Governing by targets: reductio ad unum and evolution of the two-degree climate target

Abstract

Targets are widely employed in environmental governance. In this paper, we investigate the construction of the 2°C climate target, one of the best known targets in global environmental governance. Our paper examines this target through a historical reconstruction that identifies four different phases: framing, consolidation and diffusion, adoption, and disembeddedness. Our analysis shows that, initially, the target was science-driven and predominantly EU-based; it then became progressively accepted at the international level, despite a lack of broader debate among governments on the policy implications and required measures for implementation. Once the 2°C target was endorsed at the level of the United Nations, the nature of the target changed from being policy-prescriptive to being largely symbolic. In this phase, the target became a disembedded object in global governance not linked to a shared agenda nor to coordinated and mutually binding mitigation efforts. The 2015 Paris Agreement marks the last stage in this development and may have further solidified the target as a disembedded object. In the final part of the paper, we suggest ways to overcome the current situation and to develop the 2°C target into a fully fledged global environmental governance target.

Climate risk assessments and science‐based targets: A review of emerging private sector climate action tools

“…Beyond the issue of framing, understanding the ways in which targets come to be settled upon is also an important research endeavor. In Morseletto et al's study on the consolidation of climate policy around the 2°C target, they find that targets represent nested or hybrid objects that link “conflicting interests, worldviews, expectations, commitments, societal needs, scientific understandings, [and] political intentions” in material and impactful ways (Morseletto et al, , p. 657). Rooted in a STS approach, such research underscores how targets combine competing interests and produce certain socio‐environmental responses.…”

Why setting a climate deadline is dangerous

“…Over the last two decades, international climate communities have been discussing how to operationalise or translate the ultimate objective of the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)-preventing "dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system" [3]-into a concrete, quantitative policy target [4,5]. While various target quantities were proposed (such as greenhouse gas concentration, ocean heat content or sea-level rise), global temperature emerged as the favoured indicator for quantifying a target level of climate change [6].…”

“…Since the mid-1990s, 2 o C of warming above the pre-industrial condition was increasingly adopted as the temperature threshold to avoid dangerous climate change [5]. The 2015 Paris Agreement introduced 1.5 o C as an alternative warming target [7]-although it seemed more a rhetorical aspiration at the time of the Paris talks.…”

Epistemic geographies of climate change

“…While estimates of the equilibrium response of the climate system to a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide have remained remarkably stable (and equally uncertain) over time (Van Der Sluijs et al 1998;IPCC 2014), so too has GMT endured as the organising metric of international climate politics: the 'story of global climate has in many senses become the story of global temperature' (Hulme 2010b, 560). GMT has furnished an indexed storyline of change, become a focus of sceptical challenges, and become the locus of normative policy targets, such as the goal of limiting warming to 2°C (or 1.5°C) above pre-industrial temperatures (Randalls 2010a;Morseletto et al 2016). The 2°C target has nonetheless faced challenges as regional, in the broader patterns of scientific exchange which constitute trans-local cultures of scientific practice (Livingstone 2003;Finnegan 2008;Naylor 2010;cf.…”