The socio-legal implications of the new politics of climate change

As 2016 lengthened its stride, the ‘ambivalent euphoria’ of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change gave way to a sense of ‘where to from here?’ As one of us commented at the time, ‘[w]hile the technicalities of the Kyoto Protocol were never easy fodder for inspiring collective action, the [post-Paris] terrain is arguably even more forbidding on that score’. Each country will submit Nationally Determined Contributions, a welter of sector-specific plans and measures which will be assessed, monitored, analysed and reviewed by carbon management professionals via procedures still being fought over. This is, from the perspective of global climate treaty processes, a ‘bottom-up’ approach to responding to climate change.