The Environment— Protecting the Global Commons 405of states seeking to slow, halt, and reverse global warming have aimed too high. As
Robert Keohane and David Victor have argued, perhaps what is needed is a kind of
middle- ground: a “regime complex” for climate change that focuses on key parts of
the climate change prob lem rather than the whole.^4 Many have concluded that the
pro cess of trying to accomplish many goals si mul ta neously is impractical and dys-
functional. Thus, negotiators have examined issues in a piecemeal fashion for about a
de cade. Forests were the priority in 2008, with states agreeing to get credit for saving
forests; a fund was established to help poor countries adapt. Technology and financing
were the topics in 2009, when the parties agreed to focus on new technologies and
increase financing to mitigate the effects of climate change.
A second approach has been to get the top three emitters— China (the top emit-
ter), the United States, and India—to come to agreement. In 2013, India agreed to
take on legally binding obligations, but not until after 2020, fearful that such obliga-
tions would inhibit growth. In late 2014, China agreed for the first time to stop its
emissions from growing by 2030, and the United States announced new targets for
reducing carbon emissions. These commitments proved to be a critical impetus for com-
mitments by other states in the 2015 UN climate change talks.
For still others, given the real ity of global warming and the likely continued failure
of efforts to slow or halt it, a third approach is to shift resources into preparing for
and remediating its effects. For example, 80 percent of the world’s population lives
near a coastline and some states are already vulnerable, so mitigation efforts must
become a major priority. However, financial commitments by the wealthy states are
clearly lacking.
In December 2015, following two weeks of intensive negotiations, the 195 partici-
pants in the Paris climate change talks reached an accord replacing the Kyoto Protocol.
In a grand bargain, which includes numerous compromises, the states agree to aim to
keep the increase in global average temperature to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius and
to pursue efforts to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. This agreement is diff er ent from
Kyoto in several ways. First, the target is aspirational, requiring both significant cuts
in emissions and growth in renewable sources of energy. Second, states agree to
achieve a balance between green house gases and carbon- absorbing sinks like for-
ests. And third, and perhaps most importantly, states agree to publish climate
plans every five years from 2020. The submission of plans is mandatory, but meet-
ing the targets is not legally binding. Fourth, key developed countries should take
the lead. In the end, the breakthrough was the agreement between the U.S. and
China reached prior to the Paris meetings.
Global warming and climate change are not solved by this agreement, but support-
ers assert that a structure now exists to tackle the prob lem in an effective way. Climate
change clearly will continue to be a high- priority agenda item across a wide spectrum