World Climate Change: The Role of International Law and Institutions edited by Ved P. Nanda (original) (raw)

International Approaches to Global Climate Change

2000

It also discusses issues of compliance with an international agreement to reduce emissions, actions states can take in the absence of international agreement, and contingency actions that might be considered if the problem proves to be more serious than now seems to be the case.

The Problem That Is Global Warming: Introduction

Law & Policy, 2008

Global warming poses significant challenges to society at every level, evading easy definitions that would make the usual instrumental approaches to policymaking and regulation a relatively straightforward task. The embeddedness of the carbon economy in contemporary methods of industrialization and development means that climate protection is at once a problem of environment, the global economy, and human rights. It requires us to understand the strengths and limitations of a regulatory approach, to tease apart the intricacies of international law and governance to find ways to turn economic, legal, and cultural norms toward creating climate justice. Sector specific approaches to dealing with human rights and refugees, as well as international relations based on interstate relations, also have limitations. These include insufficient capacity to appreciate the differentiated responsibility of various actors in the creation of this ecological crisis as well as creating obstacles in finding appropriate ways to motivate those with the most ability to reduce our impact on the climate. Mutual reinforcement and "virtuous" arbitrage across fragmented regulatory regimes might create new synergies with potentially positive transformative effects for climate protection. To achieve this, the development and maintenance of legitimacy is central. The articles in this edition tackle these issues and, taken as a whole, provide a springboard for future scholarship. This special issue started as an idea of the editors to bring together different disciplines and ways of seeing the world in order to understand how we can deal with arguably our greatest ecological challenge. The articles in this issue are a tentative step in this direction, bringing together diverse views on how to engage with the problem of global warming. Yet, it is the very nature of the problem that is global warming that brings with it such significant challenges. Understanding the intersections of the ecological, regulatory, and social complexity of global warming provides significant insights so that promising ways forward can be found. The articles in this issue make notable progress in this regard, from perspectives encompassing political science, law, and philosophy.

Confronting climate change: Avoiding the unmanageable and managing the unavoidable

The imminence and severity of the problems posed by the accelerating changes in the global climate are becoming increasingly evident. Heat waves are becoming more severe, droughts and downpours are becoming more intense, the Greenland Ice Sheet is shrinking and sea level is rising, and the increasing acidification of the oceans is threatening calcifying organisms. The environment and the world's societies are facing increasing stress. The United Nations' Coordinated Objectives Recognizing that "change in the Earth's climate and its adverse effects are a common concern of humankind," in 1992 the nations of the world negotiated and acceded to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which has as its objective "to achieve, in accordance with the relevant provisions of the Convention, stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. Such a level should be achieved within a time-frame sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, to ensure that food production is not threatened and to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner." Challenging as the objective of the UNFCCC is, it is becoming more and more clear that the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which are the world community's blueprint for moving towards a sustainable, just world during this decade and beyond, are becoming more difficult to achieve as a result of human-induced climate change; the situation, if not addressed, is likely to worsen over coming decades. The MDGs are intended, among other aims, to: eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; reduce child mortality; combat human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immune deficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS), malaria, and other diseases; ensure environmental sustainability; and develop a global partnership for development. People who are poor, hungry, deprived of water, and living a life that is uncertain from one day to the next can improve their lot only in conditions of environmental sustainability and against a background of social justice. As the climate changes, the higher latitudes will warm more than lower latitudes, some regions will experience more frequent and intense storms, and low-lying coastal communities worldwide will be flooded as sea level rises. Some regions will become drier as evaporation speeds up, others wetter as total precipitation increases. Climate change is expected to have a widespread negative effect on water resources, natural ecosystems, coastal communities and infrastructure, air and water quality, biodiversity, coastal fisheries, parks and preserves, forestry, human health, agriculture and food production, and other factors that support economic performance and human well-being around the world. The impacts on society are expected to differ greatly depending on regional and local cultural practices, engineering infrastructure, farming customs, governments, natural resources, population, public health conditions, financial resources, scientific and technological capability, and socioeconomic systems. Nonetheless, such significant climate disruptions are thus likely to curtail opportunities to meet the MDGs for generations to come. Only by mitigating the effects of climate change and finding new, achievable ways to adapt to them can the world find stability and prosperity. The Charge for this Study There is growing recognition of the complex scientific and technical issues related to climate change and sustainable development. The Johannesburg Plan of Implementation, adopted in 2002 at the World Summit on Sustainable Development, requested that the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) "[g]ive greater consideration to the scientific contributions to sustainable development through, for example, drawing on the scientific community."

Climate Change: National Interests or a Global Regime?

Global Environmental Governance: …, 2002

This chapter addresses the ultimate global environmental governance challenge: climate change. It explores four key questions: 1) Who is responsible for climate change? 2) Who is affected by its consequences? 3) Who should act in response? and 4) What is to be done? Climate change is profoundly different from most other environmental problems humanity has faced. The atmosphere's planetary scale and scope make it a "global public good," prone to overexploitation and underregulation. The multiplicity of causes of climate change, the uncertainty of timing and effects, and substantial economic costs make global agreement difficult to attain and maintain. Along with a challenge to material wellbeing, however, the climate change problem poses an ethical dilemma stemming from the large physical, social, and even temporal distances between emitters and victims of climate change. Climate change requires a global response, encompassing the North and the South, local and global communities, and the public and private sectors. Ranging from global negotiations to individual choices, a diversity of actors with different resource endowments, and diverging values and aspirations, need to be involved. Success will depend on the substance and equity of national commitments and on the process developed for promoting global-scale cooperation. Four conditions need to be emphasized in building a global climate regime: 1) adequate information, 2) issue linkage and bargaining, 3) technological potential, and 4) a shift in values.     climate change and global governance All social structures humanity has ever built have required some form of management. As societies evolved from tribes to kingdoms and from kingdoms to nation-states, they were governed both at an increasingly larger scale, and with increasing levels of complexity. Tribes were managed as relatively simple top-down structures, where the center of influence was the tribe itself, and the circumference of interdependence was the geographically surrounding tribes. Nationstates developed more complex systems of governance, and pushed the circumference of interdependence beyond neighboring states. In the era of globalization, however, governance issues have moved to a global level in response to a growing recognition of planetary interdependence. Climate change is one of the first truly global environmental challenges. Several key features distinguish it from other environmental problems: • The atmosphere is a classic example of a global public goodgreenhouse gas emissions in one country affect the entire planet; conversely, emission controls in any country benefit all, encouraging "free riding" on the efforts of others;

THE SCIENCE AND INTERNATIONAL POLITICS OF CLIMATE CHANGE A MID TERM REVIEW

Iqra University, 2019

This lecture emanates from reflection and synthesis of my past work which encompasses the history and functioning of global environmental governance and the interaction between the science of climate change and the social forces. It may be termed as a mid-term review of how accurate or how misguided I was in my analysis and predictions. Let me first briefly summarize my previous argument in order to put the matters in context.

Climate Change For: Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics

and Keywords Understanding the complex set of processes collected under the heading of climate change represents a considerable scientific challenge. But it also raises important challenges for our best moral theories. For instance, in assessing the risks that climate change poses, we face profound questions about how we ought to weigh the respective harms it may inflict on current and on future generations, and on humans and other species. We face, in addition, difficult questions about how to act in conditions of uncertainty, in which at least some of the consequences of climate change – and of various human interventions to adapt to or mitigate it – are difficult to predict fully (Gardiner, 2006). Even if we agree that mitigating climate change is morally required, furthermore, there is room for disagreement about the precise extent to which it ought to be mitigated (insofar as there is room for underlying disagreement about the level of temperature rises which are morally permissible). Finally, once we determine which actions we ought to take to reduce or avoid climate change, we face the normative question of who ought to bear the costs of those actions, as well as the costs associated with any climate change which nevertheless comes to pass. The primary focus of this chapter will be upon this final issue. On the assumption that limiting climate change is morally required, our mitigation efforts are likely to prove costly for some if not all of us. Moreover, even if we mitigate now, some people will incur losses as a result of greenhouse gas emissions to date. We therefore require guidance on exactly how, from the point of view of justice, the associated burdens ought to be shared.

The case of the climate change

2017

This paper has submerged from the thinking on global and its implication in the local level. Global Environmental Governance is the sustainability of environment achieved by collective management and environmental development from the national to international level. Environmental governance as it currently stands is far from meeting one or more of the so imperatives. The need to deal with the complex character of environmental issues calls for the adoption of coherent multilateral management by a great variety of stakeholders. However, the global community has proved incapable of meeting this challenge and environmental governance is currently victim to a great many afflictions. This paper shows that impressive institutional machinery has actually been built, but also that the overall state of the global environment seems not to have improved as a consequence of this. Numerous multilateral environmental agreements have been concluded, many meetings are held each year to advance imp...

Climate change: a ‘glocal’ problem requiring ‘glocal’ action

Environmental Sciences, 2007

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