The Climate Diplomat: A Personal History of the COP Conferences

Peter Betts

There’s a telling moment in Pete Bett’s posthumously-published book on climate negotiations. Having stood down as the UK and the EU’s chief climate negotiator, after more than 20 years in the bubble, he attends a meeting on resilience in Geneva. ‘I realised’, he says, that ‘I knew almost no one. Despite the huge implications of climate for resilience, my impression was the communities were not doing nearly enough to join up.’ 

From a development perspective, that exactly mirrors my own experience. From about 2009 onwards, attending climate meetings, up to and including the Durban and Paris COPs, I found rooms full of strangers, often climate scientists or from Ministries of the Environment,  highly skilled, relentlessly committed to climate action, deeply engaged in international negotiations – but often, not always, exhibiting very little familiarity with development frameworks or issues.

We tried to remedy this at ODIOverseas Development Institute (London) early on, in a meeting series in the UK parliament, organised by Natasha Grist and jointly sponsored by the All Party Groups on both development and climate change; and from 2010 onwards in work sponsored by the UK and Dutch Governments on ‘climate compatible development’. The fragile joints, however, still show.

Within the bubble, nevertheless, significant progress was made, and Pete Betts was at the heart of it. His book is honest, engaging and illuminating, not least because it was written while dealing with the brain tumour that eventually killed him in October 2023; his wife, Fiona MacGregor, played a large part in bringing the book to fruition. Pete was successively the UK civil servant in charge of international climate policy (from 1998) and then international climate change, and from 2013 onwards, until 2016, simultaneously lead negotiator for the EU. He left the civil service in 2018.

The climate regime as it exists today was created within the bubble. It includes a global temperature target, a bottom-up process of gathering together national commitments (or contributions), a five-yearly updated review process requiring greater ambition, a framework for transparent reporting of all greenhouse gases, a ‘rule-book’ for dealing with issues like carbon credits, a series of sectoral commitments on topics like renewable energy or methane, and promises on funding for mitigation, adaptation and loss-and-damage, manifested in the form of special funds under the umbrella of the UNFCC. All this is informed by the work of the IPCC; and none of it is trivial.

Pete Betts was intimately involved in all of this, and chronicles the ups and downs, the machinations and manipulations, the concessions and the compromises. Along the way, there are entertaining pen portraits, mostly charitable, about the individuals involved, some funny anecdotes, and, as you would expect, many insights into how to influence negotiations.

It was interesting to learn, for example, that ministers of the High Ambition Coalition cloistered themselves out of sight in Paris for some hours, to give the impression they were agonising about the terms of the agreement, when in fact they agreed. This, Betts tells us ‘was theatre. The theatre was stepped up further when the ministers present in the meeting decided to march arm in arm into the final plenary. I am sure this was deeply annoying to China and India who always hated the HAC.’  Similarly, Betts describes being taught by a Mexican delegate that if you want to support the compromise being put forward by the Chair, it is best not to make it obvious: ‘ ‘You do not support the chair by supporting the chair!’ said Luis Alfonso. ‘You support the chair by attacking her from the opposite direction!’.

There are more serious lessons about how to achieve positive outcomes. Betts is enthusiastic about informal groupings, especially the Cartagena Dialogue, and about the role of high-level reports, like the New Climate Economy Report. He is insightful about how to manage ministers, especially UK ones. There are interesting points about when to deploy proposals that might unblock a stalemate in negotiations. And there are pointers, some critical, for NGOs engaged in climate advocacy: for example, they should be more critical of low-ambition commitments made by developing countries.

So what is the problem? Betts is realistic about what the UNFCCC has or has not delivered in terms of actual reductions in emissions: not enough. He fully understands the constraints imposed by a commitment to universality. He makes specific recommendations for improvement, especially to do with the five-yearly stock-take and the long-standing and increasingly untenable division between developed (Annex1) and developing (non-Annex 1) countries: the latter, including China, are now and will be the largest emitters, so must take on greater responsibility. But he defends the UN process: ‘Our conclusion was that there was and is no viable alternative to securing serious action on climate through the UN’.

Accepting this conclusion, there are some points to add to the reform agenda.

First, it is a big frustration that the UNFCCC deals with territorial rather than consumption emissions. For most developed countries, imported emissions are large, so that measuring climate impact only in terms of emissions generated within national borders greatly underestimates the harm. For developing countries, manufacturing for export, the opposite is true. In the UK, for example, imported emissions account for about half of the total emissions for which we are responsible. The relative contribution of different countries would look very different, and so would the dividing lines at the UNFCCC, if the currency of negotiation were consumption rather than production. It would also have been much easier than it proved to be to link the trade and climate negotiations, for example around the issue of carbon border adjustments.

Second, it is also disappointing that Pete Betts does not say more about conditional offers from non-Annex 1 countries, known as conditional rather than unconditional Nationally Determined Contributions. These are designed to specify what additional emission reductions countries might make if financial and technical support were provided. There have, in previous rounds of NDCNational Development Council submissions, been offers of further reduction in the order of several gigatons, but overall, conditional NDCs have not been strong examples of climate compatible development, and nave not been major drivers of progress in the negotiations.

There is a reason for that, which highlights the difficulty of conducting negotiations within the UNFCCC bubble. In the end, transition is an economy-wide and society-wide endeavour, which cannot be addressed only in climate terms – by Ministries of the Environment, for example, rather than by Ministries of Finance. Historically, that was the problem the notion of climate compatible development was intended to solve: one plan rather than two, for example, one for climate and one for development. But the concept itself and the idea behind it had limited traction, certainly during the period covered by the book. Mainstream economists like Nick Stern and Mark Carney made important contributions. But it is notable that there is no reference in the book to the Sustainable Development Goals, nor to the UN’s Financing for Development Process. The references to aid are cursory, with no reference to the aid policy and coordination work of the Development Assistance Committee of the OECD. There was obviously good coordination in the UK between Pete Betts in his various roles and various champions in DFID, for example on forestry, but it is not obvious that climate was always seen as a priority by development ministers (with Rory Stewart as a notable exception).

The boundaries drawn around the UNFCCC also led to problems on the financial side. Pete Betts discusses the failure over many years to reach the target of transferring $US 100 bn annually to developing countries, and does explore the role of the private sector and of financial institutions like the World Bank. However, a conclusion is that ‘the international financial institutions like the IMFInternational Monetary Fund and the World Bank are essential parts of the global machinery for tackling climate change, but they are not an alternative to the UN’. That is at least a debateable conclusion. Of course, it would have been possible to use existing UN funding mechanisms, like UNDPUnited Nations Development Programme or the specialised funds and programmes. But does anyone seriously think that the proliferation of small climate funds under the umbrella of the UNFCCC, for example adaptation and loss and damage, even the larger Global Climate Fund, are the best way to manage flows to developing countries?

Finally, another issue not really discussed, is that the interests countries have in climate action are not independent of wider international relations, and cannot really be hived off. ‘Climate diplomacy’ is not just a special case of ‘diplomacy’, it is one facet of diplomacy. This means that the levers needed to forge an agreement may not be in the climate arena at all, but rather trade-related, or in the sphere of cultural relations, or even military. As a sociologist once observed, ‘if there is no meat in the kitchen, the answer is not to be found in the kitchen’. We can say that current global relationships clearly reflect this inter-relationship of issues. In that sense, climate diplomacy is too important to be left to climate diplomats. How might climate negotiations be different if they were more formally integrated?

All this said, we should be grateful to Pete Betts, to his wife, and to the many friends and collaborators thanked at the end of the book. For those of us with an interest in climate action – even an interest in climate compatible development – this is an invaluable read.