From Copenhagen to Cancun - Driving-Forces in the International Climate Regime

Inhaltsangabe:Introduction: For more than two decades, scientific and political communities have debated whether and how to act on climate change. This discussion moved on. Today science is very clear about the magnitude of the risks imposed by unmanaged climate change: ‘What we are doing is redifining where people could live and if we do that as a world than hundreds of million of people will move. Probably billions will move. We are talking about gambling the planet, we are talking about a radical change of the way in which human beings could live and where they could live and, indeed, how many of them.” With regard to these risks the application of the precautionary principle telling us ‘to better be safe than sorry” appears to be imperative and makes traditional cost-benefit analysis become obsolete. Thus combating global warming has become one of the most important issues facing the world in the 21. century. As nobody would be immune from the transformation the planet faces, avoiding this gamble should, in theory, be in the interest of all nations. Unfortunately, a common response in the scale necessary is hard to organize. While the industrialized countries fear the costs of the transformation from a high-carbon to a low-carbon economy, it is the poorest people who are facing a double unequity as they 1. will be hit earliest and hardest by the adverse impacts of climate change, and 2. are least responsible for the stock of current concentrations in the atmosphere. This inequity consequently leads to a great sense of injustice in developing countries being asked cut emission, while knowing, that the developed world got rich on high-carbon growth. Without any doubt the outcome of this is a historical responsibility of industrialized countries to take over leadership in reducing the emissions of greenhouse gases. However, bearing in mind that by 2050, approximately eight out of nine billion people in the world will be living in developing nations, it is impossible to get down to emission levels needed without at the same time covering the developing world as well. Against this background international climate protection is a sociopolitical, economical, and ethical challenge, concerning all nations, which have to understand that they are a community based on the principle of mutual solidarity. The international climate regime is regarded as the main platform to further cooperation between nations in order to succesfully combat global [...]