The Climate ‘Orchestra’

<aside> 🎻 Climate stakeholders are an orchestra that require conductors to support cohesive sound

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Summary of why orchestration is important, here are some examples:

Why We Need Coordinated Climate Action for the Paris Agreement

<aside> 🎻 Effective solutions to climate change require leveraging actions from various levels - local, regional, and international scales.

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Climate change is a multifaceted problem that requires coordinated effort at all levels of society - from governments to a myriad of city and regional governments, private businesses, and financial institutions (collectively, non-state actors or NSAs). To develop effective solutions that leverage actions from all of these levels, from local to international scales, adopting a perspective that envisions different stakeholders as an ‘orchestra’ can help us understand why alignment and coordination are critical to work towards a collective climate goal.

<aside> 🎻 Orchestration facilitates a cohesive approach to environmental and climate action across diverse stakeholders.

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International relations scholars (see for reference Abbott et al., 2020; Chan et al. 2015; Hale and Roger 2014; Hermwille 2018; Mai and Elsässer 2022) have discussed the need for ‘orchestration’ in the global climate governance landscape. Orchestration is the process where a “conductor,” often an international organization or a set of actors, coordinates or guides the activities of other actors towards common goals, thereby creating a cohesive approach to environmental and climate action.

<aside> 🎻 The Paris Agreement's bottom-up and decentralized ethos has shifted the approach to climate coordination.

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As this orchestration role is getting more and more complex, due to the growing number of actors that want to and need to play a role, it is no longer feasible for a small number of conductors to guide and coordinate all members of the orchestra (both state and non-state actors). Previously, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC Secretariat used to coordinate and guide national Parties, but with the advent of the bottom-up and decentralized Paris Agreement ethos, centralized orchestration is no longer feasible. Instead, the CAD 2.0 community envisions a decentralized approach, where digital tools enable multiple actors, both national government and non-state, to coordinate. Such tools, methodologies, and platforms specifically relate to the harmonization and building of open digital infrastructure, which we will explore in-depth on this website.

Challenges to Harmonizing Our Climate Orchestra

<aside> 🎻 Expanding data scalability is necessary to capture information from all players across different scales and sectors.

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At the same time, the tools providing transparency of all actors’ data are far from sufficient to allow the successful orchestration of climate challenges. There are several issues with the current data transparency attempts that need to be resolved (UNEP 2023):

Expanding data scalability: We need to capture data from all players, across different scales and sectors, requiring a larger pool of participants and associated datasets than we currently have.
Enhancing data granularity: Detailed tracking of progress is needed to incentivize actions through carbon markets and climate finance, while also addressing risks such as double-counting and greenwashing.
Increasing data precision and access: We need more detailed spatial, temporal, and sectoral data, and faster access to it, to reduce information gaps and enable data-driven decision making.
Lowering monitoring and reporting costs: These costs are mostly shouldered by the NSAs and countries themselves, which often limits data availability where it's most needed.