The EU in the United Nations Climate Change Regime

Abstract

After almost two decades of active implication in the United Nations (UN) climate change regime, the European Union’s (EU) engagement in this domain of global environmental politics has become widely considered as emblematic of its participation in global multilateral governance generally.2 In this time span, the internal and external parameters for EU activities in this domain have considerably evolved. The science of climate change, reflected in successive reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has become ever more compelling, transforming the issue into a priority foreign policy topic (IPCC, 2007). At the same time, the global politics of climate change as well as the governance structures within and beyond the UN climate regime have undergone significant transformations. Not in the least, the EU itself has become a foreign policy actor in its own right, not only driven by several internal treaty reforms, but also by recurring attempts at finding its place in the evolving regime context. One parameter that has remained a constant throughout all this time, however, is the Union’s desire to ‘play a leading role in promoting concerted and effective action at global level’, formulated by the European Council in Dublin in June 1990 (European Council 1990: Annex II – ‘The environmental imperative’). This leadership aspiration, paired with a commitment to searching for multilateral solutions to the problem of climate change, has been reinvigorated at different moments in the evolution of the climate regime on the basis of both norms and interests shared among EU Member States (van Schaik and Schunz, 2012).