Washington (AFP)
Four years after the signing of the Paris agreement on climate, a catch remains: States can not agree to avoid an accounting trick that would allow certain reductions in greenhouse gas emissions to count doubles.
Certainly, the biggest problem remains political, namely that country commitments remain insufficient to reverse the emissions curve. But the experts point out that the accounting of these commitments can be faulty if a solution is not found.
Imagine a wind turbine built in India that reduces carbon emissions by one tonne per year. From 2020, a country like Germany can theoretically buy this ton of CO2 in the form of a credit, so that this reduction of one ton is registered on the German carbon balance sheet ... and not on the Indian balance sheet.
But states, led by Brazil, argue that the reduction should remain in the Indian balance sheet while being credited to the Germans. Which would mean that the wind turbine would be counted twice: for Germany and for India. This double counting would give the impression that emissions are falling faster than reality.
"This is a really strange position, most states do not support it," says Lambert Schneider, a researcher at the Oeko Institute in Berlin, co-author of an article on the subject in Science on Thursday.
The need to avoid double counting is included in Article 6 of the Agreement in black and white, but the finalization of the "instructions" of this part failed in Poland last year, and the case must again to be debated at the 25th "Conference of the Parties" (COP25), in December in Santiago de Chile.
"This is the last big problem to solve in order to operationalize the Paris agreement," Lambert Schneider told AFP.
"The risk is that the commitments on paper do not correspond to what the atmosphere will see".
The problem is similar for aviation. Airlines are exempt from the Paris agreement because historically, states have never been able to agree on how to allocate their emissions by country (by nationality of passengers? By airports of departure? Destination?).
But the industry committed in 2016, under the umbrella of the International Civil Aviation Organization, to offset any future emissions exceeding the 2020 level.
Airlines will therefore have to buy billions of tons of carbon credits from selling countries. Again, double counting should be avoided.
If aviation were a country, it would be right behind Germany; it is not negligible. But this time, it is a group of countries led by Saudi Arabia that blocks.
© 2019 AFP