The policy brief notes that the 2015 Paris Agreement was the first multilateral climate change agreement to place legally binding obligations for emission reductions on all countries.
The brief suggests designing instruments that can “adapt over time to evolving science and changing levels of socio-economic development,” and ensure that responsibility for action is equally distributed both intra- and inter-generationally.
Because the atmosphere knows no borders, climate change is a problem of the global commons. But assigning responsibility for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions over time and across countries has proven difficult, and the history of international climate change policy has revolved around this central question. This is the dilemma explored in the latest policy brief from IISD’s ‘Still Only One Earth’ series.
The policy brief titled, ‘Global Climate Change Governance: The search for effectiveness and universality,’ by Mari Luomi, outlines two challenging themes in global climate change governance: how to differentiate between countries’ responsibilities; and what mechanism could be effective from a scientific perspective, encourage sufficient participation from the largest emitters, and ensure universal participation at the same time.
Among the highlights in the history of efforts to resolve these questions, Luomi notes that the 2015 Paris Agreement was the first multilateral climate change agreement to place legally binding obligations for emission reductions on all countries. However, she explains, some have argued that the universality of the Paris Agreement came with a cost to its effectiveness: its success “hangs on the pledges that major emitters bring to the table and turn into action.”
Luomi reports that currently, countries’ collective pledges on reducing emissions still allow for a global temperature increase of 3 degrees Celsius, an amount that will have devastating consequences for both ecosystems and humans. To avoid this, emissions must fall much more sharply in the next ten years.
The brief suggests there is a need to design instruments that can “adapt over time to evolving science and changing levels of socio-economic development,” and ensure that responsibility for action is equally distributed both intra- and inter-generationally.
The author concludes that the history of climate change governance reveals the “ultimate challenge of governing the global commons, which is that even though multilateralism remains the best antidote to anarchy, it may be insufficient to avert catastrophic environmental damage unless global solidarity among the major polluters prevails.” [Publication: Global Climate Change Governance: The search for effectiveness and universality] [Still Only One Earth policy brief series]