After years of deadlock, the 2015 Paris Agreement marked a dramatic breakthrough in multilateral climate negotiations. Its governance model - a combination of ‘bottom-up’ mechanisms of continuous national target-setting with ‘top down’ oversight and stocktaking measures - has been hailed as an innovative, more realistic approach to tackling global climate change. However, it is far from certain whether procedural innovation will translate into effective implementation of current pledges and more ambitious climate action over time.
What is the potential for learning and procedural borrowing from the international human rights regime to accelerate the Paris Agreement implementation process? What are commonalities, differences and points of intersections between the two regimes? Can we draw inspiration from human rights innovations, both on the international level and in terms of mechanisms on the ground, to drive climate action and promote accountability under the Paris Agreement? And what is the potential for learning in the other direction?
To discuss these questions and more, the UCL Global Governance Institute (GGI) and the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence hosted an international workshop on “Implementing the Paris Agreement: Comparative Lessons from the Global Human Rights Regime” from 11 to 12 May 2018. The workshop at EUI brought together leading practitioners and scholars to critically reflect on the scope (and the limits) of mutual learning and operative borrowing between the human rights and climate change regime, with the aim of identifying priority issues for future research and policy discussions.
The inspiration for the event came out of two earlier GGI workshops. The first workshop, held in June 2016 in collaboration with UNICEF UK, explored the complex relationship between climate change and human rights. The second workshop, which was supported by the French Embassy in London, took place in November 2016 and focused on the Paris Agreement’s potential to drive forward effective climate governance.
