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.

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.

Chile has begun to play a new leadership role on loss and damage in the international negotiations. Historically, Chile engaged little with loss and damage discussions in negotiations, but this changed with its presidency of the twenty-fifth Conference of Parties in 2019. Drawing on a review of the domestic policy landscape and institutional responses to loss and damage as well as fourteen interviews with key government, non-governmental organization, and private sector actors, this chapter suggests that while the presidency role acted as a driver for Chile taking the lead on the topic at the international level, the country’s economic identity acts as a constraint on the domestic development of adequate responses to loss and damage and on engagement with the loss and damage terminology. It also finds that Chile’s centralism and lack of ministerial coordination as well as the relatively institutionally weak position of the Ministry of the Environment limits more effective loss and damage governance. The chapter further argues that loss and damage as a concept has not permeated Chilean civil society. Finally, it demonstrates that Chile’s prioritization of economic growth and its extractivist economy undermine efforts to meaningfully address loss and damage at the national level.

Advancing the emerging field of comparative climate governance and policymaking, this book explores national loss and damage policymaking through seven empirically grounded studies of loss and damage governance across vulnerable countries in the Global South. The introductory chapter sets the scene by presenting the key themes, research questions, and contributions of the book. Following an introduction to the concept of loss and damage from climate change impacts and its emergence at the international level, the chapter argues for a political science of loss and damage that is sensitive to the “national turn” in research on loss and damage governance. The chapter then presents the seven country case studies featured in the book including Small Island Developing States, least developed countries, and emerging economies: Tuvalu, Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Peru, and Chile. The case studies show variation in the way countries engage with loss and damage, highlighting the importance of national contexts in understanding the success and/or failure of policymaking. The chapter concludes with a summary of key themes and findings emerging from the case studies and discusses ways in which they advance our understanding of climate policy.

This chapter explores loss and damage knowledge politics in Antigua and Barbuda, one of the few countries with national legislation referring specifically to loss and damage. At the twenty-seventh Conference of the Parties in 2022, which achieved a breakthrough agreement to establish a loss and damage fund, the country played a critical role as chair of the Alliance of Small Island States. The chapter traces the role of international influences and national institutions in shaping national loss and damage policies, and finds that there are knowledge politics at play when it comes to loss and damage in Antigua and Barbuda. These include conflicting incentives for deepening the understanding of loss and damage: while a better understanding of future scenarios aids better development planning, it can also alarm large investors (often from the Global North) about climate risks, with this potentially leading to raising fears about stranded assets and capital flight. The chapter is based on twelve semi-structured interviews with national and international policy actors, civil servants, and non-governmental organization actors in Antigua and Barbuda, textual analysis, participant observations, and first-hand experiences of international climate negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The book’s concluding chapter draws together insights from across the empirical case studies, showcasing the diversity of outcomes on national policy action on loss and damage. By offering a comparison between the different Global South countries studied, the chapter identifies patterns with respect to how policymakers and other stakeholders are approaching policy development, adoption, and innovation. It finds that Antigua and Barbuda, Tuvalu, and Bangladesh have moved the furthest in terms of policy development and innovation, while Ethiopia and The Bahamas have been slower to engage with loss and damage at the national level and Peru and Chile are only starting to understand the relevance of loss and damage for national policymaking. The chapter argues that while the very concept of loss and damage is an international construct, its meaning is still being contested and reconstituted within and across scales of governance. The chapter ends by outlining a research agenda for further studies in the context of the national turn in loss and damage governance.

The most widely read and influential component of the IPCC’s practice of writing is the summary for policymakers (SPM), where the key messages of the underlying report are presented in short sentences and figures to facilitate travel into the media, ministers’ speeches and UNFCCC negotiations. The aim of this chapter is to describe the politics of approval. The chapter begins the historical emergence of this practice and documents the tactics and strategies available to co-chairs, authors and delegates to influence the final outcome. Documenting participation in the authorship and approval of the SPM again illuminates the asymmetries revealed in previous chapters, but also highlights the growing presence of some developing countries in the process. This is evident in the content that has initiated some of the greatest struggle – the categorisation of developing versus developed countries. This account reveals that the forces structuring the final stage of the IPCC’s practice of writing originate in the broader global struggle to determine the meaning of climate change and continue after the approval, only now with a new SPM to substantiate national positions in the negotiation of the collective response.

I open the book with the political struggle that took place between parties at COP24, over whether the IPCC Special Report on 1.5°C should be noted or welcomed. This provides the context for exploring the IPCC as a central site in and producer of climate politics. In the chapter, I take the reader back to where this study began, with the question, who has the power to define climate change for collective response and what constitutes this power? The answer the book offers is the practice of writing. The actors, activities and forms of authority framework provides the analytical framework for exploring the asymmetries in power to effect how climate change is written. This approach has developed from interviews, observation and extensive data collection from IPCC documentation. The resulting book takes the reader on a journey into the intricate details of writing an assessment, the social order through which it is written and how climate change is known and acted upon through the process.

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.

The aim of this chapter is to reconceptualise climate politics as a struggle to name the problem and thereby determine how it is known and acted upon. I suggest that underpinning the visible elements of contestation over the reality of climate change, who is responsible and by how much, is a struggle over order – the distribution of economic, social and political resources and the values that organise it as such. Describing the politics of climate change as a field of activity orientated around determining the meaning of the problem enables me to situate the IPCC centrally within this struggle as the key site in producing international assessments of the issue. The IPCC’s role in establishing collective interest in climate change and the knowledge base for action has generated the structures and forces in which the IPCC as an organisation and method for producing authoritative ways to know climate change has emerged, which in the book, I identify as the IPCC’s practice of and for writing climate change.

Energy technologies are ‘the combination of hardware, techniques, skills, methods and processes’ involved in ‘producing, transforming, storing, transporting and using energy’. The IEA database captures over 500 mature and immature ‘clean energy’ technologies worldwide that contribute to achieving the goal of net-zero emissions. This chapter will show that international economic law is applicable to government interventions in even the early stages of technology development. For example, State-imposed R&D investment obligations may be banned by IIA provisions on performance requirements, and public incentives for R&D may be disciplined by WTO subsidy rules. Once commercialized, green technologies can reach foreign markets due to international trade and technology transfers that fall within the scope of international economic rules. Reducing trade barriers to environmental goods and services could give a further boost to the international movement of energy-related green technologies. While the importance of green technology transfers between countries is widely recognized, trade and investment rules must be consulted when imposing technology transfer measures.

Using a dynamic version of the principal–agent model this chapter develops a theoretical framework for an international bureaucracy’s influence on the delegation of responsibilities by the organization’s member states. It argues that this influence is reinforced by external resource flows that both directly and indirectly strengthen the role of the bureaucracy. The chapter uses the case of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to test the hypotheses since its major resource flows have been driven solely by a private market for emissions credits, the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). Between 2006 and 2013 when CDM revenues formed a significant share of the secretariat’s budget, rule-setting was increasingly dominated by the secretariat. When the crash of prices for CDM credits from 2012 onward reduced the secretariat’s revenues and projects to assess, secretariat-led rule-setting intensified. This approach was used to “buy time” in which secretariat leaders were hoping for a recovery of the CDM market. But when this recovery did not materialize, the secretariat started to lay off support staff and implicitly tried to reorient CDM resources for support of the Paris Agreement negotiations and implementation of national mitigation action.

Focusing on three initiatives of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Secretariat – the Momentum for Change Initiative, the Lima–Paris Action Agenda, and the Non-state Actor Zone for Climate Action – this chapter studies how an international environmental bureaucracy can evolve from a low-key and servant-like secretariat to an actor in its own right. It argues that international environmental secretariats increasingly take on the role of an orchestrator that seeks to shape policy outcomes through changing the behavior of others. Using orchestration as a conceptual lens, the chapter identifies new types of influence of international bureaucracies. The forms of influence that the UNFCCC Secretariat exerts include in particular (i) awareness-raising, (ii) norm-building, and (iii) mobilization. This new way of how soft power is deployed underscores the increasingly proactive role of the UNFCCC Secretariat. The chapter concludes that the UNFCCC Secretariat is currently “loosening its straitjacket” by gradually expanding its original mandate and spectrum of activity. It is no longer a passive bystander but has adopted new roles and functions in the global endeavor to cope with climate change.

International secretariats have increasingly turned toward orchestration as a mode of governance. This chapter analyzes the normative dimensions associated with orchestration, such as democratic values related to participation, accountability, transparency, and deliberation. It argues that orchestration as an indirect mode of governance muddles who should be held accountable for which actions, to which set of standards, and which agents have the right to demand said accountability. Orchestrators need to ensure that their own actions, and those of intermediaries, are democratically legitimated by affected stakeholders. The chapter applies this argument to orchestration by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Secretariat. While previous research on orchestration of the UNFCCC has predominantly focused on effectiveness nonstate action, this chapter shows how and why nonstate climate action requires democratic legitimation. It concludes by discussing the intrinsic and instrumental importance of evaluating orchestration through a democratic legitimacy lens and the implications for international secretariats.

This chapter is a practical guide for navigating international environmental conferences, focusing on what there is to these events beyond the negotiations. It sensitizes readers to the existence and specificities of conference spaces and practices such as side events, the corridors, and civil society protests, first touching upon spaces within conference venues before zooming out to consider how conferences manifest outside and beyond their dedicated venue. Building on this scene-setting, the chapter outlines the distinction between using the various conference spaces as sites for data collection and treating them as research objects in their own right. It especially underscores the need for comparative research across processes, notably by providing novel insights on the side-event phenomenon. The chapter makes explicit much of the implicit knowledge that enables seasoned participants to smoothly navigate these events and aims to stimulate scholarship that advances our understanding of the multifaceted nature of these conferences and their constitutive parts.