Despite three decades of political efforts and a wealth of research on the causes and catastrophic impacts of climate change, global carbon dioxide emissions have continued to rise and are 60% higher ...today than they were in 1990. Exploring this rise through nine thematic lenses-covering issues of climate governance, the fossil fuel industry, geopolitics, economics, mitigation modeling, energy systems, inequity, lifestyles, and social imaginaries-draws out multifaceted reasons for our collective failure to bend the global emissions curve. However, a common thread that emerges across the reviewed literature is the central role of power, manifest in many forms, from a dogmatic political-economic hegemony and influential vested interests to narrow techno-economic mindsets and ideologies of control. Synthesizing the various impediments to mitigation reveals how delivering on the commitments enshrined in the Paris Agreement now requires an urgent and unprecedented transformation away from today's carbon- and energy-intensive development paradigm.
The 2015 Lancet Commission on Health and Climate Change has been formed to map out the impacts of climate change, and the necessary policy responses, in order to ensure the highest attainable ...standards of health for populations worldwide. This Commission is multidisciplinary and international in nature, with strong collaboration between academic centres in Europe and China.
The literature on global climate change governance frequently refers to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol as a “top-down” instrument, often in unfavourable comparison with the 2015 Paris Agreement, described ...as “bottom-up”. However, the meaning ascribed to “top-down” is often left undefined, contributing to a surprisingly widespread misunderstanding that the Kyoto Protocol, and in particular its emission targets, were imposed on governments. Against this background, this paper seeks to answer the following research question: To what extent can the Kyoto Protocol’s emissions targets be justifiably referred to as having been imposed through a “top-down” process? To answer this question, the paper reviews the literature on the Kyoto Protocol, with particular attention paid to the historical record and authoritative accounts of the negotiations. Having found evidence that denoting the Kyoto Protocol as “top-down” without further explanation is misleading, to the point of caricature and misrepresentation, the paper takes on a second research question: What factors lie behind the misleading characterisation of the Kyoto Protocol as “top down”? In answer to this question, the paper points to confusion between process and substance. It also invokes a wider tendency to unduly discredit the Kyoto Protocol, along with strategic efforts to emphasise differences between the Protocol and the Paris Agreement in order to legitimise the latter. The paper ultimately finds that the “bottom-up/top-down” metaphor obscures more than it illuminates, and that our understanding of both the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement would be best served by abandoning it.
Latin American nations and negotiators have long been prominent actors in the United Nations climate change negotiations, but for many years, no distinctively Latin American coalition existed in that ...process. Since 2009, however, two Latin American coalitions have emerged—the “Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas” (ALBA), which came to the fore during the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Conference (COP‐15), and the “Independent Association of Latin America and the Caribbean” (AILAC), which was launched at the 2012 Doha Climate Conference (COP‐18). These two groups propose very different approaches for Latin American engagement on climate change, largely corresponding to their broader political and economic aspirations for the continent. Although ALBA reflects a Bolivarian vision of regional solidarity that rejects U.S.‐led neoliberalism, AILAC is more conciliatory toward the North, echoing a more outward‐looking vision of hemispheric unity. In line with these different underlying visions, the two groups have adopted contrasting positions and forms of engagement with the negotiations, with differing degrees of impact and success. AILAC now seems to be emerging as the stronger coalition, with its conciliatory approach better aligned with the current positive tone of the international negotiations. In contrast, internal contradictions within ALBA's narrative on climate change, along with political upheavals experienced by some of its key members, are weakening that group's cohesion. Theories of regionalism, combined with insights from the existing literature and some empirical analysis, help to illuminate these developments, enriching our understanding of international climate politics more broadly.
This article is categorized under:
Policy and Governance > International Policy Framework
Latin American participation in negotiating coalitions at the 2015 Paris Climate Conference (COP‐21).
The election in November 2016 of Donald Trump as a populist, nationalist and unpredictable US President has upended many aspects of international relations and policy, and of American national ...policies, regulations and practices. Climate change is an ideological issue for Trump’s administration and political base, and so climate policy is under assault. US federal climate policies and institutions are being dismantled, climate science is questioned and its funding threatened, and the President has announced that the United States “will withdraw from” the Paris Agreement (White House, 2017), a signature achievement of his predecessor Barack Obama. A year and a half into Trump’s presidency, Climate Policy has published several papers on current US climate policy and its possible effects and trajectories, some of which are collated in a thematic section in this issue of the journal. More papers will no doubt follow in coming months and years. Contemporaneous, research-based analysis of this nature is one of the strengths of this journal. This editorial takes stock and introduces key themes discussed in the papers.
Prudent risk management requires consideration of bad-to-worst-case scenarios. Yet, for climate change, such potential futures are poorly understood. Could anthropogenic climate change result in ...worldwide societal collapse or even eventual human extinction? At present, this is a dangerously underexplored topic. Yet there are ample reasons to suspect that climate change could result in a global catastrophe. Analyzing the mechanisms for these extreme consequences could help galvanize action, improve resilience, and inform policy, including emergency responses. We outline current knowledge about the likelihood of extreme climate change, discuss why understanding bad-to-worst cases is vital, articulate reasons for concern about catastrophic outcomes, define key terms, and put forward a research agenda. The proposed agenda covers four main questions: 1) What is the potential for climate change to drive mass extinction events? 2) What are the mechanisms that could result in human mass mortality and morbidity? 3) What are human societies' vulnerabilities to climate-triggered risk cascades, such as from conflict, political instability, and systemic financial risk? 4) How can these multiple strands of evidence-together with other global dangers-be usefully synthesized into an "integrated catastrophe assessment"? It is time for the scientific community to grapple with the challenge of better understanding catastrophic climate change.
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