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Brunnée, Jutta --- "Climate Change and Compliance and Enforcement Processes" [2012] ELECD 747; in Rayfuse, Rosemary; Scott, V. Shirley (eds), "International Law in the Era of Climate Change" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012)

Book Title: International Law in the Era of Climate Change

Editor(s): Rayfuse, Rosemary; Scott, V. Shirley

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781849800303

Section: Chapter 12

Section Title: Climate Change and Compliance and Enforcement Processes

Author(s): Brunnée, Jutta

Number of pages: 31

Extract:

12. Climate change and compliance and
enforcement processes
Jutta Brunnée*

INTRODUCTION
Law-making in relation to climate change, as other contributions to this
volume serve to illustrate, is not for the faint of heart. Climate change is one
of the most intractable public policy challenges of our time. On the one
hand, its potential to disrupt human and animal life on earth poses a grave
threat to humanity and demands a determined and speedy response. On the
other hand, the multiple and interrelated dimensions of the problem make it
dizzyingly complex, complicating the search for timely and effective policy
and legal responses.
Climate change is global in scope and intergenerational in its impacts. It
implicates a broad swath of production and consumption processes and so
requires fundamental and costly shifts in the world's social, economic and
energy systems. Climate change can only be curbed if all states, or at least
all major greenhouse gas emitters, cooperate. Hence it is also a quintessen-
tial collective action problem. In addition, climate change raises difficult
questions of equity or, as some would put it, global environmental justice.1

* This chapter draws on Jutta Brunnée, `Enforcement Mechanisms in Inter-
national Law and International Environmental Law' in Ulrich Beyerlin, Peter
Tobias-Stoll and Rüdiger Wolfrum (eds), Ensuring Compliance with Multilateral
Environmental Agreements: A Dialogue between Practitioners and Academia
(Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers 2006) 1; `The Kyoto Protocol: A Testing
Ground for Compliance Theories?' (2003) 63/2 Zeitschrift für ausländisches ö ...