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Chapter Five assesses to what extent multilateral actors enable the three demands of justice developed in Part I of the book. Taking each demand of justice in turn, the chapter focuses on normative commitments made in the Convention as well as assessing the policies set out in the Kyoto Protocol and examining what has been achieved so far by multilateral actors. Finally, the chapter assesses to what extent the Paris Agreement presents a shift from existing policies. In this way, the chapter provides a historical overview of multilateral climate change action, as well as looking to the future. Chapter Five puts forward that although there has been some progress made, none of the demands of justice come close to being met, and that there is an urgent need for change in the multilateral regime.

This chapter presents the X plus 60, the day when Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker and General Frederick Weyand officially disbanded the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV)—the command structure of more than half a million troops. The day also marked the start of the continual cease-fire violations of both North and South Vietnam, in what came to be known as the “war of the flags.” The two countries' military activities centered on land-grabbing operations as the two forces tried to extend their control over South Vietnamese territory. On that note, the Paris Peace Agreement may have provoked those ongoing clashes since the agreement featured a leopard-spot arrangement that left the zones of control undefined.

This chapter discusses how international law has responded to climate change, focusing on the challenges that have faced implementation of existing climate treaties, and on the suitability of the Paris Agreement to address these. Expectations of this new treaty could scarcely be greater: the Paris Agreement is meant to provide a framework to improve international cooperation on climate change, and to keep the world within the global mean temperature-change goal identified by scientists as safe. Yet, whether and how this important objective will be reached largely depends, on the one hand, on the supporting political will and, on the other, on the redesign of the international architecture for climate governance. This chapter specifically reflects on international law-making and on the approach to climate change governance embedded in the Paris Agreement, drawing inferences from the past, to make predictions on what the future may hold for international climate change law.

This chapter explores the evolution of the UN climate regime and its implications for patterns of legal argumentation. The 2015 Paris Agreement introduced three interrelated shifts. First, it brings a shift from a model in which the treaty serves as centralized forum for inter-state standard setting and accountability practices, epitomized by the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, to a more decentralized model in which the treaty helps orchestrate a range of state and non-state practices, epitomized by the Paris Agreement. Second, it marks a turn toward non-binding substantive terms, supported by binding procedural terms. Finally, the Paris Agreement shifts from legal accountability practices toward non-legal performance assessment. A practice-based, interactional, account of international law suggests that only the third shift stands to reduce the scope for legal argumentation in the regime. The Paris Agreement’s decentralized approach and its increased reliance on non-binding or procedural terms are unlikely to diminish the salience of legal argumentation.

The international climate change regime has evolved over time to include a wider spectrum of obligations—substantive and procedural, as well as obligations of conduct and result. The increasing salience of obligations of conduct, privileging greater flexibility and autonomy for all Parties and permitting increased dynamism in the regime, has created greater scope for ‘due diligence’ to play a role in international climate change law. This chapter identifies the central obligations of conduct (fleshing out due diligence requirements of states) and of result in international climate change law. It analyses the nature and extent of due diligence required of states and highlights the numerous factors, such as the expectation of good faith or common but differentiated responsibilities, influencing it. The chapter concludes with reflections on the promise and perils of relying on norms of due diligence to deliver on the ambition of the climate change regime.

This chapter examines the Paris Agreement on climate change in light of international human rights law, with particular attention to the human rights language included in the Paris Agreement. The chapter reviews the efforts over the previous decade to characterize climate change as a threat to human rights; describes the evolution of human rights obligations relating to environmental harm in general and to climate change in particular; and assesses the new climate regime in light of these norms. It concludes that the Paris Agreement is consistent with the human rights obligations relating to climate change in many respects, but that states must strengthen their commitments in order to fulfil those obligations completely. Finally, the chapter examines how human rights norms may influence climate policy in the future.

The chapter highlights the main features of climate change as a complex policy challenge. Drawing on the interactional account of international law it sets out the key traits of legality and the rule of law in the international context. It focuses primarily on how treaty-based law has evolved to grapple with complexity on the one hand, and meeting the demands of the rule of law on the other. The 2015 Paris Agreement, which was adopted under the auspices of the FCCC and employs an unprecedented range of legal ‘modes’, is taken as the key example. It is argued that the ‘hard’ vs ‘soft’ law distinction is not the most informative metric when it comes to exploring the trajectory of the international rule of law. Analytic attention is most fruitfully directed to the distinctive traits of legal norms and practices; traits that transcend traditional conceptions of formality and informality.

The Conclusion of the book focuses on the lessons that can be learned from the bridging of theory and practice. More specifically, the Conclusion considers how transnational and multilateral responses compare, and explains that state and non-state actors face very similar problems, including the ongoing struggle to lower greenhouse gas emissions at the rate required, the entrenched favouring of mitigation over adaptation, the pervasive exclusion of less developed countries from decision making processes, and the incessant failure to change the behaviour of responsible actors. These shared problems imply that integrating transnational climate change actors in multilateral processes, which the Post-Paris Agreement regime is moving towards, may not be a simple or straightforward improvement of the climate change response. The Conclusion therefore reflects on whether the direction the Post-Paris regime is heading in might be a hindrance to a just response to the climate change problem, rather than a help. The Conclusion ultimately recommends that transnational actors should be given as much space as possible to pursue their ambitions, with limited guidance from the UNFCCC.

With respect to international agreements, President Donald Trump’s basic strategy has become resigning without leaving: This chapter illustrates this pattern with respect to the Paris Climate Change Agreement, trade diplomacy, and the Iran Nuclear Deal. In each area, Trump has expressed overt hostility toward the international agreement in question and threatened to abandon it, but in practice, he has generally stayed in the existing international agreements, but underperformed, forcing other transnational players to take up the slack to compensate for his unwillingness fully to execute America’s international obligations. This approach at least has the virtue that in time, a successor administration may correct that underperformance and restore the United States to full participation in the international arrangement.

The process of interpreting the treaties of international economic law is a key aspect of the analysis that is undertaken in this book. Of particular importance is the potential relevance of the international climate regime to interpreting international economic law—a regime recently rejuvenated by the Paris Agreement, and in fulfilment of whose aims emissions trading schemes are adopted and maintained. Chapter 2 therefore sets out the methodology of the book—namely, interpreting and applying international economic law to emissions trading schemes—and assesses whether and how the international climate regime might play a role in that process.

This introductory chapter presents North Vietnam's invasion of South Vietnam—an incident that happened two years after their cease-fire agreement, which was documented in the 1973 Paris Peace Agreement. On April 30, 1975, the North Vietnamese Army, riding in the Soviet-made T-54 tanks, infiltrated the South Vietnam Presidential Palace to arrest Pres. Duong Van Minh. Against the backdrop of this event, Washington leaders had declared in 1973 that, through the cease-fire agreement, the United States could successfully avoid further causalities in the war against North Vietnam, while keeping South Vietnam intact. Given this declaration, the event posed a serious challenge for Washington policymakers trying not to lose ground in the Cold War.

This chapter describes the origins of cryoactivism, a term the author coined to describe environmental activism to protect the world’s cryosphere (its frozen surfaces). It provides examples of how people around the world are adapting to climate change and helping protect, restore, and even create glaciers. The chapter also focuses on mitigation actions that people, governments, organizations, commerce, and industry can take to confront the causes of anthropogenic climate change, including passing laws to protect glaciers, but more importantly, taking actions to reduce emissions of super pollutants (such as methane, black carbon, tropospheric ozone, and hydrofluorocarbons) that can achieve significant global cooling results in the near term. The chapter also reviews the key global climate agreements such as the Paris Agreement.

This chapter examines the Franco-German settlement after World War II. It begins with a focus on the reasons for the signature of the October 1954 Paris Agreement, which functioned as a peace treaty between the Three Powers (Great Britain, France, and the United States) and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), as it replaced the occupation statute and put inter-Allied relations with Germany on a contractual basis. It then evaluates how the agreement has fared since 1954, considering the degree to which societal or statist mechanisms can explain its endurance and the deepening of bilateral relations between France and the FRG, which developed into a stable peace. Overall, this case serves as the paradigmatic case for the author's argument, with a top-down transition driven by the Soviet threat, US hegemonic engagement, and German and French state/regime survival motives followed by successful economic, institutional, and grievance-reducing strategies to socialize the conflict in the postagreement era.

The Paris Agreement has turned traditional approaches to global governance upside down, using a bottom-up approach that made it possible for emerging powers like China to agree to binding emissions targets to contain climate change. It thus marks a further step away from the old order centered on Western power, and at the same time it fits well into Chinese attempts to create a post-American order that rests on great power diplomacy within a multilateral framework of cooperation that privileges developing countries. The Paris Agreement allows China to leverage the internal fight against pollution and the restructuring and upgrading of its economy for international status. That the agreement has so far survived President Trump’s announcement of America’s departure suggests that it could yet serve as a blueprint for other, future arrangements for world order that would be able to integrate a risen China.

The Earth’s climate system is a global public good. Maintaining it is a collective action problem. This chapter looks at a quarter-century of efforts to understand and respond to the challenges posed by global climate change and why the collective political response, until very recently, has seemed to lag so far behind our scientific knowledge of the problem. The chapter tracks the efforts of the main global, intergovernmental process for negotiating both useful and politically acceptable responses to climate change, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, but also highlights efforts by scientific and environmental groups and, more recently, networks of sub-national governments—especially cities—and of businesses to redefine interests so as to meet the dangers of climate system disruption.

On the basis of the scientific consensus on the dangers of climate change, this issue emerged as a partial order in the 1990s and was developed as an international regime in five phases. This chapter analyzes how the functional order evolved throughout the phases, and assesses the respective approaches, actors, and implications. Major steps for the development of the regime were the Kyoto Protocol (KP) and the Paris Agreement (PA) though the international agreements at times and the fight against climate change in general lack the full support from several key states like the USA, China, Japan, and Russia. The order lost its predictability but retains its legitimacy, leading, however, to questionable prospects on its effectiveness. Therefore, its greatest challenge may be to change the approach from international legal action to the restructuring of societies.