A Trifecta of Hope: Addressing Climate Change, Global Finance Reform, and Sustainable Development
By Heather Higginbottom, Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources
Despite the daunting challenges facing the world today, groundbreaking agreements reached by the nations of the world in 2015 are cause for optimism. Three global agreements, in particular, give us the frameworks and tools to change mankind’s future for the better.
Paris Agreement on Climate Change
The world took a historic step last December in Paris, where nearly 200 countries adopted a global climate change agreement at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21). As President Obama said, “When we lead nearly 200 nations to the most ambitious agreement in history to fight climate change — that helps vulnerable countries, but it also protects our children.” The Paris Agreement establishes an ambitious, durable regime that will help us avoid climate change’s most extreme impacts by focusing on both reducing greenhouse gas emissions and building resilience. While recognizing that countries face a variety of circumstances and challenges, the agreement requires action from all signatories, and sets forth a transparency framework by requiring countries to report regularly on their efforts and progress. The Paris Agreement sets in motion a race to the top wherein targets are ratcheted up over time. Countries will combine their best efforts with contributions from cities, states, businesses, and other actors.
2030 Sustainable Development Agenda
Two additional agreements reached in 2015 complement the Paris Agreement, and underscore how climate change is deeply intertwined with a range of global challenges. In September, 193 countries adopted the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda, which includes 17 interconnected Global Goals and 169 corresponding measurable targets. While celebrating the major reductions in poverty and disease of the past decades, the Global Goals raise the bar, and create a framework for advancing the interconnected challenges of economic, social, and environmental sustainability.
The Goals aim to improve the lives of everyone on the planet in the next 15 years, applying to developed and developing countries alike. They envision a world in which no one is left behind, and in which the most vulnerable and marginalized are free from poverty and hunger and have universal access to health care, education, energy, and a clean environment.
Addis Ababa Agenda for Action
In July, the world agreed to a new financial architecture for development. The Addis Ababa Agenda for Action embodies the principle that real solutions require creative leveraging of resources from a variety of sources, including domestic revenue, private sector investment, trade, and international financing, as well as official development assistance. The Addis Ababa outcome also recognizes the importance of all three dimensions of sustainable development — social, economic and environmental — and it encourages development financing to consider climate change and disaster resilience in order to achieve the sustainability that development requires.
Global Agreements — A Force Multiplier for Change
Climate change is one of the most complex problems facing humankind because it is a truly global problem set that impacts so many aspects of development.
At the same time, addressing climate change goes hand-in-hand with efforts to improve other development outcomes, and can generate a range of co-benefits. The Agenda includes a standalone goal on climate (Goal 13) that calls for urgent action to address climate change, including strengthening resilience and adaptation to climate change and integrating climate change into national policies, strategies and plans.
More importantly, the Agenda identifies a number of critical areas of development where climate change must be taken into consideration to make real progress.
Far-Reaching Impacts: A warming climate compromises agricultural productivity and food security (Goal 2 of the Sustainable Development Agenda), exacerbates disease (Goal 3), increases the intensity and frequency of natural disasters that can devastate lives and livelihoods (Goal 11), and accelerates ocean acidification and its impacts on marine life (Goal 14). When it comes to poverty, hunger, and disease, climate change is a threat multiplier. Reducing these impacts and building adaptive capacity to climate change will be critical to achieving the Global Goals.
Mutually Beneficial Solutions: On the other hand, many of the strategies needed to address climate change are embedded throughout the Global Goals, and will produce broader development benefits. Tackling climate change will depend on advancing access to modern, efficient, and renewable energy (Goal 7), promoting sustainable production and consumption (Goal 12), and reducing deforestation and land degradation, a major source of emissions in developing countries (Goal 15).
We know integrating gender equality into climate action will also be critical to reduce vulnerability to climate change in key sectors, such as agriculture and water. Engaging half of humanity in entrepreneurial, community-based and household-level action will be vital to implementing climate solutions (Goal 5).
Engine of Change: Halting climate change will depend on efforts to spur technological innovation that will transform how we use energy, move people and goods, and organize our lives (Goal 9). Low carbon energy and transport, and climate-resilient infrastructure, are keys to making cities safe, resilient, and sustainable (Goal 11). This transformation will be a powerful engine for generating jobs and stimulating sustained, inclusive, and sustainable economic growth (Goal 8). This will in turn help optimize domestic financing to support needed climate-related investments and advance other sustainable development goals.
Good Governance and Great Data: The 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda highlights good governance as critical to every sustainable development goal, including mitigating and adapting to climate change (Goal 16). As countries step up their commitments on climate change, transparent and accountable institutions subject to public scrutiny will be critical. And, as countries reduce corruption, they will generate additional domestic revenues that can help eradicate extreme poverty, hunger and inequality, and address climate change.
As the saying goes, “you are what you measure.” This is why it is so important that the Sustainable Development Agenda calls for high quality, timely, reliable, and disaggregated data to measure progress (Goal 17). The data revolution for sustainable development is as critical to tackling climate change as it is to the other goals. The United States government helped launch the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development, a platform to build capacity for collecting, analyzing, and disseminating relevant data. Of the more than 90 commitments made by country, company, and civil society partners, many focus on climate change, and the Partnership has great potential to leverage its partners’ unique capabilities to improve the integrity and reliability of climate change data.
Climate change, extreme poverty, inequality, and corruption are weighty global challenges — made more complex by their interconnectedness. Last year, the international community achieved what some believed was an insurmountable task: we forged widespread global agreement on climate change, development financing, and sustainable development. As 2016 unfolds, we now turn our attention to the hard work of implementation, leveraging U.S. global leadership to ensure our new, bold commitments better the lives of millions of global citizens.
Editor’s Note: This blog also appears on DipNote, the U.S. Department of State’s Official Blog.
Read more about climate change and environmental policy in our Medium.com publication U.S. Voices on Climate: COP21 and Beyond.
