Harvard Project Co-Sponsors, with Ontario Government, Workshop on Linkage and Paris Agreement

The Harvard Project on Climate Agreements co-sponsored a workshop,“Article 6 and North American Linkage: Finding Synergies,” in Toronto on March 22, 2018. The Province of Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change hosted the meeting. Robert Stavins, Director of the Harvard Project, moderated the sessions, and Alex Wood, Assistant Deputy Minister for Climate Change, represented the Ministry in the discussions. Participants included officials focusing on Ontario, Québec’s, and California’s linked emissions-allowance-trading systems (ETSs) — and experts from research institutes and universities in Canada and the United States.

Links to the agenda, participant list, and some of the presentations from the workshop are at the bottom of this page.

Participants in the workshop examined the status of and prospects for carbon-pricing policies in North America — and linkage among these. They also discussed the status of Article 6 of the Paris Agreement — how it might be elaborated and implemented, and how it might support, constrain, or otherwise interact with market mechanisms and linkage that are emerging in North America.

Article 6 provides a vehicle for advancing cooperation among Parties in pursuing mitigation. Though negotiators continue to elaborate the rules and measures needed to implement Article 6 after 2020, it appears that Article 6.2, in particular, may provide opportunities for linkage — broadly construed to include exchanges of mitigation units between Parties with highly heterogeneous Nationally Determined Contributions.

Kelley Kizzier and Andrew Howard presented a status update on the ongoing negotiations on the elaboration of the Paris Agreement’s Article 6, within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Ms. Kizzier is the Co-Chair of the negotiating group focusing on Article 6, and Mr. Howard has long experience with market-based mechanisms in the context of the UNFCCC and its Kyoto Protocol.

Robert Stavins and Michael Mehling, Deputy Director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, made a presentation based on their Harvard-Project research paper (with Gilbert Metcalf of Tufts University), “Linking Heterogeneous Climate Policies (Consistent with the Paris Agreement).” The paper — and presentation — examined opportunities for and challenges to linking disparate policy systems — for example, between ETSs and carbon-tax systems.

In planning and conducting this workshop, the Harvard Project drew heavily upon an ongoing initiative on Article 6 and related topics supported by the Harvard University Climate Change Solutions Fund (HU CCSF). A volume of briefs based on a workshop in July 2017 — both titled “Market Mechanisms and the Paris Agreement” and both supported by HU CCSF — may be found here.