Harvard Project on Climate Agreements' Participation in COP-22

The Harvard Project on Climate Agreements conducted two side-event panels at the Twenty-Second Conference of the Parties (COP-22) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), held in Marrakech, Morocco November 7–18, 2016. COP-22 focused on elaborating the Paris Agreement, which was adopted at COP-21 in December 2015 and which entered into force on November 4, 2016. Although the Paris Agreement represents a major step forward in efforts to address global climate change, much remains to be done to specify the rules and guidelines required to fully implement the Agreement, which primarily deals with action after 2020.

The first panel was titled "The Paris Agreement's Transparency Framework: A Building Block for Enhanced Mitigation." The Paris Agreement has established a process of cooperation among all involved stakeholders to coordinate, implement, and review accelerated global action to mitigate, and adapt to, climate change. This process will involve actors and actions at the global, national, and local level, and will need to ensure the sharing of the appropriate information among all the involved stakeholders.

The event included the presentation of a paper by Joseph Aldy, "Living Mitigation Plans: The Co-Evolution of Mitigation Pledge and Review", which examines how the Paris Agreement's enhanced transparency framework can and should be elaborated, implemented, and complemented. The discussion considered in part "living mitigation plans" as one approach to building upon a necessarily incomplete transparency regime. Panelists addressed approaches to realizing the provisions for the Agreement dealing with reporting, review, global stock-taking, and re-pledging, offering possible policy implications for domestic and global climate policy. The panel addressed, in addition, how stakeholders' engagement could support the implementation of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and how the review process can inform the design of future NDCs.

The second panel, titled, "Realizing the Potential of the Paris Agreement," considered how the Paris Agreement can be elaborated, implemented, and complemented—so that its considerable potential to advance mitigation and adaptation can best be realized. The panel was based in part on a research workshop that the Harvard Project hosted at HKS in July 2016 and an edited volume of briefs that workshop participants prepared, released in October 2016.

A third event, "Climate Think Tank Leaders on the Implementation of the Paris Agreement," featured Robert Stavins as the keynote speaker. Leaders of research institutes from around the world, including Stavins, considered the elaboration and implementation of the Paris Agreement.

The Harvard Project received considerable press coverage before, during, and following the COP.