ABSTRACT
UNCHE delegates agreed to establish a new UN Environment Programme, whose job it would be to co-ordinate global environmental governance through identifying important problems, convening and enabling international negotiations, and monitoring the resulting agreements. It is true, however, that the global summits have been sidelined by the contentious politics characterizing climate governance, which has become the focal point for global environmental governance. Paris was hailed as a huge success by negotiators and observers, which, politically, it most certainly was, and a watershed moment in the history of global environmental governance. Finally, global environmental governance institutions face the critical challenge of continued, and accelerating, rates of environmental change, most notably with respect to extreme weather events, sea level rise and other phenomena associated with climate change. These developments also highlight the growing fragmentation of global environmental governance whereby issue areas are characterized by a patchwork of governance institutions, state-led, non-state and hybrid.
