Economic consequences of climate change

Following the first World Conference on Environment and Development in Rio in 1992, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was submitted to all the world's countries. Ratified by 196 of them, it is the main global institutional reference on which climate policies and measures are based. The Conference of the Parties (COP) is responsible for monitoring compliance with the Convention's commitments, organizing scientific, institutional and financial policies, and building the decision-making process. The COP brings together all the signatory countries, known as the "Parties" to the Convention. It meets every year to take decisions, unanimously or by consensus, to meet the objectives of the fight against climate change (CC), and is held on the basis of geographical rotation in one of the countries of the five regional groups of the United Nations: Asia-Pacific, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Latin America-Caribbean and Africa.

The COP calls on the scientific expertise of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), set up in 1988 by the United Nations and the World Meteorological Organization. Recurrent IPCC reports have punctuated the stages of climate policy. The first, published in 1990, influenced the adoption of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992. The second, published in 1996, led to the Kyoto Protocol, signed in 1997. In 2000, the third proposed the notion of adaptation, which was at the heart of subsequent negotiations. The fourth, dating from 2007, introduced a 2°C limit on the temperature rise, which was discussed in Copenhagen in 2009, then in Cancún in 2010. There is every reason to believe that the fifth report in 2014 (produced by over 800 scientists) will lead to ambitious decisions, sealed within what some are already calling the "Paris Agreement".

The Kyoto Protocol defined quantified emission reduction commitments for the first time. It has been signed by 188 signatories to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Far fewer have ratified it, starting with the United States, which withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol at COP6 in Bonn in 2001. Nevertheless, it came into force on February 16, 2005. The success of such a system requires coordinated international collective action, not only to monitor the commitments made, as the Protocol has required since 2008, but also to negotiate the post-2012 period, when it was due to expire with a new agreement due to come into force in 2020. However, successive COPs have failed to agree on a new protocol, notably at the 2009 Copenhagen conference, on which many hopes had been pinned.

While the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol, which ended in 2012, saw a decline in emissions from certain developed...