After the high of the Paris Agreement in 2015, the next few years of climate negotiations would always be lower profile – yet just as important. Now that the agreement has been finalised, the hard work to create the rules and guidance it calls for will take time. Two years on, and with only a year remaining until the self-imposed deadline for implementation is upon governments, the November 2017 Conference of the Parties (COP) needed to advance the process.
In the aftermath of the US leaving the Paris Agreement on climate change, its opponents have been exaggerating its legal effect, and environmentalists playing it down. Trump’s supporters contend that staying in the Agreement could have weakened the US legal position on climate change, both in terms of international damages suits and domestic regulatory actions. Seizing on the plain language of Article 4 of the Agreement, they argue that a nation may only adjust its ‘contributions’ to climate control upward
A little over a year ago China’s environment minister, Chen Jining, publicly declared that the country needed environmental laws with ‘iron teeth’. These fine words came as the country introduced its new Environmental Protection Law, brought into force on 1 January 2015. Since its introduction, the relevant ministry in China has imposed daily fines in over 400 environmental cases and has ordered operations to be restricted or stopped in over 1,500 cases.