Given the shortcomings of the Paris Agreement, Anja Zenker examines the potential of free trade benefits as an incentive mechanism for an effective and stable climate change cooperation of states. She addresses the question of how the specific policy design affects the success of the agreement, market and trade outcomes, as well as the compatibility with multilateral WTO obligations.

Providing in-depth coverage of each article of the Paris Agreement, this Commentary offers a comprehensive, legal analysis of this most recent and important international instrument on climate change. This provision-by-provision textual analysis examines the commitments that parties to the Agreement have made to undertake ambitious efforts to combat climate change and adapt to its effects, whilst providing additional support to developing countries.

"The Fight for Climate after COVID-19 draws on the troubled and uneven COVID-19 experience to illustrate the critical need to ramp up resilience rapidly and effectively on a global scale. After years of working alongside public health and resilience experts crafting policy to build both pandemic and climate change preparedness, Alice C. Hill exposes parallels between the underutilized measures that governments should have taken to contain the spread of COVID-19 -- such as early action, cross-border planning, and bolstering emergency preparation -- and the steps leaders can take now to mitigate the impacts of climate change. Through practical analyses of current policy and thoughtful guidance for successful climate adaptation, The Fight for Climate after COVID-19 reveals that, just as our society has transformed itself to meet the challenge of coronavirus, so too will we need to adapt our thinking and our policies to combat the ever-increasing threat of climate change." --

The most important climate agreement in history, the Paris Agreement on Climate Change represents the commitment of the nations of the world to address and curb climate change. Signed in December 2015, it entered into force on 4th November 2016. Countries are moving into implementation, and efforts at all levels will be needed to fulfill its ambitious goals. The Paris Climate Agreement: Commentary and Analysis combines a comprehensive legal appraisal and critique of the new Agreement with a practical and structured commentary to and social drivers behind it, providing an overview of the pre-existing regime, and tracking the history of the negotiations. It examines the evolution of key concepts such as common but differentiated responsibilities, and analyses the legal form of the Agreement and the nature of its provisions. Part II comprises individual chapters on each Article of the Agreement, with detailed commentary of the provisions which highlights central aspects from the negotiating history and the legal nature of the obligations. It describes the institutional arrangements and considerations for national implementation, providing practical advice and prospects for future development. Part III reflects on the Paris Agreement as a whole: its strengths and weaknesses, its potential for further development, and its relationship with other areas of public international law and governance. The book is an invaluable resource for academics and practitioners, policy makers, and actors in the private sector and civil society, as they negotiate the implementation of the Agreement in domestic law and policy.

The world's nations are moving toward agreements that will bind us together in an effort to limit future greenhouse gas emissions. With such agreements will come the need for all nations to make accurate estimates of greenhouse gas emissions and to monitor changes over time. In this context, the present book focuses on the greenhouse gases that result from human activities, have long lifetimes in the atmosphere and thus will change global climate for decades to millennia or more, and are currently included in international agreements. The book devotes considerably more space to CO2 than to the other gases because CO2 is the largest single contributor to global climate change and is thus the focus of many mitigation efforts. Only data in the public domain were considered because public access and transparency are necessary to build trust in a climate treaty. The book concludes that each country could estimate fossil-fuel CO2 emissions accurately enough to support monitoring of a climate treaty. However, current methods are not sufficiently accurate to check these self-reported estimates against independent data or to estimate other greenhouse gas emissions. Strategic investments would, within 5 years, improve reporting of emissions by countries and yield a useful capability for independent verification of greenhouse gas emissions reported by countries.

A perfect introduction to climate change law, this textbook offers students and scholars an overview of the international law governing this fundamental issue. It demonstrates how to interpret the language used in the applicable instruments and conventions, and sets climate change law in its broader international legal context.

In December 2015, 196 parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) adopted the Paris Agreement, seen as a decisive landmark for global action to stop human- induced climate change. The Paris Agreement will replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol which expires in 2020, and it creates legally binding obligations on the parties, based on their own bottom-up voluntary commitments to implement Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). The codification of the climate change regime has advanced well, but the implementation of it remains uncertain. This book focuses on the implementation prospects of the Agreement, which is a challenge for all and will require a fully comprehensive burden- sharing framework. Parties need to meet their own NDCs, but also to finance and transfer technology to others who do not have enough. How equity- based and facilitative the process will be, is of crucial importance. The volume examines a broad range of issues including the lessons that can be learnt from the implementation of previous environmental legal regimes, climate policies at national and sub-national levels and whether the implementation mechanisms in the Paris Agreement are likely to be sufficient. Written by leading experts and practitioners, the book diagnoses the gaps and lays the ground for future exploration of implementation options. This collection will be of interest to policy-makers, academics, practitioners, students and researchers focusing on climate change governance.