“All Hands on Deck”: The Paris Agreement and Nonstate Climate Action

Sub- and non-state climate action: a framework to assess progress, implementation and impact

Climate Ambition and Sustainable Development for a New Decade: A Catalytic Framework

While the intergovernmental climate regime increasingly recognizes the role of non-state actors in achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement (PA), the normative linkages between the intergovernmental climate regime and the non-state dominated ‘transnational partnership governance’ remain vague and tentative. A formalized engagement of the intergovernmental climate regime with transnational partnerships can increase the effectiveness of partnerships in delivering on climate mitigation and adaptation, thereby complementing rather than replacing government action. The proposed active engagement with partnerships would include (i) collecting and analyzing information to develop and prioritize areas for transnational and partnership engagement; (ii) defining minimum criteria and procedural requirements to be listed on an enhanced Non-state Actor Zone for Climate Action platform; (iii) actively supporting strategic initiatives; (iv) facilitating market or non-market finance as part of Article 6 PA; and (v) evaluating the effectiveness of partnerships in the context of the enhanced transparency framework (Article 13 PA) and the global stocktake (Article 14 PA). The UNFCCC Secretariat could facilitate engagement and problem solving by actively orchestrating transnational partnerships. Constructing effective implementation partnerships, recording their mitigation and adaptation goals, and holding them accountable may help to move climate talks from rhetoric to action.

Legislative responses to climate change vary significantly between countries, often reflecting a combination of political, economic, and social factors. A comparative analysis of Nigeria and the USA reveals distinct approaches shaped by their unique contexts, though both face similar challenges in addressing this global crisis. In Nigeria, a developing nation with a growing population and economy heavily dependent on fossil fuels, legislative efforts to combat climate change have been relatively nascent. The country faces a multitude of environmental challenges, including deforestation, desertification, and pollution, exacerbated by inadequate infrastructure and weak enforcement mechanisms. However, recent years have seen some progress, with the Nigerian government acknowledging the need for action through initiatives like the National Climate Change Policy and Response Strategy. Legislative measures such as the Climate Change Bill aim to institutionalize climate action, although implementation remains a challenge due to limited resources and competing priorities. Conversely, the USA, as one of the world's largest emitters of greenhouse gases, has a long history of climate policy debate and action. While federal efforts have fluctuated depending on the political landscape, individual states have taken significant strides in implementing climate legislation. States like California have enacted ambitious measures to reduce emissions, promote renewable energy, and enhance resilience to climate impacts. At the federal level, policies such as the Clean Air Act and the Paris Agreement (from which the USA had withdrawn but later rejoined) demonstrate a commitment to addressing climate change, although partisan divisions often hinder progress on comprehensive legislation. A key difference between the two countries lies in their levels of development and capacity to mitigate and adapt to climate change. While the USA possesses greater financial and technological resources, Nigeria grapples with structural challenges that impede effective climate action. Additionally, socio-economic disparities within each country influence the distribution of environmental risks and benefits, highlighting the importance of equity in climate policy. While Nigeria and the USA approach legislative responses to climate change from different perspectives, both face common obstacles in transitioning to a sustainable future. Effective climate policy requires not only legislative action but also international cooperation, technological innovation, and socio-economic transformation to mitigate the impacts of climate change and build resilience for future generations.

ABSTRACTThe activities of nonstate actors are proliferating and their inclusion in global climate governance has increased. As a substantial amount of climate actions are being carried out by nonstate actors, certain major powers have strengthened their engagement under the framework of existing multilateral environmental agreements. This article offers two contributions. First, it outlines the European Union's (EU) contemporary agenda regarding climate change and the support to non-EU countries and nonstate actors who engage in climate actions. Second, it analyses the assistance it provides to nonstate actors from developing countries through various foreign policy tools. In conclusion, political recognition, as well as financial and technical support from the EU to nonstate actors could help to curb CO2 emissions. These cooperation schemes have the potential to foster the proliferation of climate solutions and promote effective climate governance. Yet nonstate actors require further strengthening for adequate and far-reaching actions to limit climate change.

Limiting global warming to 1.5 °C requires drastically reducing fossil fuel production and use. Institutional investors who invest in fossil fuels can potentially influence the energy transition. However, few papers investigate how investors can leverage their collective resources to accelerate a transition away from fossil fuels. Hence, this paper asks: How do investor initiatives inform or shape efforts of institutional investors to align with the Paris Agreement and what are the implications of these for a goal of leaving fossil fuels underground? We identify 41 investor initiatives through a document analysis and use a sectoral governance perspective to analyse initiative strategies and policies. We then examine in depth one of the largest initiatives, Climate Action 100+, supported by analysis of 55 newspaper articles. Findings indicate that while initiatives are active in providing resources to investors to assist with aligning their investments with the Paris Agreement, coordinating investor engagement, and have been successful in uniting a critical mass of investors behind climate goals ($500 billion - $106 trillion), there exist many gaps in their capacity to achieve ambitious action on climate from companies or their investor members. A lack of internal accountability, minimal transparency into their goals and timelines, and limited ambition threaten to undermine the potential for investor initiatives to be agents of climate action. Furthermore, loopholes in the net zero policies promoted by initiatives risk diluting their effectiveness in limiting fossil fuel extraction.

According to a commonly held view, states have fundamentally re-organized the differentiation between developed and developing countries in the climate regime in the 2015 Paris Agreement. In this view, the Paris Agreement replaces the ‘rigid’, ‘static’, and ‘dichotomous’ system of differentiation based on Annexes I and II to UN Framework Convention on Climate Change with a more ‘flexible’, ‘dynamic’, and ‘subtle’ solution. I argue that this view is incomplete. In fact, the early climate regime included additional layers of differentiation that go beyond the binary distinction between Annex and non-Annex parties. Through a discussion of three episodes in which states adjusted the system to the ‘special circumstances’ of regime members, I show how informalization and individualization – two hallmarks of differentiation in the Paris Agreement – had become central well before COP-21 and that the international climate regime thus developed a lot more gradually than is often assumed.

Aligning the implementation of climate efforts under the Paris Agreement with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is essential to ensuring socially just green transitions. Yet, in sub-Saharan Africa, national approaches to green transitions vary widely, particularly in how they integrate poverty reduction into climate action. Prevailing theories of policy integration frame such variation as a function of effective institutional and policy design. I advance an alternative explanation: that integration outcomes are shaped by contestations in rule- and norm-setting processes within a fragmented global environmental governance structure. I probe the plausibility of this argument by studying the co-constitutive interplay of structure and agency in two illustrative cases’ just transitions: South Africa and Kenya. I find that dominant actor coalitions strategically leverage the global environmental governance structure to reinforce liberal environmentalism as the core norm of the climate regime. The resulting, incremental changes to the core norm ultimately constrain the integration of poverty reduction into climate action in just transitions.

The Paris Agreement, which was adopted in December 2015 and entered into force less than a year later, is the newest instrument to be adopted in the United Nations-sponsored global climate regime. The Paris Agreement takes its place under the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change and next to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and 2012 Doha Amendment. After describing the historical evolution of the UN climate regime employing the tools of international law, this Article explores the structural, institutional, and legal relationships between the new Paris Agreement and the prior development and content of UN-sponsored efforts on climate protection under the auspices of the 1992 Framework Convention. The need for such an analysis is particularly urgent because the new instrument was purposely not identified as a "protocol," and its relationship to the prior Kyoto Protocol is unclear.This Article consequently traces the development of the universal, UN-anchored climate regime from its origins in the 1990s to the present moment, with particular attention to the structural relationship among its various components and historical junctures. The Article then examines the text and structure of the Paris Agreement, along with its context, against this background. The significance of the Agreement's status as an instrument other than a "protocol," and its uncertain textual and institutional relationship to the prior Kyoto Protocol, receive particular scrutiny. The Article concludes that the Paris Agreement, from a structural and institutional point of view, represents both a break with the past designed to initiate a new, globally-inclusive multilateral approach to climate protection, but also contains indications of continuity with prior questions of global climate policy.

A rapidly expanding number of companies have pledged to contribute towards the Paris Agreement’s goal by establishing 2050 net-zero emissions targets. However, the literature lacks an in-depth analysis of firms’ strategies to reach those targets and their underlying assumptions. Scholars increasingly use time and space as functional constructs to theorise what motivates different business responses to climate change. Organisational boundaries represent an additional critical dimension when analysing companies’ climate actions. Hence, we adopted a novel tri-dimensional framework (time, sense of place, and organisational boundaries) to analyse the link between the targets companies set and their proposed decarbonisation strategies. We conducted a qualitative content analysis of self-reported and tertiary data from 45 European manufacturing companies rated as leaders in climate action. By investigating how time, sense of place, and organisational boundaries substantiate companies’ decarbonisation strategies’ present and possible future impact, we delineate how different approaches to the three dimensions enable or constrain the comprehensives of net-zero strategies.

The inclusion of references to human rights in the Paris Agreement was celebrated as a milestone towards greater integration of human rights in environmental and climate governance. Beyond their symbolic value, the significance of these provisions however depends on the extent to which they inform the implementation of the Paris Agreement both at the national and international levels. This article takes stock of the integration of human rights in climate governance and identifies concrete opportunities to ensure that human rights considerations are included in the Paris Implementation Guidelines to be adopted at COP-24, promoting climate action that aligns with Parties' human rights obligations. We first consider the relevance of human rights to climate action and the incremental recognition of these linkages in the international climate regime - both in the lead up to the adoption of the Paris Agreement and since. We then consider in specific terms how human rights could inform five key dimensions of the Paris Agreement's Implementation Guidelines: NDC guidance, adaptation communications, transparency framework, global stocktake, and the article 6 mechanisms. This article will reflect on past experience of how climate policy impacts human rights and on proposals put forward in the context of the negotiations of the implementation guidelines. It concludes with recommendations on a right-based approach to the implementation of the Paris Agreement.

The aim of this article is to explore the evolution of the international climate regime following the Paris Agreement, with a particular focus on the shifting dynamics of global climate governance. Using the United Kingdom as a case study, it examines how perceived national leadership, domestic political challenges, and broader policy transformations between 2015 and 2024 impacted the country’s role and standing within the international climate framework. Employing a systems method complemented by wide range of auxiliary techniques such as historical-comparative, decision-making, and institutional-legal methods, the article discusses the nature of UK’s leadership role in climate action, its engagement in shaping the climate change regime, and the impact of internal political shifts. Our research reveals that while the UK played a leading role in forming post-Paris global climate governance, particularly around COP26, its focus and influence have fluctuated due to internal political dynamics and evolving international contexts. The study contributes to the scholarship on international climate change cooperation, shedding light on its complexity and the challenges of maintaining effectiveness in the face of dominant national interests.

Financial incentives to poor countries promote net emissions reductions in multilateral climate agreements

Background: Climate change is one of the most pressing global challenges, demanding collaborative action from both developed and developing countries. Despite numerous international agreements like the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement, political will and leadership commitment have been inconsistent, hindering effective global climate action. Private actors and global partnerships have emerged as critical players in addressing climate risks, but geopolitical and economic tensions continue to impede progress. Objectives: This research explores the key challenges and opportunities in combating climate change, emphasizing the role of international cooperation, the involvement of private and public sectors, and the need for innovative solutions. It also seeks to examine the responsibilities of developed and developing countries in contributing to global climate goals. Methods: A qualitative analysis was conducted by reviewing relevant literature, international agreements, and case studies. Data from climate summits, reports, and expert opinions were integrated to understand the political, economic, and environmental dimensions of climate change. Findings: The study identifies several challenges, including a lack of political will among major powers, economic competition, and inconsistent global leadership. It also highlights opportunities, such as the potential for technological innovation, investment in renewable energy, and the strategic role of private actors in promoting sustainable development. The findings underscore the importance of global partnerships and multilateral platforms like the United Nations in fostering cooperation among nations. Conclusion: Addressing climate change requires a holistic approach involving state and non-state actors, strong political leadership, and global partnerships. The transition to a low-carbon economy will require significant economic restructuring, but it presents opportunities for innovation and sustainable development. The study emphasizes the need for developed countries to fulfill their financial commitments to support adaptation in developing nations. Novelty: This research contributes to the existing literature by providing a comprehensive analysis of both the challenges and opportunities in combating climate change. It highlights the critical role of private actors and international cooperation, offering a framework for future global actions.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been a crucial facilitator of climate change research and governance. After its sixth assessment cycle, the organization is at a critical juncture. The amount of climate science has grown tremendously over the past three decades, but so has global emissions of greenhouse gases. If the world is to reach the objectives implied by the Paris Agreement, climate action must accelerate on an unprecedented scale and pace, across widely differing contexts. Scientific knowledge will play a key role in this endeavour. Everyone who produces or relies on climate knowledge needs to wrestle with this pivotal question: How can IPCC processes and outcomes be reformed to produce knowledge that is more relevant for climate action? The organizational and resource constraints of the IPCC must be considered when searching for answers. This is an introduction to a special collection of research articles, reviews and perspectives dealing with this question from many different angles. In this introduction, we present four possible reform agendas for the IPCC in the form of ideal types, all with their advantages and disadvantages. This introduction does not advocate a certain set of reforms but rather attempts to spur discussions and reflections on the IPCC and its future.