Environment Climate Change And International Relations

"To state that climate change and environment issues are important to International Relations is an understatement. Mitigation and adaptation debates, strategies and mechanisms are all developed at the international level. Yet, the complexities of climate change make it a difficult phenomenon for international governance. In the wake of the 2015 Paris conference, this edited collection details current tendencies of study, explores the most important routes of assessing environmental issues as an issue of international governance, and provides perspectives on the route forward."--Site web de l'éditeur.

This edited collection provides an understanding about the complex relationship between International Relations, the environment, and climate change. It details current tendencies of study, explores the most important routes of assessing environmental issues as an issue of international governance, and provides perspectives on the route forward.

This book surveys current conceptual, theoretical, and methodological approaches to global climate change and international relations. Although it focuses on the role of states, it also examines the role of nonstate actors and international organizations whenever state-centric explanations are insufficient.The book begins with a discussion of environmental constraints on human activities, the environmental consequences of human activities, and the history of global climate change cooperation. It then moves to an analysis of the global climate regime from various conceptual and theoretical perspectives. These include realism and neorealism, historical materialism, neoliberal institutionalism and regime theory, and epistemic community and cognitive approaches. Stressing the role of nonstate actors, the book looks at the importance of the domestic-international relationship in negotiations on climate change. It then looks at game-theoretical and simulation approaches to the politics of global climate change. It emphasizes questions of equity and the legal difficulties of implementing the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol. It concludes with a discussion of global climate change and other aspects of international relations, including other global environmental accords and world trade. The book also contains Internet references to major relevant documents.

Climate change and depletion of the ozone layer are two examples of dramatic changes in the Earth's natural environment which raise new questions in international relations. The nine chapters in this book explore some of the theoretical and policy problems that are posed by global environmental change. The variety of perspectives employed - international relations theory, international political economy, international law, strategic studies, North-South issues and Eastern Europe - illustrates the complexity of the issues involved.

How can a divided world share a single planet? As the environment rises ever higher on the global agenda, the discipline of International Relations (IR) is engaging in more varied and transformative ways than ever before to overcome environmental challenges. Focusing in particular on the key trends of the past 20 years, this volume explores the main developments in the global environmental crisis, with each chapter considering an environmental issue and an approach within IR. In the process, adjacent fields including energy politics, science and technology, and political economy are also touched on. Traditions and Trends in Global Environmental Politics is aimed at anybody interested in the key international environmental problems of the day, and those seeking clarification and inspiration in terms of approaches and theories that decode how the environment is accounted for in global politics. It will be an essential resource for students and scholars of global environmental politics and governance, environmental studies and IR.

Climate Change and Foreign Policy: Case Studies from East to West and its companion volume, Environmental Change and Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice, examine and explain the role of foreign policy politics, processes and institutions in efforts to protect the environment and natural resources. They seek to highlight international efforts to address human-induced changes to the natural environment, analyze the actors and institutions that constrain and shape actions on environmental issues, show how environmental changes influence foreign policy processes, and critically assess environmental foreign policies. This book examines the problem of global climate change and assesses the manner in which governments and other actors have attempted to deal with it. It presents a series of in-depth international case studies on climate policy in Australia, Japan, China, Turkey, Hungary, Denmark, France, the European Union and the United States. The authors demonstrate how studying environmental foreign policy can help us to better understand how governments, businesses and civil society actors address—or fail to address—the critical problem climate change. This book will be of strong interest to scholars and students of environmental policy and politics, foreign policy, public policy, climate change and international relations.

Environmental issues and questions of global change are now firmly established on the international political agenda. This book provides a wide-ranging survey of the current treatment of environmental issues in international relations. This book begins by looking at the relevance of the different theoretical approaches current in international relations to the study of the environment. It analyzses a wide range of approaches from the debate between neo-realism and liberal institutionalism to the significant connections between gender and global environmental change. The book goes on to consider a range of key international processes, discussing the monitoring and implementation of environmental agreements, the place of ideology in negotiations and the role of international organisations.

This book is the first of its kind to examine the role of great powers in the international politics of climate change. It develops a novel analytical framework for studying environmental power in international relations, what counts as a great power in the environmental field, and what their special environmental responsibilities are. In doing so, the book connects International Relations (IR) debates on power inequality, great powers and great power management, with global environmental politics (GEP) scholarship. The book brings together leading scholars in IR and GEP whose contributions focus on major environmental powers (United States, China, European Union, India, Brazil, Russia) and international institutions and issue areas (UN Security Council, multilateral environmental agreements, international climate leadership, coal politics). The contributors to this volume examine how individual great powers have responded to the global climate challenge and whether they have accepted a special responsibility for stabilizing the global climate. They place emerging discourses on great power responsibility in the context of wider debates about international environmental leadership and climate change securitization. And they provide new insights into how international power inequality intersects with the global ecological crisis, and what special role great powers could and should play in the international fight against global warming.