Resetting International Law Linkages: COP 20 Mechanisms and Protocols

In December 2014, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, held its conference of all world party nations in Lima, Peru , to formulate next steps for the world to address climate change and to restrict greenhouse gas emissions. The Catholic University Law School, in host city Lima, Peru, invited articles to set the stage and inform the world’s nations of necessary steps immediately before the Convention of the Parties. This article was one of those invited, published, and distributed. The U.N> Conference of the Parties held in Lima in 2014 set the stage for what became the now-existing world climate accord, the Paris Agreement of 2015. On these shoulders, the future of world climate rests. This article addresses what is the perceived greatest weakness in the Kyoto Protocol: The failure to meaningfully involve developing nations in the effort to control climate change. Developing nations comprise 80% of world countries. This article highlights a legal model developed by the author at the commencement of the Kyoto Protocol, and now demonstrated and used successfully in dozens of developed countries across the world. The article sets forth this legal model which affects the monopoly of a key business sector in the developing country which is most responsible for world climate-changing emissions. The model profiled in this article injects competition regarding climate change mitigation, sets a neutral controlled price for the sale of a key commodity, and creates neutral and fair contract terms, contract dispute resolution mechanisms, and technical specifications. The article illustrates how legal innovation can affect technology choice and promote long-term human welfare and environmental resilience. The author’s legal model now is used in every form of government, from very market-oriented countries to the centrally-planned Communist government of Vietnam. It has been implemented in countries with the second and fourth largest populations in the world, to small developing country island nations with less than a half-million population. The author’s model has been implemented in the largest Muslim nation in the world, in the largest Buddhist nation in the world, in the world’s largest Hindu nation, and in many other countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Pacific. This article provides both the keys to the model, as well as the results of its use in 5 very different Asian countries. Of the 5 countries profiled in detail in this article on their use of this legal model, included are the second and fourth most populous nations in the world, as well as mainland nations and more isolated island nations.