the number of nuclear weapons or nuclear states.
Facing the Challenges - Three Scenarios for Global Economic Governance in 2020
The GG2020 working group on global economic governance discusses three scenarios that depict global economic interaction in the year 2020, providing decision makers with a platform for asking better questions.
Working Group I - Global climate governance
Shanghai session
Berlin session
The fellows of the GG2020 working group on climate change used the scenario building method to lay out the extremes of two opposing scenarios around the fate of global climate politics under the umbrella of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The first “boundary post” scenario describes a path towards breaking the Sino-US impasse as the central obstacle to international climate negotiations, reviving the UNFCCC process and decisively moving towards a globally coordinated solution of the climate crisis. The second scenario describes the complete breakdown of cooperative processes at the global level with the UNFCCC paralyzed by differences of interest amongst the major players' and the global political community as well as civil society – both distracted by more immediate challenges and largely oblivious to the mounting dangers of global warming.
- Fellows of the working group on climate change busy
preparing for their presentation ahead of the plenary session
on the first day of the GG2020 Shanghai meeting.
After establishing the extreme readings of the future derived from the scenario-building process, the group concentrated on a third alternative version of potential developments. This third scenario depicts a sharp decline, albeit not a total disappearance, of the UNFCCC as the focal point of international cooperation in climate politics. However, in this scenario a broad spectrum of alliances on the national and subnational levels move to fill the void left by the paralyzed UN process and establish a network of less formalized cooperative processes to mitigate the impacts of climate change. The third scenario gained depth through a more detailed analysis of actors involved in the creation of an alternative form of multilateral climate governance. The actor analysis also provided the group with a number of concrete addressees to direct their policy implications.
- Duan Hongxia, expert on
global climate change issues,
discussed China’s participation
in climate protection with the
working group on climate change.
The working group on climate governance used the three scenarios to draw political implications for climate policy making today. On the basis of the underlying trends and causal links from the scenarios the fellows asked how a revitalization of the UNFCCC process can be achieved, how an alternative approach to climate governance in case of a continuous UNFCCC failure can be most effectively organized and how a complete breakdown of climate governance can be avoided. The first collection of political implications gathered during the Shanghai session will be substantiated and refined until the next GG2020 session in Washington DC.
During the course of the Shanghai session, the working group on climate governance benefited from the feedback and impulses provided by the entire group of GG2020 fellows as well as external experts. Duan Hongxia, expert for the economics of climate change at Xiamen University, as well as Wang Jiangli, focusing on issues of climate justice at Zhejiang University, shared their insights with the fellows and provided a comprehensive picture of China's perspective on some of the issues most crucial to the future of global climate governance.
In Shanghai, the GG2020 working group on climate change has taken an important step towards unraveling the complexities of international climate politics, highlighting the devastating future we are in danger of slipping towards and illustrating possible ways of avoiding this future either through the rescue of the battered process under the UN umbrella or the creation of an effective second-best option. In Washington DC, the fellows will present their thoughts on what current policymaking needs to contribute to bring either of these two options about.
