The Paris Agreement Implementation Blueprint: Legal Avenues to Blueprint Implementation (Part 2)

Abstract

The combination of political and climate crises in early 2017 create the conditions for the ultimate perfect storm. The dramatic collapse of polar ice-sheets, coupled with climatic and weather conditions increasingly hostile to human life and livelihoods, appear to demand an immediate international response at precisely the moment when coordinated political action appears unattainable.

Governments have agreed to limit warming to 1.5C or ‘well below’ 2C, but the world remains on course for disaster. There is currently no plan or framework for closing the gap between action and goal. More specifically there is no common framework to support either the equitable division of the remaining carbon budget or the quantification of rights to finance (upon which any equitable division of the carbon budget must depend).

In Part 2 of this paper we describe the legal avenues to implementation of the Blueprint framework described in Part 1 of this article.

Keywords: Climate Change, Climate Law, Climate Liability, Paris Agreement, UNFCCC, Climate Change and Human Rights, Climate Litigation, Global Justice, Climate Justice

JEL Classification: I30, I31, I32, K00, K32, K33, K41, K42, L31, L50, L51, O11, O14, O15, O19, O21, O33, O34, O35, O38