Climate change

Climate change is certainly not the biggest challenge of the 21st century. However, it is thechallenge that has the greatest impact on all other challenges. Almost thirty years after climatechange entered the global agenda at the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, it has achieved near-universal scientific and professional consensus regarding its importance. It took more than fifty years of scientific debate and evidence for the academic and professional communities to agree that climate change is a reality and a serious threat to humanity. The most
compelling evidence, however, has come from nature itself. Natural disasters that seemed sudden at first glance have provided the strongest confirmation. Despite being increasingly undisputed from a scientific perspective, climate change has still failed, over this not-so-short period on the global agenda, to achieve full political consensus on its importance, or clear economic justification for the efforts needed to slow it down.

The first attempts to define the issue of climate change were made in the middle of the last century, when a small number of scientists recognised and proved the human impact on dramatic climate change, reflected in rising ocean and sea levels and increasing global temperatures. From the 1980s onwards, driven by scientific research, the international community began – somewhat cautiously – to place this issue on the agenda of international politics. The first major shift came with the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in the early 1990s. Since then, numerous steps have been taken towards establishing a comprehensive framework for climate policy in international relations, commonly referred to as the climate regime.

Following the Rio Summit, under the UNFCCC framework, global high-level meetings began to be organised – first periodically, and later as regular annual conferences known as the Conference of the Parties ( COP). To date, a total of 27 COPs have been held. The most recent one took place last year in Sharm El Sheikh (Egypt), while COP28 will be held in Dubai (UAE). Although all COPs are important as they provide momentum to the overall process, some have been more significant than others due to their outcomes. One of the most important milestones occurred in 1997 at COP in Kyoto (Japan), where the first global protocol on national contributions to reducing greenhouse gas emissions was signed – the Kyoto Protocol. It entered into force in 2005, remained in effect until 2012, and is particularly important for our research because it
introduced the Clean Development Mechanism ( CDM). Another key moment followed at COP 13 in Bali (Indonesia) in 2007, with the adoption of the Bali Action Plan, which envisaged the creation of a global financing mechanism to address climate change through the establishment of the Global Environment Facility ( GEF). This was followed by the Copenhagen Summit (Denmark) in 2009, from which much was expected – namely, a new and improved global agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which was already seen as insufficient. However, Copenhagen proved to be a major disappointment, as the largest countries (the USA, China, Russia, India, Australia, and others) failed to reach an agreement. It seemed as though the entire process had lost its purpose. Still, not everything was bleak – Copenhagen did succeed in launching a new financing mechanism in the form of the Global Climate Fund ( GCF).

The conferences in Cancún (Mexico) in 2010, Durban (South Africa) in 2011, and especially Doha (Qatar) in 2012 gave the entire process a more optimistic momentum. In Doha, the Doha Amendment was adopted as part of a broader package known as the Doha Climate Gateway. It reflected agreement among the signatory states to extend the validity of the Kyoto Protocol until 2015, three years beyond its original end date, with a new global agreement planned for adoption by then. By far the most important cornerstone in establishing the global climate regime after the Rio Summit (1992) and the Kyoto Protocol (1997) was the Paris Summit in 2015, where the Paris Agreement was concluded. This new, and this time binding, global agreement on reducing greenhouse gas emissions replaced the Kyoto Protocol. On this occasion, countries chose a different approach from that taken under the Kyoto Protocol. Unlike 1997, when a top-down global agreement on reduction targets was attempted – an approach that proved ineffective – the Paris Agreement adopted a “bottom-up” approach. In practice, this meant that each country committed to its own emission reduction targets and agreed to strictly adhere to them.