UN Climate Research Articles

Bilateral Climate Cooperation: The EU’s Relations with China and India

Scholars of global climate governance have focused increasingly on alternative venues to the UN climate regime, with much attention focusing on the growth of transnational climate governance. This article considers the phenomenon of bilateral intergovernmental climate cooperation. It seeks to understand the development of EU–China and EU–India climate cooperation as possible instances of diffusion of ideas, policies, and institutions. While Chinese and Indian climate policies should be understood as primarily domestic developments, there is some limited evidence of diffusion from the EU to China. Domestic factors in China and India—particularly the degree of fit between externally promoted and pre-existing domestic ideas and frames and the underlying material conditions driving these frames—help to explain the variation between the two cases with respect to observed patterns of diffusion.

Climate change and infectious disease: time for a new normal?

At present, there is a clarion call for action on climate change across the global health landscape.1,2 At the recent WHO-sponsored conference on health and climate (held in Geneva, Switzerland, on Aug 27–29, 2014) and the UN Climate Summit (New York, USA, on Sept 23, 2014), participants were encouraged to act decisively to change the current trajectory of climate disruption.3 Health inequalities, including those related to infectious diseases, have now been pushed to centre stage. This approach represents a step-change in thinking.

International Climate Negotiations: Top-down, Bottom-up or a Combination of Both?

Most observers agree that more than 20 years of UN climate negotiations have been a failure. Some argue that the top-down approach is one important reason for this and that a bottom-up approach or more exclusive club approaches would have rendered better results. Based on experience with these approaches so far this is far from self-evident and there are limits to what can be achieved by clever institutional design when deep-seated political conflicts prevail. Many approaches are also hybrids between the various approaches and the future climate regime will probably contain elements of both the top-down and the bottom-up approach. However no quick fixes can be expected for this exceedingly ‘malign’ problem.

UN climate meeting prompts Catholic bishops to curb fossil fuels

UN climate meeting prompts Catholic bishops to curb fossil fuels

UN climate meeting begins in Peru

UN climate meeting begins in Peru

Contesting Climate Injustice: Transnational Advocacy Network Struggles for Rights in UN Climate Politics

Scholarship on transnational advocacy networks has not articulated the diversity and range of rights struggles that take place in international regimes, particularly those of networks representing marginal or vulnerable groups. In this article I explore the engagements of three networks in the UN climate change regime: gender equality advocates, indigenous peoples, and waste pickers. These networks have all sought to gain rights to counter what they refer to as forms of “climate injustice.” Drawing upon relevant scholarship, I develop a framework for “regime rights” analysis, and identify four types of related network interventions. These include struggles for recognition, representation, capabilities, and extended rights. I find that most network gains have been in the form of recognition, which have provided legitimacy to the regime without challenging core relations of power and inequality. The networks have realized comparatively fewer gains for representation, capabilities, and extended rights.

UN CLIMATE SUMMIT: Halting Global Warming?

Africa Research Bulletin: Economic, Financial and Technical SeriesVolume 51, Issue 9 p. 20550C-20551C Continental Alignments UN CLIMATE SUMMIT: Halting Global Warming? First published: 03 November 2014 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6346.2014.06017.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume51, Issue9November 2014Pages 20550C-20551C RelatedInformation

Notes from the Editors, November 2014

buy this issueOn September 20, 2014, while corporate and government officials arrived in New York City for the UN Climate Summit, organizers and activists from around the world participated in a peoples' summit called the NYC Climate Convergence (organized by the Global Climate Convergence and System Change Not Climate Change). The NYC Climate Convergence featured as the lead keynote speaker Naomi Klein, who presented the analysis of her new book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (Simon and Schuster, 2014). Her concluding chapter, significantly, is entitled "Leap Years: Just Enough Time for the Impossible." Monthly Review readers will be interested that Klein observes in her book: "Karl Marx… recognized capitalism's 'irreparable rift' with the 'natural laws of life itself'". Later she refers to "global capitalism's voracious metabolism".This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Warning: Climate Change is Dangerous to Your Health (In Case You Were Not Sure)

Over the last few months, the momentum to address climate change has dramatically accelerated. This momentum was palpable when 400,000 people marched through the streets of New York during the United Nations Summit in September. While it was an impressive call to action—hailed as the largest climate march in the history—it is two conservative forces in society that are driving the power and urgency to address the climate crisis: the financial industry and the health sector. The investment community’s expression of concern focuses on what is known as the “carbon bubble.” The argument goes like this: Stock valuation of fossil fuel companies is based on stores of carbon that are still in ground in the form of coal, gas, and oil reserves. Through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, climate scientists have come to the consensus that we cannot exceed 21 centigrade in planetary warming, otherwise catastrophic environmental and health impacts will occur. 1 However, if fossil fuel companies exploited all the assets they own, global temperatures would rise around 51 centigrade, essentially making the planet uninhabitable. Fossil fuel companies will never be allowed to burn all of their carbon assets, but because their valuation includes every potential drop they hypothetically could pull from ground, their stocks are vastly overpriced. These assets are “stranded.” The economic and moral argument shape up quickly: Why invest in fossil fuel companies if their true value is greatly exaggerated and their actions would throw us far past internationally recognized limits of planetary warming? Mainstream investors are rapidly recognizing this. During the UN Climate Summit, more than 50 foundations, institutions, and wealthy individuals announced they would divest more than $50 billion worth fossil fuel assets. 2 Even the

Human rights and the Clean Development Mechanism

The 2010 UN climate conference in Cancún emphasized that ‘Parties should, in all climate change related actions, fully respect human rights’. However, so far there is no further guidance. This article discusses the relevant legal human rights norms and two case studies from the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). The first case (Bajo Aguán, Honduras) shows that the current absence of any international safeguards can lead to registration of highly problematic projects. The second case (Olkaria, Kenya) suggests that safeguards, introduced here as a side effect of World Bank involvement, can have a positive impact, but that it is necessary to have them based on human rights. It therefore seems recommendable that the UN climate regime develop mandatory human rights safeguards. In addition or alternatively, individual buyer countries or groups of countries, such as the European Union, could introduce their own additional requirements for CDM projects.

Competition gives way to cooperation: rethinking Sino-Indian relations in climate change negotiations

In global climate change politics, China and India have worked closely with each other, representing two big emitters from the developing world. This article reviews Sino-Indian cooperation during four UN climate change negotiations from 2009 to 2012. Their collaboration echoed the perception of neorealism in international relations (IR) studies that states will seek “external balancing” for maximizing national “relative gains”. China and India are expected to continue their cooperation on climate change issues when sharing the same structural position as big economies and big emitters, the same pressure in carbon emission reductions, and the same goal of improving living standards for their citizens. Encountering the devastating impacts of climate change and the deadlock in responsibility division in current global climate change governance, this work seeks to shed light on the evolving multilateral governance environment and its complex implications for Sino-Indian relations from an IR perspective.

UN climate summit scores high on passion

UN climate summit scores high on passion

The Asia-Pacific partnership and market-liberal discourse in global climate governance

AbstractThis paper shows how international law scholarship might adopt a constructivist interdisciplinary research design to better engage with the political and social context of legal rules and institutions. In 2005 the Asia-Pacific Partnership was launched by the United States and Australia as a climate change institution outside the UN climate process. Controversially, the Member States claimed the Asia-Pacific Partnership was complementary to the UN climate process. This paper investigates the veracity of this claim by analysing the normative compatibility of the Partnership and the UN climate process. The paper adopts Dryzek's discourse theory to analyse the shared ideas and assumptions underlying both institutions. This analysis indicates that the Asia-Pacific Partnership embodied a deep market-liberal discourse that is in significant tension with the more interventionist and equity-based principles underpinning the UN climate process. This market-liberal discourse is important for understanding recent developments in global climate governance.

Critical Issues of Finance under the UN Climate Change Regime and the Role of Green Climate Fund(GCF)- Enhanced support for adaptation -

Critical Issues of Finance under the UN Climate Change Regime and the Role of Green Climate Fund(GCF)- Enhanced support for adaptation -

Germany in a Changing World

Germany in a Changing World

Agreement, significance, and understandings of historical responsibility in climate change negotiations

For over 20 years, Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change have struggled with the normative significance of history for the differentiation of responsibilities. Negotiations on ‘historical responsibility’ have been marked by considerable conflict between developed and developing countries. However, in 2010, the Parties acknowledged the concept in a consensus decision. This article analyses UN Climate Change Conference delegates' agreement with the decision, whether it reconciled conflict between interpretations of historical responsibility, and the significance that delegates ascribe to the decision for future agreements. The decision has not eliminated conflict between different interpretations. Delegates who understand historical responsibility as linking countries' historical contributions to climate change to their responsibilities to act agree more with the decision and foresee it having a stronger influence on future agreements than do those viewing the concept in more conceptual terms. The decision marks the start of negotiations concerning how rather than whether historical responsibility should guide operative text. This article demonstrates that (1) the divergent interpretations pose clear challenges for a necessary but demanding agreement on operationalization, and (2) focusing on an ambiguous version of proportionality between contribution to change and responsibility can become a first step for convergence between divergent positions.

Multilevel Governance Problems of the World Trading System beyond the WTO Conference at Bali 2013

This contribution argues that the perennial negotiations on adjustments of the law of the WTO (e.g. by means of the Doha Round negotiations) and of UN law (e.g. adjustments of the IMF quota and voting system, UN climate change regulations) reflect systemic problems of multilevel governance of international public goods (PGs) that call for reviewing traditional regulatory approaches at national and international levels of governance (as discussed in Sections II and III) so as to better respond to the ‘collective action problems’ of multilevel governance of international PGs (as discussed in Section IV). The concluding Section V draws policy lessons from the WTO agreements adopted at the WTO Ministerial Conference at Bali. Rather than lamenting about ‘fragmentation’ of UN and WTO law, bilateral, regional and other plurilateral agreements can be justified as necessary instruments for reforming international law for the benefit of citizens; the ‘consistent interpretation’—and ‘judicial comity’—requirements of national and international legal systems call for interpreting such agreements in conformity with the UN and WTO legal obligations of contracting parties as integral parts of multilevel governance of ‘aggregate PGs’ demanded by citizens.

Where is the South in security discourse on climate change? An analysis of India

There is an emerging research trend to incorporate views from the Global South in the analysis of the discourse on climate security. This type of research can enrich mainstream literature that often centres on the role and perceptions of actors from the Global North. This article aims to make explicit the added-value of this emerging research trend and to make an empirical contribution through a study on India. The empirical analysis starts by demonstrating how the Government of India rejects alarmist ideas on climate security. India interprets the discourse as a Western negotiation strategy seeking to push India to accept binding mitigation targets under the UN climate convention. As a next step, the analysis reviews India’s alternative expressions on the climate-security nexus. India presents the issue of internal climate migration in terms of human security, and deals with climate change as part of its policy and discourse on energy security.

Frames of Climate Change in Side Events from Kyoto to Durban

Addressing climate change is challenging because of its diverse meanings regarding the implications of science, values, risk, and governance. Climate change frames are central organizing ideas that allow us to identify why climate change is a problem of global concern, who is responsible, and the ways in which and by whom it should be governed. UN climate change conferences gather diverse actors for debating climate policy, allowing us to study the frames they represent and how they evolve. They examine the official side events at these conferences, considering the topics of all 2,214 side events from 1997 through 2011. The results show a prominence of the action and conformity frames, indicating that actors reluctant to change have not been engaged; a tendency to favor the social progress frame over the economic frame; that topical changes were not solely the result of new organizations being admitted; a rise in non-climatic issues indicating large potential for bandwagoning; and a symbiotic relationship between negotiations and side events.

UN climate change report marks risks of a warm future

UN climate change report marks risks of a warm future