Climate governance

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In political ecology and environmental policy, climate governance is the diplomacy, mechanisms and response measures "aimed at steering social systems towards preventing, mitigating or adapting to the risks posed by climate change".^[1] A definitive interpretation is complicated by the wide range of political and social science traditions (including comparative politics, political economy and multilevel governance) that are engaged in conceiving and analysing climate governance at different levels and across different arenas. In academia, climate governance has become the concern of geographers, anthropologists, economists and business studies scholars.^[2]

Climate governance – that is, effective management of the global climate system – is thus of vital importance. However, building effective collective mechanisms to govern impacts on the climate system at the planetary level presents particular challenges, e.g. the complexity of the relevant science and the progressive refinement of scientific knowledge about our global climate and planetary systems, and the challenge of communicating this knowledge to the general public and to policy makers. There is also the urgency of addressing this issue; the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has underlined that the international community has a narrow window of opportunity to act to keep global temperature rise at safe levels. Modern international climate governance is organized around three pillars: mitigation, adaptation and means of implementation. Under each pillar are many issues and policies, illustrating the many ways climate change affects society.^[3]

In the first decade of the 21st century, a paradox had arisen between rising awareness about the causes and consequences of climate change and an increasing concern that the issues that surround it represent an intractable problem.^[4] Initially, climate change was approached as a global issue, and climate governance sought to address it on the international stage. This took the form of Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs), beginning with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 1992. With the exception of the Kyoto Protocol, international agreements between nations had been largely ineffective in achieving legally binding emissions cuts.^[5] With the end of the Kyoto Protocol's first commitment period in 2012, between 2013 and 2015 there was no legally binding global climate regime. This inertia on the international political stage contributed to alternative political narratives that called for more flexible, cost effective and participatory approaches to addressing the multifarious problems of climate change.^[6] These narratives relate to the increasing diversity of methods that are being developed and deployed across the field of climate governance.^[5][7]

In 2015, the Paris Agreement was signed, which is a legally binding international treaty on climate change. Its goal is to limit global warming to "well below 2", and preferably 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, and to achieve this goal, countries agree to peak greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible to achieve a climate-neutral world by mid-century.^[8] It commits all nations of the world to achieving a "balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century."^[9] The Paris Agreement marked a new era for global energy and climate policies. Under its framework, each country submits its own nationally determined contribution (NDC) based on its particular situation. Though the Paris Agreement is legally binding, as an extension to the UNFCCC, the NDCs are not legally binding. This was because a legally binding treaty would have required ratification by the United States Senate, which was not supportive.^[10]