Negotiating the Paris Agreement rulebook

In an editorial that prefaces a special issue on the Paris Agreement rulebook for the Carbon & Climate Law Review, the authors suggest that less-than-ideal outcomes from COP24 in Katowice, Poland, are to be expected. Issues on the horizon include: difficulties experienced in key areas of negotiations over the Paris Agreement Work Programme thus far; concerns over a weak COP Presidency; and the absence of strong political leadership from key players such as the Euopean Union, the United States and China. The outcome of COP24 is likely to contain important trade-offs and compromises between legal bindingness, prescriptiveness and differentiation, the authors argue. They conclude that the eventual outcome of the Paris Rulebook negotiations will therefore require careful evaluation and analysis in order to understand what it means for the integrity, effectiveness and implementation of the Paris Agreement.