Climate Mitigation Efforts After the Paris Agreement: Achievements, Remaining Debates, and New Challenges

Abstract

Climate change has been widely recognized as a global challenge that must be addressed in the twenty-first century. As an important step toward a post-2020 climate regime, the Paris Agreement has shown great achievements as well as future directions of global climate mitigation. Although some key features can be found in the mitigation provisions of the agreement, such as dual goals of temperature increase, reliance on “nationally determined contributions,” the blending of market and non-market elements, and ambiguity in financial and technology transfer, yet remaining debates including the allocation of responsibilities and the fairness of international transfer of mitigation outcomes will continue to affect the future of global climate governance. Furthermore, new challenges have also emerged after the Paris deal. Political and economic uncertainties, “carbon leakage” among industrializing countries, and the overgrowth of climate financial institutions will all generate impacts on future climate mitigation efforts. There is no ready panacea to these problems. Nevertheless, a few options of policy and institutional innovation at the technical level should be considered to generate incremental progress.