The Paris Agreement has achieved one of two key necessary conditions for ultimate success – a broad base of participation among the countries of the world. But another key necessary condition has yet to be achieved – adequate collective ambition of the individual nationally determined...

The international community has committed itself to adopt a global climate agreement in Paris in 2015, which shall enter into force in 2020 and shall be legally-binding for all. In advance of the negotiations, parties shall submit the so-called Intended Nationally Determined Contributions...

We describe three essential elements of an effective post-2012 international global climate policy architecture: a means to ensure that key industrialized and developing nations are involved in differentiated but meaningful ways; an emphasis on an extended time path of targets; and inclusion of...

Human activities are gradually driving global change in population, consumption, technology, economic advances, and organization of human societies. These changes are likely to impact on the ecosystems, human systems, and urban systems which should challenge humanity to review or rethink...

The United States' position in, and conduct of, the negotiations leading to the Paris Agreement, as with almost all international diplomacy leading to reciprocal international undertakings conducted by that country, reflected not only internal politics, but also the constraints of domestic law....

The paper aims at drafting a feasible roadmap to move the mechanism envisaged in Article 6 of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change from its current status of legal provision to an effective tool to promote mitigation worldwide, to support the establishment of a low-carbon economy and possibly...

The recent Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP21) resulted in voluntary greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction commitments by 195 countries. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the equity implications of this “bottom-up” approach to climate change...

Three recent “roadmap” analyses outline routes to a low-carbon economy that model the decarbonization of the electricity sector and the pervasive electrification of the transportation and industrial sectors. Two of these also impose a pollution constraint on electricity resources that...

The 2015 Paris Accord is meant to control our planet's rising temperature. But it may be doing the opposite in gradually, rather than immediately reducing CO2 emissions. The Accord effectively tells dirty-energy producers to "use it or lose it." This may be accelerating their extraction and...