The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2017

26 JULY-AUGUST 2017 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL There is a great breadth and depth of official and unofficial activity around the world aimed at meeting the climate change challenge. Karen Florini, a visiting fellow at the University of Oxford’s Oxford Martin School, was deputy special envoy for climate change at the State Department from April 2015 to January 2017. Previously, she served as managing director for international climate at the Environmental Defense Fund. Ann Florini is a professor of public policy at Singapore Management University, where she focuses on global governance issues including energy and climate, and a Faculty Fellow at American University’s School of International Service. She was previously on the faculty of the National University of Singapore, the staff of the Brookings Institution and the staff of the Carnegie Endowment for Inter- national Peace. T he world no longer waits for U.S. leadership on climate. In 2014, astute U.S. diplomacy helped foster a U.S.- China joint announcement that in turn made possible the breakthrough Paris Agreement in 2015. But with that agreement now in force, businesses and cities already deeply engaged and evidence of climate impact more compelling by the day, U.S. disengagement is unlikely to leave a leadership void for long. Already the European Union is stepping into the role of China’s chief dance partner on climate, leaving the United States on the sidelines of a projected multitrillion-dollar market for climate-friendly solutions. Indeed, in the run-up to the Trump administration’s June 1 announcement that it would withdraw from the Paris Agree- ment—an announcement replete with gross mischaracteriza- tions of the agreement’s actual provisions—businesses from Exxon to General Mills to Intel called for the United States to remain a party to the agreement. They did so not least because they believe their ability to compete effectively in global markets will be undercut by Washington’s abandonment of its seat at the climate-policy table. Climate change is also increasingly seen as a security issue. In its 2015 report, National Security Implications of Climate-Related Risks and a Changing Climate , the Department of Defense identified climate change as “an urgent and growing threat to our national security, contributing to increased natural disasters, refugee flows and conflicts over basic resources such as food and water.” Moreover, Defense noted that these impacts “are already occurring, and the scope, scale and intensity of these impacts are projected to increase,” aggravating “existing problems … that threaten domestic stability in a number of countries.” Although the Paris Agreement has drawn the lion’s share of recent international climate headlines, it is far from the only forum in which Americans can, and do, address climate issues. A glorious profusion of state, non-state and hybrid entities in the United States and elsewhere is demonstrating impressive ingenuity in relevant policy and technology. But this abundance of loosely connected actors and initiatives makes it difficult to understand howmany fronts exist in the battle against cata- strophic climate change. To help reduce the confusion, this article offers a tentative taxonomy. For context, some basics of BY KAREN F LOR I N I & ANN F LOR I N I IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT PARIS International Climate Action Today FOCUS ON ENVIRONMENTAL DIPLOMACY