G7 governance of climate change

Abstract

Since the G7 summit invented the global governance of climate change in 1979, its performance has passed through three phases: leadership of an effective inclusive environment first regime from 1979 to 1989; deference to the UN’s ineffective, selective, development-first regime from 1992 to 2004; and a return to an effective, G20-supported, inclusive, environment-first regime from 2005 to 2015. The latter culminated at the Paris summit, which however, produced a political plan that was designed to fail, at a time when the irreversible tipping point in the real material world rapidly approached and just before the US elected a President slow to accept and act on the striking facts. The central challenge of the G7’s Taormina Summit in 1979 is to ensure that G7 members comply with their still unfulfilled past climate commitments, by adding accountability measures that work, improving them immediately in ways that enhance their implementation and activating assistance from the G20’s Hamburg Summit in July. To improve climate change compliance, the Taormina G7 Summit should specify an agent in its commitments, make more climate commitments each year and hold regular environment ministers’ meetings.