Moving forward in the climate change policies and practices

Shaping the climate change regime has been fraught with challenges. While the science of climate change ¹ has shown considerable progress, the politics surrounding the multilateral process of negotiations have faltered. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), ² the international regime for global action to address climate change, emerged some twenty years ago in 1992 during the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development or Rio Earth Summit. Central to the long-standing impasse in the climate change negotiations is the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities (CBDR).” ³ The principle was derived from some early discussions on the concept of responsibility and subsequently the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 44/228 attributed historical responsibility for certain global environmental problems to developed countries. But it was the Earth Summit that clearly stated the CBDR principle, a key element in the UNFCCC as well as in many other multilateral environmental agreements.