This textbook, by three experts in the field, provides a comprehensive overview of international climate change law. Climate change is one of the fundamental challenges facing the world today, and is the cause of significant international concern. In response, states have created an international climate regime. The treaties that comprise the regime - the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and the 2015 Paris Agreement establish a system of governance to address climate change and its impacts. This book provides a clear analytical guide to the climate regime, as well as other relevant international legal rules. The book begins by locating international climate change law within the broader context of international law and international environmental law. It considers the evolution of the international climate change regime, and the process of law-making that has led to it. It examines the key provisions of the Framework Convention, the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement. It analyses the principles and obligations that underpin the climate regime, as well as the elaborate institutional and governance architecture that has been created at successive international conferences to develop commitments and promote transparency and compliance. The final two chapters address the polycentric nature of international climate change law, as well as the intersections of international climate change law with other areas of international regulation. This book is an essential introduction to international climate change law for students, scholars and negotiators.

As frustration mounts in some quarters at the perceived inadequacy or speed of international action on climate change, and as the likelihood of significant impacts grows, the focus is increasingly turning to liability for climate change damage. Actual or potential climate change liability implicates a growing range of actors, including governments, industry, businesses, non-governmental organisations, individuals and legal practitioners. Climate Change Liability provides an objective, rigorous and accessible overview of the existing law and the direction it might take in seventeen developed and developing countries and the European Union. In some jurisdictions, the applicable law is less developed and less the subject of current debate. In others, actions for various kinds of climate change liability have already been brought, including high profile cases such as Massachusetts v. EPA in the United States. Each chapter explores the potential for and barriers to climate change liability in private and public law.

It has never been more important to understand how international law enables and constrains international politics. By drawing together the legal theory of Lon Fuller and the insights of constructivist international relations scholars, this book articulates a pragmatic view of how international obligation is created and maintained. First, legal norms can only arise in the context of social norms based on shared understandings. Second, internal features of law, or 'criteria of legality', are crucial to law's ability to promote adherence, to inspire 'fidelity'. Third, legal norms are built, maintained or destroyed through a continuing practice of legality. Through case studies of the climate change regime, the anti-torture norm, and the prohibition on the use of force, it is shown that these three elements produce a distinctive legal legitimacy and a sense of commitment among those to whom law is addressed.

It has never been more important to understand how international law enables and constrains international politics. By drawing together the legal theory of Lon Fuller and the insights of constructivist international relations scholars, this book articulates a pragmatic view of how international obligation is created and maintained. First, legal norms can only arise in the context of social norms based on shared understandings. Second, internal features of law, or 'criteria of legality', are crucial to law's ability to promote adherence, to inspire 'fidelity'. Third, legal norms are built, maintained or destroyed through a continuing practice of legality. Through case studies of the climate change regime, the anti-torture norm, and the prohibition on the use of force, it is shown that these three elements produce a distinctive legal legitimacy and a sense of commitment among those to whom law is addressed.

As the contours of a post-2012 climate regime begin to emerge, compliance issues will require increasing attention. This volume considers the questions that the trends in the climate negotiations raise for the regime's compliance system. It reviews the main features of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and its Kyoto Protocol, canvasses the literature on compliance theory and examines the broader experience with compliance mechanisms in other international environmental regimes. Against this backdrop, contributors examine the central elements of the existing compliance system, the practice of the Kyoto compliance procedure to date and the main compliance challenges encountered by key groups of states such as OECD countries, economies in transition and developing countries. These assessments anchor examinations of the strengths and weaknesses of the existing compliance tools and of the emerging, decentralized, 'bottom-up' approach introduced by the 2009 Copenhagen Accord and pursued by the 2010 Cancun Agreements.

As the contours of a post-2012 climate regime begin to emerge, compliance issues will require increasing attention. This volume considers the questions that the trends in the climate negotiations raise for the regime's compliance system. It reviews the main features of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and its Kyoto Protocol, canvasses the literature on compliance theory and examines the broader experience with compliance mechanisms in other international environmental regimes. Against this backdrop, contributors examine the central elements of the existing compliance system, the practice of the Kyoto compliance procedure to date and the main compliance challenges encountered by key groups of states such as OECD countries, economies in transition and developing countries. These assessments anchor examinations of the strengths and weaknesses of the existing compliance tools and of the emerging, decentralized, 'bottom-up' approach introduced by the 2009 Copenhagen Accord and pursued by the 2010 Cancun Agreements.