Briefing Post-Paris: Taking Forward the Global Climate Change Deal (original) (raw)

The Paris Climate Agreement: Towards a climate-friendly future

On the evening of 12 December 2015, Laurent Fabius, the then French Foreign Minister, and President of the 21st session of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), closed the climate conference proceedings by stating, “With a small hammer you can achieve great things.” By bringing down his legendary green hammer, Fabius signalled that all of the UNFCCC’s 195 parties had accepted the new climate agreement. This is the analysis of the Paris Agreement from the perspective of two international networks, ACT Alliance and Bread for the World

Paris Climate Accord: Miles to Go

Journal of International Development, 2016

The vicious effects of climate change are sweeping the planet along with the creation of a level of emissions that would lock in a future of rising sea levels, intense droughts and food shortages, more destructive storms and floods and other catastrophic effects. With a best hope to face the bad effects of climate change on world security and to drive the world on a low-carbon pathway, a multinational effort of the world leaders is on the process to hammer out a new global pact for reducing the emissions. But the Paris Climate Summit has not served for this purpose because of absence of actionable commitments, discord on sharing of remaining carbon space, disagreement over finance, lack of clarity and sidelining the least developed and vulnerable countries. Delivery on commitments made in Paris, therefore, calls for new systems of governance, new infrastructures, user practices, institutions, policies and cultural meanings.

From Kyoto to Paris and Beyond: The Emerging Politics of Climate Change

India Quarterly: A Journal of International Affairs, 2021

Anthropogenic climate change has emerged as the most disruptive socio-political issue in the last few decades. The Kyoto Protocol’s failure to curb the rising greenhouse gases emissions pushed the UNFCCC-led negotiations towards a more flexible, non-binding agreement at the Paris COP21 meeting in 2015. The Paris Agreement’s hybrid approach to climate change governance, where flexible measures like the nationally determined commitments are balanced against the ambition of limiting the global temperature within the two-degree range, ensured the emergence of an increasingly complex and multi-stakeholder climate change regime. The article outlines the roadmap of the transition from the top-down approach of Kyoto Protocol to the legally non-binding, bottom-up approaches adopted for the post-Paris phase. The article outlines the post-Paris developments in international climate politics, which hold long-term geopolitical and geoeconomic implications. The article focuses on the fundamental ...

The Road to Paris: Navigating the intergovernmental path to our climate commitments

This paper looks at a key reason behind Canada’s persistent failure to meet its self-imposed climate change commitments, and proposes a new institution that will be important to overcoming this failure. In 2016, Canada’s federal, provincial and territorial (FPT) governments – minus Manitoba and Saskatchewan – signed the Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change (PCF). The PCF collected a host of FPT climate change policies and programs and also laid out a set of new measures designed to help Canada reach the greenhouse gas emissions reductions targets that it committed to at the Paris Climate Change Conference in 2015. Unfortunately, despite the very real progress that the PCF represents, Canada is still not on track to meet its climate change targets. Why are we still failing, and why have we consistently failed to meet our emissions reductions targets for the last 30 years? One major reason is that solving the climate change policy problem requires collaboratively aligning all 14 FPT governments’ climate change policies – and Canada’s existing intergovernmental institutions are simply not up to the task of making that happen. Any successful Canadian climate change policy will need to be able to reduce Canada’s emissions in a way that is effective, efficient and fair. New and innovative intergovernmental institutional frameworks are required to achieve this and to overcome the various obstacles – such as diverging regional interests and significant economic diversity – that have scuttled previous efforts. This paper argues that a new independent institution, co-created by the FPT governments, will be a crucial first step in this direction. This new climate change institution should be mandated to give evidence-based advice aimed at collaboratively optimizing Canada’s 14 separate FPT climate change policies and to guide the allocation of federal transfers designed to help address the asymmetrical economic burden emissions reduction policies will create, specifically in emissions-intensive provinces.

The Paris Agreement on Climate Change: Background, Analysis and Implications

Abstract: This paper pre­sents a crit­i­cal analy­sis of the Paris Agree­ment on Cli­mate Change, agreed upon by more than 180 coun­tries at the Twenty-First Con­fer­ence of Par­ties (COP 21) of the United Na­tions Frame­work Con­ven­tion on Cli­mate Change (UN­FCCC). The ar­ti­cle traces the de­vel­op­ment of the major is­sues and points of dis­agree­ment in cli­mate ne­go­ti­a­tions from the Copen­hagen sum­mit of 2009 to COP 21 at Paris. The paper ar­gues that the out­comes of COP 21 fell con­spic­u­ously short of the world’s re­quire­ments in terms of cli­mate sci­ence and eq­uity among coun­tries. The paper ar­gues for car­bon bud­gets and, in that con­text, fur­ther ar­gues that the Paris Con­fer­ence has set goals that are at odds with the fea­si­bil­ity of such goals as in­di­cated in the Fifth As­sess­ment Re­port (AR5) of the In­ter­gov­ern­men­tal Panel on Cli­mate Change (IPCC). In gen­eral, the Paris Agree­ment per­pet­u­ates the low lev­els of cli­mate ac­tion thus far un­der­taken by the de­vel­oped na­tions while of­fer­ing lit­tle con­crete as­sis­tance to the less-de­vel­oped na­tions. The over­all re­sult of the agree­ment is likely to be, for the peo­ple of the less-de­vel­oped na­tions, greater dan­ger for those vul­ner­a­ble to the im­pact of cli­mate change and greater dif­fi­culty in guar­an­tee­ing the en­ergy basis of their fu­ture de­vel­op­ment. http://www.ras.org.in/the\_paris\_agreement\_on\_climate\_change