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In this chapter, India’s lead negotiator for the framework convention recalls that the negotiations were marked by deep differences between developed and developing countries (though there were also significant divergences within these groups). Developing countries pressed for an equity-based agreement, maintaining that developed countries should accept their responsibility for precipitating climate change. They called on industrialized countries to accept time-bound emission reduction obligations and to transfer finance and technology to support voluntary mitigation actions by developing countries. The Convention recognized that voluntary obligations agreed upon by developing countries were conditional on receipt of financial resources to cover all incremental costs. However, developed countries accepted only an ambiguously worded emission stabilization commitment. This deficiency was rectified by the Kyoto Protocol 1997, which prescribed time-bound emission reduction targets for each developed country. The Paris Agreement 2015 halted this line of progress, marking a reversal to the ‘pledge and review’ approach rejected in 1991.

The international climate change regime comprises the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, and the 2015 Paris Agreement, and numerous decisions under these instruments. These instruments, in particular the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement, represent fundamentally different approaches to the three central issues that the international climate change regime has been struggling with since the inception of multilateral negotiations. These issues are: the architecture of climate instruments; the legal form of climate instruments and the legal character of provisions in them; and differentiation among countries, in particular, between developed and developing countries. This chapter explores each of these central issues in turn, with a focus on how the Paris Agreement resolves these issues, and represents a step change in the international community’s efforts to address climate change.

The Paris Agreement of 2015 was shaped by several rounds of negotiations in decades prior. Events in Copenhagen in 2009 were pivotal in defining negotiation dynamics between developing and developed countries. This chapter offers a vivid first-hand account of the pressures and intricacies of negotiations that year. It describes the uneasy coordination between India and China as they worked to represent the interests of the developing world under the umbrella of the BASIC (Brazil, South Africa, India, and China) grouping. It also lays bare the fundamental divergence in interests between the developed and developing worlds. It does so by detailing tense side negotiations on differentiated responsibilities in reducing emissions, the financial commitments of developed countries, and systems for transparent evaluation of commitments.