The Asia‐Pacific Partnership: implementation challenges and interplay with Kyoto

Abstract

The Asia‐Pacific Partnership (APP) for Clean Development and Climate, a multilateral agreement between Australia, Canada, China, India, Japan, the Republic of Korea (Korea) and the United States of America, is a nonbinding memorandum of understanding directed at international cooperation on development, energy, environment and climate change issues involving business and industry voluntary action on technology transfer, and research and development. It has been hailed as a new model for an international climate agreement and as an alternative to the Kyoto Protocol. However, APP implementation has had challenges. As an opposing model to that of Kyoto, it is in contravention of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change's (UNFCCC's) principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and a contributor to the crumbling of climate governance. Cooperation rather than competition ideally should be the future for the relationship between the APP and the UNFCCC/Kyoto. Business and industry are involved in implementation of the Kyoto mechanisms under the UN climate regime currently; and for that reason, synchronicity between the APP and Kyoto agreements would be ideal. For example, APP nations could be involved in joint ‘regional’ emissions trading as the United States, Canada, Australia, Korea, and Japan all are in the process of establishing national schemes. However, for the APP to be a complement to Kyoto and not a barrier to its effectiveness, many hurdles need to be overcome including equity issues, additionality questions, capacity building concerns, trade barriers, intellectual property issues, adequacy of funding, assessment of APP emissions reductions, and renewal of US interest in UN climate regime participation. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. This article is categorized under: Policy and Governance > Multilevel and Transnational Climate Change Governance

Governing climate change: polycentricity in action?

“…Figure 15.2 shows that about 38 per cent of the transnational governance initiatives have promoted direct mechanisms of technology transfer, typically through project-based financing and the diffusion of technologies. They have developed in parallel with the CDM to promote a set of technologies, often reflecting the specific agenda of funding and recipient countries (Pattberg, 2010;Taplin and McGee, 2010). The larger share of clean energy initiatives (62 per cent) has placed a strong focus on policy learning, diffusion and reducing knowledge barriers.…”

Regional Development and Cooperation

“…These countries did not share a specific geography, but had common interests surrounding various climate mitigation technologies, as well as a technology-oriented approach to climate change policy. The APP was perceived to be offered forth by the participating nations as an alternative to the Kyoto Protocol (Bäckstrand, 2008;Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen and Asselt, 2009;Lawrence, 2009;Taplin and McGee, 2010), and has been described as "a deeply intensive market liberal approach to international climate policy, which contests binding emission reduction targets and the development of a global carbon market" (McGee and Taplin, 2009). The APP was a public-private partnership that included many active private sector partners in addition to governmental participants that undertook a range of projects across eight task forces organized by sector.…”