Marrakesh Accords

The Marrakesh (or Marrakech) Accords is the name given to the agreements reached at the Seventh Conference of the Parties (COP 7) at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change held in October/November 2001 in Marrakesh, Morocco. The meeting and the accords signed were related to the issue of meeting the targets on climate change established as part of the Kyoto Protocol, which was the result of the Third Conference of the Parties (COP 3) finally agreed in 1997 and followed by the first session of the Sixth Conference of the Parties (COP 6) at the Hague (November 2000) and the second session in Bonn, Germany (July 2001), at which various political agreements resulting from the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol were resolved. However, prior to the Bonn session, the U.S. government declared that the implications of the Kyoto Protocol were impractical and that it was withdrawing from some subsequent negotiations.

The Bonn agreement that was eventually reached was widely considered to have jettisoned meaningful environmental considerations for the sake of reaching a compromise agreement. It is this compromise agreement that was converted into agreed legal texts at the Marrakesh Accords. The agreements relate to the Kyoto Mechanisms (international emissions trading, Joint Implementation, and the Clean Development Mechanism) as well as land use and land-use change and forestry (LULUCF), financing for developing countries, and the issues of reporting and compliance. The purpose of these agreements was to foster international commitment to the problems of global climate change–causing emissions and the attendant problems of accommodating developing and developed countries within one overall set of treaties. Since a global solution is sought for this global problem, the withdrawal of even one country from the negotiations can have a serious negative impact on the overall regime.

Participants

In common with all multilateral negotiations, the discussions are framed by the nature and extent of the participants involved, the regulations and procedures by which the discussions are moderated, and the institutions that affect the nature of any final agreement and compliance. As a global negotiation, countries from around the world were represented, with the degree of technical capacity and skilled individuals available to each country determined by the degree of economic development and the extent to which the specter of global climate change is perceived to threaten their country’s interests. The government of the Maldives, for example, which is threatened with total depopulation by virtue of rising sea levels, devotes considerable energy to trying to contribute to meaningful agreements. The government of the United States, on the other hand, appears to have devoted more resources to protecting its economic interests against the threat of additional regulation.

For other countries, the negotiations offer the opportunity to gain influence in international diplomacy that might be transferred to other forums, as well as meet their objectives with respect to climate change. This appears to describe the position of China and its de facto leadership of the Group of 77 less-developed nations (G77). The official government delegations were also accompanied by substantial numbers of nongovernmental organizations, lobbying groups, and media representatives. As the details of the negotiations were largely complex and subtle, while the negotiating was often opaque, media representatives tended to portray the processes involved as a contest between two arbitrarily drawn sides. After the withdrawal of the United States from the negotiations, it therefore became inevitable that the media discourse of the negotiations would be one of the failure of individual governments to reach global consensus.

Main Provisions

The Marrakesh Accords are notable for the absence of the quantitative cap on emissions in international carbon permit trading (known as the supplementarity issue). Without a cap, it would be theoretically possible for a nation to trade all of its excess emissions through international market mechanisms. This approach was strongly opposed by the European Union bloc of countries, which wanted a cap to help stimulate domestic efforts to reduce the overall level of emissions, rather than just trade them away. The accords include a provision that domestic efforts should represent an important part of reduction efforts, but this would be difficult to enforce without specific, quantitative figures. Additional agreements are aimed at promoting the use of renewable energy sources in reducing emissions, even in small-scale operations, while discouraging the use of nuclear energy production for this purpose. More generally, permit trading was instituted among participant nations (Annex I countries) on a free and open basis. A number of observers have expressed disquiet that such freedom should be allowed in marketplace operations, although the mood then was in favor of the supposed efficiency of underregulated markets.

LULUCF policies are related to sink credits, in that forestry areas represent sink areas that sequester carbon from the atmosphere. The accords included regulations aimed at discouraging states from deforestation, since this represents a negative externality for all nations while encouraging forestation. Climatic, geographic, and developmental issues all have an impact upon the extent to which forest areas are practical to manage in a country. Therefore, states must be rewarded for meeting or exceeding land-use regulations, and this is linked to tradable permits. The agreement on sink credits, in the absence of the United States, was included for the first time at Marrakesh and represents its major and distinctive contribution to the international regime.

Analysis of the impact of the Marrakesh Accords is difficult to conclude, not just because of the complexity of the issues involved and the need to determine an appropriate timeframe, but also because of the withdrawal of the United States. That withdrawal had a significant impact on the demand for permits in general, and has acted to distort the nature of the market. As a result, economists and other analysts tend to estimate results based on the inclusion or exclusion of the United States. This leads to abstract analyses of the situation using such techniques as theoretical economics, game theory, and models of negotiation. Insofar as these approaches can provide optimum solutions in at least a theoretical space with full or close to full information and rational decision making, this indicates that it should be possible to predict the extent to which efficiency in carbon trading and related markets will actually be possible to achieve.