Climate governance
Introduction
In political ecology and environmental policy, climate governance is understood as diplomacy, mechanisms and response measures "aimed at guiding social systems towards prevention, mitigation or adaptation to the risks posed by climate change."[1]In that line, this concept describes the way in which societies define their objectives and priorities, and implement and monitor actions to take charge of the causes and consequences of this crisis.[2].
There is a wide range of political and social science traditions that are dedicated to conceiving and analyzing climate governance at different levels and domains, including comparative politics, political economy and multi-level governance, so arriving at a definitive interpretation of this concept is complex.
Climate governance is presented as an essential element to confront climate change, which already generates losses of billions of dollars, [3]and poses the risk of civilizational collapse. [4] So far, the construction of effective collective mechanisms to regulate the impacts of human action on the climate system has not been achieved due to strong interests against it,[5] despite the fact that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned that there is a narrow window of opportunity to keep the increase in global temperature at safe levels.
In the first decade of the century, a paradox emerged between greater awareness of the causes and consequences of climate change and growing concern about how difficult it is to address the problem because of the issues surrounding it.[6] Initially, climate change was treated as a planetary issue and climate governance sought to address it internationally. Multilateral environmental agreements were thus reached, the first of which was the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 1992.
With the exception of the Kyoto Protocol, international agreements had been largely ineffective in achieving legally binding greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions.[7] With the end of the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol in 2012, between 2013 and 2015 there was no legally binding global climate regime. This inertia on the international political scene contributed to alternative political narratives that called for more flexible, cost-effective and participatory approaches to addressing the multiple problems of climate change.[8]These narratives relate to the increasing diversity of methods that are being developed and implemented in the field of climate governance.[7][9].
In 2015, the Paris Agreement was signed, which is a legally binding international treaty on climate change. It aims to limit global warming to "well below 2", and preferably 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. To achieve this goal, signatories agree to maximize greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible, and then begin reducing them, to achieve carbon neutrality by mid-century.[10] It commits all nations of the world to achieving a “balance between sources and sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century.”[11].