Regulating Global Climate Change

For some years now, growing scientific warnings have continued to strengthen the belief that an unprecedented global warming is underway, and that only an urgent system-wide transformation can avoid climate disaster. In his June 2, 2022 address to the Stockholm+50 Conference, the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres construed “climate emergency” as one of the key drivers of the “triple planetary crisis.” Despite this, the overriding impression left by COP27, held in Sharm el-Sheikh in November 2022, was of a divided institution, floundering and nowhere close to realizing its stated aim of “stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations at a level that would prevent dangerous interference with the climate system”. While prognoses and projections set the stage for a climate change emergency, the legally ordained platform for institutionalized cooperation to deal with the problem seems always to be achieving too little too late. This book, Regulating Global Climate Change, presents articles from the special climate change issue of the journal Environmental Policy and Law (vol. 52 (5-6), 2022), published to mark the 30th year of the UNFCCC. The book provides a sequel to two previously published IOS Press books: Our Earth Matters (2021) and Envisioning Our Environmental Future (2022), and the contributions included here seek to make sense of the marathon climate-change regulatory process. The book is organized into 5 parts: climate normativity; regime at the crossroads; climate justice; factoring gender; and the Paris conundrum. Urging scholars and decision-makers to consider the approach, process, tools and techniques used to address the primary objective of the UNFCCC as well as strongly calling for a decisive new normative push from “common concern” to “planetary concern”, the book will be of interest to all those involved in the process of tackling, and dealing with the adverse effects of global climate change. Bharat H. Desai is Professor of International Law, Jawaharlal Nehru Chair in International Environmental Law and Chairperson of the Centre for International Legal Studies at School of International Studies of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi; Editor-in-Chief of the global journal Environmental Policy and Law (Amsterdam: IOS Press).