Balanced interests in the Paris Agreement : Analysis of COP attendees’ interests at multilateral climate negotiations pre- and post-the Paris Agreement

The United Nations climate change conferences are the utmost platform for climate change negotiations and are convened under an international treaty known as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The causes of greenhouse gas emissions are deeply embedded in the economic and social activity on a global scale and yet, developing countries are expected to evolve into developed countries without straining the environment further. Knowledge of the interest of the participants at the COP is limited since no other research projects have measured it quantitively and at a large scale. This thesis aims to examine the professional interest in adaptation of delegates to the UNFCCC relative to other issue areas (mitigation and financing) and if there has been a shift in focus pre- and post-Paris Agreement. This thesis uses quantitative survey data gathered by The International Negotiations Survey (INS) together with two external indexes and data regarding CO2 emissions per capita for each country. While the chosen indexes to some extent overlap, they both contribute to the analysis by allowing to (1) measure the economic and social development of a country (HDI), (2) measure a country´s vulnerability to climate change (ND-GAIN). The results in this thesis show that there is a difference in interest among respondents that represent different HDI-categories. Results show that when comparing interest in adaptation to the external indexes, the more vulnerable a country is to the effects of climate change according to their ND-GAIN score the more interested their delegates are in adaptation. The results also indicate that respondents that represent countries that are most capable of addressing the effects of climate change show the least interest in doing so.