ABSTRACT
As climate change became one of the world’s most pressing issues, global attention increasingly focused on plans for shaping the post-Kyoto regime after 2012. Thus climate leadership centred in the Group of Eight (G8), which had been restored since in 2005, accelerated in 2008–2009. Recent G8 principles, processes, and some promises had provided a starting point for creating a new, inclusive global climate change regime. Yet there remained much room for the G8 to expand its outreach and lead new plurilateral international institutions that had recently taken up the cause of climate change control. As the world searched for solutions from the developed and emerging worlds, the G8’s potential was never greater, especially as it constituted the core of the two new summit-level bodies born at the leaders’ level in 2008: the Major Economies Meeting (MEM) on Energy Security and Climate Change, which added Australia, Indonesia, and Korea to the G8 and Group of Five (G5), and the Group of Twenty (G20).
