Escaping Consensus: COP27 and the Role of Majority Voting to Accelerate the Transition to Net Zero

Lorenzo Pietro Spiller 
MBA Student at INSEAD – Sustainable Finance

Occurring in the context of the most unstable and non-resilient energy market in recent years, the 27^th session of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (or UNFCCC) took place in Sharm-El-Sheik last November. Notwithstanding the tumultuous geopolitical situation, the outcome of this year’s negotiation should not have been drastically affected by the current crisis, since COP aims to ensure the smooth implementation of the UNFCCC, the Kyoto Protocol, and the Paris Accord, all having a medium to long term perspective on decarbonization and energy transition, whereas the current situation is expected to have a considerably shorter timeframe.

In fact, representatives of fossil fuel exporter countries were able to bring the current crisis into play during the conference, underlining the need for fossil fuels to ensure the stability and reliability of the energy market and to deliver affordable energy for many years to come.

And no wonder, since this year’s COP was characterized by a high number of representatives from oil and gas businesses, 25% more than last year in Glasgow, and by an immense “Green Zone” where thousands of businesses (including oil and gas) were able to present their products and services, organize side events and engage with global press and analysts. Although polluting businesses are crucial stakeholders in the path to decarbonization, and they should be involved in climate talks such as the COP to ensure their commitment to innovation, green investments and financing of climate tech ventures, enabling them to showcase their activities in a “trade fair” style clashes with the spirit of the event, which should be considered the forefront of the transition to a net zero economy, and jeopardizes its effectiveness in setting forth the guidelines for such transition.

After two weeks of prolonged and intense negotiation, the most important decision taken by the conference, encapsulated in the final text approved by consensus on Sunday 20 November, is the commitment to set up a “loss and damage” fund. This resolution commits developed countries to fund and manage a financial instrument aimed at compensating the damages suffered by developing countries because of serious climatic events like droughts, floods, and fires. It is a considerable step towards climate justice and the acknowledgment that developed countries have an “obligation to refund” for the greenhouse gasses they emitted during the last century. From another viewpoint, this measure should partially deflate developing countries’ argument that they are not responsible for climate change, and hence they should be able to grow economically without climate boundaries and restrictive regulation. In this respect, it would be ideal to impose that developing countries should spend the compensation amounts to finance green infrastructures only.  All in all, although this loss and damage fund is hugely positive news, it is to be noted that the functioning and implementation of the fund are yet to be defined, and the following years will be crucial to ensure that it is established and managed in an effective, just and virtuous way

Apart from this brilliant political result, the Parties agreed on a timid final resolution, less courageous than last year’s one and watered down in the last weekend of negotiations by the opposition of several countries whose economies rely heavily on fossil fuels. More specifically, the resolution continues to consider both “low-emission” energy sources and renewables, as they would be on an equal footing within the energy transition. At the same time, it still consents “abated coal” to be part of the energy mix. In line with the many critics that came from climate activists, the writer believes that countries should identify a clear path to decarbonize the economy and net zero, and such a result cannot be achieved without a massive push in the deployment of renewable energy sources and the phasing-out from every fossil fuel source, at least when it comes to industrial use and electricity and heat production, by 2050.  Moreover, the concept of abated coal (i.e., the production of energy from oil involving technology that captures and stores the CO2 produced in the process) is utopic since, at the current stage, carbon storage is not economically viable at a large scale and the aggregate CO2 captured so far is less than 0.1% of the present yearly pollution of 38 gigatons of CO2.

One may wonder why, despite all the scientific evidence that climate change is happening fast, the last being the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published in 2021, and even if climate policies of significant polluters such as the US and Brazil became consistently greener after Biden and Lula got elected, the final COP27 resolution was so timid and disappointed many. The most logical reason is that the COP is an intergovernmental body, abiding by the logic of consensus as the standard voting mechanism, where a small minority in terms of number of delegates can lock the negotiations and limit the more ambitious climate targets of the majority.

This requires a brief excursus on the history of the voting procedure within the Conference of the Parties. As cumbersome as it may sound, sessions of the COP are often governed by a draft rule of procedures that was prepared in Geneva in 1996, slightly amended thereafter but never formally approved by the parties. Therefore, at each yearly session, the COP can decide whether to abide by such rules (or a portion of them), but it is not legally required to do so. Within those rules, rule 42 would discipline the voting system to reach an agreement on the matter of substance, and the 1996 draft offers two alternatives: one is consensus, the other a majority of two-thirds of representatives, provided that the parties “exhausted all efforts to reach a consensus” beforehand.

This year, the COP adopted the draft rules with the exclusion of rule 42, adopting consensus as the official voting rule. No wonder why, then, the negotiations were so prolonged and a loud minority, composed predominantly of representatives of middle eastern countries, were able to keep fossil fuels in the ideal energy mix coming out from the final resolution,

To achieve more tangible results and reposition the COP at the forefront of the transition to net zero, it is logical to argue that, starting from COP 28 in Dubai next year, the voting system should be amended to introduce majority voting of two-thirds of representatives on every decision referring to decarbonization objectives, energy transition, and innovation. Stakeholders, and especially governments, should acknowledge that we are not navigating safe water, we are running out of time, and the principle of sovereignty, requiring unanimity voting, should give way to majority voting to ensure that the guidelines, measures, and resolution adopted by the COP can keep the temperature increase by 2050 below 1.5°, as foreseen under the Paris Accord, grant the survival of humanity on this Earth as we know it.