This textbook, by three experts in the field, provides a comprehensive overview of the legal instruments and sources that govern the international response to climate change. Climate change is one of the fundamental challenges facing the world today, and is the cause of signficiant international concern. In response, states have created a legal regime, albeit a contested one, to address climate change and its impacts. The legal texts that comprise the climate regime - the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, 1992, and its Kyoto Protocol, 1997 - are in force, have concrete content, and are binding. Resources are in place to facilitate the negotiation process, incentivise emissions reductions, and supervise and enforce compliance with the obligations imposed by these treaties. However, the language used in these international instruments is frequently intentionally vague. This book provides a clear guide to the legal regime applicable to climate change, demonstrating how the terms employed in the relevant instruments and conventions should be interpreted.

The book begins by locating international climate change law within the broader context of international law and international environmental law. It considers the evolution of the international climate change regime, and the process of law-making that has led to it. It examines the key provisions of the Framework Convention and the Kyoto Protocol. It then analyses the principles that form part of the conceptual underpinning of the climate regime, as well as the elaborate institutional and governance architecture that has been created at successive international conferences. This assessment of the contours of the current regime is followed by a chapter devoted to the design of the post-2012 climate change regime, and trends indicated by the climate negotiations. The final two chapters address the relationship of international climate change law to regional and national climate change law, as well as its relationship with other areas of international regulation.

This book is an essential introduction for any student and scholar needing to know more about international climate change law.

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Daniel Bodansky is the Lincoln Professor of Law, Ethics, and Sustainability at the Sandra Day O'Conner College of Law and Professor of Law at the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University. Bodansky is an expert on international environmental law. He has worked extensively on the international climate change negotiations, including as a senior negotiator in the US Department of State and as a consultant to the UN climate change secretariat and the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. He co-edited the Oxford Handbook of International Environmental Law, and is the author of the Art and Craft of International Environmental Law, which was awarded the 2011 Harold and Margaret Sprout Award from the International Studies Association as the best book published that year in the area of international environmental politics. Jutta Brunnée holds the Metcalf Chair in Environmental Law at the University of Toronto. Professor Brunnée is co-author of Legitimacy and Legality in International Law: An Interactional Account (Cambridge University Press, 2010), which was awarded the American Society of International Law's 2011 Certificate of Merit for preeminent contribution to creative scholarship. Professor Brunnée has authored numerous articles on topics of international environmental law and international law, and was the co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of International Environmental Law (Oxford University Press 2007). She is a member of the International Law Association's Committee on Legal Principles relating to Climate Change and of World Conservation Union's (IUCN) Environmental Law Commission. Lavanya Rajamani is a Professor at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi. She was previously a University Lecturer in Environmental Law, and Fellow and Director of Studies in Law at Queens' College, Cambridge, where she lectured in international and European environmental law, international law and tort. She is the author of Differential Treatment in International Environmental Law (Oxford University Press, 2006). Lavanya Rajamani is the Rapporteur for the International Law Association's Committee on Legal Principles Relating to Climate Change, and an Indian member of the Academic Advisory Group of the Section on Energy, Environment, Natural Resources and Infrastructure Law of the International Bar Association. She has worked as a consultant to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Secretariat, the Indian Ministry of Environment and Forests, the Danish Ministry of Climate Change and Energy, and the World Bank, amongst others.