The Paris Agreement and the new logic of international climate politics

countries reached agreement on a new climate treaty that UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon described as 'a monumental triumph for people and our planet'. 1 The Paris Agreement represented a remarkable reversal of fortune for the UN-sponsored climate negotiations. After adopting the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 1992, which established the objective of preventing dangerous human-induced climate change by stabilizing greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations in the atmosphere, the international community spent over two decades negotiating legally binding rules on how to rein in global emissions. But despite the creation of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and instruments such as the Clean Development Mechanism, emissions of the main GHGs (carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide) rose steadily over this period. The 2009 Copenhagen conference, intended to create a more effective successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol, collapsed in acrimony, leading many observers to conclude that multilateral climate diplomacy had reached a dead end. Has the Paris Agreement successfully broken the 'global warming gridlock'? 2 And does it stand a chance of bringing global GHG emissions under control? This article reviews and assesses the outcome of the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP-21) to the UNFCCC, held in Paris in December 2015. It argues that the Paris Agreement does indeed break new ground in international climate policy. COP-21 brought to an end over 20 years of UN negotiations focused on a misguided approach of establishing mandatory emission reductions. Instead, the Paris Agreement acknowledges the primacy of domestic politics in climate change and allows countries to set their own level of ambition for climate change mitigation. It creates a framework for making voluntary pledges that can be compared and reviewed internationally, in the hope that global ambition can be increased through a process of 'naming and shaming'. By sidestepping the 1 'COP-21: UN chief hails new climate change agreement as "monumental triumph"', UN News Centre, 12 Dec. 2015, http://www.un.