International agreements and cooperation on climate change
International agreements and cooperation on climate change are essential frameworks that facilitate collaborative efforts among nations to address the global challenge of climate change. These agreements, often codified in treaties, establish binding commitments for countries to manage greenhouse gas emissions and promote sustainable practices. The dynamics of international law, including the rules governed by the Vienna Convention, underscore the binding nature of such treaties, requiring states to adhere to the agreements they sign and ratify.
Prominent examples include the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Paris Agreement, which collectively aim to enhance global responses to climate change through cooperative governance and market-based incentives. The Paris Agreement, in particular, encourages nations to increase their climate ambitions every five years, with periodic assessments of progress. However, achieving effective international cooperation remains challenging due to differing national interests, economic considerations, and varying levels of commitment among countries.
As climate change poses risks that transcend borders, successful international cooperation is vital for fostering technological advancements and ensuring sustainable investment flows. Emphasizing mutual interdependence, these agreements serve as a mechanism for nations to collectively address environmental challenges that cannot be resolved unilaterally. The ongoing evolution of these frameworks highlights the necessity for inclusive dialogues among various stakeholders, aiming to enhance compliance and drive meaningful action against the climate crisis.
International agreements and cooperation on climate change
Definition
International law connects nation states in a framework of agreements that implement recognized principles, norms, rules, and procedures. Subjects of public international law include sovereign nation states, international organizations, and movements of national liberation. Sources of international law are customs, accepted standards of human behavior, and treaties. The design of international agreements is voluntary, but once concluded, they are binding instruments to achieve collective benefits that states would not achieve unilaterally. To either open a new set of options that offer beneficial opportunities or to restrain options that are recognized as harmful, state governments abide by the terms of an international agreement, which in either case is a recognition of mutual interdependence. An ultimate goal of international law is to facilitate win-win solutions through cooperation.
The importance of international agreements is well demonstrated by the prisoner’s dilemma in game theory. Here two actors are in a better situation if they both cooperate rather than if they do not cooperate. If either side individually gives up cooperation for individual benefits, the joint outcome is worse for both. To prevent actors from noncooperation to maintain mutual benefits requires agreement based on communication, verification, and enforcement. To discourage violations of an agreement, they need to be detected and the expected benefits from violation be denied. It is often efficient to transfer the tasks of verification and enforcement to institutions that are not bound by individual capabilities and interests.
Significance for Climate Change
International agreements are essential in climate policy to address the regarding the atmosphere. They impose emission constraints for each member state and create opportunities for technology cooperation, capital flows, and trading markets.
The law of treaties defines the rules for legally binding agreements between states, which is codified in the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. A treaty is a written agreement between two or more sovereign states in which the parties involved agree to abide by certain specified procedures and standards of conduct, which include the signature by an authorized state representative; the ratification process by parliamentarian bodies to enter a treaty into binding national legislation, independent of the political leadership; and the entry into force upon fulfillment of specified conditions, such as the number of ratifying states. During this process, the status of a member state changes from a negotiating state to a state signatory, ratifying state, and ultimately state party after entry into force. A state that has signed a treaty is bound to it and is obliged to refrain from acts that would defeat the object and purpose of a treaty even if it has not yet ratified it. A state can change agreements before ratification and announce that it is withdrawing its signature, after which it is no longer bound.
After ratification, a state is obligated to announce to the world in advance that it plans to withdraw from a treaty, following the advanced notice required. Usually treaties hold for a limited number of parties (bilateral, trilateral, multilateral) and for a given period (for example, the Kyoto Protocol, with obligations for industrialized countries by 2012). Rules of treaties are binding, regardless of the name (for example, protocol, accord, covenant, convention, memorandum of understanding, or exchange of letters or notes). A challenge for international agreements is to design mechanisms that strike a balance between the required commitments and the degree of support for an agreement.
The threat of climate change cannot be resolved or prevented by a single nation but requires an unprecedented degree of international cooperation to foster emission reductions and technological change in the energy sector. Instruments of international law define the rules of emissions, climate impacts, and policies to diminish the risks and enhance cooperation, providing mutual assurance that policies are pursued in an integrated, coordinated, and effective way. An adaptive regulatory framework would address the collective action problem in long-term climate policy, designing efficient legal mechanisms to improve the effectiveness of institutions, to reduce conflict and codify cooperation and compliance, including the international transfer of investments and technologies to shift the composition and learning rates of the energy system toward emission reductions. Coalitions are emerging where individual action is insufficient or inefficient—for example, in achieving a critical number of votes, a critical mass of investment to realize projects, or a threshold of emissions.
The legal framework of climate policy has been defined by the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). With the signing of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 and its entry into force in 2005, the international community established a first set of instruments through a combination of cooperative governance and market-based incentives. A lack of agreement on the underlying causes, expected risks, and required actions related to long-term climate change, as well as the expected costs and partial interests, has impeded progress during the past decade. To overcome the hurdles for post-Kyoto agreements, an evaluation and negotiation process across all levels is needed, involving citizens, firms, institutions, and states in a multi-stakeholder environment, which became visible during the Bali climate summit in December 2008. Moving beyond Kyoto is a challenge for the legal and policy process that is supposed to implement the longer-term objectives and manage the potentially severe implications in case of failure. It is also a challenge for the scientific community, which becomes involved in value judgments that require innovative integrated approaches.
The Paris Agreement, also called the Paris Climate Accords, is an international treaty regarding climate change that was signed in 2016 in Paris, France. The agreement was intended to strengthen the world's response to global climate change in light of the growing body of scientific evidence showing that world governments' policies were insufficient to prevent catastrophe. The United States, China, the European Union, and 193 other parties are signatories to the agreement. Under the Paris Agreement, all signatories must increase their climate change prevention ambition every five years. This progress is to be monitored at global stocktake meetings. The first of these meetings occurred in 2023. It found that all parties' efforts were insufficient, calling for additional cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and the adoption of cleaner sources of energy.
Bibliography
Feaver, D., and N. Durrant. “A Regulatory Analysis of International Climate Change Regulation.” Law and Policy, vol. 30, no. 4, Oct. 2008, pp. 394–422.
Scheffran, J. “Preventing Dangerous Climate Change.” Global Warming and Climate Change, edited by V. I. Grover, Science Publishers, 2008.
Srouji, Jamal, and Cogan, Deirdre. "What Is the 'Global Sotcktake' and How Can It Accelerate Climate Action?" World Resources Institute, 8 Sept. 2023, www.wri.org/insights/explaining-global-stocktake-paris-agreement. Accessed 20 Dec. 2024.
Stein, J. von. “The International Law and Politics of Climate Change: Ratification of the United Nations Framework Convention and the Kyoto Protocol.” Jour. of Conflict Resolution, vol. 52, 2008, p. 243.
Verheyen, R. Climate Change Damage and International Law: Prevention Duties and State Responsibility. Martinus Nijhoff, 2005.
Yamin, F. The International Climate Change Regime: A Guide to Rules, Institutions, and Procedures. Cambridge UP, 2004.