The Paris Agreement has put structures in place for climate targets and actions to be decided by each country, but international processes inside and outside the UNFCCC still critically impact policy making and decisions taken by every country.
The DDP’s International climate governance work engages with these international processes to make them effectively support the objectives of the Paris Agreement on Climate. We seek to contribute to the ratcheting-up of collective ambition emerging from combined national targets. We also work on the enhancement of international cooperation to better facilitate the effective implementation of ambitious national actions.
Our work promotes the idea that international cooperation must build on country needs and that only a bottom-up process would enable systemic transformations that are compatible with enhanced climate ambitions of every country. We do so by relying on the in-depth work conducted by the DDP at the country level which informs how international processes can be oriented to best address the needs of the countries for their national transformations.
The DDP’s International climate governance work operates through two complementary channels.
On the one hand, we directly engage with the UNFCCC as the main policy space where international climate issues are discussed. The specific focus will evolve every year according to our assessments on where DDP insights can be most useful. A part of our work is in elaborating technical insights emerging from the DDP analysis and an ad-hoc engagement with key players of the UNFCCC discussions (policymakers, negotiators or key influencers of the international climate community) to ensure visibility and ownership of these insights. This stream of activity also seeks to favor ownership of the UNFCCC processes inside countries, notably in the Global South, as a way to support their engagement in international policymaking processes.
On the other hand, the DDP’s International climate governance campaign also seeks to establish bridges between global climate governance as it develops in the UNFCCC and other international fora or processes. Examples of this include political momentum like G7/G20, cross-cutting agendas like the SDGs, and regional political processes on development and sustainable development or sectoral processes like the international negotiations on maritime transport under the IMO or aviation under ICAO.
This bridging effort aligns these processes and the convergences of their decisions so that their combined impact can effectively support national transitions and global decarbonization. This workstream is supported by a systemic approach and a holistic methodology adopted by the DDP, informing the complementary work between discussions which otherwise may remain disconnected.