European Foreign Policy in a Decarbonising World

Challenges and Opportunities

Sebastian Oberthür, Dennis Tänzler, Emily Wright, Gauri Khandekar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032023526
• eBook ISBN: 9781000541052
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Contributing to the emerging literature on the geopolitical and foreign policy implications of decarbonisation and energy transition processes, this book sheds light on the future of the European Union's (EU) external relations under decarbonisation.

Under the Paris Agreement on climate change, adopted in 2015, governments are committed to phasing out the emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases over the coming decades. This book addresses the many questions around this process of decarbonisation through detailed analyses of EU external relations with six fossil-fuel exporting countries: Nigeria, Indonesia, Azerbaijan, Colombia, Qatar, and Canada. The authors systematically examine the six countries' varying dependence on fossil fuels, the broader political and security context, current relations with the EU, and the potential for developing these towards decarbonisation. In doing so, they put forward a series of findings that should hold across varying circumstances and provide a steppingstone to enrich and inspire further research on foreign policy, external relations, and international relations under decarbonisation. The book also makes an important contribution to understanding the external implications of the 2019 European Green Deal.

This volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of European environmental and climate policy, climate diplomacy, energy policy, foreign policy, and climate/energy geopolitics.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/ 9781003183037, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

1IntroductionThe European Union, decarbonisation, and foreign policy

DOI: 10.4324/9781003183037-1

Introduction

The European Union (EU) and the world community are embarking on a fundamental societal and economic transition away from fossil fuels and towards full decarbonisation (the ‘climate transition’). Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, governments agreed to phase out emissions of CO₂ and other greenhouse gases (GHGs) over the coming decades in order to hold global temperature rise to well below 2°C and to pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels (Klein et al. 2017). To this end, a growing number of countries have committed to phasing out GHG emissions by 2050 or 2060, including the EU, the United States, China, and others (see https://eciu.net/netzerotracker, last visited on 24 June 2021). The EU has been at the forefront of climate action by international comparison and has generally been considered an international leader on climate change (Oberthür and Dupont 2021). To make the EU sustainable and achieve climate neutrality by 2050, the European Commission launched the European Green Deal in 2019 (European Commission 2019). In this context, the EU has committed to reducing its GHG emissions by 55 percent by 2030 and to achieving climate neutrality (i.e., net zero GHG emissions) by 2050. At the time of writing, further implementing legislation to this end is forthcoming (see the next section).

Transcending climate policy as such, the challenge of the climate transition implies far-reaching adaptations of a wide range of other policies, including foreign policy and external relations.¹ The need for further alignment of other sectoral policies with climate policy arises from the crosscutting nature of the climate challenge. Although climate policy integration – the integration of climate policy objectives into other policies – has significantly advanced in the EU (Dupont 2016), the need for further progress has been acknowledged and highlighted in the European Green Deal that aims to ensure other EU policies support the climate transition. Part of the agenda of climate policy integration concerns EU external policies that need to be further developed so as to build sustainable, fruitful international partnerships under decarbonisation and in support of the climate transition (European Commission 2019: esp. 15–22).

Research on the integration of climate policy into EU foreign policy at large is at an early stage. As further discussed below, several literatures possess relevance for the topic but have so far at best made first attempts to explore the issues at a general level. Beyond the specialised literature on EU climate diplomacy and foreign climate policy (e.g., Adelle et al. 2018), studies on general EU foreign policy have started to acknowledge the principal importance of the climate transition, in particular with respect to EU foreign energy policy and bilateral relations with selected partner countries such as Russia (Knodt et al. 2017; Godzimirski 2019). Research has also begun to explore the geopolitical implications of the global climate transition for the international distribution of power and interests and international interdependence (e.g., Scholten 2018; IRENA 2019; Van de Graaf and Sovacool 2020). And literature on environmental and climate security has highlighted the significance of both climate change and climate policy for security policy (Ide et al. 2021; Swatuk et al. 2021). However, these literatures have so far stayed at a rather general level, not exploring in much detail the wide-ranging implications of the European and global climate transition for EU external relations.

Against this background, this book aims to enhance our understanding of the concrete implications of decarbonisation for EU external relations and how these can be managed and reshaped. To this end, we analyse bilateral relations between the EU and its member states, on one side, and a selection of ‘hard cases’, namely fossil fuel exporting countries, on the other, with a twofold focus. First, we aim to identify in more detail the significant challenges that arise from the decarbonisation process in the specific context of the partner countries. Second, we endeavour to delineate the room and the opportunities for developing bilateral relations beyond fossil fuels under the particularly challenging conditions of the selected partner countries in order to (1) help advance the climate transition, and (2) foster generally fruitful bilateral relations. We therefore define the task of foreign relations under decarbonisation as twofold, namely as (1) facilitating the phase-out of fossil fuels and GHG emissions and (2) transitioning towards renewed sustainable external relations that are based on other sectors, including low-carbon ones, while preventing potentially destabilising effects of the transition.

This introductory chapter sets the scene for the overall volume in four steps. The next section first provides some further background on EU climate policy and external relations in the context of the global decarbonisation challenge. Subsequently, we discuss how our effort relates to and advances four related and evolving literatures on EU climate policy, EU foreign policy and external relations, environment/climate and security, and the geopolitics of energy. This is followed by an introduction of our analytical approach and methodology, including the criteria for the selection of the six case studies that lie at the core of this study. The final section provides a short overview of the remainder of the volume.

Background: decarbonisation, EU climate policy, and EU external relations

The decarbonisation challenge

In 2015, the international community adopted the Paris Agreement and set the course for global decarbonisation before the end of the century. On the basis of its aforementioned temperature goal of 2/1.5°C, the Paris Agreement establishes in its Article 4.1 the collective target of achieving net-zero GHG emissions in the second half of this century. Consequently, many countries have moved to cut and phase out GHG emissions. Crucial to these efforts is the transition away from fossil fuels to a decarbonised energy supply, but decarbonisation is also a much broader process that will require, for example, changes in land use, greater resource efficiency, and the preservation of carbon sinks, such as forests and oceans (IPCC 2014, 2018). Given the long-term nature of the climate transition, durable commitment and long-term planning for realising decarbonisation are required. Consequently, the Paris Agreement also foresees that its parties develop long-term strategies to this effect (Art. 4.19). These strategies complement medium-term national climate action plans called ‘nationally determined contributions’ (NDCs) towards the collective temperature and decarbonisation goals (on the Paris Agreement, see Doelle 2016; Falkner 2016; Klein et al. 2017).

Realising the global decarbonisation goal implies a twofold fundamental change in the way economies and societies work. First, it entails the decline and destabilisation of carbon-intensive development models based on the production and burning of fossil fuels and overexploitation of natural resources. Second, it requires the emergence of more sustainable forms of energy production and resource use. As a ‘disruptive, contested, and non-linear’ process (Geels et al. 2017), we may expect it to have both adverse and positive effects on countries, with the particular challenges and opportunities they face varying considerably between them. The scale of these challenges is likely to be linked to existing economic dependence on fossil fuels and other high-carbon assets, while the potential to reap benefits and take advantage of new opportunities arising from decarbonisation will depend on the flexibility and capacity of the economy and society to shift and diversify.

The climate transition constitutes a crosscutting challenge for countries’ economies and societies. It cuts across many key sectoral systems, including transport, buildings, power, industry, agriculture, forestry, finance, and so on – constituted of ensembles of actors, technologies, infrastructures, economic structures, institutions, and ideas that produce resistance to change (Geels and Schot 2010). As a result, the climate transition requires countries to implement and manage deep, structural changes to their economies and societies transforming these key sectoral systems and overcoming their inherent resistance to change to effectively eliminate GHG emissions. The strength of governance and institutions, as well as overall economic and political stability, are therefore likely to be important success factors in driving deep decarbonisation processes. Conversely, conflict and instability can significantly undermine efforts to decarbonise (IPCC 2014, 2018).

EU climate policy towards decarbonisation

EU climate policy has developed significantly especially since the 2000s and has moved towards the aim of climate neutrality by 2050. Its roots go back at least to the early 1990s when the first legislative and policy action was taken in the context of the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). EU climate policy development accelerated in the 2000s, when the EU began to implement its GHG emission reduction commitment under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol (see Table 1.1) and established the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS). Since then, the development of EU climate policy has advanced further and has led to a rich acquis of climate legislation addressing all relevant sectors (including buildings, transport, industry, power, land use, etc.) and using a diversified array of regulatory, market-based, and procedural policy instruments. In this process, the EU has also stepwise strengthened its decadal GHG emission reduction objectives, as depicted in Table 1.1 (on the development of EU climate policy, see Jordan et al. 2010; Oberthür and Pallemaerts 2010; Skjærseth et al. 2016; Delbeke and Vis 2019; Kulovesi and Oberthür 2020).

In the late 2010s, the EU has firmly moved towards aiming for climate neutrality and, hence, full decarbonisation by 2050. Since 2019, the development of EU climate policy has proceeded under the umbrella of the European Commission’s European Green Deal (European Commission 2019). This has included the strengthening of GHG emission reduction targets for 2030 and 2050 (see Table 1.1). Based on the Commission’s strategic long-term vision and pathway to a climate-neutral economy (European Commission 2018), the European Council approved the 2050 climate neutrality target in December 2019, which formed the EU’s long-term strategy submitted to the UNFCCC in March 2020 (European Union 2020). Both the 2050 climate neutrality target and the upgraded 2030 GHG emission reduction target of 55 percent are enshrined in the European Climate Law agreed by the Council of the EU and the European Parliament in April 2021. The evidence available so far suggests that the Covid-19 pandemic and especially the Next Generation EU Fund agreed in response may enhance the implementation of the European Green Deal and the climate targets (Dupont et al. 2020). Eventually, the climate neutrality target implies that EU consumption and imports of fossil fuels are set to decline steeply to reach residual levels by 2050.

The EU has also established overall headline targets for the share of renewable energy in final energy consumption and for the improvement of energy efficiency for 2020 (both 20 percent) and for 2030 (32 percent for renewable energy and 32.5 percent for energy efficiency). These targets for 2030 are expected to be further strengthened in the ongoing implementation of the upgraded GHG emission reduction target of at least 55 percent for 2030. The European Commission is scheduled to table related legislative proposals to this effect in mid-2021. Both energy efficiency improvements and the share of renewable energy will also have to be enhanced further beyond 2030 in order to achieve net zero emissions in 2050 (EEA 2020).

As mentioned above, the European Green Deal also entails an upgrading of ‘climate policy integration’, that is, the integration of climate policy objectives into other sectoral policies ranging from trade over industrial to agricultural and foreign policies (see Adelle and Russel 2013; Dupont 2016). The Green Deal aims at a new quality of climate policy integration, namely that no ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface and acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: the European Union, decarbonisation, and foreign policy
• 2 Nigeria: addressing fragility away from oil?
• 3 Indonesia: building a partnership beyond fossil fuels and palm oil
• 4 Azerbaijan: partnership potential beyond gas?
• 5 Colombia: the double challenge of internal pacification and decarbonisation
• 6 Qatar: moving beyond oil and gas within a fragile regional context
• 7 Canada: reframing a well-established partnership
• 8 Conclusions: challenges and opportunities for EU foreign policy and its analysis in an era of decarbonisation
• Index