When the UN climate talks are all said and done, and the ink dries on the COP26 agreement, a strange question will remain: How enforceable will the deal be, anyway? In the past year, countries have announced a flurry of net-zero emissions pledges.
The United States promised net zero by 2050, China and Saudi Arabia targeted 2060 and India 2070. Several other countries submitted formal pledges to cut emissions this decade – known as “nationally determined contributions” or NDCs, ahead of this month’s UN climate conference. in Glasgow.
Whether those targets are legally binding is for individual countries to decide.
The 2015 Paris Agreement, a legally binding international treaty, only commits its nearly 200 signatory countries to keeping global warming “well” below 2°C and targets a target of 1.5C. But the agreement leaves it up to countries to determine their own national contributions toward the overall goals of Paris, and are not required to meet them.
“NDCs are voluntary measures,” said Lakshman Guruswamy, an international environmental law expert at the University of Colorado-Boulder. “There is no way to enforce, enforce or enforce a non-binding agreement.”
Countries including the UK and New Zealand, and the European Union of 27 countries have set individual emissions-cutting targets in their own laws. Most nations have not.
International treaties do not threaten punishment and instead rely on other political strategies and coercion tactics to ensure cooperation.
But some experts say they should mandate legally binding emissions cuts, noting that decades of UN climate summits and voluntary pledges have so far failed to stem the rise in emissions and global temperatures.
“I don’t think we’re going to make significant progress unless there are legally binding emissions restrictions on developing countries and developed countries,” Guruswamy said.
Only once has a UN climate treaty set binding targets for individual countries. The 1992 Kyoto Protocol applied them only to wealthy countries and involved a complex process of national ratification, which meant it was not fully implemented until 2005.
Binding the target can backfire
When the final Kyoto Accords were encountered, American politicians turned their backs and the country never ratified it. Canada withdrew from the treaty in 2011, before its penal system took effect.
Had the Paris Agreement included stronger rules, “countries would have stayed out,” said Ronald Mitchell, a professor of political science and environmental studies at the University of Oregon.
“Being overly ambitious can reduce participation, there is no question. Politics is the art of the possible.”
‘peer pressure’
Experts say that although there is no clear mechanism for enforcing a “legally binding” agreement under international environmental law, there are ways to keep signatories under control in UN climate agreements.
Withdrawing from a global agreement, or failing to meet commitments, could be a matter of shame on the international stage. Countries that violate an agreement also run the risk of retaliation in other areas, such as finance or trade.
The Paris Agreement includes some mechanisms that encourage countries to meet and extend their pledges, including a five-year “global stock-take” of progress.
These systems can show which countries are creating a “peer-pressure environment”, said Leslie-Anne Duvic-Paoli, deputy director of the Climate Law and Governance Center at King’s College London.
legal precedence
International climate agreements can also be incorporated into other binding deals or bilateral agreements.
For example, the EU and Japan’s 2017 trade deal referred to their Paris Agreement commitments.
The EU now demands uniform language in all its new trade agreements, and from 2024 it will be able to withdraw preferential trade access to developing countries if they do not meet environmental conventions, including the Paris Agreement.
The climate agreement can also be used in court. In January the United Nations Environment Program described a “rising tidal wave of climate matters” that brought climate lawsuits in 38 countries in 2020, up from 24 in 2017.
In a landmark 2019 legal case, activists successfully sued the Dutch government for failing to protect people from global warming, pointing to the country’s Paris Agreement obligations in their legal arguments. The court ordered the government to rapidly reduce emissions.
“We have seen many decisions in courts and jurisdictions around the world,” said Michael Berger, executive director of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, which has read the Paris Agreement to set legally enforceable targets. “
Ultimately, states need political will to deliver on their promises, he said.
“There is no international or supranational body that would come into the world and prepare the governments of the world to do something they are not willing to do.”
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