Jennifer Morgan is the global director of the climate programme at the World Resources Institute. WRI is a global research organization based in Washington DC, active in more than 50 countries and offices in countries such as India, China and Brazil. Prior to joining WRI in 2009, Morgan worked at Third Generation Environmentalism (E3G) as global climate change director.

On anticipated obstacles to the Paris climate deal: “Number one will be the level and type of support that developed countries are ready to provide for developing countries, to make that transition.”

On whether the world could tackle climate change without the UN process: “I don’t think that world can tackle climate change without the UN process, but I don’t think that the UN process can solve the problem.”

On the meaning of ‘legally binding’: “I think legally binding means that countries are deeply committed to fulfilling the commitments that they have made to each other that the world, and will be held accountable for those commitments.”

On the challenge of bringing together all the countries’ climate pledges:  “You need common accounting rules that all parties agree to, and then after Paris, they can negotiate the details.”

On whether 1.5C is still politically feasible: “Is it incredibly challenging? Absolutely. But are the impacts of climate change incredibly challenging? Even more so.”

On her vision for a long-term climate goal: “A phase out of greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero by optimally CO2 by 2050, and all greenhouse gas emissions by 2070 or so, that would give you a high probability of staying below 2C.”

On the risk that focusing on long-term targets means we forget about the short-term: “We can’t wait until 2030 to say: oh, OK we’re now going to look at what level of ambition we have. The impacts are happening too fast, the science is evolving too fast.”

How the IPCC could better serve the UNFCCC process: “The IPCC could do national or regional studies looking at the risks of two, three and four degrees for countries – to get a sense of what that really looks like. And then that can feed into the five-year cycle on adaptation.”

On the focus of the next IPCC special report: “I think my preference would be for a report on decarbonisation and how to decarbonise economies – to support countries to do national deep decarbonisation strategies.”

On decarbonisation scenarios involving BECCS: “I think in some of these models there are assumptions around renewables – and where renewables were going to be by now and in the future – which were pretty conservative, actually, which then has an impact on whether you need to use BECCS or not.”

On what’s giving her cause for optimism for the Paris climate conference: “The amazing decline in the cost of solar.”

On potential problems with the media coverage of Paris: “I do worry that in order to explain things that the media will simplify things. And that I think is really dangerous.”

CB: How do you define success in Paris? And what are the obstacles to success?

JM: Success in Paris for me is that there is a sense in the world that there has been a turning point. That the leaders of the world understand the risks that climate change poses to their societies, to their people, to their ecosystems, and that they see that solving the problem is actually in their deep national interest, and can benefit their economies. And that means that turning point can be represented inside the agreement, with things like signals that they’re going to decarbonise their economies and move to a more resilient world, and then parts inside the machinery of the agreement, for example, that countries will come back regularly. But it’s really that turning point that is for a me a signal of the success in Paris.

CB: So, fast-forwarding to that final night in Paris, what are going to be those things that everyone’s still debating? Hopefully, it will all be done before then, but let’s assume it goes to the wire: what are going to be those obstacles and sticking points that particularly you anticipate?

JM: I think one of the big obstacles or sticking points, number one will be the level and type of support that developed countries are ready to provide for developing countries, to make that transition, to help them be more ambitious, and to take care of the vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. I think that’s a key one. I think the second is whether the world is ready to shift and send that signal that they’re set to decarbonise their economy. I think that’s going to go all the way to the wire. And whether this agreement really sends the short-term signals, too. So whether there’s a commitment that parties will come back every five years and strengthen their ambitions, whether it be on reducing emissions or not. Will they really commit to that strengthening, or are they just going to commit to coming back and taking stock every five years.

I think the main barriers, I think part of it is, well, clearly not every economy in the world is already on this pathway, there’s much happening around the world and I think part of what Paris is is accelerating that pace of the shift to the low-carbon climate-resilient economy. But there’s countries who you know their major income is from fossil fuels, and I think having them feel that they can part of this transition is going to be some of the work that needs to be done over the coming months. They will not want to go that way. I think that another barrier is for the most vulnerable countries to really feel that the world gets it, to really feel that they understand that the impacts are happening now, and that they’re costly, and whether or not there’s enough there so that those countries feel like they’re going to be supported, and they haven’t caused the problem but they’re suffering that impacts. So those different pieces. And then the last one – I hope they’re not all still there on the last night! – but I think another one will just be this question of differentiation and that’s partially is there an equitable agreement as a whole? Do countries feel that there is a balance across it, between different things? And I think also inside some of those key issues, is it seen as fair by everybody? And that’s going to be hard to judge. It’s going to be an emerging fate that’s moving forward, but I could imagine something a speech on the last night of a delegate that gives a speech that it’s not equitable.

CB: So in the months we’ve got now, in the run up to Paris, what, potentially, are those catalytic moments, not at Paris, but in the month running up? What are those key, catalytic moments, if you like, that could change the gear, change direction, give you optimism?

JM: I think there’s a number of both multilateral and bilateral moments. So I think that September summit in New York, which is actually around the sustainable development goals, but I think it’s closely tied into climate – that’s a real opportunity for the world to kind of step forward together on those goals in a way that builds trust for Paris. And I think that’s a key moment. I think that a lot of the bilateral discussions going on are quite important. So President Xi Jinping will be in the US in September meeting with Obama. Those two leaders gave a big signal to the world last November: what’s going to happen this November on that? I think groups are mobilising around the world, so one of the key dates for the public – like they did in New York last year – is going to be happening in Paris, that really sends a signal to those policymakers and politicians that their citizens really care about this. And I think that some of the – there’s the vulnerable countries forum which is a group of the most vulnerable led by the Philippines. They’re going to be meeting later this year, seeing what kind of signals they send in on the highest levels, I think, to bring that urgency into the debate.

CB: We’re seeing what feels like a kind of rush of external events outside of the UN tent: we’ve got the papal encyclical; we’ve got the divestment movement; growth in renewables; interesting figures coming out of the IEA and BP and others, that we’ve got possibly hints that, maybe or maybe not, economic growth is decoupling from emissions.. Given these events and others, could the world tackle climate change without the UN process?

JM: I don’t think that world can tackle climate change without the UN process, but I don’t think that the UN process can solve the problem. So I think what we’ve learned over the years is that there are all of these things going on. But because it’s a global problem, and because there are vast economic interests also included, and equity issues included in this debate, that you need a multilateral approach. And I think what Paris is trying to answer is, what ‘s the role of the UN in this big ecosystem of things that are happening? And I think these signals that the UN can send out – all countries are going in that direction – I think the transparency that it can bring to what countries are doing, and providing a voice for the most vulnerable are really important functions of the UN. So, it’s not going to solve the problem, but you can’t do it without it.

CB: What does legally binding mean? What does it actually mean in this potential deal in Paris. What’s your vision of  that – and how can we get there?

JM: I think legally binding means that countries are deeply committed to fulfilling the commitments that they have made to each other that the world, and will be held accountable for those commitments – in some way. I think for Paris, that could look like an international binding agreement, that goes through ratification, through different approval processes, in national parliaments or through executive agreements, that type of thing. And then inside that agreement I think, it’s fine in a way that countries are held accountable, but that don’t in a way overreach on their feeling of national sovereignty. So it could be things like, they bind themselves to report and be reviewed and implement their national targets and plans, rather than that they shall achieve those national plans. And I think that we’re in a more sophisticated debate now than we’ve been in before about that binding quality of things. I think that part of that needs to also be a some kind of a compliance mechanism, I think that it will be a facilitative compliance mechanism in Paris to start out, to support countries. But that commitment and accountability, when I talk to people around the world, they want to know how are countries going to to be held accountable and that’s when that binding piece comes in.

CB: We’ve had some significant but early INDCs that have been submitted to the UNFCCC. There’s this kind of more formal moment that the [UNFCCC] secretariat seems to be doing later in the year when it’s going to assess and aggregate and look [at the INDCs], namely, how do we add them up? I mean we keep hearing that they’re not going to add up to 2C. How do you bring together these different methodologies, baselines, data etc? How do you bring this together both now for this moment before Paris, but, looking beyond that, how do we align all this and get this on a straight line?

JM: I think it’s challenging, methodologically, actually [laughs]. The World Resources Institute has done a lot of work on this kind of thing and we have a couple of global standards, actually, that help countries count their emission reductions against their goals, in a similar way, helps get a sense of what the actual goals are and how…getting transparency around those, in order to even apply that, you need common accounting rules that all parties agree to, and then after Paris, they can negotiate the details. Because otherwise the WRIs of the world can’t add it all up if it’s apples and oranges. And you really need a high level of regular transparency around what countries are doing. And then you need that long-term benchmark against which you’re kind of measuring it against, whether that’s the 2C goal or a new long-term goal that’s a bit more specific. You need to kind of unpack the black box of what countries put forward and be able to see: ah OK, that common methodology that we use, you can do those comparisons. Otherwise we won’t really know where we are in comparison with 1.5C and 2C.

CB: You mention 1.5C: is it still politically feasible? The IPCC says the carbon budget for 1.5C is very challenging: if [BAU] emissions continue, within a decade, we will have burned through that budget for 1.5C. Is it realistically, hand-on-heart, politically feasible?

JM: It’s been an interesting debate recently on the 1.5, because a recent session in Bonn in June you had a scientific review of 2 degrees versus 1.5. What I found really interesting at that debate was that the vast majority of the countries were ready to move forward and continue with keeping 1.5 on the table because of the clarity of the risks even from a 1.5 degree rise. And it was really Saudi Arabia in this instance that were saying how concerned they were, they didn’t want this debate to happen. So, hand-on-heart, except the one country [laughs] that won’t keep it on the table, I think it is politically possible. Is it incredibly challenging? Absolutely. But are the impacts of climate change incredibly challenging? Even more so.

CB: You also mentioned the long-term goal. There’s been quite a lot of focus around that recently. We’ve seen the G7 recently send a signal around this. Firstly, what is your vision, and what would be your preferred long-term goal, and over what time-frame, etc? But is there a risk that if we put too much focus on this goal to mid-century or beyond, that we lose the focus on the vitally important short-term?

JM: My vision for this agreement is that we would actually have two long-term goals. one would be a phase out of greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero by optimally CO2 by 2050, and all greenhouse gas emissions by 2070 or so, that would give you a high probability of staying below 2C. And a resilience goal to build adaptive capacity in communities around the world. I think that is only successful if you couple it with a five-year cycle. And a long-term goal alone is not going to get you what you need. So the debate about what’s the target that countries sign up for in Paris…is it the 2025 target? Or the 2030 target? How often do they come back to the table to strengthen that, is absolutely fundamental for the success of Paris in my book. We can’t wait until 2030 to say: oh, OK we’re now going to look at what level of ambition we have. The impacts are happening too fast, the science is evolving too fast.

CB: It feels as if this so-called “ratchet mechanism” within the Paris agreement, and the 5 years versus 10 years [review and commitment period], what again is your vision for how that might work or land within this agreement? What will it actually look like, potentially?

JM: I think the ratchet mechanism, or cycle… you have that long-term goal, you have that clear benchmark, you would have an assessment by a scientific body, that would look a where are we now vis-a-vis that long-term goal whether it be the phase out or something like that, so that there’s a snapshot of where we are now. Countries would then put forward their next round of mitigation commitments. And those would then be need to looked at, OK how far away are we from that target? And then what I think is important is that there is some kind of technical analysis around what those countries could be doing. And a conversation, a dialogue, and assessment, a stock-take – I don’t care what you call it! – that really tries to encourage countries to put probably more on the table, because they will see that there is a gap. They would then finalise it.

Countries are, right now, the final decision makers on what goes into this agreement. It’s a national agreement. But they would have been through kind of a question and answer, technical expertise, independent experts could come in and help, it could be done through a technical panel, that there would really be a robust process around that, before they finalised that. And then countries could actually increase their target any time, so if there’s change of government, and the next government wants to, in between these five-year cycles, increase, that would be fine. And then the final ingredient is that in the Paris agreement it says that the parties shall increase ambition every five years. So that is not only a no roll-back clause, but actually they’re committing, step-by-step, to increase that. And then, of course, they’re the transparency, so you know what countries are doing. so it’s a bit of a package, in a way that combines the long-term, the commitment to the short-term increase, good transparency, and then dialogue, input, technical into what countries are doing, and hopefully a five-year moment, where the world is looking at what every country is doing that would help increase ambition over time.

CB: The IPCC will later this year elect the new chair, secretariat, vice-chairs, etc, and begin the scoping process for the sixth assessment report, which to date has been rolling on a 6-7 year cycle. Is there any way the IPCC can better serve this UNFCCC process? With some of the things you’ve been mentioning about independent assessment scientific review, etc? Is it sensible for the IPCC to synchronise with this process, whatever comes out of Paris? Or is better to keep the IPCC at arms length, away from this kind of politicised environment?

JM: I think the IPCC can do a combined thing. I think it’s important that it remains independent – and it is independent – of this process, and does its reviews. But I think also it could be doing regular, shorter-term special reports that are very relevant for those cycles. So, for example, if the IPCC could do national or regional studies looking at the risks of two, three and four degrees for countries – to get a sense of what that really looks like. And then that can feed into the five-year cycle on adaptation. That would be tremendously helpful.

CB: Is that in the near-term? There’s talk already that the next special report by the IPCC may be around food security, there’s a submission from one party that it should be around oceans – what would be your preference for the focus of the next special report? Say, delivered in the next two or three years.

JM: I think my preference would be for a report on decarbonisation and how to decarbonise economies – to support countries to do national deep decarbonisation strategies. And I would couple that with some modelling, as far as what it looks like from… I don’t know if they could be too different. I guess if I had to pick it would be that the IPCC did a special report on this transformation and deep decarbonisation, in a way that provides examples and assistance to countries that do want to have an orderly transition to that long-term goal. And what’s worked elsewhere, or what are the key things they need to be looking at.

CB: We saw with working group three of AR5 that most of the deep decarbonisation scenarios included a whole heap of BECCS – bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (CCS) – and, in addition, also CCS itself. What’s your views on those scenarios, because if you fast-forward to mid-century and beyond – with even an overshoot scenario where you go beyond and you pull back with negative emissions – if you run that playbook out over the decades ahead, that could have severe and incredibly intense land-use implications if you we’re going to have to produce that kind of bioenergy at that scale – and also the geological storage of that underground carbon. What’s your view on that? And that signal that the working group three conclusions sent to the policymakers in terms of reaching out into the decades and the end of the century?

JM: Well, I think you can’t, you know… the models are the models and the way that they’re constructed, you can’t pick and choose which parts you like and which parts you don’t like. I mean, I think in some of these models there are assumptions around renewables – and where renewables were going to be by now and in the future – which were pretty conservative, actually, which then has an impact on whether you need to use BECCS or not.

CB: To, sort of, erase BECCS? Or do you think even if, say, the growth of renewables were more realistically represented?

JM: Well, I think one of the issues that the IPCC needs to grapple with is that they don’t really have a wide array of models that get you to 1.5 degrees that use different strategies to get there. And I think that it’s very important that that happens because policymakers need to look at those risks. So clearly there are big land challenges and potential human rights violations from some of those models that just use masses of land, and you wonder how you’re going to feed the nine billion. The WRI has done quite a lot of work around this actually. But then, what are the risks of not going that way? What are the other pathways and what risks and opportunities do they provide? And I think that it would be really helpful to policymakers if there could be additional models that don’t all depend on one technology or another.

CB: What gives you optimism? You know, often we talk about climate change and there’s a lot of pessimism around. What is currently giving you optimism for Paris – and beyond?

JM: I think that there’s a couple of things that give me optimism. I think the 700,000 people who showed up in the streets around the world – New York and elsewhere last September – gives me optimism. Because I think in the end, solving climate change is not a technical problem – it’s a political problem. And we need to have people standing in the streets, in the halls of power, demanding that their politicians listen to the science and deploy existing technology to accelerate the pace of this transformation that we need. The other thing that gives me hope is the amazing decline in the cost of solar. Because I think if you can power the homes of people in India or other places with distributed solar power – that’s a game changer. And that gives me great, great hope. And I think the third thing that gives me a bit of hope is that I see an emerging engagement of world leaders again, and that for Paris is incredibly important. So the G7 the occurred, the leadership of Chancellor Merkel, the fact that President Obama is so engaged, the fact that Xi Jinping is engaged – that gives me hope, because this is a leaders’ issue. It has to be at that top table and so we need more leaders in the coming months. We need leaders from Africa, we need leaders from Latin America, we need leaders from the small islands, but that I think is a good sign.

CB: Do you think the media will be a help or a hindrance at Paris? Given you probably have a memory of what happened in Copenhagen and the way that the end game was framed and reported and commented on, what is the role of the media in the next few months? And what is the influence of the media in the run up to Paris? Summarising it and scoring it, if you like?

JM: I mean I think the role of the media is to explain what’s happening inside the negotiations, and be able to connect it to the real world and the developments in the real world in a way that their readers or their viewers can understand it. And I think that that is really fundamentally important, so that they don’t get too much into the weeds of it. I think it’s to make sure that the various voices are heard, so that it’s not all European or American voices that get heard, but the voices from all different types of countries get heard, and those perspectives are understood. In the developing country market you have those different perspectives – I think that’s really important. I don’t think that it’s the media’s role to judge the outcome of Paris. I think the outcome of Paris will be judged by many, many different people. It will be judged by the local person who’s living below the glacier lake that could burst, it will be judged by the leaders who are there, it will be judged by the activists.

CB: You don’t fear or foresee problems with a general cynicism that sometimes lives in media coverage of this process, probably stretching before Copenhagen?

JM: I do worry that in order to explain things that the media will simplify things. And that I think is really dangerous. I mean the classic example is this really easy way of just saying that it’s the rich countries versus the poor countries – it’s just not that simple any more. It’s a much more complex debate where you have also “poor” countries stepping forward and taking action. There not all just waiting for money to come their way. And you have different levels of rich countries. So I do see a risk – definitely – in an oversimplification and therefore a politicisation of things, and I really hope that journalists take the time to learn the issues and do responsible reporting on that. Because the world’s changed since Copenhagen, and I think it’s their duty to kind of report that.

Main image: Jennifer Morgan, Director of Climate and Energy at WRI.