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Air pollution related to greenhouse gases (GHGs) is a threat to the climate system, which is changing – a change that is bound to affect the survival of entire states and populations. The enclosure of the air has been inclusionary since it was realized that the reduction of emissions by some states will not do much to improve air quality or abate climate change if other states continue to pollute. The same is true with regard to the enclosure of the ozone layer, since the elimination of ozone-depleting substances (ODSs) by some states will be fruitless if other states continue to produce and consume ODSs. In the ozone and climate change regimes, developed countries have been willing to provide side payments to developing states for joining in and for outlawing ODSs and reducing their GHGs. Other issues examined in this chapter include: the politics of green energy transition in connection with the mining of rare earths and minerals and revival of nuclear energy, and the transboundary air pollution regime – an effective inclusionary enclosure.
Three potential climate futures — 1.5 °C, 2 °C, and 3.6 °C — are predicted by the UNFCCC’s ‘climate action pathways’, each with major and escalating implications for adaptation and mitigation. Marina Romanello, Co-Lead Health Editor for The Monitor, highlights the dangers of anything above a 1.5 °C scenario, emphasizing increased health risks and economic damages. The chapter outlines the CVF Monitor’s projections for each of the three scenarios and discusses the significant differences in outcomes depending on global warming levels. Stressing the importance of adhering to international agreements like the Paris Agreement, immediate and substantial emissions reductions are crucial to avoid catastrophic impacts. The chapter underscores the need for global cooperation in achieving these goals.
The history of global climate governance can be seen as a series of politicization conflicts. Countries seek to either legitimize and strengthen hard-won global rules or reinterpret or replace them. This chapter focuses on one such conflict, whether to replace or protect the Kyoto Protocol. This conflict primarily pitted the United States against the EU, but each drew other countries into their side of the conflict. By focusing on one conflict, this chapter provides insights into how processes and strategies of politicization unfold in international politics. Countries employed a range of tools, rhetorical and behavioral, to question or support the Kyoto Protocol inside and outside the negotiation process. Several of these strategies are currently employed in relation to the Paris Agreement, marking another politicization conflict.
Chapter 9 examines the principle of the duty of care in the context of climate litigation. The authors explore how this principle has been invoked in a growing range of jurisdictions, in different ways, to hold governments and corporations accountable for their respective contributions to climate change. By analysing judicial decisions in prominent cases such as Urgenda and Milieudefensie in the Netherlands, Neubauer in Germany, and Notre Affaire à Tous in France, the authors explore the potential of the duty of care principle to compel more ambitious climate action in pending and future cases. The emerging best practice they identify suggests a growing willingness of courts to recognise a duty of care for governments and corporations towards citizens in relation to climate change.
Chapter 13 on Common but Differentiated Responsibilities and Respective Capabilities provides a critical analysis of this cornerstone principle of international climate law and its implications for climate litigation. The principle recognises the differentiated responsibilities and capabilities of countries in addressing climate change, acknowledging the historical contribution of developed nations to global greenhouse gas emissions and the greater capacity these nations possess to mitigate climate change and adapt to its impacts. The author critically analyses key cases where the principle has been raised, and assesses the legal reasoning employed by courts and tribunals that have given it a specific meaning. The author then identifies instances of emerging best practice where the principle has been interpreted and applied in ways that enhance climate justice outcomes. She notes that such instances do not yet constitute a uniform trend but they nonetheless illustrate the potential of this principle in shaping the delineation of responsibilities in climate lawsuits, considering fairness, equity, and historical responsibility.
Chapter 12 examines how international law is interpreted and applied in climate litigation. The authors explore the interplay between international and domestic law, and how it can shape the outcomes of climate litigation. Their exploration of emerging best practice reveals a progressive trend: domestic courts are increasingly incorporating international climate obligations into their rulings. This trend not only underscores the significance of international law in shaping domestic legal responses to climate change but also amplifies the capacity of domestic legal systems to address the impacts of climate change more effectively. Moreover, the authors spotlight emerging best practices from regional and international bodies. They argue that these practices demonstrate the potency of international legal norms in influencing the trajectory of climate litigation, fostering a global legal landscape that is increasingly responsive to the climate crisis.
Chapter 15 on State Responsibility provides an in-depth exploration of the circumstances under which States can be held responsible for climate change. The author starts by outlining the fundamental principles and conditions for State responsibility under international law. Her analysis bridges the gap between international and domestic law, shedding light on how each legal sphere influences the shape and contours of State responsibility in relation to climate change. Further, she enriches her analysis with insights drawn from key climate cases that have tested the limits of State responsibility. These cases reveal how courts and quasi-judicial bodies are grappling with the challenges of attributing climate harms to State actions and omissions, and the implications of holding States accountable for these harms. In distilling emerging best practice, the author identifies innovative judicial interpretations and legal strategies that have expanded the ambit of State responsibility in climate litigation.
Chapter 1 introduces The Cambridge Handbook on Climate Litigation. The editors provide an overview of the development of climate litigation and its landmark victories, including the Urgenda, Leghari, and KlimaSeniorinnen decisions. They illuminate how the Handbook will help judges, lawyers, scholars, and other actors navigate the labyrinth of legal intricacies that define the rapidly evolving climate change litigation landscape. To shed light on the methodology of the publication, the chapter details the empirical basis for the work, which involved an exhaustive cataloguing of climate litigation case law to date. This is followed by an explanation of the analytical framework that underpins each of the chapters – a framework focused on distilling ‘emerging best practice’. The latter portion of the chapter details each section of the Handbook and summarises the analyses of the contributing authors. Ultimately, the Handbook aims to inspire dialogue as well as robust and innovative legal reasoning in future climate cases.
This paper reviews efforts to meet the climate goals of the Paris Agreement: to limit global warming to well below 2°C and ideally to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. The paper shows how the likelihood of breaching these thresholds presents the need for additional measures, in mitigation and intervention. Three climate actions are discussed: emissions reduction, greenhouse gas removal, and solar radiation modification. These actions differ in timescale and current state of knowledge. Progress must intensify if they are to aid in securing a safe and stable climate for future generations.
Technical summary
Current assessments of global greenhouse gas emissions suggest the Paris Agreement temperature thresholds of 1.5°C and 2°C warming above pre-industrial levels could be breached. The impacts on humans and ecosystems could be severe. Global trends suggest a prolonged reliance on fossil fuels. Additional measures to limit global warming are therefore needed. Here, we review three climate actions: emissions reduction, greenhouse gas removal (GGR), and solar radiation modification (SRM). Emissions reduction requires shifting energy production away from fossil fuels (the primary contribution of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions), reducing energy use in key sectors, and optimising land management. GGR efforts must scale sustainably in the near term. The scale-up of novel methods is constrained by economic and technological challenges and, in some cases, limited knowledge. SRM has received growing attention, given the immediate impacts of global warming and the protracted timescales of emissions reduction and GGR. Robust research and governance frameworks are needed to assess the risks posed by SRM, alongside the risks of forgoing SRM. These three actions could enable society to fulfil the Paris Agreement, limiting global warming and its impacts while atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations are reduced to sustainable levels.
Social media summary
The progress of climate mitigation and intervention towards securing a sustainable future in a safe and stable climate.
The Paris Agreement’s commitment to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 has resulted in an uptick in environmental laws and regulations. However, such state conduct could implicate other legal obligations and norms, including international investment law and international human rights law. The conversation about human rights, net-zero and investment treaties, including arbitration cases and arbitral awards under the treaties, is in its relative infancy. This article examines how investment treaties are equipped to reconcile relevant norms with a particular focus on corporate codes and policies that pronounce broad commitments to protecting human rights and the environment. It establishes certain principles to guide parties and arbitral tribunals as to the codes while recognizing the inevitable challenges they will face.
We use a formal model to explore leaders’ incentives to set climate commitments and subsequently exert downstream mitigation effort. Since the Paris Agreement asks countries to make unilateral voluntary commitments, we investigate the domestic factors motivating climate pledges. We study a country with electoral competition between two parties, Green and Brown, who first make commitments to reduce emissions and then implement policies to meet their commitments. Voters anticipate the equilibrium policies each party will implement given the pledge. If downstream mitigation policies are insufficient relative to the commitment, the government is “shamed” by the international community. Several incentive channels arise when parties make commitments, as they have policy and electoral value. Parties can use commitments to tie the opposition’s hands to implement preferential policies in the future. If parties care only about winning elections, they will exploit commitments to serve electoral needs, which paradoxically leads anti-environmental parties to implement more ambitious commitments.
Climate treaties have progressed over time to pledge substantial reductions in global warming. This is surprising, given that theories of climate politics emphasize collective-action problems and domestic deadlock. I first describe the process of updating climate mitigation targets under the Paris Agreement. Then I develop a theoretical argument that explains target changes based on how countries are situated in economic and political networks. Trade flows create competitive economic pressures that may undermine climate action, but these pressures may ebb when partners also commit to act. I argue that political networks support conditional cooperation, especially when institutional design promotes gradual commitments. I use spatial regression models to study how countries’ climate targets are related to their partners’ prior targets. I find that countries pledged stronger updated mitigation targets in the Glasgow Climate Pact when their closest political partners submitted strong targets in the Paris Agreement. This suggests the Paris Agreement drove conditional cooperation on mitigation.
Taking Global Constitutionalism as an agora, a platform for international interdisciplinary discussions this article asks a question about the state we are in with regard to the international order as an order that is not just a ‘rule-based order’ but also more substantially, a ‘legal order’ based on the rule of law. The topic is illustrated with reference to examples of ‘contested compliance’ i.e. objections to implementing international law and/or international rulings by international actors on behalf of signatories of states parties of a treaty. Three questions guide this discussion. The first is a question of normative change: are we facing a change regarding United Nations member states’ respect for and handling of the rule of law, or is a larger change of international law itself imminent? The second is a question about the effects of the shift from ‘normal’ contestations of norms to ‘deep’ contestations of the international order itself. And the third is a question about pluralism and diversity: are the UN Charter Order’s institutions, conventions and organisations sufficiently equipped to respond to an ever more diverse range of internationally, transnationally, and sub-nationally raised justice-claims? The article elaborates on each of the three themes in light of the current situation of contested compliance with obligations under international law.
This chapter focuses on the global decarbonisation policy gap and the need to account for measurable policies for carbon neutrality, specifically in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region. One strategy to raise accountability is policy tracking, a technique that has gained traction in empirical policy analysis. The chapter introduces this technique and provides an example of a methodologically rigorous tracking of climate policies in the GCC countries in response to pledges and obligations under the Paris Agreement. This includes government policies, laws, and measures toward the mitigation goals of the Paris Agreement and carbon neutrality targets. We situate our tracker in the wider landscape of policy metrics and indexes, discuss its features, and present results on mitigation and energy policy responses to the climate crisis in the Gulf. Key conclusions are that stringency, intensity, effectiveness, and sustainability of measures vary widely across the sample and over time. Necessary macroeconomic, fiscal, technological, and social policy measures also vary greatly in terms of their intensity and the public investments made. In some GCC countries, policy measures appear to be disproportionate to the challenges linked to both reaching the goals of the Paris Agreement and the Gulf countries’ very own nationally determined contributions (NDCs), to varying degrees.
This book examines how, and under what conditions, states – in collaboration with non-state actors – can govern a societal transformation toward large-scale decarbonization in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement. It advances an innovative analytical framework on how the state governs through collaborative climate governance to foster cooperation, deliberation, and consensus between state and non-state actors. The book focuses on Sweden, which aims to become a fossil-free state. The chapters analyze Sweden's progress toward net-zero emissions, its role in international climate governance, and how the COVID-19 pandemic affected climate networks. Providing valuable policy insights for other countries endeavoring to decarbonize, this book is a useful reference for graduate students and researchers in climate governance, political science, and international relations. It is one of a series of publications associated with the Earth System Governance Project. For more publications, see www.cambridge.org/earth-system-governance. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
This article scrutinizes the role of transparency in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Specifically, it examines a widely heard claim that ‘transparency is the backbone of the Paris Agreement’, and the assumption that mandatory transparency (reporting and review) is essential to fill potential gaps in climate action left by voluntary, nationally determined climate targets. We subject this claim to critical scrutiny by tracing the political contestations around the desired role of transparency in the UNFCCC, with a focus on mitigation-related transparency. Our analysis shows that, despite developing countries expressing concerns during the pre-Paris negotiations, the Paris Agreement's enhanced transparency framework (ETF) is almost exclusively ‘enhanced’ (compared with earlier provisions) for developing countries, with some instances of regression for developed countries. Furthermore, the effects of such enhanced reporting are not straightforward and might de facto have an impact on countries’ autonomy to nationally determine their mitigation targets in diverse ways, even as all the detailed reporting does not facilitate comparability of effort. With implementation of the ETF due to start in 2024, our analysis provides a timely exploration of the extent to which transparency is really a backbone of the Paris Agreement, and for whom and with what implications for ambitious action from all under the international climate regime. It calls into question whether the transformative potential of transparency, much extolled within the UNFCCC process, will materialize for all countries in a similar manner or rather will have an impact on countries differentially.
The Paris Agreement on climate change has been widely hailed as a diplomatic triumph, but it commits its signatories only to a process, not to anything of substance. It represents a gamble: that if enough governments say they will act, they will believe each other and have the confidence to move forward – and that businesses and investors will believe them too. Six years later, the gamble appears to be succeeding, but despite this, progress is nowhere near fast enough. Global emissions of greenhouse gases are still going up.
In the concluding chapter, I look back at the question I began with and the answer I found in the practice of writing. I re-visit accounts of science and politics and describe the three sides to this relationship that I observed in the IPCC. I identify sites within the UNFCCC that have been designed to bring climate science and climate politics closer together, such as in the Global Stocktake of the Paris Agreement. While this brings accountability against the approved knowledge base, it is likely to further increase the political pressure on the IPCC as an organisation and as a practice for writing climate change. From the IPCC’s location in global climate politics, I move inward to the actors, activities and forms of authority that constitute and shape this practice of writing. The book reveals the importance of looking beyond scientific and political forms of authority and describes why the TSUs matter as actors that have the potential to uphold or challenge the scientific order of relations. I explore the implications of science as a site of politics, the global asymmetries in the knowledge economy, and their effects on participation for the design of new intergovernmental assessment bodies, which from the outset must design for meaningful participation by all in these critical sites of agreement-making.