The New York climate summit

September 23^rd was a historic day. Or that at least is how the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon chose to summarize it following the Climate Summit held in New York this week. The summit was not the conventional UNFCCC gathering, but a special event convened by Ban Ki-moon himself. It comes in the wake of what the UN organizers have called a dawning optimism that the world is finally ready to commit to real action on climate change. It’s up for debate just how widespread this optimism actually is. What does seem clear is that the New York summit was designed to revitalize the climate change agenda and build momentum prior to the critical UNFCC meeting in Paris next year.

A renewed attention is certainly needed. Climate change politics are often portrayed as a battle between believers and deniers, but in many ways the real challenge lies in getting the believers to act. Since the failed 2009 summit in Copenhagen, climate change has struggled to stay at the top of the agenda in global discourse. World leaders have had their attention firmly focused on the financial crisis and global security concerns.

It is against this background that Ban Ki Moon’s New York climate change summit should be seen: In the face of numerous competing crises around the world – Syria, Ukraine and the Ebola epidemic are the most recent – there is a real risk that political attention and commitment to next year’s important Paris summit will fail. Seeking tangible commitments and media airtime through a “splash” such as the one in New York is one way of addressing this.

It is also in this light that the outcomes of the New York summit should be understood. One of the causes of Ban Ki-moon’s enthusiasm was that the leaders present counted not only heads of state, but also business leaders, mayors of large cities and representatives of civil society organisations. The summit thereby highlighted the growing tendency to look beyond national governments for climate action and financing.

Several of the initiatives and commitments put forward at the summit thus came from the private sector and local governments. For example, major banks committed to issuing USD 30 billion in green bonds by next year, while insurance companies and pension funds committed or pledged USD 114 billion of low-carbon investments by 2015 and 2020 respectively. In a new alliance known as the Global Mayors Compact, some 2.000 cities committed to address a variety of climate efforts with both private and public funding, making it the most ambitious urban effort seen so far.

In extension of this, several new partnerships were launched bringing together a variety of different actors from the private sector, civil society, local governments, national governments and regional bodies. This introduces some unlikely new bedfellows in the climate change field. For example, in the new Oil & Gas Methane Partnership, outspoken environmental advocacy organizations have joined hands with major global oil and gas companies including Statoil and the BG Group. And in the Global Alliance for Climate-Smart Agriculture a number of research institutions, NGOs, national governments and UN organisations are partnering with major retailers such as McDonald’s, Kellogg and Walmart.

Many of these “new coalitions” (as the UN speech writers like to call them) can be seen as a fairly logical extension of the public-private partnerships and other similar arrangements that have been in the vogue in public policy for quite some time. But more broadly speaking they can also be seen as a widening of the field of collective global climate action beyond the realm of national government collaboration.

In many ways, these new developments make perfect sense. National governments neither can nor should carry the costs and challenges of climate change alone, and little real progress is likely without engaging the industries and financial sector who underpin the current high-carbon economy. Likewise, cities and local governments are key actors in climate change and need to be recognized as such.

Yet care is also needed to ensure that the growing number of actors and partnerships in climate change actually produce the results they promise. Voluntary and industry-led initiatives can lead to much momentum and change, but they also carry the inherent risk of being biased towards the interests of those involved. Some civil society organizations have already expressed concern at some of the new partnerships announced at the New York summit, claiming that they are little more than attempts at “green-washing” or even extending the commercial interests of the partners involved. Likewise, certain topics may simply “fall off” the climate change agenda because they have no immediate interest among non-state actors. For example, while scientists consider the declining state of the world’s oceans to be a major climate change problem, it has received very little attention so far.

As more and more stakeholders take on action and financing in the field of climate change, the need for coordination, monitoring and maintaining checks and balances on their actions increases. This is where national governments and intergovernmental bodies come back in. That, after all, is exactly what governance is all about.