Climate change regime

Climate change gained prominence on the international political agenda in the 1980s, due to an emerging scientific consensus about the anthropogenic causes of the problem and heightened public awareness. The commencement of treaty negotiations in 1990 exposed the diverging viewpoints of developed and developing countries on international climate policy. The 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) delivered a compromise through a framework agreement that postponed the more difficult questions related to its overall ambition and the distribution of efforts. The ultimate objective of the UNFCCC is to achieve “stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”. In the mid-2000s, international climate talks began to focus on how to continue after the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol would end in 2012. The Paris Agreement thus heralds a new era of international cooperation on climate change.