Full Title: Are the US and China ready, willing, and able to achieve their Paris Agreement goals?
Author(s): Philip Wallach
Publisher(s): Brookings Institute
Publication Date: November 1, 2016
Full Text: Download Resource
Description (excerpt):
After years of failing to produce a climate agreement backed by all of the world’s major greenhouse gas emitters, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) produced a historic success in Paris in December 2015. The Paris Agreement, backed by a consensus of all of the UNFCCC’s members and entering into force on November 4, 2016, has been widely hailed as a turning point in combating global climatic disruption. It enjoys broader and deeper political support for the agreement than for any of its predecessors, especially from the world’s two largest emitters, which have generally been reluctant participants in past international climate negotiations: the United States and China.
The Paris Agreement could garner so much support in large part because of its flexibility and openended nature: every country was asked to define its own Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDC), thereby setting its own commitment to emissions reduction relative to business-as-usual. Rather than aspiring to make these commitments binding through an international legal enforcement mechanism (of the sort that has often inspired opposition by those countries most jealous of their sovereignty), the delegates to Paris contented themselves with setting up a regime of transparent and honest reporting such that commitments can be reputationally enforced.2