An architecture for a net zero world: Global climate governance beyond the epoch of failure

Abstract

In the wake of the 2021 Glasgow meeting of the Paris Agreement, where states embedded a 2050 pathway to net zero that will overshoot the Earth's remaining carbon budget for 1.5°C, attention is turning to the flaws of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. This article highlights ways in which it blocks effective climate action, which has been acknowledged by states who are now pursuing voluntary and nonbinding initiatives on coal, forests, and oil and gas. The article assesses new proposals for treaties on deforestation, the elimination of coal, and a fossil fuel nonproliferation treaty. It argues that states should take these proposals to the UN General Assembly and adopt them as binding treaties consistent with holding global heating at 1.5°C. Following the model of the Nuclear Weapons Convention it further argues that these treaties should be folded into a full Greenhouse Convention, supported by a powerful International Climate Agency, to secure a net zero world. Drawing upon new proposals for an Earth‐centric law that takes in the totality of social‐natural processes at the planetary scale, these proposals could form part of a reformed international legal architecture that could be equal to the diabolical governance challenges of the Anthropocene.

Climate imaginaries as praxis

“…Observations and analysis of the failures, sluggishness, and recalcitrance of action at the macro (national and international) level can leave one with an overwhelming sense that both fossil-fuelled forms of life and the dominant imaginaries for a climate changed future are immoveable and impervious to transformation. For activists and communities witnessing failure after failure of the annual COPs to produce sufficiently robust agreements, and of states party to existing agreements to set or meet targets for mitigation or adaptation that are adequate to the scale of the ravages they are facing and will face, the stasis seems both dire and enervating (Burke, 2022). Nevertheless, across the world, communities, including those networked through the Transitions Network (Feola and Him, 2016) and the Global Tapestry of Alternatives (Kothari, 2020), are pursuing a range of transformations that respond to, and anticipate the social and ecological impacts of climate change.…”