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Global governance: Human rights and environmental - Coggle Diagram
- Global governance: Human rights and environmental
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3.2 Environmental
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)
- The UNFCCC is an international environment treaty negotiated at the Earth Summit in 1992, created as a mechanism for developing global environment policy
- The treaty came into force in 1994 and has 198 signatories including all UN member states
- Parties to the treaty have to make national inventories of their sources of CO2 and emissions
- At the 1997 Kyoto Summit, the signatory states were required to freeze CO2 levels from 2000 onwards - this paved the way for the introduction of legally binding emission targets
- Requirements on states were determined on the basis of equity - states that had contributed most to global warming, had industrialised earlier or were mere developed were expected to accept greater reductions in their emission, while developing states were not expected to reduce theirs
Criticisms
- The UNFCCC did not take account of the fact that emissions by developing states would increase rapidly as their economic growth accelerated
- The UNFCCC is merely a set of recommendations for further action - its rulings and requirements are not legally binding
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
- The IPCC is a UN body set up in 1988 as an internationally accepted authority on climate change
- The IPCC has 195 members
- The purpose of the IPCC is to provide impartial information and advice about climate change to decision-makers, organisations and groups
- The panel consists of climate change scientists who volunteer to review the latest research on climate change
- Through its reports, the IPCC influences understanding of, and state policy on climate change
- It has established a consensus that climate change exists by providing evidence that Earth's temperature is rising as a result of human activity - the IPCC has made it increasingly difficult for states to ignore the issue
Criticisms
- The IPCC's reliance on already published research means that its reports may be out of date, leading to an underestimation of the extent of climate change
- Some people question the validity of some scientific assumptions on which the Assessment Reports' judgements are based - eg assumptions about the oceans' capacity to absorb carbon dioxide are much disputed by the scientific community
- The IPCC has been accused of scaremongering, making predictions that do not stand up to scrutiny