Law Commons^™

International Investment Agreements: Impacts On Climate Change Policies In India, China And Beyond, Lise Johnson, Brooke Güven

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

Mitigating and adapting to climate change will require a fundamental reorientation of our global economy as we move away from fossil fuels and transition to a low carbon and climate-resilient world. This reorientation depends on government actions to help catalyze and channel financial flows in new directions and away from business-as-usual practices.

International investment agreements (IIAs) – treaties that now number over 3,000 and have the objective of promoting and protecting cross-border investment flows_could potentially play a key role in these efforts to scale up and (re)direct investments to meet climate change mitigation and adaptation needs. As presently drafted and …

A Plan To Strengthen The Paris Climate Agreement, Bryan H. Druzin

Res Gestae

Sustainable use of common-pool resources is extremely tricky to maintain. Indeed, the failure of the Kyoto Protocol is a stark testament to this challenge. This short discussion offers a potential solution to this crisis of coordination. This Article proposes a mechanism to mitigate the impact of the tragedy of the commons and help ensure that the world’s nations live up to their commitments under the Paris Agreement. The challenge to international cooperation that the tragedy of the commons creates is pernicious. The question of how to tackle the tragedy of the commons—and I say this without a trace of exaggeration—is …

Maximizing The Potential Of The Paris Agreement: Effective Review Of Action And Support In A Bottom-Up Regime, Harro Van Asselt, Thomas Hale, Meinhard Doelle, Achala Abeysinghe, Manjana Milkoreit, Caroline Prolo, Bryce Rudyk

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

To succeed, the hybrid model of international climate policy embodied in the Paris Agreement requires countries to deliver their nationally determined contributions (NDCs) and to progressively increase collective and individual efforts over time. The effectiveness of this type of regime will require international review processes that provide robust information about countries’ efforts and trajectories and give substantial opportunities for state and non-state actor engagement with this information. The Paris Agreement creates three different review processes, but leaves critical details regarding each to future decisions: It provides for a review of implementation of individual NDCs under an “enhanced transparency framework”, comprising …

Maximizing The Potential Of The Paris Agreement: Effective Review Of Action And Support In A Bottom-Up Regime, Harro Van Asselt, Thomas Hale, Meinhard Doelle, Achala Abeysinghe, Manjana Milkoreit, Caroline Prolo, Bryce Rudyk

Research Papers, Working Papers, Conference Papers

To succeed, the hybrid model of international climate policy embodied in the Paris Agreement requires countries to deliver their nationally determined contributions (NDCs) and to progressively increase collective and individual efforts over time. The effectiveness of this type of regime will require international review processes that provide robust information about countries’ efforts and trajectories and give substantial opportunities for state and non-state actor engagement with this information. The Paris Agreement creates three different review processes, but leaves critical details regarding each to future decisions: It provides for a review of implementation of individual NDCs under an “enhanced transparency framework”, comprising …

A Mitigation Based Rationale For Incorporating A Climate Change Impacts Fee Into The Federal Coal Leasing Program, Michael Burger

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

This paper describes the legal and policy rationale for imposing a fee on federal coal that reflects the costs of the climate change impacts generated by that coal. It notes that the federal government has a duty to mitigate climate impacts from the federal coal leasing program, and that the Department of Interior (“Interior”) and the Bureau of Land Management (“BLM”) have ample authority to impose a climate change impacts fee on coal leases as a form of compensatory mitigation for those coal leases. The paper also discusses technical issues that should be considered when assessing the effectiveness of this …

Comma But Differentiated Responsibilities: Punctuation And 30 Other Ways Negotiators Have Resolved Issues In The International Climate Change Regime, Susan Biniaz

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

International climate change negotiations have a long history of being contentious, and much has been written about the grand trade-offs that have allowed countries to reach agreement. Issues have often involved, for example, the level of ambition, differentiated treatment of Parties, and various forms of financial assistance to developing countries.

Lesser known are the smaller, largely language-based tools negotiators have used to resolve differences, sometimes finding a solution as subtle as a shift in the placement of a comma. These tools have operated in different ways. Some, such as deliberate imprecision or postponement, have “resolved” an issue by sidestepping it …

The 2015 Paris Agreement On Climate Change: Significance And Implications For The Future, Hari Osofsky, Lisa Benjamin, Michael B. Gerrard, Jacqueline Peel, David Titley

Faculty Scholarship

On December 12, 2015, nearly 200 countries created a major new agreement on climate change, accompanied by national commitments to act. The Paris Agreement has rightly been celebrated as a breakthrough, but was unquestionably constrained by the need for compromise, and its details will continue to be developed at the international, national, and local levels. On January 9, 2016, a panel of expert commentators and delegation members from a variety of national jurisdictions convened at the annual American Association of Law Schools meeting to analyze the Paris Agreement; they considered how the agreement evolved from prior efforts, the structure of …