International law needs to develop to keep pace with climate change.
It is creating new legal challenges for countries and communities, including unavoidable climate change-related loss and damage.
The biggest challenge globally is to agree and design a fair and effective new climate change agreement, which will involve tackling issues that have never been tackled before.
Finding solutions should involve exploring new ideas and considering lessons from different areas of law. Transitional justice is one area that may provide lessons and ideas for climate change.
Transitional justice refers to processes and mechanisms used in countries and societies that are trying to make a transition from violent conflict or large-scale human rights abuses to peace and reconciliation.
It includes criminal prosecutions, truth processes, reparations for victims and governance reforms.
There are great differences between most of the climate change-related challenges referred to here and the terrible situations faced by countries and communities that are trying to confront and move forward from conflict and violence, but experience and ideas from transitional justice could help develop responses to climate change, including at the global level.
There are also areas where transitional justice is directly relevant to climate change-related challenges.
For the complete article, please see Responding to Climate Change.
President Xi Jinping’s announcement of a post-2030 climate target aligns with global projections for what’s needed to achieve the Paris Agreement goals.
Japan will join the EU in aiming for net-zero emissions by 2050, Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga announced on Monday (26 October).
The best resource for all of our 21st Century Diplomacy: Foreign Policy Is Climate Policy content is the official website, hosted by the Wilson Center and adelphi. But the ECC editors are also collecting the topics here for eager readers.
What exactly triggers food riots? At which point does climate change come in? And what can we learn from analyzing the lack and impotence of government action in conflict areas? In our Editor’s Pick, we share 10 case studies from the interactive ECC Factbook that address the connections between food, the environment and conflict. They show how agriculture and rural livelihoods can affect stability in a country, which parties are involved in food conflicts and what possible solutions are on the table.