Post-2020 Climate Change Regime Formation

2  Is an international climate treaty worth fighting for?

Yvo de Boer

In recent years there has been an increasing sentiment expressed that an international legally binding treaty on climate is unlikely to be agreed and therefore not worth fighting for. Several reasons are behind this pessimism. Most refer to the slow pace of the international negotiations and difficulty of reaching a consensus agreement among 197 countries as the main obstacle. Which is imaginable: we have been negotiating since 1992, and we are still not close to anything that resembles a real solution.

Others point to the current political difficulties around the issue of climate change in the United States and the fact that the conditions laid down by this country for a legally ...