Introduction

It has been argued that climate change is the greatest threat facing humanity and yet is not explicitly targeted in the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) but falls rather under Goal 7's (Ensure Environmental Sustainability) target 1, “Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programs and reverse the loss of environmental resources,” and less directly through Goal 8: “Global partnership for development.” Since their implementation in 2000, the MDGs have been shown to be quite successful in mobilizing support for health, hunger, and education. The subprioritization of climate change recognizes an implicit conflict between development, with the energy use (and emissions) it entails, and climate policy. Climate changemitigation in emerging and developing countries could be harmful from a development perspective if it slows economic growth by requiring more costly, low-carbon energy sources (Jakob and Steckel, 2013).

This chapter discusses and evaluates common and innovative global climate policy targets and metrics within a benefit-cost framework appropriate for use as post-2015 goals. Moreover, it highlights the potential for the UN post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals to acknowledge current technological limitations and developmental objectives facing policy makers and thus identify policies that are regionally acceptable, appropriate, and most important, effective in slowing global warming.

International Climate Cooperation

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was created over a quarter century ago toassess the risks associated with anthropogenic climate change. In 1992 the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was created to help establish enforceable treaties to “avoid dangerous climate change” through yearly Conferences of the Parties (COPs). The past 26 years of climate negotiations have shown that establishing such an agreement is a highly challenging task. In 1996 the goal of limiting climate change to a 2_C rise in average global temperature came on the scene and has become a key focus of the international climate debate. Despite much media attention and repeated negotiations within the UNFCCC framework, if measured by performance, global climate policy has failed. Since 1990 the globe has witnessed a steady rise in emissions, only halted by the global recession, with carbon dioxide emissions having increased by more than 46 percent.