International Climate Change Law And Policy

This textbook, by three experts in the field, provides a comprehensive overview of international climate change law. Climate change is one of the fundamental challenges facing the world today, and is the cause of significant international concern. In response, states have created an international climate regime. The treaties that comprise the regime - the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and the 2015 Paris Agreement establish a system of governance to address climate change and its impacts. This book provides a clear analytical guide to the climate regime, as well as other relevant international legal rules. The book begins by locating international climate change law within the broader context of international law and international environmental law. It considers the evolution of the international climate change regime, and the process of law-making that has led to it. It examines the key provisions of the Framework Convention, the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement. It analyses the principles and obligations that underpin the climate regime, as well as the elaborate institutional and governance architecture that has been created at successive international conferences to develop commitments and promote transparency and compliance. The final two chapters address the polycentric nature of international climate change law, as well as the intersections of international climate change law with other areas of international regulation. This book is an essential introduction to international climate change law for students, scholars and negotiators.

This timely and incisive book combines an introduction to the core legal and policy issues presented by climate change with a deeper analysis of decisions that will define the path forward. Offering a guide to key terms, concepts, and legal principles in the field, this book will help readers develop a sophisticated perspective on issues central to climate change law and policy.

A perfect introduction to climate change law, this textbook offers students and scholars an overview of the international law governing this fundamental issue. It demonstrates how to interpret the language used in the applicable instruments and conventions, and sets climate change law in its broader international legal context.

"Climate change presents one of the greatest challenges of our time, and has become one of the defining issues of the twenty-first century. The radical changes which both developed and developing countries will need to make, in economic and in legal terms, to respond to climate change are unprecedented. International law, including treaty regimes, institutions, and customary international law, needs to address the myriad challenges and consequences of climate change, including variations in the weather patterns, sea level rise, and the resulting migration of peoples. ... This book addresses the major legal dimensions of the problems caused by climate change: including questions ranging from how to implement international legal frameworks at the national level, to how carbon trading systems can be used as a means of reducing the costs of meeting emission reduction targets."--Book jacket.

'UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has called Climate Change "the defining issue of our era". It presents international law and lawyers with a wide range of novel issues, practical as well as conceptual. These challenges are addressed in this volume with great authority by many of the leading international law scholars of our generation. It is an important and distinctive contribution to the burgeoning literature on an issue critical for the future of our planet.' – David Freestone, George Washington University, US Climate change will fundamentally affect every area of human endeavour, including the development of international law. This book maps the current and potential impacts of climate change on the norms, principles, rules and processes of international law. This timely study brings together a group of leading scholars in their respective fields of international law to examine the impacts of climate change, and our responses to it, on the whole spectrum of international legal regimes, including those dealing with everything from climate displacement, human rights, and international trade and investment, to the oceans, the environment, armed conflicts and the use of force, and outer-space. the volume also examines the impacts of climate change on the underlying principles and processes of international law including those relating to the making and enforcement of international law and to third party dispute resolution. the book shows that there is much more to dealing with climate change than negotiating one global climate change-specific regime. Other areas of international law can, and must, be included in the solution. In this way international law can maximise its coherence and its efficacy. This well-documented study will appeal to international lawyers, academics, policy makers, government employees, negotiators, practitioners, international legal theorists and anyone interested in climate change and how to maximise our international legal and policy responses to it.

International climate change policy can be broadly divided into two periods: A first period, where a broad consensus was reached to tackle the risk of global warming in a coordinated global effort, and a second period, where this consensus was finally framed into a concrete policy. The first period started at the "Earth Summit" of Rio de Janeiro in 1992, where the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was opened for signature. The UNFCCC was subsequently signed and ratified by 174 countries, making it one of the most accepted international rd treaties ever. The second period was initiated at the 3 Conference of the Parties (COP3) to the UNFCCC in Kyoto in 1997, which produced the Kyoto Protocol (KP). Till now, eighty-four countries have signed the Kyoto Protocol, but only twelve ratified it. A major reason for this slow ratification is that most operational details of the Kyoto Protocol were not decided in Kyoto but deferred to following conferences. This deferral of the details, while probably appropriate to initially reach an agreement, is a major stepping stone for a speedy ratification of the protocol. National policy makers and their constituencies, who would ultimately bear the cost of Kyoto, are generally not prepared to ratify a treaty that could mean anything, from an unsustainable strict regime of international control of greenhouse gases (GHGs) to an "L-regime" ofloopholes, or from a pure market-based international carbon trading to a regime of huge international carbon tax funds.

Climate Change and the Law is the first scholarly effort to systematically address doctrinal issues related to climate law as an emergent legal discipline. It assembles some of the most recognized experts in the field to identify relevant trends and common themes from a variety of geographic and professional perspectives. In a remarkably short time span, climate change has become deeply embedded in important areas of the law. As a global challenge calling for collective action, climate change has elicited substantial rulemaking at the international plane, percolating through the broader legal system to the regional, national and local levels. More than other areas of law, the normative and practical framework dedicated to climate change has embraced new instruments and softened traditional boundaries between formal and informal, public and private, substantive and procedural; so ubiquitous is the reach of relevant rules nowadays that scholars routinely devote attention to the intersection of climate change and more established fields of legal study, such as international trade law. Climate Change and the Law explores the rich diversity of international, regional, national, sub-national and transnational legal responses to climate change. Is climate law emerging as a new legal discipline? If so, what shared objectives and concepts define it? How does climate law relate to other areas of law? Such questions lie at the heart of this new book, whose thirty chapters cover doctrinal questions as well as a range of thematic and regional case studies. As Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), states in her preface, these chapters collectively provide a “review of the emergence of a new discipline, its core principles and legal techniques, and its relationship and potential interaction with other disciplines.”

Climate Change Law and Policy in the Middle East and North Africa Region provides an in-depth and authoritative examination of the guiding principles of climate change law and policy in the MENA region. This volume introduces readers to the latest developments in the regulation of climate change across the region, including the applicable legislation, institutions, and key legal innovations in climate change financing, infrastructure development, and education. It outlines participatory and bottom-up legal strategies—focusing on transparency, accountability, gender justice, and other human rights safeguards—needed to achieve greater coherence and coordination in the design, approval, financing, and implementation of climate response projects across the region. With contributions from a range of experts in the field, the collection reflects on how MENA countries can advance existing national strategies around climate change, green economy, and low carbon futures through clear and comprehensive legislation. Taking an international and comparative approach, this book will be of great interest to students, scholars, and practitioners who work in the areas of climate change, environmental law and policy, and sustainable development, particularly in relation to the MENA region.