The Role of United Nations Secretary‐General in the Climate Change Process
| Author | Janos Pasztor |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12345 |
| Published date | 01 September 2016 |
| Date | 01 September 2016 |
The Role of United Nations Secretary-General
in the Climate Change Process
Janos Pasztor
United Nations
1
Abstract
Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary-General (SG) has been visibly engaged throughout the year on preparations for and during
the Paris Conference, but his role in contributing to achieving this agreement has been little understood. The SG has no speci-
fic mandate to deal with climate change issues. Yet without his intensive engagement it would not have been possible to
reach the agreement we had in Paris. The role played by the SG and its outcomes will be the focus of this paper. Particular
attention will be paid to events in 2015, but the paper also looks at some earlier events during the entire mandate of this Sec-
retary-General, covering 2007–2016.
Participants as well as many commentators have deemed
the United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Paris
in December 2015, or more formally the 21st meeting of
the Conference of the Parties (COP) of the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) a
great success. The Paris Agreement, as well as other out-
comes of the conference have surpassed most expectations.
Much of the success has been correctly linked to the leader-
ship of the COP21 President, Laurent Fabius –at that time the
Foreign Minister of France –and to Christiana Figueres the
Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC and their respective teams.
2
Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary-General (SG) has been visi-
bly engaged throughout the year on preparations for and
during the Paris Conference, but his role in contributing to
achieving this agreement has been little understood. The SG
has no specific mandate to deal with climate change issues.
Yet without his intensive engagement it would not have
been possible to reach the agreement we had in Paris.
The role played by the SG will be the focus of this paper.
The paper will not address roles played by many others in
achieving a successful outcome. Neither does the paper
attempt to compare the role played by the SG compared to
the many other actors.
The paper, however, also has an additional objective. By 1
January 2017 there will be a new Secretary-General of the Uni-
ted Nations. This paper also wishes to provide relevant inputs
to the new Secretary-General in how she/he might formulate
her/his climate change strategy, including possibly focusing
around the ‘unique assets’a Secretary-General has in this area,
such as global legitimacy; global convening power; the moral
and political authority vested in the position; and being the
Head of the UN, and thereby the ability to lead theUN System.
A brief history of the last decade
The SG does not have any specific mandate from Member
States of the United Nations to work on climate change
issues, other than responsibility of appointing the Head of
the UNFCCC Secretariat.
3
Secretaries-General before Ban Ki-moon were not actively
engaged in the climate change process. This started to
change at the end of KofiAnnan’s term as Secretary-Gen-
eral, when he addressed a meeting of the COP in Nairobi in
November 2006 –this was a first by a UN Secretary-General.
With the arrival of Ban Ki-moon in 2007, this all changed.
Shortly after entering into office he realized the importance
of climate change for the entire work of the United Nations:
the impacts of climate change could reverse decades of suc-
cess in development efforts and peace building; climate
change would act as a threat multiplier; and the activities of
most of the UN entities had direct or indirect impacts on cli-
mate change, as well as on efforts to mitigate and adapt.
His first major action on climate change was at the 13th
meeting of the COP in Bali in December 2007. The negotia-
tions were difficult. The SG delivered a strong statement to
the COP and then had to leave Indonesia for other business.
Upon hearing news from Bali that the negotiations seemed
stuck, he decided to return to Bali, and address the negoti-
ating Parties again, urging them to find consensus. Consen-
sus was then found, and COP13 in Bali ended with a
positive outcome.
While the SG’s‘return to Bali’was highly visible and
impactful, what was not known to most observers that
already before Bali the SG had engaged with key world
leaders to seek their support for an agreement. This, as we
can see in the box below, and will also see later in this
paper, is an important contribution of the SG to the process.
One of the first visits to a Leader by the Secretary-
General, shortly after his appointment, was to US
President Bush in Washington. He raised the issue of
climate change with him, and also invited him to the
first climate change summit he was preparing for
©2016 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Global Policy (2016) 7:3 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12345
Global Policy Volume 7 . Issue 3 . September 2016
450
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