Uncharted territory: EU climate diplomacy in international transport fora

Earsom, Joseph [UCL]

As an international climate leader, the European Union (EU) has developed a robust and cohesive climate diplomacy to help facilitate its objectives within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). In recent years, the EU has placed increased attention on the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and International Maritime Organization, evoking them in Council Conclusions relating to Climate Diplomacy and Climate Diplomacy Action Plans. However, both ICAO and IMO present a significantly different institutional dynamic for climate governance, as compared to the UNFCCC. Using a comparison of the UNFCCC Paris Agreement the cases of ICAO CORSIA (2016) and the IMO Initial Strategy (2018) – two political agreements on climate action adopted in the respective fora – this paper answers the research question: How do the institutional arrangements of ICAO and IMO affect EU climate diplomacy therein? It finds that the EU’s diplomatic approach to both fora included some variation of three of the four typical elements found in the EU’s climate diplomacy for the UNFCCC. However, the mandates, membership, levels of abstraction of climate negotiations, and constellation of interests in the two fora seem to have affected the EU’s climate diplomacy, which was in fact quite convoluted, as compared to the UNFCCC. The article therefore calls into question the extent that the EU has employed a climate diplomacy in the sense as conceived in the UNFCCC and serves as a united diplomatic force in other climate fora.