A Climate Sceptical Mitigation Policy? Explaining Poland’s Carbon Forestry Two-Level Game

Can climate sceptics have an active mitigation policy? This paper argues that this seemingly paradoxical situation is possible, under appropriate conditions. To investigate this, we look at the current Polish conservative-populist government and its activities at the UNFCCC, EU and domestic arenas. Poland has a reputation of a veto player and enfant terrible of European climate policy, not only due to its very emission intensive power production, but also its openly climate sceptical rhetoric on EU forums. At the same time, it is very active in global climate negotiations, and in 2018 hosted the UNFCCC conference of the parties (COP) for the third time already. One topic has become visibly important in Polish climate policy between the 2013 and the 2018 COPs – carbon forestry, that is the role forests and tree plantations can play as carbon sinks. After 2015, the ruling Law and Justice party politicians, most notably the environmental minister Jan Szyszko, have made carbon forestry – and the idea of Forest Carbon Farms – Poland’s flagship climate initiative, both at home and internationally. The climax of this policy process was The Ministerial Katowice Declaration on Forests for the Climate presented at COP24 in Katowice. However, the proposals made by Poland and presented as innovative mitigation instruments have a 30-year track record in global climate negotiations, and its initiatives appear marginal in the ongoing climate debate. There is a visible discrepancy between the low profile and limited resonance of the Declaration internationally, and the prominence of carbon forestry in Polish domestic climate policy debates. We argue, that to explain the centrality of carbon forestry in Poland’s climate policy discourse we have to understand it as an element of a two-level game (Putnam 1988), where the main audience is domestic. We propose to analyse it as a climate sceptical mitigation policy, functioning within a particular set of domestic discourses about climate change, nature, forests as well as broader political problems Poland faces in Europe and domestically. The rhetorical strategy of Law and Justice allows for the construction of Poland as a climate policy leader and champion for the purpose of its highly climate denialist/sceptical constituency, detouring the difficult questions of Poland’s contribution to global mitigation efforts and a necessary energy transition away from coal.